Abstract
Critics are increasingly recognizing the presence of irony in environmental cultures, often stressing its ability to highlight disjunctions between the individual’s convictions and their compromised behaviors. This article extends this work by taking up the relationship between irony and settler-colonial imaginaries in writings about unpredictable bodies of water. Focusing on settler writing in Australia, the article juxtaposes nineteenth-century author Henry Lawson and contemporary novelist Jane Rawson to argue that irony constitutes a form of environmental knowledge, calling up norms and hierarchies regarding water but also creating openings toward waters that cannot be given meaning. Lawson’s writings about ephemeral rivers and lakes stress their divergence from metropolitan ideas of water’s continuity, presence, and visibility. Largely ignoring Indigenous peoples’ relationships with water, his ironies of overturned expectations and norms make contact with but also disparage water in unfamiliar forms. By contrast, Rawson’s A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (2013) employs irony to grasp how climate-changed floodwater disrupts settler norms founded upon the erasure of floodplains and of Indigenous and colonial histories of urban rivers. Juxtaposing Rawson with Lawson illuminates an ongoing need to be cautious about the ideals that irony may evoke in response to changing and uncertain waters. At the same time, irony provides a multivalent tool to critically address what Mark Rifkin calls “settler common sense,” to glimpse the persistence of Indigenous knowledge and perspectives, and to acknowledge occluded forms of environmental agency.
Inverted commas o’er the River.
—Henry Lawson, “The Paroo ‘River’” (1894)
There was no river. Or rather, there was way too much river.
—Jane Rawson, A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (2013)
“An Australian lake is not a lake,” asserted Australian settler writer Henry Lawson in New South Wales in 1893: such an entity “is either a sheet of brackish water or a patch of dry sand.”1 Lawson wavers between outright denial that these places are lakes at all and qualified alignment of precisely that term with unfamiliar forms of water and sand. He calls up unspoken expectations about what a lake is as well as the disappointment of these expectations, even while beginning to reshape the term for new climatic conditions. Almost half a century later, Xavier Herbert’s novel Capricornia (1938) described the disastrous misreading of an Australian river by a settler-educated character, in the very different context of the Northern Territory:
The grassy space was actually the river’s flood bed. The western flood-bank was the distant bush-grown ridge. . . .
The grassy spaces flanking the river were strips of no-tree’s land. . . . The fact that they were treeless was significant. Norman considered it merely fortunate, since it made travelling easy. . . .
He might also have realised how mightily the river swelled by simply looking into trees and noting the old flood-debris thirty feet above, instead of noting only cockatoos and nuttagal geese and cranes.2
A combination of preconceptions and unfamiliarity blinds the unfortunate traveler to the “dangerous potentialities” of water in this environment.3 Lawson’s lake made of sand and Herbert’s invisible flood highlight the role played by literature, and the mode of irony in particular, in settler attempts to understand and manage environmental and climatic conditions where the “sensory, political and agentive power of water” appears resistant to colonial understanding.4
The status of water in colonized and postcolonized environments, and especially the relation between water infrastructure and political power in arid regions, marks a growing point of condensation between the environmental humanities, postcolonialism, and literary ecocriticism. There is a broad applicability to a range of imperial contexts of Alan Mikhail’s observation that “understanding water management is crucial to any understanding of the political, social, and economic history” of Egypt during the centuries when it was ruled by the Ottoman Empire.5 An equally long history of Western imperial water management is laid out in Diana K. Davis’s genealogy of desiccation theory—a view of “deserts and arid regions as ruined landscapes, and especially as destroyed forests”—which began to take shape in the early modern period and led to the widespread imposition by Britain and France of irrigation and afforestation schemes in dryland environments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.6 Histories of imperial water infrastructures in the twentieth century, such as Sara B. Pritchard’s examination of “hydroimperialism” in French North Africa,7 converge with the emergence of a literary scholarship focused on categories such as “hydrocolonialism” and “hydrofiction.”8 Hannah Boast points out, in the context of Israeli settler colonialism, that attending to literature not only aids in grasping the role of political power in constructing water resources as scarce or abundant but also assists in revealing the “present situation as contingent” and thus opening up possibilities for alternative water imaginaries.9 At the same time, however, in this essay we wish to look beyond attempts at infrastructural domination of water to ask what past and present settler literature might reveal about the more tactile and intimate challenges that water poses to imperial understanding and belonging.
