Journal articles on the topic 'Wilderness areas Australia'

The rights-of-nature model is gaining traction as an innovative legal approach for nature conservation. Although adopted in several countries, it remains in its infancy, including in Australia. An important research question is whether rights of nature will offer superior environmental outcomes compared to traditional nature conservation techniques including creation of protected areas. This article investigates that question through a case study of the Tarkine wilderness, in the Australia state of Tasmania. It first identifies key lessons from existing international experience with affirmation of rights of nature, such as in New Zealand and Ecuador. The article then explores how rights of nature could apply in Australia’s Tarkine region and their value compared to existing or potential protected areas and other nature conservation measures under Australian or Tasmanian law. Affirming rights of nature represents a major conceptual shift in how people via the law relate to the natural world, but whether the model offers practical benefits for nature conservation depends on a variety of conditions, in addition to the need to address broader societal drivers of environmentaldegradation.

With ever-increasing demands being made on remote and natural lands, planners and managers require more detailed information than hitherto to assist them in monitoring the status of this wilderness resource and developing appropriate and effective management prescriptions. These requirements are addressed by a computer-based wilderness evaluation procedure that has been developed for a national wilderness survey of Australia.The methodology, based on the wilderness continuum concept (Lesslie & Taylor, 1985), places emphasis on measuring variation in wilderness quality by using four indicators that represent the two essential attributes of remoteness and naturalness. This permits a precise assessment to be made of the wilderness resource, revealing those factors which contribute to or compromise wilderness quality. The computer-based storage and analysis of data enables surveys to be conducted over large, even continental, areas, yet at a relatively fine level of resolution that is appropriate to localized planning needs.Trial application to the State of Victoria, Australia, demonstrates that the survey procedure can be successfully adapted to a wide range of environments, use-patterns, data-base characteristics, and management objectives, which should be applicable and very widely useful elsewhere.

ABSTRACTThe manner and extent to which birds associate with humans may influence the genetic attributes and antimicrobial resistance of their commensalEscherichiacommunities through strain transmission and altered selection pressures. In this study, we determined whether the distribution of the differentEscherichia coliphylogenetic groups and cryptic clades, the occurrence of 49 virulence associated genes, and/or the prevalence of resistance to 12 antimicrobials differed between four groups of birds from Australia with contrasting types of human association. We found that birds sampled in suburban and wilderness areas had similarEscherichiacommunities. TheEscherichiacommunities of backyard domestic poultry were phylogenetically distinct from theEscherichiacommunities sourced from all other birds, with a large proportion (46%) of poultry strains belonging to phylogenetic group A and a significant minority (17%) belonging to the cryptic clades. Wild birds sampled from veterinary and wildlife rehabilitation centers (in-care birds) carriedEscherichiaisolates that possessed particular virulence-associated genes more often thanEscherichiaisolates from birds sampled in suburban and wilderness areas. TheEscherichiaisolates from both the backyard poultry and in-care birds were more likely to be multidrug resistant than theEscherichiaisolates from wild birds. We also detected a multidrug-resistantE. colistrain circulating in a wildlife rehabilitation center, reinforcing the importance of adequate hygiene practices when handling and caring for wildlife. We suggest that the relatively high frequency of antimicrobial resistance in the in-care birds and backyard poultry is due primarily to the use of antimicrobials in these animals, and we recommend that the treatment protocols used for these birds be reviewed.

An aerial survey along a transect from eastern side of the Arnhem Land Plateau where Aboriginal people still lead a semi-traditional lifestyle, to the unoccupied western side of the Plateau, revealed systematic differences in the proportion of living and dead Callitris intratropica trees. Multiple regression analysis showed that the highest proportion of dead C. intratropica stems occurred on unoccupied, level terrain dominated by open Eucalyptus forests, with a minor or complete absence of Allosyncarpia ternata closed-canopy forests. A detailed study of one population of C. intratropica in western Arnhem Land adjacent to a small patch of A. ternata forest, known as Round Jungle, showed that the population had a unimodal size-class distribution, reflecting a low density of stems less than 10 cm in diameter at breast height (dbh). A computer simulation model was developed on the basis of estimates of annual fecundity, mortality and growth rates derived from observations of the stand. Sensitivity analyses suggested that a well-stocked stand could be transformed to one similar to that observed at Round Jungle after 50 years, if annual mortality rate of the immature stems (i.e. <12 cm dbh) was greater than 85%. Under these conditions, the stand would become extinct after 325 years. Variation in estimates of mature-stem (>12 cm dbh) mortality and fecundity had much less effect on the predictions of the model than the rate of mortality of the smallest size class. The model suggests that C. intratropica populations can rapidly fluctuate in response to changes in fire regime, while extinction is a gradual process and is consequently unlikely if some seedlings can escape burning, for instance by establishing in fire-protected microsites. This conclusion is consistent with the observed greater mortality of C. intratropica on sand sheets that have little topographic variability at the micro- or mesoscale, compared with other habitat types in areas that are currently unoccupied by Aboriginal people. Our study shows that predicting the fate of individual populations will require careful consideration of local factors such as the presence of micro-topographically safe sites for seedling establishment, as well as the surrounding pattern of vegetation and landforms that mediate the impact of fire on C. intratropica. However, we suggest that rather than refining details of the adjustment of C. intratropica in response to changed fire regimes associated with European colonisation, subsequent research should focus on the effect and significance of these changes for other organisms.

Context Since the introduction of fallow deer (Dama dama) to Tasmania in the early 1830s, the management of the species has been conflicted; the species is partially protected as a recreational hunting resource, yet simultaneously recognised as an invasive species because of its environmental impact and the biosecurity risk that it poses. The range and abundance of fallow deer in Tasmania has evidently increased over the past three decades. In the 1970s, it was estimated that ~7000–8000 deer were distributed in three distinct subpopulations occupying a region of ~400 000 ha (generally centred around the original introduction sites). By the early 2000s, the estimated population size had more than tripled to ~20 000–30 000 deer occupying 2.1 million ha. No study has attempted to predict what further growth in this population is likely. Aims The purpose of our study was to provide a preliminary estimate of the future population range and abundance of fallow deer in Tasmania under different management scenarios. Methods We developed a spatially explicit, deterministic population model for fallow deer in Tasmania, based on estimates of demographic parameters linked to a species distribution model. Spatial variation in abundance was incorporated into the model by setting carrying capacity as a function of climate suitability. Key results On the basis of a conservative estimate of population growth for the species, and without active management beyond the current policy of hunting and crop protection permits, abundance of fallow deer is estimated to increase substantially in the next 10 years. Uncontrolled, the population could exceed 1 million animals by the middle of the 21st century. This potential increase is a function both of local increase in abundance and extension of range. Conclusions Our results identify areas at high risk of impact from fallow deer in the near future, including ecologically sensitive areas of Tasmania (e.g. the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area). Implications The research approach and results are presented as a contribution to debate and decisions about the management of fallow deer in Tasmania. In particular, they provide a considered basis for anticipating future impacts of deer in Tasmania and prioritising management to mitigate impact in ecologically sensitive areas.

Natural area tourism may contribute to deterioration in biophysical environments important for sustainable conservation of biodiversity and/or historically significant sites. Levels of protection within the IUCN guidelines provide general descriptors of desirable outcomes, and the Limits of Acceptable Change (LAC) management tool has often been implicitly applied. This article presents an initial attempt to assess the value of Thresholds of Potential Concern (TPC) relative to LAC as management frameworks for protected areas, using the example of trail width as an indicator of visitor impacts on vegetation, soil, water and, potentially, visitor safety. Visitor preferences relating to trail width were incorporated when applying the TPC and LAC principles. Sections of three walking trails in a high-visitation national park near Sydney, Australia, were measured at ~10.7 m intervals: the mean trail widths were 1.6 m, 1.8 m and 2.14 m. Of the 115 recreationists surveyed, 16% of those having the greatest tolerance towards management interventions (‘Non-purist’ wilderness category) viewed a trail ≥ 2 m wide as acceptable, but 96% of ‘Purists’ nominated a maximum of ≤1.5 m. The TPC was found to provide a broad strategy for identification, assessment and grading of multiple biophysical thresholds within an ecological framework. Combined with stakeholder information, the TPC allows for timely, proactive and calibrated management responses to maintaining biophysical and social sustainability.

Introduction:Beginning Education at Central Coast Hospitals (BEACCHEs) was developed as an experiential wilderness experience to assist with student exposure to new hazards when commencing at a coastal regional hospital. The coast has several hazards which are specific to the area.Aim:To provide students with first responder education for situations commonly encountered on the Central Coast.Methods:Sessions on first responder training specific to coastal and remote locations included: first aid and surf safety with the Ocean Beach Surf-Lifesaving Club and anti-venom education with the Australian Reptile Park. Education was provided regarding the transition from academic to clinical medicine including support and workload management. A two-day workshop was held on the Central Coast. Pre- and post-workshop surveys were conducted with a combination of matrix questions, Likert response scales, and long answer questions. Ethics was obtained. Both quantitative and qualitative responses were analyzed.Results:Excellent feedback regarding this program was received. All students reported an increase in knowledge in all three domains of critical medicine and evacuation issues, student health and workload management, and Central Coast community and environment. The areas of greatest knowledge in each of these domains were the management of surf incidents, signs and symptoms of PTSD, and Central Coast marine and ocean environment. A confidence increase was seen in responding effectively to an emergency, particularly, in response to improvisation in the field. All findings were statistically significant with all P-values <0.01.Discussion:The addition of BEACCHEs to the orientation of medical students at the Central Coast Medical School has demonstrated to be an effective program for allowing students to adjust more quickly to the new clinical environment. Following the success of this program, BEACCHEs is expected to become part of the new Junior Medical Officer orientation in 2019.

In Sri Lanka, there are 31 species of bats distributed from lowlands to mountains. To document bat diversity and their habitat associations, 58 roosting sites in Maduru-Oya National Park periphery were surveyed. Fifteen bat species were recorded occupying 16 different roosting sites in this area. Among all the species recorded, Rhinolophusrouxii was the most abundant species per roosting site whereas Kerivoulapicta was the least abundant. A road-kill specimen similar to genus Phoniscus was found during the survey, a genus so far only documented in Southeast Asia and Australasia. Although our study area provided habitats for a diverse chiropteran community, the colony size per roost was remarkably low. Although our study area is supposedly a part of the park’s buffer zone, many anthropogenic activities are threatening the bat community: felling large trees, slash-and-burn agriculture, excessive use of agrochemicals, vengeful killing, and subsidized predation. We strongly recommend adoption of wildlife-friendly sustainable land management practices in the buffer zone such as forest gardening, agroforestry (alley cropping, mixed-cropping), and integrated farming. Bat conservation in this region should take a landscape-scale conservation approach which includes Maduru-Oya National Park and other surrounding protected areas into a regional conservation network. Extents of undisturbed wilderness are dramatically declining in Sri Lanka; thus, future conservation efforts must be retrofitted into anthropocentric multiuse landscapes and novel ecosystems like areas surrounding Maduru-Oya National Park.

Introduction:Best practice first aid management of accidental hypothermia and cold injuries in the prehospital setting is relevant for disaster management in cold environments as well as for wilderness and expedition medicine, and space medicine. In the Australasian context, guidance is currently taken from the Australian Resuscitation Council (“ARC”) Guidelines dealing with these issues.Aim:To review and update the recommendations of the ARC Guideline 9.3.3 Hypothermia: First-Aid Management (February 2009) and ARC Guideline 9.3.6 Cold Injury (March 2000).Method: The review is being undertaken through a combination of a focused literature review and expert opinion. Through the author’s membership of the International Commission for Alpine Rescue (“ICAR”) Alpine Emergency Medicine Commission, two northern-hemisphere experts on hypothermia have reviewed the guidelines and provided commentary and recommendations.Results:Much of the literature around accidental hypothermia and cold injuries (including frostbite, frostnip, and chilblains), relies on expert opinion and case studies. There are relatively few randomized controlled trials, and these are often confined to the laboratory setting. As a result, there is a heavier reliance on expert opinion than in any other areas of medicine.Discussion:This presentation will summarize the current best practice recommendations for the first aid management of accidental hypothermia and cold injuries through combining the existing ARC Guidelines with key advances identified through the literature review, and the key management recommendations stemming from expert opinion. This will provide attendees with a cohesive set of clinical practice recommendations which can be used in the field.

Throughout history the city and the wilderness have been both idea and environment for urban man. The conflict between them is expressed in the earliest mythology and manifest today in the conservation versus development debate. The conflict is misdirected: conservation and development are interdependent. They are the same process on different time scales: the sustainance and security of life on earth. Their reconciliation is proposed in the concept of sustainable development.The widespread concern about the environment in the industrialised, developed societies today combines scientific and emotional components. The scientific component is a new and valuable appreciation of, and commitment to, the global ecology. The emotional component is more an anti-technology mood, an historically cyclic phenomenon of complex origins. Modern environmentalism is a complex amalgamation of those environmental concerns with wide ranging socio-economic and political reforms. Those reforms frequently involve the concept of no-growth or very limited economic growth, especially in Western industrial society, and derive from a pessimistic world view historically common among intellectuals. It is environmentalism, not conservationism, which is in conflict with the concept of development.A successful petroleum industry is vital to Australia's future security and welfare. The main threat to the industry comes from environmentalism, and the confusing myriad of legislation and regulation it has sponsored. Of particular significance is the policy of excluding exploration from conservation areas, rather than adopting a multiple and sequential land use approach. The single-usage approach to land management is inefficient balancing of resources and, correspondingly, is poor conservation practice. Multiple land use is a fundamental tenet of the sustainable development and the National Conservation Strategy of Australia.APEA, and business and industry generally, must improve communications with the public. The significance of primary resources in the daily life and national economy must be retaught. Industry must play a leading role in defining and implementing sustainable development, and in championing the concept. The concept will be attacked and manipulated by no-growth environmentalists, but they must not be allowed to prevail.Sustainable development offers the present generations the chance to reconcile conservation and development. That reconciliation is an imperative for the future.

On 23 November 2017, the Federal Court handed down its judgment in the Bindunbur case, a long-running native title dispute over significant areas of the Middle Dampier Peninsula in the Kimberley, North-West Australia. The decision was called a ‘bombshell’ because of Justice North’s finding that the Goolarabooloo family, long described in the media and by the public as ‘traditional owners’ of James Price Point and seen as leaders of the fight against the failed Kimberley gas hub, are not traditional owners of that area after all. This article argues there are several related reasons why outsiders mistook who are the true traditional owners of James Price Point. Firstly, an entrenched association in the minds of most non-Aboriginal people between Aboriginality and wilderness; secondly, outsider ignorance of Aboriginal law; thirdly, several key differences between the customary Aboriginal normative system and Australian settler property law; and finally, that it was essential to have traditional owner support for the No Gas campaign against the project.

Imaginaries of protected areas as state-based fortresses have been challenged by expansion of the global nature conservation estate on non-government lands, notably in contexts such as Australia where neoliberal reform has been strong. Little is known about the implications of this change for the meanings, purposes and practices of nature conservation. Images are central to public understandings of nature conservation. We thus investigate the visual communication of environmental non-government organisations (ENGOs) involved in private protected areas in Australia, with particular focus on Bush Heritage Australia (BHA). We employ a three-part design encompassing quantitative and qualitative methods to study the visual imaginaries underlying nature conservation in BHA's magazines and the web homepages of it and four other ENGOs over 2004–2020. We find that visual imaginaries changed across time, as ENGOs went through an organisational process of professionalisation comprising three dynamics: legitimising, marketising, and differentiating. An imaginary of dedicated Western volunteer groups protecting scenic wilderness was replaced by the spectacle of uplifting and intimate individual encounters with native nature. Amenable to working within rather than transforming dominant political-economic structures, the new imaginary empowers professional ENGOs and their partners as primary carers of nature. It advertises a mediated access to spectacular nature that promises positive emotions and redemption for environmental wrongs to financial supporters of ENGOs. These findings reveal the role of non-government actors under neoliberal conditions in the use of visual representations to shift the meanings, purposes and practices of nature conservation.

“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. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 1998. Gibson, Ross. Seven Versions of an Australian Badland. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2002. Gibson, Ross. “Places, Past, Disappearance.” Transformations 13 (2006). Aug. 11 2008 transformations.cqu.edu.au/journal/issue_13/article_01.shtml. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Country.” M/C Journal 11.5 (this issue). Kitson, Michael. “Carver Country: Adapting Raymond Carver in Australia.” Metro150 (2006): 54-60. Lambert, Anthony. “Movement within a Filmic terra nullius: Woman, Land and Identity in Australian Cinema.” Balayi, Culture, Law and Colonialism 1.2 (2001): 7-17. Lambert, Anthony. “White Aborigines: Women, Mimicry, Mobility and Space.” Diasporas of Australian Cinema. Eds. Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska, and Anthony Lambert. UK: Intellectbooks, 2009. Forthcoming. Lambert, Anthony. “Mediating Crime, Mediating Culture.” Crime, Media, Culture 4.2 (2008): 237-255. Lennon, Jane. “The cultural significance of Australian alpine areas.” Historic environment 17.2 (2003): 14-17. McFarlane, Brian. “Locations and Relocations: Jindabyne & MacBeth.” Metro Magazine 150 (Spring 2006): 10-15. McHugh, Siobhan. The Snowy: The People Behind the Power. William Heinemann Australia, 1999. http://www.mchugh.org/books/snowy.html. Read, Peter. Haunted Earth. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003. Rundle, Guy. “Goodbye to all that: The end of Australian left-liberalism and the revival of a radical politics.” Arena Magazine 88 (2007): 40-46. Ryan, Matthew. “On the treatment of non-indigenous belonging.” Arena Magazine 84 (2006): 52-53. Simpson, Catherine. “Reconfiguring Rusticity: feminizing Australian Cinema’s country towns’. Studies in Australasian Cinemas 2.1 (2008): forthcoming. Simpson, Catherine. “Antipodean Automobility & Crash: Treachery, Trespass and Transformation of the Open Road.” Australian Humanities Review 39-40 (2006). http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-September-2006/simpson.html. Trbic, Boris. “Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne: So Much Pain, So Close to Home.” Screen Education 44 (2006): 58–64. Walker, Janet. Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. Berkley, Los Angeles and London: U of California P, 2005.

