McAuslan, Mia-Francesca, and Maguire, Emma (2025) Writing Climate, Season and Cycle: Autobiographical Composting in Maggie MacKellar’s Eco-Autobiography, Graft. Life Writing. (In Press)

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Abstract

In Maggie MacKellar’s third memoir, Graft: Motherhood, Family and a Year on the Land (2023), she is living through a drought on a Merino sheep farm in Tasmania, her children are leaving as they enter adulthood, and her identity (mother, farmer, woman, white settler Australian, human) is under pressure. The planet and the land on which MacKellar lives are also under threat. Life writing that addresses such profound events offers a space to think about what it is to story human life. This article examines textual strategies of eco-autobiography that press on anthropocentric thinking about the natural world in a time of climate crisis, and reconfigure human selfhood ‘with and as place and time’ (Wright 2024) in a way that reflects ecological ‘enmeshment’ (via Morton 2012). We propose the term ‘autobiographical composting’ to describe how Graft assembles diverse raw materials—existing literary works, reference texts, diary entries, memories—to produce a relational subjectivity that subverts traditional linear understandings of the narrative of life as beginning with birth and ending with death. Through autobiographical composting, Graft suggests both ‘life’ and ‘narrative’ as cyclical, ecologically enmeshed processes, and so moves the boundaries of life narrative beyond the human.

Item ID:	87221
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	1751-2964
Copyright Information:	© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Date Deposited:	28 Aug 2025 02:41
FoR Codes:	47 LANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE > 4705 Literary studies > 470502 Australian literature (excl. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literature) @ 80% 47 LANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE > 4701 Communication and media studies > 470103 Environmental communication @ 20%
SEO Codes:	13 CULTURE AND SOCIETY > 1302 Communication > 130203 Literature @ 100%
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