Rethinking life-in-common in the Australian landscape (original) (raw)
Related papers
Blood and Soil: nature, native and nation in the Australian imaginary
Journal of Australian Studies 35 (1): 1-18, 2011
Australia is a ‘young’ nation with a population that is one of the most polyethnic in the world. Australia’s ‘older’ Anglo-Celtic identity developed, it can be argued, out of a mythological relationship to the natural environment. This older form of cultural nationalism continues to be played out and contested in the contradictory denunciation of colonial attitudes and actions, and in the naturalisation of their resulting legacy. A key theme of Australian environmental texts is the idea that temporally and spatially, nature is simultaneously a place where settler Australians may find themselves and a place where they do not belong, precisely because they cannot yet imagine themselves as indigenous. The focus of this article is the historical co-development of Australian environmentalism and nationalism (eco-nationalism). Drawing on an eclectic range of sources including: environmental history texts; texts concerning the origins of nationalism; literature addressing the ‘national character’; educational resources produced by conservation agencies; natural science journals; newspaper reports; weekly news magazines, websites and other anthropological writing on environmentalism this paper charts the historical trajectory of nature, native and nation in the Australian imaginary with particular reference to the ecological debate concerning ideas about what belongs (and what does not belong) in the past and present Australian landscape.
Geoforum, 2018
Western environmentalism and conservation are deeply entangled with histories of colonialism. This entanglement has marginalised Indigenous and migrant perspectives on the environment to protect settler norms and interests. This paper approaches those two types of othering together in the context of environmental debate, using the lens of a mainstream conservation magazine. We analyse representations of indigeneity and migration in a shifting settler-colonial discourse on the environment, throughout the 45 volumes of the Australian Conservation Foundation’s magazine Habitat (1973-2016). The Australian Conservation Foundation was Australia’s first nation-wide conservation organization. Its magazine exemplifies a settler-colonial discourse that initially aimed to conserve pristine nature but that over time has responded to increasing awareness that environmental crises have transnational causes and consequences, and require intercultural and international cooperation. We found that, while contributors to the magazine increasingly represent Australian conservation issues as connected to international processes and closely collaborate with remote Indigenous communities, they continue to assume the settler as norm and prioritise the protection of wealth and lifestyles. These goals are achieved through the conditional inclusion of others and through the treatment of environments as having zero-sum limits. The colonial imaginaries of ‘wilderness’ and carrying capacity are repurposed to frame migration as being at odds with Australian people’s wealth and wellbeing. The reiteration of settler-colonial environmentalism as a dominant way of protecting the environment stands in the way of the greater pluralism of environmental relationships that will be needed for coping with environmental change.
Landscape as Metaphor myths and reality in Australia's post-colonial history
Who owns Australia’s past? Is it the victors of a genocidal race war, a century long war for the land, a war unrecognized by the Australian War memorial? Can we disentangle myth from verifiable fact in the legacy of assumed sovereignty and violent, dispossessory occupation? Should we be honouring our First People in the way we write history? With recognition comes identity and authenticity, the capacity for self-awareness, the hope of validation, of falsifiable precepts that, in their consideration, allow us to see more clearly as a society, as for corrective glasses to address myopia. We have inherited many of our behaviours from the past, among them, racism, and a tendency to exploit beyond sustainability, and with them, our displacive values. Is it time to accommodate our failures in a rethinking of our priorities? The early history of Australia since 1788 is caught up in the tension between invasion, resistance, and racially targeted extermination, us, and them, a typology for genocidal land acquisition. Why have we written out Aboriginal society from colonial history? Is it guilt? The guilt of Stanner’s ‘great Australian silence’? What we are is broadly determined by what we were, forged through behavioural epigenetics. Our emergent reality is circumscribed by the choices we make and have made, as a group. The question is: can we accept our past errors and change? Can our mutating rule-based order absorb the lessons of truth-telling and embrace inclusion, the rights of otherness, the rights of the biosphere? What is the role of our agreed values in a more compassionate, sustainable future? Is the concept of landscape a metaphor for our failure as a civil society, or our hope for renewal?
Negotiating belonging: plants, people, and indigeneity in northern Australia
This article focuses on human-plant relations, drawing on ethnographic research from northern Australia's Gulf Country to address the concept of indigeneity. Just as the identities of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘non-Indigenous’ people in this region are contextual and at times contested according to the vernacular categories of ‘Blackfellas’, ‘Whitefellas’, and ‘Yellafellas’, so too the issue of what ‘belongs’ in the natural world is negotiated through ambiguities about whether species are useful, productive, and aesthetically pleasing to humans, as well as local understandings about how plants and animals came to be located in the Gulf region. At the same time, plants’ distinctive characteristics as plants shape their relations with humans in ways which affect their categorization as ‘native’ and ‘alien’ or ‘introduced’. Focusing our analysis on three specific trees, we argue that attention to the ‘plantiness’ of flora contributes significantly to debates about indigeneity in society and nature. At the same time, our focus on human-plant relations contributes important context and nuance to current debates about human and other-than-human relations in a more-than-human world.
The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2021
Across Cape York Peninsula, the cattle grazing industry has declined in recent decades due to falling cattle prices, shorter wet seasons and land tenure changes. Remaining graziers perceive their status in the region as increasingly marginal and explain this precarity with the 'locking up' of Cape York land regimes and environments by National Parks and Aboriginal interests. Based on 14 months of ethnographic research in south-east Cape York conducted in 2018-2019, in this article I describe and analyse how graziers construct their claims to belonging in the region in response to land tenure changes. Drawing on recent scholarship on non-Indigenous forms of belonging in settler states and using the case study of one particular grazing family, I discuss how graziers position themselves as those who 'know the intimacies of the soil', as one grazier stated, due to multigenerational work on the land. Their claim to belonging tends to ignore prior Aboriginal occupation and instead emphasises their long-term relationships with local Aboriginal families, while the third main stakeholder in the region, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, is perceived as a kind of dispossessor representing non-local 'Green' ideologies and interests.
Landscape as Metaphor: Myths and Reality in Australian Post-Colonial History
Who owns Australia's past? Is it the victors of a genocidal race war? Can we disentangle myth from fact in the legacy of assumed sovereignty and violent displacive occupation? Should we be honouring our First People in the way we write history? With recognition comes identity and authenticity, the capacity for self-awareness, the hope of validation. The history of Australia since 1788 is caught up in the tension between invasion, resistance, and racially targeted extermination, us, and them. Why have we written out Aboriginal society from colonial history? Is it guilt? The guilt of Stanner's 'great Australian silence'? What we are is determined by what we were. Our emergent reality is circumscribed by the choices we make and have made. The question is: can we change? Can our mutating rulebased order accept the lessons of truth-telling and embrace inclusion, the rights of otherness, the rights of the biosphere?
Feminist Ecologies in Australia (Nov 2014)
Keynote speakers: Professor Germaine Greer, 'Mother? Nature?' Professor Alison Bartlett, 'Thinking–Feminism–Place: Situating the 1980s Australian Women’s Peace Camps' Associate Professor Linda Williams, 'Jocasta’s legacy and Ecocritique in Australia'