Liu Lurong, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Abstract
Apocalypticism has become the new normal of Australian life with climate change accelerated disasters like bushfires and droughts rampant across the country. These disasters inevitably draw attention to the inextricability of Australia’s island-continent space, unique ecology and the postapocalyptic scenario of “settler realism”. The Yield by Wiradjuri writer Tara June Winch, winner of Miles Franklin Award 2020, features a perilous occasion where the female protagonist August endeavors to save the Gondiwindi people from extinction against land dispossession at the hands of a mining company. Drawn on the interrelation of narrative and the environment informed by the scholarship of ecological narratology, this material-ecocritical reading treats food as a major narrative agency in The Yield, including the modes of food production, distribution, and consumption circulating among manifold entities and various forms of eating disorders of human and non-human bodies across time and space. This paper takes The Yield as an example to test the Indigenous novels’ capability to display the postapocalyptic present where quotidian crises inhabit the heart of Aboriginal realism and to investigate how the conflation of apocalyptic realism and Aboriginal realism contributes to the ambivalent but no less affirmative rhetoric of crisis in the Anthropocene.
Keywords: Indigenous Australian literature, Aboriginal realism, material ecocriticism, food and eating disorders, risk and crisis