Outback and Out West: The Settler-Colonial Environmental Imaginary by Tom Lynch (review)

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• Outback and Out West: The Settler-Colonial Environmental Imaginary by Tom Lynch
• Alex Trimble Young

Tom Lynch, Outback and Out West: The Settler-Colonial Environmental Imaginary. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2022. 348 pp. Hardcover, $60; e-book, $60.

The importation of Australian settler colonial theory into the US academy has occasioned a surge of scholarly exchange between the United States and Australia during the last two decades. This exchange has not, however—with a few happy exceptions—been accompanied by the widespread adaptation of the transnational comparative method that produced that theory. This state of affairs makes Tom Lynch's Outback and Out West: The Settler-Colonial Environmental Imaginary an especially welcome addition to transnational research on the literature of the US West, environmental humanities, and settler colonial studies. In this thoroughly researched comparative study of settler environmental writing in the two storied and arid regions named in his title, Lynch engages settler colonial studies not as a source of theoretical dogma but as a method for his challenging and original comparative close readings.

Lynch's central argument hinges on the claim that settler literary representations of the ecologies of the Outback and the West are both inflected by the settler colonial imaginary, a fantasy forged in the violence of conquest that shapes even the most seemingly benign forms of settler environmental writing. Identifying this transnational connection, Lynch argues, destabilizes not only the nationalist allegories that imagine the Outback and the West as synecdoches for the exceptional status of the nation-states of which they are a part but also countercultural claims of so much environmental [End Page 402] writing, which, he convincingly argues, can be settler colonial even when they are explicitly antinationalist.

Outback and Out West makes this nuanced argument by engaging the formal traditions of ecocriticism and bioregionalism, even as Lynch's settler colonial critique unsettles some of the key assumptions of those fields. Outback and Out West calls to mind the work of ecocritics like Scott Slovic in its organization, alternating between "field notes," brief travelogues narrating Lynch's personal experiences exploring the two regions he analyzes, and thematically organized chapters of comparative literary criticism.

While arguably undercutting the too-often imperious authority of disinterested cultural criticism, the field notes sections also tentatively unsettle their own implicit claim on authority. Much of the prose in these personal narratives reads like the work of the white naturalists of the last century, enthusiastically documenting the local geology, flora, and fauna Lynch encounters as he traverses the storied landscapes of the Outback and the US West. At the same time Lynch writes with a keen if awkward awareness of how his standpoint inflects his experience of these landscapes. At one point he pauses in a description of an Outback landscape to consider the Indigenous perspective on the place, noting that "there is another landscape, invisible to the likes of me, that lives within and animates this more obvious one. I can intuit aspects of it, but its details are out of my range of vision, and really none of my business" (89). The "field notes" sections thus highlight contradictions latent in the relation between the author's ecological enthusiasms and his political commitments without attempting to resolve them, leaving readers to judge for themselves.

The real strength of Outback and Out West is found in its comparative close readings. At their best Lynch's careful readings identify not only structural similarities between literary representations of the environment in both places but particular phrases that reoccur with startling frequency in both regional literatures, repeated like mantras that attempt to establish settler sovereignty and ownership as facts of nature. His first chapter explores one such phrase, "this very spot," that appears repeatedly in memoirs and travelogues that seek to retrace the steps of the first settler explorers in a region, a literary preoccupation of writers in both the West and the [End Page 403] Outback. By attempting to embody the perspective of these explorers, Lynch argues, contemporary writers in both locales reinforce a peculiarly and perniciously settler colonial relation to place. Another standout analysis in this regard comes in Lynch's fourth chapter (developed out of an article...