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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 May 2014
In the 29 novels by Arthur Upfield in which he is the protagonist, Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte (Bony) is often referred to as a product of Queensland. We are reminded repeatedly of his origins, first in North Queensland (where he was born and raised on a mission) and then Brisbane (where he was educated, and where he and his wife live in the suburb of Banyo – though this city location is never described). But my main purpose here is to explore Upfield's representation of ‘place’, specifically in the three Queensland-focused Bony novels, and the related, recurrent discourses and tropes commonly associated with environmental writing and eco-criticism: wilderness, toxicity, pastoral, dwelling and particularly environmental crisis, eruption and catastrophe.
1 Carol Hetherington claims that ‘Arthur Upfield is arguably the most successful . . . Australian writer of popular detective fiction in the twentieth century, whether the success be measured in financial terms, in terms of local, Australian readership, or in terms of international popularity and recognition.’ De Hoog, Kees and Hetherington, Carol (eds), Investigating Arthur Upfield: A centenary collection of critical essays (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), p. 210Google Scholar.
2 Rhoda M. Love, ‘Arthur W. Upfield (1888–1964): Australian ecologist’, unpublished paper presented at the Study of Literature and Environment Conference, Oregon, 2005, pp. 1–2.
3 Love, ‘Australian ecologist’, p. 8.
4 Buell, Lawrence, The environmental imagination: Themes, nature writing, and the formation of American culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 7–8Google Scholar.
5 Upfield, Arthur, Wings above the Diamantina (New York: Macmillan, 1986), p. 1Google Scholar.
6 Upfield, Wings above the Diamantina, p. 8.
7 Upfield, Wings above the Diamantina, p. 24.
8 Upfield, Wings above the Diamantina, pp. 68–9.
9 Upfield, Wings above the Diamantina, p. 122.
10 Neilsen, Philip, Imagined lives: A study of David Malouf (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1996), pp. 200–19Google Scholar.
11 Upfield, Wings above the Diamantina, p. 112.
12 Upfield, Wings above the Diamantina, p. 110.
13 Upfield, Wings above the Diamantina, p. 97.
14 Upfield, Wings above the Diamantina, p. 117.
15 Upfield, Wings above the Diamantina, pp. 138, 142.
16 Buell, Lawrence, Writing for an endangered world: Literature, culture and environment in the US and beyond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedermann (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 68.
18 Buell, Lawrence, The future of environmental criticism: Environmental crisis and literary imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 94Google Scholar.
19 Upfield, Wings above the Diamantina, p. 202.
20 Upfield, Wings above the Diamantina, p. 243.
21 Upfield, Wings above the Diamantina, p. 267.
22 Buell, The Environmental Imagination, p. 264.
23 Upfield, Wings above the Diamantina, p. 283.
24 Upfield, Arthur, The bone is pointed (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994), p. 42Google Scholar.
25 Buell, The future of environmental criticism, p. 66.
26 Bate, Jonathan, The song of the earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 266Google Scholar.
27 Upfield, The bone is pointed, p. 239.
28 Upfield, The bone is pointed, p. 116.
29 Upfield, The bone is pointed, p. 119.
30 Upfield, The bone is pointed, p. 87.
31 Upfield, The bone is pointed, p. 248.
32 Upfield, The bone is pointed, p. 251.
33 Upfield, The bone is pointed, pp. 253, 224.
34 Upfield, The bone is pointed, p. 266.
35 Upfield, The bone is pointed, p. 259.
36 Upfield, The bone is pointed, p. 268.
37 Upfield, The bone is pointed, p. 287.
38 Garrad, Greg, Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 101Google Scholar.
39 Upfield, Arthur, Venom House (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994), p. 38Google Scholar.
40 Upfield, Venom House, p. 63.
41 Upfield, Venom House, p. 52.
42 Upfield, Venom House, p. 39.
43 Upfield, Venom House, p. 74.
44 Upfield, Venom House, p. 94.
45 Upfield, Venom House, p. 163.
46 Upfield, Venom House, pp. 164–5.
47 Hetherington, Investigating Arthur Upfield, p. 216.
48 Upfield, Venom House, p. 191.
49 Upfield, Venom House, p. 211.
50 Upfield, Venom House, p. 219.
51 Upfield, Venom House, p. 232.
52 Upfield, Venom House, p. 258.
53 Carol Hetherington in De Hoog and Hetherington (eds.), Investigating Arthur Upfield, p. 214.
