ABSTRACT
Carrie Tiffany's Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living conjures up the colonial history of wheat cultivation by exploring the language of a wholly instrumentalised, commodified and gendered relationship to the land. Evoking a time when the attempt to farm inland Australia was subject to trial and error, rather than dialogue with Indigenous peoples, the novel reflects on the developments that have led to the Anthropocene today: this not only includes the dispossession of Indigenous land, language, culture and labour, but also the degradation of local ecologies. By contrasting colonial with lyrical language, I read the novel as exploring the crucial role of language not only for colonisation, but also for regeneration.