Through focusing on Australian writing from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, we wish to highlight the complex cultural role played by irony as a signifier of water’s resistance or excessiveness to settler knowledges. Irony has a complex and contested relationship to environmental thought. Nicole Seymour’s Bad Environmentalism (2018) points out that a “distancing mode like irony seems utterly unecological and unenvironmentalist.”10 From one perspective irony seems antithetical to the kind of sincerity that appears a necessary component of environmental concern. Irony can also tend toward elitism in its appeal to a knowing audience and may strike a conservative tone in its dependence on ideas of original intent or meaning. Seymour argues, however, that irony (among other modes) can effectively convey the contradictions facing environmental cultures as well as diversify the affective range of mainstream environmentalism, moving beyond sentimentality and self-righteousness.11 Critics and commentators are increasingly recognizing the presence of irony in environmental literature, and Bronislaw Szerszynski has even called for a “thoroughgoingly ironic environmentalism.”12 Such discussions of the role of irony in the Anthropocene have often highlighted its ability to highlight disjunctions between the individual’s environmental convictions and their compromised behaviors. Yet rather than highlighting, in Szerszynski’s terms, the “communicative” ironies enacted by individuals, we here concentrate on how “simple” linguistic ironies might open out onto “situational” ironies arising from the settler’s uncertainty about the forms of water that surround them: “Situational irony is a broad concept and covers what we would normally call ‘dramatic irony’ as well as . . . ‘cosmic irony’—where ‘we do not see the effects of what we do, the outcomes of our actions, or the forces that exceed our choices.’”13 There is an intriguing doubleness to such representations, as they simultaneously offer a critique of water’s failure to meet expectations and signal the possibility of alternative understandings.
In this essay, we bring to light the ironies that emerge in settler culture’s contact with water by considering Henry Lawson’s influential colonial writings about the Australian outback. Publishing both poetry and prose, Lawson was regarded at the turn of the twentieth century as Australia’s “most original and characteristic writer.”14 We juxtapose Lawson’s writings with Jane Rawson’s recent novel A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (2013), set in a future Melbourne wracked by the effects of climate change. While the historical and geographical differences between these texts mean they do not share the same knowledge of water or the forms that it takes, they are united in stressing linguistic disjunctions between inherited expectations and present-day experiences of water availability and behavior. This throughline between colonial and contemporary settler writing is a matter of “simple” irony that arises, according to D. C. Muecke, from a linguistic encounter where “an apparently or ostensibly true statement . . . or legitimate expectation is corrected, invalidated, or frustrated by the ironist’s real meaning, by the true state of affairs, or by what actually happens.”15 More specifically, settler responses to water in ironic terms depend upon a shared awareness of context and expectation, and thus they “foreground . . . assumed norms and values.”16 Behind Lawson’s accounts of the outback lie inherited notions of water “norms and values” associated with British pastoralism and rural landscapes, whereas Rawson’s depiction of a future Melbourne is underpinned by an implicit contrast with a present-day level of familiarity built up over decades of water management by the settler state. At the same time, our readings of how these writers narrate water are also anchored by Linda Hutcheon’s argument that irony is a “mode of the unsaid, the unheard, the unseen.”17 In presenting frustrated expectations, irony not only may look back to the apparent certainties of “assumed norms and values” but may also create openings toward water that cannot yet be given meaning and perhaps are inexpressible within a settler frame of reference. Many environmental humanists describe water’s always-unfolding forms, its “shape-shifting ways,” in Jeremy J. Schmidt’s terms, or its “characteristic tendency toward morphological reinvention,” as Andrea Ballestero puts it.18“Water is among the least cooperative of things when it comes to being contained in words and in deeds,” writes Jamie Linton.19 Ironic storytelling recognizes the fragility of meanings and structures shaped by water. In Lawson’s and Rawson’s writings, ironic hints that the meanings of water are not yet fully determined raise the possibility of noticing and including diverse waters in environmental storytelling rather than what Anna Tsing calls a “hegemonic, extinction-oriented creed” defined by control and authority.20 Yet we wish to remain alert to the fact that, in the hands of settler writers, ironic narratives may manage water’s creativity by expressing dismay and dislike regarding what diverges from norms and by participating in making tenuous settler relations with water more durable.21
Irony, Settlement, and Ephemeral Water
Henry Lawson’s understanding of water in Australia was profoundly shaped by a period he spent “Out Back,” in the arid environment of northwestern New South Wales. In the summer of 1892–93, he traveled inland to the township of Bourke, at the end of the western railway from Sydney, and later walked almost three hundred miles across country in a return journey to the town of Hungerford. “Bourke, the metropolis of the Great Scrubs,” Lawson later wrote, “was suffering from a long drought when I was there in ’92.”22 Critics have tended to read his portrayals of Australia’s arid landscapes in broad and uninflected terms: “a wasteland characterised by maddening isolation,” as Ian Kirkpatrick puts it; “a psychic terrain” or “archetypal” setting, Gillian Whitlock argues, for the settler self; or as the backdrop to “the significant social problems associated with rural working life,” in the words of Christopher Lee.23 However, Lawson’s ballads and sketches offer a tenuous form of environmental knowledge. The ironies in these works not only register a bewildering absence of water and attest to the lack of understanding that underpins this but also grudgingly bestow agency on those rivers and lakes that singularly fail to conform to inherited expectations.24
The most basic, “simple” sense of irony—the use of language to mean something other than what it appears to say—is central to Lawson’s project of educating his predominantly urban settler readers into an unfamiliar climate where the pastoral imagery of English poetry has become unmoored from its established meanings. His catalog of advice to prospective local writers, “Some Popular Australian Mistakes” (1893), redefines common terms associated with water. Some examples are:
