Lesley Head

Early human occupation of northern Australia: archaeology and thermoluminescence dating of Jinmium rock-shelter, Northern Territory

The nature and date of the human colonization of Australia remains a key issue in prehistory at the world scale, for a sufficiently early presence there indicates either Homo sapiens sapiens arriving precociously in a place remote from a supposed African origin, or a greater competence in sea-crossing than has been expected of archaic humans. Stratigraphic integrity, the new science of luminescent dating and the recognition of worked stone and of rock-engraving are immediate issues in this report from far northwestern Australia.

Nativeness, Invasiveness, and Nation in Australian Plants

The conceptualization of alien invasive species conflates two axes of variability that have become unhelpfully blurred. The nativeness/alienness axis refers to the presumed belonging of a species in ecological or social space. Invasiveness refers to the behavior of the species in question, particularly in relation to other species. The overlay of nation introduces further variability. Teasing these axes apart is important for more effective environmental management. We examine these concepts using two influential forms of ecological knowledge: the biogeographical and ecological literature and the vernacular experiences of suburban backyarders. Three case studies, the invasive native Pittosporum undulatum and two invasive exotics, Lantana camara and Cinnamomum camphora, illustrate the complex and contingent nature of human interactions with such species and the potential for human interactions to increase and/or reduce the propagation of plant species.

Cultural ecology: emerging human-plant geographies

I Ghostly fl ora? It is several years now since Jones and Cloke noted that, while there had been considerable recent interest in animals and society within human geography and anthropology, ‘fl ora ... remains an even more ghost-like presence in contemporary theoretical approaches’ (Jones and Cloke, 2002: 4; see also Hitchings and Jones, 2004). In this second progress report on cultural ecology, we identify and trace emerging trends in human-plant geographies. Human-plant interactions have been the stuff of cultural ecology since the days of Julian Steward, and many aspects of that tradition are alive and well. Following a previous progress report (Head, 2007), we are not interested in assuming an ontological and unproblematic separation between ‘cultures’ and ‘their [vegetative] environment’ as the basis on which straightforward ‘interactions’ or ‘adaptations’ can be analysed (Blute, 2008). Rather we aim here to elucidate the contributions of relational geographies, sometimes referred to as more than human geographies, to the understanding of humanplant relations (eg, Whatmore, 2002, on soybeans, and Robbins, 2004, on invasive networks). The challenges of global environmental change provide good reasons why such geographies should be nurtured, and why the notion of a clear separation between culture and environment should be long gone. Even a cursory roll call of the pressing issues of the next few decades – food security, biofuels, biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration, quality of urban life – immediately involves messy and malleable confi gurations of plants and people. Plants are fundamental players in human lives, providing our food supply and contributing to the air we breathe, and vice versa – humans have transformed many aspects of plant lives. Physical biogeographers now recognize that the vegetation patterns they are studying refl ect both deep time evolutionary pathways and the ‘muddy and indecipherable blur’ of human infl uence (Mackey, 2008: 392). At one level it is puzzling then that humanplant geographies have been less commented on than human-animal geographies. We touch here on several reasons. First, animal geographies have been spurred on by questions of ethics. Between plants and humans, there is arguably a greater ethical distance, and the unit of ethical standing (individual, species,

AUSTRALIAN BACKYARD GARDENS AND THE JOURNEY OF MIGRATION

Gardens have been an important site of environmental engagement in Australia since the British colonization. They are places where immigrant people and plants have carried on traditions from their homelands and have worked out an accommodation with new social and biophysical environments. We examined the backyard gardens of three contemporary migrant groups—Macedonian, Vietnamese, and British born—in suburban Australia and a group of first‐generation Australians with both parents born overseas. In Macedonian backyards, emphasis was strong on the production of vegetables; in Vietnamese backyards, on herbs and fruit. British backyards were more diverse, some focusing on non‐native ornamental flowers and others favoring native plants. The cohesiveness of the respective groups was partly an artifact of our sampling strategy. The Macedonian and Vietnamese migrants shared an affinity for productive, humanized landscapes that reflected their rural, subsistence backgrounds and crossed over into their attitudes toward the broader environment and national parks. The rural and village backgrounds help explain why intensive backyard food production has broken down among the next generation in (sub)urban Australia, becoming part of heritage rather than everyday practice.

Cultural ecology: adaptation - retrofitting a concept?

