That burning feeling: Rachel Fetherston, ‘Bushfire, Drought and Settler-Colonial Culpability in the Eco-crime Novel’, in Rachel Fetherston, Theorising the Postcolonial Eco-Novel, Palgrave Macmillan, 2025, pp. 155-189 | settler colonial studies blog

That burning feeling: Rachel Fetherston, ‘Bushfire, Drought and Settler-Colonial Culpability in the Eco-crime Novel’, in Rachel Fetherston, Theorising the Postcolonial Eco-Novel, Palgrave Macmillan, 2025, pp. 155-189

18Nov25

Abstract: While in recent years Australian crime fiction has gained some attention amongst both academics and reviewers, it is still missing from an area of study in which I believe it demands more notice—that is, ecocritical discussions of Australian fiction. This chapter investigates the idea of Australian crime fiction as a largely underexplored representation of the modern environmental crisis, discussing how Australian eco-crime fiction portrays the troubling relationship between human violence, the settler-colonial decimation of Australian environments and an increasing disconnect between Australian settler culture and a stable idea of home. Such a relationship indirectly alludes to the impact of a changing climate on Australian communities and ecosystems and suggests that popular genre fiction can contribute in profound ways to broader socio-environmental considerations. With this ecocritical framework in mind, this chapter analyses the nonhuman “phenomena” of drought and bushfire in Jane Harper’s The Dry (2016) and Chris Hammer’s Scrublands (2018), and what such novels reveal about the criminal nature of anthropogenic climate change and the settler-colonial destruction of Australian habitats.

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