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Misfits of the wheatbelt

John Kinsella as an impressionist
by
October 2024, no. 469

Beam of Light: Stories by John Kinsella

Transit Lounge, $32.99 pb, 261 pp

Misfits of the wheatbelt

John Kinsella as an impressionist
by
October 2024, no. 469

John Kinsella may well be Australia’s most prolific author – of poetry, fiction, short fiction, non-fiction. His extensive body of work is renowned for its obsessive concern, its fixation even, with a single place: the Western Australian wheatbelt,  where Kinsella has spent most of his life. While psychoanalysis has fallen out of favour, Kinsella’s regionalism has the character of a repetition compulsion, a syndrome Freud related to unresolved trauma. In fact, what often underlies Kinsella’s repeated envisioning of the wheatbelt is the unresolved trauma of colonialism, as the land and all who rely on it – people but also animals and plants – suffer from the impacts of modernity. In this new short-story collection, Beam of Light, colonial ecocide provides the background for almost every story. At the foreground is a misfit, a figure certainly not unrelated to the colonial condition.

Beam of Light: Stories

Beam of Light: Stories

by John Kinsella

Transit Lounge, $32.99 pb, 261 pp

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