Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.60162/swamphen.10.18099
Christine Howe, Alanna Myers, Robyn Maree Pickens, Sue Pyke
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.
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Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.60162/swamphen.10.18027
Fred Gesha
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.
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Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.60162/swamphen.10.18032
Carol Freeman
Book Review
书评
{"title":"[Book Review] Teya Brooks Pribac's Enter the Animal","authors":"Carol Freeman","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.10.18032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.10.18032","url":null,"abstract":"Book Review","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"228 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140274094","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}
Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.60162/swamphen.10.18030
Sadie Hale
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.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-05DOI: 10.60162/swamphen.9.17534
Chantelle Bayes
This letter is addressed to the quintessential city, an urban imaginary that encompasses the hopes of planners, writers, and those entangled nature-cultures who populate them. From Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow that set off the garden cities movement, to fiction such as Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and Antoni Jach’s Layers of the City that explore the socio-historical construction of urban imaginaries and more recently Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book set in a climate changed future, cities can be seen as places of abundant resources or destructive development. A swell of these voices build throughout the letter as the many idealistic versions of the city entangle and prevent any one vision from solidifying. This letter will explore these contested imaginaries, particularly the way these imaginaries impact those who are welcomed, fed and allowed to prosper and those who are chased out, excluded, and destroyed. But this letter is also about particular cities: Jach’s Paris, Calvino’s Venice and Wright’s Southern Australian City but also the Kombumerri country (Gold Coast), the city I live in and onto which I inevitably read these imaginaries. How might cities such as those built on Kombumerri country and Naarm be reimagined through critical posthumanism? Drawing on the work of Karen Barad, Astrida Neimanis, Donna Haraway and Val Plumwood, this letter meanders through the murky waters, entangled buildings and constructed garden spaces of literary urban imaginaries as I unsettle the quintessential city.
这封信是写给典型的城市的，这是一个城市想象，包含了规划者、作家和居住在其中的那些纠缠在一起的自然文化的希望。从引发花园城市运动的埃比尼泽·霍华德的《明天的花园城市》，到伊塔洛·卡尔维诺的《看不见的城市》、安东尼·雅克的《城市层次》等小说，探索城市想象的社会历史建构，再到最近亚历克西斯·赖特的《天鹅之书》，城市可以被视为资源丰富或破坏性发展的地方。随着城市的许多理想主义版本纠缠在一起，阻止任何一种愿景固化，这些声音在整封信中不断涌现。这封信将探讨这些有争议的想象，特别是这些想象如何影响那些受到欢迎、喂养和允许繁荣的人，以及那些被赶出去、被排斥和被毁灭的人。但这封信也提到了一些特定的城市:雅克的巴黎、卡尔维诺的威尼斯和赖特的南澳大利亚城市，还有我所居住的黄金海岸，我不可避免地会读到这些想象中的城市。如何通过批判的后人文主义来重新想象那些建立在Kombumerri国家和Naarm的城市?在Karen Barad, Astrida Neimanis, Donna Haraway和Val Plumwood的作品中，这封信蜿蜒穿过浑浊的水域，纠缠的建筑和文学城市想象的花园空间，我扰乱了典型的城市。
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Pub Date : 2023-07-05DOI: 10.60162/swamphen.9.17539
Taylor Coyne
This letter – addressed to the people of Sydney – contains an invitation. As a collection of reflections and thoughts it relates to four core ideas. (1) Urban undergrounds like tunnels, drains, and caverns, are vibrant and nourishing places. They are ecosystems and they are habitats. Undergrounds also present generous opportunities to consider parts of their city that are often made out-of-bounds. The cultural richness of the subterranean city can evoke a profound kind of connection for a city’s people. (2) I affirm that people can connect more meaningfully to a city by engaging in processes of listening to their city. More specifically, I refer to the practice of ‘deep listening’ to undergrounds. (3) Enacting this sonic connection can be mediated by planning that responds to the ‘cry for the right to the city’. (4) The infrastructures that thread into and amongst undergrounds often provide opportunities for nonhuman life to thrive and is so doing necessitate responsibility for humans to care for these infrastructures as kin especially when they are damaged by pollution or degradation. Water flows underneath cities. It flows through gutters into drains, pipes, and canals. It flows, often unseen, and even more often with voices unheard. This letter prompts stillness and reflection of these voices.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-05DOI: 10.60162/swamphen.9.17548
Chantelle Bayes, Chantelle Mitchell, J. Waterhouse
