ABSTRACT
Much scholarship on Australian crime fiction highlights the genre’s engagement with “the rural” and yet literary researchers often neglect the ecocritical possibilities of such texts. I argue that modern Australian settler-colonial crime fiction, like Emma Viskic’s Caleb Zelic series (2017-2022), reflects uncertain settler connections to place and ecology through both urban and rural settings. I also investigate how Indigenous Australian crime author Julie Janson’s Madukka: The River Serpent (2022) compares to settler evocations of place and is doing more to connect colonial crime and environmental crime through a characterisation of place that stems strongly from Aboriginal cultures and traditions.
