38 - Riddling the Nation

Summary

This chapter explores the rise of an allegorical mode of imagining in twenty-first-century fiction by Australian women. Analysing a mode of literature associated with universality, ahistoricism and abstraction in such a nationalist, historical and gendered context might appear a contradictory enterprise. However, it is one necessitated by the doubleness of allegory itself, which is marked by an enigmatic and therefore productive relationship between the timeless and historical, the literal and figurative, the aesthetic and material. This chapter examines a range of novels written by Australian women and published in the twenty-first century, focusing on Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), Merlinda Bobis’s Locust Girl: A Lovesong (2015), Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015), Kathryn Heyman’s Storm and Grace (2017), and Carmel Bird’s Field of Poppies (2019). Existing in the liminal space between fantasy and realism, the allegories surveyed here intersect with various genres, such as the speculative, magical realism and Indigenous futurism, and often veer into the dystopian. They provide an uncanny and defamiliarising model for drawing attention to contemporary national problems related to gender, the postcolonial, asylum seekers and the Anthropocene.