« The law of the settler: Brenna Bhandar, ‘The Antinomies of Settler Colonialism and International Law: Between Juridifiction and Juridicide’, The Palestine Yearbook of International Law Online, 2026

Weird settler colonialism: Isabelle Hesse, ‘Speculative Histories and the More-Than-Human: Weirding Colonialism and Climate Change in Contemporary Australian Fiction’, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2026

10Mar26

Abstract: In From the Wreck (2017), Australian author and environmentalist Jane Rawson imagines that her great-great-grandfather George Hills, one of the survivors of the shipwreck of the SS Admella, is rescued by a more-than-human shapeshifting being, who subsequently destabilizes his identity as a settler living in colonial South Australia. In this essay, I argue for the importance of bringing together speculative histories, the New Weird, and critical ocean studies, whose intersections are embodied in the more-than-human being asa character in Rawson’s novel. I suggest that this constitutes an important critical tool for interrogating the ways in which we remember settler colonial history in Australia, especially a history that is depicted as independent of the environment and one that marginalizes the relationship between the human and the more-than-human. In this way, I demonstrate how the New Oceanic Weird as a genre can highlight reciprocity on an individual and a collective level to emphasize the entangled and reciprocal histories between the human and the more-than-human alongside those of settler colonialism and environmental destruction.


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