Grounding Story

Swamphen emerges from the air, lands and seas that form the stories of the First Nation peoples of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. We attend to these communities’ narratives as a first principle. We acknowledge the unceded territories on which we have worked, to produce this issue of Swamphen, and we pay our respects to those territories’ Elders, past, present and emerging. This respect is imbued in our namesake, swamphen, a bird active in this region’s ground, skies and waters. As volume seven, this issue of Swamphen forms part of its predecessor journal, the Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology. We are indebted to CA Cranston and her team who founded the ASLEC-ANZ journal. The theme of this issue, Grounding Story, has its origins in the 2019 ASLEC-ANZ conference and the writings we have gathered continue the conversations had there, about the importance of grounded story-telling in a time of crisis.