Going Bush

Kirsty Gunn is known for the powerful use of landscape in her fiction. In Going Bush, landscape again comes to the forefront as she revisits the vistas of her childhood in New Zealand, evoking an ethereal and meditative autobiography of place. Revisiting with words the landscapes she once explored by sight, sound, and touch, Gunn uncovers what is wild about these places, in particular the bush. Interweaving essay, memoir, and narrative, she recalls the ways in which the landscape’s very foreignness could also have provided refuge to a child an escape from the suffocating cultural norms of colonial society. Gunn’s words are accompanied by a series of images made specially for the cahier by her sister, Merran Gunn, which extend the exploration of words’ capabilities and their limitations in attempting to address the particularities of place.