Speculative Histories and the More-Than-Human: Weirding Colonialism and Climate Change in Contemporary Australian Fiction

In From the Wreck (2017), Australian author and environmentalist Jane Rawson imagines that her great-great-grandfather George Hills, one of the survivors of the shipwreck of the SS Admella , is rescued by a more-than-human shapeshifting being, who subsequently destabilizes his identity as a settler living in colonial South Australia. In this essay, I argue for the importance of bringing together speculative histories, the New Weird, and critical ocean studies, whose intersections are embodied in the more-than-human being as a character in Rawson’s novel. I suggest that this constitutes an important critical tool for interrogating the ways in which we remember settler colonial history in Australia, especially a history that is depicted as independent of the environment and one that marginalizes the relationship between the human and the more-than-human. In this way, I demonstrate how the New Oceanic Weird as a genre can highlight reciprocity on an individual and a collective level to emphasize the entangled and reciprocal histories between the human and the more-than-human alongside those of settler colonialism and environmental destruction.