Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)

The Collective Memory of the Hairy Man

2024-02-05T16:14:28+11:00

My work with the Hairy Man story aims to debunk the false narratives of colonialist invaders who sought to legitimate dominion over, and transform the identities of, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – who were often referred to as scarcely human – in order to seize land to declare ‘Terra Nullius’. I show how cultural knowledge of the Hairy Man is integral to how I identify with and connect to Country. I tell this story to make explicit my cultural sovereignty over an aspect of First Nations ‘intangible’ knowledge that the Western world has often labelled as myth or legend.

Miring Grounds

2024-02-05T16:28:20+11:00

Through the presence of an unstable earth, swampy sites disturb land-water binaries while also creating imaginaries that offer an otherwise to colonial fictions of territory. Representations of swamps tend toward the wasted, the toxic and the untamed. Swamps are sites of alternative temporal configurations of muddy-matter that persist throughout histories of resource extraction, management, draining, and burying. The specific spatialities of swamps create the conditions for an emergence of material and imaged fictions. Drawing on thinking from feminist geophilosophy on permeability and saturation, queer materialist understandings of toxicity, along with contemporary critiques on the myths of colonial representations of land, this text explores cultural figurings of muddy grounds to posit swamps as producers of both material and representational imaginaries. ‘Miring Grounds’ engages material porosity and speculative image-reading to frame swamps as sites of marshy resistance that enfold their own representational logics into unique material and ecological compositions of ground.

Contagious Collaborators and Microbial Kin

2024-02-05T16:21:45+11:00

Exploring the incursion of SARS-2 COVID-19 into human cultures at the beginning of 2020, this paper investigates how microbial, and specifically viral, worlds might be positioned as beneficial companions in telling the stories of our times and radically reconfiguring what possible futures come next. While most intellectual efforts to understand COVID-19 have had the intention to control, suppress or eradicate it, approaching the pathogen through a posthumanist framework enables the consideration of what viral worlds might invite if approached as a collaborative agency, rather than adversary. How might thinking with and through COVID-19 reconfigure relations between human and non-human worlds in not just the present but also the future? Creating the opportunity for an experiential encounter with this question, Emissary 2920 (E2920) was a participatory, multiplatform, and pervasive two-week experience delivered to local audiences experiencing the rolling lockdowns of 2020 in Narrm/Melbourne. This work positioned participants as time-travelling emissaries from the future Institute of Human-Viral Relations who had volunteered to complete field work and gather experiential, sensory data from within the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tapestries of Poison

2024-02-05T11:20:37+11:00

Cuz and I are talking about how our ancestors used poison to score a feed. I have questions about nyannum. How do you poison a fish and not be affected when you eat it? Wouldn’t it make you sick? Stun sometimes, not kill, Cuz says, and sometimes things are left to rise, to sit in the water for a while so that toxins are released. We both getting hungry, sitting by the water, talking about fish. Nyannum contains poison that only affects fish. Stunned in a small rock pool. Perfect for a grab bag. Nyannum leaves are heart-shaped and shiny. Fish also stunned in a trap. Our people are known for making beautiful traps. Our architecture is destroyed for other architecture. A light rail takes precedence over the ancient traps that have been there for thousands of years. Under neo-colonial rule, they can’t both co-exist. The ghosts surface in the new city. Is nature writing a white-settler literature? Perhaps you would think so if you browsed the genre. It is only recently we’ve seen First Nations names come up in discussions of the Australian canonistic spectrum of nature writing, environmental literature and ecopoetics. A few names, cherrypicked to be on reading lists and citations. This inclusion seems to be a tokenistic gesture rather than a recognition of sovereignty, or a reading and writing … and storytelling … and a knowing … that has always been present.

On Sharks Unseen

2024-02-05T16:39:44+11:00

Basking sharks are the planet’s second-largest fish, and in the summer they feed on plankton in the Sea of the Hebrides, in Scotland. Once hunted for the oil contained in their livers, basking sharks are now a protected species, with tour companies offering the possibility to see and even snorkel with them. There is no guarantee of a sighting, however. This essay takes as its point of departure one such unsuccessful attempt to find basking sharks, undertaken as part of a research trip to learn about the history of shark hunting in the north-east Atlantic. Engaging with literature from multispecies ethnography, the essay considers the implications of treating absences as a condition of research on underwater species. It asks what form the tenets of multispecies ethnography – such as arts of attentiveness, immersion, and sustained participation in the lives of others – can take in oceanic settings. It suggests that direct observation cannot always account for relations with the unseen, and that methodologically and conceptually, the non-encounter offers a way of thinking through the ways that human activity can contribute to the loss of other species.

[Reading Group Review] Contesting ‘Wilderness’

2024-02-05T11:37:41+11:00

Reading Group Review

[Book Review] Teya Brooks Pribac's Enter the Animal

2024-02-05T16:50:40+11:00

Book Review

[Book Review] Hayley Singer's Abandon Every Hope

2024-02-05T16:45:15+11:00

Book review

Editorial Note: Ngā Tohu o te Huarere

2024-03-01T10:41:17+11:00

Swamphen emerges from the air, lands and seas that form the stories of the First Peoples of Australia and Aotearoa. We attend to these communities’ narratives as a first principle. We acknowledge the unceded territories on which we and our contributors have worked to produce this issue of Swamphen. We pay our respects to those territories’ Elders, past and present, with an eye to our namesake, the swamphen (kwilom, milu, ping ping, Porphyrio melanotus, pukeko), a bird active in this region’s ground, skies and waters.