Allegory and the Anthropocene

Abstract

This chapter explores the allegorical relationship between humans and the natural world in two exemplary stories set in the Australian outback. It combines ecocritical readings of the allegorical novel Tourmaline by Randolph Stow and a reading of the allegorical and formal elements of Ted Kotcheff’s film adaptation of Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright. The chapter focuses on the allegorical and ecocritical presentations of the Anthropocene in the fictional mining towns of Tourmaline and the Yabba and maintains that the connection between place and eco-allegorical meanings becomes particularly manifest in the Australian literary and cinematic outback. Making use of aspects of Walter Benjamin’s work and theory of allegory, the chapter argues that the outback settings of Tourmaline and Wake in Fright allegorize the ruins of colonial myths in the Anthropocene, revealing the possibility of a finite freedom for a postanthropocentric age.