2 Shipwrecks, colonial histories, and environmental destruction

At the time when it happened, on 6 August 1859, the shipwreck of the SS Admella and the plight of the survivors were seen as mobilizing and uniting communities across different colonies on the continent now known as Australia.Footnote ¹⁷ This shipwreck continues to fascinate people in the contemporary period, such as Jane Rawson, who decided to write about this event during its 150-year commemoration at Mount Gambier in 2009.Footnote ¹⁸ The resulting novel From the Wreck—which was long-listed for the Miles Franklin Award and won the 2017 Aurealis Award, Australia’s premier award for speculative fiction—tells the story of Rawson’s great-great-grandfather, George Hills, who was one of the people who survived the shipwreck of the Admella. The novel, which can be situated among a wider trend of historical fiction novels centred on Australia’s colonial history, revisits key moments that have shaped Australia’s colonial identity. However, it also exemplifies features of what Hamish Dalley calls “the postcolonial historical novel,” such as “open[ing] its narratives to an intertextual dialogue with other accounts of the past.”Footnote ¹⁹ This intertextual dialogue is exemplified through the fact that Rawson does not simply reconstruct the life of George Hills during and after the shipwreck. Instead, she uses the shipwreck and the fact that George is saved by a more-than-human being as a way to depict a moment of rupture in South Australian colonial history and to question George’s sense of belonging alongside his sense of human exceptionalism.

The more-than-human being first appears when George is checking in on the horses on the SS Admella in the opening pages of the novel. George sees them in the form of a woman who “licked the foam from the horse’s quivering muzzle” and then George “could hear the creature breathe, a strange whimper deep in its chest. That did not sound like comfort. ‘Harvesting’ was the word that forced itself to George’s mind.”Footnote ²⁰ This first encounter sets up the strangeness of the being and the sense of unease that George experiences for most of the novel in relation to them. This is illustrated not only through the strange sound that the more-than-human being makes but also through the verb “harvesting,” which alludes to its predatory nature and posits the being as a threat. George’s ambivalent perceptions of the more-than-human being are confirmed when the ship sinks and the being appears again and saves him. George describes this scene as follows:

This description associates the being with a strange sense of the ocean as a weird space, which aligns with what Sharae Deckard and Kerstin Oloff have described as the “Oceanic Old Weird.”Footnote ²² This genre, which is associated with the work of H. P. Lovecraft, “is suffused with fear and loathing of the unknowable sea, which is imagined as a force of malevolent antagonism directed at ships and sailors, or as embodying the natural immanence of death and entropy.”Footnote ²³ This is an important aspect of the being’s presence in the novel because they are the reason that George starts feeling uncertain about his sense of belonging and where he fits into nineteenth-century colonial South Australian society. After the shipwreck, George becomes obsessed with finding the more-than-human being to reclaim his former identity, and for two months he sails the seas and refuses to return to his previous life, including to his fiancé Eliza. When confronted by his brother-in-law, William, George explains that the being “is why I am here now and I tell you I’m not ready to live life as though I am a normal living man.”Footnote ²⁴ This quote shows that George has been changed by the encounter with the more-than-human being and that he is no longer able to return to his former life as he no longer considers himself a “normal living man.”

This loss of humanity is foreshadowed when the lifeboat that will save the people stuck on the wreck appears. George reflects that “he had been worn down to the bare nub of human consciousness.”Footnote ²⁵ He emphasizes the perceived loss of his body as a signifier for the loss of his humanity, which is confirmed when he considers that even if he is saved, a part of him will remain on the shipwreck:

George describes leaving his dead body—the remains of his old self and identity—behind but rather than resulting in a rebirth, the body that emerges from the wreck is described as not human anymore but monstrous. This description also evokes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), both through the use of the verb “rimed” and through the thematic similarities between both texts, including the fall from grace and the sense of strangeness, especially a strangeness linked to the sea. It is worth noting that Coleridge’s text can be read as an early example of a text that focuses on “ethical and ecological as well as political and philosophical implications” of technologies linked to the steam transport, including steam boats.Footnote ²⁷ Moreover, the poem has been read through the lens of the “ecological uncanny” whereas its emphasis on the killing of the albatross and the changing weather have been linked to contemporary climate change.Footnote ²⁸ Hence, reading George’s description in conjunction with Coleridge’s poem creates strong links with the history of imperial seafaring and the Steam Revolution, both of which have contributed to the contemporary climate crisis.Footnote ²⁹ At the same time, this intertext situates From the Wreck within a long tradition of critical speculative engagement with environmental destruction caused by humans and within a history that foreshadows the impact of industrialization on the human and the more-than-human.

