Ecological Australia: Ecocriticism in the Arts
Public Lecture 3 October 2013. Venue: Theatre A, Elisabeth Murdoch (Building 134), University of Melbourne 6 to 7pm
Lecture followed by Q&A
Bob Brown (public lecture): ‘Creative responses to the urgent call of our fellow species’
Australian forests are under severe threat. World heritage listings are no longer secure in Tasmania. In Victoria, less than two hours’
drive from Melbourne, the tallest flowering trees in the world are being felled for pulp and pallets. Species are disappearing. People
power can put a halt to this irretrievable and unnecessary damage, with artwork having a vital role in this resistance. Poetry,
photographs and other creative responses can rise above the media silence on Earth damage. My own photographic practice has been
an essential part of my contribution to the environmental movement over the last thirty years.
Symposium 4 October 2013. Venue: Theatre C, Old Arts Building, University of Melbourne, 9am to 5pm.
Registration (9:00am-9:30am)
Session one: thinking country (9:30-10:30am)
Ken Gelder (participating chair): ‘The Problem of Distinction: Early Thoughts about Native, Feral and Introduced Species in
Australia’
In Australia, species classification and species extinction happened almost simultaneously: someone like John Gould is important
here, for example. Species visibility thus brings two competing but intertwined realities into play. I want to look very briefly at a
colonial animal fable, E.J. Brady’s ‘The Friar Bird’s Sermon’ (1897), which works by gathering native species together, making them
visible (even allowing them to ‘speak’), and classifying them: but all within the cultural logics of colonial modernity. Brady went on
to publish the best-selling paean to Australian settlement and land development, Unlimited Australia (1918).
Deborah Bird Rose (virtual) ‘Beauty, Stability, Integrity’
In this ‘Age of Loneliness’, to use E. O. Wilson’s term, many politicians are taking up the positive duty of destroying all that is
beautiful in the natural world. Eco-aesthetics – the beauty of the biosphere in its self-organising and self-repairing integrity – is under
attack both as collateral damage and with direct hits. This paper discusses ideas of world heritage in the conjoined contexts of country
and ecocide.
Rachael Swain: ‘Dance and Country an Uneasy Ecology’
This paper will discuss the findings of the Australian intercultural Indigenous dance theatre company, Marrugeku's first research lab
into dance as a practice of Listening to Country at a time of global environmental change. Engaging with the some of the controversial
environmental and industrial issues facing Aboriginal Australians living in the Kimberley today, I will discuss our practice based and
conceptual concerns of Listening to Country in today’s global environmental issues of climate change and industrial development. I
will present documentation of the company's practice lead research and recent symposium held in Broome and sketch the plans for
Marrugeku's new production Cut the Sky, as results of the research.
Session two: the post-Enlightened imagination (1:00pm-2.30pm)
Peter Otto (participating chair): ‘The geography of loss: worlds, environments, and the post-enlightened imagination’
Historians of the post-enlightened imagination, whether celebrating or debunking its claims, usually describe it as an expressive,
productive, and potentially transgressive power, whose characteristic activity is the creation of worlds, whether imagined or actual.
The same view is dominant in Blake studies and Romanticism more generally. But as this short paper will suggest, in Blake’s oeuvre
this represents only one aspect of an imagination (and of the art in which it is embodied) that attempts to open such worlds to a
complexity (an environment) that exceeds them. Aesthetics accordingly becomes entwined with politics and ecology; and questions
concerning the present world (endorsed by God, reason, or imagination) are framed by the reductive geography (and paradoxically
also the creative potential) of loss.
