In Peramangk Country, now commonly known as the Adelaide Hills, an early British settlement was made in the 1840s, near a series of ponds. The town that grew up here was named Chain of Ponds after these pools, and chains of ponds, as a fluvial form, have come to recent interest in studies of fluvial behaviour. I draw attention to the chain of ponds aqueous form as a way of thinking about the aqueous poetics in four recent texts, in order to employ ‘thinking with’ as a posthuman methodology (Haraway). In all four texts recently published in Australia – John Kinsella’s Cellnight: A Verse Novel (2023), Natalie Harkin’s poem ‘Cultural Precinct’ from Archival Poetics (2019), Tony Birch’s novel The White Girl (2019) and Christos Tsiolkas’s novel 7½ (2021) – water is integral to both meaning and imagery, inviting readings that think with watery forms. Like the hydrological form of the…
Recentring Water: Thinking with the Chain of Ponds
Abstract
What might thinking with specific waters, and particular watery forms, bring to our understandings of how literature comes to mean? Taking cues from recent work in both the Blue Humanities – inspired by Pacific scholars – and the posthumanities, this article considers examples of recent writing in order to explore what is revealed when focus shifts to the aqueous. What ‘transversal alliances’ (Braidotti) and concomitant limitations are highlighted in writings and readings that take account of water? Thinking with a peculiarly Australian form of fluvial geomorphology – the chain of ponds – I consider four recent texts: John Kinsella’s 'Cellnight'; Natalie Harkin’s ‘Cultural Precinct’; Tony Birch’s The White Girl, and Christos Tsiolkas’s 7½. Thinking with the chain of ponds reveals aspects of ‘hydrocolonialisms’ (Hofmeyr) and immersive ontologies. While all waters are revealed to be operating within the multiple restrictions of the nation state together with anthropogenic climate emergency, a focus on waters reveals possibilities of renewal as well as human and more-than-human connections. Taking this beyond the island continent to trans-Pacific links, I also consider the ways such connections are joyfully celebrated in Lisa Reihana’s indigifuturist video work Groundloop.
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Published 25 May 2024 in Volume 39 No. 1. Subjects: Natural environment, Natural environment - Literary portrayal, Tony Birch, Christos Tsiolkas, John Kinsella, Humanities Research, Natalie Harkin, Indigenous Knowledges.
Cite as: Treagus, Mandy. ‘Recentring Water: Thinking with the Chain of Ponds.’ Australian Literary Studies, vol. 39, no. 1, 2024, doi: 10.20314/als.95d4ac9cc5.
- Mandy Treagus — Mandy Treagus is Associate Professor in English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, where she teaches literature, culture, and visual studies.Full details →