Gillian Mears's Foal's Bread as a Postcolonial Pastoral

Gillian Mears’s Foal’s Bread as a PostcolonialPastoral

Land, Humans, and Animals

Jopi Nyman, University of Eastern Finland

This article presents a reading of Gillian Mears’s novel Foal’sBread (2011) as a postcolonial counter-pastoral that problematizesconventional mythologies of Australian identity and rethinks therelationships with humans, land, and non-humans. By challengingnaturalized ways of telling stories of the relationship betweenhumans and nature, Mears’s novel deconstructs the anthropocen-tric and hierarchical world view promoted in the discourses ofmodernity and colonialism and underlines the entanglement ofhumans, animals, and their shared natural world. Horses, in par-ticular, play an important role in the novel both thematically andin terms of its imagery. This essay suggests that Foal’s Breadreconstructs the pastoral mode and reworks the connectionbetween humans and the natural world from a perspective thatrethinks interspecies relations and the division into human andnon-human animals. In so doing the novel inserts humans into thecontexts of land and landscape, making them inseparable from it,and also reconstructs the text as a form of nature.1

Keywords: Gillian Mears, postcolonial, pastoral, human–animal studies, ecocritic-ism, horses in literature.

I. Introduction

Gillian Mears’s well-received novel Foal’s Bread (2011) is a serious exami-

nation of human–animal relationships in early to mid-twentieth-century

rural Australia. Through its narrative of the Nancarrow family, renowned

nationally for their skilled high-jumping performances, the novel

approaches human–animal relations in the postcolonial and Australian

context with particular attention to land and animals, disability and sexual-

ity. As I shall show in my reading of Mears’s novel, Foal’s Bread writes

against conventional colonialist mythologies of Australian identity that

Orbis Litterarum 69:5 390–410, 2014© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

tend to promote gendered mastery over nature. By problematizing natural-

ized ways of telling stories of the relationship between humans and land

and between humans and animals, Mears’s novel deconstructs the anthro-

pocentric and hierarchical world view promoted in the discourses of

modernity and colonialism. In so doing it underlines the entanglement of

humans, animals, and their shared natural world and can seen to be in dia-

logue with the tradition of the pastoral.

Mears’s Foal’s Bread, the recipient of the esteemed Prime Minister’s

Literary Award for Fiction in 2012, was published 16 years after the

publication of her previous novel, a silence partially resulting from a

serious illness. The novel is set in Wirri, New South Wales, in a period

extending from the 1920s to the 1950s, and it centres upon the regional

high-jumping horse competitions popular before the Second World War.

The novel consists of three parts, a ‘Preamble’, which introduces the

location and functions as a guide to the novel, the main narrative con-

sisting of 22 chapters, and a ‘Coda’, where one of the main characters

revisits the location after decades of absence. Foal’s Bread is the story of

Noah ‘Noey’ Nancarrow (n�ee Childs), the daughter of a drover and a

farmer, and her husband, Rowley ‘Roley’ Nancarrow, a famous compe-

tition rider whose career ends in a progressive nervous disorder that

affects his control over his body and leads to his death, and their chil-

dren, Elaine (Lainey) and disabled George.2 Through the ordeals of the

Nancarrow family and its gradual disintegration owing to George’s ill-

ness and Noah’s alcoholism, the novel explores such issues as trauma

and memory, family and community, and the relationship between

humans, animals, and nature. While at one level a narrative of rural life

and landscape, Foal’s Bread is not an optimistic or harmonious pastoral

but a text that challenges the generic expectations with its thematic

involving violence, abuse, and anger. The various members of the family

also appear to be haunted by the past. This is most evident in Noah’s

struggle with the memory of her firstborn child whose father is Uncle

Nipper, her father’s older brother, and in references to family members

who have died in wars abroad.

Since the optimism characterizing the world of the pastoral is

countered in Noah’s difficulties in making the Nancarrows’ One Tree

Farm her home, the hard realities of farming, and the racial and gen-

dered violence of the period’s rural Australia, the novel can be read as a

Gillian Mears’s Foal’s Bread as Postcolonial Pastoral 391

postcolonial pastoral that displays an ironic attitude towards the ideal-

ized fantasies of rural life promoted in traditional pastorals. As I shall

show, the novel’s critique of such models is intrinsically linked with a

view demanding a reassessment of the relationship between humans and

nature, or to use the words of Huggan and Tiffin, ‘a re-imagining and

reconfiguration of the human place in nature’ (Huggan & Tiffin 2010, 6).

Since the novel, as a part of this redefinition of the connection between

humans and nature, focuses on animals – horses in particular – it is also

relevant from the perspective of contemporary human–animal studies.

These issues form the core of this essay. I shall start with a discussion of

the novel as a postcolonial pastoral and then move towards the ways in

which Mears’s novel seeks to rethink the relationship between humans,

animals, and nature.

