Journal articles on the topic 'Wombat State Forest (Vic )'

Abstract. Well-drained, aerated soils are important sinks for atmospheric methane (CH4) via the process of CH4 oxidation by methane-oxidising bacteria (MOB). This terrestrial CH4 sink may contribute towards climate change mitigation, but the impact of changing soil moisture and temperature regimes on CH4 uptake is not well understood in all ecosystems. Soils in temperate forest ecosystems are the greatest terrestrial CH4 sink globally. Under predicted climate change scenarios, temperate eucalypt forests in south-eastern Australia are predicted to experience rapid and extreme changes in rainfall patterns, temperatures and wild fires. To investigate the influence of environmental drivers on seasonal and inter-annual variation of soil–atmosphere CH4 exchange, we measured soil–atmosphere CH4 exchange at high-temporal resolution (< 2 h) in a dry temperate eucalypt forest in Victoria (Wombat State Forest, precipitation 870 mm yr−1) and in a wet temperature eucalypt forest in Tasmania (Warra Long-Term Ecological Research site, 1700 mm yr−1). Both forest soil systems were continuous CH4 sinks of −1.79 kg CH4 ha−1 yr−1 in Victoria and −3.83 kg CH4 ha−1 yr−1 in Tasmania. Soil CH4 uptake showed substantial temporal variation and was strongly controlled by soil moisture at both forest sites. Soil CH4 uptake increased when soil moisture decreased and this relationship explained up to 90 % of the temporal variability. Furthermore, the relationship between soil moisture and soil CH4 flux was near-identical at both forest sites when soil moisture was expressed as soil air-filled porosity (AFP). Soil temperature only had a minor influence on soil CH4 uptake. Soil nitrogen concentrations were generally low and fluctuations in nitrogen availability did not influence soil CH4 uptake at either forest site. Our data suggest that soil MOB activity in the two forests was similar and that differences in soil CH4 exchange between the two forests were related to differences in soil moisture and thereby soil gas diffusivity. The differences between forest sites and the variation in soil CH4 exchange over time could be explained by soil AFP as an indicator of soil moisture status.

ABSTRACT As part of an ongoing project treating the ferns and lycophytes from the region of Viçosa, MG, Brazil, we here present the taxonomic treatment of Polypodiaceae. We performed field expeditions in remaining forest patches and disturbed sites from 2012 to 2016. We also revised the Polypodiaceae collection of VIC herbarium. In the region of Viçosa, 19 species of Polypodiaceae occur: Campyloneurum centrobrasilianum, C. decurrens, C. lapathifolium, C. phyllitidis, Cochlidium punctatum, Microgramma crispata, M. percussa, M. squamulosa, M. vacciniifolia, Niphidium crassifolium, Pecluma filicula, P. plumula, P. truncorum, Phlebodium areolatum, P. decumanum, Pleopeltis astrolepis, P. minima, Serpocaulon fraxinifolium, and S. menisciifolium. Among them, six are endemic to the Atlantic Forest. During our search in VIC, we found an isotype of Campyloneurum centrobrasilianum. We present keys, descriptions, illustrations, examined materials, and comments of all taxa.

A series of spotlight transects were carried out over a two-year period within a 7-ha area of the Wombat State Forest, Victoria, which contained nestboxes used by feathertail gliders, Acrobates pygmaeus. Spotlighting was carried out on foot through open forest, not along tracks, and only one feathertail glider was detected in 13.8 h of spotlighting. The nestboxes were checked on days following spotlighting surveys and 72 captures of feathertail gliders were made over the same two- year period. Spotlighting can provide important information on the biology of feathertail gliders when used in long-term scientific studies by experienced spotlighters. However, it is an unsatisfactory technique for broad surveys of feathertail gliders, and nestboxes provide a better technique but require a longer time-frame and additional cost.

This study examined the habitat selected by the swamp wallaby, Wallabia bicolor, the red-necked wallaby, Macropus rufogriseus, and the common wombat, Vombatus ursinus. The habitats were unlogged forest and three age classes of logged forest at 16 weeks and 72 weeks after a fire in November 1980 in Mumbulla State Forest on the south coast ofNew South Wales. Habitat selection was determined from decay-corrected dung counts. The dung count for each species varied with the topography and age class of the forest, demonstrating that logging and fire had a marked effect on the habitat selected. The ridges logged during the woodchip-sawlog operation in 1979 and 1980 had little dung, indicating low use as feeding areas. Since these habitats were the most exposed, the conclusion drawn was that they were rarely used by the herbivores. However, ridges logged 10-15 years earlier supported all species because they provided both food and refuge shelter. Recommendations for management of forests subject to logging and fire include the retention of unlogged gully forest and spreading operations through both space and time to minimise population fluctuations.

Soil samples taken in the Wombat State Forest in Victoria, at depths of 0-2, 2-5, and 5-10 cm before and after burning fuel loads of 0 (unburnt control), 15, 50, 150, and 300 t ha-1 were analysed for pH, exchangeable cations and cation exchange capacity, available and total P, organic carbon and soil moisture, over a 2-year, 2000 mm rainfall period. Short term responses (up to 6 months) occurred in levels of exchangeable NH4+, K+, and Mg2+, and long term changes (2 years or longer) over the period of the study were observed for pH, available and total P and exchangeable ca2+ at the 0-2 cm soil depth for the burnt treatments. Following burning (and 108 mm of rain), changes in soil chemical parameters were strongly correlated with fuel load and the quantity of fuel burnt. Changes through the 0-10 cm profile for the various chemical parameters are described, together with seasonal variations. For similar yellow podzolic soils, measurement of soil pH may be a useful criterion for monitoring soil chemical changes following slash and fuel reduction burning, provided that accurate estimates of fuel loads, composition and amount burnt can be established.

The Australian species of the water beetle genus Hydraena Kugelann, 1794, are revised, based on the study of 7,654 specimens. The 29 previously named species are redescribed, and 56 new species are described. The species are placed in 24 species groups. High resolution digital images of all primary types are presented (online version in color), and geographic distributions are mapped. Male genitalia, representative female terminal abdominal segments and representative spermathecae are illustrated. Australian Hydraena are typically found in sandy/gravelly stream margins, often in association with streamside litter; some species are primarily pond dwelling, a few species are humicolous, and one species may be subterranean. The areas of endemicity and species richness coincide quite closely with the Bassian, Torresian, and Timorian biogeographic subregions. Eleven species are shared between the Bassian and Torresian subregions, and twelve are shared between the Torresian and Timorian subregions. Only one species, H. impercepta Zwick, is known to be found in both Australia and Papua New Guinea. One Australian species, H. ambiflagellata, is also known from New Zealand. New species of Hydraena are: H. affirmata (Queensland, Palmerston National Park, Learmouth Creek), H. ambiosina (Queensland, 7 km NE of Tolga), H. antaria (New South Wales, Bruxner Flora Reserve), H. appetita (New South Wales, 14 km W Delagate), H. arcta (Western Australia, Synnot Creek), H. ascensa (Queensland, Rocky Creek, Kennedy Hwy.), H. athertonica (Queensland, Davies Creek), H. australula (Western Australia, Synnot Creek), H. bidefensa (New South Wales, Bruxner Flora Reserve), H. biimpressa (Queensland, 19.5 km ESE Mareeba), H. capacis (New South Wales, Unumgar State Forest, near Grevillia), H. capetribensis (Queensland, Cape Tribulation area), H. converga (Northern Territory, Roderick Creek, Gregory National Park), H. cubista (Western Australia, Mining Camp, Mitchell Plateau), H. cultrata (New South Wales, Bruxner Flora Reserve), H. cunninghamensis (Queensland, Main Range National Park, Cunningham's Gap, Gap Creek), H. darwini (Northern Territory, Darwin), H. deliquesca (Queensland, 5 km E Wallaman Falls), H. disparamera (Queensland, Cape Hillsborough), H. dorrigoensis (New South Wales, Dorrigo National Park, Rosewood Creek, upstream from Coachwood Falls), H. ferethula (Northern Territory, Cooper Creek, 19 km E by S of Mt. Borradaile), H. finniganensis (Queensland, Gap Creek, 5 km ESE Mt. Finnigan), H. forticollis (Western Australia, 4 km W of King Cascade), H. fundaequalis (Victoria, Simpson Creek, 12 km SW Orbost), H. fundata (Queensland, Hann Tableland, 13 km WNW Mareeba), H. hypipamee (Queensland, Mt. Hypipamee National Park, 14 km SW Malanda), H. inancala (Queensland, Girraween National Park, Bald Rock Creek at "Under-ground Creek"), H. innuda (Western Australia, Mitchell Plateau, 16 mi. N Amax Camp), H. intraangulata (Queensland, Leo Creek Mine, McIlwrath Range, E of Coen), H. invicta (New South Wales, Sydney), H. kakadu (Northern Territory, Kakadu National Park, Gubara), H. larsoni (Queensland, Windsor Tablelands), H. latisoror (Queensland, Lamington National Park, stream at head of Moran's Falls), H. luminicollis (Queensland, Lamington National Park, stream at head of Moran's Falls), H. metzeni (Queensland, 15 km NE Mareeba), H. millerorum (Victoria, Traralgon Creek, 0.2 km N 'Hogg Bridge', 5.0 km NNW Balook), H. miniretia (Queensland, Mt. Hypipamee National Park, 14 km SW Malanda), H. mitchellensis (Western Australia, 4 km SbyW Mining Camp, Mitchell Plateau), H. monteithi (Queensland, Thornton Peak, 11 km NE Daintree), H. parciplumea (Northern Territory, McArthur River, 80 km SW of Borroloola), H. porchi (Victoria, Kangaroo Creek on Springhill Rd., 5.8 km E Glenlyon), H. pugillista (Queensland, 7 km N Mt. Spurgeon), H. queenslandica (Queensland, Laceys Creek, 10 km SE El Arish), H. reticuloides (Queensland, 3 km ENE of Mt. Tozer), H. reticulositis (Western Australia, Mining Camp, Mitchell Plateau), H. revelovela (Northern Territory, Kakadu National Park, GungurulLookout), H. spinissima (Queensland, Main Range National Park, Cunningham's Gap, Gap Creek), H. storeyi (Queensland, Cow Bay, N of Daintree River), H. tenuisella (Queensland, 3 km W of Batavia Downs), H. tenuisoror (Australian Capital Territory, Wombat Creek, 6 km NE of Piccadilly Circus), H. textila (Queensland, Laceys Creek, 10 km SE El Arish), H. tridisca (Queensland, Mt. Hemmant), H. triloba (Queensland, Mulgrave River, Goldsborough Road Crossing), H. wattsi (Northern Territory, Holmes Jungle, 11 km NE by E of Darwin), H. weiri (Western Australia, 14 km SbyE Kalumburu Mission), H. zwicki (Queensland, Clacherty Road, via Julatten).

Abstract. 2003 was a record year for wildfires worldwide. Severe forest fires killed four people, displaced 20 500 others and burnt 260 000 ha in South-East Australia in January 2003. The uncontrolled fires ignited in early January 2003 as a result of a prolonged El Niño drought in South-East Australia. Severe weather conditions resulted in a fast spread of the fires and poor air quality in a region where 70% of the population of Australia lives. We use state-of-art global chemistry and transport model GEOS-Chem in conjunction with ground- and space-based observations to study the ozone (O3) and aerosol enhancement due to fires. Firstly, the monthly mean surface O3 and Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) in January 2003 are compared to January 2004 and, secondly, from sensitivity model simulations, four episodes are isolated and an attempt is made to quantify the contribution of the fires to air quality in south and South-East Australia. In January 2003 the observed monthly mean afternoon surface O3 in Victoria (VIC) and South Australia (SA) reached 27.5 ppb, which is 6.5 ppb (i.e. 30%) higher than in 2004. The simulated O3 is 29.5 ppb, which is 10 ppb higher than in 2004. While the model tends to overestimate the observed peak O3, it exhibits very good skill in reproducing the O3 temporal variability in January 2003 with a correlation of 0.83. In VIC, the air quality 4-h ozone (O3) standard exceedences are reported on 17, 24 and 25 January. On 12, 17, 24–25 and 29 January 2003, the observed O3 peaks above 40 ppb and the simulated fire contribution is higher than 10 ppb. During these 4 episodes, the range of observed O3 enhancement due to fires is 20–35 ppb, which is a factor of 3 to 5 higher than the monthly mean. The simulated fire O3 enhancement is in the range 15–50 ppb with a factor of 1.5 to 5 higher than the monthly mean. During two episodes, a well-formed surface wind channel stretches across the Tasman Sea facilitating the long range transport to New Zealand contributing to a 10% increase of surface O3. During the four episodes in January 2003, the observed AOD was up to a factor of five higher that the monthly mean AOD. The simulated and observed AODs agree on the spatial structure. Despite the model tendency to underestimate the AOD, it proves a useful tool in reconstructing the mostly patchy observations.

