Issue Details: First known date: 2023... 2023 Aboriginal Australian Picturebooks : Ceremonial Listening to Plants
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Walking through the Australian bush is a walk through a living library. From the moment the Ancestors moved through Country, creating all the sentient beings, we can still see today, and those that we can’t, Australian plants and trees have held both physical and psychic, tangible and sacred knowledges. This chapter explores the possible portals of access that are opened to hearing the stories and languages of Australian plants and trees when shared by Aboriginal Australian peoples through the form of the picturebook. Such contemporary Australian books weave with ancient ways of knowing to create nurturing spaces for all readers to see, touch, smell, hold and taste the world around them. Through their own forms of Story and Language, plants and trees give insight into medicines, tools and food, as well as kinship, seasons and ceremony. When woven with picturebook modalities, they encourage embodied relationships with non-human and more-than-human elements of Country.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Storying Plants in Australian Children's and Young Adult Literature : Roots and Winged Seeds Melanie Duckworth (editor), Annika Herb (editor), Cham : Palgrave Macmillan , 2023 27274711 2023 anthology criticism

    'Storying Plants in Australian Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Roots and Winged Seeds explores cultural and historical aspects of the representation of plants in Australian children’s and young adult literature, encompassing colonial, postcolonial, and Indigenous perspectives. While plants tend to be backgrounded as of less narrative interest than animals and humans, this book, in conversation with the field of critical plant studies, approaches them as living beings worthy of attention. Australia is home to over 20,000 species of native plants – from pungent Eucalypts to twisting mangroves, from tiny orchids to spiky, silvery spinifex. Indigenous Australians have lived with, relied upon, and cultivated these plants for many thousands of years. When European explorers and colonists first invaded Australia, unfamiliar species of plants captured their imagination. Vulnerable to bushfires, climate change, and introduced species, plants continue to occupy fraught but vital places in Australian ecologies, texts, and cultures. Discussing writers from Ambelin Kwaymullina and Aunty Joy Murphy to May Gibbs and Ethel Turner, and embracing transnational perspectives from Ukraine, Poland, and Aotearoa New Zealand, Storying Plants addresses the stories told about plants but also the stories that plants themselves tell, engaging with the wide-ranging significance of plants in Australian children’s and Young Adult literature.'  (Publication summary)


     
    Cham : Palgrave Macmillan , 2023
    pg. 35-50
Last amended 13 Dec 2023 14:03:18
35-50 Aboriginal Australian Picturebooks : Ceremonial Listening to Plantssmall AustLit logo
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