The personal is ecological
Some thoughts on subjectivity and colonialism in The Inland Sea by Madeleine Watts
The environment was merely the outer equivalent of my inner reality. Or perhaps it was the other way around.
The Inland Sea is the first novel I’ve read that explicitly relates to our current time of ecological crisis, which was long overdue. I can easily pinpoint why I hadn’t gone out of my way to read one before. It’s terrifying, perhaps more so for being fictionalised. Although stark, the statistical and detached language of science journalism somehow manages to dampen real panic. In the first-person narrative of a book like Inland Sea, described by its author as about ‘different types of emergencies, ecological and emotional’, there is no distance to be found.
Rather than imagining a postlapsarian future, Inland Sea creates a sense of apocalypse now, or rather, past and ongoing. The book is set in 2013, until recently the year of the most destructive bushfires in Australia. It captures like nothing else I’ve yet read how eco-anxiety is alternately smothered and oxygenated by everyday experiences. The unnamed narrator, fresh graduate and aspiring writer, takes a job at Triple Zero in Sydney, connecting emergency calls to the police, fire, or ambulance services. She notes down snippets of callers’ and colleagues’ speech and reads about historical catastrophes. Outside work hours, she restarts a thing with her ex, goes out with friends, has unprotected sex with strangers, meets up with her mother, remembers her abusive father, and plans to flee Australia for California.
What struck me most on first reading was a sense of precarity, of teetering on the edge of something irreversible, ruminating on the formative experiences of your past, knowing you must move forward without quite knowing how. Precarious climate, precarious belonging, precarious embodiment.
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The text is alive with elemental imagery of fire and water, a sense of impending cataclysm almost biblical:
The [storms] seemed to occur yearly now, maybe more, along with the heat, the fire and the flood.
Fire and heat are repeatedly associated with men, and women with water and porousness. The narrator loves to swim and be near the sea or swimming pools, associating them with sanctuary and healing. But this doesn’t remain a simple duality. ‘Dark waters’ and the sea’s ‘formlessness’ hold a threat of death and oblivion that the narrator half-craves; she is told that her unruly red hair signifies fire, and one night she notices it smells of smoke. With a degree of irony, the narrator is equated with Mary Magdalene, the demon seductress Lamia, and even Eve after the Fall (‘I was suddenly aware of my nakedness’). A sense of retributive justice pervades her interpretation of the accelerating climate crisis, repeating the words of Pliny the Elder that ‘earthquakes were an expression of the earth’s displeasure about her violation by men.’ She is also obsessed with the case of a woman raped and murdered in Melbourne; the killer’s trial, which grips the public, is televised on the news at work.
The sense of unavoidable emergency makes the narrator careless with her own body, in defiance of how she has been taught to consider ‘safety first’ by her anxious mother and private schooling, with the heavy implication that it is more her responsibility to keep herself out of harm’s way than it is for others not to do harm. After a failed attempt at getting an IUD, she interprets this distressing but neutral experience as a rebuke: ‘there was no point trying to protect it … my body had physically rejected all my gestures in attempting to vouchsafe its protection.’ She attempts to find safety in her reignited relationship with the lover she gives the riverine pseudonym of Lachlan. When he speaks:
the rivers swelled, the water tanks refilled, the pollutants and the sea snakes were cleansed from the storm surge, the Maldives rose above the waterline, the melting glaciers were restored to their rightful form.
Boundaries subside, tangling the personal with the ecological: ‘The border between world and self had been … washed away in the flood long ago. Every siren was for me.’ This reinforces the nightmarish sense of catastrophe and confusion along with the narrator’s own solipsism. Yet it also highlights the subjective way that we experience external realities and our environments: through our own embodied perceptions.
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Repeatedly throughout Inland Sea, women and their bodies are paired with the land and mapping territory, with men linked to explorers and past imperialists.
[he looked at me] as though there were a difficult cartography to my features that he was trying to learn by hand.
…watching her [mother] struggle into underwear, the lovely flesh mapped with the straps and seams.
The hands campaigned southwards, to the hem of my dress…
… the land was just as wild as the kind of woman who’s asking for it.
They all believed. Believed in the warm, wet centre spreading its legs out there in the heart of the dead, dry country.
Like women, the bush came wild or tamed, and they knew which one they preferred.
Although recognising this as an intentional exposure of the gendered structures of thought that envisioned colonised spaces like Australia as ripe for imperial ‘penetration’, at times I had to consider whether this analogy wasn’t simply replicating the language of colonialism rather than deconstructing it. In that the narrator is a white woman, her association with stolen Aboriginal land is an uncomfortable juxtaposition. Paranoia about the vulnerability of white women in dangerous ‘half-tamed’ territories was a staple of imperialist discourse across continents, from Australia to India to Africa.