One of the most in demand research topic in today’s technology world is medical area and cancer is one of them. The second main cause of death in the world is cancer. In 2015 about 8.8 million people have died due to cancer [5]. For the early detection of breast cancer several types of research have been done to start the treatment and increase the survivability. Breast cancer affects the women mentally as well as emotionally. The goal of this challenge is to provide a framework that uses a cancer medical dataset as input and then analyses the dataset to produce findings that help medical experts better understand the state of the disease. The majority of studies concentrate on mammography results. However, incorrect detection in mammography pictures can occasionally result, endangering the patient's health. Cancer that forms in the cells of breast is said to be breast cancer. The cancer should be cured if it is diagnosed in early stage. So, with the help of machine learning algorithm the cancer should be diagnosed early. Most of the women lives are affected by the breast cancer in all over the world. There are two types of tumors that can be found in breast cancer i.e. malignant or benign. If a person is having a cancer disease, then it will be categorized as malignant otherwise it is known as benign. In 2020, 685000 deaths and 2.3 million women diagnosed with breast cancer globally, somewhere in world in every 14 seconds, a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer [1]. Patient life from the breast cancer can be saved only if it is found in early stage; if it is diagnosed later then the chances of survival are less. If the cancer is diagnosed early then the patient will get a better treatment. This study will concentrate on a few machine learning methods for identifying if a breast cancer is malignant or benign. The Wisconsin Breast Cancer Dataset, which was acquired via Kaggle, was used in this study. Our goal is to evaluate how accurately various machine learning algorithms can detect breast cancer. These include Random Forest Classifier, Decision Tree Classifier, Support Vector Machine, and K-Nearest Neighbors. All the experiments are conducted on a Jupiter platform. After the analyzing the accuracy of each algorithm the most suitable one is Support Vector Machine that gives the better accuracy among all i.e., 98%.

There are more than 300 blackberry (Rubus) species worldwide. Rubus brasiliensis Mart. is a native Brazilian species found in tropical forests. In January 2009, samples of R. brasiliensis with severe leaf blight were collected from an area of rain forest in the city of São Miguel do Anta, State of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Dark spots began developing in the young leaves and progressed to necrotic spots with occasional twig dieback. From the spots, a fungus was isolated with the following morphology: acervuli that were 20 to 50.0 × 50 to 125.0 μm and hyaline amerospores that were ellipsoid and fusiform and 7.5 to 23.75 × 2.5 to 5.0 μm. On the basis of these morphological characteristics, the fungus was identified as Colletotrichum acutatum. In Brazil, C. acutatum is reported in apple, citrus, strawberry, peach, plum, nectarine, olive, medlar, and yerba-mate, but it was not reported as the causal agent of leaf blight in R. brasiliensis. A sample was deposited in the herbarium at the Universidade Federal de Viçosa, Minas Gerais, Brazil (VIC 31210). One representative isolate, OLP 571, was used for pathogenicity testing and molecular studies. Identity was confirmed by amplifying the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) regions of the ribosomal RNA with primers ITS4 (3), CaInt2 (a specific primer for C. acutatum [2]) and CgInt (a specific primer for C. gloeosporioides [1]). Isolates of C. acutatum (DAR78874 and DAR78876) and C. gloeosporioides (DAR78875) obtained from Australian olive trees were used as positive controls. The primers ITS4 and CaInt2 amplified a single DNA product of 500 bp expected for C. acutatum. OLP 571 was grown for 7 days on potato dextrose agar. Young leaves of R. brasiliensis were inoculated with a conidial suspension (106 conidia/ml) on young leaves. Inoculated plants were maintained in a moist chamber for 2 days and subsequently in a greenhouse at 25°C. Necrotic spots similar to those described were detected on young leaves 3 days after the inoculation. Control leaves, on which only water was sprayed, remained healthy. The same fungus was reisolated from the inoculated symptomatic tissues. To our knowledge, this is the first report of C. acutatum causing leaf blight in the native species of R. brasiliensis in Brazil. References: (1) P. R. Mills et al. FEMS Microbiol. Lett. 98:137, 1999. (2) S. Sreenivasaprasad et al. Plant Pathol. 45:650, 1996. (3) T. J. White et al. Page 315 in: PCR Protocols: A Guide to Methods and Applications. Academic Press, San Diego, 1990.

IntroductionWhen she divorced, Cheryl Strayed chose for herself an entirely new surname. In Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found, the memoir she wrote and published in 2012 about hiking 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) from the Mojave Desert to the Oregon-Washington border, she recalls looking up the definition of the word “strayed”, and how its meaning resonated for her. “I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild”, Strayed writes. “Even in my darkest days—those very days in which I was naming myself—I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn’t have known before” (97).From the outset of her memoir, Strayed links the notion of wildness with movement, suggesting that “becom[ing] wild” only came about for her when she moved away from—and I would suggest here deliberately rejected—a sedentary role in her life. That is, when she became a peripatetic walker: someone “travelling from place to place, in particular working or based in various places for relatively short periods” (Oxford English Dictionary online). In this article, I discuss Strayed’s memoir Wild as an example of radical wandering. I argue that Strayed subverts the figure of the adventuring explorer in nature—who we usually think of as male—by using the idea of “dark peripatetic walking” whereby the dark peripatetic walker transgresses by going against, or existing outside of, society’s norms, walking “perhaps out of life itself” (Adams 196). Strayed walks the PCT out of desperation and grief after her mother dies and her marriage ends. While Paul Adams interprets dark peripatetic walking as a dire act, in this article I offer a reading of this impulse to wander away from as empowering: a radical “return to the self” only made possible by solitude (Barbour 201-202). My reading of Strayed’s walking as dark peripatetic offers a framework for understanding women’s walking in the wild; how, in wandering away from society’s norms, and in seeking solitude and being self-sufficient, the female walker rejects what society expects of women in the wild and finds empowerment in the transgressive act of existing in a male-dominated terrain: in this case, the literal one of the PCT, and the generic one that comprises memoirs about journeys in nature.Dark Peripatetic Walking as Radical Wandering A rich history of walking exists throughout the last few centuries, from Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur strolling the streets of Paris, to psychogeography and Guy Debord’s theory of the dérive, to pilgrimages throughout the ages. However, much of this walking was conducted in primarily urban spaces—and flânerie, in particular, excluded women both culturally and linguistically. Dark peripatetic walking is also associated with the urban rather than nature, but I want to take it out into wild landscapes. Adams describes two kinds of walking that Western society practises: “light peripatetic” and “dark peripatetic”. Light peripatetic is associated with solitude, simplicity, and idyll; in short, it connotes a Romantic strolling (193-194). Adams cites the celebrated nature writer Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Walking” as an example of light peripatetic, in which, for Thoreau, walking is an essential, routine part of each day. Dark peripatetic is a more ominous form of walking. Adams writes that “the dark peripatetic motif signals that the bonds of society have been torn, or a character’s identity is beginning to dissolve, or both” (196). The dark peripatetic walker is seen to walk “out of doors, out of society, out of community, out of normal reality, and perhaps even out of life itself” (196). Adams associates dark peripatetic with walking in urban spaces, driven by a sense of leaving, or being forced to leave, society.Extending Adams’s concept of the dark peripatetic, we might follow the dark peripatetic walker away from an urban setting and into the wilderness. Here we find Strayed. By the time she sets out to embark on the PCT, she has transgressed a number of social norms that have taken her to the edge of society and her existence: she has been unfaithful in her marriage, which has now fallen apart; she regularly takes drugs (though does not consider herself an addict); she is struggling with depression after the death of her mother; she is emotionally isolated as significant relationships with her family and wider networks have collapsed, and she has almost no money and no plans for the immediate future. We can see in Strayed a figure poised at the edge of what could be conceived as the limit of what is bearable. Strayed’s solution is to walk away from her broken life and into solitude and nature. The impulse of dark peripatetic is away from; the dark peripatetic walker transgresses by going against, or existing outside of society’s norms, walking “perhaps out of life itself” (Adams 196). However, while Strayed’s sense of identity, and her connections with society, have come to feel tenuous, I do not insinuate that she sees hiking the PCT as an act that leads her away from life and into death. While her reasoning for embarking on the hike comes from a place of desperation, it is not a desperate act; while Strayed is unprepared for the rigours of the hike, her inexperience does not equal failure. While Adams interprets dark peripatetic walking as dire, it is possible also to interpret this impulse to walk away from as radical and empowering—particularly for women walking away from societal norms and gendered constrictions that say women should not be, nor want to be, in the wild. Woman in the WildWhen we think about “wildness”, notions of the unfamiliar are evoked; the uncomfortable, the frightening, and the physically arduous. But wildness can also evoke the empowering. For Thoreau, the word “wild” was “the past participle of to will, self-willed” (cited in Turner 111). Carol Black elaborates on this idea, describing Thoreau’s wild as “that which lives out of its own intrinsic nature rather than bowing to some extrinsic force” (Black). Understood like this, to be wild is ultimately to embody your intrinsic essence. Of course, the discussion of an “intrinsic essence”, or, implicitly, one of a woman’s, is complicated territory: as the feminist scholar Donna Haraway writes, “there is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices” (155). There is a long association between women and nature as the ecofeminist scholar Carolyn Merchant discusses in her important book The Death of Nature, with both being dominated by science and men, and both being conflated as the “nurturing mother” (xx). The association between men and nature, however, is interestingly fluid, as the ecocritic