Unscaling Australia through the Fold

What do French philosophers Bruno Latour and Michel Serres and the Australian writers Michelle De Kretser, Gail Jones, and Drusilla Modjeska have in common? They share in a reading of time that is topological and multiple.
Wrongly, according to Serres, “we conceive of time as an irreversible line, whether interrupted or continuous, of acquisitions and inventions. We go from generalizations to discoveries, leaving behind us a trail of errors finally corrected – like a cloud of ink from a squid” (1995: 48). This view of time and history as progressive has pernicious effects, as it intimates that “we never cease to be at the summit, on the cutting edge, at the state-of-the-art of development” and are hence “always right, for the simple, banal, and naïve reason that we are living in the present moment” (48). However, “[this is] not time,” Serres concludes, “but a trajectory of the race for first place, […] a simple competition, […] war” (49). “The first to arrive, the winner of the battle,” he emphasises, “obtains as his prize the right to reinvent history to his own advantage” (49; original emphasis). This is then not without recalling the colonial enterprise and the fact that, as Inga Clendinnen points out, “history in the grand narrative sense will always belong to the victors” (2006: 66). In a counteracting stance, she claims that we have to “destabilis[e] those self-congratulatory accounts of the past, because the past, like the present, is simply too complicated and too multiple to be told in any single story” (66). Drawing on this and the postcolonial Australian predicament, my paper will seek to investigate how attempts at a distabilisation – or unscaling – of the metrical view of time manifest in the works of (at least) three Australian women writers, namely Michelle de Kretser, Gail Jones, and Drusilla Modjeska. Indeed, it is my contention that these three writers share, believe and narrativize a reading of time that is folded, complicated and multiple, and that allows them to re-imagine Australia from another angle.