Post-colonial, John Kinsella

" There is a sense of secrecy, a fear of letting out Australia’s secrets – not just the secret of internal imperialism in Australia, but perhaps the even more repressed secret that there actually is such a thing as class hierarchy in the seemingly egalitarian society of mateship and the ‘fair go’ …

Kinsella’s willingness to theorise disconnections, and to traffic in deprivations, his admission of plaint into what could be panoply, shows his steadfast refusal to at all mystify regimes of colonial domination. "

- Nicholas Birns

About the book

Post-colonial is a poetic and wildly experimental account of cultural intrusion and appropriation from one of Australia’s finest and most prolific writers. Questioning what it is that constitutes nation and place, particularly in reference to Australia itself, Kinsella’s narrator travels to the Cocos Islands to collect oral histories. Disaffected and unsure of his own role there, and cast adrift upon an ocean of his own dependencies, the narrator offers not only a fragmented tale of crisis, but also a sophisticated exploration of issues of history and self-determination among the local Cocos Malay of Home Island and the non-Cocos Malay foreigners of West Island. Post-colonial is also a novel about how we read so-called post-colonial texts. It is a work in which time frames and time signatures shift, events are retold, and the reader is led to ask questions about the nature of history itself. Ranging from the ‘natural’ and ‘real’ to the fantastical, the narrative is in constant flux. History is erased, lost, reclaimed, and restated. As Nicholas Birns says in his introduction, “… a dark pastoral … one ineffably coloured by insignificance and absence … We grasp as much what is missing as we do what is there, what threatens the sense of place as much as what maintains it. The sense of fragility and dependence, of scenic poverty and ecological persistence, brings to us Cocos as a fact, not a vista.”

bio

John Kinsella is a multi- and cross-genre writer whose most recent books include Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful (poetry), Divine Comedy: Journeys Through A Regional Geography (poetry), Disclosed Poetics: beyond landscape and lyricism (criticism), Contrary Rhetoric: Lectures on Landscape and Language (criticism), and Conspiracies (stories, with Tracy Ryan). Earlier fictionalist ‘explorations’ include Genre (1997) and Grappling Eros (1998). He has also edited numerous volumes of poetry, is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University. He lived on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands for a short period in the mid-1990s and is a vegan anarchist pacifist.