Academic literature on the topic 'Alpine water-use conflict'

High-resolution satellite imagery permits acquisition of critical data to observe climate-change and environmental impact on conflict-impacted indigenous communities with co-existing socio-economic factors, often within unstable regimes. Conflict may prevent direct access in remote regions to validate civilian conflict actor evidence. In such cases use of remote sensing tools, techniques, and data are extremely important. Software-based imagery assessment can quantify radiometrically calibrated or Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and provide temporal changes with rapid detection over large search areas. In this work we evaluate recent trends in equatorial alpine glacier ablation to address the probability of indigenous water scarcity, as pure glacial water reserves are depleted near the Grasberg gold and copper mine in the Carstenz region, Western part of Papua Island, North of Oceania.

Hydropower is expanding globally and is regarded a key measure for mitigating climate change, but it also results in major environmental degradation, both at local scale and more widely. We can learn lessons about how restoration can be used to alleviate these problems from failures and successes in countries with a long history of hydropower development, such as Norway. Here, hydropower projects grew larger over time, and in the 1960s, the emerging environmentalist movement started to challenge hydropower developments because of their negative impacts on the environment. The Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate then appointed a landscape architect who became very influential, particularly due to his skills in aesthetics and photo documentation. He developed principles for designing self-sustaining environments which he called “living nature”, and in particular proposed methods of restoring barren, unattractive, alpine spoil heaps. Later, restoration methods and goals have changed in response to new insights and the changing goals of ecological restoration. Here, we present current best practice for the alpine biome and sum up general lessons in three points: restoration can represent a sustainable, ‘third way’ in the conflict between conservation and development; including a wider group of professionals may improve restoration goals and methods, and effective use of visual communication can be a good way of gaining support for new restoration principles.

The increasing number of water abstractions and water-use conflicts in alpine regions represents a significant threat for these fragile aquatic ecosystems. The use of tools, like multicriteria analysis (MCA), can support related decision-making processes towards sustainable solutions. In this paper, an innovative approach to assess water withdrawals sustainability by integrating the MesoHABSIM (Mesohabitat Simulation Model) into an MCA framework is presented and discussed. The methodology was implemented by replacing, within the MCA assessment, Water Framework Directive biological indicators with the MesoHABSIM based river Habitat Integrity Index, related to watercourse discharge and morphology, which allows quantifying the impacts of withdrawals on river ecosystems and fish communities. The resulting MCA procedure considers four criteria (energy, environment and fishing, landscape, economy) and requires only the use of measurable indicators based on watercourse discharge and its continuous monitoring. It was tested in Aosta Valley region (NW Italy) to both ex ante and ex post scenarios, for different types of water withdrawals and, currently, 20 experimentations, involving 58 hydropower plants and 12 farmer consortia, are ongoing. The proposed MCA process demonstrated its applicability with an increased decision-making quality and involved stakeholders’ satisfaction and is being officially endorsed in the regional River Strategic Plan.

Abstract. The Water Framework Directive (WFD, directive 2000/60/EC) was created to ensure the sustainable use of water resources in the European Union. A central guideline included throughout the directive is a call for the participation of stakeholders in the management of these resources. Involving stakeholders is an important step to ensure that catchment management plans take into consideration local experience in the development of these plans and the impact of the plans on local interests. This paper describes and analyses the results of a series of workshops to facilitate implementation of the WFD at a catchment level based on the stakeholder participation model, CATCH. To test the usefulness of the CATCH model, developed for water management in a catchment area, a sub-catchment in an alpine valley in the north-east of Italy, the Alta Valsugana in the Province of Trento, was chosen as the setting for a series of workshops. In this valley water is fundamental for activities associated with agriculture, domestic use, energy production, sports and recreation. In the recent past the valley has had serious problems related to water quality and quantity. Implementation of water management plans under the WFD may lead to conflicts within the catchment between different stakeholder interest groups. Including stakeholders in the development of management plans not only follows the guidelines of the WFD but also could result in a more locally adapted and acceptable plan for the catchment. A new stakeholder analysis methodology was developed and implemented in order to identify the relevant stakeholders of the area and then two sets of workshops involving the key stakeholders identified were conducted in Spring 2006. The CATCH meetings were a new experience for the participants, who had to deal with both the principles of the WFD in general and the participation requirement in particular. During the meetings, the CATCH model played a very important role in structuring the participatory process. It provided a general framework consisting of a sequence of steps that helped the participants to reach the goal of the process: the identification and evaluation of measures to improve water management in the catchment. This test of the CATCH model showed it to be a dynamic and flexible tool, useful for structuring and guiding the participation process, without imposing undue restrictions on influencing the outcome of stakeholder participation in a small catchment.

