Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)
Swamphen: A Journal of Cultural Ecology encourages writerly responses to the sentient habitats of the world. We publish scholarly articles, lyrical essays, creative works and reviews of relevant scholarship, amplifying work that attends to human encounters with other species. Our journal emerges from the air, lands and seas that formed the first peoples of our region and we attend to these communities’ narratives as a first principle. While the journal primarily offers literary insights into the unsettled territories many know as Australia and Aotearoa, we also look to other ecologies in formation during this time of critical environmental change. Swamphen is peer reviewed and published biennially, in response to ASLEC-ANZ conferences. We welcome proposals for special issues. Swamphen was previously known as the Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology. Our refreshed name refers to the Australasian swamphen: kwilomi n Noongar language; milu in Kala Lagaw Yai language, ping ping in Dja Dja Wurrung language; porphyrio melanotus in binomial nomenclature; and pūkeko in te reo Māori. Like the swamphen, our journal attends to life on the ground, in the skies and in waters. The name itself, swamp and hen, brings together the plants, earth, water and animals that are the focus of ASLEC-ANZ. ASLEC-ANZ, is affiliated with a worldwide network of similar associations, of which the first was founded in the USA in 1992 (www.asle.org), followed by Korea (ASLE-Korea), the UK & Ireland (ASLE UKI), Japan (ASLE), Europe (EASCLE), India (OSLE and ASLE) and Canada (ALECC), with more in the process of formation elsewhere. ISSN: 2652-2411
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms: Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
Swamphen emerges from the air, lands and seas that form the stories of the First Peoples of Australia and Aotearoa. We attend to these communities’ narratives as a first principle. We acknowledge the unceded territories on which we and our contributors have worked to produce this issue of Swamphen. We pay our respects to those territories’ Elders, past and present, with an eye to our namesake, the swamphen (kwilom, milu, ping ping, Porphyrio melanotus, pukeko), a bird active in this region’s ground, skies and waters.
[Book Review] Teya Brooks Pribac's Enter the Animal
[Book Review] Hayley Singer's Abandon Every Hope
Basking sharks are the planet’s second-largest fish, and in the summer they feed on plankton in the Sea of the Hebrides, in Scotland. Once hunted for the oil contained in their livers, basking sharks are now a protected species, with tour companies offering the possibility to see and even snorkel with them. There is no guarantee of a sighting, however. This essay takes as its point of departure one such unsuccessful attempt to find basking sharks, undertaken as part of a research trip to learn about the history of shark hunting in the north-east Atlantic. Engaging with literature from multispecies ethnography, the essay considers the implications of treating absences as a condition of research on underwater species. It asks what form the tenets of multispecies ethnography – such as arts of attentiveness, immersion, and sustained participation in the lives of others – can take in oceanic settings. It suggests that direct observation cannot always account for relations with the unseen, and that methodologically and conceptually, the non-encounter offers a way of thinking through the ways that human activity can contribute to the loss of other species.
Through the presence of an unstable earth, swampy sites disturb land-water binaries while also creating imaginaries that offer an otherwise to colonial fictions of territory. Representations of swamps tend toward the wasted, the toxic and the untamed. Swamps are sites of alternative temporal configurations of muddy-matter that persist throughout histories of resource extraction, management, draining, and burying. The specific spatialities of swamps create the conditions for an emergence of material and imaged fictions. Drawing on thinking from feminist geophilosophy on permeability and saturation, queer materialist understandings of toxicity, along with contemporary critiques on the myths of colonial representations of land, this text explores cultural figurings of muddy grounds to posit swamps as producers of both material and representational imaginaries. ‘Miring Grounds’ engages material porosity and speculative image-reading to frame swamps as sites of marshy resistance that enfold their own representational logics into unique material and ecological compositions of ground.
