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The book focuses on various ways of articulating settler belonging in Australian memoir since the turn of the 21st century. After Australia witnessed a reinvigorated public interest in the revisionist history of European settlement and colonial violence, resulting in the dispossession of Indigenous people and damaged settler–Indigenous relations, Australian settler majority has experienced an unsettlement of their sense of belonging, or the so-called “setter anxiety.” The book analyzes how settler (un)belonging is narrativized in popular memoirs written by Australian public intellectuals, such as historians, artists, writers, and commentators, in the period after 2000. These memoirs of settler belonging share one aspect: they all ask and seek answers to the implicit question, how to belong as a White settler who bears witness to the legacy of violent colonization vis-à-vis continuing Indigenous dispossession? How to justify the settler presence in and love of the land that was stolen from First Australians? The individual chapters examine historians’ memoirs, White women’s travel narratives, experimental place-writing, and eco- and landscape memoirs, tracing a gradual shift in literary representations of settler anxiety and detecting new perspectives on what can be called ethical settler belonging.
“This book asks hard questions—insistently and passionately. Yet its arguments are careful and scrupulous, dissecting their topic with meticulous surgical precision. Martina Horáková is an outstanding scholar whose comprehensive study of settler memoir is the most important intervention in the broader field since Kay Schaffer’s groundbreaking work.” — Anne Brewster, University of New South Wales, Australia.
“Horáková delivers a compelling and rigorous analysis of Australian memoirs of settler belonging, tracing a shift from anxious reckonings to deep attachment to Country. She interrogates the ethical stakes of this transformation, revealing how narratives of entitlement persist beneath eco-conscious aesthetics. Offering the perspective of a cultural and spatial outsider, this vital work challenges readers to confront the politics of place and the enduring myths of settler belonging shaping Australia’s national imagination.” — Lisa Slater, University of Wollongong, Australia.
“Martina Horáková illuminates the challenge of belonging on stolen land for settler Australians with a generative critical eye. She understands the “memoir of settler belonging” as a cultural form with complex political and ethical intentions that are not always aligned with the truth-telling that First Nations people call for.” — Emily Potter, Deakin University, Australia.
Martina Horáková is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Masaryk University, Czech Republic.
Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Between Anxiety and Grounding: Longing to Belong in Australian Settler Culture; 2. Self, Place, and Nation: Historians’ Memoirs of Settler Belonging; 3.Journeys of Unsettled Desires: White Women’s Travel Memoirs of Settler Belonging; 4. A Poetics of Place: Creative and Experimental Memoirs of Settler Belonging; 5. From Landscape to Country: Settler Belonging in Landscape Memoirs and Eco-Memoirs; Coda; Bibliography; Index