Traditionally, the country way of life, the country worldview -- the country culture -- has been understood differently to the city way of life. Notions of rural have been represented in terms such as 'Eden', 'Arcadia', 'Golden Age', and associated with beauty, fertility, moral uprightness and authenticity. In contrast, notions of urban have been characterised by pollution, sterility, degeneration and artificiality. In Australia, the culture of the first white settlers developed out of this tradition, but with its own distinctive characteristics. The harshness and indomitability of the landscape became the means by which unique character, unifying myths of belonging and societal significance were constructed and asserted. In contrast to the communities of the country's original inhabitants, which were perceived as passive, unproductive and disconnected, the new culture was characterised by notions of 'land', 'masculinity', 'white', 'productive', 'homogenous' and 'nationalistic' (Moore 54; Turner 6; Ward; White 16ff.). Defining the country worldview in contemporary Australia, however, is problematic. Question marks hang over the continued significance, even existence, of a specifically country culture. Post-war Australia has witnessed enormous economic and social changes, wrought by improved transport and communication networks, a shrinking rural population, and the decreasing importance of the agricultural industries. The steady decline in grass roots support for the National Party of Australia, traditional defender of the country way of life, suggests that the voting population no longer views the upholding of specifically pro-country policies as necessary to the well-being of the nation. Australia is now recognised as the most urbanised, sub-urbanised and multi-cultural of the western industrialised nations. Globalisation of the mass communications media has blurred the boundaries between rural, urban, state and national. Consequently, many argue that the differences between the country and city are now insignificant (for example, Aitkin 34-41). Yet notions of country that are distinct, even definitive, continue to be represented in various urban-based communications industries, cultural policies, and the discourses of environmental politics and nationalism. Examples include John Laws's very popular Across Australia radio talk-back programme which celebrates the outback, the farmer and 'battler', and the 'True Blue' music of country artist John Williamson; the push by the Green movement to separate and protect wilderness areas of 'natural' bushland from the corrupting influences of human cultivation; and the continued significance of the 'bush' and 'bushman' in divers constructions of national cultural identity. Share and Lawrence argue that such representations are a state of mind rather than a state of being, "in the imagination of the cosmopolis" only (Share & Lawrence 101). Imagined or otherwise, however, the evidence suggests that they are representations which are nevertheless there -- albeit constructed in varying ways, with varying emphases, and in a variety of settings. Tamworth: Country at Heart Jacka argues that it is the 'local', constructed by a specific set of forces and circumstances and operating within a particular time frame and place, that provides the best or most 'authentic' means of analysing notions of the 'country' (qtd. in Share & Lawrence 102). Tamworth, situated in North Western New South Wales, approximately four hundred kilometres from Sydney, is one such 'authentic' locality. The city of Tamworth and its surrounding hinterland is populated by some 55,000 people. Timber and farmland constitute 95% of its land use. Agricultural production generates the bulk of its net income. The Tamworth electoral district has been designated 'country' by the State Electoral Office. Promotional billboards erected by the Tamworth City Council and situated on all major highways into the city describe Tamworth as 'the heart of country'. Tamworth is renowned as 'the Country Music Capital of Australasia' and celebrates 'country' values annually through a highly successful Country Music Festival. Clearly, notions of country are significant in the shaping of how Tamworth is perceived as a community locally and nationally. These notions are an important component of the process of meaning generation, circulation and exchange inTamworth -- indeed, they are an important component of the essential fabric that constitutes the Tamworth culture. Analysis The Tamworth worldview was studied through an analysis of the coverage of the local NSW state election campaigns of 1995 and 1999 by Tamworth's only regional daily newspaper, the Northern Daily Leader. Regional daily newspapers are a useful means of analysing the major preoccupations of a culture. They contribute significantly to the construction and representation of the communities they serve: they are moulded by the specific needs of their communities; they are prominent influences of the norms, values and processes of these communities; they are the product of a community that is connected by common and local interests and knowledge, written with and by the people of this community (Mules et al. 242). The coverage of the 1995 and 1999 election campaigns represented a discrete sample of texts with a common focus. An important aspect of this focus was Mr Tony Windsor, Independent State Member for Tamworth. Windsor's Independent status was significant to the study. Firstly, it suggests that he was elected to office on his own merits or on the merits of his policies, as against any particular party affiliation. Papadakis and Bean argue that a vote for an Independent most often represents a protest vote against the dominant players in the political system rather than any systemic approval of the policy positions or other qualities of the recipient (109). This may well have been the case for Windsor's initial victory in 1991. However, in the 1995 election he won an unprecedented 83% of the primary vote, representing voters from right across the political spectrum. He further increased his majority in the 1999 election. Windsor's extraordinary popularity suggests that his appeal cut across the political boundaries into the social and cultural realms. As such, Windsor embodies a singular means of analysing the socio-politico-cultural preoccupations of those he represents. The study tracked story frequency and space, and analysed pictorial, headline and lead texts in terms of story focus, personal and thematic associations, and candidate agency. It was found that the Leader markedly privileged Windsor over his opponents in regards to story frequency and space. The pictorial and key word analyses identified Windsor's public persona as more active and more person-oriented than those of his opponents, and as associated more often with exterior settings, particularly those in or connected with 'bush' locations. This stood in contrast to the representations of his major ALP opponents. In both elections they were female, associated more with interior settings, and represented as speaking more than doing, passive more than active, and concerned more with their emotions and states of being than was Windsor. Overall, the Leader's representation of Windsor was found to comprise the six notions noted above as being characteristic of the traditional country worldview. Windsor's connections with and concerns for the land and country issues were significant. The construction of male and female gender roles was masculinist in nature. The absence of any signifiers associated with notions of 'Aboriginality', 'ethnicity', even 'diversity', indicated the existence of naturalised discourses of 'white' and 'homogeneity'. Notions of productivity were evident through Windsor's preoccupation with the business and industry. Nationalism was implied through Windsor's association with characteristics that epitomise traditional understandings of what it is to be an Australian. Two additional characteristics were also identified. The first of these was named 'Independent', as indicated through the significance placed upon Windsor's politically Independent status. It was defined by the traditional understandings of the country worldview and ideas of integrity, 'a fair go' for the country, and of giving power back to the people. In contrast, the major political parties, ALP and National Party, were associated with the city, corruption, interference, lack of democracy, the undermining of country values by city values, and a subordination of the country to the city. The second characteristic was named 'community'. It was indicated through ideas of belonging and like-mindedness, andWindsor's representation as friendly, person-oriented and concerned with the active provision of services for the people. Implications The Tamworth culture is characterised by the notions of 'land', 'masculinity', 'white', 'productive', 'homogenous', 'nationalistic', 'Independent' and 'community'. This very characterisation, however, is one that gives rise to a number of questions. What drove the Leader to construct and represent the Tamworth culture in this way? How did and does this particular characterisation serve the needs of the Tamworth people? How and why are these needs different to the needs of city people -- or even people in other rural communities? Perhaps the best answer lies with the demonstrated longevity of the essential nature of the Tamworth worldview. Traditional notions of country have remained distinctive, even definitive, despite Australia's urbanisation, suburbanisation, multiculturalism; despite the enormous economic and social changes that have been wrought by globalisation; despite the consequent blurring of boundaries between rural, urban, state and national. This traditional nature, it seems, is resistant to change. Yet there is also evidence that a blurring of boundaries, even change, has occurred in Tamworth. Examples include the fact that the combined income generated by secondary and tertiary industries in the Tamworth district is now greater than that generated by agriculture; Windsor, with whom the Leader so closely associates the land and other notions traditionally associated with the country, also holds a university degree in economics; the annual Country Music Festival is celebrated largely from within the confines of the city of Tamworth itself; Tamworth City Council and Country Music Festival both have sites on the World Wide Web, thereby connecting them with the very globalisation that the Leader would have them resisting. Although this may suggest that the country has actually appropriated, even assimilated many of the notions that are most often associated with change in today's society, it also seems that this assimilation is one that is on the country's terms only. Notions of the city are subordinated to notions of the country. Change is appropriated, but in a way that maintains the status quo -- that perpetuates the essential country worldview, both locally and nationally. Such evidence of change may also suggest that the Leader's representation of Windsor, of Tamworth, is perhaps a state of mind rather than a state of being. It is a representation that taps into the imagination of the people rather than their everyday existence. In so doing, it worked to position over 85% of the population into voting a particular way in the 1995 and 1999 NSW State elections. It may also work to draw the many people from around Australia who bring their tourist dollars into Tamworth each year to celebrate country values through the Country Music Festival. The Tamworth culture may well uphold a construction of Australian identity that is outside the direct experience of those who live on the coastal fringes, yet it provides an attractive, even desirable holiday destination for many. Perhaps this is because people, country and city alike, continue to see the country as a place that offers them a simple solution to tensions and conflicts that are otherwise unresolvable. Change produces anxiety -- especially a postmodern change in which all semblances of certainty have been removed. On the other hand, the study suggests that the country worldview represents that which does not change. Its definitive nature stands in contrast and provides an alternative to the relativism of the city. Notions of country represent a surety in a world that is otherwise uncertain. References Aitkin, D. "Countrymindedness: The Spread of an Idea." Australian Cultural History 4 (1985): 34-41. Moore, A. "The Old Guard and 'Countrymindedness' during the Great Depression." Journal of Australian Studies 27 (1990): 54. Mules, W., T. Shirato, and B. Wigman. "Rural Identity within the Symbolic Order: Media Representations of the Drought." Communication and Culture in Rural Areas. Ed. P. Share. Wagga Wagga: Charles Sturt UP, 1995. 242. 6. Papadakis, E., and C. Bean. "Independents and the Minor Parties: The Electoral System." Australian Journal of Political Science 30 (1995): 109. Share, P., G. Lawrence. "Fear and Loathing in Wagga Wagga: Cultural Representations of the Rural and Possible Policy Implications." Communication and Culture in Rural Areas. Ed. P. Share. Wagga Wagga: Charles Sturt UP, 1995. Turner, G. Making It National. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994. Ward, R. The Australian Legend. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1958. White, R. Inventing Australia. Sydney:Allen & Unwin, 1981. 16ff. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Catherine Richardson. "The Politics of a Country Culture: State of Mind or State of Being?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.2 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/country.php>. Chicago style: Catherine Richardson, "The Politics of a Country Culture: State of Mind or State of Being?," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 2 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/country.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Catherine Richardson. (2000) The politics of a country culture: state of mind or state of being?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(2). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/country.php> ([your date of access]).

ObjectiveDevelop a public health surveillance plan for the Oregon Public Health Division (OPHD) in anticipation of the expected influx of visitors for the 2017 Great American Solar Eclipse.IntroductionThe Great American Solar Eclipse of 2017 provided a rare opportunity to view a complete solar eclipse on the American mainland. Much of Oregon was in the path of totality and forecasted to have clear skies. Ahead of the event, OPHD aggregated a list of 107 known gatherings in mostly rural areas across the state, some with estimated attendance of up to 30,000 attendees. Temporary food vendors and a range of sanitation solutions (including open latrines) were planned. International travelers were expected, along with large numbers of visitors traveling by car on the day of the eclipse.The potential for multiple simultaneous mass gatherings across the state prompted OPHD to activate an incident management team (IMT) and to create a Health Intelligence Section to design a mass gathering surveillance strategy. Statewide syndromic surveillance (Oregon ESSENCE) has been used to monitor previous mass gatherings (1) and captures statewide emergency department (ED), urgent care, Oregon Poison Center, and reportable disease data.MethodsThe OPHD Health Intelligence Section identified five categories of public health effects associated with large outdoor gatherings based on literature review (2–5) and an internal risk assessment. These included health system status (total visit or call counts), communicable disease (fever, bloody diarrhea and reportable disease counts), injuries and substance abuse (including motor vehicle accidents), and outdoor exposure (heat-related illness, snake bites and asthma-related visits). An event-related category monitored trends in eclipse-related visits or eye-related injuries (looking directly at the sun). Where possible, syndromic trends were assessed in multiple data sources. These categories were used to create dashboards within Oregon ESSENCE and shared in a guidance document for local health departments and hospitals.Health Intelligence monitored syndromes of interest during a period of enhanced surveillance (9/18-9/22), and met daily with members of the OPHD IMT to share surveillance summaries, which were also sent to OPHD leadership and external partners.ResultsDuring the enhance surveillance period, the OPHD Health Intelligence Section did not identify statewide increases in healthcare utilization (total ED visits and calls to the Oregon Poison Center), but did observe increases in visits at select emergency departments in the state. Visits by out-of-state residents (as determined by patient zip code at time of registration) increased during the surveillance period. Fever-related visits increased as well but were not accompanied by reports of illnesses clusters.Increases were noted for motor vehicle accidents, eye-related injuries, and “eclipse”-related visits. Increases in eye-related injuries appeared to be an annual seasonal trend and not related to the eclipse. There were no increases of note in the other queries monitored. Development of new queries (West Nile Virus) was begun based upon mosquito pool surveillance findings. Surveillance highlights were posted publicly in a special edition of the biweekly Oregon ESSENCE Hazard Report (see Image 1).ConclusionsStatewide public health surveillance during the 2017 Great American Solar Eclipse in Oregon did not identify clusters of infectious disease or other opportunities for real-time public health intervention. Nevertheless, surveillance identified increases in motor vehicle accidents, especially among out-of-state residents, due perhaps to increased road travel for the event. Preparations for this event increased capacity of state health department staff to conduct this type of surveillance in the future. Tools created for the eclipse have been used in several IMT activations since the eclipse.References1. Jagger MA, Jaramillo S, Boyd L, Johnson B, Reed KR, Powell M. Mass Gathering Surveillance : New ESSENCE Report and Collaboration Win Gold in OR. 2017;9(1):2579.2. WHO. Public Health for Mass Gatherings: Key Considerations. World Health Organization. 2015.3. Lombardo JS, Sniegoski CA, Loschen WA, Westercamp M, Wade M, Dearth S, et al. Public health surveillance for mass gatherings. Johns Hopkins APL Tech Dig (Applied Phys Lab. 2008;27(4):347–55.4. Polkinghorne BG, Massey PD, Durrheim DN, Byrnes T, MacIntyre CR. Prevention and surveillance of public health risks during extended mass gatherings in rural areas: The experience of the Tamworth Country Music Festival, Australia. Public Health. 2013;127(1):32–8.5. Burdick TE. Wilderness event medicine: Planning for mass gatherings in remote areas. Vol. 3, Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease. 2005. p. 249–58.

If you live through this with me, I swear that I would die for you— Hole, “Asking for It” (1994)The 1990s was a curious decade – post-1980s excess and the Black Monday correction, we limped into the last decade of the 20th century with a whimper, not a bang. The baby boomers were in ascendency, shaking off the detritus of a century of extremes behind closed doors.It’s easy now to think that the disaffection manifesting in Generation X and in particular in the grunge music scene was a put on, an act. But in most big game cultures the emerging generation was caught between old school regimes that refused to recognise very obvious failures and what appeared to be distant, no access futures. This point has been compellingly made by Mark Davis, the author of one of the essays in this 'nineties' issue of M/C Journal.The editors of this issue came of age in 1990s Australia. Or, to paraphrase grunge act Hole, we lived through this. And what a time to be alive! How appropriate to revisit the twentieth century’s swansong as the second decade of the twenty-first century nears its own denouement.When we sat down to work on this issue, one clear question arose: How to explain this 1990s nostalgia? Commentators have proffered a slew of explanations. These have ranged from the “20 year cycles” for nostalgia in popular culture (Tucker) to a desire for an apparently simpler, more trouble-free and, well, less connected time. As Atkinson wryly observes: “While we had the internet in the grunge era, it didn't necessarily dominate your life at that point. Your existence was probably a bunch more focused on IRL than URLs.”Some contributors invoke 1990s nostalgia. Paul Stafford provides a reverential and autoethnographic account of his experiences as a fan of grunge music during that genre’s early 1990s heyday. Renee Middlemost describes the excoriating response from fans to The Simpsons’ episode “That 90s Show”. Middlemost’s essay reminds us of the program’s brilliance prior to “jumping the shark” in the 2000s.Yes, the 1990s hosted transgressive, test of time-standing examples of popular culture. This includes the ‘grunge’ music genre that arose in the US circa the early 1990s, in the work of bands such as Hole, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden (see Stafford’s essay). Grunge music and its associated sub-cultural markers went on to flourish globally in countries such as Poland, as Marek Jezinski and Lukasz Wojtkowski describe in their contribution.The 1990s also saw lesser known, but no less significant, pop cultural phenomena. Julian Novitz revisits the Doctor Who novels published between 1991 and 1997. These novels are particularly significant given that the 1990s have commonly been regarded as the “wilderness years” for that franchise.The 1990s saw an increased feminist visibility in popular culture. This visibility is suggested in Jessica Ford’s essay on Roseanne/Roseanne Barr’s feminism, Claire Knowles’s reading of Agent Scully (of X Files fame) as feminist icon, and Justine Ettler’s reflection on her meeting with US “post-punk-feminist” Kathy Acker. Ettler is the author of the breakout Australian novel The River Ophelia (1995), which was influenced by Acker’s oeuvre, and of which Acker was evidently a fan.Yet, 1990s feminisms had their limitations. They lacked, for example, the focus of intersectionality that was conceptualised by African-American legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw during the late 1980s, and that is only now (in the 21st century) really starting to take shape, albeit not without a struggle. Ford makes this point when analysing the “whiteness” of Roseanne/Roseanne’s gender politics in the 90s and 2018.In other areas, too, the 90s were not “all good”. There was no such thing as regional arts development funds. There was no reconciliation or Beyond Blue. No #MeToo or #TimesUp. No kombucha or viral campaigns or shops open after five. No royal commissions into child abuse. Australia was yet to have a female prime minister or governor general. Mentioning global warming meant you were a crackpot. Gender reassignment was something your nanna and your neighbour had never heard about.Put simply, then, the 1990s cannot be described in entirely affirmative or negative terms. The 1990s (as with any decade, really) is too complex for such summations.In some ways the 1990s was about what was started (internet insurgence), what was set on fire (Die Yuppy Die), and what came after the ashes drifted. Many of our writers have taken this comparative view, exploring the then(s) and now(s) and the enormous gaps between that don’t just register in years. Mark Davis, for example, argues the Alt Right is far more nightmarish in the new millennium than even he could have imagined.Some contributors have explored the merger of old and new, past and future in creative and idiosyncratic ways. Chris Campanioni theorises “the cover and the glitch, two performative and technological enactments that fomented the collapse between author-reader and user-machine.” Campanioni’s exploration focuses, in particular, on the Y2K bug and David Lynch’s cult series Twin Peaks (1990-91), and the much hyped reboot in 2017.In his feature essay contribution, Mitch Goodwin reminds us that 1999 — and its anticipation of technological dystopia (Y2K anxieties ahoy!) — “could not have happened” without 1995. Goodwin teases out this point via readings of two futuristic thrillers Johnny Mnemonic and Strange Days.As Goodwin puts it:It might seem strange now but tapping into the contents of Keanu Reeve’s brain was a utopian data moment in 1995. This was still the digital frontier when the network was as yet not fully colonised by corporate America. The Lo-Teks effectively delivering a global moment of healing via satellite. These were the dreams we had in the nineties.While no single collection could hope to encapsulate the complexity of the period spanning 1990 to 1999. The contributors to the ‘Nineties’ issue of M/C Journal have given this one helluva go.References Bernstein, Sara. “Why Gen X Isn’t Psyched for the ‘90s Revival.” Vox. 13 Mar. 2018. <https://www.vox.com/2018/3/13/17064842/gen-x-90s-revival>.Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1 (1989): 139-167.Davis, Mark. Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1997.Hole. “Asking for It.” Live through This. Georgia, US: City Slang, 1994.