Adaptation was a core concept of twentieth-century cultural ecology. It is having a new life in the context of debates over climate change, particularly as it becomes more significant in public discourse and policy. In this third and final progress report, I identify ways in which geographers and others are currently using the concept of adaptation, tracing both continuities and discontinuities with its earlier heritage. Three differences that warrant attention are the new mitigation/adaptation binary, the deliberate and conscious nature of climate change adaptation, and the fact that the stimuli to which we are adapting are complex assemblages comprising more-than-climate. To ‘retrofit’ the concept for twenty-first-century conditions, we should avoid the limitations of some past uses, and enhance its operation with new techniques and approaches. I identify four threads in recent geographic research that enhance the retrofit: cultural research around climate; emphasis on everyday practices; attention to the contingencies of scale; and more-than-human/ more-than-nature theoretical conceptualizations.

Changing cultures of water in eastern Australian backyard gardens

Research into diverse cultural understandings of water provides important contributions to the pressing global issue of sustainable supply, particularly when combined with analysis of relationships between everyday household practice and larger sociotechnical networks of storage and distribution. Here we analyse semi-structured interviews with 298 people about their 241 backyards in the Australian east coast cities of Sydney and Wollongong, undertaken during the 2002–2003 drought. Water emerged as an important issue in both consciousness and practice. In contrast to a number of other environmental issues which stimulate more polarised responses, a commitment to reducing water consumption was shared across the study population and manifest in a variety of changed practices. However, these aspirations are in tension with the pleasure derived from water, and expressed desires for more watery environments. This work contrasts with and extends other studies that have emphasised the perceived separation between the modern home and the networks of production that sustain it. We argue that it is in the relationship between house and garden that people see, understand and participate in the network of water storage and distribution. Their active engagement with these processes enhances their capacity to manage and reduce consumption.

Household Sustainability: Challenges and Dilemmas in Everyday Life

Contents: Introduction 1. Having a Baby 2. Spaghetti Bolognese 3. Clothes 4. Water 5. Warmth 6. Toilets 7. Laundry 8. Furniture 9. Plastic Bags 10. Driving Cars 11. Flying 12. The Refrigerator 13. Screens 14. Mobile Phones 15. Solar Hot Water 16. The Garden 17. Christmas 18. Retirement 19. Death 20. Conclusion References Index

Becoming differently modern: Geographic contributions to a generative climate politics

Anthropogenic climate change is a quintessentially modern problem in its historical origins and discursive framing, but how well does modernist thinking provide us with the tools to solve the problems it created? On one hand even though anthropogenic climate change is argued to be a problem of human origins, solutions to which will require human actions and engagements, modernity separates people from climate change in a number of ways. On the other, while amodern or more-than-human concepts of multiple and relational agency are more consistent with the empirical evidence of humans being deeply embedded in earth surface processes, these approaches have not sufficiently accounted for human power in climate change, nor articulated generative pathways forward. We argue that recent research in human geography has much to offer because it routinely combines both deconstructive impulses and empirical compulsions (ethnographic, material, embodied, practice-based). It has a rather unique possibility to be both deconstructive and generative/creative. We bring together more-than-human geographies and cross-scalar work on agency and governance to suggest how to reframe climate change and climate change response in two main ways: elaborating human and non-human continuities and differences, and identifying and harnessing vernacular capacities.

Walking practice and suburban nature-talk

Drawing on recent conceptualisations of ‘performativity’ this article examines the experiential knowledge of a heterogenous group of people who regularly walk through a maze of criss-crossing paths in a relatively flat suburban Australian reserve. Attention is given to how routine walking can be conceptualised as one way of ‘doing’ nature. Routine walking is conceptualised as a territory-making process. Mindful of the social context and bodily experience, walking offers insights into the possibilities of making points of connection with the performances of plants and animals. While experiential knowledge from habitual walking illustrates the blurring of culture–nature dichotomies, walkers still rely on the fiction of the distinction that divides them to make sense of self and place. To elicit a more conversational narrative and tap into the lived experiences of walking, our methodological approach relied upon photography. How respondents express a type of care for, and protect animals and plants in a territory understood as their own backyard has direct relevance to recent discussions of the role residents can play in the current and future environmental management of suburban reserves and parks.

Prehistoric aboriginal impacts on Australian vegetation: an assessment of the evidence

SUMMARY To what extent were Australian vegetation patterns in 1788 a product of human activity? Pollen and charcoal evidence which addresses this question is reviewed. I discuss the nature of the evidence, particularly the difficulties involved in establishing relationships between charcoal and fire history, and between fire history and human activity. I then address the broader question from the perspectives of both time and space by examining three key periods which might be expected to provide relevant evidence: (i) the time of initial human colonisation of the continent; (ii) the late Holocene, when Aboriginal population densities are thought to have increased substantially; and (iii) the last 200 years, when Aboriginal influences on the landscape have been mostly removed. Impacts are likely to have been different in different environments, with vegetation types vulnerable to fire showing the most marked changes. I conclude with a discussion of ways alternative interpretations have been utilised by co...