Abstract. The Water Framework Directive (WFD; directive 2000/60/EC) was created to ensure the sustainable use of water resources in the European Union. A central guideline included throughout the directive is a call for the participation of stakeholders in the management of these resources. Involving stakeholders is an important step to ensure that catchment management plans take into consideration local experience in the development of these plans and the impact of the plans on local interests. This paper describes and analyses the results of a series of workshops to facilitate implementation of the WFD at a catchment level based on the stakeholder participation model, CATCH. To test the usefulness of the stakeholder participation model CATCH for water management in a catchment area, a sub-catchment in an alpine valley in the north-east of Italy, the Alta Valsugana in the Province of Trento, was chosen as the setting for a series of workshops. In this valley water is fundamental for activities associated with agriculture, domestic use, energy production, sports and recreation. In the recent past the valley has had serious problems related to water quality and quantity. Implementation of water management plans under the WFD may lead to conflicts within the catchment between different stakeholder interest groups. Including stakeholders in the development of management plans not only follows the guidelines of the WFD but also could result in a more locally adapted and acceptable plan for the catchment. A new stakeholder analysis methodology was developed and implemented in order to identify the relevant stakeholders of the area and then two sets of workshops involving the key stakeholders identified were conducted in Spring 2006. The CATCH meetings were a new experience for the participants, who had to deal with both the principles of the WFD in general and the participation requirement in particular. During the meetings, the CATCH model played a very important role in structuring the participatory process. It provided a general framework consisting of a sequence of steps that helped the participants to reach the goal of the process; the identification and evaluation of measures to improve water management in the catchment. This test of the CATCH model showed it to be a dynamic and flexible tool, useful for structuring and guiding the participation process, without imposing undue restrictions on influencing the outcome of stakeholder participation in a small catchment.

In 2022, the Swiss branch of the international publishing house Springer published a book, a collection of papers entitled Military Geoscience: A Multifaceted Approach to the Study of Warfare. It consists of selected contributions by international researchers in the field of military geoscience, presented at the 13th International Conference on Military Geosciences, held in Padua in June 2019. The first paper is by the editors, Aldin Bondesan and Judy Ehlen, and provides a brief overview of understanding the concept of military geoscience as an application of geology and geography to the military domain, and the historical development of the discipline. It should also be pointed out that the International Conferences on Military Geosciences (ICMG), which organises this biennial international conference, has over the past two decades also covered other aspects, such as conflict archaeology. The publication is further divided into three parts. The first part comprises three contributions covering military geoscience up to the 20th century. The first paper, by Chris Fuhriman and Jason Ridgeway, provides an insights into the Battle of Marathon through topography visualisation. The geography of the Marathon field, the valley between Mt. Cotroni and Mt. Agrieliki, allowed the Greek defenders to nullify the advantage of the Persian cavalry and archers, who were unable to develop their full potential. This is followed by a paper by Judy Ehlen, who explores the geological background of the Anglo-British coastal fortification system along the English Channel, focusing on the Portsmouth area of Hampshire. The author thus points out that changes in artillery technology and naval tactics between the 16th and 19th centuries necessitated changes in the construction of coastal fortifications, both in terms of the form of the fortifications and the method of construction, including the choice of basic building materials, as well as the siting of the fortifications in space. The next article is then dedicated to the Monte Baldo Fortress in north-eastern Italy, between Lake Garda and the Adige River. In his article, Francesco Premi analyses the presence of the fortress in the transition area between the Germanic world and the Mediterranean, and the importance of this part of Italy (at the southernmost part of the pre-Alpine mountains) in military history, as reflected in the large number of important military and war relics and monuments. The second part of the book, which is the most comprehensive, focuses on the two World Wars and consists of nine papers. The first paper in this part