Special Care Notice This article contains images of deceased people that might cause sadness or distress to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers. Introduction Like many cities, Perth was founded on wetlands that have been integral to its history and culture (Seddon 226–32). However, in order to promote a settlement agenda, early mapmakers sought to erase the city’s wetlands from cartographic depictions (Giblett, Cities). Since the colonial era, inner-Perth’s swamps and lakes have been drained, filled, significantly reduced in size, or otherwise reclaimed for urban expansion (Bekle). Not only have the swamps and lakes physically disappeared, the memories of their presence and influence on the city’s development over time are also largely forgotten. What was the site of Perth, specifically its wetlands, like before British settlement? In 2014, an interdisciplinary team at Edith Cowan University developed a digital visualisation process to re-imagine Perth prior to colonisation. This was based on early maps of the Swan River Colony and a range of archival information. The images depicted the city’s topography, hydrology, and vegetation and became the centerpiece of a physical exhibition entitled Re-imagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands and a virtual exhibition hosted by the Western Australian Museum. Alongside historic maps, paintings, photographs, and writings, the visual reconstruction of Perth aimed to foster appreciation of the pre-settlement environment—the homeland of the Whadjuck Nyoongar, or Bibbulmun, people (Carter and Nutter). The exhibition included the narrative of Fanny Balbuk, a Nyoongar woman who voiced her indignation over the “usurping of her beloved home ground” (Bates, The Passing 69) by flouting property lines and walking through private residences to reach places of cultural significance. Beginning with Balbuk’s story and the digital tracing of her walking route through colonial Perth, this article discusses the project in the context of contemporary pressures on the city’s extant wetlands. The re-imagining of Perth through historically, culturally, and geographically-grounded digital visualisation approaches can inspire the conservation of its wetlands heritage. Balbuk’s Walk through the City For many who grew up in Perth, Fanny Balbuk’s perambulations have achieved legendary status in the collective cultural imagination. In his memoir, David Whish-Wilson mentions Balbuk’s defiant walks and the lighting up of the city for astronaut John Glenn in 1962 as the two stories that had the most impact on his Perth childhood. From Gordon Stephenson House, Whish-Wilson visualises her journey in his mind’s eye, past Government House on St Georges Terrace (the main thoroughfare through the city centre), then north on Barrack Street towards the railway station, the site of Lake Kingsford where Balbuk once gathered bush tucker (4). He considers the footpaths “beneath the geometric frame of the modern city […] worn smooth over millennia that snake up through the sheoak and marri woodland and into the city’s heart” (Whish-Wilson 4). Balbuk’s story embodies the intertwined culture and nature of Perth—a city of wetlands. Born in 1840 on Heirisson Island, Balbuk (also known as Yooreel) (Figure 1) had ancestral bonds to the urban landscape. According to Daisy Bates, writing in the early 1900s, the Nyoongar term Matagarup, or “leg deep,” denotes the passage of shallow water near Heirisson Island where Balbuk would have forded the Swan River (“Oldest” 16). Yoonderup was recorded as the Nyoongar name for Heirisson Island (Bates, “Oldest” 16) and the birthplace of Balbuk’s mother (Bates, “Aboriginal”). In the suburb of Shenton Park near present-day Lake Jualbup, her father bequeathed to her a red ochre (or wilgi) pit that she guarded fervently throughout her life (Bates, “Aboriginal”).Figure 1. Group of Aboriginal Women at Perth, including Fanny Balbuk (far right) (c. 1900). Image Credit: State Library of Western Australia (Image Number: 44c). Balbuk’s grandparents were culturally linked to the site. At his favourite camp beside the freshwater spring near Kings Park on Mounts Bay Road, her grandfather witnessed the arrival of Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Irwin, cousin of James Stirling (Bates, “Fanny”). In 1879, colonial entrepreneurs established the Swan Brewery at this significant locale (Welborn). Her grandmother’s gravesite later became Government House (Bates, “Fanny”) and she protested vociferously outside “the stone gates guarded by a sentry [that] enclosed her grandmother’s burial ground” (Bates, The Passing 70). Balbuk’s other grandmother was buried beneath Bishop’s Grove, the residence of the city’s first archibishop, now Terrace Hotel (Bates, “Aboriginal”). Historian Bob Reece observes that Balbuk was “the last full-descent woman of Kar’gatta (Karrakatta), the Bibbulmun name for the Mount Eliza [Kings Park] area of Perth” (134). According to accounts drawn from Bates, her home ground traversed the area between Heirisson Island and Perth’s north-western limits. In Kings Park, one of her relatives was buried near a large, hollow tree used by Nyoongar people like a cistern to capture water and which later became the site of the Queen Victoria Statue (Bates, “Aboriginal”). On the slopes of Mount Eliza, the highest point of Kings Park, at the western end of St Georges Terrace, she harvested plant foods, including zamia fruits (Macrozamia riedlei) (Bates, “Fanny”). Fanny Balbuk’s knowledge contributed to the native title claim lodged by Nyoongar people in 2006 as Bennell v. State of Western Australia—the first of its kind to acknowledge Aboriginal land rights in a capital city and part of the larger Single Nyoongar Claim (South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council et al.). Perth’s colonial administration perceived the city’s wetlands as impediments to progress and as insalubrious environments to be eradicated through reclamation practices. For Balbuk and other Nyoongar people, however, wetlands were “nourishing terrains” (Rose) that afforded sustenance seasonally and meaning perpetually (O’Connor, Quartermaine, and Bodney). Mary Graham, a Kombu-merri elder from Queensland, articulates the connection between land and culture, “because land is sacred and must be looked after, the relation between people and land becomes the template for society and social relations. Therefore all meaning comes from land.” Traditional, embodied reliance on Perth’s wetlands is evident in Bates’ documentation. For instance, Boojoormeup was a “big swamp full of all kinds of food, now turned into Palmerston and Lake streets” (Bates, “Aboriginal”). Considering her cultural values, Balbuk’s determination to maintain pathways through the increasingly colonial Perth environment is unsurprising (Figure 2). From Heirisson Island: a straight track had led to the place where once she had gathered jilgies [crayfish] and vegetable food with the women, in the swamp where Perth railway station now stands. Through fences and over them, Balbuk took the straight track to the end. When a house was built in the way, she broke its fence-palings with her digging stick and charged up the steps and through the rooms. (Bates, The Passing 70) One obstacle was Hooper’s Fence, which Balbuk broke repeatedly on her trips to areas between Kings Park and the railway station (Bates, “Hooper’s”). Her tenacious commitment to walking ancestral routes signifies the friction between settlement infrastructure and traditional Nyoongar livelihood during an era of rapid change. Figure 2. Determination of Fanny Balbuk’s Journey between Yoonderup (Heirisson Island) and Lake Kingsford, traversing what is now the central business district of Perth on the Swan River (2014). Image background prepared by Dimitri Fotev. Track interpolation by Jeff Murray. Project Background and Approach Inspired by Fanny Balbuk’s story, Re-imagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands began as an Australian response to the Mannahatta Project. Founded in 1999, that project used spatial analysis techniques and mapping software to visualise New York’s urbanised Manhattan Island—or Mannahatta as it was called by indigenous people—in the early 1600s (Sanderson). Based on research into the island’s original biogeography and the ecological practices of Native Americans, Mannahatta enabled the public to “peel back” the city’s strata, revealing the original composition of the New York site. The layers of visuals included rich details about the island’s landforms, water systems, and vegetation. Mannahatta compelled Rod Giblett, a cultural researcher at Edith Cowan University, to develop an analogous model for visualising Perth circa 1829. The idea attracted support from the City of Perth, Landgate, and the University. Using stories, artefacts, and maps, the team—comprising a cartographer, designer, three-dimensional modelling expert, and historical researchers—set out to generate visualisations of the landscape at the time of British colonisation. Nyoongar elder Noel Nannup approved culturally sensitive material and contributed his perspective on Aboriginal content to include in the exhibition. The initiative’s context remains pressing. In many ways, Perth has become a template for development in the metropolitan area (Weller). While not unusual for a capital, the rate of transformation is perhaps unexpected in a city less than 200 years old (Forster). There also remains a persistent view of existing wetlands as obstructions to progress that, once removed, are soon forgotten (Urban Bushland Council). Digital visualisation can contribute to appreciating environments prior to colonisation but also to re-imagining possibilities for future human interactions with land, water, and space. Despite the rapid pace of change, many Perth area residents have memories of wetlands lost during their lifetimes (for example, Giblett, Forrestdale). However, as the clearing and drainage of the inner city occurred early in settlement, recollections of urban wetlands exist exclusively in historical records. In 1935, a local correspondent using the name “Sandgroper” reminisced about swamps, connecting them to Perth’s colonial heritage: But the Swamps were very real in fact, and in name in the [eighteen-] Nineties, and the Perth of my youth cannot be visualised without them. They were, of course, drying up apace, but they were swamps for all that, and they linked us directly with the earliest days of the Colony when our great-grandparents had founded this City of Perth on a sort of hog's-back, of which Hay-street was the ridge, and from which a succession of streamlets ran down its southern slope to the river, while land locked to the north of it lay a series of lakes which have long since been filled to and built over so that the only evidence that they have ever existed lies in the original street plans of Perth prepared by Roe and Hillman in the early eighteen-thirties. A salient consequence of the loss of ecological memory is the tendency to repeat the miscues of the past, especially the blatant disregard for natural and cultural heritage, as suburbanisation engulfs the area. While the swamps of inner Perth remain only in the names of streets, existing wetlands in the metropolitan area are still being threatened, as the Roe Highway (Roe 8) Campaign demonstrates. To re-imagine Perth’s lost landscape, we used several colonial survey maps to plot the location of the original lakes and swamps. At this time, a series of interconnecting waterbodies, known as the Perth Great Lakes, spread across the north of the city (Bekle and Gentilli). This phase required the earliest cartographic sources (Figure 3) because, by 1855, city maps no longer depicted wetlands. We synthesised contextual information, such as well depths, geological and botanical maps, settlers’ accounts, Nyoongar oral histories, and colonial-era artists’ impressions, to produce renderings of Perth. This diverse collection of primary and secondary materials served as the basis for creating new images of the city. Team member Jeff Murray interpolated Balbuk’s route using historical mappings and accounts, topographical data, court records, and cartographic common sense. He determined that Balbuk would have camped on the high ground of the southern part of Lake Kingsford rather than the more inundated northern part (Figure 2). Furthermore, she would have followed a reasonably direct course north of St Georges Terrace (contrary to David Whish-Wilson’s imaginings) because she was barred from Government House for protesting. This easier route would have also avoided the springs and gullies that appear on early maps of Perth. Figure 3. Townsite of Perth in Western Australia by Colonial Draftsman A. Hillman and John Septimus Roe (1838). This map of Perth depicts the wetlands that existed overlaid by the geomentric grid of the new city. Image Credit: State Library of Western Australia (Image Number: BA1961/14). Additionally, we produced an animated display based on aerial photographs to show the historical extent of change. Prompted by the build up to World War II, the earliest aerial photography of Perth dates from the late 1930s (Dixon 148–54). As “Sandgroper” noted, by this time, most of the urban wetlands had been drained or substantially modified. The animation revealed considerable alterations to the formerly swampy Swan River shoreline. Most prominent was the transformation of the Matagarup shallows across the Swan River, originally consisting of small islands. Now traversed by a causeway, this area was transformed into a single island, Heirisson—the general site of Balbuk’s birth. The animation and accompanying materials (maps, images, and writings) enabled viewers to apprehend the changes in real time and to imagine what the city was once like. Re-imagining Perth’s Urban Heart The physical environment of inner Perth includes virtually no trace of its wetland origins. Consequently, we considered whether a representation of Perth, as it existed previously, could enhance public understanding of natural heritage and thereby increase its value. For this reason, interpretive materials were exhibited centrally at Perth Town Hall. Built partly by convicts between 1867 and 1870, the venue is close to the site of the 1829 Foundation of Perth, depicted in George Pitt Morrison’s painting. Balbuk’s grandfather “camped somewhere in the city of Perth, not far from the Town Hall” (Bates, “Fanny”). The building lies one block from the site of the railway station on the site of Lake Kingsford, the subsistence grounds of Balbuk and her forebears: The old swamp which is now the Perth railway yards had been a favourite jilgi ground; a spring near the Town Hall had been a camping place of Maiago […] and others of her fathers' folk; and all around and about city and suburbs she had gathered roots and fished for crayfish in the days gone by. (Bates, “Derelicts” 55) Beginning in 1848, the draining of Lake Kingsford reached completion during the construction of the Town Hall. While the swamps of the city were not appreciated by many residents, some organisations, such as the Perth Town Trust, vigorously opposed the reclamation of the lake, alluding to its hydrological role: That, the soil being sand, it is not to be supposed that Lake Kingsford has in itself any material effect on the wells of Perth; but that, from this same reason of the sandy soil, it would be impossible to keep the lake dry without, by so doing, withdrawing the water from at least the adjacent parts of the townsite to the same depth. (Independent Journal of Politics and News 3) At the time of our exhibition, the Lake Kingsford site was again being reworked to sink the railway line and build Yagan Square, a public space named after a colonial-era Nyoongar leader. The project required specialised construction techniques due to the high water table—the remnants of the lake. People travelling to the exhibition by train in October 2014 could have seen the lake reasserting itself in partly-filled depressions, flush with winter rain (Figure 4).Figure 4. Rise of the Repressed (2014). Water Rising in the former site of Lake Kingsford/Irwin during construction, corner of Roe and Fitzgerald Streets, Northbridge, WA. Image Credit: Nandi Chinna (2014). The exhibition was situated in the Town Hall’s enclosed undercroft designed for markets and more recently for shops. While some visited after peering curiously through the glass walls of the undercroft, others hailed from local and state government organisations. Guest comments applauded the alternative view of Perth we presented. The content invited the public to re-imagine Perth as a city of wetlands that were both environmentally and culturally important. A display panel described how the city’s infrastructure presented a hindrance for Balbuk as she attempted to negotiate the once-familiar route between Yoonderup and Lake Kingsford (Figure 2). Perth’s growth “restricted Balbuk’s wanderings; towns, trains, and farms came through her ‘line of march’; old landmarks were thus swept away, and year after year saw her less confident of the locality of one-time familiar spots” (Bates, “Fanny”). Conserving Wetlands: From Re-Claiming to Re-Valuing? Imagination, for philosopher Roger Scruton, involves “thinking of, and attending to, a present object (by thinking of it, or perceiving it, in terms of something absent)” (155). According to Scruton, the feelings aroused through imagination can prompt creative, transformative experiences. While environmental conservation tends to rely on data-driven empirical approaches, it appeals to imagination less commonly. We have found, however, that attending to the present object (the city) in terms of something absent (its wetlands) through evocative visual material can complement traditional conservation agendas focused on habitats and species. The actual extent of wetlands loss in the Swan Coastal Plain—the flat and sandy region extending from Jurien Bay south to Cape Naturaliste, including Perth—is contested. However, estimates suggest that 80 per cent of wetlands have been lost, with remaining habitats threatened by climate change, suburban development, agriculture, and industry (Department of Environment and Conservation). As with the swamps and lakes of the inner city, many regional wetlands were cleared, drained, or filled before they could be properly documented. Additionally, the seasonal fluctuations of swampy places have never been easily translatable to two-dimensional records. As Giblett notes, the creation of cartographic representations and the assignment of English names were attempts to fix the dynamic boundaries of wetlands, at least in the minds of settlers and administrators (Postmodern 72–73). Moreover, European colonists found the Western Australian landscape, including its wetlands, generally discomfiting. In a letter from 1833, metaphors failed George Fletcher Moore, the effusive colonial commentator, “I cannot compare these swamps to any marshes with which you are familiar” (220). The intermediate nature of wetlands—as neither land nor lake—is perhaps one reason for their cultural marginalisation (Giblett, Postmodern 39). The conviction that unsanitary, miasmic wetlands should be converted to more useful purposes largely prevailed (Giblett, Black 105–22). Felicity Morel-EdnieBrown’s research into land ownership records in colonial Perth demonstrated that town lots on swampland were often preferred. By layering records using geographic information systems (GIS), she revealed modifications to town plans to accommodate swampland frontages. The decline of wetlands in the region appears to have been driven initially by their exploitation for water and later for fertile soil. Northern market gardens supplied the needs of the early city. It is likely that the depletion of Nyoongar bush foods predated the flourishing of these gardens (Carter and Nutter). Engaging with the history of Perth’s swamps raises questions about the appreciation of wetlands today. In an era where numerous conservation strategies and alternatives have been developed (for example, Bobbink et al. 93–220), the exploitation of wetlands in service to population growth persists. On Perth’s north side, wetlands have long been subdued by controlling their water levels and landscaping their boundaries, as the suburban examples of Lake Monger and Hyde Park (formerly Third Swamp Reserve) reveal. Largely unmodified wetlands, such as Forrestdale Lake, exist south of Perth, but they too are in danger (Giblett, Black Swan). The Beeliar Wetlands near the suburb of Bibra Lake comprise an interconnected series of lakes and swamps that are vulnerable to a highway extension project first proposed in the 1950s. Just as the Perth Town Trust debated Lake Kingsford’s draining, local councils and the public are fiercely contesting the construction of the Roe Highway, which will bisect Beeliar Wetlands, destroying Roe Swamp (Chinna). The conservation value of wetlands still struggles to compete with traffic planning underpinned by a modernist ideology that associates cars and freeways with progress (Gregory). Outside of archives, the debate about Lake Kingsford is almost entirely forgotten and its physical presence has been erased. Despite the magnitude of loss, re-imagining the city’s swamplands, in the way that we have, calls attention to past indiscretions while invigorating future possibilities. We hope that the re-imagining of Perth’s wetlands stimulates public respect for ancestral tracks and songlines like Balbuk’s. Despite the accretions of settler history and colonial discourse, songlines endure as a fundamental cultural heritage. Nyoongar elder Noel Nannup states, “as people, if we can get out there on our songlines, even though there may be farms or roads overlaying them, fences, whatever it is that might impede us from travelling directly upon them, if we can get close proximity, we can still keep our culture alive. That is why it is so important for us to have our songlines.” Just as Fanny Balbuk plied her songlines between Yoonderup and Lake Kingsford, the traditional custodians of Beeliar and other wetlands around Perth walk the landscape as an act of resistance and solidarity, keeping the stories of place alive. Acknowledgments The authors wish to acknowledge Rod Giblett (ECU), Nandi Chinna (ECU), Susanna Iuliano (ECU), Jeff Murray (Kareff Consulting), Dimitri Fotev (City of Perth), and Brendan McAtee (Landgate) for their contributions to this project. The authors also acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands upon which this paper was researched and written. References Bates, Daisy. “Fanny Balbuk-Yooreel: The Last Swan River (Female) Native.” The Western Mail 1 Jun. 1907: 45.———. “Oldest Perth: The Days before the White Men Won.” The Western Mail 25 Dec. 1909: 16–17.———. “Derelicts: The Passing of the Bibbulmun.” The Western Mail 25 Dec. 1924: 55–56. ———. “Aboriginal Perth.” The Western Mail 4 Jul. 1929: 70.———. “Hooper’s Fence: A Query.” The Western Mail 18 Apr. 1935: 9.———. The Passing of the Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent among the Natives of Australia. London: John Murray, 1966.Bekle, Hugo. “The Wetlands Lost: Drainage of the Perth Lake Systems.” Western Geographer 5.1–2 (1981): 21–41.Bekle, Hugo, and Joseph Gentilli. “History of the Perth Lakes.” Early Days 10.5 (1993): 442–60.Bobbink, Roland, Boudewijn Beltman, Jos Verhoeven, and Dennis Whigham, eds. Wetlands: Functioning, Biodiversity Conservation, and Restoration. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2006. Carter, Bevan, and Lynda Nutter. Nyungah Land: Records of Invasion and Theft of Aboriginal Land on the Swan River 1829–1850. Guildford: Swan Valley Nyungah Community, 2005.Chinna, Nandi. “Swamp.” Griffith Review 47 (2015). 29 Sep. 2015 ‹https://griffithreview.com/articles/swamp›.Department of Environment and Conservation. Geomorphic Wetlands Swan Coastal Plain Dataset. Perth: Department of Environment and Conservation, 2008.Dixon, Robert. Photography, Early Cinema, and Colonial Modernity: Frank Hurley’s Synchronized Lecture Entertainments. London: Anthem Press, 2011. Forster, Clive. Australian Cities: Continuity and Change. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.Giblett, Rod. Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1996. ———. Forrestdale: People and Place. Bassendean: Access Press, 2006.———. Black Swan Lake: Life of a Wetland. Bristol: Intellect, 2013.———. Cities and Wetlands: The Return of the Repressed in Nature and Culture. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. 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(Quoted material transcribed from 3.08–3.39 of the video.) O’Connor, Rory, Gary Quartermaine, and Corrie Bodney. Report on an Investigation into Aboriginal Significance of Wetlands and Rivers in the Perth-Bunbury Region. Perth: Western Australian Water Resources Council, 1989.Reece, Bob. “‘Killing with Kindness’: Daisy Bates and New Norcia.” Aboriginal History 32 (2008): 128–45.Rose, Deborah Bird. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996.Sanderson, Eric. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2009.Sandgroper. “Gilgies: The Swamps of Perth.” The West Australian 4 May 1935: 7.Scruton, Roger. Art and Imagination. London: Methuen, 1974.Seddon, George. Sense of Place: A Response to an Environment, the Swan Coastal Plain, Western Australia. Melbourne: Bloomings Books, 2004.South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council and John Host with Chris Owen. “It’s Still in My Heart, This is My Country:” The Single Noongar Claim History. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 2009.Urban Bushland Council. “Bushland Issues.” 2015. 29 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.bushlandperth.org.au/bushland-issues›.Welborn, Suzanne. Swan: The History of a Brewery. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 1987.Weller, Richard. Boomtown 2050: Scenarios for a Rapidly Growing City. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 2009. Whish-Wilson, David. Perth. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2013.