Contagious Collaborators and Microbial Kin
Exploring the incursion of SARS-2 COVID-19 into human cultures at the beginning of 2020, this paper investigates how microbial, and specifically viral, worlds might be positioned as beneficial companions in telling the stories of our times and radically reconfiguring what possible futures come next. While most intellectual efforts to understand COVID-19 have had the intention to control, suppress or eradicate it, approaching the pathogen through a posthumanist framework enables the consideration of what viral worlds might invite if approached as a collaborative agency, rather than adversary. How might thinking with and through COVID-19 reconfigure relations between human and non-human worlds in not just the present but also the future? Creating the opportunity for an experiential encounter with this question, Emissary 2920 (E2920) was a participatory, multiplatform, and pervasive two-week experience delivered to local audiences experiencing the rolling lockdowns of 2020 in Narrm/Melbourne. This work positioned participants as time-travelling emissaries from the future Institute of Human-Viral Relations who had volunteered to complete field work and gather experiential, sensory data from within the COVID-19 pandemic.
My work with the Hairy Man story aims to debunk the false narratives of colonialist invaders who sought to legitimate dominion over, and transform the identities of, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – who were often referred to as scarcely human – in order to seize land to declare ‘Terra Nullius’. I show how cultural knowledge of the Hairy Man is integral to how I identify with and connect to Country. I tell this story to make explicit my cultural sovereignty over an aspect of First Nations ‘intangible’ knowledge that the Western world has often labelled as myth or legend.
[Reading Group Review] Contesting ‘Wilderness’
Cuz and I are talking about how our ancestors used poison to score a feed. I have questions about nyannum. How do you poison a fish and not be affected when you eat it? Wouldn’t it make you sick? Stun sometimes, not kill, Cuz says, and sometimes things are left to rise, to sit in the water for a while so that toxins are released. We both getting hungry, sitting by the water, talking about fish. Nyannum contains poison that only affects fish. Stunned in a small rock pool. Perfect for a grab bag. Nyannum leaves are heart-shaped and shiny. Fish also stunned in a trap. Our people are known for making beautiful traps. Our architecture is destroyed for other architecture. A light rail takes precedence over the ancient traps that have been there for thousands of years. Under neo-colonial rule, they can’t both co-exist. The ghosts surface in the new city. Is nature writing a white-settler literature? Perhaps you would think so if you browsed the genre. It is only recently we’ve seen First Nations names come up in discussions of the Australian canonistic spectrum of nature writing, environmental literature and ecopoetics. A few names, cherrypicked to be on reading lists and citations. This inclusion seems to be a tokenistic gesture rather than a recognition of sovereignty, or a reading and writing … and storytelling … and a knowing … that has always been present.
Seeing Within, Without, Across and Between
This paper discusses letters and photo-stories as sites for making strange our familiar relationships with the non-human world, through considering images and methods from the action-research project ‘Portraits of Change’, which explored environmental behaviour change and human/non-human relations through participatory visual dialogue between urban youth in Bangladesh, Australia and China. In particular, it focuses on various themes arising in the exchange of letters and photo-stories created by students through workshops in Dhaka and Melbourne, and how these can both reinforce and challenge our ways of viewing the non-human world. These themes, including health, aesthetics and visuality, also highlighted differing environmental perspectives between youth in majority and minority worlds. The complexity of the multi-sited action-research engagements require methodological adaptations in both the participatory design of the workshops, and analysis of their resulting visual artifacts.
The ocean is a planetary force consisting of both surface and depth. The imaginary of the ocean is an interconnecting and interconnected force. The ocean, with its hypnotic lack of form, reminds us that who we are does not end at the skin. We bleed into our environments, and our environments bleed into us. The sea is both conceptually and materially entangled with us: we are on a transcorporeal continuum with the ocean. In this love letter, we turn toward the ocean as an ontological space of transformation and extend a dedication to our strange kin: decorator crabs. Decorator crabs are slow nocturnal scavengers. In an attempt to look “less-crab” or “more-than-crab”, they select materials, debris, and other living beings from their environment to adorn their shells, placing them over a velcro-like surface on their carapace: these crustaceans entangle themselves with their environment. In our viewing and interactions with them, we as human researchers similarly entangled ourselves amongst the crabs, all within the potent transformative fluid of the aquarium tank. We present our epistolary dedication to these critters as we conceptualise the aquarium as an alchemist’s pot of entanglements - a metonym for the ocean - to learn and become with the resident crustaceans. The letter is presented in video form here – A love letter to decorator crabs. Trigger warning: Please be advised that this piece contains descriptions of humans confining and eating other animals.