provides an analysis of the operation of trench warfare training camps in the Aube region of France. The group of authors, Jérôme Brenot, Yves Desfossés, Robin Perarnau, Marc Lozano and Alain Devos, initially note that static warfare training camps have not received much attention so far. Using aerial photography of the region dating from 1948 and surviving World War II photographic material, they identified some 20 sites where soldiers of the Entente forces were trained for front-line service in trenches. Combined archaeological and sociological fieldwork followed, confirming the presence of these camps, both through preserved remains and the collective memory. The second paper in this volume also concerns the survey on trenches, located in northern Italy in the Venezia Tridentina Veneto area in northern Italy. The authors Luigi Magnini, Giulia Rovera, Armando De Guio and Giovanni Azzalin thus use digital classification methods and archaeology to determine how Italian and Austro-Hungarian First World War trenches have been preserved or, in case they have disappeared, why this was the case, both from the point of view of the natural features as well as from the anthropological point of view of the restoration of the pre-war settings. The next paper, by Paolo Macini and Paolo Sammuri, analyses the activities of the miners and pioneers of the Italian Corps of Engineers during the First World War, in particular with regard to innovative approaches to underground mine warfare. In the Dolomites, the Italian engineers, using various listening devices, drilling machinery and geophysical methods, developed a system for drilling underground mine chambers, which they intended to use and actually used to destroy parts of Austro-Hungarian positions. The paper by Elena Dai Prà, Nicola Gabellieri and Matteo Boschian Bailo concerns the Italian Army's operations during the First World War. It focuses on the use of tactical maps with emphasis on typological classification, the use of symbols, and digital cartography. The authors thus analysed the tactical maps of the Italian Third Army, which were being constantly updated by plotting the changes in positions and tactical movements of both sides. These changes were examined both in terms of the use of new symbols and the analysis of the movements. This is followed by a geographical presentation of the Italian Army's activities during the First World War. The authors Paolo Plini, Sabina Di Franco and Rosamaria Salvatori have thus collected 21,856 toponyms by analysing documents and maps. The locations were also geolocated to give an overview of the places where the Italian Army operated during the First World War. The analysis initially revealed the complexity of the events on the battlefields, but also that the sources had misidentified the places of operation, as toponyms were misidentified, especially in the case of homonyms. Consequently, the area of operation was misidentified as well. In this respect, the case of Vipava was highlighted, which can refer to both a river and a settlement. The following paper is the first on the Second World War. It is the article by H. A. P. Smith on Italian prisoners of war in South Africa. The author outlines the circumstances in which Italian soldiers arrived to and lived in the southern African continent, and the contribution they made to the local environment and the society, and the remnants of their presence preserved to the present day. In their article, William W. Doe III and Michael R. Czaja analyse the history, geography and significance of Camp Hale in the state of Colorado. In doing so, they focus on the analysis of the military organization and its impact on the local community. Camp Hale was thus the first military installation of the U.S. Army, designated to test and train U.S. soldiers in mountain and alpine warfare. It was here that the U.S. 10th Mountain Division was formed, which concluded its war path on Slovenian soil. The Division's presence in this former camp, which was in military use also after the war until 1965, and in the surrounding area is still visible through numerous monuments. This is followed by a paper by Hermann Häusler, who deals with German military geography and geology on the Eastern Front of the Second World War. A good year before the German attack on the Soviet Union, German and Austrian military geologists began an analysis of the topography, population and infrastructure of the European part of the Soviet Union, which led to a series of publications, including maps showing the suitability of the terrain for military operations. During the war, military geological teams then followed the frontline units and carried out geotechnical tasks such as water supply, construction of fortifications, supply of building materials for transport infrastructure, and analysis of the suitability of the terrain for all-terrain driving of tracked and other vehicles. The same author also authored a paper in the next chapter, this time focusing on the activities of German military geologists in the Adriatic area. Similarly to his first contribution, the