IntroductionRegional identity is a constant construction, in which landscape, human activity and cultural imaginary build a narrative of place. For the Tasmanian Midlands, the interactions between history, ecology and agriculture both define place and present problems in how to recognise, communicate and balance these interactions. In this sense, regionality is defined not so much as a relation of margin to centre, but as a specific accretion of environmental and cultural histories. According weight to more-than-human perspectives, a region can be seen as a constellation of plant, animal and human interactions and demands, where creative art and design can make space and give voice to the dynamics of exchange between the landscape and its inhabitants. Consideration of three recent art and design projects based in the Midlands reveal the potential for cross-disciplinary research, embedded in both environment and community, to create distinctive and specific forms of connectivity that articulate a regional identify.The Tasmanian Midlands have been identified as a biodiversity hotspot (Australian Government), with a long history of Aboriginal cultural management disrupted by colonial invasion. Recent archaeological work in the Midlands, including the Kerry Lodge Archaeology and Art Project, has focused on the use of convict labour during the nineteenth century in opening up the Midlands for settler agriculture and transport. Now, the Midlands are placed under increasing pressure by changing agricultural practices such as large-scale irrigation. At the same time as this intensification of agricultural activity, significant progress has been made in protecting, preserving and restoring endemic ecologies. This progress has come through non-government conservation organisations, especially Greening Australia and their program Tasmanian Island Ark, and private landowners placing land under conservation covenants. These pressures and conservation activities give rise to research opportunities in the biological sciences, but also pose challenges in communicating the value of conservation and research outcomes to a wider public. The Species Hotel project, beginning in 2016, engaged with the aims of restoration ecology through speculative design while The Marathon Project, a multi-year curatorial art project based on a single property that contains both conservation and commercially farmed zones.This article questions the role of regionality in these three interconnected projects—Kerry Lodge, Species Hotel, and Marathon—sited in the Tasmanian Midlands: the three projects share a concern with the specificities of the region through engagement with specifics sites and their histories and ecologies, while also acknowledging the forces that shape these sites as far more mobile and global in scope. It also considers the interdisciplinary nature of these projects, in the crossover of art and design with ecological, archaeological and agricultural practices of measuring and intervening in the land, where communication and interpretation may be in tension with functionality. These projects suggest ways of working that connect the ecological and the cultural spheres; importantly, they see rural locations as sites of knowledge production; they test the value of small-scale and ephemeral interventions to explore the place of art and design as intervention within colonised landscape.Regions are also defined by overlapping circles of control, interest, and authority. We test the claim that these projects, which operate through cross-disciplinary collaboration and network with a range of stakeholders and community groups, successfully benefit the region in which they are placed. We are particularly interested in the challenges of working across institutions which both claim and enact connections to the region without being centred there. These projects are initiatives resulting from, or in collaboration with, University of Tasmania, an institution that has taken a recent turn towards explicitly identifying as place-based yet the placement of the Midlands as the gap between campuses risks attenuating the institution’s claim to be of this place. Paul Carter, in his discussion of a regional, site-specific collaboration in Alice Springs, flags how processes of creative place-making—operating through mythopoetic and story-based strategies—requires a concrete rather than imagined community that actively engages a plurality of voices on the ground. We identify similar concerns in these art and design projects and argue that iterative and long-term creative projects enable a deeper grappling with the complexities of shared regional place-making. The Midlands is aptly named: as a region, it is defined by its geographical constraints and relationships to urban centres. Heading south from the northern city of Launceston, travellers on the Midland Highway see scores of farming properties networking continuously for around 175 kilometres south to the outskirts of Brighton, the last major township before the Tasmanian capital city of Hobart. The town of Ross straddles latitude 42 degrees south—a line that has historically divided Tasmania into the divisions of North and South. The region is characterised by extensive agricultural usage and small remnant patches of relatively open dry sclerophyll forest and lowland grassland enabled by its lower attitude and relatively flatter terrain. The Midlands sit between the mountainous central highlands of the Great Western Tiers and the Eastern Tiers, a continuous range of dolerite hills lying south of Ben Lomond that slope coastward to the Tasman Sea. This area stretches far beyond the view of the main highway, reaching east in the Deddington and Fingal valleys. Campbell Town is the primary stopping point for travellers, superseding the bypassed towns, which have faced problems with lowering population and resulting loss of facilities.Image 1: Southern Midland Landscape, Ross, Tasmania, 2018. Image Credit: Patrick Sutczak.Predominantly under private ownership, the Tasmanian Midlands are a contested and fractured landscape existing in a state of ecological tension that has occurred with the dominance of western agriculture. For over 200 years, farmers have continually shaped the land and carved it up into small fragments for different agricultural agendas, and this has resulted in significant endemic species decline (Mitchell et al.). The open vegetation was the product of cultural management of land by Tasmanian Aboriginal communities (Gammage), attractive to settlers during their distribution of land grants prior to the 1830s and a focus for settler violence. As documented cartographically in the Centre for 21st Century Humanities’ Colonial Frontier Massacres in Central and Eastern Australia 1788–1930, the period 1820–1835, and particularly during the Black War, saw the Midlands as central to the violent dispossession of Aboriginal landowners. Clements argues that the culture of violence during this period also reflected the brutalisation that the penal system imposed upon its subjects. The cultivation of agricultural land throughout the Midlands was enabled by the provision of unfree convict labour (Dillon). Many of the properties granted and established during the colonial period have been held in multi-generational family ownership through to the present.Within this patchwork of private ownership, the tension between visibility and privacy of the Midlands pastures and farmlands challenges the capacity for people to understand what role the Midlands plays in the greater Tasmanian ecology. Although half of Tasmania’s land areas are protected as national parks and reserves, the Midlands remains largely unprotected due to private ownership. When measured against Tasmania’s wilderness values and reputation, the dry pasturelands of the Midland region fail to capture an equivalent level of visual and experiential imagination. Jamie Kirkpatrick describes misconceptions of the Midlands when he writes of “[f]latness, dead and dying eucalypts, gorse, brown pastures, salt—environmental devastation […]—these are the common impression of those who first travel between Spring Hill and Launceston on the Midland Highway” (45). However, Kirkpatrick also emphasises the unique intimate and intricate qualities of this landscape, and its underlying resilience. In the face of the loss of paddock trees and remnants to irrigation, change in species due to pasture enrichment and introduction of new plant species, conservation initiatives that not only protect but also restore habitat are vital. The Tasmanian Midlands, then, are pastoral landscapes whose seeming monotonous continuity glosses over the radical changes experienced in the processes of colonisation and intensification of agriculture.Underlying the Present: Archaeology and Landscape in the Kerry Lodge ProjectThe major marker of the Midlands is the highway that bisects it. Running from Hobart to Launceston, the construction of a “great macadamised highway” (Department of Main Roads 10) between 1820–1850, and its ongoing maintenance, was a significant colonial project. The macadam technique, a nineteenth century innovation in road building which involved the laying of small pieces of stone to create a surface that was relatively water and frost resistant, required considerable but unskilled labour. The construction of the bridge at Kerry Lodge, in 1834–35, was simultaneous with significant bridge buildings at other major water crossings on the highway, (Department of Main Roads 16) and, as the first water crossing south of Launceston, was a pinch-point through which travel of prisoners could be monitored and controlled. Following the completion of the bridge, the site was used to house up to 60 male convicts in a road gang undergoing secondary punishment (1835–44) and then in a labour camp and hiring depot until 1847. At the time of the La Trobe report (1847), the buildings were noted as being in bad condition (Brand 142–43). After the station was disbanded, the use of the buildings reverted to the landowners for use in accommodation and agricultural storage.Archaeological research at Kerry Lodge, directed by Eleanor Casella, investigated the spatial and disciplinary structures of smaller probation and hiring depots and the living and working conditions of supervisory staff. Across three seasons (2015, 2016, 2018), the emerging themes of discipline and control and as well as labour were borne out by excavations across the site, focusing on remnants of buildings close to the bridge. This first season also piloted the co-presence of a curatorial art project, which grew across the season to include eleven practitioners in visual art, theatre and poetry, and three exhibition outcomes. As a crucial process for the curatorial art project, creative practitioners spent time on site as participants and observers, which enabled the development of responses that interrogated the research processes of archaeological fieldwork as well as making connections to the wider historical and cultural context of the site. Immersed in the mundane tasks of archaeological fieldwork, the practitioners involved became simultaneously focused on repetitive actions while contemplating the deep time contained within earth. This experience then informed the development of creative works interrogating embodied processes as a language of site.The outcome from the first fieldwork season was earthspoke, an exhibition shown at Sawtooth, an artist-run initiative in Launceston in 2015, and later re-installed in Franklin House, a National Trust property in the southern suburbs of Launceston.Images 2 and 3: earthspoke, 2015, Installation View at Sawtooth ARI (top) and Franklin House (bottom). Image Credits: Melanie de Ruyter.This recontextualisation of the work, from contemporary ARI (artist run initiative) gallery to National Trust property enabled the project to reach different audiences but also raised questions about the emphases that these exhibition contexts placed on the work. Within the white cube space of the contemporary gallery, connections to site became more abstracted while the educational and heritage functions of the National Trust property added further context and unintended connotations to the art works.Image 4: Strata, 2017, Installation View. Image Credit: Karen Hall.The two subsequent exhibitions, Lines of Site (2016) and Strata (2017), continued to test the relationship between site and gallery, through works that rematerialised the absences on site and connected embodied experiences of convict and archaeological labour. The most recent iteration of the project, Strata, part of the Ten Days on the Island art festival in 2017, involved installing works at the site, marking with their presence the traces, fragments and voids that had been reburied when the landscape returned to agricultural use following the excavations. Here, the interpretive function of the works directly addressed the layered histories of the landscape and underscored the scope of the human interventions and changes over time within the pastoral landscape. The interpretative role of the artworks formed part of a wider, multidisciplinary approach to research and communication within the project. University of Manchester archaeology staff and postgraduate students directed the excavations, using volunteers from the Launceston Historical Society. Staff from Launceston’s Queen Victorian Museum and Art Gallery brought their archival and collection-based expertise to the site rather than simply receiving stored finds as a repository, supporting immediate interpretation and contextualisation of objects. In 2018, participation from the University of Tasmania School of Education enabled a larger number of on-site educational activities than afforded by previous open days. These multi-disciplinary and multi-organisational networks, drawn together provisionally in a shared time and place, provided rich opportunities for dialogue. However, the challenges of sustaining these exchanges have meant ongoing collaborations have become more sporadic, reflecting different institutional priorities and competing demands on participants. Even within long-term projects, continued engagement with stakeholders can be a challenge: while enabling an emerging and concrete sense of community, the time span gives greater vulnerability to external pressures. Making Home: Ecological Restoration and Community Engagement in the Species Hotel ProjectImages 5 and 6: Selected Species Hotels, Ross, Tasmania, 2018. Image Credits: Patrick Sutczak. The Species Hotels stand sentinel over a river of saplings, providing shelter for animal communities within close range of a small town. At the township of Ross in the Southern Midlands, work was initiated by restoration ecologists to address the lack of substantial animal shelter belts on a number of major properties in the area. The Tasmania Island Ark is a major Greening Australia restoration ecology initiative, connecting 6000 hectares of habitat across the Midlands. Linking larger forest areas in the Eastern Tiers and Central Highlands as well as isolated patches of remnant native vegetation, the Ark project is vital to the ongoing survival of local plant and animal species under pressure from human interventions and climate change. With fragmentation of bush and native grasslands in the Midland landscape resulting in vast open plains, the ability for animals to adapt to pasturelands without shelter has resulted in significant decline as animals such as the critically endangered Eastern Barred Bandicoot struggle to feed, move, and avoid predators (Cranney). In 2014 mass plantings of native vegetation were undertaken along 16km of the serpentine Macquarie River as part of two habitat corridors designed to bring connectivity back to the region. While the plantings were being established a public art project was conceived that would merge design with practical application to assist animals in the area, and draw community and public attention to the work that was being done in re-establishing native forests. The Species Hotel project, which began in 2016, emerged from a collaboration between Greening Australia and the University of Tasmania’s School of Architecture and Design, the School of Land and Food, the Tasmanian College of the Arts and the ARC Centre for Forest Value, with funding from the Ian Potter Foundation. The initial focus of the project was the development of interventions in the landscape that could address the specific habitat needs of the insect, small mammal, and bird species that are under threat. First-year Architecture students were invited to design a series of structures with the brief that they would act as ‘Species Hotels’, and once created would be installed among the plantings as structures that could be inhabited or act as protection. After installation, the privately-owned land would be reconfigured so to allow public access and observation of the hotels, by residents and visitors alike. Early in the project’s development, a concern was raised during a Ross community communication and consultation event that the surrounding landscape and its vistas would be dramatically altered with the re-introduced forest. While momentary and resolved, a subtle yet obvious tension surfaced that questioned the re-writing of an established community’s visual landscape literacy by non-residents. Compact and picturesque, the architectural, historical and cultural qualities of Ross and its location were not only admired by residents, but established a regional identity. During the six-week intensive project, the community reach was expanded beyond the institution and involved over 100 people including landowners, artists, scientists and school children from the region (Wright), attempting to address and channel the concerns of residents about the changing landscape. The multiple timescales of this iterative project—from intensive moments of collaboration between stakeholders to the more-than-human time of tree growth—open spaces for regional identity to shift as both as place and community. Part of the design brief was the use of fully biodegradable materials: the Species Hotels are not expected to last forever. The actual installation of the Species Hotelson site took longer than planned due to weather conditions, but once on site they were weathering in, showing signs of insect and bird habitation. This animal activity created an opportunity for ongoing engagement. Further activities generated from the initial iteration of Species Hotel were the Species Hotel Day in 2017, held at the Ross Community Hall where presentations by scientists and designers provided feedback to the local community and presented opportunities for further design engagement in the production of ephemeral ‘species seed pies’ placed out in and around Ross. Architecture and Design students have gone on to develop more examples of ‘ecological furniture’ with a current focus on insect housing as well as extrapolating from the installation of the Species Hotels to generate a VR visualisation of the surrounding landscape, game design and participatory movement work that was presented as part of the Junction Arts Festival program in Launceston, 2017. The intersections of technologies and activities amplified the lived in and living qualities of the Species Hotels, not only adding to the connectivity of social and environmental actions on site and beyond, but also making a statement about the shared ownership this project enabled.Working Property: Collaboration and Dialogues in The Marathon Project The potential of iterative projects that engage with environmental concerns amid questions of access, stewardship and dialogue is also demonstrated in The Marathon Project, a collaborative art project that took place between 2015 and 2017. Situated in the Northern Midland region of Deddington alongside the banks of the Nile River the property of Marathon became the focal point for a small group of artists, ecologists and theorists to converge and engage with a pastoral landscape over time that was unfamiliar to many of them. Through a series of weekend camps and day trips, the participants were able to explore and follow their own creative and investigative agendas. The project was conceived by the landowners who share a passion for the history of the area, their land, and ideas of custodianship and ecological responsibility. The intentions of the project initially were to inspire creative work alongside access, engagement and dialogue about land, agriculture and Deddington itself. As a very small town on the Northern Midland fringe, Deddington is located toward the Eastern Tiers at the foothills of the Ben Lomond mountain ranges. Historically, Deddington is best known as the location of renowned 19th century landscape painter John Glover’s residence, Patterdale. After Glover’s death in 1849, the property steadily fell into disrepair and a recent private restoration effort of the home, studio and grounds has seen renewed interest in the cultural significance of the region. With that in mind, and with Marathon a neighbouring property, participants in the project were able to experience the area and research its past and present as a part of a network of working properties, but also encouraging conversation around the region as a contested and documented place of settlement and subsequent violence toward the Aboriginal people. Marathon is a working property, yet also a vital and fragile ecosystem. Marathon consists of 1430 hectares, of which around 300 lowland hectares are currently used for sheep grazing. The paddocks retain their productivity, function and potential to return to native grassland, while thickets of gorse are plentiful, an example of an invasive species difficult to control. The rest of the property comprises eucalypt woodlands and native grasslands that have been protected under a conservation covenant by the landowners since 2003. The Marathon creek and the Nile River mark the boundary between the functional paddocks and the uncultivated hills and are actively managed in the interface between native and introduced species of flora and fauna. This covenant aimed to preserve these landscapes, linking in with a wider pattern of organisations and landowners attempting to address significant ecological degradation and isolation of remnant bushland patches through restoration ecology. Measured against the visibility of Tasmania’s wilderness identity on the national and global stage, many of the ecological concerns affecting the Midlands go largely unnoticed. The Marathon Project was as much a project about visibility and communication as it was about art and landscape. Over the three years and with its 17 participants, The Marathon Project yielded three major exhibitions along with numerous public presentations and research outputs. The length of the project and the autonomy and perspectives of its participants allowed for connections to be formed, conversations initiated, and greater exposure to the productivity and sustainability complexities playing out on rural Midland properties. Like Kerry Lodge, the 2015 first year exhibition took place at Sawtooth ARI. The exhibition was a testing ground for artists, and a platform for audiences, to witness the cross-disciplinary outputs of work inspired by a single sheep grazing farm. The interest generated led to the rethinking of the 2016 exhibition and the need to broaden the scope of what the landowners and participants were trying to achieve. Image 7: Panel Discussion at Open Weekend, 2016. Image Credit: Ron Malor.In November 2016, The Marathon Project hosted an Open Weekend on the property encouraging audiences to visit, meet the artists, the landowners, and other invited guests from a number of restoration, conservation, and rehabilitation organisations. Titled Encounter, the event and accompanying exhibition displayed in the shearing shed, provided an opportunity for a rhizomatic effect with the public which was designed to inform and disseminate historical and contemporary perspectives of land and agriculture, access, ownership, visitation and interpretation. Concluding with a final exhibition in 2017 at the University of Tasmania’s Academy Gallery, The Marathon Project had built enough momentum to shape and inform the practice of its participants, the knowledge and imagination of the public who engaged with it, and make visible the precarity of the cultural and rural Midland identity.Image 8. Installation View of The Marathon Project Exhibition, 2017. Image Credit: Patrick Sutczak.ConclusionThe Marathon Project, Species Hotel and the Kerry Lodge Archaeology and Art Project all demonstrate the potential of site-based projects to articulate and address concerns that arise from the environmental and cultural conditions and histories of a region. Beyond the Midland fence line is a complex environment that needed to be experienced to be understood. Returning creative work to site, and opening up these intensified experiences of place to a public forms a key stage in all these projects. Beyond a commitment to site-specific practice and valuing the affective and didactic potential of on-site installation, these returns grapple with issues of access, visibility and absence that characterise the Midlands. Paul Carter describes his role in the convening of a “concretely self-realising creative community” in an initiative to construct a meeting-place in Alice Springs, a community defined and united in “its capacity to imagine change as a negotiation between past, present and future” (17). Within that regional context, storytelling, as an encounter between histories and cultures, became crucial in assembling a community that could in turn materialise story into place. In these Midlands projects, a looser assembly of participants with shared interests seek to engage with the intersections of plant, human and animal activities that constitute and negotiate the changing environment. The projects enabled moments of connection, of access, and of intervention: always informed by the complexities of belonging within regional locations.These projects also suggest the need to recognise the granularity of regionalism: the need to be attentive to the relations of site to bioregion, of private land to small town to regional centre. The numerous partnerships that allow such interconnect projects to flourish can be seen as a strength of regional areas, where proximity and scale can draw together sets of related institutions, organisations and individuals. However, the tensions and gaps within these projects reveal differing priorities, senses of ownership and even regional belonging. Questions of who will live with these project outcomes, who will access them, and on what terms, reveal inequalities of power. Negotiations of this uneven and uneasy terrain require a more nuanced account of projects that do not rely on the geographical labelling of regions to paper over the complexities and fractures within the social environment.These projects also share a commitment to the intersection of the social and natural environment. They recognise the inextricable entanglement of human and more than human agencies in shaping the landscape, and material consequences of colonialism and agricultural intensification. Through iteration and duration, the projects mobilise processes that are responsive and reflective while being anchored to the materiality of site. Warwick Mules suggests that “regions are a mixture of data and earth, historically made through the accumulation and condensation of material and informational configurations”. Cross-disciplinary exchanges enable all three projects to actively participate in data production, not interpretation or illustration afterwards. Mules’ call for ‘accumulation’ and ‘configuration’ as productive regional modes speaks directly to the practice-led methodologies employed by these projects. The Kerry Lodge and Marathon projects collect, arrange and transform material taken from each site to provisionally construct a regional material language, extended further in the dual presentation of the projects as off-site exhibitions and as interventions returning to site. The Species Hotel project shares that dual identity, where materials are chosen for their ability over time, habitation and decay to become incorporated into the site yet, through other iterations of the project, become digital presences that nonetheless invite an embodied engagement.These projects centre the Midlands as fertile ground for the production of knowledge and experiences that are distinctive and place-based, arising from the unique qualities of this place, its history and its ongoing challenges. Art and design practice enables connectivity to plant, animal and human communities, utilising cross-disciplinary collaborations to bring together further accumulations of the region’s intertwined cultural and ecological landscape.ReferencesAustralian Government Department of the Environment and Energy. Biodiversity Conservation. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2018. 1 Apr. 2019 <http://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/conservation>.Brand, Ian. The Convict Probation System: Van Diemen’s Land 1839–1854. Sandy Bay: Blubber Head Press, 1990.Carter, Paul. “Common Patterns: Narratives of ‘Mere Coincidence’ and the Production of Regions.” Creative Communities: Regional Inclusion & the Arts. Eds. Janet McDonald and Robert Mason. Bristol: Intellect, 2015. 13–30.Centre for 21st Century Humanities. Colonial Frontier Massacres in Central and Eastern Australia 1788–1930. Newcastle: Centre for 21st Century Humanitie, n.d. 1 Apr. 2019 <https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/>.Clements, Nicholas. The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2014. Cranney, Kate. Ecological Science in the Tasmanian Midlands. Melbourne: Bush Heritage Australia, 2016. 1 Apr. 2019 <https://www.bushheritage.org.au/blog/ecological-science-in-the-tasmanian-midlands>.Davidson N. “Tasmanian Northern Midlands Restoration Project.” EMR Summaries, Journal of Ecological Management & Restoration, 2016. 10 Apr. 2019 <https://site.emrprojectsummaries.org/2016/03/07/tasmanian-northern-midlands-restoration-project/>.Department of Main Roads, Tasmania. Convicts & Carriageways: Tasmanian Road Development until 1880. Hobart: Tasmanian Government Printer, 1988.Dillon, Margaret. “Convict Labour and Colonial Society in the Campbell Town Police District: 1820–1839.” PhD Thesis. U of Tasmania, 2008. <https://eprints.utas.edu.au/7777/>.Gammage, Bill. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2012.Greening Australia. Building Species Hotels, 2016. 1 Apr. 2019 <https://www.greeningaustralia.org.au/projects/building-species-hotels/>.Kerry Lodge Archaeology and Art Project. Kerry Lodge Convict Site. 10 Mar. 2019 <http://kerrylodge.squarespace.com/>.Kirkpatrick, James. “Natural History.” Midlands Bushweb, The Nature of the Midlands. Ed. Jo Dean. Longford: Midlands Bushweb, 2003. 45–57.Mitchell, Michael, Michael Lockwood, Susan Moore, and Sarah Clement. “Building Systems-Based Scenario Narratives for Novel Biodiversity Futures in an Agricultural Landscape.” Landscape and Urban Planning 145 (2016): 45–56.Mules, Warwick. “The Edges of the Earth: Critical Regionalism as an Aesthetics of the Singular.” Transformations 12 (2005). 1 Mar. 2019 <http://transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_12/article_03.shtml>.The Marathon Project. <http://themarathonproject.virb.com/home>.University of Tasmania. Strategic Directions, Nov. 2018. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://www.utas.edu.au/vc/strategic-direction>.Wright L. “University of Tasmania Students Design ‘Species Hotels’ for Tasmania’s Wildlife.” Architecture AU 24 Oct. 2016. 1 Apr. 2019 <https://architectureau.com/articles/university-of-tasmania-students-design-species-hotels-for-tasmanias-wildlife/>.