1. An Australian mirage does not look like water; it looks too dry and dusty. . . .
3. A river is not a broad, shining stream with green banks and tall, dense eucalypti walls; it is more often a string of muddy water-holes—“a chain of dry water-holes,” someone said. . . .
19. An Australian lake is not a lake; it is either a sheet of brackish water or a patch of dry sand.25
The list expresses both dislike of Australian water’s unknowability and disdain for those writers who insist on approaching it in metropolitan terms. If Romanticism had taught “a confidence in nature, in its own workings,” as Raymond Williams put it, Lawson instead demanded in Australia at the end of the nineteenth century that settler writers remove the “green spectacles” from their eyes.26 Problems of representation, political as well as aesthetic, arise from an awareness that water strays so far from the natural order of Britain: “A region where there are no seasons to speak of; where the surface will bake for nine months or a year, and then suddenly become a boundless marsh; where the single river, flowing between drought-baked banks and under blazing skies, will rise from a muddy gutter to a second Mississippi, because of the Northern rains.”27 At the center of these complaints is the possibility that water might continue to remain outside of the grasp of settler language.
Lawson’s recourse to simple irony as a means of describing such rivers and lakes accords with challenges that they posed to colonial legal and scientific regimes in Australia. Mark Patrick Taylor and Robert Stokes point out that English common-law definitions of “river” and “watercourse” were received into New South Wales law at the commencement of British settlement in 1788 and have persisted into current-day legislative frameworks.28 Those definitions recognize water that flows in “perennial or intermittent” ways, thus rendering invisible the “ephemeral” streams and rivers that are a “common component of most drainage networks in NSW.”29 One of Lawson’s contemporaries, the meteorologist H. C. Russell, wrote that the variability of the Darling River—Australia’s longest river system, inclusive of its tributaries—posed “serious difficulty” for the collection of meaningful data.30 Seeking to discern a multiyear pattern that might align the river’s flow with a cyclical norm, Russell asserted both that “in a period of nineteen years, the general character of the weather returns” and that “the weather is not subject to such rules.”31 Such struggles to make Australia’s rivers conform to a colonial knowledge regime—to establish what Mark Rifkin, in another context, calls settler common sense32—suggest that irony ought to be read not merely as a marker of contradiction or expression of frustration but as a means of approaching environmental knowledge that exceeds settlers’ grasp.
Lawson’s predominant response to the seeming recalcitrance of Australian water is to foreground “situational” ironies—those that highlight “broader forces that exceed our choices”—and address them directly in comic mode so that that their disruptive potential might be contained. The ballad “Lake Eliza” (1893) recounts the last half mile of the speaker’s trek to a place he has been advised will make a suitable campsite, buoyed by thoughts of “green and shady banks” and “pleasant waters” that are connoted by its placename.33 What is eventually found is just a “patch of grey, discoloured sand, / A fringe of tufty ‘grasses’” with no visible signs of water in evidence.34 The speaker’s response is to treat the designation of water in the place name as something like a practical joke:
In another ballad describing a search for a dubious watercourse, “The Paroo ‘River’” (1894), Lawson signals from the outset the need for irony with an epigraph, “Inverted commas o’er the River.”36 At the end of a day’s journey the speaker and his more experienced companion notice “a strip of ground,” which they initially mistake for another dusty track, “No barer than the surface round / But just a little hollowed.”37 Here again, water is severed from its accepted meanings, for the river is entirely dry:
The irony of the dry river is deployed in multiple directions. The speaker’s naivety about this environment is one source of humor, as is his companion’s unfazed assertion that a dry hollow is indeed a river in this unfamiliar territory. Rather than leading to the suggestion that such a place might be beyond the possibilities of settlement, however, Lawson’s humor sustains that presence by offering a form of environmental education for the unwitting settler reader.
