Lexington Books
Pages: 268
•
Trim: 6 x 9
978-1-4985-9994-8 • Hardback • October 2019 • $111.00 • (£85.00)
978-1-4985-9995-5 • eBook • October 2019 • $105.00 • (£81.00)
John Charles Ryan is postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New England, Australia, and honorary research fellow in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Australia. He is the author of Plants in Contemporary Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination.
Li Chen is researcher and writer for environmental conservation and community development NGOs in Perth, and has published in the journals Heritage and The Conversation.
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Credits
Pt IAustralian Wetland Cultures
The Swamp Nandi Chinna
Racecourse Lagoon, Uralla, New South Wales John C. Ryan
Ch 1 Introduction to Australian Wetland Humanities: Thinking About (and With) Swamps
John Charles Ryan and Li Chen
Ch 2 Rainbow Serpent Anthropology, or Rainbow Spirit Theology, or Swamp Serpent Sacrality and Marsh Monster Maternity?
Rod Giblett
Ch 3 Artist and Swamp: Wetlands in Australian Painting and Photography
Rod Giblett
Ch 4 Poet and Swamp: Wetlands in Australian Verse
John Charles Ryan
Ch 5Plant and Swamp: The Biocultural Histories of Five Australian Hydrophytes
John Charles Ryan
Pt IIWestern Australian Wetland Cultures
Beeliar Nandi Chinna
Three Wetland Poems by John Kinsella, Dedicated to J.P. Quinton
Poem for the Gathering
The Trees Along Bibra Lake
Resisting from Within the Green Tent at Bibra Drive, Beeliar (For James)
Ch 6 Environmental Activism and Wetlands Conservation in Western Australia
Philip Jennings
Ch 7 Where Fanny Balbuk Walked: Reenvisioning Perth’s Wetlands
John Charles Ryan, Danielle Brady, and Christopher Kueh
Ch 8 The Cultural Significance of Wetlands: Perth’s Lost Swamps to the Beeliar Wetlands
Danielle Brady and Jeffrey Murray
Ch 9 Swamp-philia and Paludal Heroism: The Passion of Wetland Conservationists in Australia and Elsewhere
John Charles Ryan and Li Chen
Power of Deluge Glen Phillips
Ch 10 Epilogue: Twenty-Five Years of Wetland Studies in the Humanities
Rod Giblett
About the Contributors
A wonderfully engrossing book, elegantly championing the pivotal role of wetlands in Australian cultural life. The chapters within this book are as serpentine and mesmerising as the waterscapes they interrogate. The book draws the reader into considerations of why we often experience cognitive dissonance in these landscapes, to explore how wetlands as ‘othering’ spaces is embedded within interconnected artistic, semantic and physical practices. Australian Wetland Cultures provides us with a timely reminder that these paludal environments are a palimpsest of our ever shifting human drive to mould and mark landscapes. Our cultural perceptions shape our relationship with space, and the authors prove this is nowhere more true than within wetlands; places for the dead, the living and the more-than-human. I encourage readers to immerse themselves within this wonderful text, with an eye to appraising wetlands with a renewed vigour henceforth.
— Mary Gearey, University of Brighton