IntroductionI spent five days on the Arizona Utah border, photographing Monument Valley and the surrounding areas as part of a group of eight undertaking a landscape photography workshop under the direction of a Navajo guide. Observing where our guide was taking us, and watching and talking to other tourist photographers, I was reminded of John Urry’s concept of the “tourist gaze” and the idea that tourists see destinations in terms of the promotional images they are familiar with (Urry 1). It seemed that tourists re-created images drawn from the popular imaginary, inserting themselves into familiar narratives of place. The goal of the research was to look specifically at the tourist gaze, that is, the way that tourists see view destinations and then represent that vision in their images. Circle of Representation Urry explained the tourist gaze as a particular way of seeing the world as a series of images created by the tourism industry; images which were then consumed or collected through tourist photography. He saw this as constituting a “closed circle of representation” where the images employed by the tourism industry to attract tourists to particular destinations were reproduced in tourists’ own holiday snaps, and as more tourists sought out these locations, they were increasingly used to represent the destination. Susan Sontag saw travel employed as “a strategy for accumulating photographs” (9) suggesting that the images were the culmination of the journey. Urry also saw the end point of tourism as travellers to a destination “demonstrating that they have really been there by showing their version of the images that they had seen originally before they set off” (140).Talking to the guide, my group, and other tourists about the images we were recording, and reviewing images tagged Monument Valley on Instagram revealed that digital and network technologies had altered tourists’ photographic practices. Tourist impressions of destinations come from a wide range of popular culture sources. They have, even on smartphones, fairly sophisticated tools for creating images; and they have diverse networks for distributing their images. Increasingly, the images that tourists see as representative of Monument Valley came from popular culture and social media, and not simply from tourism promotions. People are posting their travel images online, and are in turn looking to posts from others in their search for travel information (Akehurst 55). The current circle of representation in tourist photography is not simply a process of capturing promotional imagery, but an interaction between tourists that draws upon films, television, and other popular culture forms. Tourist photographs are less a matter of “consuming places” (Urry 259) and more an identity performance through which they create ongoing personal narratives of place by inserting themselves into pre-existing stories about the destination and circulating the new narratives.Jenkins analysed brochures on Australia available to potential tourists in Vancouver, Canada, and determined that the key photographic images used to promote Australia were Uluru and the Sydney Opera House, followed by sandy beaches alongside tropical blue waters. Interviews with Canadian backpackers travelling around Australia, and an examination of the images these backpackers took with the disposable cameras they were given, found a correlation between the brochure images and the personal photographs. Jenkins concluded that the results supported Urry’s theory of a closed circle of representation, in that the images from the brochures were “tracked down and recaptured, and the resulting photographs displayed upon return home by the backpackers as evidence of the trip” (Jenkins 324).Garrod randomly selected 25 tourists along the seafront of Aberystwyth, Wales, and gave them a single-use camera, a brief socio-demographic questionnaire, a photo log, and a reply-paid envelope in which they could return these items. The tourists were asked to take 12 photos and log the reason they took each photograph and what they tried to capture in terms of their visit to Aberystwyth. Nine females and four males returned their cameras, providing 164 photographs, which were compared with 70 postcards depicting Aberystwyth. While an initial comparison revealed similarities in the content of tourist photographs and the picture postcards of the town, Garrod’s analysis revealed two main differences: postcards featured wide angle or panoramic views, while tourist photos tended to be close up or detail shots and postcards included natural features, particularly bodies of water, while tourist photographs were more often of buildings and man-made structures. Garrod concluded that the relationship between tourism industry images and tourist photographs “might be more subtle and complex than simply for the two protagonists in the relationship to mimic one other” (356).MethodIdentifying a tourist’s motivation for taking a particular photograph, the source of inspiration for the image, and the details of what the photographer was attempting to capture involves the consideration of a range of variables, many of which cannot be controlled. The ability of the photographer and the sophistication of their equipment will have an impact on the type of images captured; for example this may explain the absence of panoramas in Aberystwyth tourist photos. The length of the stay and the level of familiarity with the location may also have an impact; on a first visit a tourist may look for the major landmarks and on subsequent visits photograph the smaller details. The personal history of the tourist, the meaning the location has for them, their reasons for visiting and their mood at the time, will all influence their selection of photo subjects. Giving tourists a camera and then asking them to photograph the destination may influence the choice of subject and the care taken with composition, however this does ensure a direct link between the tourist opinions gathered and the images analysed. An approach that depends on seeing the images taken independently by the tourists who were interviewed has logistical problems that significantly reduce sample size.Fourteen randomly selected tourists at the visitors centre in Monument Valley, a random sampling of 500 Instagram images hash tagged Monument Valley, and photographs taken by seven photographers in the author’s group were studied by the author. The tourists were asked what they wanted to take photographs of while in Monument Valley, and why of those particular subjects. The images taken by these tourists were not available for analysis for logistical reasons, and 500 Instagram images tagged #MonumentValley were collected as generally representative of tourist images. Members of the photography workshop group were all serious amateur photographers with digital SLR cameras, interchangeable lenses, and tripods. Motivations, decisions and the evaluation of images were discussed with this group, and their images reviewed in terms of the extent to which the image was felt to be representative of the location.Monument ValleyMonument Valley can be considered a mythic space in that it is a real place that has taken on mythic meanings that go beyond physical characteristics and lived experiences (Slotkin 11). Located on the Navajo Tribal Park on the Arizona Utah border, it is known by the Navajo as Tse'Bii'Ndzisgaii or “Valley of the Rocks.” Monument Valley is emblematic of the Wild West, the frontier beyond which civilization vanishes, a mythology originally derived from the Western Films of director John Ford. Ford's film, Stagecoach, was shot in Monument Valley and Ford returned nine times to shoot Westerns here, even when films (such as The Searchers, set in Texas) were not set in Arizona or Utah. The spectacular desert scenery with its towering rock formations combine epic grandeur with brutal conditions, providing an appropriate backdrop for dramatic oppositions: civilization versus barbarity, community versus wilderness, freedom versus domestication. The mythological meanings attached to Monument Valley were extended in the films, novels, television programs, and advertising that followed. Footage of Monument Valley is used to represent a blend of freedom and danger in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Easy Rider, Thelma & Louise, Marlborough and Chevrolet advertising, the television series Airwolf and episodes of Doctor Who. Monument Valley was the culmination of Forrest Gump's exhaustive run, and the setting for music videos by Kanye West, Madonna and Michael Jackson, each drawing on the themes of alienation and the displacement of the hero. While Westerns are on one level uniquely American, they are consistent with widely known romantic myths and stories, and the universal narratives evoked by Monument Valley have appeal far outside the USA. The iconic images of Monument Valley have been circulated well beyond tourist informational material, permeating a breadth of popular culture forms.Photographing the ValleyPhotography is intrinsically linked with tourism, fulfilling a number of roles. Travel can have as its purpose the collection of images, and as such, photography can function to structure the travel experience, and to evaluate its success (Schroeder; Sontag). Recognisable images of the location provide evidence that travel was undertaken, places were visited, and the traveller has experienced some form of authentic or exotic experience (Chalfen 435). Sharing images is an essential part of the process. The various roles of photography are to an extent dependent on having a shared mental image of what photographs from the travel location would look like. This mental image is derived, in part, from tourism sources such as postcards, brochures, and websites, but also from popular culture, and increasingly from photographs taken by other tourists. Travel images are shared online on sites such as Trip Advisor and Virtual Tourist, as well as travel blogs and photo sharing sites like Flickr and Instagram. People who post images online are likely to look to the same sites to search for travel information from others (Akehurst 55), reinforcing specific images as representative of the place and the experience.At the beginning of our photography-based tour we were asked which locations we wanted to photograph. There was a general consensus, with people looking for vistas and panoramas, “golden hour” light on the rock formations of buttes and mesas, sunrises and sunsets with silhouetted landscape forms, and close-ups of shadow patterns and textures. Our guide added that one day had been set aside for the iconic images, which were described as the “Forest Gump” shot from Highway 163, the Mittens at sunrise, John Ford Point (as most recently seen in The Lone Ranger movie posters), and the vista from Artist’s Point or North Window. When I asked tourists at the visitor information centre the same question about the images they wanted to capture, the responses were uniform with all of them saying the view of The Mittens, which was immediately before them. Seventy-eight percent (N=11) said that they were after a general panorama with the distinctive landforms, and Highway 163 was named by 57 percent (N=8). Few gave more than these three sites. Forty-two percent (N=6) described the John Ford Point image with the Navajo rider as a goal, and the same number said they would like to take some sunrise or sunset images. Twenty-eight percent (N=4) were looking to take images of themselves or their friends and family, with the distinctive landscape as a backdrop. There was a high level of consistency between the images described by the guide as “iconic” and the photographs that tourists wished to capture.Categorising five hundred Instagram images with the hashtag Monument Valley revealed 195 pictures (39 percent) of the Mittens, 58 of which were taken at sunrise or sunset. There were 88 images (18 percent) taken of Highway 163. John Ford Point featured in 26 images (five percent) of images and Artist’s Point was the location in 20 (four percent). Seventy-nine photographs (16 percent) were of other landmarks such as the Three Sisters, Elephant Butte, and Rain God Mesa, all visible from the self-drive circuit. Landmarks which could only be visited accompanied by a Navajo guide, accounted for 48 (nine percent) of the Instagram images. There were 16 images (three percent) of people, meals, and cars without any recognisable landmarks in the frame. The remaining 28 images (five percent) were of landmarks in the Southwest, but not in Monument Valley, although they were tagged as such.As expected, the photography tour group had a fairly wide range of images, which included close-ups of rocks, images of juniper trees, and images taken in places that were accessible only with a high clearance vehicle and a Navajo guide, such as the Totem Pole and Yei Bi Chei, the Valley of the Gods, and the slickrock formations of Mystery Valley. However, in the images selected at the end of the workshop as representative of their experience of Monument Valley, all participants included the iconic images of Highway 163, the Mittens, and the Artist’s Point vista.Very few images were of the Navajo people. Tourists are requested not to photograph the Navajo unless they were at a sign-posted location where a mechanism was available for paying for the privilege. Here the Navajo posed in traditional dress, engaged in customary activities, or as foreground interest in the desert landscape. The few tourists availing themselves of these opportunities seemed self-conscious, hurriedly taking the snap and paying the fee. Gillespie explains this as the effect of the “reverse gaze” where the photographed positions the photographer “as an ignorant and superficial tourist” (349). At the time, only one of the iconic images was featured on one of the official tourist sites, with the Mittens forming the banner image on the Visit Utah Monument Valley page. The Visit Arizona Monument Valley page had a single image (of the Ear of the Wind natural arch), and the Navajo Nation Parks and Recreation Monument Valley page also had a single image, that of the Three Sisters formation.Image and MeaningThe dominant subject in both tourist and tourism industry images is the Mittens. This image is also prominent in popular culture beginning with John Ford's film Stagecoach, through to Kanye West’s Bound 2 music video. This suggests that there is a closed circle of representation in tourist photography, with visitors capturing the images they have previously seen as representative of the destination. However, there may be an additional, more prosaic, explanation. The Mittens can be photographed from the terrace at the visitors centre, from the rooms at the View Hotel, or they can be captured from the car park, meaning that tourists do not have to leave their cars to attach this image to their travel narrative. The second most photographed landscape was that of Highway 163, an image that can be taken without even having to pay the fee and enter the Navajo Park.Garrod’s study of tourist and professional images of Aberystwyth noted that tourists did not have photographs taken from the top of the hill, and while no explanation for this was given, it could be that ease of access was a consideration. While the number of visitors to America’s national parks and recreation areas is increasing each year, the amount of time each visitor spends at the attraction is in decline. The average visit to Yosemite lasts just under five hours, visitors stay for just under two hours in Saguaro National Park in Arizona, and at the Grand Canyon National Park, most visitors spend just 17 minutes looking at the magnificent landscape (Bernstein; de Graaf). In Yosemite National Park many visitors “simply rolled by slowly in their cars, taking photos out the windows” (de Graaf np). So, ease of access to locations familiar from popular culture images is a factor in tourist representations of their destinations.Our photography tour group stayed five days in Monument Valley and travelled further afield to locations only accessible with a Navajo guide, however the images selected as representative of Monument Valley were of the same easily reached landmarks. This suggests that the process around the perpetuation of iconic tourist images is more complex than simple ease of access, or first impressions.What is apparent in looking at both the Instagram images and those photographs selected as representative by the tour group, is that what is depicted is not necessarily contemporary tourist experience, but rather a way of seeing the experience in terms of personal and cultural stories. Photography involves the selection, structuring and shaping of what is to be captured (Urry 260), so that the image is as much the representation of a perception, as a snapshot of experienced reality. In a guide to photographing the southwest of the USA, Matrés regrets the greater restrictions on movement and the increased commercialisation in Monument Valley (170), which reduce the possibility of photographing under good light conditions, and of capturing images without tourist buses, sales booths, and consequent crowds. However, almost all of the photographs studied avoided these. Photographers seemed to have expended considerable effort to produce an idealised image of a Western landscape that would have been familiar to John Ford, as the photographs were not of a commercialised, crowded tourist destination. When someone paid the horseman to ride out to the end of John Ford Point, groups of tourists would walk out too, fussing over the horse, however having people in the image led to those on the photography tour rejecting the image as representative of Monument Valley. For the most part, the landscape images highlighted the isolation and remoteness, depicting the frontier beyond which civilization ceases to exist.ConclusionPhotography is one of the performances through which people establish personal realities (Crang 245), and the reality for Monument Valley tourists is that it is still a remote destination. It is in the driest and least populated part of the US, and receives only 350,000 visitors a year compared, with the five million people who visit the nearby Grand Canyon. On a prosaic level, tourist photographs verify that the location was visited (Sontag 9), so the images must be able to be readily associated with the destination. They are evidence that the tourist has experienced some form of authentic, exotic, place (Chalfen 435), and so must depict scenes that differ from the everyday landscape. They also play a role in constructing an identity based in being a particular type of tourist, so they need to contribute to the narrative constructed from a blend of mythologies, memories and experiences. The circle of representation in tourist images is still closed, though it has broadened to constitute a narrative derived from a range of sources. By capturing the iconic landmarks of Monument Valley framed to emphasise the grandeur and isolation, tourists insert themselves into a narrative that includes John Wayne and Kanye West at the edge of civilization.References2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968.Airwolf. Dir. Donald P. Bellisario, CBS, 1984–1986.Akehurst, Gary. “User Generated Content: The Use of Blogs for Tourism Organisations and Tourism Consumers.” Service Business 3.1 (2009): 51-61.Bernstein, Danny. “The Numbers behind National Park Visitation.” National Parks Traveller, 2010. 5 Aug. 2016 <http://www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2010/04/numbers-behind-national-park-visitation/>.Kanye West. Bound 2. Nick Knight Good Music, 2013.Chalfen, Richard M. “Photography’s Role in Tourism: Some Unexplored Relationships.” Annals of Tourism Research 6.4 (1979): 435–447Crang, Mike. “Knowing, Tourism and Practices of Vision.” Leisure/Tourism Geographies: Practices and Geographical Knowledge. Ed. David Crouch. London: Routledge, 1999. 238–56.De Graaf, John. “Finding Time for Our Parks.” Earth Island Journal, 2016. 5 Aug. 2016 <http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/finding_time_for_our_parks/>.Doctor Who. Sydney Newman, C. E. Webber, Donald Wilson. BBC One, 1963–present.Easy Rider. Dir. Dennis Hopper. Columbia Pictures, 1969.Garrod, Brian. “Understanding the Relationship between Tourism Destination Imagery and Tourist Photography.” Journal of Travel Research 47.3 (2009): 346-358Gillespie, Alex. "Tourist Photography and the Reverse Gaze." Ethos 34.3 (2006): 343-366.Jenkins, Olivia. “Photography and Travel Brochures: The Circle of Representation.” Tourism Geographies 5.3 (2003): 305-328.Matrés, Laurent. Photographing the Southwest. Alta Loma, CA: Graphie Publishers, 2006.Schroeder, Jonathan E. Visual Consumption. London: Routledge, 2002.Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. London: Penguin Books, 1977 Stagecoach. Dir. John Ford. United Artists, 1937.The Searchers. Dir. John Ford. Warner Bros, 1956.Thelma & Louise. Dir. Ridley Scott. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1991.Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage, 1992.