II. Approaching the postcolonial pastoral

The genre of the pastoral has been shown to be especially important to

postcolonial literature in settler colonies such as South Africa and Aus-

tralia in particular. The roots of the pastoral are in Greek and Roman

literature and Antiquity, Theocritus and Virgil being central examples,

and its conventional content consists of shepherds addressing each other

in idealistic rural surroundings. In his Pastoral, Terry Gifford distin-

guishes three ways of using the term: it denotes, first, texts rooted in this

historical tradition such as Pope’s pastoral poetry or pastoral drama;

second, any form of writing that contrasts the rural with the urban and

presents a celebratory view praising nature; and, third, a set of texts with

a focus on nature but expressing a critical attitude underlining the ideal-

izing elements evident in the pastoral texts (Gifford 2005, 14–15). The

idealism of the genre has been viewed harshly by many later writers and

critics, and as Gifford suggests, with particular reference to ‘anti-pasto-

ral’ authors ranging from Matthew Arnold and John Clare to Patrick

Kavanagh and Cormac McCarthy, such texts challenge the optimism of

the pastoral by presenting a shared view suggesting that ‘the natural

world can no longer be constructed as “a land of dreams,” but is in fact

a bleak battle for survival without divine purpose’ (p. 133). What

Gifford calls for is a literary form that he labels ‘post-pastoral’. Such

writing ‘is aware of the anti-pastoral and of the conventional illusions

392 Jopi Nyman

upon which Arcadia is premised’ and it also understands that ‘the prob-

lems of human accommodation with nature should be able to encompass

visionaries from the past as well as the present and a range of forms

from the ballad to travel writing’ (p. 149). In other words, the post-pas-

toral, as defined by Gifford, has a respectful view towards nature as it

displays ‘an awe in attention to the natural world’ (pp. 151–152). It also

understands that humans and their surroundings are intertwined

(pp. 156–160), expressing an ‘awareness of both nature as culture and of

culture as nature’ (p. 161) and a concern for ecofeminist issues linking

the oppression of women and other minorities and of the natural world

(p. 164). For Gifford, the pastoral is a changing form that can be used

in various ways in different historical and cultural contexts, rather than

a merely historical convention with fixed form and content.

Postcolonial scholars have paid attention to the role of the pastoral as

a means of narrating life and self in (post)colonial space where the land

encountered and imagined has a double function and plays a part in

more than one discourse and culture. The problem of the traditional

pastoral is also summed up by Rob Nixon, who recognizes that colonial

lands are unsuitable locations for the performance of pastoral ideology:

‘At the heart of English pastoral lies the idea of the nation as garden

idyll into which neither labor nor violence induces’ (Nixon 2005, 239).

Yet the pastoral plays a significant role in postcolonial writing, but there

it has transformed into a version of the post-pastoral to reflect on the

problematic relationship with colonized spaces. Huggan and Tiffin dis-

cuss such texts as ‘counter-pastorals’ and claim that it has been a domi-

nant mode of literary expression in South Africa and Australia (Huggan

& Tiffin 2010, 97). Referring to J. M. Coetzee’s White Writing: On the

Culture of Letters in South Africa (1988), they suggest that colonized

spaces lack the qualities expected from a proper pastoral. Rather,

Huggan and Tiffin write, ‘The Cape Colony, in other words, was an

anti-pastoral space, a site of barbarism and degradation, a space repeat-

edly explored in white South African literature, in which pastoral myths

have always co-existed uneasily’ (p. 98; italics original). The counter-

pastoral, unlike the pastoral, recognizes that the land and nature are

politically contested rather than innocent spaces.

Scholars of Australian culture have also paid attention to the prob-

lems of the pastoral as a means of representing the nation and its nature.


As Koshin suggests, on the basis of scholars such as Bernard Smith,

European settlers considered the ‘bushland’ unappealing and preferred

cultivated landscapes: ‘The promise of pastoral idealism was represented

by the rolling plains such as those beyond the Blue Mountains west of

Sydney or of the midlands of Van Diemen’s Land’ (Koshin 2011, 7). In

a similar way, Hoorn claims in her analysis of the development of pasto-

ralism in the visual arts that in their attempt to portray Australia as a

peaceful and attractive land, early Australian landscape painters ‘sepa-

rate[d] pastoralism from the forced reoccupation of the land’ (Hoorn

2007, 10) and chose not to represent conflict and violence. Reflecting on

the role of pastoral landscapes in nineteenth-century paintings, Hoorn

suggests that such paintings sought to imagine their topic as ‘desirable’

(p. 44). In other words, they were advertisements promoting a view of

Australia as a space of leisure and as an empty space waiting to become

the property of the European colonizers (p. 44). The different ways of

thinking about nature in the traditional pastoral and the revisionary

understandings of the form can also be seen in the way in which these

issues have been conceived by different critical schools of thought. Writ-

ing in 2005, Rob Nixon draws attention to the problems that traditional

American-based ecocriticism has posed for postcolonial criticism. What

the former tends to find central, a localized sense of place as something

to be preserved and kept intact through ‘preservationist discourses of

purity’ (Nixon 2005, 235), may appear to promote a strong sense of

national unity and exceptionalism, whereas postcolonial critics have

emphasized the role of cultural interaction, hybridity, and transnational-

ism for the identity of any place and its history and people (p. 235). His-

tory, as Nixon remarks, tends to disappear from much of ecocritical

writing where ‘[i]t is often repressed or subordinated to the pursuit of

timeless, solitary moments of communion with nature’ (p. 235).

