Split River novella & essays: South Asia in peri-federation Australia (1890–1915)

A divided response—between acceptance and rejection—currently exists among the Australian population toward people arriving in Australia from South Asia, particularly those seeking asylum. This rift has an analogue in the settler response to cameleers and other workers who arrived in Australia from across the Indian Ocean in the peri-Federation years (1890–1915). This research therefore examines the peri-Federation diaspora of South Asia to Australia to address the apparent persistence of a dissension for a period of more than one hundred years. I work across two genres—a fictional novella and a non-fiction essay series—motivated by how the respective mechanisms and conventions of these two genres might differently illuminate this issue. The writing in both genres develops an immersive praxis informed by Nancy Tuana’s interactionist ontology, which pays attention to non-human agency in analysing human-to-human dissension. Concurrently, the work also seeks to acknowledge the layered entanglement of ontologies that comprise contemporary Australia, by connecting this research topic to the process of colonisation, including the overwriting of Indigenous knowledge systems, and attempting, to some extent, a decolonisation. Taking this two-genre, expansive approach has debunked the formulation of a polarised acceptance/rejection phenomenon, and gives voice to multiple unexpected events, objects and observations that fall outside this paradigm. Ultimately, the thesis is a demonstration of method – an immersive writing praxis – that engages with two writing genres, and responds to the materiality of the research topic and environments to create a shifting prism that challenges preconceptions and negates a totalising conclusion.