Moreover, considered in light of theories about shipwreck narratives, George’s experience can be interpreted as a rupture of cultural stability.Footnote ³⁰ George’s individual identity crisis is depicted as being caused by the shipwreck, which has changed George and results in him being haunted by the idea of finding Bridget Ledwith to reclaim his humanity and his sense of belonging. This identity crisis also becomes a metaphor for wider concerns. These include the identity of the colony of South Australia, which becomes obvious in the following sarcastic description of the colony, which is made by Beatrice Gallwey, who is marginalized as a single woman in this society: “the little colony of South Australia, where no one was of convict stock and everyone went to church and life was lovely and calm and polite.”Footnote ³¹ This depiction of South Australian society as considering themselves above other colonial societies has also been emphasized in historical accounts, as the colony’s founding principles of freedom and liberalism have been seen as differing from other colonies’ founding ideas.Footnote ³² However, these accounts conveniently ignore how this society was built on the dispossession, displacement, and extermination of local indigenous populations, something that also emerges in Rawson’s novel, as I will discuss further below. For now, I want to emphasize that one of the ways in which she challenges the ideal of the colonial society in South Australia is by interrogating the image of the nuclear heteronormative family by presenting many disrupted and dysfunctional families in her novel. For the purpose of this essay, the most important of these families is George’s family, which is destabilized by George’s loss of belonging, including his initial refusal to return home to his fiancé, but also the presence of the more-than-human being as challenging both George’s and his son Henry’s identities and understandings of the relations between the human and the more-than-human.Footnote ³³

In addition to challenging the colonial image of South Australia as a society based on the family as a microcosm for the nation, through the presence of the more-than-human being, Rawson draws attention to the ways in which the founding of this society is based on the dispossession, displacement, and decimation of another society. This is, of course, typical for settler colonial societies, as Patrick Wolfe has famously noted, because “settler colonialism destroys to replace.”Footnote ³⁴ Although From the Wreck does not explicitly address the consequences of the settlement of South Australia for Aboriginal people because there is no clearly defined Aboriginal character present in the novel, we can certainly read the more-than-human being as a stand-in for Aboriginal characters and histories as their story references experiences of First Nations peoples in Australia. Rawson has explained that the being is “a refugee from another dimension, trapped on earth and looking for the rest of her kind,” who loses their sense of identity.Footnote ³⁵ This creates a problematic conflation between indigenous people and aliens, and one that is common in western science fiction, where it is paired with presenting conquest as “discovery,” as Anishinaabe critic Grace L. Dillon notes.Footnote ³⁶ However, following Ulrike Küchler, Silja Maehl and Graeme Stout, who argue that “the alien stands for the dispossessed who cannot be reconciled within the normal state of political life,”Footnote ³⁷ I would suggest that Rawson’s decision not to include any Aboriginal characters in her novel can also be read as interrogating the ways in which settlers have represented and spoken for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in Australia for centuries.Footnote ³⁸ Although still problematic, by including references to the history of the Aboriginal People, Rawson is careful not to erase Aboriginal history from her novel, and to consider the impact of settler colonialism on First Nations Peoples in Australia, even if she does so obliquely. Moreover, the being’s story plays an important narrative role in considering the links between settler colonialism and environmental destruction. They explain that the world they lived in before was “a world all ocean,” and they lived in harmony with other species for “thousands and thousands and millions of years,”Footnote ³⁹ until their lives were disrupted due to the arrival of another species. This is depicted as follows:

It is hard not to hear echoes of the arrival of the first British settlers and the experience of the Eora people in Kamay/Botany Bay when James Cook’s HMS Endeavour arrived in 1770 and when the First Fleet marked the start of the British invasion in 1778. Rawson’s depiction mirrors common perceptions of the settlers as visitors or guestsFootnote ⁴¹ although it depicts the immediate and long-term impact of this invasion on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, including violence, displacement, diseases, and genocide. In Rawson’s novel, the more-than-human being further emphasizes how the settlers impact the environment and foreshadows how they will continue to do so. The reader is told that they are building machines and plants, and modifying and destroying the environment as part of this process.Footnote ⁴² In this way, From the Wreck demonstrates Corey Ross’s argument that “altering ecosystems was an integral part of modern imperialism.”Footnote ⁴³ Thus, the being emphasizes how the settlers laid the foundations for industrialization even before the Anthropocene.