More recently the concerns of ecocriticism and postcolonialism have

merged, as the editors of the recent essay collection Postcolonial

Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment point out in their introduc-

tion: ‘our definition of postcolonial ecology reflects a complex

\epistemology that recuperates the alterity of both history and nature,

without reducing either to the other’ (DeLoughrey & Handley 2011, 4;

italics original). Calling for dialogue that would benefit both research

fields, they point out that the ‘turn to nature’ continues and reshapes

394 Jopi Nyman

the concerns of postcolonial studies rather than disrupts the field

(p. 25). The understanding of nature as a contextual and historically

contested space is central to the counter-pastoral, and deemed central

already in Nixon’s definition of the postcolonial pastoral as ‘writing

that refracts an idealized nature through memories of environmental

and cultural degradation in the colonies’ (Nixon 2005, 239). Huggan

and Tiffin, while reminding us that the form is changing and that it

can be put to different uses, also underline the central feature of the

form, common to all different postcolonial pastorals: ‘For postcolonial

writers and thinkers, at any rate, there can be no pastoral without pol-

itics; by definition, the pastoral they countenance is an interrogative as

well as an affective mode’ (Huggan & Tiffin 2010, 120). In other

words, postcolonial pastorals problematize idealizations and excavate

the silenced and colonial histories that have constructed colonial

spaces, as seen in J. M. Coetzee’s The Life of Michael K (1983) or

Disgrace (1999) (see pp. 107–108).

The case is similar with Australian literature where the unsuitability of

the traditional pastoral to portray the realities of the nation’s nature has

generated diverse responses. Australian novelists and poets have for a

long time recognized the problem of idealism pertinent to the pastoral.

Works such as Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia (1946) and Patrick White’s

The Tree of Man (1956) investigate the relationship between humans and

the land in postcolonial Australia critically and thus contribute to the

critique of the pastoral mode. When White’s protagonist reaches his des-

tination, nature appears as silent and uninviting, grass is ‘splintered

now, sharp as glass’ and ‘rocks […] grown in hostility’ (White 1978, 15).

In her discussion of White’s novel, Rutherford defines it as a melan-

cholic narrative of settlement where the protagonist ‘claims the land less

as an act of colonial will than in the absence of any other purpose’

(Rutherford 2010, 61). In a similar way, Australian poetry reveals a cri-

tique of the mode. In Kane’s view the ‘anti-pastoral’ poems by such

writers as Philip Hodgkins, John Kinsella, Craig Sherborn, and Coral

Hull offer alternative reflections on life in rural Australian through the

use of ‘modal fragments of pastoral’ (Kane 2004, 276).

According to Huggan and Tiffin, such revisions of the form tend to be

ironic and foreground white Australia’s problematic legacy with Aborigi-

nes and the difficulties in accommodating them in the narrative of the


white settlers (Huggan & Tiffin 2010, 86–87). As a response to this, they

suggest, the pastoral elegy has emerged as a way of approaching the

issue by both white and black Australian writers as a form capable of

addressing a national history ‘marked by the death and/or dispossession

of [the nation’s] original inhabitants’ (p. 89). Huggan and Tiffin claim

that, while the work of Judith Wright, with its critique of the conven-

tions of the pastoral and its ‘rural idyll’ in particular, undermines her

own ‘white-settler privilege’ and ‘posit[s] an ecological alternative to

what she sees […] as a destructively technocratic world’ (p. 94), the

poetry of Oodgeroo shows how the nation is ‘haunted’ with ‘the spirit of

violence’ (p. 97). What these modern counter-pastorals demand is the

redefinition of the relationship between humans and the natural world,

land as well as animals, in a way that takes into account the political

contexts and ideologies of race and nation. Furthermore, as James

Graham argues in the context of South Africa, they may also strive for

increasing environmental awareness and promote activism in the manner

of Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life (Graham 2010, 196).

III. Gillian Mears’s Foal’s Bread and the problems of the pastoral

Mears’s Foal’s Bread can be read as a postcolonial pastoral in the sense

proposed both by Nixon and by Huggan and Tiffin. The following anal-

ysis will start with a discussion of the conventions of the postcolonial

pastoral (rural landscape; herding; land and belonging; problematization

of home; violence and silenced history). Section IV will then focus on

the ways in which the novel negotiates the relationship between humans

and the natural world, and animals in particular.

The rural setting of Foal’s Bread surrounds the small New South

Wales community of Wirri, but during the novel it changes owing to

modernization, transport, and increasing links with the wider world. As

is typical of a counter-pastoral, the novel does not portray a ‘rural idyll’

but a backwards and tough community where labour and hardships are

the rule. The ironic relationship with the pastoral is evident throughout

the novel. Its opening chapter is a good example. When describing

Noah’s arrival at Wirri in 1926, it makes clear that she is not an elo-

quent shepherd. Rather, this unlikely drover depicted in the novel is a

na€ıve, hungry, and pregnant 14-year-old girl whose main job is herding

396 Jopi Nyman

pigs, ‘like a good dog’ (Mears 2012, 15), as her father puts it. Her inex-

perience is emphasized in the description of her pleasure of anticipating

eating cake given to her by the Nancarrows:

The girl rode steadier going back down the long hill. Even with the tight feel-ing in her belly, she could only feel great happiness that slung in a flour bagin front of her saddle was cake, a whole half-slab, a real yellowy one it wasand as fat as that Ralda who’d baked it. (p. 8)

In addition to revising the figure of the shepherd, the conventions of the

pastoral are critiqued in the novel at various levels, ranging from the

rural setting of the novel to the reconstruction of the human–nature rela-

tionship. Mears’s pastoral space is a site of uninterrupted hard work.

Upon marrying Roley, Noah, in particular, endures hard labour on

the family farm, milking, shoeing horses, and spaying being her tiring

tasks.