Lawson’s situational irony at times goes beyond a technique for managing difference to a means of ascribing—albeit reluctantly—agency, or vitality, to water’s uncertain forms. Jane Bennett’s conception of “vibrant matter” proposes that nonhuman agency is made visible through the overturning of human intentions: “By ‘vitality’ I mean the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.”39 This possibility is especially evident in Lawson’s treatment of the Darling River, a subject that he returned to repeatedly throughout his career. The most well known of these works, “The Song of the Darling River” (1899), gives voice to the river as a living entity, although only to suggest that it desires for its flows to become more regulated—to become a proper river:
In a series of impressionistic travel narratives, however, the Darling River is glimpsed as a more subtle and incomprehensible being. Lawson describes a steamship journey where “the boat steered north, south, east, and west to humour the river.”41 Elsewhere, he observes that “the Darling rose, for reasons best known to itself.”42 In an anecdote of a steamboat journey that was begun “in flood-time,” the river simply disappears: “A month later the captain got bushed between the Darling and the South Australian border. The waters went away before he could find the river again, and left his boat in a scrub.”43 Teetering between factual recollection and tall tales, such accounts endow the river with propensities of its own that are indifferent or even resistant to settler interests, although it remains unclear whether it is simply refractory or if there is a more active purpose to its actions.
Even in crediting water with agency, however, Lawson’s situational ironies remain grounded in the normative perspective of the settler population. This reflects what Colebrook describes as the elitist potential of irony: “To say one thing and mean another, or to say something contrary to what is understood, relies on the possibility that those who are not enlightened or privy to the context will be excluded. We . . . can also say that it is conservative to assume that there simply is a community.”44 That narrow sense of meaningful community is built on the startling absence of any Indigenous presence from Lawson’s water writings—aside from one repeated refrain. “The Song of the Darling River” begins with an epigraph: “The only national work of the blacks was to form a dam or dyke of stone across the Darling River at Brewarrina. The stones they carried from Lord knows where—and the Lord knows how.”45 Similarly, when Lawson revised his articles on the Darling River for republication, one of his most notable changes was a new concluding paragraph that expressed a very similar sentiment: “The only national work performed by the blacks is on the Darling. They threw a dam of rocks across the river—near Brewarrina, we think—to make a fish-trap. It’s there yet. But God only knows where they got the stones from, or how they carried them, for there isn’t a pebble within forty miles.”46 These grudging and dismissive comments refer to the ancient Brewarrina fish traps, or Baiame’s Ngunnhu, and Lawson offers them to assert the irony that settlers had not managed at that time to similarly harness the river to their own “national” purpose.47 Yet such irony proves unruly, because it reinforces the narrowness of settler water understanding. Jessica Weir, writing of the traditional owners of the Murray-Darling basin, points out that “Indigenous people speak about water as a web of relations within which life, spirit and the law are connected, whereas the moderns have created a far narrower vision of water as resource to be stored, regulated and allocated for human consumption and economic production.”48 The persistence of the fish traps not only highlights the absence of locks that Lawson desired to regulate the Darling but also contrasts with the fragmentation of his anecdotal prose forms. What Lawson presents as a mystery, and what he disdains but cannot ignore, persists as a physical reminder of a different way that Australia’s water might be known.
Irony, Climate Change, and Urban Floodwater
More than a century after Lawson’s outback water writings were published, Jane Rawson uses irony in A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists to explore climate-changed urban water. Rawson grapples with knowledge under pressure in the face of flooding and an intermittent potable water supply in a future version of Melbourne. While Lawson uses irony to manage how early settlers interface with relatively unknown and disorienting rivers and lakes, Rawson explores how global climate change is disrupting settler norms built on the many decades of material and cultural interventions in water since Lawson wrote his works. Linda Morris describes A Wrong Turn as “the best Australian book you’ve probably never read,” and indeed it is sometimes mentioned but rarely engaged in depth in studies of climate fiction.49 Rawson’s novel traces the lives of poor characters who struggle to survive heat, flooding, and fresh water scarcity, among other climate-related processes, and who eventually relocate to an imaginary version of San Francisco. Rawson’s central character Caddy lives at the “Newell Settlement”—along a riverbank inhabited by refugees and the poor, in the vicinity of Footscray Road in inner West Melbourne. The encampment is set in the area of Melbourne known as Newell’s Paddock, a wetland that buffers the suburb of Footscray from the Maribyrnong River, a perennial waterway that runs over forty-one kilometers from a mountainous catchment through Melbourne City to Port Phillip Bay. Footscray lies within the homelands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and the Bunurong peoples of the Kulin Nation. Amid the upheavals of European settler colonialism from the 1830s, the Maribyrnong River and surrounding locales were affected by industrial facilities such as slaughterhouses and factories, and Footscray became known as “the smelliest place in Melbourne.”50 Geographer Brad Jessup describes Footscray as “among the areas of Melbourne ‘burdened with [hazardous] industries.’ . . . The burden was and remains an historical legacy of inequitable wealth and the presence of working-class and migrant populations in these geographies.”51 The Maribyrnong River has a history of flooding, and sea level rise scenarios suggest that riparian areas like Footscray could face tidal inundation.52