Copyright (c) 2023 Jianni Tien, Elizabeth Burmann
This special issue arises from a virtual symposium held on 5 February 2021 which sought to challenge the letter writing tradition, interrogating the communicative capacity of the more-than-human. This seemed strangely fitting, occurring as it did in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic when the nonhuman was asking us to listen; a period of life gone strange in which we were forced to adopt new modes of meeting, communicating and being together-apart. As the symposium website describes, we were ‘dislocated from one another by lockdowns, border closures, and the unsustainability, cost, and even danger of travel’. The marked rise in letter writing throughout the COVID-19 lockdowns emerged as a means of countering this dislocation, taking advantage of the epistolary form’s unique qualities as a way of being together-apart (Jenkins). Perhaps this trend was a reflection upon shifting temporalities (compared to other ways of communicating, the slowness of the postal service became less crucial amidst shifts in day-to-day realities), but also perhaps out of a desire to connect. But as we turned our attention to the Earth, the environment, to the more-than-human, we were called to rethink such correspondence. The symposium asked us to imagine how our letters might help us to connect with others through ‘arboreal love letters and existential ruminations’ as were written to the trees of Naarm (Melbourne) (City of Melbourne; Hesterman) or by ‘making-strange … ideas of ancestry, earth, law, weather and writing itself’ as Alexis Wright implored us to do in her letter ‘Hey, Ancestor!’ in The Guardian in 2018, or by paying attention to the way that nonhumans communicate with each other, as Vicki Kirby suggests when describing lightning as ‘a sort of stuttering chatter between the ground and the sky’ (10).1
Copyright (c) 2023 Chantelle Bayes, Chantelle Mitchell, Jaxon Waterhouse
The T. Rudzinskaitė Memorial Amateur Lichenologists Society was founded in 2018 by continuing co-chairs Tessa Zettel and Dr. Sumugan Sivanesan at Nida Art Colony on the Curonian Spit, Lithuania, eighth Eco-zone. Named in honour of Tekle Rudzinskaitė, Lithuania’s foremost amateur lichenologist, after 73 years the Society remains dedicated to promoting the love and study of lichen in this galaxy and beyond. Its steadily growing membership of multispecies co-constituents participate in myriad curious forms of research, happenings and publications, collectively exploring speculative narratives and rituals around extinction that take lichen as guide, teacher, poet and friend. In 2091 the liveliest of its many enthusiast-led working groups are the emergent Crystal Radio Lab, the Metta Verse Mutual Aid Space Program (with subsidiary SpaceTime Fab Lab) and the Therolinguistics Reading Group. Periodically the Society publishes a bulletin—in whatever ready context is amenable—updating members on its latest movements; what follows is the 2089 edition, regrettably somewhat delayed. Please click on the links between the written pieces in the newsletter to see the recordings.