Astrid Bracke points out: “‘male’ can be seen as both culture, and nature: culture, when ‘wild’, ‘natural’ women have to be civilized, nature when it comes to drawing a contrast to the domestic sphere of the home, the place of women and children” (“Macho Nature”). The discussion of the essence of a human being is complex and potentially fraught, and would require another article to do it justice, so what I want to focus on here is the idea of wildness as being, or returning to, a sense of selfhood that may have been forgotten. I focus here on how Strayed experiences self and wildness through the act of walking in solitude, and what this means for narratives of being in the wild. The ability to inhabit, explore freely, and stake claims on wild places has often been the business of men in history and male characters in literature. For instance, Tanya Kam argues that women who hike alone are more likely to be asked what compelled them to do so, whereas this legitimisation is not required when a man does the same thing (365). She suggests that adventures in the wild are often perceived in Western society as a “rite of masculinity” (365) where the male explorer sets out to conquer “rugged, natural terrain” (353). For Kam, this stems from the concept of “frontier masculinity”, which, she writes, “depends on romanticised conceptions of the wilderness, rugged self-sufficiency, courage, masculine physical strength, autonomous individualism, and the active subordination of nature” (353). This masculine explorer trope impedes the fact that women have always been present in nature and wilderness. Sarah McFarland calls for “the reconstruction of the concept of nature itself” (45), which she argues women’s nature writing can bring about, in a way that will “integrat[e] the interests of actual women into an actual wilderness” (45). Memoirs such as Tracks (1980) by Robyn Davidson, Woman in the Wilderness (2018) by Miriam Lancewood, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube (2016) by Blair Braverman, and even The Word for Woman Is Wilderness by Abi Andrews (2018), which is not a memoir but a novel that reads like one, are a suite of texts that I think would interest McFarland, who proposes that by disrupting the notion of the solitary male “questing hero” (37), women-authored texts about being in nature refute “the myth of a womanless wilderness” (38). Strayed, with Wild, joins the lineage of women writers who do this.One strategy that Strayed uses to refute this myth, and provide an alternative to the male explorer, is to embody some of the tropes of this figure in her narration of hiking the PCT. The criteria by which Kam defines this masculine explorer are evident, in most instances, in Strayed’s narrator in Wild. During the three months that she spends hiking the PCT, she is forced to become self-sufficient; she finds courage in the face of extreme hardship; her physical strength develops, and she becomes comfortable in her autonomy. Strayed consistently highlights the gender of her body in this narration: her overweight pack “Monster” is a constant struggle for her smaller physique; she pushes herself physically so male hikers don’t overtake her; she lists the condoms and natural sea sponge she packs, anticipating occasions of physical intimacy and attending to the practicality of menstruating while on the trail. She notes, as the weeks pass, the way her hair grows straw-like from exposure to the weather, and how the developing muscles in her legs “rippl[e] beneath [her] thinning flesh in ways they never had” (190). Patches of skin on her hips and tailbone bleed and scab over from her pack chafing (190). Strayed’s walking, and how she foregrounds the femininity of her body, disrupts the idea that the wilderness is not a place for a woman’s body.However, it is important that the narrator does not seek to subordinate nature—a key aspect of Kam’s “frontier masculinity”. Embodying some, but not all, of the masculine explorer’s traits, as a female narrator-protagonist, Strayed engages with, but ultimately resists, conforming to this tradition, subverting the dominant picture of the masculine explorer in wild places. This is not to say that Strayed refrains from engaging in adversarial encounters with nature; she feels triumphant after successfully navigating snow-covered parts of the trail, and loudly blows her whistle to scare away wildlife. Strayed’s gender is key here: with this strategy, Strayed claims her place as a woman in masculine territory, but in doing so she is more concerned with reflecting on her inner life than in asserting herself over the land that she traverses. In a statement against patriarchal and colonial conceptions of “the wilderness” as empty space to be claimed (via literally claiming land, or by inscribing a romantic narrative upon it), Strayed finds her place in the landscape without owning it. She writes about being in nature, but is ultimately more occupied with being in herself.Witnessing the SelfIf the need to assert himself over nature drives the male adventurer, as Kam suggests, we might read in Wild’s female adventurer an antithesis to this impulse: the act of witness. In a moment of revelation, the narrator realises what it is that drove her, and others before her, to hike the PCT:It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way. (207)Strayed’s language choices are significant here. In walking through the landscape features that she names in the above passage, she is witnessing place. Witnessing connotes viewing, but not acting upon. We might also surmise, however, that she is witnessing herself located in these places. Strayed uses the phrase “how it felt to be” to describe the essence of her experience in the wild—again, “felt” could refer to tactile experience in the landscape, or a sense of wildness in her identity that manifested through being in that landscape.On the trail, Strayed also discovers that she is comfortable alone. In a passage that is deceptively short, Strayed makes a remarkable comment on solitude as a transgressive and transformative state for a woman to seek out and ultimately feel at home in: Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was. The radical aloneness of the PCT had altered that sense. Alone wasn’t a room anymore, but the whole wide world, and now I was alone in that world, occupying it in a way I never had before. (119, emphasis mine)There are two important points in this passage: the first is that Strayed feels most herself when she is alone, and the second that her understanding of aloneness has shifted. Reading Strayed’s walking as dark peripatetic allows us to see the act of walking as a radical “return to the self”. John Barbour, from whom I have borrowed this phrase, explains that “solitude … is not oriented toward escaping the world, but toward a different kind of participation in it, as made possible by the disengagement from ordinary social interactions. Solitude is a return to the self” (201-202). Kam discusses how Barbour’s “return to the self” (201-202) occurs when the subject is freed from the various social and domestic responsibilities by which they would normally be bound. She speculates that isolation, or solitude, is generally discouraged in the individual as it endangers the functionality of society. This criticism seems particularly relevant in relation to women, as it highlights their roles as home-makers in a patriarchal society. Hiking alone, Strayed finds that her participation in the world has changed—and it is through her solitary experience that this occurs. There is a safety, a self-containment, in Strayed’s solitude—which counters the narrative that for women, in particular, the wilderness contains danger and threat. As Kam points out, it is not wild animals that present the greatest threat to Strayed; it is a pair of male hunters who encounter her campsite on one occasion (Kam 363).Claiming autonomy and seeking out solitude, as Strayed does in Wild, suggests an experience of wildness that resonates with Thoreau’s understanding of it as “self-willedness” (Turner 111). After reading Wild, the phrase “radical self-containment” seems to me to describe the phenomenon of the particular kind of wildness enabled by walking; the autonomy found in solitude; and in existing beyond the reach of extrinsic forces that would normally affect one’s life. In this experience of wildness, walking, the natural world, and solitude are entwined and essential to the other: wildness is both an embodied and internal experience. ConclusionWild asks us to think about what we make of women venturing into the wild, and the role that walking plays in this. Reading Strayed’s walking in Wild as dark peripatetic suggests a framework for understanding women’s walking in the wild; how, in seeking and discovering that she is at home in solitude, the female walker rejects what society expects of women. Women are not, culturally speaking, encouraged to seek out either solitude or wild places. As nature writing has historically suggested, wild terrain is male terrain. Strayed subverts the figure of the adventuring explorer in nature with her walking by foregrounding the lived experiences of her female body, rejecting society’s role for her, and finding that she is at home in solitude. But most importantly, she does so by shifting the gaze of the walker that we encounter in much male-authored nature literature: rather than looking outward with the intention of conquering, dominating, or claiming landscape, she looks inwards, witnessing the changes in self that walking in remote, wild landscapes enables, and in doing so, gives us another narrative for contemporary journeys in the wild.ReferencesAdams, Paul C. “Peripatetic Imagery and Peripatetic Sense of Place.” Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies. Eds. Paul C. Adams, Steven Hoelscher, and Karen E. Till. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 2001.Andrews, Abi. The Word for Woman Is Wilderness. London: Profile Books, 2018.Barbour, John D. The Value of Solitude: The Ethics and Spirituality of Aloneness in Autobiography. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2004.Black, Carol. “On the Wildness of Children: The Revolution Will Not Take Place in the Classroom.” Carolblack.org, Apr. 2016. 27 May 2019 <https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/on-the-wildness-of-children/>.Bracke, Astrid. “Macho Nature? Or, Gender in New Nature Writing Part I.” Astridbracke.com, 19 Feb. 2013. Braverman, Blair. Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North. New York: HarperCollins, 2016.Davidson, Robyn. Tracks. 1980. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.Kam, Tanya Y. “Forests of the Self: Life Writing and ‘Wild’ Wanderings.” Life Writing 13.3 (2016): 351-371. 22 Apr. 2019 <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14484528.2016.1086290>.Lancewood, Miriam. Woman in the Wilderness: A Story of Survival, Love and Self-Discovery in New Zealand. New Zealand: Allen & Unwin. 2017.McFarland, Sarah E. “Wild Women: Literary Explorations of American Landscapes.” Ed. Barbara J. Cook. Women Writing Nature: A Feminist View. Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2008.Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. New York: HarperCollins, 1983.“Peripatetic.” Oxford English Dictionary. Lexico, 2019. <https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/peripatetic>.Strayed, Cheryl. Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found. Rev. ed. London: Atlantic Books, 2013.Turner, Jack. The Abstract Wild. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1996.