In A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, Rawson uses irony to evoke disruptions to knowledge that occur when the river flows into the urban infrastructure on its floodplain. During a storm, Caddy’s shelter and an entire settlement are washed away. In the locale of Caddy’s destroyed home, we brush up against a waterscape at odds with language: “The river had taken even the tennis courts, grown to about four times its usual width, making a lake of the paddock and pouring through the handrails of the bridge she’d planned to walk over.”53 Remade as a channel for flowing water, the bridge is unmoored from its definition as a structure that takes a road across a river and becomes something almost entirely nonsensical. Water possesses the tennis courts, creating a new elemental geography and temporarily overpowering the regime of property. The flood transforms the settler infrastructure of the paddock into a landscape of water and sediment: “Most of the Paddock had turned to greasy mud.”54 Caddy’s reference to this altered landscape as a “lake” is also ironic, insofar as (recalling our reading of Lawson) Australian settler culture has associated lakes with enduring fresh water rather than with ephemeral pools of floodwater and mud fields. To return to Hutcheon’s argument for irony as the mode of the “unheard,” Rawson casts water as creative in ways that disappoint the normative settler expectations implicit in terms like river and lake.55
Such simple ironies of definition underwrite Rawson’s broader invocation of situational ironies to represent how people relate to urban floodwaters. To recall: situational irony arises where characters do not simply fail to see the implications of their actions but where their agency is revealed to be limited by relationality or by “the forces that exceed our choices.” The floodwater frustrates Caddy’s plans to use the bridge and her expectations about the extent of the river. In the flood’s aftermath, she plans to wash bedding but “remembered there was no river. Or rather, there was way too much river.”56 Her bewilderment illuminates the limitations of her knowledge in the face of water that is “cutting a new course through an old floodplain.”57 More broadly, we can sense the fragility and narrowness of settler culture’s understandings of this land and waterscape in Rawson’s descriptions of structures placed on land not acknowledged as floodplain and in the concept of property overwhelmed by the vitality of water.
In parallel to Lawson, Rawson’s situational irony activates a shared settler cultural sense of what it really means to be a watercourse. She implies that floodwater confounds land that should be steadily above water and organized as property. Caddy calls the locale affected by inundation “the Paddock,” a term that settlers brought from Europe to Australia and eventually used to refer to small enclosures as well as large, socially organized spaces, from fenced private property and stock routes to roadside commons known as “long paddocks.”58 At first glance, Caddy’s description of the river as “making a lake of the paddock” implies that flooding is a deviation from a norm of settler access to land.59 Rawson’s novel goes further, however, in questioning those underlying settler expectations of environmental stability. As historian Emily O’Gorman suggests, the notion that riverine expansion and contraction is nontypical elides the changeable flows of many Australian rivers: “The label ‘natural disaster’ in some sense also classifies an event as unusual. But floods in Australia challenge such a classification. Floods are central to river hydrologies and ecologies in many Australian rivers.”60 Even the concept of a flood is culturally charged, as Margaret Cook argues: “Many rivers naturally overflow their banks, but it’s only when settlements are inundated that this overflow is labelled a flood.”61 Cook describes how settlers envisioned flooding to be “a problem of water control” and in the state of Queensland sought to straighten, dredge, and shorten the Brisbane river system.62 In the state of Victoria, where A Wrong Turn is set, life-forms like the iconic River Red Gums that depend upon inundation are now stressed due to settler infrastructure—irrigation systems, canals, and levees—that impedes rivers’ capacities to flood.
As these social interventions in water imply, climate-related flooding does not affect water that was previously in a neutral state. It impacts on what are already contested relationalities between water and societies. To draw from Jamie Linton and Jessica Budds, “water internalizes and reflects social and power relations that might otherwise remain invisible.”63 Jessica Ballestero writes, “something becomes a water body in a particular time and place, and . . . that body is always a technopolitical entity.”64 In the case of A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, sea level rise and storms interface with floodplains and water sources already appropriated, restructured, and managed by settlers. This is particularly evident in the opening scene, which touches on Caddy’s memories from before her husband Harry and cat Skerrick died in an explosion and she was displaced. In this scene, Caddy washes dishes, among other activities, while Harry drinks beer.65 Water is an almost invisible element of this domestic scene, its place ordinary and certain in a way that reflects what Rifkin terms “settler common sense,” which describes how settler access to Indigenous territories and resources is normalized and “lived as given.”66 Richard Rorty similarly asserts, “The opposite of irony is common sense.”67 If Lawson uses irony to malign muddy water holes, dusty depressions in land, and intermittent flow, urging settlers to build hydrological infrastructures, Rawson writes of a character for whom tap water was an inherited common sense that then was lost.