The object of mapping is to produce a "correct" relational model of the terrain. Its assumptions are that the objects in the world to be mapped are real and objective, and that they enjoy an existence independent of the cartographer; that their reality can be expressed in mathematical terms; that systematic observation and measurement offer the only route to cartographic truth; and that this truth can be independently verified. -- J. B. Harley, "Deconstructing the Map" Cartography, in its pragmatic operation under these assumptions, avoids almost all of the problems of representation with which cultural studies is only too familiar. Maps are representations, and all representations, even "scientific" ones, are cultural signs rather than truths produced in an ideological vacuum. The notion that mathematics, as a tool of Renaissance rationality, allowed real, objective detachment from an object of study was slowly absorbed into the cartographic tradition of Europe about four hundred years ago. "From at least the seventeenth century onward there was an epistemic break in activities such as cartography and architecture, and European map makers increasingly promoted what we would describe today as a standard scientific model of knowledge and cognition" (Harley 234). This model, in its increasing reliance upon mathematics and mathematical probability, essentially avoids or denies the objection that scientific observation and interpretation, and especially the technological gaze of its lens, produce anything other than objective, "real" knowledge. Through a mathematical detachment from the world, aided by the gaze of the lens, we see not the world itself (which includes us in its unmappable flux) but the numbers, straight lines and generalisations (which do not) that modern maps, including photographs, must employ to give the world fixed form and meaning. We find this model of cartography most impressively represented today in NASA's Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) probe, not merely as a sign of the technical success of mathematics, but also of its conceptual failure to provide the "true" representations of terrain to which a truly scientific cartography must aspire. MGS's 1998 attempt to "solve" the controversy surrounding a particularly contentious area on Mars, called Cydonia, with newer, "truer" images of the infamous Face on Mars was, contrary to popular opinion, an unsuccessful one; unsuccessful because NASA failed to remove all reasonable doubt that the Face was a natural geological formation. Not that this was particularly evident from media coverage of the image's release and reception -- the maverick researchers who comprised the protest were given a less than admirable hearing at the trial. Australian headlines reported that the Mars "romantics" (The Australian) had their Face theory "scuttled" (Courier-Mail). Professor Stanley V. McDaniel was demoted to "Mr McDaniel" in the The Australian, someone who wants NASA to continue re-imaging Cydonia to document other nearby features because "he believes [they] are further evidence of a Martian civilisation" (6). Also misrepresented was the like-minded, if slightly more adventurous researcher, Richard Hoagland, author of the underground classic, The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever (1987). Hoagland carelessly became (in both newspapers) Richard "Hoaglund", "leader of the movement" that believes the face is a monument left in Mars's Cydonia region by an ancient civilisation. The Australian, in line with the rest of the Earth's media, was apparently closing the door on the annoyingly persistent research into the Artificial Origin at Cydonia (AOC) hypothesis, which actually "does not claim that there is proof of artificial features on Mars, but that the probability of there being artificial features is strong enough to make new high-resolution photographs a top priority for any future mission to that planet" (McDaniel 2). Rather than confront the hypothesis itself, The Australian merely reminded us that "despite the image being 10 times better than the Viking photograph [a simplified qualification of the imaging process], it seems that some people still want to dream about ancient Martians building huge monuments to themselves" (The Australian). Dr. Mark J. Carlotto, a widely published specialist in the areas of digital image processing, pattern recognition, and computer vision, apparently still wants to dream that dream. An advocate of the AOC hypothesis, he notes that close examination of the image reveals the formation to be rough and highly eroded. Many have therefore concluded that the Face is natural. But others contend that if the Face is artificial it must certainly be very old and highly eroded. Thus the question remains as to how to distinguish an eroded artificial feature from a natural one. (Carlotto) This interestingly portentous question is one which NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and their contracted image processors, the privately owned Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) have been somewhat reluctant to confront since the image of the Face was first captured in Viking frame 35A72. NASA's inaugural public statement on the Cydonia issue, for example, was handled ... "clumsily". As McDaniel reports: Upon the discovery of the Face in July, 1976, a Viking Project Scientist held up Viking frame 35A72, containing the Face, and announced to the assembled press corps that in a picture taken a few hours later "it all went away; it was just the way the light fell on it" -- but with a significant omission: the alleged later photograph, in which the facial features were supposed to have disappeared, was not shown for comparison [because] the statement could not possibly have been true. Frame 35A72 was taken in the early evening at approximately 6pm local time (sun angle 10 degrees). The object was in darkness a few hours later; the spacecraft, with an orbital period of about 24 hours, was no longer in a position to re-photograph the site; nor would it return to the site for many more orbits to come. Thus NASA's first official response to this strange object was an inexplicable misstatement based upon an apparent impossibility. (McDaniel 11-2) Things did not improve from there. NASA was never able to produce the elusive second photograph, yet continued to maintain that it both existed and conclusively disproved that the landform in question could possibly be artificial. In May 1993 the paradox attracted the attention of Senator John Glenn, who received (along with at least ten other members of the House and the Senate) a copy of the NASA document "Information on NASA's Re-Photographing of the Cydonia Region of Mars", which still held that the Face disappeared in the different lighting angles of a separate frame, which it did not reference. Finally in June 1993, after another inquiry by Senator Dianne Feinstein, a revised draft was issued which omits reference to the mysterious "real" photograph of the Face (McDaniel 12-3). NASA's next attempt to re-image Mars, including Cydonia, was the Observer probe, which failed to observe much at all and was declared lost in space. In conjunction with the recent mysterious failure of the Russian Phobos probe, and NASA's constant public relations blunders, conspiracy theories abounded. Was there something lurking at the threshold? The answer came in 1998 through the MGS, from which MSSS had produced a newer, clearer, "truer" image of the contentious feature which seemed to confirm Dr. Michael Malin's own earlier (and strangely self-contradictory) evaluation of 35A72: "it's simply a funny looking hill -- there is nothing unusual about it" (McDaniel 55). The MGS image certainly appeared, at least to the "naked eye" perusing the newspaper, to be just that. The wilderness had been tamed, and the coals cooled, temporarily. We had melted the witch. But exorcisms are never "final". Although NASA had apparently relegated the monstrous Face back to the realm of nature, restoring it within the parameters of conventional geology, McDaniel, Carlotto and others have maintained that NASA's conclusions were drastically premature, noting, as mentioned previously, that if the Face is artificial it must certainly be very old and, considering the Martian environment, highly eroded (Carlotto). According to their independent research, detailed analysis of the MGS image (which NASA appears not to have commissioned), does not invalidate the hypothesis that the Face may be artificial. Rather, it confirms many of the facial features recorded by the Viking, provides further evidence for the formation's high degree of lateral symmetry, and illuminates more anomalous internal detail (Carlotto). The Face on Mars, like the classical monsters of history, will not die easily. Ironically, perusal of Carlotto's dense research is an entry into the latent but undeniable plasticity of numbers, which itself is the quality of the monster that haunts modern cartographic representation. Mathematics, in almost every field of application, is finding it increasingly difficult to keep its disordering unknowns at bay. Geographer Erol Torun, for example, examined the angles formed by the facets of the two-mile long "D & M pyramid" (named after its discoverers, Vincent DiPietro and Gregory Molenaar). As Brian O'Leary writes, he subsequently found that the ratios between the five principal angles at the pyramid apex "express the universal mathematical constants of the square roots of 2,3,5,6, e, and pi ... . These constants should be known by any civilisation possessing Egyptian level technology (or greater) ... . The constants themselves are universal because they exist regardless of the number of the base being used". Regarding the other angles, Torun continued to find mathematically significant numbers "no matter how I looked at the object" (O'Leary 210). As the Cydonia controversy seems to clearly demonstrate, rather than revealing obvious, fixed truths about the world, mathematics and the observational tools they inspire require us to learn to see an approximation of the object they construct and represent as "real". We are thus compelled to draw the Other closer, but not "really", through the technological gaze of the artificial lens, a gaze that works to mask its own latent epistemic crisis. Indeed, this very compulsion inspired the growth of popular microscopy in the mid-eighteenth century, which required a new mode of seeing that could only very generously be termed "observation". Captain Basil Hall vividly recalls a meeting of the Geological Society, when a bottle was produced which was said to contain certain zoophytes. It was handed round, in the first instance, among the initiated on the foremost benches, who commented freely with one another on the forms of the animals in the fluid; but, when it came to our hands, we could discover nothing in the bottle but the most limpid fluid, -- without any trace, so far as our optics could make out, of animals dead or alive, the whole appearing absolutely transparent. The surprise of the ignorant at seeing nothing was only equal to that of the learned who saw so much to admire; nor was it till we were specifically instructed what we were to look for, and the shape, size, and general aspect of the zoophytes pointed out, that our understandings began to co-operate with our eyesight in peopling the fluid, which, up to that moment, had seemed perfectly uninhabited. The wonder then was, how we could possibly have omitted seeing objects now so palpable. (Mantell 8) Indeed, as Harley indicates, the relationship between the geographic and microscopic gaze is fundamental to the modern cartographic tradition. He cites Monmonier and Schnell's Map Appreciation (1988) as a recent example: Geography thrives on cartographic generalisation. The map is to the geographer what the microscope is to the microbiologist, for the ability to shrink the earth and generalise about it ... the microbiologist must choose a suitable objective lens, and the geographer must select a map scale appropriate to both the phenomenon in question and the "regional laboratory" in which the geographer is studying it. (in Harley 245) Importantly for this discussion, through both microscopy and cartography, "photography has also played a large role in twentieth-century ethnological representation", writes James Duncan. What better way to assert the primacy of the visual, produce a "true" representation of the place in question and establish presence than through the use of photography? But the mimetic claims of photography can also be called into question. A camera is a machine constructed to produce an image based upon artificial perspective. Only if one accepts the claims of the naturalness of Renaissance artificial perspective can we accept photography as a mimetic representation of the world. Such claims can be cast in doubt, for example, by the failure of peoples unfamiliar with photographs to be able to "read" them. (43) At the end of the day, though, it all may have more to do with down-to-earth economics than Martian "geopolitics". For many researchers, McDaniel among them, NASA's evasive treatment of the Face and surrounding features (variously labelled the Tholus, the D&M pyramid, the Fort, and the City Square) suggests a cover-up. Specifically, a cover-up of NASA's own inexplicable lack of investigation into apparently artificial structures on the Martian surface. Since the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's data imaging is contracted to a private company legally unaccountable to the public, McDaniel has confronted the somewhat disheartening possibility that financial motives may be obscuring investigation into what seem to be the most intriguing features of the Martian surface. He "does not personally believe in the conspiracy theory", but simply suggests that the Cydonia controversy may demonstrate that the financial interests of Malin Space Science Systems have assumed higher priority than the search for extraterrestrial artefacts: The contract for the Mars Observer (now MGS) involved close to 10 million dollars for Malin Space Science Systems ... . If it became clear that the probability of artificial structures on Mars is very high [or even that such a probability existed], it seems the focus of investigation would shift radically. The emphasis would fall to an accelerated manned mission to Mars. Archaeologists and perhaps biologists would assume an increasingly important role. It would be the manned mission (Johnson Space Flight Centre), not JPL, that takes the driver's seat. (McDaniel 1999) In other words, by producing results which indicated that the Cydonia region was worthy of closer attention, MSSS would jeopardise the future of its own multi-million dollar contract with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory -- hardly a wise business venture, regardless of their geopolitical stance. But whatever the "true" source of the Martian controversy (it is, after all, the mythic planet of war), it seems undeniable that the Face on Mars is at once both an appropriately postmodern enigma and a genuine cartographic anomaly. For we find embodied within its monstrous form (through the lens), the message that our gaze is destined to be returned by ourselves. From the stars to the quarks, "we" seem to forever inhabit the very wilderness our technological gaze functions to both distance and draw closer; to abject. References Berland, Jody. "Mapping Space: Imaging Technologies and the Planetary Body." Technoscience and Cyberculture. Eds. Stanley Aronowitz, Barbara Martinsons, and Michael Menser. New York: Routledge, 1996. 123-37. Bull, Sandra. "Images from Mars Scuttle Face Theory." The Courier-Mail 8 April 1998. Carlotto, Mark J. "Analysis of Global Surveyor Imagery of the Face on Mars." 1998. 4 Oct. 2000 <http://www.psrw.com/~markc/Articles/MGSreport/paper.php>. ---. "New Cydonia Images -- April 2000: Preliminary Data Analysis." 2000. 4 Oct. 2000 <http://www.psrw.com/~markc/Articles/April_2000/April2000.php>. Crowley, Brian, and James J. Hurtak. The Face on Mars: Evidence of a Lost Martian Civilisation. 1986. Melbourne: Sun/Macmillan, 1989. Duncan, James. "Sites of Representation: Place, Time and the Discourse of the Other." Place/Culture/Representation. Eds. James Duncan and David Ley. London: Routledge, 1993. 39-56. Harley, J. B. "Deconstructing the Map." Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape. Eds. Trevor J. Barnes and James Duncan. London: Routledge, 1992. 231-47. Leech, Graeme. "Mars Romantics Face the Truth: There's Nothing Out There." The Australian 8 April 1998. Mantell, Gideon Algernon. The Invisible World Revealed by the Microscope; or, Thoughts on Animalcules. London: John Murray, 1850. McDaniel, Stanley V. The McDaniel Report: On the Failure of Executive, Congressional and Scientific Responsibility in Investigating Possible Evidence of Artificial Structures on the Surface of Mars and in Setting Mission Priorities for NASA's Mars Exploration Program. Berkeley: North Atlantic, 1993. ---. "Here It Is! But What Is It?" 1998. 4 Oct. 2000 <http://www.mcdanielreport.com/homepage.htm>. ---. "The Cydonia Question: Where Do We Stand?" 1999. 4 Oct. 2000. <http://www.mcdanielreport.com/standing.php>. O'Leary, Brian. "Mars and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life." Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries. Ed. Jonathan Eisen. Auckland: AIT, 1994. 204-13. Picknett, Lynn, and Clive Prince. The Stargate Conspiracy: Revealing the Truth behind Extraterrestrial Contact, Military Intelligence and the Mysteries of Ancient Egypt. London: Little, Brown and Co., 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Adam Dodd. "'Unacceptable Renewals': The Geopolitics of Martian Cartography." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.6 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/mars.php>. Chicago style: Adam Dodd, "'Unacceptable Renewals': The Geopolitics of Martian Cartography," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 6 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/mars.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Adam Dodd. (2000) 'Unacceptable renewals': the geopolitics of Martian cartography. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(6). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/mars.php> ([your date of access]).

