Spicer, Chrystopher J. (2025) "Nature Was Breathing With Joy": The Ecological Writing of Louis Becke. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 24 (2).

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Abstract

Although often typified as an Australian short story writer, Louis Becke’s literary oeuvre includes over sixty articles and stories concerning the natural environments and ecologies of the South Pacific region, his knowledge of which was so respected by his peers that he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society. In The World in Which We Occur, Neil W. Browne uses the term “ecological writing” for that literary understanding of the participation between the human and natural worlds evident in this group of Becke’s works. Here, Becke observes and discusses not only animals (particularly fish and birds), as well as flora and fauna of various Pacific Islands and the Australian east coast littoral, but also human participation in those environments and ecologies that includes the Islanders’ sustainable management of their natural resources. At the turn of the nineteenth century, at a time when Americans, Europeans, and Australians alike knew little about the South Pacific, Becke articulated in his ecological writing, within his own literary ecosystem of the imagination in which writer, reader, text, landforms, creatures, and humans were vitally entwined, the complex interactions between the region’s human culture and natural world.

Item ID:	85982
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	1833-6027
Keywords:	Louis Becke, Australian author, South Pacific author, Australian literature, tropics literature, South Pacific literature, South Pacific culture, culture, place and space, colonial literature, ecowriting, South Pacific ecology, ecology, marine ecology, South Pacific flora and fauna, natural environment, environment, South Pacific environment, South Pacific islands, Oceania, Oceania islands, Oceania culture, Oceania ecology, sustainable management
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Copyright Information:	Articles are made available under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.
Additional Information:	This is one of a series of papers by this researcher and author about the greatest Australian writer of the South Pacific, Louis Becke (1855-1913).
Date Deposited:	30 Jun 2025 22:06
FoR Codes:	45 INDIGENOUS STUDIES > 4513 Pacific Peoples culture, language and history > 451319 Pacific Peoples ways of knowing, being and doing @ 20% 45 INDIGENOUS STUDIES > 4515 Pacific Peoples environmental knowledges > 451504 Pacific Peoples environmental knowledges @ 20% 47 LANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE > 4705 Literary studies > 470502 Australian literature (excl. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literature) @ 60%
SEO Codes:	28 EXPANDING KNOWLEDGE > 2801 Expanding knowledge > 280114 Expanding knowledge in Indigenous studies @ 20% 13 CULTURE AND SOCIETY > 1302 Communication > 130203 Literature @ 60% 21 INDIGENOUS > 2112 Pacific Peoples heritage and culture > 211202 Pacific Peoples connection to land and environment @ 20%
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