Paradise as property: Writing and projecting Lord Howe Island

Lord Howe Island is represented in various texts as paradise. From its earliest depictions in the Arthur Phillip’s 1789 accounts to the mid-century novel Landfall the Unknown to contemporary science communication, the documentation of this place sustains a mythology. In writing a novel featuring the island, I become a representer in a chain, another to mantle the region with the possessive project of articulation. Brenna Bhandar writes of the novel and other forms as a means of consolidating a ‘colonial vision of the world’; as Aileen Moreton-Robinson writes, to sustain a postcolonising ‘Australia’, land is iteratively articulated as secured property. By use of pastiche, I situate myself in that mantling process – a discursive layering of the landscape – as well as undermining the colonial logics that permit my projections and the ones that have gone before me. Through this technique of enjambing quotation, creating a patter of recycled sources to accompany my own fiction, I investigate the echoes of language around the island, the terms repetitively applied to this place: pure, pristine, paradise.