Our culture abhors the world.Yet Quicksand is swallowing the duellists; the river is threatening the fighter: earth, waters and climate, the mute world, the voiceless things once placed as a decor surrounding the usual spectacles, all those things that never interested anyone, from now on thrust themselves brutally and without warning into our schemes and manoeuvres (Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, p 3). When Michel Serres describes culture's abhorrence of the world in the opening pages of The Natural Contract he draws our attention to the sidelining of nature in histories and theories that have sought to describe Western culture. As Serres argues, cultural histories are quite often built on the debates and struggles of humanity, which are largely held apart from their natural surroundings, as if on a stage, "purified of things" (3). But, as he is at pains to point out, human activity and conflict always take place within a natural milieu, a space of quicksand, swelling rivers, shifting earth, and atmospheric turbulence. Recently, via the potential for vast environmental change, what was once thought of as a staid “nature” has reasserted itself within culture. In this paper I explore how Serres’s positioning of nature can be understood amid new communication systems, which, via the apparent dematerialization of messages, seems to have further removed culture from nature. From here, I focus on a set of artworks that work against this division, reformulating the connection between information, a topic usually considered in relation to media and anthropic communication (and something about which Serres too has a great deal to say), and nature, an entity commonly considered beyond human contrivance. In particular, I explore how information visualisation and sonification has been used to give a new sense of materiality to the atmosphere, repotentialising the air as a natural and informational entity. The Natural Contract argues for the legal legitimacy of nature, a natural contract similar in standing to Rousseau’s social contract. Serres’ss book explores the history and notion of a “legal person”, arguing for a linking of the scientific view of the world and the legal visions of social life, where inert objects and living beings are considered within the same legal framework. As such The Natural Contract does not deal with ecology per-se, but instead focuses on an argument for the inclusion of nature within law (Serres, “A Return” 131). In a drastic reconfiguring of the subject/object relationship, Serres explains how the space that once existed as a backdrop for human endeavour now seems to thrust itself directly into history. "They (natural events) burst in on our culture, which had never formed anything but a local, vague, and cosmetic idea of them: nature" (Serres, The Natural Contract 3). In this movement, nature does not simply take on the role of a new object to be included within a world still dominated by human subjects. Instead, human beings are understood as intertwined with a global system of turbulence that is both manipulated by them and manipulates them. Taking my lead from Serres’s book, in this paper I begin to explore the disconnections and reconnections that have been established between information and the natural environment. While I acknowledge that there is nothing natural about the term “nature” (Harman 251), I use the term to designate an environment constituted by the systematic processes of the collection of entities that are neither human beings nor human crafted artefacts. As the formation of cultural systems becomes demarcated from these natural objects, the scene is set for the development of culturally mediated concepts such as “nature” and “wilderness,” as entities untouched and unspoilt by cultural process (Morton). On one side of the divide the complex of communication systems is situated, on the other is situated “nature”. The restructuring of information flows due to developments in electronic communication has ostensibly removed messages from the medium of nature. Media is now considered within its own ecology (see Fuller; Strate) quite separate from nature, except when it is developed as media content (see Cubitt; Murray; Heumann). A separation between the structures of media ecologies and the structures of natural ecologies has emerged over the history of electronic communication. For instance, since the synoptic media theory of McLuhan it has been generally acknowledged that the shift from script to print, from stone to parchment, and from the printing press to more recent developments such as the radio, telephone, television, and Web2.0, have fundamentally altered the structure and effects of human relationships. However, these developments – “the extensions of man” (McLuhan)— also changed the relationship between society and nature. Changes in communications technology have allowed people to remain dispersed, as ideas, in the form of electric currents or pulses of light travel vast distances and in diverse directions, with communication no longer requiring human movement across geographic space. Technologies such as the telegraph and the radio, with their ability to seemingly dematerialize the media of messages, reformulated the concept of communication into a “quasi-physical connection” across the obstacles of time and space (Clarke, “Communication” 132). Prior to this, the natural world itself was the medium through which information was passed. Rather than messages transmitted via wires, communication was associated with the transport of messages through the world via human movement, with the materiality of the medium measured in the time it took to cover geographic space. The flow of messages followed trade flows (Briggs and Burke 20). Messages moved along trails, on rail, over bridges, down canals, and along shipping channels, arriving at their destination as information. More recently however, information, due to its instantaneous distribution and multiplication across space, seems to have no need for nature as a medium. Nature has become merely a topic for information, as media content, rather than as something that takes part within the information system itself. The above example illustrates a separation between information exchange and the natural environment brought about by a set of technological developments. As Serres points out, the word “media” is etymologically related to the word “milieu”. Hence, a theory of media should be always related to an understanding of the environment (Crocker). But humans no longer need to physically move through the natural world to communicate, ideas can move freely from region to region, from air-conditioned room to air-conditioned room, relatively unimpeded by natural forces or geographic distance. For a long time now, information exchange has not necessitated human movement through the natural environment and this has consequences for how the formation of culture and its location in (or dislocation from) the natural world is viewed. A number of artists have begun questioning the separation between media and nature, particularly concerning the materiality of air, and using information to provide new points of contact between media and the atmosphere (for a discussion of the history of ecoart see Wallen). In Eclipse (2009) (fig. 1) for instance, an internet based work undertaken by the collective EcoArtTech, environmental sensing technology and online media is used experimentally to visualize air pollution. EcoArtTech is made up of the artist duo Cary Peppermint and Leila Nadir and since 2005 they have been inquiring into the relationship between digital technology and the natural environment, particularly regarding concepts such as “wilderness”. In Eclipse, EcoArtTech garner photographs of American national parks from social media and photo sharing sites. Air quality data gathered from the nearest capital city is then inputted into an algorithm that visibly distorts the image based on the levels of particle pollution detected in the atmosphere. The photographs that circulate on photo sharing sites such as Flickr—photographs that are usually rather banal in their adherence to a history of wilderness photography—are augmented by the environmental pollution circulating in nearby capital cities. Figure 1: EcoArtTech, Eclipse (detail of screenshot), 2009 (Internet-based work available at:http://turbulence.org/Works/eclipse/) The digital is often associated with the clean transmission of information, as packets of data move from a server, over fibre optic cables, to be unpacked and re-presented on a computer's screen. Likewise, the photographs displayed in Eclipse are quite often of an unspoilt nature, containing no errors in their exposure or focus (most probably because these wilderness photographs were taken with digital cameras). As the photographs are overlaid with information garnered from air quality levels, the “unspoilt” photograph is directly related to pollution in the natural environment. In Eclipse the background noise of “wilderness,” the pollution in the air, is reframed as foreground. “We breathe background noise…Background noise is the ground of our perception, absolutely uninterrupted, it is our perennial sustenance, the element of the software of all our logic” (Serres, Genesis 7). Noise is activated in Eclipse in a similar way to Serres’s description, as an indication of the wider milieu in which communication takes place (Crocker). Noise links the photograph and its transmission not only to the medium of the internet and the glitches that arise as information is circulated, but also to the air in the originally photographed location. In addition to noise, there are parallels between the original photographs of nature gleaned from photo sharing sites and Serres’s concept of a history that somehow stands itself apart from the effects of ongoing environmental processes. By compartmentalising the natural and cultural worlds, both the historiography that Serres argues against and the wilderness photograph produces a concept of nature that is somehow outside, behind, or above human activities and the associated matter of noise. Eclipse, by altering photographs using real-time data, puts the still image into contact with the processes and informational outputs of nature. Air quality sensors detect pollution in the atmosphere and code these atmospheric processes into computer readable information. The photograph is no longer static but is now open to continual recreation and degeneration, dependent on the coded value of the atmosphere in a given location. A similar materiality is given to air in a public work undertaken by Preemptive Media, titled Areas Immediate Reading (AIR) (fig. 2). In this project, Preemptive Media, made up of Beatriz da Costa, Jamie Schulte and Brooke Singer, equip participants with instruments for measuring air quality as they walked around New York City. The devices monitor the carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NOx) or ground level ozone (O3) levels that are being breathed in by the carrier. As Michael Dieter has pointed out in his reading of the work, the application of sensing technology by Preemptive Media is in distinct contrast to the conventional application of air quality monitoring, which usually takes the form of extremely high resolution located devices spread over great distances. These larger air monitoring networks tend to present the value garnered from a large expanse of the atmosphere that covers individual cities or states. The AIR project, in contrast, by using small mobile sensors, attempts to put people in informational contact with the air that they are breathing in their local and immediate time and place, and allows them to monitor the small parcels of atmosphere that surround other users in other locations (Dieter). It thus presents many small and mobile spheres of atmosphere, inhabited by individuals as they move through the city. In AIR we see the experimental application of an already developed technology in order to put people on the street in contact with the atmospheres that they are moving through. It gives a new informational form to the “vast but invisible ocean of air that surrounds us and permeates us” (Ihde 3), which in this case is given voice by a technological apparatus that converts the air into information. The atmosphere as information becomes less of a vague background and more of a measurable entity that ingresses into the lives and movements of human users. The air is conditioned by information; the turbulent and noisy atmosphere has been converted via technology into readable information (Connor 186-88). Figure 2: Preemptive Media, Areas Immediate Reading (AIR) (close up of device), 2011 Throughout his career Serres has developed a philosophy of information and communication that may help us to reframe the relationship between the natural and cultural worlds (see Brown). Conventionally, the natural world is understood as made up of energy and matter, with exchanges of energy and the flows of biomass through food webs binding ecosystems together (DeLanda 120-1). However, the tendencies and structures of natural systems, like cultural systems, are also dependent on the communication of information. It is here that Serres provides us with a way to view natural and cultural systems as connected by a flow of energy and information. He points out that in the wake of Claude Shannon’s famous Mathematical Theory of Communication it has been possible to consider the relationship between information and thermodynamics, at least in Shannon’s explanation of noise as entropy (Serres, Hermes74). For Serres, an ecosystem can be conceptualised as an informational and energetic system: “it receives, stores, exchanges, and gives off both energy and information in all forms, from the light of the sun to the flow of matter which passes through it (food, oxygen, heat, signals)” (Serres, Hermes 74). Just as we are related to the natural world based on flows of energy— as sunlight is converted into energy by plants, which we in turn convert into food— we are also bound together by flows of information. The task is to find new ways to sense this information, to actualise the information, and imagine nature as more than a welter of data and the air as more than background. If we think of information in broad ranging terms as “coded values of the output of a process” (Losee 254), then we see that information and the environment—as a setting that is produced by continual and energetic processes—are in constant contact. After all, humans sense information from the environment all the time; we constantly decode the coded values of environmental processes transmitted via the atmosphere. I smell a flower, I hear bird songs, and I see the red glow of a sunset. The process of the singing bird is coded as vibrations of air particles that knock against my ear drum. The flower is coded as molecules in the atmosphere enter my nose and bind to cilia. The red glow is coded as wavelengths from the sun are dispersed in the Earth’s atmosphere and arrive at my eye. Information, of course, does not actually exist as information until some observing system constructs it (Clarke, “Information” 157-159). This observing system as we see the sunset, hear the birds, or smell the flower involves the atmosphere as a medium, along with our sense organs and cognitive and non-cognitive processes. The molecules in the atmosphere exist independently of our sense of them, but they do not actualise as information until they are operationalised by the observational system. Prior to this, information can be thought of as noise circulating within the atmosphere. Heinz Von Foester, one of the key figures of cybernetics, states “The environment contains no information. The environment is as it is” (Von Foester in Clarke, “Information” 157). Information, in this model, actualises only when something in the world causes a change to the observational system, as a difference that makes a difference (Bateson 448-466). Air expelled from a bird’s lungs and out its beak causes air molecules to vibrate, introducing difference into the atmosphere, which is then picked up by my ear and registered as sound, informing me that a bird is nearby. One bird song is picked up as information amid the swirling noise of nature and a difference in the air makes a difference to the observational system. It may be useful to think of the purpose of information as to control action and that this is necessary “whenever the people concerned, controllers as well as controlled, belong to an organised social group whose collective purpose is to survive and prosper” (Scarrott 262). Information in this sense operates the organisation of groups. Using this definition rooted in cybernetics, we see that information allows groups, which are dependent on certain control structures based on the sending and receiving of messages through media, to thrive and defines the boundaries of these groups. We see this in a flock of birds, for instance, which forms based on the information that one bird garners from the movements of the other birds in proximity. Extrapolating from this, if we are to live included in an ecological system capable of survival, the transmission of information is vital. But the form of the information is also important. To communicate, for example, one entity first needs to recognise that the other is speaking and differentiate this information from the noise in the air. Following Clarke and Von Foester, an observing system needs to be operational. An art project that gives aesthetic form to environmental processes in this vein—and one that is particularly concerned with the co-agentive relation between humans and nature—is Reiko Goto and Tim Collin’s Plein Air (2010) (fig. 3), an element in their ongoing Eden 3 project. In this work a technological apparatus is wired to a tree. This apparatus, which references the box easels most famously used by the Impressionists to paint ‘en plein air’, uses sensing technology to detect the tree’s responses to the varying CO2 levels in the atmosphere. An algorithm then translates this into real time piano compositions. The tree’s biological processes are coded into the voice of a piano and sensed by listeners as aesthetic information. What is at stake in this work is a new understanding of atmospheres as a site for the exchange of information, and an attempt to resituate the interdependence of human and non-human entities within an experimental aesthetic system. As we breathe out carbon dioxide—both through our physiological process of breathing and our cultural processes of polluting—trees breath it in. By translating these biological processes into a musical form, Collins and Gotto’s work signals a movement from a process of atmospheric exchange to a digital process of sensing and coding, the output of which is then transmitted through the atmosphere as sound. It must be mentioned that within this movement from atmospheric gas to atmospheric music we are not listening to the tree alone. We are listening to a much more complex polyphony involving the components of the digital sensing technology, the tree, the gases in the atmosphere, and the biological (breathing) and cultural processes (cars, factories and coal fired power stations) that produce these gases. Figure 3: Reiko Goto and Tim Collins, Plein Air, 2010 As both Don Ihde and Steven Connor have pointed out, the air that we breathe is not neutral. It is, on the contrary, given its significance in technology, sound, and voice. Taking this further, we might understand sensing technology as conditioning the air with information. This type of air conditioning—as information alters the condition of air—occurs as technology picks up, detects, and makes sensible phenomena in the atmosphere. While communication media such as the telegraph and other electronic information distribution systems may have distanced information from nature, the sensing technology experimentally applied by EcoArtTech, Preeemptive Media, and Goto and Collins, may remind us of the materiality of air. These technologies allow us to connect to the atmosphere; they reformulate it, converting it to information, giving new form to the coded processes in nature.AcknowledgmentAll images reproduced with the kind permission of the artists. References Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. Briggs, Asa, and Peter Burke. A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet. Maden: Polity Press, 2009. Brown, Steve. “Michel Serres: Science, Translation and the Logic of the Parasite.” Theory, Culture and Society 19.1 (2002): 1-27. Clarke, Bruce. “Communication.” Critical Terms for Media Studies. Eds. Mark B. N. Hansen and W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 131-45 -----. “Information.” Critical Terms for Media Studies. Eds. Mark B. N. Hansen and W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 157-71 Crocker, Stephen. “Noise and Exceptions: Pure Mediality in Serres and Agamben.” CTheory: 1000 Days of Theory. (2007). 7 June 2012 ‹http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=574› Connor, Stephen. The Matter of Air: Science and the Art of the Etheral. London: Reaktion, 2010. Cubitt, Sean. EcoMedia. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005 Deiter, Michael. “Processes, Issues, AIR: Toward Reticular Politics.” Australian Humanities Review 46 (2009). 9 June 2012 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-May-2009/dieter.htm› DeLanda, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London and New York: Continuum, 2002. Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005 Harman, Graham. Guerilla Metaphysics. Illinois: Open Court, 2005. Ihde, Don. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. Albany: State University of New York, 2007. Innis, Harold. Empire and Communication. Toronto: Voyageur Classics, 1950/2007. Losee, Robert M. “A Discipline Independent Definition of Information.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 48.3 (1997): 254–69. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Sphere Books, 1964/1967. Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Murray, Robin, and Heumann, Joseph. Ecology and Popular Film: Cinema on the Edge. Albany: State University of New York, 2009 Scarrott, G.C. “The Nature of Information.” The Computer Journal 32.3 (1989): 261-66 Serres, Michel. Hermes: Literature, Science Philosophy. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1982. -----. The Natural Contract. Trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992/1995. -----. Genesis. Trans. Genevieve James and James Nielson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1982/1995. -----. “A Return to the Natural Contract.” Making Peace with the Earth. Ed. Jerome Binde. Oxford: UNESCO and Berghahn Books, 2007. Strate, Lance. Echoes and Reflections: On Media Ecology as a Field of Study. New York: Hampton Press, 2006 Wallen, Ruth. “Ecological Art: A Call for Intervention in a Time of Crisis.” Leonardo 45.3 (2012): 234-42.

“This table breeds idleness!” read the text of a handwritten message placed prominently on the table I shared with 5 of my friends many years ago in secondary school. Ours was one of several tables positioned to the side of the main teaching area of the classroom where we would gather on arrival, decant our bags to tables, gossip with our ‘group’ and then begin our school day. It was also a space where we could sit or study quietly between classes and during free periods. The note about our idleness was left only on ‘our’ table. Recognising the handwriting of our classroom teacher, Sister Celestine, we greeted her note with restrained laughter and a sense of teenage pride. Her reprimand was stern, but she had also acknowledged our specialness. We were seen as we might have wanted to be seen, recalcitrant, not too hardworking, slightly roguish, and a bit improper.That note, and its words, stayed with me for a long time. There was something wonderfully urgent about this call to reflexivity; and something pleasantly disturbing about the panicky tone of its message. It seemed a peculiar expression of both crisis and care. ‘Idleness’ was a word we rarely encountered. In fact, it seemed such an old fashioned utterance, belonging more to a past era of our nun and the vernacular of her time. What was it that moved this nun to construe our mischief and our youthful conviviality as idleness? We considered ourselves spirited and boisterous, certainly not inert, as the word seemed to imply. This was curious, but it was the word ‘breeds’ that captured me more. What precisely is the generative or reproductive power of the conjunction of our bodies and this table? The concern was clearly not just about our idleness, but also about the breeding power of this table.Idleness here speaks to us of what happens when proper things are not happening. When the table and our bodies converge in this space of idleness we are in the terrain of waste: wasting time (that could be spent on studying), wasting potential (that could advance our life prospects), wasting space (that could be used productively). The breeding of idleness is a judgement about how we are occupying this time and space. The table is a wasted space, and in turn it produces us as a waste of space. It is regulated by a circular logic. We are wasting time, which is wasting space; this in turn produces us as the wasters of that space. The space of the table might be used more purposefully, but not while it is breeding us. The nun’s note to us might have read, “You are a waste of space because you are wasting time.” Time is thus spatialised. The ‘table of idleness’ has returned to me in recent times as a partial metaphor for the paradigm of urban renewal. Contemporary urban renewal and regeneration programs in places like the UK, Europe, North America and Australia are inspired to use space more productively, and to design and develop urban space in ways that enable the production of vibrant, clean, safer places where cultural diversity might be experienced as cosmopolitan chic. Tethering modern urban design to property development and the trend to ‘lifestyle’ based local economies, urban renewal is a strategy sweeping most postindustrial economies. Suburbs ripe for these renewal, regeneration or revitalisation projects are identified in part through the presence of dormant, derelict spaces, in other words, wasted spaces from bygone eras. Typically these suburbs show the signs of neglect associated with economic change. They have become dormant as large-scale deindustrialisation and the development of large shopping malls away from urban centres sees people exiting the suburbs to work and shop. Street life diminishes and local businesses struggle or close, leaving landscapes of decaying infrastructure and urban decline. Urban renewal apprehends such idle spaces as wasted opportunities that can be designed and developed into a usefulness that provides lifestyles of comfort, vitality and urban safety. But these wasted spaces also produce shadow wastes. Much like our table of indolence and time wasting, these spaces are considered breeding grounds, not just for a sense of urban dullness and decay but, more worryingly, for generating urban sloth and danger. They become the breeding grounds for what is now commonly referred to as ‘antisocial behaviour’ or ‘urban incivility’. That is, those who ‘unproductively’ and ‘dangerously’ occupy particular urban public spaces. In the inner western Melbourne suburb of Footscray, which is currently undergoing renewal, these bodies are identified as the unruly public drinkers and drug users, black African men who have created a street café culture, and people with mental health difficulties who occupy the streets and who at times display anomalous bodily comportment and atypical civil demeanours. Many of these people are poor and sometimes engage in unconventional modalities of conviviality. A contemporary urban version of the idle schoolgirls in many ways, they sit at tables, on footpaths, in stairwells, on seats, in parks and often linger around railways stations. They are the unproductive, idle, culturally defunct bodies of the present day. It is useful to hold these bodies in mind when considering the waste products, and waste producers, of present time In the discourse of urban renewal, Footscray is depicted as a once thriving regional hub that has been ‘in decline’ since the 1980s. Decline here is code for the loss of industry and retail business alongside rising levels of poverty, cultural diversity, and public crime (predominantly drug related and property crime). A suburb in the grip of uneven gentrifying change, its dominant image of danger and diversity still sabotages its ‘lifestyle potential’. It remains a wasted space.The nexus of urban renewal and wasted space reveals a double obligation of renewal programs. The need to remove the waste, to ‘clean up’ the debris and decay of a bygone industrial and suburban era and to ‘clean out’ its progeny, the bodies borne of, and now further wasting, this wasted space. In this sense idle space as waste entails a bio-politics that produces particular bodies as a ‘waste of space’. Urban Dictionary defines waste of space thus: 1. A person devoid of any redeeming characteristics; 2. Someone who consumes valuable resources without contributing anything to society. A bum. A drain on the economy. 3. A person or occasionally an object which nobody is fond of. In fact, most people hate this person/thing and find it completely useless. 4. Completely useless people. 5. Waste of room, usually on computer hard drives, that could be used for better things. It is therefore worth considering the conceptual and historical trajectory of the link between waste and idleness as a prelude to considering in more detail some of the anxieties associated with the disorderly urban effects of idle bodies in wasted spaces. Waste as Improper UseAt its most elemental, waste is a judgment. Waste as profligate or excess consumption, or as leftover material, or as something that has deteriorated through neglect or lack of effort, is a moral reckoning. Judgments about waste signal a moral economy far more than they do a fiscal one. In his book On Garbage, John Scanlan notes that ‘waste’ in its old and middle English modes referred to a land or an environment that was unsuitable to human habitation. This reference was gradually replaced by the corresponding terms ‘wilderness’ or ‘desert’, thus marking the beginning of waste as reprimand. Bringing together modern and pre-modern language usage, Scanlan suggests that waste at its most general refers to an imbalance (22). Whether it is rubbish, junk, clutter or other extravagance excess, and squander, waste is too much, but also too little in the sense of ‘not making the best use of something’ (time, resources, opportunities). Pared right down waste refers to the proper use of something. Scanlan again: “‘waste’ carries force because of the way in which it symbolises an idea of improper use, and therefore operates within a more or less moral economy of the right, the good, the proper, their opposites and all values in between” (22 my emphasis). In the contemporary urban domain this might refer to the overuse of vast tracts of land exhausted or wrecked by industry, the abandonment or underutilisation of shops and commons, or the improper and uncivil use of the space that lingers. Scanlan traces this idea of waste as improper use back to the relation between self and natural space that inheres in seventeenth century English political philosophy. Referring to the work of John Locke in particular, waste is conceived as the original condition of the chaos of nature. For Locke selfhood became linked to freedom from this chaos and entailed the virtue, indeed the necessity, of human labour and intervention to ward off the potential ruin that nature may inflict. Locke outlines a philosophical and ethical basis for claims to property over land and natural resources such that “claims to property ownership rest on an idea of the proper use of land which entails the appropriation (through the use of one’s labour) of its previously unused potential” (Scanlan 24). Hence, “Land that is left wholly to nature, that hath no improvement of pasturage, tillage, or planting, is called, as indeed it is, waste; and we shall see the benefit of it amount to little more than nothing.” (Locke quoted in Scanlan 24). This Lockean understanding of waste has come to be associated with his theories of property rights, but, as Scanlan points out, it was also driven by the idea that any benefits derived from property were “dependent on a duty to a higher power” (26).Nature is construed as useless and chaotic (waste) in the absence of human intervention. Property and ‘land use’ were not just about use by humans, but use for humans in order to defend them against the unruliness of nature and the disorder and ruin it might issue. The danger of going to rack and ruin through the disorder of untamed waste is crucial to this understanding. To neglect nature through idleness or lack of intervention is to invite ruin. Idleness thus breeds waste. There is a link here between land and character, for doing nothing or not doing things properly corresponds with improper character. Scanlan advances that waste can best be understood here as an indeterminacy signaling the need for form and discipline. He notes that Montaigne in his essay On Idleness compares wasted land with the idle mind, which when undisciplined allows wildness of character and purpose. Reminiscent of schoolgirls at their table of idleness, the defunct bodies of urban life are seen to be without purpose or goal and to be wasteful of life itself. As a consequence they are deemed to be inviting havoc and all its destructive tendencies. This fear of the indeterminacy of waste, says Scanlan, portends the social and cultural links between “waste, imperfection, disorder and ruin” (25). While concepts of properness and proper use have multiple histories, it is not difficult to see how these seventeenth century Enlightenment associations of proper use and rights to property underpinned the period of new imperialism of the nineteenth century. We might say then that waste features prominently in the imperialist imaginary. Codes of properness, as in the proper use of things, are time and place specific, hence interrogating the meanings of ‘proper use’ entails a prior enquiry into the framing of time. It is linear time, that is, time as progress which frames imperial and colonial history. Progress is movement away from scarcity, disorder and deficiency towards enlightened reason, discipline and mastery. However, this notion of progress, which is central to ideologies of both Enlightenment and imperialism, is always dependent on a shadow other: backwardness. Anne McClintock emphasises a corresponding need to always travel backwards in time in order to apprehend the colonised spaces and people as existing in an eternally prior time, as obsolete historical subjects. According to McClintock, imperialist discourse relies on two principal tropes: panoptical time and anachronistic space. She explains that the eighteenth century historians and empiricists required “a visual paradigm […] to display evolutionary progress as a measurable spectacle.” Progress is fundamentally a visually driven process and narrative. Panoptical time is depicted as “the image of global history consumed—at a glance—in a single spectacle from the point of privileged invisibility” (37). Marginal groups are placed outside of history in the sense that they can be seen by the bourgeoisie, who itself remains unseen. In this spectacle of progress, history appears static and fixed, but this is countered through the invention of the trope of anachronistic space. This space denies the agency of the archaic subjects that exist outside and therefore threaten history as progress. McClintock explains: “the agency of women, the colonised and the industrial working class are disavowed and projected onto anachronistic space: prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity” (40). If imperial panoptical time produces inferior subjects who are “hemmed in” (Fanon 29) by anterior time and anachronistic space, contemporary urban renewal projects prompt questions about their time, the time of now. How might we conceptualise the time/space of now, and are these regulatory technologies of panoptical time and anachronistic space at work in the time/space of now? In what way is urban renewal a contemporary “measurable spectacle of progress” in an age of postindustrial neoliberalism?Urban Space, Proper Use and Idle BodiesIn a recent article on sexual politics and torture, Judith Butler argues that the ways in which debates of this nature are framed “are already imbued with the problem of time, of progress in particular, and in certain notions of what it means to unfold a future of freedom in time” (1). Butler reminds us that hegemonic conceptions of progress endure, and continue to define themselves over and against a pre-modern temporality produced for self-legitimation. This narrative of progressive modernity continues to spatialise time. For her it is the framing of modernity as sexual freedom that apprehends others as outmoded and stuck in anachronistic space. The time of now in the urban setting is the time of neoliberal modernity, a time that is also driven by spectacle. The vision of freedom through lifestyle consumption similarly identifies others who are outside this time and who threaten it. Neoliberalism as the ideology of a radically free market that institutes economic deregulation, tariff reduction, public financial support for business and its shareholders, and the reduced role of government in areas of welfare and social expenditure, the effects of which are discernable at the urban scale. For Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, “actually existing neoliberalism” is witnessed in what they call the “creative destruction” that inheres in the urbanisation of neoliberalism. In this materialisation of neoliberal time, modernity and progress continue to be driven visually. Thus this neoliberal/urban nexus depends on further sub-units of time, nominated by Brenner and Theodore as moments of (visual) “destruction and creation.” A series of examples of such creative destruction are offered by Brenner and Theodore and include the destruction of rights through the creation policing and social exclusion agendas. They argue that the mechanism of “re-regulating urban civility” entails moments of destroying notions of the liberal city in which all inhabitants are entitled to social services and political rights, and moments of creating zero tolerance policing, new forms of social surveillance and new policies to prevent social exclusion. The destructive moment of “re-representing the city” recasts the postwar image of the working class through visions of urban disorder, dangerous classes of people and of economic decline, involves the creative moment of entrepreneurial discourses about the need for revitalisation, renewal and reinvestment in urban areas (372). The ‘proper use’ of neoliberal urban space depends on the dynamic of destruction/creation through a new consumer-driven urban entrepreneurialism. Urban renewal as proper neoliberal usage is a re-ordering of space to make it fit for purpose. Proper use here follows the Lockean impulse of human intervention through planning, design and redevelopment, is now apprehended not as service to God, but capitulation to the dictates of the neoliberal agendas implemented by the combined forces of the state and capital. The moral economy of waste is at work in the moral economy of urban renewal, As Sharon Zukin elaborates: “the look and feel of cities reflect decisions about what and who should be visible and what should not, concepts of order and disorder, and on uses of aesthetic power” (7). At the crux of waste, and of urban renewal, is an anxiety about visibility, therefore the persistently visible presence of waste as idleness, has become an acute focus of contemporary urban governance and police ‘law and order’ campaigns. Modernity and progress must materialise as an urban aesthetic that is purposeful and vibrant, not idle and wasteful.The indeterminacy of waste thus becomes determined by its attribution as ‘garbage’ to be disposed of, banished, evicted, cast out. Waste converted to garbage is made into an object disconnected from the process of its production. Garbage is a noun rather than a verb, and as such, it conceals process. Creative destruction is again at play; waste is destroyed (as process) and garbage (as object) is produced. In the suburbs this conversion from process to object is narrated through the objectifying language of anti social behavior and incivility. I recently attended Maribyrnong council meeting (Maribyrnong being the local government authority for Footscray), where a discussion about cleaning up the central activity district quickly became a discussion about “those antisocial people.” This was not the terminology of council officers, but of a number of ratepayers. This anxiety about the image of the area is reflected also in the minutes of a further council meeting where differences between the stigmatised image of Footscray was compared with the changing images of other inner municipalities: “The visibility of these antisocial behaviours and the associated negative impact has significantly diminished in these [other] areas due to the gentrification of the inner-city, and the associated revitalisation of street activities. [Our municipality] is on the cusp of a similar transformation. In the meantime the social issues … continue to remain more visible” (71). These bodies are the garbage to be removed from the urban landscape so it might be made anew.The bodies at the imaginative centre of this cleansing impulse are those bodies that one might see as the waste products of neoliberalism. Loic Wacquant suggests that today’s urban policies focus on “making the dangerous and dirty classes invisible.” This, he argues is “leading to a cleansing of the urban environment and the streets from the physical and human detritus wrought by economic deregulation and welfare retrenchment” (198). Consequently, waste in urban renewal both conceals and reveals the shadow side of contemporary cultural politics. Public policy is increasingly concerned with the detritus, yet the failed and wasted bodies that litter the streets and stations, these bodies and their predicaments, as with other garbage objects, are steadfastly disconnected from the policies and processes that produced and continue to ‘breed’ them. The moral economy of urban renewal targets a cluster of wastes—idle bodies, wasted time, and improper uses of space—all fused in an endless reproduction of uselessness. This coalescence of wastes and wasters forms the spectacle of contemporary urban decay and failure. Neoliberal urban renewal begins to mimic Locke’s taming of nature, making it useful as a defense against ruin and disorder. The uncultivated bodies of urban waste are contemporary versions of Lockean wildness. Being of such poor character they have no right to occupy the property in which they idle. Through the panoptical time of neoliberalism they are cast as remarkable spectacles of failure, out of place in this time and space. They are wasting time, and are themselves a waste of space. References Brenner, Neil and Nik Theodore. “Cities and the Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism’.” Antipode 34.3 (July 2002): 349-79.Butler, Judith. “Sexual Politics, Torture and Secular Time.” The British Journal of Sociology 59.1 (2008): 1-23.Fanon, Frantz. Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin, 1963.Maribyrnong City Council. Ordinary Meeting Minutes, File no: HEA-60-014, 29 April. 2010.McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. London: Routledge, 1995.Scanlan, John. On Garbage. London: Reaktion, 2005.Wacquant, Loic. “Relocating Gentrification: The Working Class, Science and the State in Recent Urban Research.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32.1 (2008): 198-205.Zukin, Sharon. The Culture of Cities. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1995.

