Re-Imagining the Australian Farm Novel

The Cairns Institute Postgraduate Research Fellow, Elizabeth Smyth, is breaking new ground in georgic literature with two new publications this month. 
The first is a chapter in Georgic Literature and the Environment: Working Land, Reworking Genre, edited by Sue Edney and Tess Somervell. The second, an article in the October issue of TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses. Georgic literature is based mostly on classical poems about farming by Virgil and Hesiod but has a vivid presence in the literature of Far North Queensland. The georgic explores labour, harsh realities, and human relationships with the environment.
Two farm novels highlighted in Elizabeth’s research are Jean Devanny’s Cindie: A Chronicle of the Canefields (1949) and John Naish’s The Cruel Field (1962). Both are set in North Queensland and offer realistic depictions of life on sugarcane farms in the era of harvesting sugarcane by hand.

They are very different novels, and although Naish addresses Indigenous dispossession and marginalization ahead of the growing understandings of the 1970s, both contribute to a period in Australian literature of nation-building according to the settler-colonial worldview. Elizabeth aims to radically change this kind of representation, and literary understandings of farmers and farming, through a contemporary magic realist farm novel written as part of her research. Magic realism means the story is part realistic and part-magical or fantasy and enables representation of two contrasting worldviews.

‘The exciting aspect of this new story is being able to give agency and character to the nonhuman, like sugarcane plants, a harvester and the soil,’ Elizabeth says. ‘It’s a crazy world I’ve created where sugarcane plucks itself out of the ground and moves wherever it wants. The plants are either kind or cruel to the main human characters, depending on whether they regard them as helpful or a threat. And it’s the sugarcane, machines and soil, rather than the human ‘farmer’, who controls what happens on the farm. 

‘This is the magical side of the story. But the eventual eviction of all the people from the farm is not so far from reality. Farmlands are gradually depopulating as farm sizes increase and machinery and technologies become more sophisticated. This happens in my story with a surprising result.’

The TEXT article, titled ‘Writing an Australian Farm Novel: Connecting Regions via Magic Realism’, explains too how Elizabeth’s writing is embedded in the Wet Tropics of north-eastern Australia. Giving context to this work, the Routledge book explores connections between georgic literature and the natural world. Elizabeth’s chapter titled ‘The Semi-Georgic Australian Sugarcane Novel’ contributes to a section on Eco-Georgic and the Anthropocene.
This research builds on the literary scholarship of JCU Adjunct Associate Professor Cheryl Taylor and draws on research by historians, such as former JCU Professor Peter Griggs who wrote Global Industry, Local Innovation: The History of Cane Sugar Production in Australia, 1820-1995 (2011) and JCU Adjunct Lecturer Bianka Vidonja Balanzategui.

Elizabeth’s advisors are Dr Roger Osborne, Dr Emma Maguire and Professor Stephen Naylor.For more information, contact Elizabeth.Smyth@my.jcu.edu.au