This emphasis on humanity’s impact on the environment and on other species permeates the novel and is crystallized in the fact that the being is the last of their species, thus foreshadowing what environmental destruction will do to humanity in the future. This approach allows us to read Rawson’s novel as an example of what Kathryn Yusoff calls “Anthropogenesis,” which she defines as “a material, evolutionary narrative that re-imagines human origins and endings.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Although Rawson does not necessarily depict an ending for humanity, and while her novel is exclusively situated in nineteenth-century South Australia, thus not explicitly linking the speculative historical past that is depicted to an imagined present or future, I would suggest that through the being’s experience of colonization, dispossession, and extinction of their community, Rawson gives her readers the tools to extrapolate these ideas beyond the past to consider the fate of humanity in a time of climate crisis in the present and the future.

3 Critical posthumanism, colonial guilt, and interspecies connections

Linking the past and the present, and settler colonialism and environmental destruction, is a key aspect of Rawson’s aim to give a voice to the more-than-human being. The being’s first-person voice is different from George’s third-person omniscient narration, but it is still recognizable to human readers, which is part of the relationality that Rawson sets up between the human and the more-than-human. The idea of relationality, or at least the importance of encountering difference, is at the heart of New Weird Fiction, a genre in which Turnbull et al. argue “otherness (…) is not to be feared but rather approached with care and respect.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Although George mainly fears the more-than-human being, for the reader, the being shows affinities with human beings and through sharing their story and their sense of feeling out-of-place, the reader is able to connect with them. Like George, the more-than-human being loses their sense of identity after the shipwreck. They reflect: “Am I still me? I touch here, taste this, smell that. I remember. I am still me (…) But the rest of it? None of the shapes are right.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Similar to George, but also in many ways very different from him, the more-than-human being is reduced to their consciousness as their body does not feel “right” anymore. Thus, from the start, the novel sets up a strong relation between George and the being and emphasizes how they each affect how the other perceives their identity and their place in the world. This is a typical aspect of how the “alien” is depicted in science fiction, where it “allows us to imagine something that is truly foreign and, through its eyes, to look at ourselves as if from the outside” and as such it “encourages us to rethink antimonies of inside and outside, self and other.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The being in Rawson’s novel certainly encourages George to rethink his identity as a white settler, as discussed above. However, unlike more traditional approaches to representing alien-human encounters, From the Wreck also depicts a more reciprocal relationship between the being and George through mirroring their stories and experiences but also through their regular encounters with each other, which culminate in the being living in George’s household, an idea that I will return to below.

This reciprocal approach is part of the novel’s wider approach to depicting interspecies connections. Mark Jackson has argued that such an approach, which Jackson situates within critical posthuman studies, reminds us “that different life forms also share affective capacities, that they are shaped by the material resonance of worldly things in ways that can be recognised as similar or even shared.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The voice of the more-than-human being and their connection with and reflection in George remind the reader not to focus exclusively on how environmental destruction impacts human beings but also to consider how this affects nature and animals. This is something that Rawson herself has made explicit in an interview, saying that “I realised once I’d finished writing that [the more-than-human being] stands in for all the other species that humans just don’t give a rat’s arse about.”Footnote ⁴⁹