Copyright (c) 2023 Tessa Zettel, Sumugan Sivanesan
Writing Strange Letters in the Garden, with Love and Fury
French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous says, ‘the book is a letter on the run’ ( White Ink 177) and I too have taken the letters of two Australian women gardeners on the run to create my thesis. I grasped the letters between wildflower illustrator Kathleen McArthur and poet Judith Wright and ran with them. I held them close as I grappled to understand how contemporary Australian women’s digital garden stories might work to create conditions of community and worlds in common. In corresponding about their gardens, the poet and the artist developed a deep friendship that bloomed into a broader conservation ethic and action. Their letters and deep female friendship evolved into a question about how to live in harmony with the more-than human world. They would go on to play vital roles in the protection of places I hold dear: The Great Barrier Reef, K’gari (Fraser Island) and the Cooloola National Park. As I held these letters close and analysed my own thesis findings the world around me suffered increasing, human-caused, environmental catastrophe and I felt myself writing with both love and fury, much like Wright did. I began writing strange letters to Kathleen McArthur, alongside letters to my supervisor Professor Liz Mackinlay. Through these letters I searched for what gardens said and did and felt when they were turned into stories. What happens to garden boundaries in this time of environmental love and loss, and digital connection?
What can nonhuman road trauma, more commonly referred to as ‘roadkill’, teach us about ecological crises and human culpability? Incidents of nonhuman road trauma could be described as strange encounters, revealing the shared trauma of the nonhumans and humans involved while simultaneously highlighting the supposed inevitability of such events. I argue that the choice to check the rearview mirror – to exhibit attentiveness and care in self-reflection – is an act of radical correspondence with the more-than-human. Such correspondence functions as a kind of non-spoken letter to both nonhumans and other human drivers; a letter calling for acts of care and attentiveness that acknowledge the nonhuman experience, mourn losses, and possibly instigate radical change when it comes to how nonhuman road trauma is thought about now and hopefully avoided in future. In her work on the ‘Anthropocene noir’, Deborah Bird Rose speaks of ‘the Anthropocene parallel’ in which humans are spectators of the suffering of nonhumans, and also spectators of a suffering that is our own. Written as both an essay and a personal log of my own experiences with nonhuman road trauma, this work draws on Rose’s idea in an attempt to reconcile the concept of what I term a ‘strange spectatorship’, in which humans observe, are implicated in, and turn away from the phenomenon of nonhuman road trauma and what such trauma reveals about human-nonhuman relations, particularly for settler-colonial Australians. Reflecting on anecdotal experiences as well as the representation of roadkill in Australian literature, I explore the strangeness perceived in how settler-colonial Australians are both actors and spectators in nonhuman road trauma. I grapple with the idea of such trauma as a means of better understanding the settler-colonial impact on Australian natural environments, and the consequences for both humans and nonhumans if we do not better address the ethical and ecological consequences of our modern road infrastructure.
Four pairs of images from the Postcards from the Underground (2022) print series are presented here as experiments in translating invertebrate underground worlds. Artist Perdita Phillips and cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis collaborated to create an interdisciplinary ‘walkshop’ event to the coal mining town of Lithgow, as part of Phillips’ Artsource both/and artist in residence at Artspace, Sydney in 2017. The many forms of stygofauna—small invertebrate animals including worms, mites, snails, insects and many crustacea—can be found in the millimetreswide in-between spaces in groundwater. Short-range endemism is common—due to their distribution in isolated patches beneath semi-arid to rainforest landscapes in Australia—and sporadic relic distribution world-wide. Working between Neimanis’ text and Phillips’ drawings and found images, the conversations with and through stygofauna, underground water and mining were then developed into colour postcards, that use a red/cyan optical masking technique. The images can be decoded with a red filter that is held up to the eye. The previously invisible cyan delineations are then revealed from beneath—alluding to the layers of concern and the double state of both/and—“caught up in both the noticing and notnoticing of each other” that the artist/author were articulating (Neimanis and Phillips 137). The swirling patterns of swimming and the complex fingering of many limbs were rendered into cryptic scores. The postcards explore notions of hiding/revealing and comprehension and miscomprehension of subterranean ecosystems, through the multiple scratchings of the skittering limbs of stygofauna. Phillips, Perdita and Astrida Neimanis. Postcards from the Underground. 2022. Private Collection.