The rural world of Mears’s novel is no idyll, which is seen in the

diverse forms of abuse and violence represented in the novel as well as

in its description of life at the farms. ‘Violence and violation,’ as Kossew

(2004, 67) suggests in her reading of Mears’s earlier fiction, play a signif-

icant role, revealing the darker side of history in her writing more gener-

ally and also in Foal’s Bread. The depiction of such events ranges from

the village schoolgirls’ attack (Mears, 2012, 160) on George to Noah’s

abuse and impregnation by her Uncle Nipper in their old house in Dun-

dalla, in the bush, occasionally even when her drunken father lies in the

next room (see p. 323). That the Australian countryside hides physical

and sexual violence is also evident in the fact that Roley’s aged Uncle

Owen tries to rape 13-year-old Lainey, an incident that parallels Noah’s

childhood experience and leads her to intoxicate, castrate, and kill him.

At one level, the representation of incest in this postcolonial narrative is

a stronger reminder of the role of abuse and patriarchal power in socie-

ties where women and girls are male possessions, like horses, land, and

its produce: ‘she’d felt those fingers that had held so many reins check-

ing her as if she were potatoes just before harvest or a heifer getting

milked for the first time’ (p. 324). When Noah encounters Owen, the

novel brings the past abuses into the present as she hears Nipper’s ‘whis-

kery old voice’ (p. 323). Similarly, her childhood memories of abuse by

her uncle, ‘their secret’, are explicitly narrated on the same occasion:


Whenever her dad was out for the count after a spree, she learnt how heruncle liked it best if she didn’t get into her milking gear straight away butstayed in her school dress.

‘Just slip off yer duds, darling. And put yer leg over like you’re hoppin onboard your horse. There’s a good girl, Noh.’

He’d give a kind of signal with the glitter in his eyes and then she learnt toride him home like only she knew how. (p. 323)

There is, however, a sense of ambiguity in the novel’s representation of

incest. Noah remembers her uncle as a knowledgeable and lovable per-

son whose life she views with admiration: ‘if Uncle Nip were here he’d

have caught at least one yellabelly by now […] With a memory arriving

of her uncle, of the golden quality of a few of the hairs in amongst the

snowy ones on his huge forearms, for a moment her eyes grew watery’

(p. 18). His knowledge of horses in particular is what Noah frequently

appeals to in the course of the novel: ‘According to Uncle Nipper, a pie-

bald horse was lucky, whereas a skewbald, with the exception of the cle-

ver little high-jump pony Patches, would be the opposite. […] And

Uncle Nip, was he ever known to be wrong?’ (pp. 176–177; cf. p. 178).

However, the interrogative sentence questioning the epistemological and

moral status of Uncle Nipper marks Noah’s gradual understanding of

the severity of her uncle’s abuse, as the novel reveals that his death is

also a moment of promise: ‘At the memory of her uncle she went all tin-

gly with a hope she couldn’t understand’ (p. 7). The representation of

Uncle Owen who tries to rape his great-niece is similarly ambiguous in

Mears’s novel: Lainey admires Owen and is a keen listener of his tall

tales: ‘That was the Uncle Owe she knew, never short of a story’ (p.

310). What both descriptions share is that the relationship between the

abuser and the victim is based on trust and narrative, on the construc-

tion of a shared story world and the transmission of tradition. Paul

Sharrad has suggested that the representation of incest in postcolonial

fiction is cultural and historical, not only psychological, and often

‘symptomatic of concerns from a particular constituency about the nat-

ure of nation and family’ (Sharrad 2008, 114). Such concerns can be

traced in Mears’s novel as well: patriarchal figures such as the two

uncles represent a particular construction of a masculinist and colonial

nationhood that they seek to reproduce through their discourse. Such

views, well outdated by the time of Uncle Owen’s death in the 1950s, are

398 Jopi Nyman

to be challenged as being harmful to life and the construction of postco-

lonial identity, which Noah’s symbolic castration of this bearer of the

tradition aims at. In so doing she transforms Owen literally into a sub-

human ‘beast’ and a ‘mongrel’ and emphasizes that this is the end of his

attempts at rape and abuse:

Efficiently […] as if castrating a young bull what had somehow been missed asa calf, she flicked open his nuts. Taking out the first, she flung it with a growlout of the window. Finding the second one harder to get, again just as if shewas working on a beast, she bent down, about to sever it with her teeth. Thenshe stopped. ‘Reckon you can be a bleeder, Uncle Owe. Then you’ll be strik-ing no one ever again, let alone Lainey. […] Now that it’s likely you’ll ever betryin it on again.’ […] Just a good-for-nothing mongrel. (Mears, 2012, 325–326)

The rural space of the novel is indeed one of sexual violence and also of

trauma. Rather than a liberating moment, the end of the Childs’ long

drove to Wirri marks for Noah a lifelong trauma as she gives birth to a

boy and decides to abandon it. In this scene the natural space of the

river, a conventional symbol of life and change, functions as the site of

unwanted birth: Noah ‘slip[s]’ her baby into it silently, ‘bit[ing] her wrist’

in pain not to draw the attention of the inhabitants of One Tree Farm.

Unable and unwilling to keep the child, Noah makes the decision to put

her ‘Little Mister’ (Mears, 2012, 18) into a ‘butter box’ that she lets float

down the river, all the way to the sea, justifying her deed by claiming

that: ‘Gunna give you a chance, little fella’ (p. 13). In so doing she is

described as ‘kissing [it] instead of killing [it]’ (p. 14). This moment, how-

ever, will return to haunt her in later life, especially when intoxicated

and full of self-hatred. To quote the novel: ‘She couldn’t realise that for

the rest of her life she’d be watching Flaggy Creek spinning that baby

away from her, the fast waters making it disappear like a little bend-

and-flag pony that’s forgotten to take the final turn’ (p. 15). As in Me-

ars’s short story collection Fineflour (1990), as suggested by Kossew

(2004, 67), in this novel the river is also ‘a trope of memory’ that

reminds of death and violence.