i) In Australia we do a lot of thinking about home. Or so it would seem from all the talk about belonging, home, being at home (see Read). A sure sign of displacement, some might say. In his recent memoir, John Hughes writes: It is a particularly Australian experience that our personal heritage and sense of identity includes a place and a history not really our own, not really accessible to us. The fact that our sense of self-discovery and self-realisation takes place in foreign lands is one of the rich and complex ironies of being Australian. (24-25) My sense of self-discovery did not occur in a foreign land. However, my personal heritage and sense of identity includes places and histories that are not really my own. Unlike Hughes I don’t have what is often portrayed as an exotic heritage; I am plainly white Australian. I grew up on the Far North Coast of New South Wales, on farms that every year knew drought and flood. My place in this country – both local and national – seemingly was beyond question. I am after all a white, settler Australian. But I left Kyogle twenty years ago and since then much has changed. My project is very different than Hughes’. However, reading his memoir led me to reflect upon my sense of belonging. What is my home made from? Like Hughes I want to deploy memories from my childhood and youth to unpack my idea of home. White settler Australians’ sense of belonging is often expressed as a profound feeling of attachment; imagined as unmediated (Moreton-Robinson 31). It is a connection somehow untroubled by the worldliness of the world: it is an oasis of plentitude. For Indigenous Australians, Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues, non-Indigenous Australians sense of belonging is tied to migrancy, while the Indigenous subject has an ontological relationship to land and these modes are incommensurable (31). Since colonisation the nation state has attempted through an array of social, legal, economic and cultural practices to break Indigenous people’s ontological connections to land, and to cast them as homeless in the ‘modern’ world. The expression of belonging as a profound sense of attachment – beyond the material – denies not only the racialised power relations of belonging and dispossession, but also the history of this sentiment. This is why I want to stay right here and take up Moreton-Robinson’s challenge to further theorise (and reflect) upon how non-Indigenous subjects are positioned in relation to the original owners not through migrancy but through possession (37). ii) Australia has changed a lot. Now most understand Australia to be comprised of a plurality of contradictory memories, imaginaries and histories, generated from different cultural identities and social bodies. Indigenous Australians, who have been previously spoken for, written about, categorised and critiqued by non-Indigenous people, have in the last three decades begun to be heard by mainstream Australia. In a diversity of mediums and avenues Indigenous stories, in all their multiplicity, penetrated the field of Australian culture and society. In so doing, they enter into a dialogue about Australia’s past, present and future. The students I teach at university arrive from school with an awareness that Australia was colonised, not discovered as I was taught. Recent critical historiography, by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers and academics, calls for and creates a new Australian memory (Hage 80). A memory, or memories, which the reconciliation movement not only want acknowledged by mainstream Australia but also integrated into national consciousness. Over the last twenty years, many Australian historians have reinforced the truths of fictional and autobiographical accounts of colonial violence against Indigenous people. The benign and peaceful settlement of Australia, which was portrayed in school history lessons and public discourse, began to be replaced by empirical historical evidence of the brutal subjugation of Indigenous people and the violent appropriation of Indigenous land. Indigenous struggles for recognition and sovereignty and revisionist history have created a cultural transformation. However, for all the big changes there has been limited investigation into white Australians’ sense of belonging continuing to be informed and shaped by settler colonial desire. Indigenous memories not only contest and contradict other memories, but they are also derived from different cultural bodies and social and historical contexts. My memory of our farm carved out of Toonumbah State Forest is of a peaceful place, without history; a memory which is sure to contradict Bundjalung memories. To me Kyogle was a town with only a few racial problems; except for the silences and all those questions left unasked. Ghassan Hage argues that a national memory or non-contradictory plurality of memories of colonisation in Australia is impossible because although there has been a cultural war, the two opposing sides have not assimilated to become one (92). There remain within Australia, ‘two communal subjects with two wills over one land; two sovereignties of unequal strength’ (Hage 93). The will of one is not the will of the other. I would argue that there is barely recognition of Indigenous sovereignty by non-Indigenous Australians; for so many there is only one will, one way. Furthermore, Hage maintains that: For a long time to come, Australia is destined to become an unfinished Western colonial project as well as a land in a permanent state of decolonisation. A nation inhabited by both the will of the coloniser and the will of the colonised, each with their identity based on their specific understanding, and memory, of the colonial encounter: what was before it and what is after it. Any national project of reconciliation that fails to fully accept the existence of a distinct Indigenous will, a distinct Indigenous conatus, whose striving is bound to make the settlers experience ‘sadness’, is destined to be a momentary cover-up of the reality of the forces that made Australia what it is. (94) Why must Indigenous will make settlers experience sad passions? Perhaps this is a naïve question. I am not dismissing Hage’s concerns, and agree with his critique of the failure of the project of reconciliation. However, if we are to understand the forces that made Australia what it is – to know our place – then as Hage writes we need not only to acknowledge these opposing forces, but understand how they made us who we are. The narrative of benign settlement might have resulted in a cultural amnesia, but I’m not convinced that settler Australians didn’t know about colonial violence and its aftermath. Unlike Henry Reynolds who asked ‘why didn’t we know?’ I think the question should be, as Fiona Nicoll asks, ‘what is it we know but refuse to tell?’ (7). Or how did I get here? In asking what makes home, one needs to question what is excluded to enable one to stay in place. iii) When I think of my childhood home there is one particular farm that comes to mind. From my birth to when I left home at eighteen I lived in about six different homes; all but one where on farms. The longest was for about eight years, on a farm only a few kilometres from town; conveniently close for a teenager wanting all the ‘action’ of town life. It was just up the road from my grandparents’ place, whose fridge I would raid most afternoons while my grandmother lovingly listened to my triumphs and woes (at least those I thought appropriate for her ears). Our house was set back just a little from the road. On this farm, my brother and I floated paper boats down flooded gullies; there, my sisters, brother and I formed a secret society on the banks of the picturesque creek, which was too quickly torn apart by factional infighting. In this home, my older sisters received nightly phone calls from boys, and I cried to my mother, ‘When will it be my turn’. She comforted me with, ‘Don’t worry, they will soon’. And sure enough they did. There I hung out with my first boyfriend, who would ride out on his motor bike, then later his car. We lolled around on our oddly sloping front lawn and talked for hours about nothing. But this isn’t the place which readily comes to mind when I think of a childhood home. Afterlee Rd, as we called it, never felt like home. Behind the house, over the other side of the creek, were hills. Before my teens I regularly walked to the top of the first hill and rode around the farm, but not all the way to the boundary fence. I didn’t belong there. It was too exposed to passing traffic, yet people rarely stopped to add to our day. For me excitement and life existed elsewhere: the Gold Coast or Lismore. When I think of my childhood home an image comes to mind: a girl child standing on the flat between our house and yards, with hills and eucalypts at her back, and a rock-faced mountain rising up behind the yards at her front. (Sometimes there is a dog by her side, but I think it’s a late edition.) The district was known as Toonumbah because of its proximity (as the crow flies) to Toonumbah Dam. My siblings and I ventured across the farm and we rode with my father to muster, or sometimes through the adjoining State Forest to visit our neighbours who lived deep in the bush. I thought the trees whispered to me and watched over us. They were all seeing, all knowing, as they often are for children – a forest of gods. Sometime during my childhood I read the children’s novel Z for Zachariah: a story of a lone survivor of an apocalypse saved by remaining in a safe and abundant valley, while the rest of the community went out to explore what happened (O’Brien). This was my idea of Toonumbah. And like Zachariah’s valley it was isolated and for that reason, in spite of its plenty, a strange home. It was too disconnected from the world. Despite my sense of homeliness, I never felt sovereign. My disquiet wasn’t due to a sense that at any moment we might be cast out. Quite the opposite, we were there to stay. And not because I was a child and sovereignty is the domain of adults. I don’t think, at least as a feeling, it is. But rather because sovereignty is tied to movement or crossings. Not just being in place, but leaving and returning, freely moving through and around, and welcoming others who recognise it as ‘our’ place. Home is necessitated upon movement. And my idea of this childhood home is reliant upon a romanticised, ‘profound’ feeling of attachment; a legacy of settler colonial desire. There is no place like home. Home is far more than a place, it is, as Blunt and Dowling suggest, about feelings, desire, intimacy and belonging and relationships between places and connections with others (2). One’s sense of home has a history. To be at home one must limit the chaos of the world – create order. As we know, the environment is also ordered to enable a sense of bodily alignment and integrity. How or rather with whom does one establish connections with to create a sense of home? To create a sense of order, who does one recognise as belonging or not? Who is deemed a part of the chaos? Here Sara Ahmed’s idea of the stranger is helpful. Spaces are claimed, or ‘owned’, she argues, not so much by inhabiting what is already there, but rather movement or ‘passing through’ creates boundaries, making places by giving them a value (33). Settlers moved out and across the country, and in so doing created the colonies and later the nation by prescribing an economic value to the land. Colonialism attempts to enclose both Indigenous people and the country within its own logic. To take possession of the country the colonisers attempted to fix Indigenous people in place. A place ordered according to colonial logic; making the Indigenous subject out of place. Thus the Indigenous ‘stranger’ came into view. The stranger is not simply constituted by being recognised by the other, but rather it is the recognition of strangers which forms the local (Ahmed 21-22). The settler community was produced and bounded by their recognition of strangers; their belonging was reliant upon others not belonging. The doctrine of terra nullius cleared the country not only of people, but also of the specifics of Indigenous place, in an attempt to recreate another place inspired by the economic and strategic needs of the colonisers. Indigenous people were further exposed as strangers in the ‘new’ country by not participating in the colonial economy and systems of exchange. Indigenous people’s movement to visit family, to perform ceremony or maintain connections with country were largely dismissed by the colonial culture and little understood as maintaining and re-making sovereignty. European forms of commerce made the settlers sovereign – held them in place. And in turn, this exchange continues to bind settler Australians to ways of being that de-limit connections to place and people. It created a sense of order that still constrains ideas of home. Colonial logic dominates Australian ideas of sovereignty, thus of being at home or belonging in this country. Indeed, I would argue that it enforces a strange attachment: clinging fast as if to a too absent parent or romancing it, wooing a desired but permissive lover. We don’t know, as Fiona Nicoll questions, what Indigenous sovereignty might look like. Discussions of sovereignty are on Western terms. If Indigenous sovereignty is recognised at all, it is largely figured as impractical, impossible or dangerous (Nicoll 9). The fear and forgetting of the long history of Indigenous struggles for sovereignty, Nicoll writes, conceals the everydayness of the contestation (1). Indigenous sovereignty is both unknown and too familiar, thus it continues to be the stranger which must be expelled to enable belonging. Yet without it we cannot know the country. iv) I carry around a map of Australia. It is a simple image, a crude outline of the giant landmass; like what you find on cheap souvenir tea-towels. To be honest it’s just the continent – an islandless island – even Tasmania has dropped off my map. My map is not in my pocket but my head. It comes to mind so regularly I think of it as the shape of my idea of home. It is a place shared by many, yet singularly mine. I want to say that it is not the nation, but the country itself, but of course this isn’t true. My sense of Australia as my home is forged from an imaginary nation. However, I have problems calling Australia home – as if being at home in the nation is like being in an idealised family home. What is too often sentimentalised and fetishised as closed and secure: a place of comfort and seamless belonging (Fortier 119). Making home an infantile place where everything is there for me. But we understand that nations are beyond us and all that they are composed of we cannot know. Even putting aside the romantic notions, nations aren’t very much like home. They are, however, relational. Like bower birds, we collect sticks, stones, shells and coloured things, building connections with the outside world to create something a bit like home in the imaginary nation. I fill my rough map with ‘things’ that hold me in place. We might ask, is a home a home if we don’t go outside? My idea of home borrows from Meaghan Morris. In Ecstasy and Economics, she is attempting to create what Deleuze and Guattari call home. She writes: In their sense of the term, “home does not pre-exist”; it is the product of an effort to “organize a limited space”, and the limit involved is not a figure of containment but of provisional (or “working”) definition. This kind of home is always made of mixed components, and the interior space it creates is a filter or a sieve rather than a sealed-in consistency; it is not a place of origin, but an “aspect” of a process which it enables (“as though the circle tended on its own to open into a future, as a function of the working forces it shelters”) but does not precede – and so it is not an enclosure, but a way of going outside. (92) If home is a way of going outside then we need to know something about outside. Belonging is a desire and we make home from the desire to belong. In desiring belonging we should not forsake the worldliness of the world. What is configured as outside home are often the legal, political, economic and cultural conditions that have produced contemporary Australia. However, by refusing to engage with how colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty have made Australia one might not be able to go outside; risk imprisoning oneself in a too comfortable space. By letting in some of the elements which are strange and unhomely, one might begin to build connections which aid the reimagining of the self and the social, which in turn enables one to not only live in postcolonial Australia but participate in creating it (Probyn). A strange place: unsettled by other desires, histories, knowledge and memories, but a place more like home. I am arguing that we need to know our place. But knowing our place cannot be taken for granted. We need many hearts and minds to allow us to see what is here. The childhood home I write of is not my home, nor do I want it to be. However, the remembering or rather investigation of my idea of home is important. Where has it come from? There has been a lot of discussion about non-Indigenous Australians being unsettled by revisionist historiography and Indigenous demands for recognition and this is true, but the unsettlement has been enabling. Given that settler Australians are afforded so much sovereignty then there seems plenty of room for uncertainty. We don’t need to despair, or if we do, it could be used productively to remake our idea of home. If someone were to ask that tired question, ‘Generations of my family have lived here, where am I going to go?’ The answer is no where. You’re going no where, but here. The question isn’t of leaving, but of staying well. References Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality. London: Routledge, 2000. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Fortier, Anne-Marie. “Making Home: Queer Migrations and Motions of Attachment.” Uprootings/Regrounding: Questions of Home and Migration. Eds S. Ahmed et. al. Oxford: Berg, 2003. 115-135. Gelder, Ken, and Jane Jacobs. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. Carlton, Vic: Melbourne UP, 1998. Hage, Ghassan. Against Paranoid Nationalism. Annandale: Pluto Press, 2003. Hughes, John. The Idea of Home: Autobiographical Essays. Sydney: Giramondo, 2004. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. “I Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging and Place in a White Postcolonizing Society.” Uprootings/Regrounding: Questions of Home and Migration. Eds S. Ahmed et. al. Oxford: Berg, 2003. 23-40. Morris, Meaghan. Ecstasy and Economics: American Essays for John Forbes. Sydney: Empress, 1992. Nicoll, Fiona. “Defacing Terra Nullius and Facing the Public Secret of Indigenous Sovereignty in Australia.” borderlands 1.2 (2002): 1-13. O’Brien, Robert C. Z for Zachariah: A Novel. London: Heinemann Educational, 1976. Probyn, Elspeth. Outside Belongings. New York: Routledge, 1996. Read, Peter. Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Reynolds, Henry. Why Weren’t We Told?: A Personal Search for the Truth about Our History. Melbourne: Penguin, 2002. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Slater, Lisa. "No Place like Home: Staying Well in a Too Sovereign Country." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/13-slater.php>. APA Style Slater, L. (Aug. 2007) "No Place like Home: Staying Well in a Too Sovereign Country," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/13-slater.php>.