But Watts is clearly aware of this. One key difference is the subjectivity, inhabiting a female perspective previously denigrated or ignored. This point-of-view is used to delve into the complexities of white women’s positions within colonialism. They suffer from misogyny and violence but are nonetheless connected to the exploitation and dispossession of Aboriginal people. Inland Sea’s narrator views a quotation from postcolonial writer Frantz Fanon as self-evident: ‘Every citizen of a nation is responsible for the actions committed in the name of that nation.’
This tension is illustrated particularly by the narrator’s relationship with her father (viewed critically now but both adored and feared by her child-self) and their shared ancestor John Oxley, a British surveyor-general who explored along the river Lachlan in 1817 in search of an ‘inland sea’. Despite failing to find it, he maintained it was there, just beyond reach. The false promise of this dead-end river-journey parallels the narrator’s dead-end relationship with her ex. Lachlan is the river, also named after a British Governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie. Explicitly likened to the narrator’s father, he is tanned with sandy-hair, as if from the desert sun, speaking with a British-inflected accent. She is simultaneously attracted and repulsed by what the imperial explorer represents: the allure of power and self-righteousness. The mimicry of Oxley’s hubristic and self-justificatory behaviour reveals the narrator’s own complicity with the history and legacy of colonialism.
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In her review of Inland Sea for the Sydney Review of Books, Katie Dobbs is unconvinced by Watts’ presentation of these themes, seeing a
sidestep [to] her white narrator’s implication in the colonial project, as though her voluntary abdication of agency absolves her of any responsibility at all.
But I don’t think this is ultimately the case; in fact, the narrator’s desultory state is another indictment of her privilege.
Admittedly, this becomes much clearer upon reading Watts’ essay ‘Leave no trace’ in Believer magazine, a kind of companion piece to the novel that provides crucial socio-cultural and historical context. Watts discusses a literary tradition of Australian Gothic that views the bush as a ‘weird melancholy’ landscape, almost malevolently sentient. A sense of menace is transferred to the land to displace colonial guilt, mostly directed at women, rather than the hardy ‘bush man’ foundational to national self-image. Australian settler culture developed a fixation on ‘lost girls’ threatened by the place itself, made manifest in the now iconic aesthetics of loose fair hair and ethereal white dresses in the film Picnic at Hanging Rock (dir. Peter Weir, 1975). Adapted from Joan Lindsay’s novel, it features the vanishing of four schoolgirls while climbing the Rock, a sacred site for local indigenous tribes turned into a public park.
Watts asserts that this cultural myth:
concealed the fact that white women were not only complicit in the systemic violence perpetrated against indigenous people, but often its beneficiaries as well … We taught white women that being afraid would keep them safe … cast [it] as a form of responsibility instead of the violence it was and continues to be.
This obsession with feminine vulnerability in colonised spaces can be traced to the present through cases of abducted white girls and women. This contrasts with the realities faced by Aboriginal women, who are not treated with this degree of concern. Instead, they are regarded with indifference by authorities and the national community, despite being statistically most at risk of homicide and domestic-abuse related hospitalisation. Watts relays the chillingly casual response of a policeman to the mother of missing sixteen-year-old Colleen Walker in 1990: ‘Oh, did she go walkabout?’
In light of this, the narrator’s compulsive walks about the city and pursuit of unhappy hedonism in Inland Sea are part of a subconscious awareness and disgust of her own comparative safety and value to the dominant culture. The psycho-geographical specificity of these descriptions are another reminder of colonialism and its overbearing naming practices. Never having visited Australia, it gave me a jolt to read of Penrith (a town in Cumbria, my mother’s home region) and Lewisham (where I live in London). It prompts me to reflect on my own implication in the legacies of imperialism.
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Whilst reading the novel, it is easy to focus mostly on Watts’ skilful depictions of her narrator’s relatable messiness and post-graduate malaise. But the colonial themes of the novel are insistent and disquieting. Colonialism, gendered violence, and ecological destruction are not separate processes. They are intimately bound up with each other, felt and enacted through the body.
If any of this sparked your curiosity, I highly recommend you check out The Inland Sea. You can read ‘Leave no Trace’ in its entirety here. Watts also has her own newsletter, Search Party.
Katie Dobbs’ review is also a brilliant piece of writing that raises some great points, as you can find out here.
"Colonialism, gendered violence, and ecological destruction are not separate processes. They are intimately bound up with each other, felt and enacted through the body." Too true! What a great read, going have to seek out all the articles you mentioned...