In addition to addressing human-to-human violence and abuse, the

novel also portrays how nature functions as a source of danger to

humans. This idea is seen most significantly in Roley’s debilitating ill-

ness, which is attributed to the fact that he has been hit thrice by


lightning. The final paralysing bolt hitting the metal bridge while he is

passing it on his horse leaves him not only with burn marks (Mears,

2012, 73) but also powerless: ‘He felt the energy taking off down his

body’ (p. 69). As the description of One Tree Farm in the ‘Preamble’ of

the book shows, there is a constant conflict between nature and culture,

which problematizes the importance and maintenance of culture by colo-

nizers in a space that they have appropriated and think they are capable

of mastering:

Only once the One Tree house is reached comes the feeling that the land issliding in steep folds towards it; as if paddocks are to flow right over first thejacaranda, then the hut and house; as if the verandas of hardwood milledfrom the farm will gradually be pinched into pieces by the pressure of theland’s pitch. (p. 3)

This idea of nature’s destructive powers is developed further in the

description of the exceptionally hard and persistent five-day rain that

torments the region after Roley’s demise. Rather than a ‘good’ rain as

in previous years that merely boosted agriculture, this rain is aggressive

and violent, described by the use of such verbs as ‘hammering’, ‘pelt-

ing’, and ‘pound[ing]’ (p. 247), and it transforms the river into a killer

of humans and animals. The flood leads not only to the death by

drowning of humans and animals but also to the loss of land and trees,

conventional symbols of life, to the river: ‘the river had risen thirty

foot, ripping out old bull oaks by their roots and sweeping away Lai-

ney’s ice-cream-soda trees’ (p. 247). Since the connection with land is a

particularly emphasized motif in Australian pastorals, seen for instance

in the poetry of Les Murray as ‘represent[ing] connection, repetition,

and living culture’ (McCooey 2000, 172), Mears’s novel works on the

idea to suggest that the permanence of land is in fact a fiction, its

instability resembling the fallible status of the colonial narratives on

which identity has been built. This can be seen in the following pas-

sage:

When it became clear exactly how much of the Nancarrow land had beentaken, Lainey had the feeling that more than the river was to blame. That allof them, but most of all the fighting between her Nin and her mum, hadcaused the land to tear away, to slide swirling and fleeing into the currents.The land, she thought, just like a horse, taking off at a gallop to get awayfrom the anger. (Mears, 2012, 249)

400 Jopi Nyman

The pastoral qualities of the novel’s natural world are eroded in the

novel. In addition to describing nature as capable of killing people, in

Myers’s anti-pastoral young mothers have to protect their babies from

being devoured by pigs that farmers such as Mr Oswald have ‘rear[ed]

to be cannibals’ (Mears, 2012, 15) and which can easily kill horses like

Nugget with their tusks (pp. 10–11). The fact that the village is a space

of death, rather than a pastoral space, is emphasized later in the novel

when Roley’s mother, Minna, sends Noah’s horse Magpie to a

Wirri paddock. Though green with plenty of grass, this paddock in the

village is described as a sinister and threatening space owing to its

deadly location:

But yes, the grass was sickening, just like the colour of the new icing onRalda’s latest teacake, what people marvelled over and always ate too muchof. The grass was fed on blood that came straight to the paddock in a pipefrom the slaughterhouse.

In the air was always the smell of blood. (p. 306)

This description of colonial land as feeding on blood can be examined

in the context of postcolonial history, as it suggests that Australia as a

nation rests on violence and racial oppression. Nature, the passage sug-

gests, is not beyond the discourses of colonization and violence. In con-

trast to Minna, who in the novel represents colonial modernity as seen

in her insistence on property – that is, in her acquisition of electric light-

ing and modern conveniences such as a fridge – Noah is associated with

nature rather than culture, with history rather than modernity. This

becomes evident when the natural history is examined in the light of the

history of race as depicted in the novel. The Aborigines portrayed in the

novel are marginalized characters, such as the two boys who, upon hear-

ing the sound of an approaching horse, try to escape it in fear, under

the impression that they are ‘pursued’ (Mears, 2012, 307; cf. Kossew

2004, 68–71); or the woman in the first chapter of the novel, shown to

be selling herself for a drink (see Mears, 2012 p. 16). Similarly, Noah’s

racial status is constantly commented upon by Minna, who disapproves

of her daughter-in-law’s family background and racializes her and her

family. When she suggests that their dinners consist of ‘roast snake or

goanna’ (p. 46), her discourse constructs them as culturally inferior in all

aspects, disgusting because of their non-Western appetite. The power of


the racist discourse as Minna’s means of racializing Noah is evident in

her comment on Noah’s mother and grandmother:

Well Nesta Avery was a lovely girl […] It’s true. Cos I was at DundallaSchool with her and some of her sisters for a while. But their mother. Olddarkie yes. She was a bad one and it come out in them all eventually. […] Shewas a slut […]. Like mother like daughter. (p. 45)