IntroductionThe horror film Hush (2016) has attracted attention since its release due to the uniqueness of its central character—a deaf–mute author who lives in a world of silence. Maddie Young (Kate Siegel) moves into a remote cabin in the woods to recover from a breakup and finish her new novel. Aside from a cat, she is alone in the house, only engaging with loved ones via online messaging or video chats during which she uses American Sign Language (ASL). Maddie cannot hear nor speak, so writing is her primary mode of creative expression, and a key source of information for the audience. This article explores both the presence and absence of text in Hush, examining how textual “captions” of various kinds are both provided and withheld at key moments. As an author, Maddie battles the limits of written language as she struggles with writer’s block. As a person, she fights the limits of silence and isolation as a brutal killer invades her retreat. Accordingly, this article examines how the interplay between silence, text, and sound invites viewers to identify with the heroine’s experience and ultimate triumph.Hush is best described as a slasher—a horror film in which a single (usually male) killer stalks and kills a series of victims with relentless determination (Clover, Men, Women). Slashers are about close, visceral killing—blood and the hard stab of the knife. With her big brown eyes and gentle presence, quiet, deaf Maddie is clearly framed as a lamb to slaughter in the opening scenes. Indeed, throughout Hush, Maddie’s lack of hearing is leveraged to increase suspense and horror. The classic pantomime cry of “He’s behind you!” is taken to dark extremes as the audience watches a nameless man (John Gallagher Jr.) stalk the writer in her isolated house. She is unable to hear him enter the building, unable to sense him looming behind her. Neither does she hear him killing her friend outside on the porch, banging her body loudly against the French doors.And yet, despite her vulnerability, she rises to the challenge. Fighting back against her attacker using a variety of multisensory strategies, Maddie assumes the role of the “Final Girl” in this narrative. As Carol Clover has explained, the Final Girl is a key trope of slasher films, forming part of their essential structure. While others in the film are killed, “she alone looks death in the face; but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued (ending A) or to kill him herself (ending B)” (Clover, Her Body, Himself). However, reviews and discussions of Hush typically frame Maddie as a Final Girl with a difference. Adding disability into the equation is seen as “revolutionising” the trope (Sheppard) and “updating the Final Girl theory” for a new age (Laird). Indeed, the film presents its Final Girl as simultaneously deaf and powerful—a twist that potentially challenges the dynamics of the slasher and representations of disability more generally.My Weakness, My StrengthThe opening sequence of Hush introduces Maddie’s deafness through the use of sound, silence, and text. Following an establishing shot sweeping over the dark forest and down to her solitary cottage, the film opens to warm domesticity. Close-ups of onion, eggs, and garlic being prepared are accompanied by clear, crisp sounds of crackling, bubbling, slicing, and frying. The camera zooms out to focus on Maddie, busy at her culinary tasks. All noises begin to fade. The camera focuses on Maddie’s ear as audio is eliminated, replaced by silence. As she continues to cook, the audience experiences her world—a world devoid of sound. These initial moments also highlight the importance of digital communication technologies. Maddie moves smoothly between devices, switching from laptop computer to iPhone while sharing instant messages with a friend. Close-ups of these on-screen conversations provide viewers with additional narrative information, operating as an alternate form of captioning from within the diegesis. Snippets of text from other sources are likewise shown in passing, such as the author’s blurb on the jacket of her previous novel. The camera lingers on this book, allowing viewers to read that Maddie suffered hearing loss and vocal paralysis after contracting bacterial meningitis at 13 years old. Traditional closed captioning or subtitles are thus avoided in favour of less intrusive forms of expositional text that are integrated within the plot.While hearing characters, such as her neighbour and sister, use SimCom (simultaneous communication or sign supported speech) to communicate with her, Maddie signs in silence. Because the filmmakers have elected not to provide captions for her signs in these moments, a—typically non-ASL speaking—hearing audience will inevitably experience disruptions in comprehension and Maddie’s conversations can therefore only be partially understood. This allows for an interesting role reversal for viewers. As Katherine A. Jankowski (32) points out, deaf and hard of hearing audiences have long expressed dissatisfaction with accessing the spoken word on television and film due to a lack of closed captioning. Despite the increasing technological ease of captioning digital media in the 21st century, this barrier to accessibility continues to be an ongoing issue (Ellis and Kent). The hearing community do not share this frustrating background—television programs that include ASL are captioned to ensure hearing viewers can follow the story (see for example Beth Haller’s article on Switched at Birth in this special issue). Hush therefore inverts this dynamic by presenting ASL without captions. Whereas silence is used to draw hearing viewers into Maddie’s experience, her periodic use of ASL pushes them out again. This creates a push–pull dynamic, whereby the hearing audience identify with Maddie and empathise with the losses associated with being deaf and mute, but also realise that, as a result, she has developed additional skills that are beyond their ken.It is worth noting at this point that Maddie is not the first Final Girl with a disability. In the 1967 thriller Wait until Dark, for instance, Audrey Hepburn plays Susy Hendrix, a blind woman trapped in her home by three crooks. Martin F. Norden suggests that this film represented a “step forward” in cinematic representations of disability because its heroine is not simply an innocent victim, but “tough, resilient, and resourceful in her fight against the criminals who have misrepresented themselves to her and have broken into her apartment” (228). Susy’s blindness, at first presented as a source of vulnerability and frustration, becomes her strength in the film’s climax. Bashing out all the lights in the apartment, she forces the men to fight on her terms, in darkness, where she holds the upper hand. In a classic example of Final Girl tenacity, Susy stabs the last of them to death before help arrives. Maddie likewise uses her disability as a tactical advantage. An enhanced sense of touch allows her to detect the killer when he sneaks up behind her as she feels the lightest flutter upon the hairs of her neck. She also wields a blaring fire alarm as a weapon, deafening and disorienting her attacker, causing him to drop his knife.The similarities between these films are not coincidental. During an interview, director Mike Flanagan (who co-wrote Hush with wife Siegel) stated that they were directly informed by Wait until Dark. When asked about the choice to make Maddie’s character deaf, he explained that “it kind of happened because Kate and I were out to dinner and we were talking about movies we liked. One of the ones that we stumbled on that we both really liked was Wait Until Dark” (cited in Thurman). In the earlier film, director Terence Young used darkness to blind the audience—at times the screen is completely black and viewers must listen carefully to work out what is happening. Likewise, Flanagan and Siegel use silence to effectively deafen the audience at crucial moments. The viewers are therefore forced to experience the action as the heroines do.You’re Gonna Die Screaming But You Won’t Be HeardHorror films often depend upon sound design for impact—the most mundane visuals can be made frightening by the addition of a particular noise, effect, or tune. Therefore, in the context of the slasher genre, one of the most unique aspects of Hush is the absence of the Final Girl’s vocalisation. A mute heroine is deprived of the most basic expressive tool in the horror handbook—a good scream. “What really won me over,” comments one reviewer, “was the fact that this particular ‘final girl’ isn’t physically able to whinge or scream when in pain–something that really isn’t the norm in slasher/home invasion movies” (Gorman). Yet silence also plays an important part in this genre, “when the wind stops or the footfalls cease, death is near” (Whittington 183). Indeed, Hush’s tagline is “silence can be killer.”The arrival of the killer triggers a deep kind of silence in this particular film, because alternative captions, text, and other communicative techniques (including ASL) cease to be used or useful when the man begins terrorising Maddie. This is not entirely surprising, as the abject failure of technology is a familiar trope in slasher films. As Clover explains, “the emotional terrain of the slasher film is pretechnological” (Her Body, Himself, 198). In Hush, however, the focus on text in this context is notable. There is a sense that written modes of communication are unreliable when it counts. The killer steals her phone, and cuts electricity and Internet access to the house. She attempts to use the neighbours’ Wi-Fi via her laptop, but does not know the password. Quick thinking Maddie even scrawls backwards messages on her windows, “WON’T TELL. DIDN’T SEE FACE,” she writes in lipstick, “BOYFRIEND COMING HOME.” In response, the killer simply removes his mask, “You’ve seen it now” he says. They both know there is no boyfriend. The written word has shifted from being central to Maddie’s life, to largely irrelevant. Text cannot save her. It is only by using other strategies (and senses) that Maddie empowers herself to survive.Maddie’s struggles to communicate and take control are integral to the film’s unfolding narrative, and co-writer Siegel notes this was a conscious theme: “A lot of this movie is … a metaphor for feeling unheard. It’s a movie about asserting yourself and of course as a female writer I brought a lot to that.” In their reflection on the limits of both verbal and written communication, the writers of Hush owe a debt to another source of inspiration—Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series. Season four, episode ten, also called Hush, was first aired on 14 December 1999 and features a critically acclaimed storyline in which the characters all lose their ability to speak. Voices from all over Sunnydale are stolen by monstrous fairytale figures called The Gentlemen, who use the silence to cut fresh hearts from living victims. Their appearance is heralded by a morbid rhyme:Can’t even shout, can’t even cry The Gentlemen are coming by. Looking in windows, knocking on doors, They need to take seven and they might take yours. Can’t call to mom, can’t say a word, You’re gonna die screaming but you won’t be heard.The theme of being “unheard” is clearly felt in this episode. Buffy and co attempt a variety of methods to compensate for their lost voices, such as hanging message boards around their necks, using basic text-to-voice computer software, and drawing on overhead projector slides. These tools essentially provide the captions for a story unfolding in silence, as no subtitles are provided. As it turns out, in many ways the friends’ non-verbal communication is more effective than their spoken words. Patrick Shade argues that the episode:celebrates the limits and virtues of both the nonverbal and the verbal. … We tend to be most readily aware of verbal means … but “Hush” stresses that we are embodied creatures whose communication consists in more than the spoken word. It reminds us that we have multiple resources we regularly employ in communicating.In a similar way, the film Hush emphasises alternative modes of expression through the device of the mute Final Girl, who must use all of her sensory and intellectual resources to survive. The evening begins with Maddie at leisure, unable to decide how to end her fictional novel. By the finale she is clarity incarnate. She assesses each real-life scene proactively and “writes” the end of the film on her own terms, showing that there is only one way to survive the night—she must fight.Deaf GainIn his discussion of disability and cinema, Norden explains that the majority of films position disabled people as outsiders and “others” because “filmmakers photograph and edit their work to reflect an able-bodied point of view” (1). The very apparatus of mainstream film, he argues, is designed to embody able-bodied experiences and encourage audience identification with able-bodied characters. He argues this bias results in disabled characters positioned as “objects of spectacle” to be pitied, feared or scorned by viewers. In Hush, however, the audience is consistently encouraged to identify with Maddie. As she fights for her life in the final scenes, sound fades away and the camera assumes a first-person perspective. The man is above, choking her on the floor, and we look up at him through her eyes. As Maddie’s groping hand finds a corkscrew and jabs the spike into his neck, we watch his death through her eyes too. The film thus assists viewers to apprehend Maddie’s strength intimately, rather than framing her as a spectacle or distanced “other” to be pitied.Importantly, it is this very core of perceived vulnerability, yet ultimate strength, that gives Maddie the edge over her attacker in the end. In this way, Maddie’s disabilities are not solely represented as a space of limitation or difference, but a potential wellspring of power. Hence the film supports, to some degree, the move to seeing deafness as gain, rather than loss:Deafness has long been viewed as a hearing loss—an absence, a void, a lack. It is virtually impossible to think of deafness without thinking of loss. And yet Deaf people do not often consider their lives to be defined by loss. Rather, there is something present in the lives of Deaf people, something full and complete. (Bauman and Murray, 3)As Bauman and Murray explain, the shift from “hearing loss” to “deaf gain” involves focusing on what is advantageous and unique about the deaf experience. They use the example of the Swiss national snowboarding team, who hired a deaf coach to boost their performance. The coach noticed they were depending too much on sound and used earplugs to teach a multi-sensory approach, “the earplugs forced them to learn to depend on the feel of the snow beneath their boards [and] the snowboarder’s performance improved markedly” (6). This idea that removing sound strengthens other senses is a thread that runs throughout Hush. For example, it is the loss of hearing and speech that are credited with inspiring Maddie’s successful writing career and innovative literary “voice”.Lennard J. Davis warns that framing people as heroic or empowered as a result of their disabilities can feed counterproductive stereotypes and perpetuate oppressive systems. “Privileging the inherent powers of the deaf or the blind is a form of patronizing,” he argues, because it traps such individuals within the concept of innate difference (106). Disparities between able and disabled people are easier to justify when disabled characters are presented as intrinsically “special” or “noble,” as this suggests inevitable divergence, rather than structural inequality. While this is something to keep in mind, Hush skirts the issue by presenting Maddie as a flawed, realistic character. She does not possess superpowers; she makes mistakes and gets injured. In short, she is a fallible human using what resources she has to the best of her abilities. As such, she represents a holistic vision of a disabled heroine rather than an overly glorified stereotype.ConclusionHush is a film about the limits of text, the gaps where language is impossible or insufficient, and the struggle to be heard as a woman with disabilities. It is a film about the difficulties surrounding both verbal and written communication, and our dependence upon them. The absence of closed captions or subtitles, combined with the use of alternative “captioning”—in the form of instant messaging, for instance—grounds the narrative in lived space, rather than providing easy extra-textual solutions. It also poses a challenge to a hearing audience, to cross the border of “otherness” and identify with a deaf heroine.Returning to the discussion of the Final Girl characterisation, Clover argues that this is a gendered device combining both traditionally feminine and masculine characteristics. The fluidity of the Final Girl is constant, “even during that final struggle she is now weak and now strong, now flees the killer and now charges him, now stabs and is stabbed, now cries out in fear and now shouts in anger” (Her Body, Himself, 221). Men viewing slasher films identify with the Final Girl’s “masculine” traits, and in the process find themselves looking through the eyes of a woman. In using a deaf character, Hush suggests that an evolution of this dynamic might also occur along the dis/abled boundary line. Maddie is a powerful survivor who shifts between weak and strong, frightened and fierce, but also between disabled and able. This portrayal encourages the audience to identify with her empowered traits and in the process look through the eyes of a disabled woman. Therefore, while slashers—and horror films in general—are not traditionally associated with progressive representations of disabilities, this evolution of the Final Girl may provide a fruitful topic of both research and filmmaking in the future.ReferencesBauman, Dirksen, and Joseph J. Murray. “Reframing: From Hearing Loss to Deaf Gain.” Trans. Fallon Brizendine and Emily Schenker. Deaf Studies Digital Journal 1 (2009): 1–10. <http://dsdj.gallaudet.edu/assets/section/section2/entry19/DSDJ_entry19.pdf>.Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1992.———. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations 20 (1987): 187–228.Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso, 1995.Ellis, Katie, and Mike Kent. Disability and New Media. New York: Routledge, 2011.Gorman, H. “Hush: Film Review.” Scream Horror Magazine (2016) <http://www.screamhorrormag.com/hush-film-review/>.Jankowski, Katherine A. Deaf Empowerment: Emergence, Struggle, and Rhetoric. Washington: Gallaudet UP, 1997.Laird, E.E. “Updating the Final Girl Theory.” Medium (2016) <https://medium.com/@TheFilmJournal/updating-the-final-girl-theory-b37ec0b1acf4>.Norden, M.F. Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1994.Shade, Patrick. “Screaming to Be Heard: Community and Communication in ‘Hush’.” Slayage 6.1 (2006). <http://www.whedonstudies.tv/uploads/2/6/2/8/26288593/shade_slayage_6.1.pdf>.Sheppard, D. “Hush: Revolutionising the Final Girl.” Eyes on Screen (2016). <https://eyesonscreen.wordpress.com/2016/06/08/hush-revolutionising-the-final-girl/>.Thurman, T. “‘Hush’ Director Mike Flanagan and Actress Kate Siegel on Their New Thriller!” Interview. Bloody Disgusting (2016). <http://bloody-disgusting.com/interviews/3384092/interview-hush-mike-flanagan-kate-siegel/>.Whittington, W. “Horror Sound Design.” A Companion to the Horror Film. Ed. Harry M. Benshoff. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2014: 168–185.