This special issue arises from a virtual symposium held on 5 February 2021 which sought to challenge the letter writing tradition, interrogating the communicative capacity of the more-than-human. This seemed strangely fitting, occurring as it did in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic when the nonhuman was asking us to listen; a period of life gone strange in which we were forced to adopt new modes of meeting, communicating and being together-apart. As the symposium website describes, we were ‘dislocated from one another by lockdowns, border closures, and the unsustainability, cost, and even danger of travel’. The marked rise in letter writing throughout the COVID-19 lockdowns emerged as a means of countering this dislocation, taking advantage of the epistolary form’s unique qualities as a way of being together-apart (Jenkins). Perhaps this trend was a reflection upon shifting temporalities (compared to other ways of communicating, the slowness of the postal service became less crucial amidst shifts in day-to-day realities), but also perhaps out of a desire to connect. But as we turned our attention to the Earth, the environment, to the more-than-human, we were called to rethink such correspondence. The symposium asked us to imagine how our letters might help us to connect with others through ‘arboreal love letters and existential ruminations’ as were written to the trees of Naarm (Melbourne) (City of Melbourne; Hesterman) or by ‘making-strange … ideas of ancestry, earth, law, weather and writing itself’ as Alexis Wright implored us to do in her letter ‘Hey, Ancestor!’ in The Guardian in 2018, or by paying attention to the way that nonhumans communicate with each other, as Vicki Kirby suggests when describing lightning as ‘a sort of stuttering chatter between the ground and the sky’ (10).1
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Pub Date : 2023-07-05DOI: 10.60162/swamphen.9.17551
Jianni Tien, Elizabeth Burmann
The ocean is a planetary force consisting of both surface and depth. The imaginary of the ocean is an interconnecting and interconnected force. The ocean, with its hypnotic lack of form, reminds us that who we are does not end at the skin. We bleed into our environments, and our environments bleed into us. The sea is both conceptually and materially entangled with us: we are on a transcorporeal continuum with the ocean. In this love letter, we turn toward the ocean as an ontological space of transformation and extend a dedication to our strange kin: decorator crabs. Decorator crabs are slow nocturnal scavengers. In an attempt to look “less-crab” or “more-than-crab”, they select materials, debris, and other living beings from their environment to adorn their shells, placing them over a velcro-like surface on their carapace: these crustaceans entangle themselves with their environment. In our viewing and interactions with them, we as human researchers similarly entangled ourselves amongst the crabs, all within the potent transformative fluid of the aquarium tank. We present our epistolary dedication to these critters as we conceptualise the aquarium as an alchemist’s pot of entanglements - a metonym for the ocean - to learn and become with the resident crustaceans. The letter is presented in video form here – A love letter to decorator crabs. Trigger warning: Please be advised that this piece contains descriptions of humans confining and eating other animals.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-05DOI: 10.60162/swamphen.9.15707
Melissa Jane Fagan
In May 2020, when I should have been experiencing spring in Scotland, I was instead living in Queensland, surfing the point breaks of the southern Gold Coast as the autumn swells rolled in. It was there that I noticed a bird I had never seen before and didn’t know how to identify. Over coming weeks and months, I would watch this bird and others like it dive for fish from a great height, mesmerised. I wanted to know more. In my strange/letter, addressed to the birds, I track my attempts to identify and understand them via close observation and research, a process that led me back to Scotland through Bryan Nelson’s monograph, The Gannet (1978). I trace the way in which I began to feel a sense of kinship with this animal, while also interrogating the limits of that kinship, amid a backdrop of border closures and uncertainty that was the strange southern winter of 2020.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-05DOI: 10.60162/swamphen.9.17535
Julie Vulcan
Initially I stood at a threshold peering into a place of momentous ending. I shook my head. Gundungurra country needs to burn, I imagine its people say across time, just not like this. There is a requirement for care-full in/action when living with and on a post-fire terrain while still in trauma. It is a difficult balancing act for humans who like to fix things. Beyond the domestic clean-up of burnt buildings and infrastructure, my teachers await my attention. They are not of the human kind, rather they are the critters that perch in branches or skitter under rock. They are the soil movers, the crevice crouchers and the mark makers. They are the stirring plants and the underground tendrils of fungal hyphae. They send slow signals and resist tidy aesthetics. They challenge the perception of “dead” and question short-term human economies of usefulness. Ultimately, they remind me that home is made up of many intersecting homes weaving, twisting and turning in a constant process of becoming.
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