Copyright (c) 2023 Perdita Phillips, Astrida Neimanis
Setting Fire to the Poetic Correspondence of Multispecies Relationships
This poetic work is a multispecies love letter seeking to make the reader aware of the strange aporia of human ‘love’ for animals.[1] Contradictory human expressions of love, care, indifference, and harm towards animals can be seen in words that change perceptions of animals (as individuals, groups or in general). Consider the changing status of a ‘pet’ cat being discarded and becoming ‘feral’. Is ‘it’ a ‘pest’ to be ‘culled’, not even ‘killed’ or ‘put to sleep’ or can ‘they’ be ‘rescued’? This work explores multiple and conflicting affective outcomes words have on building compassion, understanding and support for animals, or adding to misconceptions which can result in disregard or violent treatment. The words we use to represent animals and express our relationships to them can reduce animals to iconic national symbols and supportive anthropocentric tools, or to draw out the diversity, multiplicity and intrinsic value of animal being and create space for animals in the text. The poem focuses on the contemporary Australian context for the aporia of human love for animals. It grounds the work in place and time by using Australian phrases, idioms, slang, associations, terms and names for animals, plants, and places while concentrating on recent events of bushfires, droughts, floods, and pandemic isolation. It references ongoing Australian settler-colonial practices where human animal entanglements and conflicts are highlighted, including horse racing, hunting, bushwalking, fishing, and farming. Repetition and wordplay are used to amplify, destabilize, complicate, confuse and decentre human perspectives. The method is informed by the fictocritical work of Ania Walwicz in horse utilizing ‘The process of associative thought and reflection. Improvisation and analysis. The flight of thought, a trajectory and reflection, retrieval, recoil. The use of multilevel text comprising poetics, theory and appropriated text’ (5). The poet aims to draw attention to the ways our relationships with animals are constructed and circulated through our use of language which forms an inherently anthropocentric frame of reference. Unresolved contradictions between intimacy and distance in human animal relationships are used to create a space of questioning to provoke thought. Work Cited Walwicz, Ania. horse: A Psychodramatic Enactment of a Fairytale. Crawley, Western Australia: UWAP, 2018. Print. [1]Although encompassing both, ‘animals’ is used here to differentiate ‘animals of different species’ from ‘human animals.’ Terms like ‘nonhuman animals’ and ‘other animals’ are definitions centring humans, in terms of what is not human rather than what are these beings. Words like ‘beast’ also have othering meanings.
Listen Deep to Subterranean Kinfrastructures
This letter – addressed to the people of Sydney – contains an invitation. As a collection of reflections and thoughts it relates to four core ideas. (1) Urban undergrounds like tunnels, drains, and caverns, are vibrant and nourishing places. They are ecosystems and they are habitats. Undergrounds also present generous opportunities to consider parts of their city that are often made out-of-bounds. The cultural richness of the subterranean city can evoke a profound kind of connection for a city’s people. (2) I affirm that people can connect more meaningfully to a city by engaging in processes of listening to their city. More specifically, I refer to the practice of ‘deep listening’ to undergrounds. (3) Enacting this sonic connection can be mediated by planning that responds to the ‘cry for the right to the city’. (4) The infrastructures that thread into and amongst undergrounds often provide opportunities for nonhuman life to thrive and is so doing necessitate responsibility for humans to care for these infrastructures as kin especially when they are damaged by pollution or degradation. Water flows underneath cities. It flows through gutters into drains, pipes, and canals. It flows, often unseen, and even more often with voices unheard. This letter prompts stillness and reflection of these voices.
[Review]Iris Ralph, Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecosides and Eco-Sides, Routledge, 2022, 174pp.
At first glance, a review of Iris Ralph’s Packing Death in Australian Literature (2020) does not fit neatly into an issue themed ‘Strange/Letters’, for, as Ralph’s acknowledgements page indicates, this book grew out of the inaugural 2005 conference of ASLEC-ANZ (then known as ASLE-ANZ). However, Ralph’s analysis, which ‘addresses plants and animals in Australia and its literature’ (1), is very much about strangeness if we consider that, until fairly recently, the contemplation of the nonhuman was an unfamiliar approach to Australian literary criticism.
