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The remoteness of settler colonialism: Lars Jensen, Remotely Australian: Environment, migrancy, sovereignty, nation (re)-building and rim, Mt Hopeless Products, 2022

07Jan23

Excerpt: Remoteness is an at once apt and fuzzy term to apply to conceptualisations of Australia as an imagined space (rather than community). Remoteness holds a double meaning in an Australian context. As a general metaphor it indicates obscurity and indeterminacy, yet in Australia is also applied prescriptively and descriptively to thinly populated areas far from population centres. In this book, however, I am more interested in the thematic potential of remoteness as a key to unlock Australia as a contentious site of belonging. Belonging in itself can be a normative assertion reflecting power relations that enable some notions of belonging to hold sway, rendering others peripheral or outside the horizon of acceptability or inclusion. This observation leads to a central preoccupation in this book, how those relegated to the periphery or beyond the horizon – the abode of the remote – produce counter narratives of selfhood and make alternative imaginings of the national space available.


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