Lesley Instone

Northern Belongings: Frontiers, Fences, and Identities in Australia's Urban North

The importance of the frontier in shaping northern Australia continues to arouse interest and debate among scholars. This paper contributes to this scholarship through the exploration of the mutual constitution of frontier and belonging in suburban backyards in Australias urban north. The focus of the paper is the angry and indignant resistance to the introduction of mandatory pool fencing in the Northern Territory in 2002–04. Adopting an attitude of ‘witnessing’ small and ordinary happenings, I explore the spontaneous outbursts of identity and belonging expressed by antifence residents of Darwin, with particular emphasis on their creative enactment of frontier tropes of freedom, vigilance, risk, and self-reliance in defence of unfenced pools. By exploring an apparently ordinary event I reflect on the unconscious, subtle, and pervasive reach of the frontier in shaping performances of belonging in the urban north.

Dog waste, wasted dogs: the contribution of human-dog relations to the political ecology of Australian urban space

The city is increasingly recognised as a complex more-than-human space where the lives of humans and non-humans entwine in consequential ways. Human–animal encounters constitute sometimes convivial and sometimes challenging relations that reflect wider pleasures and tensions in urban society. This paper grapples with concerns about the place of dogs in Australian urban public space and urban life more broadly. Adopting a relational political ecology approach, we ask what pet dogs tell us about the political, emotional, and material struggles that surround multispecies urban cohabitation. Following two human–dog urban waste streams – one concerned with dog waste, the other with dogs as waste – we consider how human–animal relations of both attachment and disposability shape the material flows that constitute urban political ecologies. In particular, by focusing on the ‘shadow ecologies’ of dog waste and disposal, we uncover the dynamic practices of care, disgust, violence, and love through which dogs, their waste, and their bodies are sanitised, controlled, and ultimately concealed from our everyday urban spaces.

The trouble with dogs: 'animaling' public space in the Australian city

This paper grapples with contestations about the place of dogs in Australian urban public space. On the one hand, urban Australia is characterized by high levels of dog ownership and intense family-style human–dog relations, yet, on the other, in public space dogs and their humans are subject to strict regulation and a regime of spatial segregation. Increased urban surveillance, privatization and control, coupled with regulation based on the figure of the dog-as-problem, have intensified disputation over the place of dogs in the city. Birke, Bryld, and Lykke (2004) suggest the notion of ‘animaling’ as a tactic for shifting perspective from animal essences – dangerous dogs and dog breeds, for example – towards a study of the material-semiotic performativity of human/animal relationships. This paper takes up this notion to explore the multiple ways in which dogs, humans and various human–dog conjunctions and relations ‘animal’ the city and shape public space. As a transgressive queer(y)ing of the border work that constitutes the human/animal dualism, ‘animaling’ is also useful for thinking about the affinities, partial connections and agencies that co-constitute human–dog relations and urban spatialities.

Thinking About Inheritance Through the Figure of the Anthropocene, from the Antipodes and in the Presence of Others

Modes of thinking matter. In this article we engage with the figure of the Anthropocene as the impetus for rethinking the messy environmental legacies of Australian settler colonialism that we have inherited. We do this rethinking in a small rural valley community, where the intractable realities of human and more than human settler colonial relations are played out on a daily basis. We also try to do this rethinking collectively, in the presence of other animals with whom our inherited pasts, our mundane everyday presents and our uncertain futures are inextricably enmeshed. What comes of all this thinking is a common account of mutual multispecies vulnerabilities and of collective agencies that recasts the dominant tales of a singular Anthropocene and the conventional human-centred inheritances of a rural Australian

The coyote’s at the door: revisioning human - environment relations in the Australian context

is the most common and well-articulated starting-point. Emerging in the early 1970s, ecofeminism has contributed important insights and challenges to environmental thought. While there is a rich variety of ecofeminist approaches and theorizing, ecofeminisms of all kinds hold a number of ideas in common. Most fundamentally, ecofeminism recognizes the centrality of the connection between the dual oppression of women and nature in Western culture. It exposes the logic of domination and the frameworks that create an integrated, mutually reinforcing oppression of nature by humans and of women by men. Karen Warren argues that ‘any feminist theory and environmental ethic which fails to take seriously the interconnected domination of woman and nature is simply inadequate’. Although ecofeminism has challenged environmental thought to include gender as a central component of analysis and action, it shares with much environmental thinking and action a conception of nature as external and material, a ‘natural’ entity imbued with wholeness and harmony in some fundamental sense. Recent theoretical writings from chaos theory to postmodernism, in fields as diverse as cultural studies, geography, ecology, environmental philosophy and social studies of science, have fundamentally questioned this account of nature. As William Cronon points out, the insight that we can never directly know nature and that it is not as stable, balanced and holistic as once thought, destabilizes the previously fixed, knowable and discoverable category ‘nature’. A lively debate about the ‘nature of ‘‘nature’’ ’ has emerged between what Kate Soper identifies as the nature-endorsing or ecological perspective – the ‘naive realists’ who appeal to nature as ‘an independent domain of intrinsic value, truth or authenticity’ – and the postmodern or nature-sceptical position – the

