Cirrus@Austlit

'Greater Western Sydney is unceded Aboriginal land, Country reciprocally caring and cared for by Darug, Dharawal and Gundungurra Peoples over tens of thousands of years. The region is currently home for more than 2.5 million people, with significant further population increase anticipated, facilitated by administrative documents such as the Cumberland Plain Conservation Plan. This pervasive desire for ongoing sprawling development is supported by ‘antiecological’ thinking creating ‘productionist timescapes’. This desire conflicts with the fact that Greater Western Sydney is a diverse place that is cared for by and cares for many: a beautiful and diverse Country, described by Western sciences as Cumberland Plain woodland, a natural world home for myriad non-human beings. This article reads a variety of contemporary literary texts, considering their differing attitudes to and representation of Care for Country. It identifies a continuum of placemaking practices on unceded Land, from the proprietorial, through varying visions for intercultural futures, to those committed to #landback. A commitment to intercultural practices of Care for Country is discernible, creating more just and equitable futures in the present. This article traces Western Sydney literature’s thinking on the entanglement and intra-action of human and more-than-human worlds. It concludes by observing this intra-action in practice.' (Publication abstract) 

'Australia has a long history of epidemics. In 1983, Noel Butlin went so far as to argue that colonial Australia was constituted on the consequences of epidemic. Butlin was referring to smallpox, which had catastrophic consequences when encountered on the east coast by Indigenous Australians with limited or no herd immunity. This was ‘our original aggression’. Australia’s history prior to the twentieth century is punctuated by the introduction of diseases which took a heavy toll, especially on vulnerable segments of the population. Until the years after World War Two, infectious diseases were commonplace in a way that has generally been forgotten in the sanitised and healthy twenty-first century.' (Introduction)