In his essay "A Literature of Place," essayist, novelist, and nature-writer Barry Lopez establishes the tenets of the literature of place through nature writing. He writes:
The real topic of nature writing, I think, is not nature but the evolving structure of communities from which nature has been removed, often as a consequence of modern economic development. It is writing concerned, further, with the biological and spiritual fate of those communities. It also assumes that the fate of humanity and nature are inseparable. Nature writing in the United States merges here, I believe, with other sorts of post-colonial writing, particularly in Commonwealth countries. In numerous essays it addresses the problem of spiritual collapse in the West and, like those literatures, it is in search of a modern human identity that lies beyond nationalism and material wealth.
In most of the stories in Kennedy's collection, nature has been or is in the process of being removed or tamed in the interest of suburban development. The most explicit case is in "Sleepers," in which corporate developers factor into the main conflict of the plot. Here, the consequences on the community of "modern economic development" are laid bare; Ray's town faces a depression. Ray has only part-time work, and Kennedy establishes that he isn't the only one struggling. At the pub, his friend Frank "hadn't worked in fourteen months" (129), and that's about all we learn about Frank. Which is to say, Kennedy is clearly concerned with the agency of communities against corporate development. Ray's pub friends discuss how things would be different "if that contractor was a local" (130), and Kennedy makes a point to state that "not a single local [was] employed" (137). A major tension that arises then is, to whom does the redgum belong? Of course, for a Commonwealth nation, as for the U.S. and any nation founded by colonialism and the displacement and genocide of native peoples, this question runs deeper than just one generation cheated out of what is rightfully theirs. Kennedy's story, "Sleepers," stops with Ray and his friends and doesn't mention indigenous people; however, it's clear from the story "White Spirit" that Kennedy is thinking about whitewashing, colonialism, gentrification, and the problems of representation.
The Australian-ness of this collection seems both essential and coincidental to the content. Kennedy so fully immerses herself in the perspectives of those she's writing about—and those she's writing about are often just "regular folks" going about their normal day, suddenly faced with extraordinary circumstances—that national identity rarely figures in. In the selection of stories reviewed here, the most explicit yearning for expatriation comes from the recent high-school graduate in "Laminex and Mirrors" who wishes to visit Paris and London and get lost in "culture and life" (39). What she seeks is not specific to a nation, but to an organization of community. In Kennedy's stories, the "natural" and "primal" qualities of human existence play out in parking lots. The narrator of "Like a House on Fire" is slighted for failing to fulfill his "husbandly duties" in the parking lot of the supermarket; Michelle's let-down reflex is triggered in the parking lot of Coles. In any case, there is no doubt that Kennedy is trying to render some "modern human identity that lies beyond nationalism," and she does so by training her careful eye on the suburban and rural Australian communities she knows best.