Renting Over Troubled Waters: An Urban Political Ecology of Rental Housing

Urban political ecology emphasises the hybrid nature of cities and the flows of people and materials that constitute the built environment. Climate change introduces a profound dimension of uncertainty in the socio-material relations of urban life, raising questions for urban residents of how to act, what sort of actions might make a ‘difference’ and ‘matter’. For renters this uncertainty is amplified by limited access to ‘resources for adaption’ such as gardens, water efficiency and alternative energy, and exacerbated by poor communication and unresponsiveness from landlords. The built environment, and housing in particular, is recognized as both a significant site of greenhouse gas emissions and a site where adaptation to climate change will need to occur. However, the capacity of urban residents to make changes to their housing is uneven. This paper draws on a case study of rental property managers and tenants in Newcastle, NSW to explore social and cultural processes that are both shaped by and shape rental housing provision. In this paper we explore the urban political ecologies of rental housing through the lens of water, revealing a suite of practices, materials and discourses that assemble to make resources for adaptation, and simultaneously render water as useful, troubled and troublesome. The socionatural relations of tenure are shaped by regulatory practices including leases, insurance and capital investment alongside human and non-human actors. In particular the paper draws attention to the different conditions of access to ‘resources for adaptation’ in the material relations of public and private rental housing provision.

Walking towards Woomera: touring the boundaries of ‘unAustralian geographies’

Woomera, located in the desert almost 500km north of Adelaide, is constituted by a complex history as the world’s longest rocket range, a support base for British nuclear tests and the US surveillance base at Nurrungar, the location of a detention centre for asylum seekers, and indigenous homeland of the Kokatha people. By following a metaphorical journey, the article explores the affective qualities of Woomera in relation to national identities and geographies, and the contested meanings of ‘Australian’ and ‘unAustralian’. The reader is invited to walk across a shifting socio-political landscape of inclusion and exclusion and to weave together the fragmentary stories of Woomera. To guide the journey, the paper draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the refrain to trace the contours of past and emerging territories of detention, deterrence and shifting borders, in order to reveal an alter-tale of national identity and spatiality that is forgotten and repressed. This ‘open secret’ is shown to actively sustain the imaginary of ‘fortress Australia’ and the paradoxical space of ‘unAustralian geographies’.

Legislating nature for biodiversity offsets in New South Wales, Australia

In the contemporary environmental management landscape, legislation is a principal means through which sustainable outcomes are negotiated. Yet the relations between legislation (as a social practice), nature and justice have been subjected to limited scrutiny. This paper explores these relations through consideration of a system of biodiversity offsets currently being implemented in New South Wales, Australia, following the enactment of the Threatened Species Conservation Amendment (Biodiversity Banking) Act 2006 (NSW). In this paper we investigate the work this legislation does in enacting the materiality of nature in order to explore the interrelations of materiality, law and concerns for environmental and ecological justice. We argue that the act of ‘legislating nature’ is simultaneously a ‘mode of matter-ing’ (Law 2004) that in the case of biodiversity banking (BioBanking), resituates biodiversity within new meanings, spatialities, human–nature relations, and which accounts for biodiversity at a state, rather than local, scale. Utilising the work of Latour, we examine the processes of ‘translation’ required to generate abstracted ‘biodiversity values’ that can be traded and moved between locations. Examination of these processes leads to a consideration of the broad requirements of environmental and ecological justice as a theoretical and political response to BioBanking.

From pest to partner: rethinking the Australian White Ibis in the more-than-human city

Calls to rethink our ethical and political responsibilities with nonhuman others abound recent work in cultural geography. Such work unpacks the more-than-human agencies reshaping and rematerialising our bodies and subjective knowledges. This article uncovers the coproduction of human knowledges and urban spaces by examining the problematic migration of the Australian White Ibis into Australian urban localities. We put forth a storied approach to human-ibis relations, capturing the multiple and situated experiences materialising our urban relations with the species. Drawing on ibis ethology, media narratives, personal and interviewee stories, we explore how ibis take part in the co-constitution of urban spaces and identities. In particular, we examine how the ibis as a pest narrative is mobilised and reproduced in public and media discourses that shape the species identity and influence modes of relating. Both the publics and our own personal intra-actions with ibis shed light on conceptions of nonhuman belonging, death and human desires for living-with. This article forwards a cosmopolitical approach to provoke a reconceptualisation of our ethical and political responsibility with urban ibis. We question the narrative of ibis-as-pest to forward ideas of living-with that provokes new modes of relating, uncomfortable for either party. Within these precarious relations, possibilities open for nonhierarchical modes of cohabitation, challenging our political and ethical responsibilities in living-with uncomfortable others.

Eating the country

A study is presented that examines white Australian attempts to ingest Indigenous food and practices to explore postcolonial anxieties of place, belonging, and identities that are expressed through a specific way of eating. With talented local chefs in Australia the particular combination of landscape, both material and visual, not only showcases regional flavours, but gestures towards the search for an elusive authentic Australian cuisine.