In contrast with Lawson, however, Rawson critically interrogates the assumptions and power dynamics that can underlie stories of changing waters. Caddy’s references to past water bear a conspicuously bucolic sheen that encourage a reader to inhabit an ironic distance from them. Even amid Harry and Caddy’s tranquil domestic life at the beginning of the novel, oil tanks loom “into every horizon.”68 At such moments, Rawson emphasizes how expectations mediate rather than neutrally translate the history of a changing environment as well as how the expectations themselves are often contested and opaque. “Irony often spotlights discrepancies between what is promised or expected and what is delivered,” Angelique Haugerud writes, “but it also can call into question the very norms and ideals on which expectations are based.”69 Colebrook also describes “modes of irony that challenge just how shared, common and stable our conventions and assumptions are.”70 Rawson’s novel reflects on how social inequality shapes people’s expectations of water. For Caddy, “Paddock” is not an abstract term for agricultural land but the proper name of culturally devalued riparian terrain where people seek refuge after being displaced amid the upheavals of climate change. She describes the elite classes as “the hillsiders” in reference to their elevated settlements.71 By contrast, those who live in the path of floodwater are “discounted” peoples, to draw from Rob Nixon’s description of the state, corporate, and social devaluation of the lives of the poor, those people with few material resources.72 Caddy tells a refugee family that it is not safe to move into the Paddock because it is an area subject to flooding, but they imply that they have few options: “It’s safer than in the city.”73 For Caddy, the notion that the Paddock is usually dry land is perhaps more of a desire than an expectation. Her story speaks to instability and marginality within the norms of settler colonialism.
Through the story of Caddy’s friend Ray, Rawson hints that the relationships with water that Caddy laments, including ready access to water, reflect the history of settler-colonial dispossession and erasure of Indigenous peoples. Identifying as an Iora (Eora) man with connections to Sydney, Ray is associated with creative tactics of survival in the city and surrounding locales. But he also faces racism, economic precariousness, and exposure to climate-related hazards and eventually decides to migrate with Caddy from Melbourne to San Francisco. Ray’s presence complicates settler culture’s constructions of Melbourne as non-Indigenous space, although Rawson does not substantially engage with Indigenous communities or the longer Indigenous histories of the river. Penelope Edmonds writes that even recently “many studies, especially in Australia, have ignored the dynamic, interactive contact histories of the colonial cityscape, as if Indigeneity stopped at the urban.”74 As settlers used private property and fenced paddocks to encroach into Indigenous lands in the area of Melbourne during the 1840s, they struggled to incorporate rivers and wetlands in these regimes. Indigenous peoples established camps in “unallotted spaces, such as river banks, road reserves and swamps near the town. . . . Such spaces along creeks and rivers were transitional within the processes of colonialism, nervous spaces that were not yet property.”75 Edmonds notes that by the mid-1840s, the Melbourne Town Council was casting urban Indigenous camps as a nuisance. Settlers sought to deny Indigenous peoples access to Melbourne and auctioned riparian land without acknowledgment of its Indigenous owners. Such histories underlie carbon-intensive ways of life and intensify the impacts of climate change on Indigenous communities. Tony Birch writes of ancient connections between Kulin nation peoples and the Birrarung (Yarra) River in Melbourne, as well as colonial upheavals of the river, from disruptions of the river’s course and connections with Port Phillip Bay to the destruction of wetlands and riverine life-forms. Birch suggests that Kulin stories of living with a vanishingly old, changeable, and powerful river can inform understandings of the present-day climate crisis, although he cautions that this “is not a lesson to be co-opted by non-Indigenous people, but one to learn and gain from.”76 In A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, Rawson offers limited recognition of Indigenous peoples’ connections with urban places but does not imagine how Melbourne’s climate-changed waterscape might look if Indigenous presences and knowledges were centered.77
As A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists proceeds, Caddy and Ray undertake a tactical survival in a changeful environment where, for the poor who are most exposed, few understandings and expectations seem able to gain any durability. Together, however, they do build tenuous understandings of friendship and shared endurance. In parallel to how Lawson presents the ironic bewilderment of settler travelers to encourage levity and adaptability when knowledge and presence falter in the face of environmental unknowability and Indigenous relationships with water, Rawson’s characters turn the tables (if only in imagination) by treating difficulties and unknowns of relating to water in a joking manner. They share affinities with the picaro, a downtrodden literary figure who lives by wits and parasitism.78 But instead of using irony to emphasize the survival of settlers and to malign Indigenous peoples in the manner of Lawson, Rawson includes Ray as a creator of humor alongside Caddy in their efforts to be responsive to flooding dynamics. For example, Caddy and Ray seek to repurpose her association with the river’s turbidity, the mud that follows flooding, and the dust that relentlessly sticks to her body. Her visible proximity to dirt is a marker of her marginal social position, as is evident in her efforts to acquire soap and water. Caddy is a sex worker, and Ray teasingly suggests that she can cultivate a “tastefully dirty” appearance for the elite clients who want “the full experience” of her shelter and the camp.79 They utilize her status as someone associated with dirt toward acquiring economic resources. This is one of the ways in which they acknowledge and live with the river’s transformations of the city and its life. Ray and Caddy create a tenuous but vital sense of being able to rely on each other. In their collaborative, unequal, unfolding engagement, Rawson imagines a new pathway to the shared expectations that often underlie irony.