‘Historiographic Metafiction’ (HM) is a literary term first coined by creative writing academic Linda Hutcheon in 1988, and which refers to the postmodern practice of a fiction author inserting imagined--or illegitimate--characters into narratives that are intended to be received as authentic and historically accurate, that is, ostensibly legitimate. Such adventurous and bold authorial strategies frequently result in “novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (Hutcheon, A Poetics 5). They can be so entertaining and engaging that the overtly intertextual, explicitly inventive work of biographical HM can even change the “hegemonic discourse of history” (Nunning 353) for, as Philippa Gregory, the author of HM novel The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), has said regarding this genre of creative writing: “Fiction is about imagined feelings and thoughts. History depends on the outer life. The novel is always about the inner life. Fiction can sometimes do more than history. It can fill the gaps” (University of Sussex). In a way, this article will be filling one of the gaps regarding HM.Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) is possibly the best known cinematic example of HM, and this film version of the 1986 novel by Winston Groom particularly excels in seamlessly inserting images of a fictional character into verified history, as represented by well-known television newsreel footage. In Zemeckis’s adaptation, gaps were created in the celluloid artefact and filled digitally with images of the actor, Tom Hanks, playing the eponymous role. Words are often deemed less trustworthy than images, however, and fiction is considered particularly unreliable--although there are some exceptions conceded. In addition to Gregory’s novel; Midnight’s Children (1980) by Salman Rushdie; The Name of the Rose (1983) by Umberto Eco; and The Flashman Papers (1969-2005) by George MacDonald Fraser, are three well-known, loved and lauded examples of literary HM, which even if they fail to convince the reader of their bona fides, nevertheless win a place in many hearts. But despite the genre’s popularity, there is nevertheless a conceptual gap in the literary theory of Hutcheon given her (perfectly understandable) inability in 1988 to predict the future of e-publishing. This article will attempt to address that shortcoming by exploring the potential for authors of HM e-novels to use hyperlinks which immediately direct the reader to fact providing webpages such as those available at the website Wikipedia, like a much speedier (and more independent) version of the footnotes in Fraser’s Flashman novels.Of course, as Roland Barthes declared in 1977, “the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture” (146) and, as per any academic work that attempts to contribute to knowledge, a text’s sources--its “quotations”--must be properly identified and acknowledged via checkable references if credibility is to be securely established. Hence, in explaining the way claims to fact in the HM novel can be confirmed by independently published experts on the Internet, this article will also address the problem Hutcheon identifies, in that for many readers the entirety of the HM novel assumes questionable authenticity, that is, the novel’s “meta-fictional self-reflexivity (and intertextuality) renders their claims to historical veracity somewhat problematic, to say the least” ("Historiographic Metafiction: Parody", 3). This article (and the PhD in creative writing I am presently working on at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia) will possibly develop the concept of HM to a new level: one at which the Internet-connected reader of the hyperlinked e-novel is made fully (and even instantly) aware of those literary elements of the narrative that are legitimate and factual as distinct from those that are fictional, that is, illegitimate. Furthermore, utilising examples from my own (yet-to-be published) hyperlinked HM e-novel, this article demonstrates that such hyperlinking can add an ironic sub-text to a fictional character’s thoughts and utterances, through highlighting the reality concerning their mistaken or naïve beliefs, thus creating HM narratives that serve an entertainingly complex yet nevertheless truly educational purpose.As a relatively new and under-researched genre of historical writing, HM differs dramatically from the better known style of standard historical or biographical narrative, which typically tends to emphasise mimesis, the cataloguing of major “players” in historical events and encyclopaedic accuracy of dates, deaths and places. Instead, HM involves the re-contextualisation of real-life figures from the past, incorporating the lives of entirely (or, as in the case of Gregory’s Mary Boleyn, at least partly) fictitious characters into their generally accepted famous and factual activities, and/or the invention of scenarios that gel realistically--but entertainingly--within a landscape of well-known and well-documented events. As Hutcheon herself states: “The formal linking of history and fiction through the common denominators of intertextuality and narrativity is usually offered not as a reduction, as a shrinking of the scope and value of fiction, but rather as an expansion of these” ("Intertextuality", 11). Similarly, Gregory emphasises the need for authors of HM to extend themselves beyond the encyclopaedic archive: “Archives are not history. The trouble with archives is that the material is often random and atypical. To have history, you have to have a narrative” (University of Sussex). Functionally then, HM is an intertextual narrative genre which serves to communicate to a contemporary audience an expanded story or stories of the past which present an ultimately more self-reflective, personal and unpredictable authorship: it is a distinctly auteurial mode of biographical history writing for it places the postmodern author’s imaginative “signature” front and foremost.Hutcheon later clarified that the quest for historical truth in fiction cannot possibly hold up to the persuasive powers of a master novelist, as per the following rationale: “Fact is discourse-defined: an event is not” ("Historiographic Metafiction", 843). This means, in a rather simplistic nutshell, that the new breed of HM novel writer is not constrained by what others may call fact: s/he knows that the alleged “fact” can be renegotiated and redefined by an inventive discourse. An event, on the other hand, is responsible for too many incontrovertible consequences for it to be contested by her/his mere discourse. So-called facts are much easier for the HM writer to play with than world changing events. This notion was further popularised by Ansgar Nunning when he claimed the overtly explicit work of HM can even change the “hegemonic discourse of history” (353). HM authors can radically alter, it seems, the way the reader perceives the facts of history especially when entertaining, engaging and believable characters are deliberately devised and manipulated into the narrative by the writer. Little wonder, then, that Hutcheon bemoans the unfortunate reality that for many readers the entirety of a HM work assumes questionable “veracity” due to its author’s insertion of imaginary and therefore illegitimate personages.But there is an advantage to be found in this, the digital era, and that is the Internet’s hyperlink. In our ubiquitously networked electronic information age, novels written for publication as e-books may, I propose, include clickable links on the names of actual people and events to Wikipedia entries or the like, thus strengthening the reception of the work as being based on real history (the occasional unreliability of Wikipedia notwithstanding). If picked up for hard copy publication this function of the HM e-novel can be replicated with the inclusion of icons in the printed margins that can be scanned by smartphones or similar gadgets. This small but significant element of the production reinforces the e-novel’s potential status as a new form of HM and addresses Hutcheon’s concern that for HM novels, their imaginative but illegitimate invention of characters “renders their claims to historical veracity somewhat problematic, to say the least” ("Historiographic Metafiction: Parody", 3).Some historic scenarios are so little researched or so misunderstood and discoloured by the muddy waters of time and/or rumour that such hyperlinking will be a boon to HM writers. Where an obscure facet of Australian history is being fictionalised, for example, these edifying hyperlinks can provide additional background information, as Glenda Banks and Martin Andrew might have wished for when they wrote regarding Bank’s Victorian goldfields based HM novel A Respectable Married Woman. This 2012 printed work explores the lives of several under-researched and under-represented minorities, such as settler women and Aboriginal Australians, and the author Banks lamented the dearth of public awareness regarding these peoples. Indeed, HM seems tailor-made for exposing the subaltern lives of those repressed individuals who form the human “backdrop” to the lives of more famous personages. Banks and Andrew explain:To echo the writings of Homi K. Bhaba (1990), this sets up a creative site for interrogating the dominant, hegemonic, ‘normalised’ master narratives about the Victorian goldfields and ‘re-membering’ a marginalised group - the women of the goldfields, the indigenous [sic], the Chinese - and their culture (2013).In my own hyperlinked short story (presently under consideration for publishing elsewhere), which is actually a standalone version of the first chapter of a full-length HM e-novel about Aboriginal Australian activists Eddie Mabo and Chicka Dixon and the history of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra, entitled The Bullroarers, I have focussed on a similarly under-represented minority, that being light-complexioned, mixed race Aboriginal Australians. My second novel to deal with Indigenous Australian issues (see Starrs, That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance), it is my first attempt at writing HM. Hopefully avoiding overkill whilst alerting readers to those Wikipedia pages with relevance to the narrative theme of non-Indigenous attitudes towards light-complexioned Indigenous Australians, I have inserted a total of only six hyperlinks in this 2200-word piece, plus the explanatory foreword stating: “Note, except where they are well-known place names or are indicated as factual by the insertion of Internet hyperlinks verifying such, all persons, organisations, businesses and places named in this text are entirely fictitious.”The hyperlinks in my short story all take the reader not to stubs but to well-established Wikipedia pages, and provide for the uninformed audience the following near-unassailable facts (i.e. events):The TV program, A Current Affair, which the racist character of the short story taken from The Bullroarers, Mrs Poulter, relies on for her prejudicial opinions linking Aborigines with the dealing of illegal drugs, is a long-running, prime-time Channel Nine production. Of particular relevance in the Wikipedia entry is the comment: “Like its main rival broadcast on the Seven Network, Today Tonight, A Current Affair is often considered by media critics and the public at large to use sensationalist journalism” (Wikipedia, “A Current Affair”).The Aboriginal Tent Embassy, located on the lawns opposite the Old Parliament House in Canberra, was established in 1972 and ever since has been the focus of Aboriginal Australian land rights activism and political agitation. In 1995 the Australian Register of the National Estate listed it as the only Aboriginal site in Australia that is recognised nationally for representing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their political struggles (Wikipedia, “The Aboriginal Tent Embassy”).In 1992, during an Aboriginal land rights case known as Mabo, the High Court of Australia issued a judgment constituting a direct overturning of terra nullius, which is a Latin term meaning “land belonging to no one”, and which had previously formed the legal rationale and justification for the British invasion and colonisation of Aboriginal Australia (Wikipedia, “Terra Nullius”).Aboriginal rights activist and Torres Strait Islander, Eddie Koiki Mabo (1936 to 1992), was instrumental in the High Court decision to overturn the doctrine of terra nullius in 1992. In that same year, Eddie Mabo was posthumously awarded the Australian Human Rights Medal in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Awards (Wikipedia, “Eddie Mabo”).The full name of what Mrs Poulter blithely refers to as “the Department of Families and that” is the Australian Government’s Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (Wikipedia, “The Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs”).The British colonisation of Australia was a bloody, murderous affair: “continuous Aboriginal resistance for well over a century belies the ‘myth’ of peaceful settlement in Australia. Settlers in turn often reacted to Aboriginal resistance with great violence, resulting in numerous indiscriminate massacres by whites of Aboriginal men, women and children” (Wikipedia, “History of Australia (1788 - 1850)”).Basically, what is not evidenced empirically with regard to the subject matter of my text, that is, the egregious attitudes of non-Indigenous Australians towards Indigenous Australians, can be extrapolated thanks to the hyperlinks. This resonates strongly with Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s assertion in 2012 that those under-represented by mainstream, patriarchal epistemologies need to be engaged in acts of “reclaiming, reformulating and reconstituting” (143) so as to be re-presented as authentic identities in these HM artefacts of literary research.Exerting auteurial power as an Aboriginal Australian author myself, I have sought to imprint on my writing a multi-levelled signature pertaining to my people’s under-representation: there is not just the text I have created but another level to be considered by the reader, that being my careful choice of Wikipedia pages to hyperlink certain aspects of the creative writing to. These electronic footnotes serve as politically charged acts of “reclaiming, reformulating and reconstituting” Aboriginal Australian history, to reuse the words of Smith, for when we Aboriginal Australian authors reiterate, when we subjugated savages wrestle the keyboard away from the colonising overseers, our readers witness the Other writing back, critically. As I have stated previously (see Starrs, "Writing"), receivers of our words see the distorted and silencing master discourse subverted and, indeed, inverted. Our audiences are subjectively repositioned to see the British Crown as the monster. The previously presumed rational, enlightened and civil coloniser is instead depicted as the author and perpetrator of a violently racist, criminal discourse, until, eventually, s/he is ultimately eroded and made into the Other: s/he is rendered the villainous, predatory savage by the auteurial signatures in revisionist histories such as The Bullroarers.Whilst the benefit in these hyperlinks as electronic educational footnotes in my short story is fairly obvious, what may not be so obvious is the ironic commentary they can make, when read in conjunction with the rest of The Bullroarers. Although one must reluctantly agree with Wayne C. Booth’s comment in his classic 1974 study A Rhetoric of Irony that, in some regards, “the very spirit and value [of irony] are violated by the effort to be clear about it” (ix), I will nevertheless strive for clarity and understanding by utilizing Booth’s definition of irony “as something that under-mines clarities, opens up vistas of chaos, and either liberates by destroying all dogmas or destroys by revealing the inescapable canker of negation at the heart of every affirmation” (ix). The reader of The Bullroarers is not expecting the main character, Mrs Poulter, to be the subject of erosive criticism that destroys her “dogmas” about Aboriginal Australians--certainly not so early in the narrative when it is unclear if she is or is not the protagonist of the story--and yet that’s exactly what the hyperlinks do. They expose her as hopelessly unreliable, laughably misinformed and yes, unforgivably stupid. They reveal the illegitimacy of her beliefs. Perhaps the most personally excoriating of these revelations is provided by the link to the Wikipedia entry on the Australian Government’s Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, which is where her own daughter, Roxy, works, but which Mrs Poulter knows, gormlessly, as “the Department of Families and that”. The ignorant woman spouts racist diatribes against Aboriginal Australians without even realising how inextricably linked she and her family, who live at the deliberately named Boomerang Crescent, really are. Therein lies the irony I am trying to create with my use of hyperlinks: an independent, expert adjudication reveals my character, Mrs Poulter, and her opinions, are hiding an “inescapable canker of negation at the heart of every affirmation” (Booth ix), despite the air of easy confidence she projects.Is the novel-reading public ready for these HM hyperlinked e-novels and their potentially ironic sub-texts? Indeed, the question must be asked: can the e-book ever compete with the tactile sensations a finely crafted, perfectly bound hardcover publication provides? Perhaps, if the economics of book buying comes into consideration. E-novels are cheap to publish and cheap to purchase, hence they are becoming hugely popular with the book buying public. Writes Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, a successful online publisher and distributor of e-books: “We incorporated in 2007, and we officially launched the business in May 2008. In our first year, we published 140 books from 90 authors. Our catalog reached 6,000 books in 2009, 28,800 in 2010, 92,000 in 2011, 191,000 in 2012 and as of this writing (November 2013) stands at over 250,000 titles” (Coker 2013). Coker divulged more about his company’s success in an interview with Forbes online magazine: “‘It costs essentially the same to pump 10,000 new books a month through our network as it will cost to do 100,000 a month,’ he reasons. Smashwords book retails, on average, for just above $3; 15,000 titles are free” (Colao 2012).In such a burgeoning environment of technological progress in publishing I am tempted to say that yes, the time of the hyperlinked e-novel has come, and to even predict that HM will be a big part of this new wave of postmodern literature. The hyperlinked HM e-novel’s strategy invites the reader to reflect on the legitimacy and illegitimacy of different forms of narrative, possibly concluding, thanks to ironic electronic footnoting, that not all the novel’s characters and their commentary are to be trusted. Perhaps my HM e-novel will, with its untrustworthy Mrs Poulter and its little-known history of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy addressed by gap-filling hyperlinks, establish a legitimising narrative for a people who have traditionally in white Australian society been deemed the Other and illegitimate. Perhaps The Bullroarers will someday alter attitudes of non-Indigenous Australians to the history and political activities of this country’s first peoples, to the point even, that as Nunning warns, we witness a change in the “hegemonic discourse of history” (353). If that happens we must be thankful for our Internet-enabled information age and its concomitant possibilities for hyperlinked e-publications, for technology may be separated from the world of art, but it can nevertheless be effectively used to recreate, enhance and access that world, to the extent texts previously considered illegitimate achieve authenticity and veracity.ReferencesBanks, Glenda. A Respectable Married Woman. Melbourne: Lacuna, 2012.Banks, Glenda, and Martin Andrew. “Populating a Historical Novel: A Case Study of a Practice-led Research Approach to Historiographic Metafiction.” Bukker Tillibul 7 (2013). 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://bukkertillibul.net/Text.html?VOL=7&INDEX=2›.Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1977.Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974.Colao, J.J. “Apple’s Biggest (Unknown) Supplier of E-books.” Forbes 7 June 2012. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/06/07/apples-biggest-unknown-supplier-of-e-books/›.Coker, Mark. “Q & A with Smashwords Founder, Mark Coker.” About Smashwords 2013. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹https://www.smashwords.com/about›.Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver, San Diego: Harcourt, 1983.Forrest Gump. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Paramount Pictures, 1994.Fraser, George MacDonald. The Flashman Papers. Various publishers, 1969-2005.Groom, Winston. Forrest Gump. NY: Doubleday, 1986.Gregory, Philippa. The Other Boleyn Girl. UK: Scribner, 2001.Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, 2nd ed. Abingdon, UK: Taylor and Francis, 1988.---. “Intertextuality, Parody, and the Discourses of History: A Poetics of Postmodernism History, Theory, Fiction.” 1988. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://ieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_3553.pdf›.---. “Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History.” Eds. P. O’Donnell and R.C. Davis, Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins UP, 1989. 3-32.---. “Historiographic Metafiction.” Ed. Michael McKeon, Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. 830-50.Nunning, Ansgar. “Where Historiographic Metafiction and Narratology Meet.” Style 38.3 (2004): 352-75.Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980.Starrs, D. Bruno. That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! Saarbrücken, Germany: Just Fiction Edition (paperback), 2011; Starrs via Smashwords (e-book), 2012.---. “Writing Indigenous Vampires: Aboriginal Gothic or Aboriginal Fantastic?” M/C Journal 17.4 (2014). 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/834›.Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies. London & New York: Zed Books, 2012.University of Sussex. “Philippa Gregory Fills the Historical Gaps.” University of Sussex Alumni Magazine 51 (2012). 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.scribd.com/doc/136033913/University-of-Sussex-Alumni-Magazine-Falmer-issue-51›.Wikipedia. “A Current Affair.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Current_Affair›.---. “Aboriginal Tent Embassy.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Tent_Embassy›.---. “Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Families,_Housing,_Community_Services_and_Indigenous_Affairs›.---. “Eddie Mabo.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Mabo›.---. “History of Australia (1788 – 1850).” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Australia_(1788%E2%80%931850)#Aboriginal_resistance›.---. “Terra Nullius.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_nullius›.