Kate Rigby: ‘New Materialisms and Post-Secular Possibilities: Australian Perspectives’
In this paper, I argue that the so-called ‘new materialisms’ are conducive to a post-secular turn in contemporary ecological thought
and practice; one that resonates with both the post-enlightened imagination of European Romanticism and the non-modern ontoepistemology of Indigenous Australians. I then explore some of the pathways towards a material spirituality that have been opened up
within the Australian ecological humanities, focusing in particular on Val Plumwood’s and Debbie Rose’s Indigenous-inspired
‘philosophical animism’; Freya Mathews’ renovated ‘panpsychism’ and ontopoetics; and my own forays into Christian ecotheology in
the process tradition.
Grace Moore: ‘By the Blazing Firelight: Campfires and Portable Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century Australia’
Cultural theorists working on the place of fire in the popular imagination have hypothesized that fire in the hearth and the oven
combine to make a home, as distinct from a mere dwelling (see, for instance Luis Fernández-Galiano, Fire and Memory). In this
paper I shall consider the representation of the campfire in nineteenth-century Australian settler literature. Reading the campfire as a
form of portable, yet temporary, domesticity I shall examine its importance in shaping ideas of ‘mateship’ in the bush, drawing settlers
closer to their new environments, and taming the landscape. Interpreting the lighting of a campfire as an act of domestication, I will
argue that it offered settlers an illusion of mastery over their new environment.
Alexis Harley: ‘Euphemism and elegy: nineteenth-century natural history, extinction and empire’
Nineteenth-century theories of extinction palliated the disappearance of whole species as a necessary step towards an evolutionary
perfection. Meanwhile, early Darwinians like Alfred Wallace saw species migration as putting improving selective pressure both on
the migrant species and on the inhabitants of the receiving (or invaded) terrain. In this paper, I read these accounts against the massive
species’ transfer, and the slew of extinctions, resulting from Britain’s imperial invasion of Australia, and argue that the optimism of
Victorian evolutionary thinking was enabled by a studied refusal to recognise the ecological effects of an unprecedented imperial
machinery.
Lunch
Tom Ford: ‘On the poetic meaning of the sentence ‘it is raining’’
What does ‘it’ name in the sentence ‘it is raining’? Twentieth-century philosophers suggested we best understand this ‘it’ as an
environment: it is impersonal despite describing a situation centred on the speaker; that situation is singular, yet only vaguely
delimitable; its meaning remains obscure even as one reaches for an umbrella. But as Paul Valéry observed, ‘it’ works differently in
poetry. In poetic language, it is ‘nonusage—the not saying ‘it is raining’—which is [the poet’s] business.’ What does saying, or not
saying, this sentence mean poetically? To address this question, I look at a fragment from P.B. Shelley, ‘The fitful alternations of the
rain.’
Tom Bristow: ‘Theorizing seed banks and rethinking herbaria’
This paper will whizz through Latour and Foucault to address whether the structuring logic of imperial capital is an appropriate lens
through which to read contemporary compressions of space and suspensions of time manifest in today’s spectacles and functional
artefacts. This short paper provides a biopolitical reading of the ‘Gallery for Gymnosperms’ (Kew Gardens, 1904) and the Millennium
Seed Bank Partnership’s ‘Seed Cathedral’ (Shanghai Expo, 2010). Kew Gardens’ plant exchange programmes were intended to
strengthen and rationalize the resources of empire. Today’s seed banks register a new form of economic botany for they are politicized
in terms of food security and conservation interests. I think of these as wild memory formalised in humanist terms.
Poetry reading (2:30pm-3:00pm)
Tom Bristow (introduction)
John Kinsella (virtual): ‘A reading from jam tree gully
John Kinsella will read poems from his home at Jam Tree Gully, with an emphasis on the more-than-human world, spatial relations of
the pastoral, and empathy in the anthropocene.
Session three: politics, practice and the arts (3:00pm-3:45pm)
Kate Darian-Smith (participating chair): ‘The heritages of our ecological past’
In this brief commentary, I explore the material and intangible traces of our ecological past. How can we understand the impact of
European colonialism on the Australian environment, and the evolution of European agricultural practices over time, through visual
and textual sources and material culture? Drawing on a couple of examples from public collecting institutions, I’ll focus on narratives
of agricultural innovation and species specialization and how these heritage objects (and collections) might contribute to our
understandings of ecological biodiversity today and in the future.