Furthermore, Noah’s two aunts who run a guest house in Wirri are rep-

resented through discourses of race that associate Aboriginal identity

with dishonourable morality, alcoholism, and rampant sexuality – as a

sign of this, Noah’s preference for a red dress is seen as being ‘just like

[that of] one of the black gins’ (Mears, 2012, 207). In this view black

women construct a different species, one ‘with hair on, you know, the

tit. Like a dog’ (p. 45). The racialized identity of her family can also be

seen in the description of her brothers. While her brother Chippy com-

plains about being ‘good enough to fight for the country […] but still

too bloody black to drink in a Port pub’ (p. 206), the hands and tongue

of her other brother Monty – who has never visited One Tree Farm –

are described by using a stereotype often linked with black people when

they are referred to as particularly pink. The discourse of race is also

applied in the descriptions of Noah’s children. In addition to emphasiz-

ing Little Mister’s ‘sootiness’ (p. 62), the novel claims that disabled

George – possibly with Down’s syndrome – ‘takes after his aunties more

than his mum’ (p. 80). This colonialist understanding of the alleged

moral and racial superiority of whiteness and the related fear of racial

hybridity is contrasted with a contemporary view in the novel’s coda

where aged Elaine revisits her childhood home after a long absence, now

aware of the silenced story of her great-grandmother Nup’s scandalous

marriage that had shaded her childhood:

Elaine knows for sure now that she’s got a bit of Aboriginal blood in her her-self. Found out from her own granddaughter Bridie. […] After Elaine had gotused to the idea she found it made her strangely proud. And it sure didexplain many things. A whole life of never settling for long anywhere. Thatlove just like her mum had had for being outside: for stars, for winds. (p. 346)

While the passage presents adult Elaine’s construction of Aboriginal

identity in a romanticizing manner, emphasizing nomadism and an alleg-

edly close relationship with nature, it also reveals the role of history and

402 Jopi Nyman

shows that the dominant narratives and idealized versions of the past

are to be excavated. Huggan has suggested that such revisions of

national history and memory characterize contemporary Australian writ-

ing, which often reconstructs not only historical figures and events with

the aim of ‘challenging the white paradigms around which the idea of

Australia is constructed – in (re-)imagining the nation, it often ends up

interrogating the category of whiteness itself’ (Huggan 2007, 70). This is

also the project that Mears’s postcolonial pastoral is involved in: by

revising the alleged narratives reproducing a white history of Australia

as an official national story, Foal’s Bread excavates alternative and

hybrid pasts of Australian identities, problematizing claims to purity as

an ideal. In so doing, it rewrites the racialized history of Australianness.

IV. Negotiating the human–nature relationship

Although the previous section has suggested that the rural idyll charac-

terizing the conventional pastoral is an imagined construct that does not

pay sufficient attention to the various histories and discourses pertinent

to the making of any space, Mears’s novel seeks to search for new ways

of approaching the connection with humans and nature, with land and

animals. Following Terry Gifford’s (2005) view of the particular features

of the post-pastoral, this section seeks to address the ways in which

Foal’s Bread explores the intertwinement of humans and nature in gen-

eral and equines in particular. I shall discuss both the thematic and met-

aphorical and textual presences of the animal in the text.

What characterizes Mears’s postcolonial pastoral is the way in which

its human characters relate to the natural world. In the case of

Roley and Noah, this extends from their profession as riders and farm-

ers to the ways in which the novel examines them in the context of

human–non-human encounters. The central symbol of the novel, foal’s

bread – hippomanes – mentioned in the novel’s title, contributes to both

the significance of human–animal relations in the novel and to the pro-

posed reading of the novel as a post-pastoral. Since Antiquity, foal’s

bread, the afterbirth on a foal’s forehead that the mare usually swallows,

has been thought to possess magical powers as a love charm (see King

1967). An example is provided by Theocritus. While in his pastoral

poems he identifies the hippomanes as a plant known to his Arcadians,


its effects are clear as it is one of the ingredients of a love potion pre-

pared in ‘The Spell’: ‘Horse-madness is a herb grows in Arcady, and

makes every filly, every flying mare run a-raving in the hills’ (Theocritus

2001, 31). In Mears’s novel, Roley gives his luck charm, a foal’s bread,

for Noah to carry when they meet at her first competition. This act has

immediate effects on both of them:

That smile she flashed him! So big with the size of her hope. How could henot have lent her his luck?

Seen close up, the background of his jumping colours was an even deeperblue. A perfect match with his eyes. She felt as shiny with hope as the silversilk hoops and the silk stars. When her jumper brushed against him the staticgave them both a small electric shock. (Mears 2012, 35)

The foal’s bread, then, serves as a marker of the animal and has powers

that overrule human reason. The novel thus opens up for readings that

problematize human mastery over the natural world and conventional

hierarchies. In the world of the pastoral, humans, men and women, like

horses and mares, lose their ability to think rationally when exposed to

foal’s bread. The second foal’s bread in the novel brings Roley and Noah

together similarly, until the charm withers away and becomes a child’s toy,

paralleling Roley’s physical deterioriation and sexual impotence.

Rather than being a mere romanticization of Aboriginal identity, as

seen in Elaine’s words above, this relationship is based on a non-anthro-

pocentric view of interspecies relations seeking to emphasize the inter-

twinement of humans and non-humans. The novel encourages such a

reading by repeatedly locating its human characters in a close relation-

ship with nature. This can be seen in the way in which Noah and Roley

find pleasure outdoors rather than in the closed domestic space of the

hut. The construction of the jacaranda tree as their own space where

they can spend the hot night closer to the environment is described in

the novel as a moment of increased awareness of nature and animals:

On this first night outside, just one hand loosely touching Roley, Noah wasaware of all the animals on One Tree tuned in and listening. She felt the dogs’ears pricking and the cats’ tails curling with the knowledge that now she’dcome to One Tree, there was a secret. […] And higher, up in the scrub, wilddogs and owls getting ready for the hunt, she thought they knew too. (Mears,2012, 54–55)

404 Jopi Nyman

Another example of the way in which human identities are embedded in

nature concerns the way in which the novel uses the singing of a water-

bird in the same incident. What the bird starts as ‘[k]now-what-know-

what’, Roley continues and makes his own: ‘No-ah, No-ah […] Nell-a,

Nell-a? Know-what-know-what what what?’ (p. 55; italics original).

