The Littoral Zone Australian Contexts and Their Writers

This chapter surveys and assesses from an ecocentric perspective some representative literary portrayals of the Australian deserts. Generally, it contrasts works that portray the desert as an alien, hostile, and undifferentiated void with works that recognise and value the biological particularities of specific desert places. It explores the literature of three dominant cultural orientations to the deserts: pastoralism, mining, and traversal. It concludes with a consideration of several multi-voiced and/or multi-genred bioregionally informed works that suggest fruitful directions for more ecocentric literary approaches. [... ] in European imaginations deserts = fear; in an Australian imagination it could be different. Susan Hawthorne (qtd. in Bartlett 1998: 119)