Lauren Richards: ‘Why worry? The strategic role of emotions in responding to the eco-crisis’
As much as climate change necessitates rapid, transformational responses, it imposes profound limitations on our ability to know,
plan, or positively intervene in the complex systems we are part of. A ‘super wicked problem’, climate change is at once global,
proven and shared, and a context-specific, ambiguous and muted influence on dynamic local responses. It is real and constructed,
known and unknown, and requires both informed and imaginative responses. This paper draws on the climate narratives of Australian
farmers to explore the tension between humility and insistence in climate change messages, and reflects on the challenges and need for
eco-criticism.
Kate Auty: 'Using visuals in communicating biodiversity messages’ (in absentia)
The Office of the Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability is required to make reports publicly available and 'publish on the
internet'. When the Office was established in 2003 this may have seemed like a relatively fresh undertaking and even an energy
saving device. Throughout this decade the science community has continued the evolution of its use of and recourse to communication
tools, and remains very clearly of the view that its communicative idioms need constant refreshing. In this presentation I discuss the
route this Office has taken to address these new challenges to present reports in ways which include the data, provide information and
encourage the acquisition of knowledge.
Afternoon tea
Session four: the arts, affect and ethics (4:00pm-5:00pm)
Denise Varney (participating chair): ‘Ecological theatre: embodying environmental conflict’
Kate Grenville’s The Secret River is recognized for confronting the violence perpetrated on Aboriginal people by settlers in the
nineteenth century. However, less well recognized, is its detailed account of the cultural politics of land use. The stage adaption
dramatises this conflict in ways that suggest that theatre’s power (political, affective, visceral) lies in its capacity to rework the
narrative as embodied action involving environment and race. Adapted by an Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cast and crew, the
possibilities for ethical spectatorship are arguably heightened in this new rendition eight years after the novel’s publication.
Linda Williams: ‘What Lies Beneath: Cultural economies of affect, ocean acidification and the vulnerability of marine species.’
This paper is part of a wider project addressing the question of whether the problem of ocean acidification and erosion of marine
biodiversity may be revealed affectively as cultural formations. Rather than renegotiating the problematic terrain of environmental
aesthetics, I turn instead to a preliminary model of an inter-species economy of affects arising from lives of creatures concealed
beneath the surface of the ocean, and the concealed connections with nonhuman life that are deeply embedded beneath our common
conceptions of human subjectivity.
Freya Mathews: ‘Art as Ontopoetics’
I shall argue that the deepest reason for our affective and hence ethical disconnect from the living world is the specular and purely
representational subject-object epistemology that underlies the theoretical imagination. From this diagnosis, it follows that we will
only be moved to act decisively in defence of the biosphere when the world rises up from the passive plane of representation and
actively joins us in the making of meaning. In other words, only when our relationship with reality becomes two-way, a subjectsubject transaction, a call and response, can we possibly escape the solipsism of our epistemic condition and become genuinely
engaged with reality. I shall trace the implications of this thesis for the meaning and practice of art.
Brief biographies
Auty, Kate: Kate Auty was appointed by the Victorian Government in June 2009, for a five year term, as the Commissioner for
Environmental Sustainability, Victoria. She is an Adjunct Professor at the LaTrobe Institute for Social and Environmental
Sustainability Centre within the Office of the Pro Vice-Chancellor (Sustainability) at La Trobe University.
Bristow, Tom: Tom Bristow sits on the board of the Australasian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres (ACHRC), and is
President of the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture – Australia and New Zealand (ASLEC-ANZ). His
monograph, Lyricism in the Anthropocene, will be published in 2014.
