This article reads Thea Astley’s final novel in the context of rhetoric about the death of Australian literature that has been a mainstay of our national culture almost since its inception. In the early 2000s, a new round of obituarists argued that the global publishing industry, critical trends and changing educational pedagogies were eroding Australia’s literary identity. Drylands, published in 1999, can be considered a slightly prescient participant in this conversation: it is subtitled A Book for the World’s Last Reader, seemingly framing the novel in a polemics of decline. My reading, however, sees the book as the product of two correlated yet combative literary projects: the attempt by its primary narrator, Janet Deakin, to write a book after what she sees as the likely death of reading and writing; and Astley’s more nuanced exploration of the role of literature in settler colonial modernity. Reading across the seven narratives that constitute the book, I argue that Drylands performs the fraught relationship between ethics and aesthetics in the context of writing about the systemic violence of the settler colonial state, questioning literary privilege, exclusivity and complicity in ways that remain relevant to debates regarding Australian literature today.

中文翻译：

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西娅·阿斯特利 (Thea Astley) 的旱地中澳大利亚文学的消亡

这篇文章在谈论澳大利亚文学的消亡的背景下阅读 Thea Astley 的最后一部小说，该文学几乎自诞生以来就一直是我们民族文化的支柱。在 2000 年代初期，新一轮讣告者认为全球出版业、批判趋势和不断变化的教育教学法正在侵蚀澳大利亚的文学身份。1999 年出版的《旱地》可以被认为是这次对话的一个略有先见之明的参与者：它的副标题是《世界最后一位读者的书》，似乎在衰落的论战中构建了这部小说。然而，在我的阅读中，这本书是两个相互关联但又充满战斗力的文学项目的产物：主要叙述者珍妮特·迪金 (Janet Deakin) 试图在她认为阅读和写作可能死亡之后再写一本书；以及阿斯特利对文学在定居者殖民现代性中的作用的更细致入微的探索。阅读构成这本书的七个叙述，我认为旱地在写作关于定居者殖民国家的系统性暴力、质疑文学特权、排他性和同谋的背景下，表现出伦理和美学之间令人担忧的关系今天关于澳大利亚文学的辩论。