Patrick White "The bowerbird": Beyond Nature and Culture in the Anthropocene

This thesis examines how Patrick White's (1912-1990) fiction unsettles inherited distinctions between nature and culture by transforming perception and literary form. Through close readings across his oeuvre, including The Aunt's Story, Voss, and The Cockatoos, it shows how landscape acts as an interlocutor and how objects retain and transmit histories that shape relation and subjectivity. The method builds on critical sources that underscore the complexity of White's rhetorical and narrative strategies and argues that White's bowerbird poetics intertwines and arranges fragmented materials into an ecology of form that tests and remakes the boundary between nature and culture. The study combines ecocriticism with anthropological and narratological approaches to perception, classification, and form. Structured in three parts, the thesis first establishes perception and landscape as communicative fields and examines the effects of acceleration on relation and environment. It then examines the consequences of acceleration and routine: freedom under constraint, the afterlives of domestic objects, and destruction as a method of disclosure. Finally, it develops an ecology of form, showing how satire, hybridity, and genre experiment test the limits of representation while staging meaning as a process of ecological circulation. Reframing White's fiction as an ecological as much as an aesthetic practice, I argue that White dissolves the nature-culture binary from within, dislocating and recomposing nature and culture so that relations become legible as form. The thesis not only explores White's connections with culture and the outer world, but also the methods and techniques of writing, including inspiration, selection, montage, and recurrence, through which those relations take shape.

Author dc:creator

• Potter, Miriam

Language dc:language.iso

en_AU

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1885/733805516

OAI record oai:identifier

https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/server/oai/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=dim&identifier=oai%3Aopenresearch-repository.anu.edu.au%3A1885%2F733805516