Pursuits of Settler Belonging in Contemporary Australian Memoirs

This book examines Australian memoirs of settler belonging written by public intellectuals—writers, historians, academics, journalists—which attempt to come to terms with the history of colonial violence and dispossession of Indigenous people, and articulate new perspectives on how to belong ethically in a settler colony of the 21st century.

The book focuses on various ways of articulating settler belonging in Australian memoir since the turn of the 21st century. After Australia witnessed a reinvigorated public interest in the revisionist history of European settlement and colonial violence, resulting in the dispossession of Indigenous people and damaged settler–Indigenous relations, Australian settler majority has experienced an unsettlement of their sense of belonging, or the so-called “setter anxiety.” The book analyzes how settler (un)belonging is narrativized in popular memoirs written by Australian public intellectuals, such as historians, artists, writers, and commentators, in the period after 2000. These memoirs of settler belonging share one aspect: they all ask and seek answers to the implicit question, how to belong as a White settler who bears witness to the legacy of violent colonization vis-à-vis continuing Indigenous dispossession? How to justify the settler presence in and love of the land that was stolen from First Australians? The individual chapters examine historians’ memoirs, White women’s travel narratives, experimental place-writing, and eco- and landscape memoirs, tracing a gradual shift in literary representations of settler anxiety and detecting new perspectives on what can be called ethical settler belonging.

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