Issue Details: First known date: 2020... no. 7 2020 of Swamphen : A Journal of Cultural Ecology est. 2020 Swamphen : A Journal of Cultural Ecology
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Swamphen emerges from the air, lands and seas that form the stories of the First Nation peoples of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. We attend to these communities’ narratives as a first principle. We acknowledge the unceded territories on which we have worked, to produce this issue of Swamphen, and we pay our respects to those territories’ Elders, past, present and emerging. This respect is imbued in our namesake, swamphen, a bird active in this region’s ground, skies and waters.' (Grounding Story Swamphen Collective, introduction)

Notes

  • Only literary material within AustLit's scope individually indexed. Other material in this issue includes: 

    Whakapapa: Stories through Time and Space by Paora Tapsell

    Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology by Astrida Neimanis (2019) by 

    Marion May Campbell

     

Contents

* Contents derived from the 2020 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Story(telling), Thom Van Dooren , single work essay
'Debbie taught me about stories. I was lucky enough to have her as my PhD supervisor, and then as a collaborator and friend. Over the fifteen years that we worked together, she slowly, sometimes painfully, taught me to tell stories. At the same time, she taught me that stories are more than a mode of expression, they are a means of understanding, of thinking, of attending, of relating, and so a profoundly important opening into responsibility.' (Introduction)
Reflections on Environmental History and the Work of Deborah Bird Rose, Emily O'Gorman , single work essay
'I have been engaging with Deborah Bird Rose’s work in a project that aims to bring together environmental history and the broader environmental humanities to examine the past and possible futures of wetlands in the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia. I have particularly been engaging with two concepts she developed in conversation with others: ‘will-to-destruction’ and ‘deep colonising’ (‘Angel’ 67-78; ‘Land’ 6-13). These concepts are connected through histories of British colonisation and are relevant to environmental historians more widely, in Australia and other places.'

 (Introduction)

Debbie’s Gift, Kate Wright , single work essay
'I attended Debbie’s last public lecture at the Australian Museum in Sydney in 2018. I remember her saying ‘the gift of life is a gift that must keep moving’ (‘Gifts’).'

 (Introduction)

The Edges, Michael Adams , single work essay
'My personal introduction to Debbie was through learning about writing: twenty years ago she stood in front of a diverse group of postgrads and read from work in progress. She lyrically described driving across the Alligator River Flood Plain in Kakadu National Park in the late afternoon with an Aboriginal man, who says a version of ‘Hey Debbie, if you look out the window to the east you’ll see a cool thing’. She looks out the window of the Toyota, and the dark edge of Burrungkuy – the Nourlangie Rock escarpment – is lit up with tiny glittering sparkles of light. The man laughingly explains that it is tourists’ camera flashes, as they photograph the sunset from one of the most famous Indigenous rock art galleries in the world.'  (Introduction)
Ingratitude in Gratitude to Deborah Bird Rose, Jennifer Hamilton , single work essay

'This is a story of how Debbie Rose grounded my research in unlikely ways and how I repaid her by writing something critically provocative about the field she helped found: the environmental humanities. I don’t feel bad about this, which is odd given my learned tendency towards feelings of guilt. But as a strange kind of free verse elegy I want to explore the ambivalent state I find myself in here: on one hand grieving a lost mentor and friend, and on the other feeling committed to my critical position.'  (Introduction)

Ineluctable Resolve, Kim Satchell , single work essay

'The legacy of Deborah Bird Rose’s scholarship and life has come into focus at a critical moment when the ecological crisis no longer appears to the mainstream as a future threat but is increasingly becoming understood as a current reality. Debbie loomed in my life as an exemplary figure and consummate thinker, who became influential in my nascent understanding of the riddle that had troubled my adolescent intuition, in the form of the unfolding ecology of the Anthropocene. Firstly, as a person in print, then through an invigorating correspondence as a mentor and colleague, finally and more importantly as a dear friend and confidant.' (Introduction)

The Ecological Poetics of Deborah Bird Rose : Analysis and Application, Stuart Cooke , single work criticism

'In the essay that follows I outline and then respond to the poetic qualities of Deborah Bird Rose’s thinking. Trained as an anthropologist, Rose was a highly original scholar. She pioneered ecological ethnography by focusing on the links between social and ecological justice, in particular with the Yarralin and Lingarra communities in the Northern Territory, and she is a founding figure in the environmental humanities, multispecies studies and extinction studies. Her sustained interest in poetry and the poetic imagination made her ever aware of the power of ‘deep stories’; Rose wanted always to be close to ‘the cadences of the[ir] poetry’ (Wild Dog 16). Unlike many scholars in the humanities, for whom writing and reading are dominated by genres of prose, references to poetry and to contemporary poets are common in Rose’s work, and her writing regularly gestures towards the poetic. Rose’s work is vital for ecological criticism that attempts to grapple with the drastic cultural and climactic changes of this century, particularly for criticism with decolonising ambitions.' (Introduction)

