Mine

 Mine

Reviewed By  Nan van Dissel       August 2, 2026

 

Author  Adam Ouston

Distributor:      Transit Lounge
ISBN:                 9781923023604
Publisher:         Transit Lounge
Release Date:   2 August 2026  

   Website:   https://transitlounge.com.au/shop/mine/

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Award winning Tasmanian author Adam Ouston has accepted the challenge of creating a literary work that flows continuously in one sentence; his second novel “Mine” has done just that. “Mine” explores the history of the destruction of Tasmania’s unspoiled pre white environment through the eyes of an aging ecowarrior, the ‘poet’, who is trapped in an unused Tasmanian mine.

Triggered by the death six months earlier, the almost eighty years old ‘Poet’, hoping to capture the landscape with his final project, decides to write a hauntology of the West Coast of Tasmania; a work which would bring together all his other works. When looking for the Chester Mine Hut, he found himself trapped in an old disused mine. It is here that his mind starts to reflect on his life.

While immobilised in the abandoned mine, the ‘Poet’ continuous thoughts travel to his past history as an environmentalist and that of those whose mines destroyed Tasmania’s pristine wildness; James Crotty, and Edward Edwin Bowes Kelly. Ouston through the narrative of ‘Poet’ also explores the calamitous Mawson Antarctic expedition and the Mt Lyell mining disaster; his own inevitable death nearer than he’d hoped.

While readers will find this well-researched history of Tasmania’s early mining exploration and that of Mawson’s Antarctic ‘adventures’ engaging, some might find this unconventional style of one long sentence and lack of narrative structure too challenging. 

Fiction, General