The concept of the “writer flâneur”, as developed by Walter Benjamin, sought to make sense of the seemingly chaotic nineteenth century city. While the flâneur provided a way for new urban structures to be ordered, it was also a transgressive act that involved engaging with urban spaces in new ways. In the contemporary city, where spaces are now heavily controlled and ordered, some members of the city’s socio-ecological community suffer as a result of idealistic notions of who and what belongs in the city, and how we must behave as urban citizens. Many of these ideals emerge from nineteenth century conceptions of the city in contrast to the country (Williams). However, a reimagining of the flâneur can allow for new transgressions of urban space and result in new literary imaginaries that capture the complexity of urban environments, question some of the more damaging processes and systems, offer new ways of connecting with the city, and propose alternative ways of living with the non-human in such places. With reference to the work of Debra Benita Shaw, Rob Shields and Donna Haraway, I will examine how the urban walking figure might be reimagined as cyborg, complicating boundaries between the real and imagined, the organic and inorganic, and between the human and non-human (Haraway Cyborgs). I will argue that the cyborg flâneur allows for new ways of writing and reading the urban and can work to reimagine the city as posthuman multispecies community. As one example of cyborg flânerie, I look to the app Story City to show how a writer can develop new environmental imaginaries in situ as an act of resistance against the anthropocentric ordering of the city. This article intends to begin a conversation about the ethical, political and epistemological potential of cyborg flânerie and leads to several questions which will require further research.Shaping the City: Environmental ImaginariesIn a sense, the flâneur is the product of a utopian imaginary of the city. According to Shields, Walter Benjamin used the flâneur as a literary device to make sense of the changing modern city of Paris: The flâneur is a hero who excels under the stress of coming to terms with a changing ‘social spatialisation’ of everyday social and economic relations which in the nineteenth century increasingly extended the world of the average person further and further to include rival mass tourism destinations linked by railroad, news of other European powers and distant colonies. This expanding spatialization took the form of economic realities such as changing labour markets and commodity prices and social encounters with strangers and foreigners which impinged on the life world of Europeans. (Fancy Footwork 67)Through his writing, these new spaces and inhabitants were made familiar again to those that lived there. In consequence, the flâneur was seen as a heroic figure who approached the city like a wilderness to be studied and tamed:Even to early 20th-century sociologists the flâneur was a heroic everyman—masculine, controlled and as in tune with his environment as James Fenimore Cooper’s Mohican braves were in their native forests. Anticipating the hardboiled hero of the detective novel, the flâneur pursued clues to the truth of the metropolis, attempting to think through its historical specificity, to inhabit it, even as the truth of empire and commodity capitalism was hidden from him. (Shields Flanerie 210)In this way, the flâneur was a stabilising force, categorising and therefore ordering the city. However, flânerie was also a transgressive act as the walker engaged in eccentric and idle wandering against the usual purposeful walking practices of the time (Coates). Drawing on this aspect, flânerie has increasingly been employed in the humanities and social sciences as a practice of resistance as Jamie Coates has shown. This makes the flâneur, albeit in a refigured form, a useful tool for transgressing strict socio-ecological conventions that affect the contemporary city.Marginalised groups are usually the most impacted by the strict control and ordering of contemporary urban spaces in response to utopian imaginaries of who and what belong. Marginalised people are discouraged and excluded from living in particular areas of the city through urban policy and commercial practices (Shaw 7). Likewise, certain non-human others, like birds, are allowed to inhabit our cities while those that don’t fit ideal urban imaginaries, like bats or snakes, are controlled, excluded or killed (Low). Defensive architecture, CCTV, and audio deterrents are often employed in cities to control public spaces. In London, the spiked corridor of a shop entrance designed to keep homeless people from sleeping there (Andreou; Borromeo) mirrors the spiked ledges that keep pigeons from resting on buildings (observed 2012/2014). On the Gold Coast youths are deterred from loitering in public spaces with classical music (observed 2013–17), while in Brisbane predatory bird calls are played near outdoor restaurants to discourage ibis from pestering customers (Hinchliffe and Begley). In contrast, bright lights, calming music and inviting scents are used to welcome orderly consumers into shopping centres while certain kinds of plants are cultivated in urban parks and gardens to attract acceptable wildlife like butterflies and lorikeets (Wilson; Low). These ways of managing public spaces are built on utopian conceptions of the city as a “civilising” force—a place of order, consumption and safety.As environmental concerns become more urgent, it is important to re-examine these conceptions of urban environments and the assemblage of environmental imaginaries that interact and continue to shape understandings of and attitudes towards human and non-human nature. The network of goods, people and natural entities that feed into and support the city mean that imaginaries shaped in urban areas influence both urban and surrounding peoples and ecologies (Braun). Local ecologies also become threatened as urban structures and processes continue to encompass more of the world’s populations and locales, often displacing and damaging entangled natural/cultural entities in the process. Furthermore, conceptions and attitudes shaped in the city often feed into global systems and as such can have far reaching implications for the way local ecologies are governed, built, and managed. There has already been much research, including work by Lawrence Buell and Ursula Heise, on the contribution that art and literature can make to the development of environmental imaginaries, whether intentional or unintentional, and resulting in both positive and negative associations with urban inhabitants (Yusoff and Gabrys; Buell; Heise). Imaginaries might be understood as social constructs through which we make sense of the world and through which we determine cultural and personal values, attitudes and beliefs. According to Neimanis et al., environmental imaginaries help us to make sense of the way physical environments shape “one’s sense of social belonging” as well as how we “formulate—and enact—our values and attitudes towards ‘nature’” (5). These environmental imaginaries underlie urban structures and work to determine which aspects of the city are valued, who is welcomed into the city, and who is excluded from participation in urban systems and processes. The development of new narrative imaginaries can question some of the underlying assumptions about who or what belongs in the city and how we might settle conflicts in ecologically diverse communities. The reimagined flâneur then might be employed to transgress traditional notions of belonging in the city and replace this with a sense of “becoming” in relation with the myriad of others inhabiting the city (Haraway The Trouble). Like the Benjaminian flâneur, the postmodern version enacts a similar transgressive walking practice. However, the postmodern flâneur serves to resist dominant narratives, with a “greater focus on the tactile and grounded qualities of walking” than the traditional flâneur—and, as opposed to the lone detached wanderer, postmodern flâneur engage in a network of social relationships and may even wander in groups (Coates 32). By employing the notion of the postmodern flâneur, writers might find ways to address problematic urban imaginaries and question dominant narratives about who should and should not inhabit the city. Building on this and in reference to Haraway (Cyborgs), the notion of a cyborg flâneur might take this resistance one step further, not only seeking to counter the dominant social narratives that control urban spaces but also resisting anthropocentric notions of the city. Where the traditional flâneur walked a pet tortoise on a leash, the cyborg flâneur walks with a companion species (Shields Fancy Footwork; Haraway Companion Species). The distinction is subtle. The traditional flâneur walks a pet, an object of display that showcases the eccentric status of the owner. The cyborg flâneur walks in mutual enjoyment with a companion (perhaps a domestic companion, perhaps not); their path negotiated together, tracked, and mapped via GPS. The two acts may at first appear the same, but the difference is in the relationship between the human, non-human, and the multi-modal spaces they occupy. As Coates argues, not everyone who walks is a flâneur and similarly, not everyone who engages in relational walking is a cyborg flâneur. Rather a cyborg flâneur enacts a deliberate practice of walking in relation with naturecultures to transgress boundaries between human and non-human, cultural and natural, and the virtual, material and imagined spaces that make up a place.The Posthuman City: Cyborgs, Hybrids, and EntanglementsIn developing new environmental imaginaries, posthuman conceptions of the city can be drawn upon to readdress urban space as complex, questioning utopian notions of the city particularly as they relate to the exclusion of certain others, and allowing for diverse socio-ecological communities. The posthuman city might be understood in opposition to anthropocentric notions where the non-human is seen as something separate to culture and in need of management and control within the human sphere of the city. Instead, the posthuman city is a complex entanglement of hybrid non-human, cultural and technological entities (Braun; Haraway Companion Species). The flâneur who experiences the city through a posthuman lens acknowledges the human as already embodied and embedded in the non-human world. Key to re-imagining the city is recognising the myriad ways in which non-human nature also acts upon us and influences decisions on how we live in cities (Schliephake 140). This constitutes a “becoming-with each other”, in Haraway’s terms, which recognises the interdependency of urban inhabitants (The Trouble 3). In re-considering the city as a negotiated process between nature and culture rather than a colonisation of nature by culture, the agency of non-humans to contribute to the construction of cities and indeed environmental imaginaries must be acknowledged. Living in the posthuman city requires us humans to engage with the city on multiple levels as we navigate the virtual, corporeal, and imagined spaces that make up the contemporary urban experience. The virtual city is made up of narratives projected through media productions such as tourism campaigns, informational plaques, site markers, and images on Google map locations, all of which privilege certain understandings of the city. Virtual narratives serve to define the city through a network of historical and spatially determined locales. Closely bound up with the virtual is the imagined city that draws on urban ideals, potential developments, mythical or alternative versions of particular cities as well as literary interpretations of cities. These narratives are overlaid on the places that we engage with in our everyday lived experiences. Embodied encounters with the city serve to reinforce or counteract certain virtual and imagined versions while imagined and virtual narratives enhance locales by placing current experience within a temporal narrative that extends into the past as well as the future. Walking the City: The Cyber/Cyborg FlâneurThe notion of the cyber flâneur emerged in the twenty-first century from the practices of idly surfing the Internet, which in many ways has become an extension of the cityscape. In the contemporary world where we exist in both physical and digital spaces, the cyber flâneur (and indeed its cousin the virtual flâneur) have been employed to make sense of new digital sites of connection, voyeurism, and consumption. Metaphors that evoke the city have often been used to describe the experience of the digital including “chat rooms”, “cyber space”, and “home pages” while new notions of digital tourism, the rise of online shopping, and meeting apps have become substitutes for engaging with the physical sites of cities such as shopping malls, pubs, and attractions. The flâneur and cyberflâneur have helped to make sense of the complexities and chaos of urban life so that it might become more palatable to the inhabitants, reducing anxieties about safety and disorder. However, as with the concept of the flâneur, implicit in the cyberflâneur is a reinforcement of traditional urban hierarchies and social structures. This categorising has also worked to solidify notions of who belongs and who does not. Therefore, as Debra Benita Shaw argues, the cyberflâneur is not able to represent the complexities of “how we inhabit and experience the hybrid spaces of contemporary cities” (3). Here, Shaw suggests that Haraway’s cyborg might be used to interrupt settled boundaries and to reimagine the urban walking figure. In both Shaw and Shields (Flanerie), the cyborg is invoked as a solution to the problematic figure of the flâneur. While Shaw presents these figures in opposition and proposes that the flâneur be laid to rest as the cyborg takes its place, I argue that the idea of the flâneur may still have some use, particularly when applied to new multi-modal narratives. As Shields demonstrates, the cyborg operates in the virtual space of simulation rather than at the material level (217). Instead of setting up an opposition between the cyborg and flâneur, these figures might be merged to bring the cyborg into being through the material practice of flânerie, while refiguring the flâneur as posthuman. The traditional flâneur sought to define space, but the cyborg flâneur might be seen to perform space in relation to an entangled natural/cultural community. By drawing on this notion of the cyborg, it becomes possible to circumvent some of the traditional associations with the urban walking figure and imagine a new kind of flâneur, one that walks the streets as an act to complicate rather than compartmentalise urban space. As we emerge into a post-truth world where facts and fictions blur, creative practitioners can find opportunities to forge new ways of knowing, and new ways of connecting with the city through the cyborg flâneur. The development of new literary imaginaries can reconstruct natural/cultural relationships and propose alternative ways of living in a posthuman and multispecies community. The rise of smart-phone apps like Story City provides cyborg flâneurs with the ability to create digital narratives overlaid on real places and has the potential to encourage real connections with urban environments. While these apps are by no means the only activity that a cyborg flâneur might participate in, they offer the writer a platform to engage audiences in a purposeful and transgressive practice of cyborg flânerie. Such narratives produced through cyborg flânerie would conflate virtual, corporeal, and imagined experiences of the city and allow for new environmental imaginaries to be created in situ. The “readers” of these narratives can also become cyborg flâneurs as the traditional urban wanderer is combined with the virtual and imagined space of the contemporary city. As opposed to wandering the virtual city online, readers are encouraged to physically walk the city and engage with the narrative in situ. For example, in one narrative, readers are directed to walk a trail along the Brisbane river or through the CBD to chase a sea monster (Wilkins and Diskett). The reader can choose different pre-set paths which influence the outcome of each story and embed the story in a physical location. In this way, the narrative is layered onto the real streets and spaces of the cityscape. As the reader is directed to walk particular routes through the city, the narratives which unfold are also partly constructed by the natural/cultural entities which make up those locales establishing a narrative practice which engages with the urban on a posthuman level. The murky water of the Brisbane River could easily conceal monsters. Occasional sightings of crocodiles (Hall), fish that leap from the water, and shadows cast by rippling waves as the City Cat moves across the surface impact the experience of the story (observed 2016–2017). Potential exists to capitalise on this narrative form and develop new environmental imaginaries that pay attention to the city as a posthuman place. For example, a narrative might direct the reader’s attention to the networks of water that hydrate people and animals, allow transportation, and remove wastes from the city. People may also be directed to explore their senses within place, be encouraged to participate in sensory gardens, or respond to features of the city in new ways. The cyborg flâneur might be employed in much the same way as the flâneur, to help the “reader” make sense of the posthuman city, where boundaries are shifted, and increasing rates of social and ecological change are transforming contemporary urban sites and structures. Shields asks whether the cyborg might also act as “a stabilising figure amidst the collapse of dualisms, polluted categories, transgressive hybrids, and unstable fluidity” (Flanerie 211). As opposed to the traditional flâneur however, this “stabilising” figure doesn’t sort urban inhabitants into discrete categories but maps the many relations between organisms and technologies, fictions and realities, and the human and non-human. The cyborg flâneur allows for other kinds of “reading” of the city to take place—including those by women, families, and non-Western inhabitants. As opposed to the nineteenth century reader-flâneur, those who read the city through the Story City app are also participants in the making of the story, co-constructing the narrative along with the author and locale. I would argue this participation is a key feature of the cyborg flâneur narrative along with the transience of the narratives which may alter and eventually expire as urban structures and environments change. Not all those who engage with these narratives will necessarily enact a posthuman understanding and not all writers of these narratives will do so as cyborg flâneurs. Nevertheless, platforms such as Story City provide writers with an opportunity to engage participants to question dominant narratives of the city and to reimagine themselves within a multispecies community. In addition, by bringing readers into contact with the human and non-human entities that make up the city, there is potential for real relationships to be established. Through new digital platforms such as apps, writers can develop new environmental imaginaries that question urban ideals including conceptions about who belongs in the city and who does not. The notion of the cyborg is a useful concept through which to reimagine the city as a negotiated process between nature and culture, and to reimagine the flâneur as performer who becomes part of the posthuman city as they walk the streets. This article provides one example of cyborg flânerie in smart-phone apps like Story City that allow writers to construct new urban imaginaries, bring the virtual and imagined city into the physical spaces of the urban environment, and can act to re-place the reader in diverse socio-ecological communities. The reader then becomes both product and constructer of urban space, a cyborg flâneur in the cyborg city. This conversation raises further questions about the cyborg flâneur, including: how might cyborg flânerie be enacted in other spaces (rural, virtual, more-than-human)? What other platforms and narrative forms might cyborg flâneurs use to share their posthuman narratives? How might cyborg flânerie operate in other cities, other cultures and when adopted by marginalised groups? In answering these questions, the potential and limitations of the cyborg flâneur might be refined. 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