Cars crest the rise behind the truck stop and drop cones of light over the highway. Ryan dunks his head under a tap. He rubs red dust from his pores and tries to drink some water, but it slides down his throat like a length of wire.His older brother Josh fills their drink bottles. “Wanna get some chips or something?”Ryan shakes his head. He’s sick of watching Josh’s pulpy tongue poke his broken tooth. Their dad never left visible marks before—Ryan used to wish for a cut or bruise, so someone at school could see it. He shivers and clutches his coat tight. Josh says, “We got money.”Ryan wonders how Josh stole it. He didn’t know there was anything to steal. He stares back down the road.“Fine, fuck, I’ll get—”Ryan nudges him and he looks over his shoulder. A square silhouette approaches. The brothers stand back as a two-storey house pulls up in front of them, strapped to the back of a truck. The house is cut in half, patched with pale afterimages of furniture and light fittings. A door slams and a tattooed man with a white wedge of beard climbs out of the cabin. He stretches and heads for the toilets. Josh sidles up to the house and runs his hands along the straight, fresh edge of the floorboards. Sawdust settles onto his hoodie. He laughs and hurls his bag into one of the rooms. “Shit yeah. You coming?” Ryan hesitates. He remembers the time Josh’s Torana—a windowless wreck, used for drifting in paddocks and chasing kangaroos—broke down at the back of their property. Ryan and their dad towed Josh in the four-wheel drive while he sat in the Torana, steering with his knees. He started swinging wide, bouncing the back of the car off tree trunks, until he overshot and hit an old gum headfirst. The cable snapped, jerking the four-wheel drive to a halt. Ryan’s head smacked against the dash. Josh emerged from the smoking Torana with a bloody nose, laughing hysterically—thumping the bonnet and laughing hysterically—even after his dad came over and hit him on the back of the head. Through a window in the far wall they watch the driver eat a sausage roll. Ryan follows Josh upstairs and they stand on the edge of the second floor, where the distorted acoustics amplify the traffic sounds. From this angle, the outback barely conceals the curvature of the earth. The moon is a globe of bone amongst the clouds, a ball and socket. Ryan thinks they’re in a kid’s bedroom; a mural on the far wall depicts the bottom of the ocean and a tinted window spreads faded colours on the floor. He tries to imagine the room with all its walls in place. The brothers hide in a back room when they hear the driver's footsteps. The driver slides a torch over the house and light filters through the floorboards in front of them. They press themselves against the wall. Ryan starts shivering again and Josh elbows him in the ribs. The truck eases onto the road and the house groans, its unsupported floorboards dipping and lifting like piano keys. Signs and lights flick past. The brothers creep downstairs, struggling to stay upright on the vibrating staircase. Josh opens two tins of baked beans. A string of cold sauce as thick as an artery spills down Ryan’s neck. They place the empty tins on the floor and bet on which one will roll off the edge first. Josh wins. He grabs Ryan’s head and rubs his knuckles into it. Josh runs into the bathroom, which juts out over the edge of the trailer. Ryan hangs back in the doorway. Instead of a toilet Josh finds a small circle cut out of the floor. He steadies himself and pisses in it. Ryan sprints into the other room and pisses out the window. They laugh and piss until a horn blares behind them. Ryan ducks. Urine splatters on the sill. He scrabbles with his pants. He’s pissed on someone’s windscreen. The horn’s still going. Headlights hit the trees beside him. Josh comes in from the toilet and Ryan grabs him and pulls him to the ground. A four-wheel drive appears beside them. There’s barely enough room on the road; the truck swerves away and a branch scrapes along the roof of the house. The passengers hang out the windows, screaming abuse. Josh stumbles onto his feet and gives them the finger. Someone hurls an empty coke can and it lands on the second floor. Then the car is gone and only the wind remains, filling the house with the whining roar of a depressurised aircraft. The trees are a smear of static. Josh smacks Ryan on the back of the head. Ryan swings instinctively. Josh deflects his fist and knocks him to the floor and Ryan’s head hits the skirting board. Something crumbles. Ryan presses his thumb into Josh’s black eye and Josh twists his arm behind his back. When they were kids Josh pinned Ryan in this position and shoved gravel into his mouth. Ryan remembers the stones scratching his teeth, the bloody mud he spat out. Josh lets him up and Ryan scrambles into the corner, sick with sudden panic. He kicks his bag away. Josh wipes his mouth and laughs. He crouches down and stares at the spot where Ryan’s head hit the wall. One of the panels has collapsed inwards. Josh snorts. “Look what your fucking head did!” He pulls out the panel and tosses it onto the road. He shines his torch into the space behind it, brushes away the cobwebs and extracts a cheap gold box. “Well, well, well,” he mutters. He sets it on the ground and dusts the lid off. He tries to pry it open it but it’s locked. Ryan looks over. Josh grips the box in both hands and pulls. For a moment his top teeth dig into his lip and then the box bursts open, scattering pieces of silver. Ryan reaches out his hand, expecting jewellery, but he jerks it back when he finds a razor near his foot. The floor is littered with needles and knives. Josh picks up a brown glass bottle and squints at the label. “Iodine.” They stare at the blades in silence. A sand bank slides past as steadily as a sine wave. Josh carves the word FUCK into the floor with a scalpel. Ryan cringes but doesn’t dare warn him about diseases. On long-distance drives Ryan often stares out the window and imagines his vision is a laser-beam, cutting cleanly through cities, forests, passers-by. Now he pictures a wrecking ball swinging into the darkness and colliding with a run-down rollercoaster. He imagines the ball smashing through the tangle of struts and tracks; wrapping around and around a corkscrew section like a yoyo; sending a train of carriages hurtling through the remains of a loop. A few hours later the house passes through a town surrounded by silos and steel windmills. The brothers retreat to the mural room. Streetlights slide on and off them: orange, black, orange, black, orange, black. Josh waves at the people on the balcony of the pub. In a slouched house over a hardware store Ryan glimpses, through half-closed curtains, a topless woman sitting on the edge of a bed, combing her hair. He tries to make out the name of the town on the shopfronts. Josh lights a joint, indifferent. Ryan slides his torch over the door frame, which is marked with the family’s heights. The vibrations blur the words, but he makes out the name “Molly” at eye level. He wonders if this is her room. He stares at the underwater scene and remembers reading somewhere that squids lay eggs via a funnel under their eyes, so their offspring emerge like hard, heavy tears. Josh offers the joint to Ryan, who snatches it and takes a shallow drag. Josh brushes dandruff off his sleeves. Ryan drops the joint when a siren starts to wail: they scramble to their feet and run over to the back window, fearing the police, but the road’s empty. Josh looks up and shouts, “Smoke detector!” Ryan starts waving his jacket to clear the smoke, but Josh just rips the detector from the ceiling and hurls it into a dam beside the road. Once the houses thin out the brothers climb back downstairs and unroll their sleeping bags. Ryan uses his pack as a pillow but Josh’s is still full of tins. Dark branches clasp the stars. Ryan gets up and tugs at his penis in the toilet, watching the bitumen slide under the hole like a belt sander. He tries to remember the scene above the hardware store—the line of tea lights on the windowsill, the mosquito net over the bed, the woman’s small, pale breasts—but his mind keeps replaying the image of a young girl pressing a razor into her thigh. They're woken a few hours later by footsteps. Ryan opens his eyes. Josh is already on his feet. “What the hell is that?” The ceiling creaks again and Josh picks up the torch and the scalpel. “I'm gonna take a look.” They creep upstairs. The hall is empty. Something shuffles in one of the rooms and slams against the wall. Josh whispers, “There ain’t no doors on that side of the hall. The fucking door's in the other half of the house.' He grabs the end of the wall and leans out, struggling to see around it. The wind blasts him back and he cups his hands over his black eye. He pushes the torch into Ryan’s chest. “Go. You go.” Ryan tries to turn away but Josh blocks him and says, “Don’t be a dickhead. Just see what’s over there.” The dark, crinkled skin around his eye shines with tears. “Fuck’s sake, my eye’s killing me. I can’t go.” He pushes Ryan again. With his free hand Ryan feels for the frame behind the plaster. He swings his leg around the wall, plants his foot on the other side, presses his chest against the end of the wall and edges into the other room. It’s empty. Sliding doors in the far wall conceal a walk-in wardrobe. A door on the right leads to an en suite. His foot crunches on the coke can and he kicks it onto the road. He pushes the bathroom door open and the torch beam slides over the tiles. He glimpses movement behind him in the mirror, but it’s only the trees. The tiles remind him of the killing floor on their chicken farm. When he and Josh were little their dad just cut the chickens’ heads off with an axe and let them run around spurting blood out of their necks, but a few years ago he got new machinery installed. Now the chickens were strung up by their feet on an overhead conveyor belt that carried them to a trough filled with electrified water, which killed them as soon as their heads hit it. He walks back into the bedroom and stares at the sliding doors. “Oi hurry up!” Josh shouts from the hall. “Fuck you.” “Fuck you, dickhead!” Ryan pushes a sliding door open and shines his torch in. A man crouches in the darkness, gripping a bottle of colourless liquid in both hands. His clothes are stuffed with newspapers; his beard clings to his chin like clotted blood caked together. He stares at Ryan and shouts, “Bastards! Leave me alone ya bastards! Get outta here! Get out!” He hurls the bottle and it smacks into Ryan’s shoulder. The bottle smashes on the floor; shards of glass cascade onto the highway. The man stumbles out of the wardrobe, lunging at Ryan, grabbing at his jacket. Ryan reaches around the wall and Josh pulls him over. The man slams his fists rhythmically, like pistons, into the other side of the wall. They scramble downstairs and Ryan takes off his jacket and waves it over the edge, screaming to get the driver’s attention. He looks up and sees the man shouting at him, tears streaming sideways across his face. Josh pulls Ryan back but he struggles free. Ryan crouches near the edge and stares at the scrub racing past. There’s a hill ahead and the truck’s slowing down. Josh sees what he’s thinking and calls him an idiot, but he’s already leaning forwards, judging the distance, waiting for the driver to downshift. Josh grabs him by the collar and hisses something but he doesn’t listen and pulls away and jumps. His head smacks solidly against a root and his arm twists under his torso, grinding into the gravel. He lies on his back and spits out black dust. Blood dribbles out of his arm. When the house reaches the top of the hill something flies out and bounces along the side of the road. Ryan gets to his feet and limps towards it. He searches through the bushes and finds his bag with half the tins in it. The roof of the house disappears over the top of the hill and he imagines Josh reaching his destination, perhaps a few hours after dawn, on a small hill out in the bush somewhere, where the morning light is as sallow as blood plasma and the other half of the house is already waiting.

