Contact, Rationalism, and Indigenous Queer Natures in Ellen Van Neerven's “Water”

This chapter looks at Yugambeh writer Ellen Van Neerven’s 2014 short story “Water” as a queer contact narrative. “Water” presents a near-future commentary on reformist, progressive, and recolonizing left-wing systems of governance, reflected in the actions of its fictional Australian president, Tanya Sparkle. I engage closely with the interspecies relationship between the story’s protagonist Kaden and the “plantperson” Larapinta, which serves as both an incitement to political action and a generative re-storying of queer, gendered, and human/nonhuman relations in Indigenous communities. This chapter examines how the contact narrative in the story speaks to the concept of survivance and to Grace Dillon’s notion of contact in science fiction through its production of a queer Yugambeh perspective set in a postcolonizing future, interrupting and complicating the colonizing actions of the virtuous racial state.