Emotion and Narratives of Heartland: Kim Scott's Benang and Peter Carey's Jack Maggs

[...]Maggs's gigantic stature pitches him as a Frankenstein's monster-the product of an imperialist penal experiment-whereas Harley's whiteness (rather than his Aboriginal ancestry) is what renders him strange: he is literally the colonial subject 'artificially' created through an engineered miscegenation. [...]narrative emotion, I want to argue, both motivates the narrative and enables the transformation (in conceptual terms) of metaphoric feeling into (a mimetically) 'concrete' event. In Benang, a competition for heartland generates the strife. Since the white perspective is directed by a longing for the unattainable heartland of Britain, the coloniser must establish himself as native to this new place through a reproduction of culture, society and place. Because our history around this pursuit of heartland is so violent and cruel, and our attachment to this land complexly drawn, the bonds of heartland are unclear-they have been ruptured, damaged, or poorly established-having been mediated by the violence of colonisation.