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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'The world is full of beautiful places. Beaches and oceans, cliffs, forests, mountains and valleys, deserts, rivers, islands, harbours and bays. Places where the sky is a perfect half dome, and others where it is pinched between mountains and buildings. These beautiful places have the power to inspire and delight, to provide respite and solace. They are depicted by artists and evoked by poets, and in some cultures assume a spiritual significance beyond their physicality. We flock to them in increasing numbers, maybe sensing that they will not always be there.' (On suicide watch? The enduring power of nature, Julianne Schultz : Introduction)
Contents
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Crossing the Line : Unknown Unknowns in a Liminal, Tropical World,
single work
essay
'Imagine an airplane flying north from Brisbane to Cairns. In just over two hours, it will cover nearly 1,400 kilometres of Australia's eastern coastline and add 340 kilograms of carbon dioxide to each of its passengers' personal carbon footprints.' (Publication abstract)
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Lost and Found in Translation : Who Can Talk to Country?,
single work
essay
'Unlike many city-dwelling Australians, the desert holds no terrors for me. Instead, like DH Lawrence, I find the cathedral forests of the coastal regions oppressive and disquieting. Lawrence brought to his descriptions of the Australian bush the same overwrought sensitivity that created the claustrophobic emotional landscape of 'Sons and Lovers', and the appalling, majestic insularity of the Italian mountain village in 'The Lost Girl'. He was the writer who made explicit the sense of some non-human presence in the Antipodean landscape, and while I have a different interpretation of the 'speechless, aimless solitariness' he attributes to the country, his instincts were good.' (Publication abstract)
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Boodjar Ngan Djoorla - Country, My Bones,
single work
essay
'My bones are in the soul of Country, and Country is in my bones. My veins are the creeks that flow to the sea and never quite reach it; walled off by sand, drying up in the sun. They only flow out, break the walls when the sky cries. The sky is all cried out.' (Publication abstract)
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A Fragile Civilisation : Collective Living on Australian Soil,
single work
essay
'At the same time as a headline in 'The Guardian' announced: 'Indigenous Australians most ancient civilisation on Earth, DNA study confirms', we could also read that $3 billion had been left by healthcare tycoon Paul Ramsay to set up, under the direction of right-wing former prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott, a plan to install courses on 'Western civilisation' in major Australian universities. This contrast is confusing, but telling. Civilisation has nothing to do with science as such (DNA is indifferent to it), nor is it something a passing political initiative can uphold. But with a long view of Australian history, the concept of civilisation is caught precisely in this politically charged dichotomy: between an Indigenous civilisation and a recently arrived 'Western' one. It seems that the upholders of the latter would like the former to remain dubious and 'ancient', of little relevance to the future of the country. This essay is a personal reflection on the possibilities for a more reasonable hybrid definition of 'civilisation' based on Australian soil.' (Publication abstract)
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The Planet Is Alive: Radical Histories for Uncanny Times,
single work
essay
'I want to take you on a journey from the planet to the parish, from the global to the local, from the Earth in space to the earth beneath our feet, from the lonely glowing speck of dust at the edge of the galaxy to the soil that we kneel upon and sift through our fingers and to which we ultimately return, dust to dust. These are contrasting perspectives of our home - one vertiginous, the other intimate; one from the outside in deep space and the other from the inside in deep time - on very different scales but still connected. And we have to see them as connected if we are to live respectfully and sustainably as part of nature.'' (Publication abstract)
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A Change in the Political Weather?: Forecasting the Future of Climate Policy,
single work
prose
'In recent years, a figure has begun to emerge from the dark recesses of Australia's colonial history - one of the most progressive and courageous people from Queensland's violent pastoral and logging frontier. Danish-born Carl Feilberg was a journalist and fiction writer of elegance, an environmentalist and Indigenous rights campaigner who confronted Queensland's politicians and their vested pastoral and logging interests with ugly truths about their killing of the country and its custodians. Feilberg is colonial Queensland's most notable early non-Indigenous human rights activist, and perhaps this continent's first campaigning environmentalist; yet he has remained an obscure figure until recently because most of his advocacy appeared anonymously, without by-line, in a range of Queensland newspapers.' (Publication abstract)
- Geebung, near Braidwoodi"This is barefoot country", single work poetry (p. 88)
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We All Took a Stand : Margaret River Versus the Coal Industry,
single work
essay
'Nobody looks very comfortable. There are four faces, angled inelegantly, only one inclined to engage with the camera, the attached bodies mostly submerged in a hot, foaming tub. There are two men and two women. The picture is from an age before digital cameras were everywhere, so the image hasn't been altered and as far as I know exists only in slowly fading semi-gloss hard copy. It is a scene more awkward than salacious: only one drink is in evidence and the expressions of the four twenty-somethings reflect self-consciousness more than any release of inhibitions. Everyone is wearing bathers and there's nothing scandalous to see here. As one of that group, I remember the night wryly.' (Publication summary)
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Life and Death on Dyarubbin: Reports from the Hawkesbury River,
single work
essay
'On the riverbank at the old Sackville Aboriginal Reserve on Dyarubbin there-s a stone obelisk. It seems permanent and solid, but it has a habit of slipping out of landscape and memory. Erected in 1952, the obelisk was later swallowed whole by lantana, and when found again during a clean-up in the 1970s, nobody could recall anything about it. There is a sense of quiet reverence to it - this tall, solitary monument dark with age, like a gravestone. But perhaps more striking is the fantastical old fig tree nearby, its interwoven roots wrapped over a massive rectangular rock.' (Publication abstract)
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Rebuilding Reefs, Restoring Memory : At Work in the Waters of History,
single work
essay
'As a historian I'm not used to this sort of archive.
