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Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796–1945 , by Michael Farrell

Michael Farrell. Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796-1945. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015. 234 pp. A$106 ISBN: 9781137485717 (Hardback)https://www.bookdepository.com/Writing-Australian-Unsettlement-2015-Michael-Farrell/9781137485717This is important work. It's a rollick and a good read and, importantly, it takes us where we wouldn't ordinarily or otherwise be going. It doesn't necessarily take us the way we'd want to go, but then, which worthwhile book does? The important thing is that the journey is worth making.In these pages we visit a challenging array (not to say assemblage) of Australian colonial texts: Ned Kelly's 'Jerilderie Letter,' a letter of Bennelong's, an especially non-native text from a Chinese miner incarcerated in a (doubly) Victorian mental institution (outsider writing before the fact). There are travelling diaries and drovers' journals, unexpected drawings and Aboriginal life writing composed for the benefit of A.O. Neville, notorious Protector of Aborigines. Cosying up to the canon a little, we have some Dorothea Mackellar, some Christopher Brennan and some Charles Harpur-but in every case, it's the stuffyou wouldn't know or expect. Defamiliarising, one way or another.Farrell's starting point is a challenge 'to listen' set by Phil Mead in his 2008 study, Networked Language' (in several ways, a work presaging this): to listen, in other words, to voices that would not otherwise be heard. The process of drawing attention to those voices frames a critique of the canon and in particular of the canonising anthology and its role in Australian letters. Farrell notes the irony that the image of Ned Kelly as a writer is more disruptive than the image of him as a bushranger. This is the observation of the work in a nutshell. It's all about unsettling us, as in we-the-readers of ozlit. Very particularly it's about unsettling the kind of text list you might come up with if you worked on Tony Abbott and friends' assumption that culture in Australia began in 1788 with white patriarchal authority.The book as a whole is, in a sense, an extended pun on the idea of settlement negated, on the idea of un-settlement and/or de-settlement and anti-settlement sentiment. The punning is the kind of thing you should expect when poets write theory. The book is littered with poet's fancies, many of which are fun. Nor is the ghost of Gilles Deleuze ever very far. And he's definitely one you want inside the tent pissing out. An ever-helpful sprite. Whether or not 'unsettlement,' the particular key neologism in the picture, is needed in the vocabulary of Australian cultural/literary studies, I leave to the reader to judge. Here's how Farrell positions his idea:Unsettlement takes place regardless of sentiment or intention, and, conversely, is not guaranteed by antisettlement sentiment (such as might be found in the poems of Henry Lawson, for example). It is effected through writing practice: through writing in terms of other literacies; through reinventing writing and genre; and through material location.The settlement/unsettlement thing is a little heimlich/unheimlich for me personally, a little close to the bone. Listening to the tanks fill as I type this review, in yet a next global-warming induced weather event, in fact I'm happy that the weather's come. We were getting a little low. Of course you don't want too much weather, said Hanrahan. Ambivalences beget ambivalences. I scribble these musings as a recovering academic, living on a bushy block, a few hours from the city on the NSW mid-north coast. A century ago-when the sharpest thing available was an axe-there would have been very few trees within cooee of where my house now leans. The cows got hot but they had plenty to graze on. Not now. I'm told that in the day (as they say today) there was a bloke whose board and keep for most of his life was keeping the trees offthe (now well re-forested) hill across the river from my place. …