Irony, Sincerity, and Settler Survival
The ironies of Rawson and Lawson not only highlight tensions with the forms that water takes in the environments they describe but also contrast with their other writings that respond to water in more sincere or straightforward ways. Lawson urgently and consistently advocated the modification of the Australian outback environment through irrigation. He envisaged a nationalist project of environmental change in a quasi-memoir, “Drought-Stricken” (1903): “Every spare penny should be spent on water conservation and irrigation, in sinking tanks and putting down bores, in locking our thousands and thousands of miles of rivers—almost at sea level—where oceans of water waste away after each flood time. To attend to these things is a national work, for the benefit of the whole nation; to neglect them is a national crime—it is suicidal.”80 Similarly, Lawson reflected in 1916, “I saw, studied out, and dreamed of the possibilities of water storage in the Bourke and other districts twenty-five years ago, and wrote about it hopelessly for years. . . . Australia’s greatest hope . . . is, and has always been, the conservation of water, and irrigation.”81 Jane Rawson’s sincerity is expressed as public environmental advocacy. As coauthor with James Whitmore of The Handbook: Surviving and Living With Climate Change (2015), she proffers “the kind of information that will help you plan and execute a strategy to deal with extreme weather and other effects of climate change.”82 The book offers advice on psychological preparedness, reducing vulnerability to certain risks—heat, bushfire, flood—and increasing self-sufficiency. This latter culminates with a list of “17 skills that will make you more useful to your community and yourself,” such as:
3. Cook a few simple meals without a recipe. . . .
6. Tie knots for a variety of situations. . . .
11. Fell a tree: if you have to do this, you want to be able to do it right. . . .
13. Use tools, either powered or manual. . . .
17. Meditate and stay fit.83
Both Lawson’s and Rawson’s turns toward more ostensibly sincere forms of writing are offered in the name of survival. Unlike Lawson’s advocacy for national water infrastructure, however, Rawson’s book recognizes disproportionate impacts on Indigenous peoples. While differing widely in their focus, both nevertheless enact a literalism that establishes a more oppositional stance toward water and its environments. The turn to sincerity, in other words, further highlights the contrasting potential of irony to imagine other forms of relation to water.
Jane Rawson, Henry Lawson: the rhyming names of the authors we discuss usefully signal the tensions we have sought to explore between similarity and difference, continuity and divergence, in the settler articulation of water knowledge and its limitations across time. Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery, and Sarah Nuttall propose a “hydrocolonial” reading practice that “explores the literary implications of overlaying the hydrological cycle onto imperial and post-imperial cartographies.”84 We are not suggesting that these writers’ hydrocolonial visions are equivalent. Indeed, Lawson and Rawson evoke rivers that are almost entirely different. Lawson ponders whether impressions in sand could be called a river, while Rawson suggests that a river cannot be imagined as fully distinct from a petroleum company. Nor are we proposing ironic writing as the most, or only, appropriate mode for engaging with unfamiliar environments. But we are arguing that, in a context of settler colonialism, irony provides one means whereby occluded forms of water’s agency might be acknowledged and the persistence of Indigenous knowledge and perspectives might be glimpsed. In positing resemblances between colonial and contemporary settler writing about water, we do not wish to posit a timeless or universal settler condition. Neither do we wish to simply argue that the past determines the present, nor to assert an equivalence between past and present that diminishes the urgency of contemporary crises. Instead, we wish to claim that ironic structures continue to bring about new environmental insights by emphasizing—and also managing—a gap between expectation and lived experience, whether it is the past or present that is brought into view.
