Who Gets to Survive the Apocalypse? Disability Hierarchy in Post-Disaster Fiction in Australian YA

Abstract

Australia has produced many post-disaster novels since the 1980s, our landscape and sense of global isolation inspiring long lists of environmental and political crises. While this literature provokes considerable work from ecocritical and postcolonial perspectives, the representation or use of disability in post-disaster narratives is less studied. This essay undertakes crip readings of a range of Australian young adult novels published since the 1980s, including Isobelle Carmody’s long running Obernewtyn chronicles (1986-2015) and Ambelin Kwaymullina’s Tribe sequence, particularly The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (2012) and The Foretelling of Georgie Spider (2015).

All fiction creates worlds, but speculative fiction, whether it favours fantasy or science fiction elements, contains worldbuilding. By considering the implications disability hierarchies created for disabled characters in these novels, and how disabled characters exist in these spaces, I am able to draw from disability theory to examine assumptions about the bodies and behaviours of those inhabiting these speculative landscapes and use crip readings to highlight how these texts either reinforce or subvert current understandings of disability, especially disability hierarchy and the subversive potential of interdependence in young adult narrative.