“All Life Matters, or None Does”: Connecting Human and Nonhuman Worlds in Ambelin Kwaymullina’s The Tribe Series

The ‘nonhuman’ encompasses such a vast variety of different agents that it seems difficult to collect them all under the same term. However, insisting on a strict division between them may still be rooted firmly in a Western-centric need to classify and categorise. Based partly on the Aboriginal concept of ‘country,’ Ambelin Kwaymullina’s young adult (YA) The Tribe trilogy endeavours to make varied nonhuman voices audible by representing multiple nonhuman agents, which, on the surface, seem vastly different from one another but are similar in their value and dignity. This chapter explores Kwaymullina’s strategies for making the nonhuman heard as a collective without denying the individuality of each nonhuman agent. It also strives to explain how Kwaymullina uses the genre of YA speculative fiction to reach a wider audience without denying the reality of the beliefs Kwaymullina holds and represents. The concept of a sentient nonhuman world is thus not weakened because of its framing within speculative fiction; instead, it is reconfirmed as a futuristic but very much possible human-nonhuman dynamic, which requires not magic but merely human awareness to come into being.