Both Lawson and Rawson use ironic forms to narrate water that breaks with settler knowledge and expectations. Lawson implicitly casts what is normal and known for water in terms of continuity, presence, and visibility. Largely ignoring Indigenous peoples’ relationships with water, he recognizes but also devalues water that is intermittent or even ephemeral. Through its structure of overturning expectations and norms, Lawson shows that irony can make contact with but may also disparage water in unfamiliar forms. While Lawson confronts environments that were largely unfamiliar to him, Rawson writes of settler characters for whom access to and knowledge of water was liable to be lived as given, evoking the past of climate crisis as a time in which certain social groups could readily access fresh water through taps. Reading Rawson alongside Lawson, in whose writing a politics of settler presence and of tension with Australian hydrology is so palpable, encourages us to be critically cautious also of the irony we might find in narratives of climate-changed water. Rawson’s writing suggests that expectations of water may reflect the colonial histories of urban rivers. Her stories of people’s daily struggles for fresh water amid an intermittent supply, and of poor communities washed away in floods, suggest that people’s strivings to have some expectations of water matter, but such stories must address critically settler cultures’ “common sense”: the resulting erasures and deep inequalities that underlie people’s capacities to relate to water as relatively knowable and predictable. The history of settler irony also suggests the need for future narratives to grapple increasingly with openness to water’s uncertain, changing forms.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful responses. Our work was supported by the Marsden Fund Council (grant no. MFP-19-MAU-022), managed by Royal Society Te Apārangi.
Notes
Seymour uses irony to engage with a situation that is “cruelly, humorously, or strangely at odds with assumptions or expectations,” drawing on Sianne Ngai’s claim that it is a “rhetorical attitude with a decidedly affective dimension” (Seymour, Bad Environmentalism, 8).
Szerszynski, “Post-ecologist Condition,” 350. See also Cardon, “Species Suicide Notes”; Clark, “Some Climate Change Ironies.”
Linton, What Is Water?, 4. Ballestero suggests that water “confounds the institutional and organizational protocols we use for its scientific exploration and political organization” (Ballestero, Future History of Water, 14).
Linton calls such efforts in durability “fixing water (conceptually and materially)” (Linton, What Is Water?, 10). See also Schmidt’s discussion of the philosophy of global water management based on a liberal vision of water as a resource (Schmidt, Water, 141–86).
Quoted in John Barnes, “Making of a Legend,” 47.
Kirkpatrick, “‘New Words Come Tripping Slowly,’” 202; Whitlock, “Bush, the Barrack-Yard, and the Clearing,” 40, 41; Lee, “Uncultured Rhymer,” 92.
For a contrasting account of Australian poetry from this time expressing “optimism and faith” that technology might provide solutions to water shortages in arid environments, see Powell, “Song of the Artesian Water.”
Lawson, “Lake Eliza,” lines 11–12.
Lawson, “Lake Eliza,” lines 17–18.
Lawson, “Lake Eliza,” lines 29–32. Advertiser was a common name for colonial newspapers.
Lawson, “Paroo ‘River,’” lines 49, 51–52.
Lawson, “Paroo ‘River,’” lines 59–64.
Bennett, Vibrant Matter, viii.
Lawson, “Song of the Darling River,” lines 23–28.
Lawson, “Australian Rivers,” no. 2.
Lawson, “Australian Rivers,” no. 3.
Lawson, “Australian Rivers,” no. 1.
The widespread use of such traps and related technologies is described in Humphries, “Historical Indigenous Use of Aquatic Resources,” 109.
Morris, “Jane Rawson’s Debut Novel.” E. M. Fehskens discusses the novel’s imagining of refuge in a context of climate precarity (Fehskens, “‘Rain Coming Down’”). Teresa Shewry highlights Rawson’s use of a humor of incongruity (Shewry, “Ice Thieves”). Charlotte Lancaster briefly situates A Wrong Turn within Australian settler apocalyptic literary traditions that elide Indigenous peoples as well as historical and continuing colonial violence (Lancaster, “Apocalypse Repeated”).
A speculative mapping of inundation in Footscray during the highest tide in 2100 is available at Coastal Risk Australia, https://coastalrisk.com.au/home (accessed August 4, 2021).
A number of Indigenous Australian writers draw on Indigenous frameworks to explore the intersections between water and climate change, including Alexis Wright (Waanji) in The Swan Book, a novel of swans and people living in a swamp affected by colonialism and climate change, and Claire G. Coleman (Noongar) in the creative essay “Boodjar Ngan Djoorla: Country, My Bones,” an exploration of the meanings of sea level rise in relation to Noongar conceptions of Country.
Rob Nixon writes that this figure of the picaresque genre can reveal widening economic inequality and the disproportionate effects of ecological degradation on the poor (Nixon, “Neoliberalism,” 444).
