Refiguring the Silence of Australian Landscapes

Abstract

This paper explores the way silence has been defined and redefined as a means of describing the Australian landscape. Since the first stages of European colonisation in Australia, “silence” has been a common trope used to describe the Australian landscape. While many parts of the country, especially the interior, are indeed audibly silent, other “noisier” regions were also described as such. This silence has been identified as being based in a problem of description and an ‘ontological uncertainty’, which was in turn effaced through the rhetorical construction of silence as implying an absence or lack of meaning in the landscape prior to the arrival of European settlers. Judith Wright’s poetry interrogates this silence in these terms, demonstrating that it may not be a signifier of emptiness, but rather of signs or aspects of phenomena that escapes conceptual grasp. Taking a poststructuralist-informed, ecocritical approach to Wright’s poetry, I argue that Wright refigures the perceived silence of the Australian landscape in such a way that it comes to signify the presence of other-than-human configurations of landscape, without venturing to define them explicitly.