Tag: environment

Emplacement

SoutherlyBlog

by Jessica White ‘One can never fault a Brisbane winter,’ I smugly tell my friends in the south. The air is mild, the light golden, and one only needs a jumper in the evenings. Come summer, though, it’s a different story. I’m far from smug when I’m lying on the couch before a fan blowing hot air into my face. I’ve never lived in a home with air-conditioning and neither do I want to; I resent the sense of being boxed in. On oppressive days I usually go to public places such as a pub or the State Library, but…

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The architecture of grass

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by Tom Lee In Bill Gammage’s remarkable book on the land care practices of the first Australians, The Biggest Estate on Earth,‘grass’ is among the most frequently indexed words. It’s up there with ‘Europeans’, ‘animals’, and ‘forest’. In the ‘grass’ entry in the index the reader is told to see also “clearings; fire; grass names; plains”, and the subcategories include: introduced, native, beside water, corridors (see also belts, paths), and on good soil. The word’s semantic reach includes more than half the book. Why is this word so central to Gammage’s thesis? Because the first Australians were experts at caring…

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Invincible Summer

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by Rebecca Giggs Ah, better the thud of the deadly gun, and the crash of the bursting shell, Than the terrible silence where drought is fought out there in the western hell; And better the rattle of rifles near, or the thunder on deck at sea, Than the sound — most hellish of all to hear — of a fire where it should not be. — Henry Lawson, The Bush Fire (1906). On Tuesday fires on the north-western edge of Sydney festooned the city with strange atmosphere. Smoke, covert as a cat, let itself into the house. I rushed downstairs…

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‘Progress’: ethics, awards and the environment

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Ali Alizadeh My last post took aim at a rather obvious ideological edifice, the new literary patriotism in Australia and its mostly transparent role in the generation of cultural and literary surplus-value for publishers, cultural organisations and affiliated individuals. But this phenomenon is a rather rare instance of an openly conservative, proudly old-fashioned bourgeois ideology at the service of the ruling classes–patriotism has been the last refuge of a scoundrel, as Samuel Johnson would have it, for well over two hundred years. Today’s capitalist superstructure is often far more innovative and deceptive. It is an ideology that bears the aura…

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