Initially I stood at a threshold peering into a place of momentous ending. I shook my head. Gundungurra country needs to burn, I imagine its people say across time, just not like this. There is a requirement for care-full in/action when living with and on a post-fire terrain while still in trauma. It is a difficult balancing act for humans who like to fix things. Beyond the domestic clean-up of burnt buildings and infrastructure, my teachers await my attention. They are not of the human kind, rather they are the critters that perch in branches or skitter under rock. They are the soil movers, the crevice crouchers and the mark makers. They are the stirring plants and the underground tendrils of fungal hyphae. They send slow signals and resist tidy aesthetics. They challenge the perception of “dead” and question short-term human economies of usefulness. Ultimately, they remind me that home is made up of many intersecting homes weaving, twisting and turning in a constant process of becoming.
This letter is addressed to the quintessential city, an urban imaginary that encompasses the hopes of planners, writers, and those entangled nature-cultures who populate them. From Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow that set off the garden cities movement, to fiction such as Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and Antoni Jach’s Layers of the City that explore the socio-historical construction of urban imaginaries and more recently Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book set in a climate changed future, cities can be seen as places of abundant resources or destructive development. A swell of these voices build throughout the letter as the many idealistic versions of the city entangle and prevent any one vision from solidifying. This letter will explore these contested imaginaries, particularly the way these imaginaries impact those who are welcomed, fed and allowed to prosper and those who are chased out, excluded, and destroyed. But this letter is also about particular cities: Jach’s Paris, Calvino’s Venice and Wright’s Southern Australian City but also the Kombumerri country (Gold Coast), the city I live in and onto which I inevitably read these imaginaries. How might cities such as those built on Kombumerri country and Naarm be reimagined through critical posthumanism? Drawing on the work of Karen Barad, Astrida Neimanis, Donna Haraway and Val Plumwood, this letter meanders through the murky waters, entangled buildings and constructed garden spaces of literary urban imaginaries as I unsettle the quintessential city.
This paper considers how systems of art production are changing in response to climate crisis, and how artists are re-materialising extractive materials like plastic. This discussion centres on the creative practice of Te Whanganui-a-Tara and Ōtautahi based Pākehā artist Raewyn Martyn and thinks through connections with Pākehā, tauiwi and Indigenous practitioners in the context of earlier ecologically engaged practices. Extreme weather is escalating concerns about cycles of industry reliant on carbon emissions and waste production, and within contemporary art industries there is heightened dissatisfaction with dominant models of production, curation, collection and market-led valuation. We discuss parallel changes within systems of production in the plastics industry (with a focus on bioplastics) and within the art world, specifically Martyn’s investigation and creation of biopolymer forms which simultaneously comprise context, ground, and ‘image’ within each site responsive painting. Attention will be focused on the potentials of circular economies and aesthetics, alongside values that complicate an art ecology within the wider transition away from petro-hegemonic culture.
Copyright (c) 2022 Raewyn Martyn, Heather Galbraith
Relationscapes of Extinction, and More Life
3:20 a.m. Friday, 14 August 2020: Wildes Meadow, the Illawarra highlands, Wodi Wodi First Peoples and Yuin nation Countries, south-eastern Australia. A Boobook is calling. This sonorous guide in refrain, before and after the Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies conference in Tāmaki Makaurau, some eight months later. Two days ago, the SARS-CoV-2 lockdown lifted in New South Wales. Only now can you light a match without visceral trepidation. Without a gut return to the climate crisis inferno of the 2019–2020 summer. Anthropocene-in-the-making? Yes. No. These are Viral Bushranger Times. Anything can happen now. The shadows trace of the Zincland project is one mode of more-than-human wit(h)nessing that I have introduced elsewhere from an ecology and ethos of open field practice where contemporary art and writing converges with the feminist, decolonising environmental humanities and sciences. Following the conference, I had a plan to travel south, to Pōneke/Wellington and Ōtepoti/Dunedin, to continue a linked project of engaging with naturecultures of extinction, to wit(h)ness two sites of multispecies recovery and ecological restoration. If Zincland took me to Aotearoa, I had no inkling of what I might encounter in this onward momentum of and from the shadows trace. So, let me take you there. Let me pick up this passage of wit(h)nessing and translation one day after leaving Tāmaki Makaurau.