Brown, Bob: Bob Brown was the face of the Save the Franklin River campaign in 1982, and was elected to the Tasmanian state
parliament in that year, leading the expansion of the Tasmanian World Heritage Area. In 1996 Bob was elected to the Senate and he
resigned in 2012 to establish the Bob Brown Foundation. He is a published author and acclaimed photographer.
Darian-Smith, Kate: Kate Darian-Smith is Professor of Australian Studies and History and Professor of Cultural Heritage at the
University of Melbourne. Her most recent book is Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage. She is involved in an ARC-funded
project on the cultural sustainability of country towns.
Ford, Tom: Tom Ford is a Lecturer in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. Before taking up this position, he
was an Australian Postdoctoral Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, ANU. His current research focuses on the atmospheres of
poetry in British Romanticism.
Gelder, Ken: Ken Gelder is Professor of English at the University of Melbourne. His most recent book is New Vampire Cinema,
published by the British Film Institute, and he is co-editor (with Rachael Weaver) of a forthcoming book titled The Colonial Journals
and the Emergence of Australian Literary Culture. He co-directs the Australian Centre with Denise Varney.
Harley, Alexis: Alexis Harley lectures in nineteenth-century literature and autobiography at La Trobe University. She has recently
completed work on the interactions of evolutionary theory and Victorian life-writing, and is exploring cultural articulations of ideas
about time, change, species and nature. She has also published widely on autobiography and apostasy and posthumanism.
Kinsella, John: John Kinsella is poet, fictionalist, essayist, literary critic and activist. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge
University and a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. He has published over 60 books. He is a vegan
anarchist pacifist.
Mathews, Freya: Freya Mathews is Adjunct Professor of Environmental Philosophy at Latrobe University. Her most recent book
is Reinhabiting Reality: Towards a Recovery of Culture and she is the author of over sixty articles in the area of ecological
philosophy. She co-edits the journal, Philosophy Activism Nature and manages a private biodiversity reserve in Central Victoria.
Moore, Grace: Grace Moore is a Senior Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. Her books
include Dickens and Empire and The Victorian Novel in Context. She is at present working on a book-length study of bushfires in
nineteenth-century settler literature, Arcady in Flames.
Otto, Peter: Peter Otto is ARC (DORA) Research Professor at the University of Melbourne. His recent publications include
Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality. He is currently preparing a selected edition of
Blake's poetry and designs for Oxford University Press.
Rickards, Lauren: Lauren Rickards is a Research Fellow in the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute. Her current work includes
action-oriented research on transformational responses to climate change; and philosophical exploration of different scientific,
political and ethical categories of Humanness.
Rigby, Kate: Kate Rigby is Professor of Environmental Humanities and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is
the author of Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism and co-editor of Ecocritical Theory: New
European Approaches, and was the founding President of ASLEC-ANZ.
Rose, Deborah Bird: Deborah Bird Rose, FASSA, Environmental Humanities Program, University of New South Wales, is the
author of numerous acclaimed books. The most recent is Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction. Her current research focuses on
multi-sited, multispecies ethnographies in zones of extinction. She co-edits the new journal, Environmental Humanities.
Swain, Rachael: Rachael Swain is co-founder and co-director of Marrugeku and Stalker Theatre. She is the dramaturg and creative
producer for Marrugeku’s Gudirr Gudirr and is working on an ARC project to further practice lead research into dance and
dramaturgy. Rachael will direct Marrugeku’s forthcoming Cut the Sky to premiere in 2015.
Varney, Denise: Denise Varney is Associate Professor in Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne and teaches in the English
and Theatre program. Her research interests include Australian theatre and performance and feminist theatre. She co-directs the
Australian Centre with Ken Gelder.
Williams, Linda: Dr Linda Williams is Associate Professor of Art, Environment and Cultural Studies at RMIT University where she
leads the AEGIS research network and has curated major international exhibitions. Along with her recent publications on histories of
human-animal relations, philosophy and ecocriticism, she currently leads an international ARC project on art and climate change.