{"title":"Cultivating Chlorophilia","authors":"Heather Hesterman","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.8.16705","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.8.16705","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Chlorophilia, a human’s love or attraction to trees and plants (van Biesen), promises an alternative poetic encounter with nature that provokes the question: Can art mediated experiences influence concern and care for flora and the environment? Drawing upon art projects—including Melbourne City Council’s Urban Forest Visual Map (2013) in which people emailed individual trees—I examine how exchanges between humans and plants, mediated by art, can result in emergent states that escape the bounds of the predictable. Focussing on practice within an eco-social paradigm, this paper is historically contextualized by Agnes Denes’ and Katie Paterson’s art projects, where cultivation and growth stands as an essential action. Furthermore, my own projects in Moonee Valley, Craigieburn and Melbourne offer insights into this enquiry via direct observation, reflexivity and practice-based research. I argue that encouraging an engagement with nature via haptic and ocular modes of art practice may facilitate a deeper engagement with, and/or increased appreciation for, flora. Creating circumstances within both gallery and public contexts to engage people with plants, as real and imaginary propositions, offers community members of all ages a mediated pathway into participation and conversation. I speculate that these encounters may assist in establishing connections and creating multispecies relationships in both the short and long term. \u0000","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123615237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Relationscapes of Extinction, and More Life","authors":"Louise Boscacci","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.8.16712","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.8.16712","url":null,"abstract":"3:20 a.m. Friday, 14 August 2020: Wildes Meadow, the Illawarra highlands, Wodi Wodi First Peoples and Yuin nation Countries, south-eastern Australia. A Boobook is calling. This sonorous guide in refrain, before and after the Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies conference in Tāmaki Makaurau, some eight months later. Two days ago, the SARS-CoV-2 lockdown lifted in New South Wales. Only now can you light a match without visceral trepidation. Without a gut return to the climate crisis inferno of the 2019–2020 summer. Anthropocene-in-the-making? Yes. No. These are Viral Bushranger Times. Anything can happen now. \u0000The shadows trace of the Zincland project is one mode of more-than-human wit(h)nessing that I have introduced elsewhere from an ecology and ethos of open field practice where contemporary art and writing converges with the feminist, decolonising environmental humanities and sciences. Following the conference, I had a plan to travel south, to Pōneke/Wellington and Ōtepoti/Dunedin, to continue a linked project of engaging with naturecultures of extinction, to wit(h)ness two sites of multispecies recovery and ecological restoration. If Zincland took me to Aotearoa, I had no inkling of what I might encounter in this onward momentum of and from the shadows trace. So, let me take you there. Let me pick up this passage of wit(h)nessing and translation one day after leaving Tāmaki Makaurau. ","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126389732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ineluctable Resolve","authors":"Kim M Satchell","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.7.14364","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.7.14364","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114778986","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Portraits of Change: Photo-Storytelling Across Bangladesh, China and Australia","authors":"Michael Chew","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.7.14369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.7.14369","url":null,"abstract":"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).","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126436644","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology by Astrida Neimanis (2019)","authors":"M. Campbell","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.7.14371","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.7.14371","url":null,"abstract":"To read Astrida Neimanis’s Bodies of Water is to immerse oneself in a fluid poetics, contemplating the teeming, virtual infinity of lifeforms for which water, in its myriad incarnations, supplies the medium of connection and dispersal; of gestation and differentiation through space-time. Through its feminist posthuman phenomenological lens, this work recasts the intertextual net eloquently and generously, re-inflecting a polyphony of feminist, philosophical, poetic, and scientific voices to address our planetary emergency in the wake of ecocidal extractionist and consumerist practices. Neimanis’s project seeks to ‘inaugurate’ new ‘ontologies [that…] are not only about correcting a phallologocentric understanding of bodies, but also about developing imaginaries that might allow us to relate differently’ (Neimanis 11). ","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"99 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117235097","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Edges","authors":"Michael Adams","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.7.14362","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.7.14362","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"90 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114386049","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Whakapapa: Stories through Time and Space","authors":"Paora Tapsell","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.7.14358","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.7.14358","url":null,"abstract":"All my academic writings and publications have grown out of an emotional engagement with my field of study: the Arawa people. By capturing moments in prose – reflexive ethnography on first approach – I create a layer of narrative continuity that is galvanised through encoded memories. This ‘‘whakapapa” is like archaeological stratification: providing genealogically ordered layers of code transmitted through time and space. Decades after writing I can ‘‘relive” my embedded memories and recognise the repeating patterns, codes and algorithms that underpin humanity itself from my uniquely Te Arawa informed perspective of the universe.","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116871759","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Ecological Poetics of Deborah Bird Rose: Analysis and Application","authors":"S. Cooke","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.7.14365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.7.14365","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116484354","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Debbie’s Gift","authors":"Kathleen Wright","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.7.14361","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.7.14361","url":null,"abstract":"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’). For Debbie, the gift of life was a way of expressing the complex entanglement of ethics, time, relationality, entropy, energy, memory, culture, and inheritance, in living, mortal systems. The gift of life is not something we choose or something we can opt out of. The gift is fundamental for survival as living systems weave webs of togetherness in a planet that tends toward dissolution. The gift, Debbie wrote elsewhere, ‘is the way life evades entropy’ (‘Multispecies’ 136).","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"76 7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127394572","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ingratitude in Gratitude to Deborah Bird Rose","authors":"J. Hamilton","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.7.14363","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.7.14363","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117278186","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}