Melodious and unmistakable. Brolgas are overhead, crossing country. They bugle on the fly. In a Sydney gallery, Elder, eminent artist and activator Nancy Yukuwal McDinny scans the postcard I hand her. An aerial photograph of a zinc refinery on the east coast of Queensland connected to the catastrophic McArthur River Mine in her Country (Garrwa, Yanyuwa) near Borroloola in the Northern Territory, Australia. She pauses, steadies her hand, looks more closely, then speaks. This paper presents the project “Greetings from Zincland: Unfolding a Shadow Country” associated with Postcards from the Anthropocene: Unsettling the Geopolitics of Representation, an international exhibition and conference held in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2017, and recently published as a book (Cincik and Torres-Campos). Greetings from Zincland, a postcard I sent across the equator as a digital image, a recorded voice reading, and a critical text, is a dispatch from belonged-by country and its shadow places. It recalibrates vintage 1950s’ imagery of local tourist views composed in the North Queensland port city of Townsville—in Gurambilbarra Wulgurukaba and Bindal Countries—with one contemporary sighting of a twenty-first century becoming. Here, I introduce and map a scattered particular-planetary shadow country found in the glare of bleaching tropical light. With this, I unfold a wit(h)nessing story from one shadow place of unexpected connection and confrontation in the antipodean Anthropocene-in-the-making (Yusoff). If a picture postcard is a material form of encounter and exchange, an affect charged one is also an im/material dispatch. And, Auckland, you are one of my shadow places.
Viewing and contemplating archival objects and images provokes me—a female Australian settler artist—to imaginatively engage with and re-present stories of the past; pasts that resonate in the contemporary present. My focus over the last ten years has been to imagine and think within the historical records of the French Enlightenment voyages of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as led by the colonial governor, Antoine Bruni d’Entrecasteaux and cartographer and naturalist, Nicolas Baudin. These voyages to Australia and the Pacific are situated within a dismembering discourse of Empire, exploration, ‘discovery’ and exoticism (Chevallier). A major impetus for their undertaking was given by the emerging discipline of the natural sciences, and accompanying shifts in European conceptions of humankind’s relation to the natural world; a prime objective was the gathering/taking/making of knowledge by observation, measurement and material collection. In 2020, following the 2019–20 summer of ferocious bushfires, and during a COVID-19 lockdown in Canberra amidst a global pandemic, my focus in practice turned to the endemic birds around me: local, heard, seen, treasured. What emerged was a renewed close-to-home response to the Baudin collecting raid of ‘exotic’ Australian species.
Tender Places is a creative research project engaging the settler body in reflexive dialogue with theory in and through place, to explore moral responsibilities of settler descended peoples in the time of ecological breakdown. The entanglement of severance and extraction with ecological and social violence poses a provocation to settler descended peoples. Working with the Ilparpa Claypans, a site of personal significance on the outskirts of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, my creative research uses Deborah Bird Rose’s provocation of “Taking Notice,” sensual language and presencing the co-existence of love and violence in order to mobilise the body in the act of physical translation of ideas with/in place through walking, writing and digital photography. The research acknowledges and activates trans-local relationships through the creation and sending of postcards that document, translate and disseminate field notes to and through an international network of artist peers. The postcard is presented as a queering material medium; an appropriated artefact of outsider privilege, a public/ private artwork for an audience of one, and a material item that crosses political and geographical borders to link places and people through space and time. My paper locates this practice of (trans)local place-based inquiry into ecological crisis within broader decolonising, feminist and creative inquiries into the Anthropocene. Postcards and other creative research artefacts will be shared to demonstrate the methodology in action, and I reflect on the decolonising potential of reflexive and embodied engagement with place in relation to settler identity.
