Writing, water and woe: the natural environment in Australian Women's Weekly feature articles on flood, 1934-2011

Abstract

By taking as its starting point the concept of magazine exceptionalism, this essay argues that popular magazines such as the Australian Women’s Weekly play an important, if not always obvious, role in influencing perceptions of the natural environment. This occurs partly through feature articles on what commonly is called natural disaster, which tell stories of human interactions with nature when it behaves in unwelcome ways. Interrogating these stories over time can inform and challenge writing practice. To illustrate, the essay examines Australian Women’s Weekly feature articles on exceptional floods from 1934 to 2011. It identifies recurring tropes, most notably metaphors of warfare as well as, in some articles, a more ecocentric perspective. Findings are aligned with a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship concerned with the ways in which writers conceptualise non-human others. That scholarship calls for a posthumanist sensibility at a time when anthropogenic climate change will make humans’ relations to the natural environment more fraught.