By suggesting that human and non-human identities are interchange-

able and mutually constitutive, the novel critiques the anthropocentricity

of much of animal writing where animals are provided with human val-

ues and qualities. In Mears’s novel, humans are represented as having

animal qualities, as seen in Noah’s perception of Roley that links him

with animals and land: she was ‘drinking in his smell, which was of

horses, leather and […] the dirt of One Tree’ (Mears, 2012, 53). The

novel suggests further that the boundary between humans and horses is

flexible. Lainie and George, fascinated by the new foal, spend all their

time in the paddock, falling asleep and ‘curl[ing] up together’ (p. 140),

which incites the following exchange of words between their grand-

mother and father:

‘Fair dinkum, Rol, would you take a look at that? Spend any more time inthere and I reckon there’ll be three to break in.’

‘Gunna turn into foals, you reckon? The high-jinks of them. See George?Smiling in his sleep.’ (p. 140)

The importance of horses is emphatically present in the language of the

novel since its figurative language foregrounds equine metaphors and

similes when referring to its characters. This can be seen, for example, in

the following cases: dead Uncle Nip’s hair ‘was just as fine as the old

grey work mare’s mane and tail’ (p. 7); Uncle Owen, when about to try

to rape Lainey, ‘looked like he was walking on eggshells. Like a horse

about to go all navicular’ (p. 311); Noah’s desperation is emphasized by

referring to her as ‘a lone horse, looking across the land to where the

other horses were in a paddock; as if God had cut her away from the

herd’ (p. 294); and for Noah her husband is like ‘a promising new colt

beginning to sire mares’ (p. 56). Noah also says of Lainey that ‘She’s a

horse herself! She’s a hurdler!’ (p. 173). This linguistic and stylistic strat-

egy stressing the intertwinement of humans and horses contributes fur-

ther to the novel’s problematization of the alleged separateness of

human and non-human animals.


The extent of this intertwinement of the novel’s characters such as

Roley and Noah with the natural world and horses in particular is a

strategy seeking to negotiate the relationship between humans and nat-

ure in the post-pastoral. That the human characters of the novel are not

separate from the non-human is seen particularly well in the way in

which Foal’s Bread describes their performance as successful high-jump

riders. Rather than relying on long ‘legs to wrap around the horse’

(Mears 2012, 22), their expertise stems from their ‘sense of balance’ (p.

22), their bodily communication with the horse to the extent that Roley

jumps successfully without ‘bridle and saddle’ (p. 22) or ‘reins’ (p. 33).

This idea of ‘balance’ as a special form of human–animal relationship is

contrasted with the lesser skills of ‘dangerous’ riders such as Noah’s

drunken father who ‘reef[s] on the reins and roar[s] at the horse’ or ‘pull

[s] fiercely on the horse’s mouth’ (p. 32). The idea of balance, in other

words, is more than a marker of physical expertise; it constructs the rela-

tionship between humans and non-humans as one where touch and the

body, rather than speaking and language, are the means of communica-

tion. To be in balance with the horse means more than controlling and

mastering it. It also means that riders like Roley and Noah, as well as

their children, are in an embodied relationship with the non-human that

allows them to perform as a human–horse hybrid. This is seen in the

words of young Noah participating in her first show: ‘It seemed it was

just she and the horse, finding the way to best reach that jump’ (p. 23),

and more emphatically when Lainey prepares to jump at the Wirri Show

two years after her father’s death when she was 14. The following pas-

sage emphasizes the physical bond between Lainey and her mother’s

horse:

Trotting the horse away she said to the tall pair of grey ears, ‘Do it for medad, we will.’ And somehow, with this thought, she felt power surging in herback and belly, her legs light and heavy both at once, her breath and Land-wind’s in alignment, the power in her belly like a cord that carried the horseforward. (p. 278)

The novel even suggests that there may be no limits to the joint perfor-

mance of the human–horse hybrid. When preparing for the ride, Lainey

thinks that ‘the jump would just keep on going up: nine, ten, fifteen

foot. Up, up into the sky, until horse and rider, Lainey and Landy,

406 Jopi Nyman

would take an almighty leap and never be seen at Wirri showground

again’ (p. 270). Humans and horses, the novel suggests, share a world

and construct joint identities, become together, in the sense proposed by

Donna Haraway (2008, 35).

While the novel foregrounds the intertwinement of humans and non-

humans, the relationship is more complex because of Noah’s occasion-

ally violent behaviour generating fear in horses and her children. The

clearest example of this is the way in which she causes pain to the mare

she is shoeing. As the horse resists her, she loses her temper and first

resorts to verbal abuse – ‘ya little mongrel’; ‘you’re a poppy-eyed bas-

tard’; ‘ya flaming spoilt mongrel’ (Mears 2012, 170) – but soon turns to

violence, ‘twist[s] up one of the horse’s ears,’ and then ‘kick[s] the horse

in guts’: ‘The thumps and thuds landing on the horse sounded so vio-

lent, like all the heads in hell banging together when the fires had gone

out’ (p. 170). A possible way to read such episodes is to link them with

the representations of violence against animals discussed by Kari Weil.

