Wilderness as Liminal Space: Tim Winton’s Dirt Music and Problems of the Map

Abstract

In Tim Winton’s novel Dirt Music, almost-indigenous wanderer Axle burns Robinsonade loner Luther Fox’s maps and says to him: “Go on the country, … [n]ot on the map” (312). This scene is pivotal in my reading of the novel in that it foregrounds the slippages and discrepancies between real and imagined landscapes. It alludes to the key paradox of wilderness, constructed in the novel as an imagined geography, a site of projection, an island off the northwest coast of Australia.