author presents the work of military geologists in northern Italy and north-western Slovenia. He also focuses on the construction of fortification systems in northern Italy and presents the work of karst hunters in the Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral. Part 3 covers the 21st century with five different papers (chapters). The first paper by Alexander K. Stewart deals with the operations of the U.S. Army specialised teams in Afghanistan. These Agribusiness Development Teams (ADTs) carried out a specialised form of counter-guerrilla warfare in which they sought to improve the conditions for the development of local communities through agricultural assistance to the local population. In this way, they were also counteracting support for the Taliban. The author notes that, in the decade after the programme's launch, the project had only a 19% success rate. However, he stresses that such forms of civil-military cooperation should be present in future operations. The next chapter, by Francis A. Galgan, analyses the activities of modern pirates through military-geographical or geological methods. Pirates, who pose a major international security threat, are present in four regions of the world: South and South-East Asia, East Africa and the Gulf of Guinea. Building on the data on pirate attacks between 1997 and 2017, the author shows the temporal and spatial patterns of pirate activities, as well as the influence of the geography of coastal areas on their activities. This is followed by another chapter with a maritime topic. Mark Stephen Blaine discusses the geography of territorial disputes in the South China Sea. Through a presentation of international law, the strategic importance of the sea (sea lanes, natural resources) and the overlapping territorial claims of China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia, the author shows the increasing level of conflict in the area and calls for the utmost efforts to be made to prevent the outbreak of hostilities or war. M. H. Bulmer's paper analyses the Turkish Armed Forces' activities in Syria from the perspective of military geology. The author focuses on the Kurdish forces' defence projects, which mainly involved the construction of gun trenches, observation towers or points, tunnels and underground facilities, as well as on the Turkish armed forces' actions against this military infrastructure. This involved both mountain and underground warfare activities. While these defensive infrastructures proved to be successful during the guerrilla warfare period, direct Turkish attacks on these installations demonstrated their vulnerability. The last chapter deals with the current operational needs and limitations of military geosciences from the perspective of the Austrian Armed Forces. Friedrich Teichmann points out that the global operational interest of states determines the need for accurate geo-data as well as geo-support in case of rapidly evolving requirements. In this context, geoscience must respond to new forms of threats, both asymmetric and cyber, at a time when resources for geospatial services are limited, which also requires greater synergy and an innovative approach to finding solutions among multiple stakeholders. This also includes increased digitisation, including the use of satellite and other space technologies. The number of chapters in the publication illustrates the breadth and depth of military geoscience, as well as the relevance of geoscience to past, present and future conflicts or military operations and missions. The current military operations in Ukraine demonstrate the need to take into account the geo-geological realities of the environment and that terrain remains one of the decisive factors for success on the battlefield, irrespective of the technological developments in military engineering and technology. This can also be an incentive for Slovenian researchers and the Slovenian Armed Forces to increase research activities in the field of military geosciences, especially in view of the rich military and war history in the geographically and geologically diverse territory of Slovenia.

“People live here, they die here so they must leave traces.” (Read 140) “Whatever colonialism was and is, it has made this place unsettling and unsettled.” (Gibson, Badland 2) Introduction What does it mean for [a] country to be haunted? In much theoretical work in film and Cultural Studies since the 1990s, the Australian continent, more often than not, bears traces of long suppressed traumas which inevitably resurface to haunt the present (Gelder and Jacobs; Gibson; Read; Collins and Davis). Felicity Collins and Therese Davis illuminate the ways Australian cinema acts as a public sphere, or “vernacular modernity,” for rethinking settler/indigenous relations. Their term “backtracking” serves as a mode of “collective mourning” in numerous films of the last decade which render unspoken colonial violence meaningful in contemporary Australia, and account for the “aftershocks” of the Mabo decision that overturned the founding fiction of terra nullius (7). Ray Lawrence’s 2006 film Jindabyne is another after-Mabo film in this sense; its focus on conflict within settler/indigenous relations in a small local town in the alpine region explores a traumatised ecology and drowned country. More than this, in our paper’s investigation of country and its attendant politics, Jindabyne country is the space of excessive haunting and resurfacing - engaging in the hard work of what Gibson (Transformations) has termed “historical backfill”, imaginative speculations “that make manifest an urge to account for the disconnected fragments” of country. Based on an adaptation by Beatrix Christian of the Raymond Carver story, So Much Water, So Close to Home, Jindabyne centres on the ethical dilemma produced when a group of fishermen find the floating, murdered body of a beautiful indigenous woman on a weekend trip, but decide to stay on and continue fishing. In Jindabyne, “'country' […] is made to do much discursive work” (Gorman-Murray). In this paper, we use the word as a metonym for the nation, where macro-political issues are played out and fought over. But we also use ‘country’ to signal the ‘wilderness’ alpine areas that appear in Jindabyne, where country is “a notion encompassing nature and human obligation that white Australia has learned slowly from indigenous Australia” (Gibson, Badland 178). This meaning enables a slippage between ‘land’ and ‘country’. Our discussion of country draws heavily on concepts from Ross Gibson’s theorisation of badlands. Gibson claims that originally, ‘badland’ was a term used by Europeans in North America when they came across “a tract of country that would not succumb to colonial ambition” (Badland 14). Using Collins and Davis’s “vernacular modernity” as a starting point, a film such as Jindabyne invites us to work through the productive possibilities of postcolonial haunting; to move from backtracking (going over old ground) to imaginative backfill (where holes and gaps in the ground are refilled in unconventional and creative returns to the past). Jindabyne (as place and filmic space) signifies “the special place that the Australian Alps occupy for so many Australians”, and the film engages in the discursive work of promoting “shared understanding” and the possibility of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal being “in country” (Baird, Egloff and Lebehan 35). We argue specifically that Jindabyne is a product of “aftermath culture” (Gibson Transformations); a culture living within the ongoing effects of the past, where various levels of filmic haunting make manifest multiple levels of habitation, in turn the product of numerous historical and physical aftermaths. Colonial history, environmental change, expanding wire towers and overflowing dams all lend meaning in the film to personal dilemmas, communal conflict and horrific recent crimes. The discovery of a murdered indigenous woman in water high in the mountains lays bare the fragility of a relocated community founded in the drowning of the town of old Jindabyne which created Lake Jindabyne. Beatrix Christian (in Trbic 61), the film’s writer, explains “everybody in the story is haunted by something. […] There is this group of haunted people, and then you have the serial killer who emerges in his season to create havoc.” “What’s in this compulsion to know the negative space?” asks Gibson (Badland 14). It’s the desire to better know and more deeply understand where we live. And haunting gives us cause to investigate further. Drowned, Murderous Country Jindabyne rewrites “the iconic wilderness of Australia’s High Country” (McHugh online) and replaces it with “a vast, historical crime scene” (Gibson, Badland 2). Along with nearby Adaminaby, the township of Old Jindabyne was drowned and its inhabitants relocated to the new town in the 1960s as part of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme. When Jindabyne was made in 2006 the scheme no longer represented an uncontested example of Western technological progress ‘taming’ the vast mountainous country. Early on in the film a teacher shows a short documentary about the town’s history in which Old Jindabyne locals lament the houses that will soon be sacrificed to the Snowy River’s torrents. These sentiments sit in opposition to Manning Clark’s grand vision of the scheme as “an inspiration to all who dream dreams about Australia” (McHugh online). With a 100,000-strong workforce, mostly migrated from war-ravaged Europe, the post-war Snowy project took 25 years and was completed in 1974. Such was this engineering feat that 121 workmen “died for the dream, of turning the rivers back through the mountains, to irrigate the dry inland” (McHugh online). Jindabyne re-presents this romantic narrative of progress as nothing less than an environmental crime. The high-tension wires scar the ‘pristine’ high country and the lake haunts every aspect of the characters’ interactions, hinting at the high country’s intractability that will “not succumb to colonial ambition” (Gibson, Badland 14). Describing his critical excavation of places haunted, out-of-balance