'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)
'Early on a July morning in 1983 I drove with Ruth Lipscomb from Darwin to Jabiru. She was visiting the school there and had offered to take me along. She picked me up from my motel around 6 am. Just before we reached the Alligator River, she pulled off the road and produced a flask of hot tea and a packet of sandwiches that she had thoughtfully prepared. As we stood by the roadside she drew my attention to the song of a distant bird. ‘People around here’, she said, ‘when they hear that bird know that a particular tree is in flower and coming into fruit’. I do not recall either the name of the bird or of the tree. But what has stuck with me was the sudden awareness of the importance to a hunter-gatherer people of their knowledge of the signs of seasonal change around them. They lived and still live by a calendar not divided into mathematically determined months and seasons but one they can read in the appearance of winds and cloud, in the songs of the bird life around them, in the behaviour of the animals, reptiles and insects, and in the flowering and fruiting of the plants growing in their country. ' (Introduction)
'Early on a July morning in 1983 I drove with Ruth Lipscomb from Darwin to Jabiru. She was visiting the school there and had offered to take me along. She picked me up from my motel around 6 am. Just before we reached the Alligator River, she pulled off the road and produced a flask of hot tea and a packet of sandwiches that she had thoughtfully prepared. As we stood by the roadside she drew my attention to the song of a distant bird. ‘People around here’, she said, ‘when they hear that bird know that a particular tree is in flower and coming into fruit’. I do not recall either the name of the bird or of the tree. But what has stuck with me was the sudden awareness of the importance to a hunter-gatherer people of their knowledge of the signs of seasonal change around them. They lived and still live by a calendar not divided into mathematically determined months and seasons but one they can read in the appearance of winds and cloud, in the songs of the bird life around them, in the behaviour of the animals, reptiles and insects, and in the flowering and fruiting of the plants growing in their country. ' (Introduction)
'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)