This aligns with research about how cephalopods, such as the octopus, which is the original form of the more-than-human being, are seen as essential for thinking through the experience of other species. As Peter Godfrey-Smith notes about cephalopods, their “brains (…) are different [from human brains] on almost every scale,” which is why they lend themselves to “understand[ing] other minds” as their minds “are the most other of all.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This, in turn, is important for preventing humans from “visualizing scaled-down versions of ourselves” which happens “when we imagine the lives and experiences of simpler animals.”Footnote ⁵¹ Although Rawson does not follow Godfrey-Smith in depicting the more-than-human being’s mind as completely other, she nevertheless resists turning them into a “scaled-down version” of a human as the being repeatedly emphasizes that they are not quite human. For example, when they try to take on the form of Bridget Ledwith when on land, their transformation is described as follows “The shape made a woman and the woman made no sense.”Footnote ⁵² This description echoes what Fisher has called “the sensation of wrongness” that is central to Weird Fiction and this is confirmed throughout the novel by how human beings feel when they encounter the more-than-human being, particularly George. This is typical for the genre of the New Weird, where cephalopods are seen as examples of “the abyss of the unknown sea reaching up to the surface with a certain inevitability,” as Eugene Thacker has pointed out.Footnote ⁵³ George similarly perceives the being throughout the novel, experiencing dread and uncertainty at being challenged in his identity as a human and as a white settler, as I discussed above. In this way, and by giving the more-than-human being a voice, From the Wreck emphasizes the more-than-human being’s agency, exemplifying how the New Weird can perform a “progressive ecological move,” including through “the overturning of human assumptions of supremacy and centrality,” as Emily Alder has noted.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Although George resists this decentralization of the human, his son Henry comes closer to being a “progressive ecological subject.” After the birth of Henry, the being assumes the shape of a birthmark on Henry’s back, and is henceforth known in the novel as Mark. As a birthmark, the being both works as a symbol of colonial guilt and as a way to explore a critical posthumanist approach to relations between the human and the more-than-human. The idea of the birthmark as a symbol of colonial guilt is reinforced by how Mark continues to make George question his humanity. George increasingly feels haunted, saying that “even his mind had turned on him, was telling him there was something behind him, something behind him, always something behind him and there never was.”Footnote ⁵⁵ This is part of a wider trend in non-Indigenous Australian writing, which Potter has described as being informed by “a series of concerns around time, place and ecological pressures [which] coalesced in the heightened iteration of an anxiety long-held in this colonized country: the status of non-indigenous belonging to land never ceded by Indigenous presence or claim.”Footnote ⁵⁶ George’s loss of humanity is a comment about the anxiety and instability of non-Indigenous belonging on Indigenous lands and how colonial guilt negates, or at least complicates, this sense of belonging.

As a birthmark on Henry’s back, the more-than-human being becomes the symbol and constant reminder of George not fully belonging in nineteenth-century colonial South Australia. George blames himself for Mark’s presence, suggesting that he feels responsible for passing down his colonial guilt and identity. In this way, Mark can be read as a stain that taints South Australia’s white settler identity but also a comment on George’s loss of masculinity, which challenges “the central character of the Australian legend,” which is the “noble frontiersman” who is defined amongst others things as being white and male.Footnote ⁵⁷ George’s loss of masculinity and identity is confirmed by George’s attempts to remove the birthmark from his son’s body. George reflects that “He had let himself believe that Henry had escaped unscathed but he knew it wasn’t true. That thing on his back, the oddness of his mind. George needed to stand up, be a man, take responsibility.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Although George is talking about his responsibility for Henry having this mark on his body, this comment can easily be extrapolated to responsibility for settler colonialism and the ways in which the legacies of settler colonialism are passed down generations of settlers.

George’s obsession with Henry’s Mark intensifies when Henry inadvertently becomes responsible for the death of his younger brother Georgie. Georgie’s death is an accident that happens when Henry makes up a game where they are looking for a tramp who has supposedly hidden treasure in the creek.Footnote ⁵⁹ While going back to their house to get a mace for Henry to attack the tramp, Georgie drowns. George blames his younger son’s death on himself, but also explicitly on the more-than-human-being, saying that

This is another example of George projecting his fears about his family falling apart and his loss of humanity onto the more-than-human being. The being is blamed for bringing this unease to the surface, following the genre of the New Weird’s approach to cephalopods as contributing to unearthing fears and uncertainties about belonging, as Thacker mentioned above. In this way, Rawson’s novel departs from traditional New Weird fiction, where, as China Miéville, one of the key contemporary authors of this genre, notes “the awe that Weird Fiction attempts to invoke is a function of lack of recognition, rather than an uncanny resurgence, guilt-function, the return of the repressed.”Footnote ⁶¹ Although there is a lack of recognition in that the being is not human like George, they nevertheless fulfil a “guilt-function” as their presence is a constant reminder about George’s sense of deficiency as a man, and by extension as a settler, who is unable to protect his family.