or simply badlands, Gibson explains: Rummaging in Australia's aftermath cultures, I try to re-dress the disintegration in our story-systems, in our traditional knowledge caches, our landscapes and ecologies […] recuperate scenes and collections […] torn by landgrabbing, let's say, or by accidents, or exploitation that ignores rituals of preservation and restoration (Transformations). Tourism is now the predominant focus of Lake Jindabyne and the surrounding areas but in the film, as in history, the area does not “succumb to the temptations of pictorialism” (McFarlane 10), that is, it cannot be framed solely by the picture postcard qualities that resort towns often engender and promote. Jindabyne’s sense of menace signals the transformation of the landscape that has taken place – from ‘untouched’ to country town, and from drowned old town to the relocated, damned and electrified new one. Soon after the opening of the film, a moment of fishing offers a reminder that a town once existed beneath the waters of the eerily still Lake Jindabyne. Hooking a rusty old alarm clock out of the lake, Stuart explains to Tom, his suitably puzzled young son: underneath the water is the town where all the old men sit in rocking chairs and there’s houses and shops. […] There was a night […] I heard this noise — boing, boing, boing. And it was a bell coming from under the water. ‘Cause the old church is still down there and sometimes when the water’s really low, you can see the tip of the spire. Jindabyne’s lake thus functions as “a revelation of horrors past” (Gibson Badland 2). It’s not the first time this man-made lake is filmically positioned as a place where “violence begins to seem natural” (Gibson, Badland 13). Cate Shortland’s Somersault (2004) also uses Lake Jindabyne and its surrounds to create a bleak and menacing ambience that heightens young Heidi’s sense of alienation (Simpson, ‘Reconfiguring rusticity’). In Somersault, the male-dominated Jindabyne is far from welcoming for the emotionally vulnerable out-of-towner, who is threatened by her friend’s father beside the Lake, then menaced again by boys she meets at a local pub. These scenes undermine the alpine region’s touristic image, inundated in the summer with tourists coming to fish and water ski, and likewise, with snow skiers in the winter. Even away from the Lake, there is no fleeing its spectre. “The high-tension wires marching down the hillside from the hydro-station” hum to such an extent that in one scene, “reminiscent of Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)”, a member of the fishing party is spooked (Ryan 52). This violence wrought upon the landscape contextualises the murder of the young indigenous woman, Susan, by Greg, an electrician who after murdering Susan, seems to hover in the background of several scenes of the film. Close to the opening of Jindabyne, through binoculars from his rocky ridge, Greg spots Susan’s lone car coursing along the plain; he chases her in his vehicle, and forces her to stop. Before (we are lead to assume) he drags her from the vehicle and murders her, he rants madly through her window, “It all comes down from the power station, the electricity!” That the murder/murderer is connected with the hydro-electric project is emphasised by the location scout in the film’s pre-production: We had one location in the scene where Greg dumps the body in some water and Ray [Lawrence] had his heart set on filming that next to some huge pipelines on a dam near Talbingo but Snowy Hydro didn’t […] like that negative content […] in association with their facility and […] said ‘no’ they wouldn’t let us do it.” (Jindabyne DVD extras) “Tales of murder and itinerancy in wild country are as old as the story of Cain in the killing fields of Eden” (Badlands 14). In Jindabyne we never really get to meet Greg but he is a familiar figure in Australian film and culture. Like many before him, he is the lone Road Warrior, a ubiquitous white male presence roaming the de-populated country where the road constantly produces acts of (accidental and intentional) violence (Simpson, ‘Antipodean Automobility’). And after a litany of murders in recent films such as Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005) and Gone (Ringan Ledwidge, 2007) the “violence begins to seem natural” (Gibson Transformations 13) in the isolating landscape. The murderer in Jindabyne, unlike those who have migrated here as adults (the Irish Stuart and his American wife, Claire), is autochthonous in a landscape familiar with a trauma that cannot remain hidden or submerged. Contested High Country The unsinkability of Susan’s body, now an ‘indigenous murdered body’, holds further metaphorical value for resurfacing as a necessary component of aftermath culture. Such movement is not always intelligible within non-indigenous relations to country, though the men’s initial response to the body frames its drifting in terms of ascension: they question whether they have “broken her journey by tying her up”. The film reconfigures terra nullius as the ultimate badland, one that can never truly suppress