Recalling 'Walden': Thoreau's Embodied Aesthetics and Australian Writings on Place

Abstract

This essay argues that the works of the nineteenth-century American philosopher, poet, and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) have molded Australian place writings of the last one hundred years. Beginning with the foundational work into Australian literature done by the American critics C. Hartley Grattan (1902-1980), A. Grove Day (1904-1994), and Joseph Jones (1908-1999), I go on to contextualize my discussion in the contemporary transhemispherical scholarship of Australian literary historian Harry Heseltine and American ecocritic Robert Zeller. I then maintain that, both syncretic and embodied, Thoreau's literary approach to place draws from a fusion of multi-sensory experience, ethnographic inquiry, and bodily participation in the landscape through walking. Australian place writers including Edmund Banfield (1852-1923), Charles Barrett (1872-1959), Jack McLaren (1884-1954), Derek Robert (c. 1920-?), Barbara York Main (1929-), and Rod Giblett (1951-), explicitly or implicitly, reflect the influence of Thoreau's embodied aesthetics.