Reading the Entrails: The Extractive Work of a Fence

This essay offers an evisceration of my troubled links to ‘cattle country’, seeking a truth-telling that responds to my mother’s romancing. I trace my family’s part in the cattle industry imposed upon Jiman Country and Wulli Wulli Country, drawing on stories populated with the hooves of cattle, the flight of emus, and the stare of a goanna. I find myself in uncomfortable territory, complicit in the actions of my settler relatives in this region of Central Queensland, but to not examine this informal archive of possession feels like a lie. The stories that shape me begin with the tales of Mum’s foster-mother, my great-aunt, about the dreadful murderous harms done during the early settler occupation of Jiman Country. My family’s later deployment of this stolen land is a related act of war. I see a related mode of violence in tales of terrified cattle in nearby Wulli Wulli Country, Mum’s girl-self perched on the back of a weary horse, whip in her hand. In all this, there is me, telling tales, like settler writers before me, caught in the writing act, exposed as a fence, dealing in stolen goods, part of the ongoing posts of making up and wires of making do. Nonetheless, I take up my extractive blade, sharpened by a field trip to this region, and carve into my family history, with its legacy of generational violence to humans, cows, waterways, and earth, exposing three extractions: the near-genocidal murders of the Jiman and Wulli Wulli people; the ongoing slaughter of cattle; and finally, there, on the kill floor, entrails exposed, the stories of my mother, laid bare for this critical reading.

Sailing to Jerusalem

This chapter details the earliest stages of the American obsession with Palestine. It provides capsule narratives of visits to Ottoman Palestine by Herman Melville and Mark Twain, and early settler colonies of Christian missionaries, such as the Adams Colony and the free-living “American colony.” The content also sources the American obsession with Israel to the Bible, and a Christian desire to convert Jews to their beliefs.

The Novel in English in Canada to 1950

This chapter discusses English-language novels in Canada, focusing on a limited set of texts that exemplify key historical and socio-economic concerns informing the periods of early settler-colonialism, Confederation, and early to late modernism in Canada. The development of the novel in Canada to 1950 is at times a bleak story, albeit one with notable highlights. In telling that story, the chapter eschews a linear trajectory of ‘development’ in favour of a two-pronged approach: adopting an issue-based focus, the chapter employs the categories of empire, race, and gender; the second approach focuses on the historical conditions of the production and circulation of novels. It then looks at the post-1950 era to account for the ways in which the canon of pre-1950s Canadian novels is shaped and/or sustained by contemporary institutional forces such as the New Canadian Library and Editing Modernism in Canada Project.

Evidence for the Historical Occurrence of Wolves (Canis spp.) in Nova Scotia, Canada

Although once common across the entire North American continent, wolves (Canis spp.) have been extirpated from most of their former territory. The historical occurrence and persistence of wolves in Nova Scotia has been a subject of debate because of comments on the wolf’s rarity in early settler accounts and the absence of physical specimens. By consulting historical documents of European settlers, the Mi’kmaw lexicon, and fur trade records, we found evidence for the presence of a wolf population in Nova Scotia (which included the territory of New Brunswick before 1784) at European contact and persisting until the early 20th century.