How Mangroves Story : On Being a Filter Feeder, Kate Judith , single work prose

'It is a drowsy Saturday morning and I’m out early, walking between road and fences, through human-oriented suburbs, to the mangroves at Lime Kiln Bay on the Georges River in Sydney’s southern suburbs. As I enter the mangroves along the boardwalk here, I move into a darker world, one of twisted trees, diffuse light and the strange scuttling of crabs. Settling my attention into the mangroves, the sounds of joggers and dog walkers fade, along with the expectations of a world divided into solid land and fluid water. I become alert to mangrove movements, mangrove light. What matters changes. I realise I want to know how high the tide is and which way it is moving.' (Introduction)

Storying with Groundwater, Deborah Wardle , single work criticism

'Subterranean waters enable life. Humans, non-human animals and enmeshed ecosystems of more-than-human entities, such as river and creek sides, mound springs and swamps, interact with groundwater in a myriad of complex relationships. Hundreds of Australian inland towns and communities rely on bore water. Population counts of people dependent on aquifers across Australia, on the Asian and African continents, in the Middle East and across the Americas reach into the billions. Despite this, there are few literary expressions of groundwater’s potency and vulnerability in the Australian imaginary (Wardle). This essay draws upon fictional portrayals of groundwater from the climate fiction manuscript, Why We Cry (Wardle), to suggest the ways that climate fiction might make a small shift from the ‘derangement’ of blindness to subterranean places through the novel’s endeavours to osmotically affect readers.' (Introduction)

Responsive Topographies : Reading the Ontopoetics in Mullumbimby and The Swan Book, Stephen Dickie , single work criticism

'The ways in which European settlers have disrupted Australian lands, and disrupted the relationship that First Nations people have to Indigenous Country, are massive and manifold. This despoliation has deep and lasting implications because Country relies on a dialogue between people and place, and this dialogue is based on millennia of accumulated knowledges. Mitigating the despoliation requires the acknowledgement of this dialogue’s importance, and one mode of making it legible, particularly to European settlers, is through works of Indigenous literature.' (Introduction) 

Portraits of Change : Photo-Storytelling Across Bangladesh, China and Australia, Michael Chew , single work criticism

'Trained in art photography, I initially hoped that my own photography would inspire positive environmental change. However I soon felt uncomfortable with putting my energy towards conventional nature photography, which tends to rely on simplified and polarised emotions of either fear in images of despoiled landscapes or hope in the form of pristine wilderness (Manzo 206) that can serve to reproduce essentialised ideas of nature and culture which are becoming increasingly untenable in the Anthropocene era. In contrast, I gradually found through research, and my own grassroots projects that participatory photography methods—such as photovoice—have the potential to generate rich locally-grounded photo-stories which open up deeper engagements with the complexities of nature-culture relations (Gustafson and Al-Sumait 9).' (Introduction)

The Flight of Birds : A Novel in Twelve Stories by Joshua Lobb (2019), Rowena Lennox , single work review
— Review of The Flight of Birds Joshua Lobb , 2019 single work novel ;

'This book feels good. The cover, designed by Miguel Yamin and Alexandra Guzmán, is smooth, matt laminated, with a luminous blue watercolour background that fades in places to white—designating clouds, perhaps, or sunspots? Three black cockatoos fly towards the top right-hand corner of the front cover. They are representations of the three black cockatoos who, in flight, came eye to eye with author Joshua Lobb as he walked across a rail bridge in North Wollongong, before they dropped and flew under the bridge.' (Introduction)

Writing Belonging at the Millennium: Notes from the Field on Settler-Colonial Place by Emily Potter (2019) Hayley Singer, Hayley Singer , single work review
— Review of Writing Belonging at the Millennium : Notes from the Field on Settler-Colonial Place Emily Potter , 2019 multi chapter work criticism ;

'History, Emily Potter proposes in Writing Belonging at the Millennium: Notes from the Field on Settler-Colonial Place, ‘does not end when we stop telling a particular story of a particular time’ (146). The stories sit right here, in the ground. As Potter shows, they radiate in unpredictable ways. They continue to mark the present no matter how colonial culture attempts to encyst narratives of Indigenous knowledge, cultural practice and unextinguished connection to Indigenous Country.' (Introduction)

False Claims of Colonial Thieves by Charmaine Papertalk Green and John Kinsella (2018)., Jeanine Leane , single work review
— Review of False Claims of Colonial Thieves Charmaine Papertalk-Green , John Kinsella , 2018 selected work poetry ;

'False Claims of Colonial Thieves is the founding myth of colonial Australia. Yamaji poet Charmaine Papertalk Green and settler poet John Kinsella launch into the long overdue conversation Australia needs to have between the Country’s First Peoples and the settler-invaders. Australia needs this radical intervention in publishing to move forward in dialogue with First Nations people.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 28 Apr 2020 10:44:34
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