Content area
Full Text
Introduction
In 1997, Stephen Knight described Australian crime fiction as a genre that is 'thriving but unnoticed' (Continent of Mystery 1). While in recent years the genre has gained more attention amongst both academics and reviewers, it remains largely absent from an area of study in which I believe it demands more notice-that is, ecocritical discussions of Australian fiction. In this paper, I contend that some texts of Australian crime fiction reflect important ideas about the way Australians-in particular, non-Indigenous, settler-colonial Australians-understand and interact with the Australian nonhuman. In this context, I investigate the idea of Australian crime fiction as a largely underexplored representation of the modern environmental crisis, and the connection between this crisis and settler-colonial systems of domination.
As I will contend, modern Australian crime fiction often portrays the troubling relationship between intra-human violence and the treatment of the nonhuman. Such a relationship indirectly alludes to the impact of a changing climate on Australian communities and ecosystems and suggests that popular genre fiction can contribute in profound ways to broader environmental considerations. With these arguments in mind, this paper considers the ecocritical value of Australian crime fiction and, more specifically, how this genre's representation of the nonhuman reveals the criminal nature of anthropogenic ecological crises. I include Jane Harper's The Dry (2016) and Chris Hammer's Scrublands (2018) as examples of crime fiction that explore the Australian nonhuman in both productive and problematic ways in the context of the settler-colonial project and the role it has played in environmental devastation in Australia.
This paper's ecocritical discussion of Australian crime fiction also represents a contribution to a field of knowledge within literary studies that is slowly growing. Crime fiction worldwide is often viewed as entertaining, sometimes escapist reading. Scholars, however, are now more clearly demonstrating the significant influence of crime fiction on modern culture, with more researchers choosing to focus on this genre in their work (Sjö 1). I believe that the ecocritical value of some Australian crime fiction has largely gone unnoticed; as a popular genre, it may provide novel ways to encourage new perspectives on Australia's nonhumans and associated ecological crises amongst readers of less classically 'literary' genres. The fact that crime fiction often attracts a broad audience provides an opportunity to encourage...