Henry, as the younger generation, has a different relationship with Mark and one that comes closer to a critical posthumanist approach. Mark becomes a way of challenging the boundaries between different types of knowledge, at least initially, and thus Henry’s and Mark’s relationship models a more inclusive approach to considering different species and their histories. Rawson writes

Henry not only rationally experiences new knowledge, but he equally has new sensory experiences that are more-than-human, which can be explained through the fact that Mark is increasingly in Henry’s thoughts and shares their own experiences of living in the ocean as an octopus and as a water-based species before arriving on Earth. The depiction of these experiences, for example in sentences such as “the taste of skin felt through your tentacles,” has a strong resonance with the weird and particularly with the New Oceanic Weird, not only as a mode for bringing together colonialism and environmental destruction in the way that Deckard and Oloff have defined it but also as a means of establishing reciprocity between the human and the more-than-human. This becomes obvious in Rawson’s novel through Mark’s bodily presence on Henry and their sharing of bodies and minds, which generates a new way of understanding the world. This new understanding, which could be described as a double-consciousness, offers Henry not only a different approach to considering the more-than-human being’s history and their present concerns but also to resisting colonial world views that separate environmental destruction and settler colonialism and only focus on human beings at the expense of the more-than-human.

These worldviews are embodied in George, as a representative of the older generation, who considers Mark and the knowledge that they equip Henry with in a very negative light. However, interestingly, towards the end of the novel, George changes how he engages with the more-than-human being after the being seeks him out in a pub in the human form of Bridget Ledwith. This moment leads to George’s breakdown, which is further compounded by Henry asking him why he is never enough for his father, thus challenging his position and identity within their nuclear family. As a result of this, George decides to drown himself. When George enters the water, the more-than-human being appears to him in the form of an octopus. They tell him different stories about their life and let George revisit the experience of the shipwreck: “George watched inside his mind as Bridget Ledwith lay beside him on the Admella’s wreck.”Footnote ⁶³ This is an important moment as it encourages George to consider which identity he left behind on the shipwreck and whether he still needs this old identity as one that is linked to a masculine settler colonial identity that sees itself as divorced from the more-than-human. This is encapsulated in the following epiphany that George has when being shown this image: “She’s you and you’re me. We’re all together.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Confirming the existence of Bridget Ledwith and the fact that she is one of the many forms of the more-than-human being brings George’s quest to an end. Significantly, this is also the first time in the novel that George understands the more-than-human being’s predicament, exhibiting an attitude that comes close to the idea of critical posthumanism discussed in relation to Henry. This leads George to realize that humans are not exceptional but part of a wider ecosystem and that they need to relate to both the human and the more-than-human to imagine a future for themselves.

4 Conclusion: reintegrating the human and the more-than-human

Speculative fiction is emerging as a key genre to engage with pressing concerns in the present, such as climate change, due to its ability to connect different temporalities. Moreover, as Allison Mackey has argued, “as a genre of cognitive estrangement (…) is particularly suited to exploring questions of environmental futurity and reintegrating the human and the non-human.”Footnote ⁶⁵ This is exactly what we see in the use of the New Oceanic Weird in From the Wreck. Although firmly set in the past, Rawson’s novel nevertheless allows us to speculate about “environmental futurity” and to consider the reintegration of the human and the more-than-human in the present and the future through the use of the New Oceanic Weird as a genre that emphasizes dialogue. By bringing together the histories of settler colonialism and environmental destruction and their impact as embodied in the more-than-human being, Rawson not only amplifies George’s anxieties about belonging in nineteenth-century colonial South Australia, but she equally foreshadows what might happen to humanity in the not-too-distant future. In this way, Rawson encourages us to consider how the histories of the human and the more-than-human need to be reintegrated in the past to consider the importance of the entangled histories of settler colonialism and environmental destruction in the present and the future.