Regain Balance,Strive For Harmony ——A Comparative Study Of The Secret River And Journey To The Stone Country From The Perspective Of Post-colonial Ecocriticism

At the beginning of the 21 st century,the Australian government promoted the multi-cultural policy,advocating diverse ethnic.Kate Grenville and Alex Miller,both white writers,actively engaged in the creation of the novels on this genre.In The Secret River,Grenville tells the story of a white convict William Thornhill who comes to Australia with the aim of grabbing personal interests,made the local’s natural ecology,social ecology,and spiritual ecology disrupt.The same scenes also happened in Journey to the Stone Country.So far,however,scholars at home and abroad focused more on racial conflicts than the “imbalance” contained in the two novels.Thus,the thesis applied theories in Postcolonial Ecocriticism,adopting the methods of comparative study to analyze the “imbalance” in the two novels,and thus further grasps the authors’ ecological view.This thesis firstly explored the common imbalance,which mainly exhibited in three aspects: the whites plundered the natural resources without restraint,disturbing the local natural ecology.To grab as much interests as possible,people became self-centered,indifferent to others’ suffering,leading to an alienated society.Besides,with ethnocentrism,the whites implant colonial culture to the natives to realize their complete rule.The despoiled land,collapsing society,and the crushed culture together constructed the Aboriginals’ imbalanced homeland.Then,the thesis analyses two characters’ respective ways of dealing with the imbalance.In The Secret River,as the balance was broken,the relationships between the whites and natives are irreversible,which triggered the bloody war.By contrast,in Journey to the Stone Country,confronting with the cruel history,the whites’ descendant Annabelle actively identifies with the natives’ culture,expecting the two nations to dispel the discord and realize reconciliation.Based on above analysis,this study finds that with the idea of racial hegemony,Thornhill rejected the aboriginal culture.Finally,he took up the land but failed to establish the spiritual connection with the land.While for Annabelle,her journey to the stone country was more like a path of reconstruction.With sincerity and reverence,she won recognition of the natives and fell in love with the Aboriginal descendant Bo.Their combination not only represents the two nations’ acceptance and recognition of each other but also embodies Miller’s ecological view,which emphasizes the harmony between not only man and man but man and nature.