Overview

Among the most productive ecosystems on earth, wetlands are also some of the most vulnerable. Australian Wetland Cultures argues for the cultural value of wetlands. Through a focus on swamps and their conservation, the volume makes a unique contribution to the growing interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities. The authors investigate the crucial role of swamps in Australian society through the idea of wetland cultures. The broad historical and cultural range of the book spans pre-settlement indigenous Australian cultures, nineteenth-century European colonization, and contemporary Australian engagements with wetland habitats. The contributors situate the Australian emphasis in international cultural and ecological contexts. Case studies from Perth, Western Australia, provide practical examples of the conservation of wetlands as sites of interlinked natural and cultural heritage. The volume will appeal to readers with interests in anthropology, Australian studies, cultural studies, ecological science, environmental studies, and heritage protection.

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9781498599948

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Reviews

A wonderfully engrossing book, elegantly championing the pivotal role of wetlands in Australian cultural life. The chapters within this book are as serpentine and mesmerising as the waterscapes they interrogate. The book draws the reader into considerations of why we often experience cognitive dissonance in these landscapes, to explore how wetlands as 'othering' spaces is embedded within interconnected artistic, semantic and physical practices. Australian Wetland Cultures provides us with a timely reminder that these paludal environments are a palimpsest of our ever shifting human drive to mould and mark landscapes. Our cultural perceptions shape our relationship with space, and the authors prove this is nowhere more true than within wetlands; places for the dead, the living and the more-than-human. I encourage readers to immerse themselves within this wonderful text, with an eye to appraising wetlands with a renewed vigour henceforth.--Mary Gearey, University of Brighton

Author Information

John Charles Ryan is postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New England, Australia, and honorary research fellow in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Australia. He is the author of Plants in Contemporary Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination. Li Chen is researcher and writer for environmental conservation and community development NGOs in Perth, and has published in the journals Heritage and The Conversation.

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