'To come right up against it': Wonder and water in Robbie Arnott’s Flames and The Rain Heron

'To come right up against it': Wonder and water in Robbie Arnott’s Flames and The Rain Heron

Robbie Arnott’s novels, Flames (2018) and The Rain Heron (2020) offer a vividly magical reimagining of the Australian landscape, with a strong focus on the waterways of lutruwita (Tasmania). Like traditional fairy tales, these works offer ‘potent cocktails of beauty, horror, marvels, violence, and magic’ (Tatar 2010, p. 55). In this paper, we argue that Arnott’s novels are part of an emerging tide of fairy tales that figure the natural world as the source and site of fairy-tale wonder. These ecological fairy tales build on the Carter generation’s feminist revisionary work, with their strong focus on reconsiderations of gender and sexuality, by challenging the ways that the natural world has been flattened and ignored in earlier fairy-tale works.

Through an examination of the ways in which water and its creatures embody, express, inhabit, and inhibit wonder in Flames and The Rain Heron, this paper reveals how Arnott’s ecological fairy tales–like the mirror owned by Snow White’s mother–reflect and refract the natural world, figuring it as self and other, companion and habitat, threat and haven. We argue that, just as Angela Carter and her peers recognised that we desperately needed new stories about complex, queer, strong and strange women, Arnott (and his peers) recognise and respond to the contemporary need for new stories that lift us up beyond the fear of, or for, the natural world. Stories that will support us in imagining, and creating, new futures.

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