What do you need to know to prosper as a people for at least 65,000 years? The First Knowledges series provides a deeper understanding of the expertise and ingenuity of Indigenous Australians. Plants are the foundation of life on Earth. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have always known this to be true. For millennia, reciprocal relationships with plants have provided both sustenance to Indigenous communities and many of the materials needed to produce a complex array of techn...

How are we to think about nature and the environment?The idea of nature as it relates to culture, society and humans has always been in constant flux and highly contested.Lesley Head interrogates the ways the cultures of nature have operated in Australia across time, and how these ways of thinking and being limit our capacity to deal with the challenges of the climate change and biodiversity crises. Drawing on her life’s work and lessons she has picked up along the way, Hea...

Cultural landscapes are usually understood within physical geography as those transformed by human action. As human influence on the earth increases, advances in palaeocological reconstruction have also allowed for new interpretations of the evidence for the earliest human impacts on the environment. It is essential that such evidence is examined in the context of modern trends in social sciences and humanities. This stimulating new book argues that convergence of the two approaches can pr...

Cultural geography has a long and proud tradition of research into human–plant relations. However, until recently, that tradition has been somewhat disconnected from conceptual advances in the social sciences, even those to which cultural geographers have made significant contributions. With a number of important exceptions, plant studies have been less explicitly part of more-than-human geographies than have animal studies. This book aims to redress this gap, recognising plants and their ...

Plants are fundamental players in human lives, underpinning our food supply and contributing to the air we breathe, but they are easy to take for granted and have received insufficient attention in the social sciences. This book advances understanding of human-plant relations using the example of wheat. Theoretically, this book develops new insights by bringing together human geography, biogeography and archaeology to provide a long term perspective on human-wheat relations. Although the r...

The Anthropocene is a volatile and potentially catastrophic age demanding new ways of thinking about relations between humans and the nonhuman world. This book explores how responses to environmental challenges are hampered by a grief for a pristine and certain past, rather than considering the scale of the necessary socioeconomic change for a 'future' world. Conceptualisations of human-nature relations must recognise both human power and its embeddedness within material relations. Hope is...

How are different concepts of nature and time embedded into human practices of landscape and environmental management? And how can temporalities that entwine past, present and future help us deal with challenges on the ground? In a time of uncertainty and climate change, how much can we hold onto ideals of nature rooted in a pristine and stable past? The Scandinavian and Australian perspectives in this book throw fresh light on these questions and explore new possibilities and challenges i...

Our Laws are forever present and provide the pathways for all Australians to truly learn how to belong to this continent.' - June Oscar 'No other current work has been able to so comprehensively explain the significance of traditional law in all its manifestations.' - Henry Reynolds Law is culture, and culture is law. Given by the ancestors and cultivated over millennia, Indigenous law defines what it is to be human. Complex and evolving, law holds the keys to resilient, caring communities...

What do you need to know to prosper for 65,000 years or more? The First Knowledges series provides a deeper understanding of the expertise and ingenuity of Indigenous Australians. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are the oldest scientists in human history. Many First Peoples regard the land as a reflection of the sky and the sky a reflection of the land. Sophisticated astronomical expertise embedded within the Dreaming and Songlines is interwoven into a deep understanding of ch...

What do you need to know to prosper as a people for at least 65,000 years? The First Knowledges series provides a deeper understanding of the expertise and ingenuity of Indigenous Australians. For millennia, Indigenous Australians harvested this continent in ways that can offer contemporary environmental and economic solutions. Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe demonstrate how Aboriginal people cultivated the land through manipulation of water flows, vegetation and firestick practice. Not sole...

Aboriginal design is of a distinctly cultural nature, based in the Dreaming and in ancient practices grounded in Country. It is visible in the aerodynamic boomerang, the ingenious design of fish traps and the precise layouts of community settlements that strengthen social cohesion. Alison Page and Paul Memmott show how these design principles of sophisticated function, sustainability and storytelling, refined over many millennia, are now being applied to contemporary practices. Design: Bui...

Let this series begin the discussion.' - Bruce Pascoe 'An act of intellectual reconciliation.' - Lynette Russell Songlines are an archive for powerful knowledges that ensured Australia's many Indigenous cultures flourished for over 60,000 years. Much more than a navigational path in the cartographic sense, these vast and robust stores of information are encoded through song, story, dance, art and ceremony, rather than simply recorded in writing. Weaving deeply personal storytelling with ex...