The weight of planetary problems is distressing, and the forgetting seems to have multiplied when I wasn’t looking. In late 2020, whilst a global pandemic is also multiplying with disastrous and tragic consequences, I get my mask on. I make sure my shoelaces are tied and tell my children who are studying remotely, or streaming with screens blazing unchecked, that I am disappearing for a walk along the Merri Creek. Walking for one hour and now two for exercise, as mandated by the Victorian State Government, has been an activity that propels people out of their houses. Walking has taken on new significance for Melburnians living in COVID-19 lockdown: exercise is a reason to legally leave your house and you are reminded as you put one foot in front of the other that you can walk five kilometres in any direction. Knowing that is a quiet freedom. We are enmeshed and complicit, in the way we are also entangled, unpredictable, clever, complex, stupid and amazing, just like other organisms. Every action has a consequence, no matter how big or small.
Chlorophilia, a human’s love or attraction to trees and plants (van Biesen), promises an alternative poetic encounter with nature that provokes the question: Can art mediated experiences influence concern and care for flora and the environment? Drawing upon art projects—including Melbourne City Council’s Urban Forest Visual Map (2013) in which people emailed individual trees—I examine how exchanges between humans and plants, mediated by art, can result in emergent states that escape the bounds of the predictable. Focussing on practice within an eco-social paradigm, this paper is historically contextualized by Agnes Denes’ and Katie Paterson’s art projects, where cultivation and growth stands as an essential action. Furthermore, my own projects in Moonee Valley, Craigieburn and Melbourne offer insights into this enquiry via direct observation, reflexivity and practice-based research. I argue that encouraging an engagement with nature via haptic and ocular modes of art practice may facilitate a deeper engagement with, and/or increased appreciation for, flora. Creating circumstances within both gallery and public contexts to engage people with plants, as real and imaginary propositions, offers community members of all ages a mediated pathway into participation and conversation. I speculate that these encounters may assist in establishing connections and creating multispecies relationships in both the short and long term.
I want to begin with an image of the vast ephemeral salt lake called Wilkinkarra/Lake Mackay, sitting in Pintupi Country in the remote Western Desert of Western Australia. This was a key site for my early research into ways to reimagine abiotic perspectives—to work with a ‘geologic’ using creative methods of site responsive artworks. I document these explorations of place as a means to explore my attempts and struggles to unpack complexities in the colonial settler spatiotemporal imaginary of the environment in the Anthropocene. My art practice is informed by the concept of uncritical “White Geology” as identified by the inhuman geographer, Kathryn Yusoff. In particular, the Eurocentric sociohistorical entanglements that help maintain a hierarchical outlook regarding the perception of abiotic matter. In September 2020, following my introduction to this approach at Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s, I completed three experimental site responsive artworks on a field trip to the Jack Hills in Wajarri Yamaji Country, in the Murchison district of Western Australia. This creative focus piece discusses secular pilgrimage and presents my durational performance art from that project.
Sound is essential to humpback whales, Megaptera novaeangliae. It is their primary means of communication. Noise—unwanted sound—travels through the sea as pressure, and it travels further in the sea than in air. This practice-led research situates my drawing practice within the context of aesthetic developments arising from responses to environmental pollution that originates in human activity. The methodological investigations underpinning the research speculate on and imagine the humpback whale’s experience of human created sound as it interferes with their oceanic waters. Through the development of an in-depth drawing research process that tunes into bodily, sensory and gestural responses to ocean acoustics, a visual language for the unseen sound forces experienced by whales has evolved. Relational encounters with science and ‘nature’ played a role in the production of this knowledge.