Cirrus@Austlit

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'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)

'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)

'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)

'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)

'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)

'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) 

'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)

'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)

'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 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)