'It's a freezing spring morning in Clifton Springs, near Geelong, and I'm elbow deep in shellfish in a suburban backyard. We're measuring mussels: sixty-five millimetres long, twenty-nine millimetres wide, fifteen millimetres deep; fifty-six millimetres long, twenty millimetres wide, nine millimetres deep. On and on it goes, hundreds of times. Then we move to oysters: fifteen millimetres; fourteen millimetres, three millimetres...' (Publication abstract) -
The Butterfly Effect: Stalking a Giant in PNG,
single work
prose
'Sometime in 1906, butterfly hunter Albert Stewart Meek disembarks from an old pearler named 'Hekla' on the north-east coast of New Guinea. He unloads his provisions and tools of trade: killing bottles with cyanide of potassium for small insects, syringes with acetic acid for larger ones, non-rusting pins for setting his trophies, cork-lined collecting cases. He waves off the boat with instructions to the skipper to return for him in three months.' (Publication abstract)
- Tamby East, single work short story (p. 125-132)
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Eating Turtle : Changing Narratives of the Normal,
single work
prose
'One night late in 2017, I knelt on a coral cay on the Great Barrier Reef, watching a green turtle lay eggs. It was 2 am. The moon was high, the sea flickered silver. A few gulls and black noddies called from casuarina trees; otherwise, the beach was quiet.' (Publication abstract)
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Every Path Tells : Traversing the Landscape of Memory,
single work
autobiography
'When I was in my middle thirties, I abruptly abandoned a long-term relationship and impulsively moved from Sydney to Melbourne, having accepted a job as a senior policy advisor on affirmative action for which I was manifestly unfit.' (Publication abstract)
- The Secret to Trouti"Sitting with empty creels", single work poetry (p. 162)
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How to Draw a Tree: A Matter of Perspective,
single work
autobiography
'Depending on your definitions, this particular essay has taken three months to write and the book of essays that it's a part of has taken - again, depending on your definitions - five years. Saplings grow far more quickly than my manuscript has. The production timeline of your average physical book is easily long enough for an entire ecosystem to be destroyed. This should make me write faster, but in fact the opposite has happened.' (Publication abstract)
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Valuing Country : Let Me Count Three Ways,
single work
essay
'It was reading Alexis Wright's novel 'Carpentaria' (Giramondo, 2006) in 2007 that introduced me to the idea of 'country': land as a living being with meaning, personality, will, a temper and ancient reciprocal relationships with its people governed by law. This made sense to me. I've felt the living presence of this land and I care deeply about how we treat it. I'm especially interested in how our thinking about land shapes our behaviour towards it. And I've been preoccupied by ideas of country and two new ways of conceiving it - 'natural capital' and 'rights of nature' - that seek to address the many ecological crises currently afflicting our planet.' (Publication abstract)
- Shape-shifti"In the light that steals across dead valleys like a shallow wave", single work poetry (p. 192)
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Ghost Species and Shadow Places: Seabirds and Plastic Pollution on Lord Howe Island,
single work
prose
'I want to walk the shadow places. These are sites of extraction and production: think coal-seam gas fields and their attendant communities, think eroded landscapes and marine dead-zones, think sweatshops - all the places from which we extract resources, or to which we outsource disorder, risk and pollution. They provide for our material comfort, yet in the words of philosopher Val Plumwood, they are places 'we don't know about, don't want to know about, and in a commodity regime don't ever need to know about. ' Is it possible to expand our responsibilities beyond care for home and the places we love, to the degraded, broken and overlooked?' (Publication abstract)
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The Costs of Consumption : Dispatches from a Planet in Decline,
single work
essay
'Last October, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature released the 2018 'Living Planet Report'. Published biennially since 1998, the report offers a comprehensive overview of ecosystems and biodiversity worldwide.' (Publication abstract)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Feeling the Forest
2020
single work
prose
— Appears in: Meanjin , Autumn vol. 79 no. 1 2020;'The other day someone told me one of those amazing German compound words: Waldeinsamkeit. It means the feeling of being alone in the forest, in a calm and peaceful way—communing with nature, if you like.' (Introduction)
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Natural Selection
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 9 March 2019; (p. 18)
— Review of Griffith Review no. 63 January 2019 periodical issue'A wide range of scientists, farmers and writers argue we each should do something to protect the world that sustains us all, even if others don’t, writes Geordie Williamson' (Introduction)
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Natural Selection
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 9 March 2019; (p. 18)
— Review of Griffith Review no. 63 January 2019 periodical issue'A wide range of scientists, farmers and writers argue we each should do something to protect the world that sustains us all, even if others don’t, writes Geordie Williamson' (Introduction)
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Feeling the Forest
2020
single work
prose
— Appears in: Meanjin , Autumn vol. 79 no. 1 2020;'The other day someone told me one of those amazing German compound words: Waldeinsamkeit. It means the feeling of being alone in the forest, in a calm and peaceful way—communing with nature, if you like.' (Introduction)