Introduction Amidst ecological collapse and environmental catastrophe, humankind is surrounded by indications that our habitat is turning against us in monstrous ways. The very environments we live within now evoke existential terror, and this state of ecological monstrosity has permeated popular media, including video games. Such cultural manifestations of planetary catastrophe are particularly evident in video game monsters. These virtual figures continue monsters’ long-held role in reflecting the socio-cultural anxieties of their particular era. The horrific figures that monsters present play a culturally reflexive role, echoing the fears and anxieties of their social, political and cultural context. Media monsters closely reflect their surrounding cultural conditions (Cohen 47), representing “a symptom of or a metaphor for something bigger and more significant than the ostensible reality of the monster itself” (Hutchings 37). Society’s deepest anxieties culminate in these figures in forms that are “threatening and impure” (Carroll 28), “unnatural, transgressive, obscene, contradictory” (Kearney 4–5), and abject (Kristeva 4). In this article I ask how the appearance of the monstrous within contemporary video games reflects an era of climate change and ecological collapse, and how this could inform the engagement of players with discourse concerning climate change. Central to this inquiry is the literary practice of ecocriticism, which seeks to examine environmental rather than human representation in cultural artefacts, increasingly including accounts of contemporary ecological decay and disorder (Bulfin 144). I build on such perspectives to address play encounters that foreground figures of monstrosity borne of the escalating climate crisis, and summarise case studies of two recent video games undertaken as part of this project — The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo EPD) and The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog). An ecocritical approach to the monsters that populate these case studies reveals the emergence of a ludic form of ecological monstrosity tied closely to our contemporary climatic conditions and taking two significant forms: one accentuating a visceral otherness and aberrance, and the other marked by the uncanny recognition of human authorship of climate change. Horrors from the Anthropocene A growing climate emergency surrounds us, enveloping us in the abject and aberrant conditions of what could be described as an ecological monstrosity. Monstrous threats to our environment and human survival are experienced on a planetary scale and research evidence plainly illustrates a compounding catastrophe. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a relatively cautious and conservative body (Parenti 5), reports that a human-made emergency has developed since the Industrial Revolution. The multitude of crises that confront us include: changes in the Earth’s atmosphere driving up global temperatures, ice sheets in retreat, sea levels rising, natural ecosystems and species in collapse, and an unprecedented frequency and magnitude of heatwaves, droughts, flooding, winter storms, hurricanes, and wildfires (United Nations Environment Programme). Further human activity, including a post-war addiction to the plastics that have now spread their way across our oceans like a “liquid smog” (Robles-Anderson and Liboiron 258), or short-sighted enthusiasm for pesticides, radiation energy, and industrial chemicals (Robles-Anderson and Liboiron 254), has ensured a damaging shift in the nature of the feedback loops that Earth’s ecosystems depend upon for stability (Parenti 6). Climatic equilibrium has been disrupted, and growing damage to the ecosystems that sustain human life suggests an inexorable, entropic path to decay. To understand Earth’s profound crisis requires thinking beyond just climate and to witness the interconnected “extraordinary burdens” placed on our planet by “toxic chemistry, mining, nuclear pollution, depletion of lakes and rivers under and above ground, ecosystem simplification, vast genocides of people” which will continue to lead to the recursive collapse of interlinked major systems (Haraway 100). To speak of climate change is really to speak of the ruin of ecologies, those “living systems composed of many moving parts” that make up the tapestry of organic life on Earth (Robles-Anderson and Liboiron 251). The emergency that presents itself, as Renata Tyszczuk observes, comprises a pervasiveness, uncertainty, and interdependency that together “affect every aspect of human lives, politics and culture” (47). The emergence of the term Anthropocene (or the Age of the Humans) to describe our current geological epoch (and to supersede the erstwhile and more stable Holocene) (Zalasiewicz et al. 1036–7; Chang 7) reflects a contemporary impossibility with talking about planet Earth without acknowledging the damaging impact of humankind on its ecosystems (Bulfin 142). This recognition of human complicity in the existential crisis engulfing our planet once again connects ecological monstrosity to the socio-cultural history of the monstrous. Monsters, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen points out, “are our children” and despite our repressive efforts, “always return” in order to “ask us why we have created them” (20). Ecological monstrosity declares to us that our relegation of greenhouse gases, rising sea levels, toxic waste, species extinction, and much more, to the discursive periphery has only been temporary. Monsters, when examined closely, start to look a lot like ourselves in terms of biological origins (Perron 357), as well as other abject cultural and social markers that signal these horrific figures as residing “too close to the borders of our [own] subjectivity for comfort” (Spittle 314). Isabel Pinedo sees this uncanny nature of the horror genre’s antagonists as a postmodern condition, a ghoulish reminder of the era’s breakdown of categories, blurring of boundaries, and collapse of master narratives that combine to ensure “mastery is lost … and the stable, unified, coherent self acquires the status of a fiction” (17–18). In standing in for anxiety, the other, and the aberrant, the figure of the monster deftly turns the mirror back on its human victims. Ecocritical Play The vast scale of ecological collapse has complicated effective public communication on the subject. The scope involved is unsettling, even paralysing, to its audiences: climate change might just be “too here, too there, too everywhere, too weird, too much, too big, too everything” to bring oneself to engage with (Tyszczuk 47). The detail involved has also been captured by scientific discourse, a detached communicative mode which too easily obviates the everyday human experience of the emergency (Bulfin 140; Abraham and Jayemanne 74–76). Considerable effort has been focussed upon producing higher-fidelity models of ecological catastrophe (Robles-Anderson and Liboiron 248), rather than addressing the more significant “trouble with representing largely intangible linkages” between micro-environmental actions and macro-environmental repercussions (Chang 86). Ecocriticism is, however, emerging as a cultural means by which the crisis, and restorative possibilities, may be rendered more legible to a wider audience. Representations of ecology and catastrophe not only sustain genres such as Eco-Disaster and Cli-Fi (Bulfin 140), but are also increasingly becoming a precondition for fiction centred upon human life (Tyszczuk 47). Media artefacts concerned with environment are able to illustrate the nature of the emergency alongside “a host of related environmental issues that the technocratic ‘facts and figures’ approach … is unlikely to touch” (Abraham and Jayemanne 76) and encourage in audiences a suprapersonal understanding of the environmental impact of individual actions (Chang 70). Popular culture offers a chance to foster ‘ecological thought’ wherein it becomes “frighteningly easy … to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected” (Morton, Ecological Thought 1) rather than founder before the inexplicability of the temporalities and spatialities involved in ecological collapse. An ecocritical approach is “one of the most crucial—yet under-researched—ways of looking into the possible cultural impact of the digital entertainment industry” upon public discourse relating to the environment crisis (Felczak 185). Video games demand this closer attention because, in a mirroring of the interconnectedness of Earth’s own ecosystems, “the world has also inevitably permeated into our technical artefacts, including games” (Chang 11), and recent scholarship has worked to investigate this very relationship. Benjamin Abraham has extended Morton’s arguments to outline a mode of ecological thought for games (What Is an Ecological Game?), Alenda Chang has closely examined how games model natural environments, and Benjamin Abraham and Darshana Jayemanne have outlined four modes in which games manifest players’ ecological relationships. Close analysis of texts and genres has addressed the capacity of game mechanics to persuade players about matters of sustainability (Kelly and Nardi); implicated Minecraft players in an ecological practice of writing upon landscapes (Bohunicky); argued that Final Fantasy VII’s plot fosters ecological responsibility (Milburn); and, identified in ARMA III’s ambient, visual backdrops of renewable power generation the potential to reimagine cultural futures (Abraham, Video Game Visions). Video games allow for a particular form of ecocriticism that has been overlooked in existing efforts to speak about ecological crisis: “a politics that includes what appears least political—laughter, the playful, even the silly” (Morton, Dark Ecology 113). Play is liminal, emergent, and necessarily incomplete, and this allows its various actors—players, developers, critics and texts themselves—to come together in non-authoritarian, imaginative and potentially radical ways. Through play, audiences are offered new and novel modes for envisioning ecological problems, solutions, and futures. To return, then, to encounters with ecological monstrosity, I next consider the visions of crisis that emerge through the video game monsters that draw upon the aberrant nature of ecological collapse, as well as those that foreground our own complicity as humans in the climate crisis, declaring that we players might ourselves be monstrous. The two case studies that follow are necessarily brief, but indicate the value of further research and textual analysis to more fully uncover the role of ecological monstrosity in contemporary video games. Breath of the Wild’s Corrupted Ecology The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo EPD) is a fantasy action-adventure game in which players adopt the role of the games series’ long-running protagonist, Link, and explore the virtual landscapes of fictional Hyrule in unstructured and nonlinear ways. Landscape is immediately striking to players of Breath of the Wild, with the game using a distinctive, high-definition cel-shaded animation style to vividly render natural environments. Within the first ten minutes of play, lush green grass sways around the player’s avatar, densely treed forests interrupt rolling vistas, and finely detailed mountains tower over the player’s perspective. The player soon learns, however, that behind these inviting landscapes lies a catastrophic corruption of natural order, and that their virtual enemies will manifest a powerful monstrosity that seems to mirror Earth’s own ecological crises. The game’s backstory centres around the Zelda series’ persistent antagonist, Ganon, and his use of a primal form of evil to overwhelm a highly evolved and industrialised Hyrulian civilisation, in an event dubbed the Great Calamity. Hyrule’s dependency on mechanical technology in its defences is misjudged, and Ganon’s re-appearance causes widespread devastation. The parallel between Hyrule’s fate and humankind’s own unsustainable commitment to heavy industry and agriculture, and faith in technological approaches to mitigation in the face of looming catastrophe, are immediately recognisable. Visible, too, is the echo of the revenge of Earth’s climate in the organic and primal force of Ganon’s destructive power. Ganon leaves in his wake an array of impossible, aberrant creatures hostile to the player, including the deformed humanoid figure of the Bokoblin (bearing snouts, arrow-shaped tails, and a horn), the sand-swimming spike-covered whale known as a Molduga, and the Stone Talus, an anthropomorphic rock formation that bursts into life out of otherwise innocuous geological features. One particularly apposite monster, known simply as Malice, is a glowing black and purple substance that oozes its way through environments in Hyrule, spreading to cover and corrupt organic material. Malice is explained by in-game introductory text as “poisonous bogs formed by water that was sullied during the Great Calamity”—an environmental element thrown out of equilibrium by pollution. Monstrosity in Breath of the Wild is decidedly ecological, and its presentation of unstable biologies, poisoned waters, and a collapsed natural order offer a conspicuous display of our contemporary climate crisis. Breath of the Wild places players in a traditional position in relation to its virtual monsters: direct opposition (Taylor 31), with a clear mandate to eliminate the threat(s) and restore equilibrium (Krzywinska 12). The game communicates its collection of biological impossibilities and inexorable corruptions as clear aberrations of a once-balanced natural order, with Hyrule’s landscapes needing purification at the player’s hands. Video games are driven, according to Jaroslav Švelch, by a logic of informatic control when it comes to virtual monsters, where our previously “inscrutable and abject” antagonists can be analysed, defined and defeated as “the medium’s computational and procedural nature makes monstrosity fit into databases and algorithms” (194). In requiring Link, and players, to scrutinise and come to “know” monsters, the game suggests a particular ecocritical possibility. Ecological monstrosity becomes educative, placing the terrors of the climate crisis directly before players’ avatars, screens, and eyes and connecting, in visceral ways, mastery over these threats with pleasure and achievement. The monsters of Breath of the Wild offer the possibility of affectively preparing players for versions of the future by mediating such engagements with disaster and catastrophe. Recognising the Monstrosity Within Set in the aftermath of the outbreak of a mutant strain of the Cordyceps fungus (through exposure to which humans transform into aggressive, zombified ‘Infected’), The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog) is a post-apocalyptic action-adventure game. Players alternate between two playable human characters, Ellie and Abby, whose travels through the infection-ravaged states of Wyoming, Washington, and California overlap and intertwine. At first glance, The Last of Us Part II appears to construct similar forms of ecology and monstrosity as Breath of the Wild. Players are thrust into an experience of the sublime in the game’s presentation of natural environments that are vastly capacious and highly fidelitous in their detailing. Players begin the game scrambling across snowbound ranges and fleeing through thick forests, and later encounter lush grass, rushing rivers, and wild animals reclaiming once-urban environments. And, as in Breath of the Wild, monstrosity in this gameworld appears to embody impurity and corruption, whether through the horrific deformations of various types of zombie bodies, or the fungal masses that carpet many of the game’s abandoned buildings in a reclamation of human environments by nature. Closer analysis, however, demonstrates that the monstrosity that defines the play experience of The Last of Us Part II uncannily reflects the more uncomfortable truths of the Anthropocentric era. A key reason why zombies are traditionally frightening is because they are us. The semblance of human faces and bodies that remain etched into these monsters’ decaying forms act as portents for our own fates when faced with staggering hordes and overwhelmingly poor odds of survival. Impure biologies are presented to players in these zombies, but rather than represent a distant ‘other’ they stand as more-than-likely futures for the game’s avatars, just as Earth’s climate crisis is intimately bound up in human origins and inexorable futures. The Last of Us Part II further pursues its line of anthropocentric critique, as both Ellie and Abby interact during the game with different groupings of human survivors, including hubristic militia and violent religious cultists. The player comes to understand through these encounters that it is the distrust, dogmatism, and depravity of their fellow humans that pose immediate threats to avatarial survival, rather than the scrutable, reliable, and predictable horrors of the mindless zombies. In keeping with the appearance of monsters in both interactive and cinematic texts, monsters’ most important lessons emerge when the boundaries between reality and fiction, human and nonhuman, and normality and abnormality become blurred. The Last of Us Part II utilises this underlying ambiguity in monstrosity to suggest a confronting ecological claim: that monstrous culpability belongs to us—the inhabitants of Earth. For video game users in particular, this is a doubly pointed accusation. As Thomas Apperley and Darshana Jayemanne observe of digital games, “however much their digital virtuality is celebrated they are enacted and produced in strikingly visceral—ontologically virtual—ways”, and such a materialist consideration “demands that they are also understood as objects in the world” (15). The ecological consequences of the production of such digital objects are too often taken for granted, despite critical work examining the damaging impact of resource extraction, electronic waste, energy transfer, telecommunications transfer, and the logics of obsolescence involved (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter; Newman; Chang 152). By foregrounding humanity’s own monstrosity, The Last of Us Part II illustrates what Timothy Morton describes as the “weirdly weird” consequences of human actions during the Anthropocene; those uncanny, unexpected, and planetarily destructive outcomes of the post-industrial myth of progress (Morton, Dark Ecology 7). The ecocritical work of video games could remind players that so many of our worst contemporary nightmares result from human hubris (Weinstock 286), a realisation played out in first-person perspective by Morton: “I am the criminal. And I discover this via scientific forensics … I’m the detective and the criminal!” (Dark Ecology 9). Playing with Ecological Monstrosity The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Last of Us Part II confront players with an ecological form of monstrosity, which is deeply recursive in its nature. Players encounter monsters that stand in for socio-political anxieties about ecological disaster as well as those that reflect humanity’s own monstrously destructive hubris. Attention is further drawn to the player’s own, lived role as a contributor to climate crisis, a consequence of not only the material characteristics of digital games, but also their broader participation in the unsustainable economics of the post-industrial age. To begin to make the connections between these recursive monsters and analogies is to engage in the type of ecological thought that lets us see the very interconnectedness that defines the ecosystems we have damaged so fatally. In understanding that video games are the “point of convergence for a whole array of technical, cultural, and promotional dynamics of which [players] are, at best, only partially aware” (Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter 19), we see that the nested layering of anxieties, fears, fictions, and realities is fundamental to the very fabric of digital games. Recursion, Donna Haraway observes in relation to the interlinked failure of ecosystems, “can be a drag” (100), but I want to suggest that playing with ecological monstrosity instead turns recursion into opportunity. An ecocritical approach to the examination of contemporary videogame monsters demonstrates that these horrific figures, through their primordial aesthetic and affective impacts, are adept at foregrounding the ecosystemic nature of the relationship between games and our own world. Videogames play a role in representing both desirable and objectionable versions of the world, and such “utopian and dystopian projections of the future can shape our acts in the present” (Fordyce 295). By confronting players with viscerally accessible encounters with the horror of an aberrant and abjected near future (so near that it is, in fact, already the present), games such as Breath of the Wild and The Last of Us Part II can critically position players in relation to discourse and wider public debate about ecological issues and climate change (and further research could more closely examine players’ engagements with ecological monstrosity). Drawing attention to the symmetry between monstrosity and ecological catastrophe is a crucial way that contemporary games might encourage players to untangle the recursive environmental consequences of our anthropocentric era. Morton argues that beneath the abjectness that has come to define our human co-existence with other ecological actors there lies a perverse form of pleasure, a “delicious guilt, delicious shame, delicious melancholy, delicious horror [and] delicious sadness” (Dark Ecology 129). This bitter form of “pleasure” aptly describes an ecocritical encounter with ecological monstrosity: the pleasure of battling and defeating virtual monsters, complemented by desolate (and possibly motivating) reflections of the ongoing ruination of our planet provided through the development of ecological thought on the part of players. References Abraham, Benjamin. “Video Game Visions of Climate Futures: ARMA 3 and Implications for Games and Persuasion.” Games and Culture 13.1 (2018): 71–91. Abraham, Benjamin. “What Is an Ecological Game? 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