continuing forms of physical, spiritual, historical and cultural engagement with country, and the alpine areas of Jindabyne and the Snowy River in particular. Lennon (14) points to “the legacy of biased recording and analysis” that “constitutes a threat to the cultural significance of Aboriginal heritage in alpine areas” (15). This significance is central to the film, prompting Lawrence to state that “mountains in any country have a spiritual quality about them […] in Aboriginal culture the highest point in the landscape is the most significant and this is the highest point of our country” (in Cordaiy 40). So whilst the Jindabyne area is contested country, it is the surfacing, upward mobility and unsinkable quality of Aboriginal memory that Brewster argues “is unsettling the past in post-invasion Australia” (in Lambert, Balayi 7). As the agent of backfill, the indigenous body (Susan) unsettles Jindabyne country by offering both evidence of immediate violence and reigniting the memory of it, before the film can find even the smallest possibility of its characters being ‘in country’. Claire illustrates her understanding of this in a conversation with her young son, as she attempts to contact the dead girls’ family. “When a bad thing happens,” she says, “we all have to do a good thing, no matter how small, alright? Otherwise the bad things, they just pile up and up and up.” Her persistent yet clumsy enactment of the cross-cultural go-between illuminates the ways “the small town community move through the terms of recent debate: shame and denial, repressed grief and paternalism” (Ryan 53). It is the movement of backfill within the aftermath: The movement of a foreign non-Aboriginal woman into Aboriginal space intertextually re-animates the processes of ‘settlement’, resolution and environmental assimilation for its still ‘unsettled’ white protagonists. […] Claire attempts an apology to the woman’s family and the Aboriginal community – in an Australia before Kevin Rudd where official apologies for the travesties of Australian/colonial history had not been forthcoming […] her movement towards reconciliation here is reflective of the ‘moral failure’ of a disconnection from Aboriginal history. (Lambert, Diasporas) The shift from dead white girl in Carver’s story to young Aboriginal woman speaks of a political focus on the ‘significance’ of the alpine region at a given moment in time. The corpse functions “as the trigger for crisis and panic in an Australia after native title, the stolen generation and the war-on-terror” (Lambert, Diasporas). The process of reconnecting with country and history must confront its ghosts if the community is to move forward. Gibson (Transformations) argues that “if we continue to close our imaginations to the aberrations and insufficiencies in our historical records. […] It’s likely we won’t dwell in the joy till we get real about the darkness.” In the post-colonial, multicultural but still divided geographies and cultures of Jindabyne, “genocidal displacement” comes face to face with the “irreconciled relation” to land “that refuses to remain half-seen […] a measure of non-indigenous failure to move from being on the land to being in country” (Ryan 52), evidenced by water harvesting in the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and the more recent crises in water and land management. Aftermath Country Haunted by historical, cultural and environmental change, Jindabyne constitutes a post-traumatic screen space. In aftermath culture, bodies and landscapes offer the “traces” (Gibson, Transformations) of “the social consequences” of a “heritage of catastrophe” that people “suffer, witness, or even perpetrate” so that “the legacy of trauma is bequeathed” (Walker i). The youth of Jindabyne are charged with traumatic heritage. The young Susan’s body predictably bears the semiotic weight of colonial atrocity and non-indigenous environmental development. Evidence of witnesses, perpetrators and sufferers is still being revealed after the corpse is taken to the town morgue, where Claire (in a culturally improper viewing) is horrified by Susan’s marks from being secured in the water by Stuart and the other men. Other young characters are likewise haunted by a past that is environmental and tragically personal. Claire and Stuart’s young son, Tom (left by his mother for a period in early infancy and the witness of his parents strained marital relations), has an intense fear of drowning. This personal/historical fear is played with by his seven year old friend, Caylin-Calandria, who expresses her own grief from the death of her young mother environmentally - by escaping into the surrounding nature at night, by dabbling in the dark arts and sacrificing small animals. The two characters “have a lot to believe in and a lot of things to express – belief in zombies and ghosts, ritual death, drowning” (Cordaiy 42). As Boris Trbic (64) observes of the film’s characters, “communal and familial harmony is closely related to their intense perceptions of the natural world and their often distorted understanding of the ways