Abstract
Tim Winton’s In the Winter Dark and the settler condition
Abstract
Settler colonies tend to resort to myths in order to settle contemporary anxieties. If myths have a settling function, what happens when the seams that hold a contentious past together are unpicked? Tim Winton’s In the Winter Dark (1988) demonstrates that colonial myths cannot account for a sequence of events that take place in bushland surrounding the protagonist’s farm. As the characters fail to resolve this mysterious violence through narrative, the contradictions that demanded the construction of foundational myths re-appear. Winton’s gothic tale engages with the idea of settler colonial trauma, but the object of trauma is displaced and treated allegorically. I demonstrate how John Docker’s concept of ‘Epistemological Vertigo’ can be used to propose a postcolonial reading of Winton’s novel.
By showing how easily the most inflexible settler-farmer gives way to fear and irrational behaviour, this story reveals the fragility of the settler society. The settling myths that hold the nation together are not enough to hold back the violence associated with the colonial past which keeps coming to the surface of the present in the form or personal and collective trauma. The conclusion Winton reaches is that the settler is not settled. The bush defeats settler logic. Space defeats time too. In the Winter Dark challenges romanticised perceptions of the bush and promotes a non-anthropocentric view of space and nature. Only by moving away from traditional representations of nature can Australians re-establish a productive relationship with space.
Recommended Citation
Cordier, Stephane Christophe
(2018)
"Tim Winton’s In the Winter Dark and the Settler Condition,"
Antipodes: Vol. 32:
Iss.
2, Article 1.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/antipodes/vol32/iss2/1