Reading Raskolnikov’s dream in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment,

and a similar incident in Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘Tobias Mindernickle’,

Weil suggests that:

In each of the stories, there is an identification between beater and beaten. In‘Tobias,’ the man who is beating the dog and the boy who is crying over thebeaten animal body are the same person. In Dostoevsky, the positions of bea-ter and beaten are further identified with the sympathetic onlooker throughthe dreamer, Raskolnikov himself. […] A horse is being beaten, a dog is beingbeaten, a child/old lady is being beaten; in each instance there is a shiftingand substitutability of positions: somebody is beaten, somebody watches,somebody beats – and that somebody is the same person. (Weil 2012, 68)

This idea is applicable to Noah’s situation and it actually links her with

the horses rather than separating her from them. Her childhood abuse

has changed into a marginalized position on One Tree Farm owing to

Minna’s inability to accept her and the debilitating illness of her hus-

band.

The intertwinement of humans and horses is not a mere theme in the

novel but it is also explored metatextually, as revealed in its metafic-

tional ‘Preamble’. The relationship between human and horse, rider and

equine, is also that of reader and writer, suggesting that ‘riding’ is ‘read-

ing’ and vice versa. In other words, this ‘Preamble’ instructing a rider


how to approach One Tree Farm functions as a guide to the reader to

read the novel in a particular way, wanting them to be immersed in the

story, to ride into it, but also to listen to the voices of history with

heightened sensitivity: ‘the rider should listen even more carefully. Listen

and there will be the sound of sobbing in there too’ (Mears 2012, 2).

And the demand to ride/read is represented as an ethical task belonging

to everyone:

The sound of horses’ hooves turns hollow on the farms west of Wirri. If aman can still ride, if he hasn’t totally lost the use of his legs, if he hasn’t diedto the part of his heart that understands such things, then he should go for agallop. At the very least he should stand at the road by the river imaginingthat he’s pushing a horse up the steep hill that leads to the house on the farmonce known as One Tree. (p. 1)

By presenting the textual space of the novel as a form of nature, as a

space to be ridden and explored, the novel questions the division into

culture and nature, as well as into human and non-human. By using the

materialistic and bodily metaphor of riding to talk about the aesthetic,

writing, the novel urges its reader to rethink the concept in a way that

accommodates for nature and is not limited to an anthropocentric and

cognitive definition: ‘Could there be any sound sweeter than that of the

high-jump horses crossing from grass to the trotting track and back?

That sharp crack of horseshoes on the packed dirt road?’ (p. 275). As a

result, the novel argues for a reconstructed aesthetic and tells its reader

to abandon old habits and preferences and enter fully the world of ani-

mal texts: ‘Don’t fall off. Don’t put the horse in those yards held up by

various bits of twine and wire. Go for a gallop. Get off the horse’s kid-

neys. Lean forward. Don’t hold the reins up like that. Get them into a

decent bridge’ (p. 2). In so doing, the novel, once again, seeks to bridge

animals and humans rather than keep them separate.

V. Conclusion

This essay has suggested that Mears’s novel rewrites the pastoral mode

from a critical and postcolonial perspective in order to interrogate the

lack of historical understanding of the making of the national narrative in

Australia. By showing that the land has various contested histories of race

and gender, the novel contributes to the revisionary project of

408 Jopi Nyman

reconstructing national history. Rather than being a mere celebration of

regional culture, Foal’s Bread sees the transformation of rural Australia in

a larger context where local transformations are linked with wider cur-

rents, as revealed in the novel’s ‘Coda’ where Elaine returns to Wirri sev-

eral decades after the events of the novel. When riding to the farm from

the town, she reflects on the events and places them in the context of the

changes generated by the Second World War in the nation and also in its

relationship with its racialized past. While showing that the pastoral mode

is not appropriate to describe the conditions in (post)colonial Australia, a

view in which it follows the tradition of anti-pastoralism in Australian let-

ters, the novel also promotes a new way of thinking about the connection

between humans and the natural world, especially horses, as it endorses a

perspective that seeks to rethink interspecies relations. In so doing it both

inserts humans into their natural contexts of land and landscape, making

them inseparable from it, and reconstructs the text as a form of nature.

What emerges as a result is a novel whose aesthetic is based on both the

cultural and the natural, which stresses the importance of a holistic view

of human and non-human life. In other words, Foal’s Bread is a contem-

porary counter-pastoral aiming to challenge the anthropocentric and hier-

archical divisions between humans, animals, and nature.

NOTES

1. The research reported in this article has been funded by the Academy of Finlandand it is part of the research project Companion Animals in the Affective Turn:Reconstructing the Human–Horse Relationship in Modern Culture (Project 14875).I would also like to thank the School of English, University of Leeds, UK, forthe award of a visiting professorship during which the article was written.

2. In the text I use the form Lainey to talk about the child character and Elainewhen discussing her as an adult.

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Jopi Nyman ([email protected]) is professor of English at the University of EasternFinland, Joensuu Campus. He has taken degrees in English (MA 1992, PhD 1996, Uni-versity of Joensuu), Sociology (DSocSc 2005, University of Joensuu), and CulturalStudies (PGDip 1995, University of East London). He is the author of several booksincluding the monograph Home, Identity, and Mobility in Contemporary Diasporic Fic-tion (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009) and the co-edited collectionMobile Narratives: Travel,Migration, and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2013). His current researchinterests include transcultural and border narratives and human–animal studies.

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Documents

Gillian Mears's Foal's Bread as a Postcolonial Pastoral