their partners, friends and children cope with the grieving process.” Hence the legacy of trauma in Jindabyne is not limited to the young but pervades a community that must deal with unresolved ecologies no longer concealed by watery artifice. Backfilling works through unsettled aspects of country by moving, however unsteadily, toward healing and reconciliation. Within the aftermath of colonialism, 9/11 and the final years of the Howard era, Jindabyne uses race and place to foreground the “fallout” of an indigenous “condemnation to invisibility” and the “long years of neglect by the state” (Ryan 52). Claire’s unrelenting need to apologise to the indigenous family and Stuart’s final admission of impropriety are key gestures in the film’s “microcosm of reconciliation” (53), when “the notion of reconciliation, if it had occupied any substantial space in the public imagination, was largely gone” (Rundell 44). Likewise, the invisibility of Aboriginal significance has specificity in the Jindabyne area – indigeneity is absent from narratives recounting the Snowy Mountains Scheme which “recruited some 60,000 Europeans,” providing “a basis for Australia’s postwar multicultural society” (Lennon 15); both ‘schemes’ evidencing some of the “unrecognised implications” of colonialism for indigenous people (Curthoys 36). The fading of Aboriginal issues from public view and political discourse in the Howard era was serviced by the then governmental focus on “practical reconciliation” (Rundell 44), and post 9/11 by “the broad brushstrokes of western coalition and domestic political compliance” (Lambert, CMC 252), with its renewed focus on border control, and increased suspicion of non-Western, non-Anglo-European difference. Aftermath culture grapples with the country’s complicated multicultural and globalised self-understanding in and beyond Howard’s Australia and Jindabyne is one of a series of texts, along with “refugee plays” and Australian 9/11 novels, “that mobilised themselves against the Howard government” (Rundell 43-44). Although the film may well be seen as a “profoundly embarrassing” display of left-liberal “emotional politics” (44-45), it is precisely these politics that foreground aftermath: local neglect and invisibility, terror without and within, suspect American leadership and shaky Australian-American relations, the return of history through marked bodies and landscapes. Aftermath country is simultaneously local and global – both the disappearance and the ‘problem’ of Aboriginality post-Mabo and post-9/11 are backfilled by the traces and fragments of a hidden country that rises to the surface. Conclusion What can be made of this place now? What can we know about its piecemeal ecology, its choppy geomorphics and scarified townscapes? […] What can we make of the documents that have been generated in response to this country? (Gibson, Transformations). Amidst the apologies and potentialities of settler-indigenous recognition, the murdering electrician Gregory is left to roam the haunted alpine wilderness in Jindabyne. His allegorical presence in the landscape means there is work to be done before this badland can truly become something more. Gibson (Badland 178) suggests country gets “called bad […] partly because the law needs the outlaw for reassuring citizens that the unruly and the unknown can be named and contained even if they cannot be annihilated.” In Jindabyne the movement from backtracking to backfilling (as a speculative and fragmental approach to the bodies and landscapes of aftermath culture) undermines the institutional framing of country that still seeks to conceal shared historical, environmental and global trauma. The haunting of Jindabyne country undoes the ‘official’ production of outlaw/negative space and its discursively good double by realising the complexity of resurfacing – electricity is everywhere and the land is “uncanny” not in the least because “the town of Jindabyne itself is the living double of the drowned original” (Ryan 53). The imaginative backfill of Jindabyne reorients a confused, purgatorial Australia toward the “small light of home” (53) – the hope of one day being “in country,” and as Gibson (Badland 3) suggests, the “remembering,” that is “something good we can do in response to the bad in our lands.” References Baird, Warwick, Brian Egloff and Rachel Lenehan. “Sharing the mountains: joint management of Australia’s alpine region with Aboriginal people.” historic environment 17.2 (2003): 32-36. Collins, Felicity and Therese Davis. Australian Cinema after Mabo. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Cordaiy, Hunter. “Man, Woman and Death: Ray Lawrence on Jindabyne.” Metro 149 (2006): 38-42. Curthoys, Anne. “An Uneasy Conversation: The Multicultural and the Indigenous.” Race Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand. Ed. John Docker and Gerhard Fischer. Sydney, UNSW P, 2000. 21-36. Gelder, Ken and Jane M. Jacobs. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness an Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. 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