Abstract
At the heart of Tim Winton’s acclaimed novel Cloudstreet is the wrenching story of Fish Lamb, a young boy who drowns and is resuscitated shortly after—except that, despite their frantic efforts, his rescuers do not quite manage to bring all of him back. True to his name, this anomalous creature of land and sea will spend the rest of his long life, and his next life, seized by a yearning unintelligible to everyone around him: to return to the experience of luminous engulfment in water.1
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Notes
Tim Winton, Cloudstreet (Rngwood, Australia: Penguin, 1992), 25–32.
I take the term “geoimaginary” from Christopher L. Connery’s “Ideologies of Land and Sea: Alfred Thayer Mahan, Carl Schmitt, and the Shaping of Global Myth Elements,” Boundary 2 28, no. 2 (2001): 173–201.
See John Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 3–4;
Christopher L. Connery, “The Oceanic Feeling and the Regional Imaginary,” in Global Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 284–311;
Philip Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001);
Antonis Balasopoulos, “‘Suffer a Sea Change’: Spatial Crisis, Maritime Modernity and the Politics of Utopia,” Cultural Critique 63 (2006): 122–56; “Nesologies: Island Form and Postcolonial Geopoetics,” Postcolonial Studies 11, no. 1 (2008): 9–26;
Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, eds., Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (London: Routledge, 2004);
Mchael Taussig, “The Beach (A Fantasy),” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 249–77;
Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750–1840, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (1988; repr., London: Penguin, 1994).
David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 108–24;
see also James Muldoon, “Who Owns the Sea?” in Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture, ed. Bernhard Klein (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 13–27.
John Fiske, Bob Hodge, and Graeme Turner, Myths of Oz (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 53.
See also Leone Huntsman, Sand in Our Souls (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001);
Franke Broeze, Island Nation, A History of Australians and the Sea (St Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1998);
Douglas Booth, Australian Beach Cultures (London: Frank Cass, 2001).
Jon Stratton, “Dying to Come to Australia,” in Our Patch: Enacting Australian Sovereignty Post-2001, ed. Suvendrini Perera (Perth: Network Books, 2007), 183.
Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea, trans. Simona Draghici (1950; repr., Washington, DC: Plutarch Press, 1997), 48.
William Shakespeare, Richard II, 2.1.40–60 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Sebastian Sobecki, The Sea and Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 4;
Alex Law, “Of Navies and Navels: Britain as a Mental Island,” Geografiska Annaler 87 B (2005): 267–77.
John Agnew, Geopolitics: Re-visioning World Politics (London: Routledge, 2003), 3.
Philip Steinberg, “Insularity, Sovereignty and Statehood: The Representation of Islands on Portolan Charts and the Construction of the Territorial State,” Geografiska Annaler 87 B (2005), 256.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans, and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 36–37.
Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 11.
Laura Doyle, “Sublime Barbarians in the Narrative of Empire; or, Longinus at Sea in The Waves,” Modern Fiction Studies 42, no. 2 (1996), 326.
Joseph Pugliese, “Indigeneity and the Racial Topography of Kant’s ‘Analytic of the Sublime,’” in Indigeneity: Construction and Re/Presentation, ed. James N. Brown and Patricia M. Sant (Commack: Nova Science, 1999), 23, 27.
See also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 13–15.
Fiona Capp, That Oceanic Feeling (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2003), 36.
On border protection and Australian policy toward refugees in this period see Suvendrini Perera, “A Line in the Sea,” Race & Class 44, no. 2 (2002): 23–39; Joseph Pugliese “Penal Asylum,” Borderlands e-journal\, no. 1 (2002), http://www.borderlands.net.au/vollnol_2002/pugliese.html; “The Incommensurability of Law to Justice: Refugees and Australia’s Temporary Protection Visa,” Law and Literature 16, no. 3 (2005): 285–311; “Subcutaneous Law: Embodying the Migration Amendment Act 1992,” Australian Feminist Law Journal 21 (2004): 23–34;
David Marr and Marian Wilkinson, Dark Victory (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2003).
For the testimonies of asylum seekers and refugees in this period see Linda Briskman, Susie Latham, and Chris Goddard, eds., Human Rights Overboard (Melbourne: Scribe, 2008).
For a discussion of the Pacific Solution see Greg Fry, “The ‘Pacific Solution’?” in William Mayley et al., Refugees and the Myth of the Borderless World (Canberra: Department of International Relations, RSPAS, 2002);
Prem Kumar Rajaram, “Making Place: The ‘Pacific Solution’ and Australian Emplacement in the Pacific and on Refugee Bodies,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24, no. 3 (2003): 290–306.
On the surfer as a figure of subversion see Fiske, Hodge, and Turner, Myths of Oz, 64–72, and Booth, Australian Beach Cultures, 107–23; for a different reading of localized surfing culture see Clifton Evers, “The Cronulla Race Riots: Safety Maps on an Australian Beach,” South Atlantic Quarterly 107, no. 2 (2008): 411–29.
Don Watson, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart (Sydney: Vintage Books, 2002), 500–501.
Peter Hulme, “Cast Away,” in Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean, ed. Bernard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun (London: Routledge, 2004), 187–97.
See Ian Anderson, “Reclaiming Tru-ger-nan-ner, Decolonising the Symbol,” Art Monthly 66 (1993–1994): 10–14,
Tony Birch, “The Last Refuge of the ‘UnAustralian,’” UTS Review 7, no. 1 (2001): 17–22.
Amal Basry, “I Am Still in the Water with the Dying of SIEV X,” http://www.AxisofLogic.com [November 1, 2004] reprinted with permission in Suvendrini Perera, “They Give Evidence: Bodies Borders and the Disappeared,” Social Identities 12, no. 6 (2006): 637–56; see also Arnold Zable, “Amal Basry’s Long Journey Finds Home,” Age, March 21,2006. Hope, a documentary about Amal Basry, directed by Steve Thomas, was released in 2008. Her story also inspired a number of paintings, songs, and literary works.
The most detailed investigation of the circumstances surrounding the sinking of SIEV X is by Tony Kevin in A Certain Maritime Incident: The Sinking of SIEVX (Melbourne: Scribe, 2004).
Derek Walcott, “The Sea Is History,” in The Oxford Book of the Sea, ed. Jonathan Raban (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 500.
Elizabeth Deloughrey, “Routes and Roots: Tidalectics in Caribbean Literature,” in Soundings on Kamau Brathwaite, ed. Annie Paul (Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2007), 168.
Quoted in Silvio Torres-Saillant, “The Trials of Authenticity in Kamau Brathwaite,” World Literature Today 68, no. 4 (1994), 697.
Mary Morgan, “Highway to Vision: This Sea Our Nexus,” World Literature Today 68, no. 4 (1994), 663; Deloughrey, “Routes and Roots,” 168.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Anne Lavers (London: Paladin, 1973), 121.
Meaghan Morris, “On the Beach,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 461.
Philip Drew, Veranda: Embracing Place (Pymble, NSW: Angus & Robertson, 1992),
Philip Drew, The Coast Dwellers. Australians Living on the Edge (Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1994).
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© 2009 Suvendrini Perera
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Perera, S. (2009). “All the Water in the Rough Rude Sea”. In: Australia and the Insular Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230103122_3
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