"Nature Was Breathing with Joy": The Ecological Writing of Louis Becke

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.