In Writing Belonging at the Millennium, Emily Potter critically considers the long-standing settler-colonial pursuit of belonging manifested through an obsession with firm and stable ground. This pursuit continues across the field of the postcolonial nation today; the recognition of colonization’s destructive impacts on humans and environments troublingly generates a renewed desire to secure non-indigenous belonging. Focusing on the crucial role that Australia’s contemporary liter...

Film Figures develops a figural account of the memory structure of films.Employing theoretical concepts drawn from a range of sources, including French post-humanist philosophy and German Idealism, the book undertakes an organology of film guided by the work of Bernard Stiegler whose philosophy of mnemotechnesis provides the framework of analysis. Situating films in the quantum field of spacetime relativity as a field of cosmic views, inquiry into...

Melbourne, founded in 1835 among marshes and beside a sluggish stream, grew from wetlands into a world-class modern city. Drawing on a wide range of historical, literary and artistic sources, this book explores the cultural and environmental history of the city and its site. Tracing the city from its swampy beginnings in a squatter’s settlement nestled in the marshy delta of the Yarra and Maribyrnong Rivers, Rod Giblett illuminates Melbourne through its visible structures and the invisible...

With Nature provides new ways to think about our relationship with nature in today’s technologically mediated culture. Warwick Mules makes original connections with German critical philosophy and French poststructuralism in order to examine the effects of technology on our interactions with the natural world. In so doing, the author proposes a new way of thinking about the eco-self in terms of a careful sharing of the world with both human and non-human beings. With Nature

Tracing the life of the plants and animals of Forrestdale Lake through the six seasons of the local indigenous people, the first part of Black Swan Lake presents a wetlands calendar over a yearly cycle of the rising, falling and drying waters of this internationally important wetland in south-western Australia. The second part of this book considers issues and explores themes from the first part, including a cultural history of the seasons and the black swan. Black Swan Lake

Artist and writer Stephanie Radok possesses a unique international perspective. For over twenty years she has written about and witnessed the emergence of contemporary Aboriginal art and the responses of Australian art to global diasporas. In "An Opening: Twelve love stories about art", Stephanie Radok takes us on a walk with her dog and finds that it is possible to re-imagine the suburb as the site of epiphanies and attachments. "Art wants to enter our lives, yet it is a rare art writer who ...

A collection of beautiful and moving essays on the wonder of the natural world and the cultural complexities of writing landscape in AustraliaWords are Eagles collects in one place the essays of award-winning novelist and nature writer, Gregory Day. Grounded in the landscape of southwestern Victoria, and infused with the heightened sense of place and environmental literacy that have long been key to Day's work, these essays traverse landscape, language and...

The concept of law lies at the heart of our social and political life. Legal philosophy, or jurisprudence, explores the notion of law and its role in society, illuminating its meaning and its relation to the universal questions of justice, rights, and morality. In this Very Short Introduction Raymond Wacks analyses the nature and purpose of the legal system, and the practice by courts, lawyers, and judges. Wacks reveals the intriguing and challenging nature of legal philosophy wit...

"A gripping guide to the modern taming of the infinite."—The New York Times. With a new introduction by Neal Stephenson.Is infinity a valid mathematical property or a meaningless abstraction? David Foster Wallace brings his intellectual ambition and characteristic bravura style to the story of how mathematicians have struggled to understand the infinite, from the ancient Greeks to the nineteenth-century mathematical genius Georg Cantor's counterintuitive discovery that the...

"Probing, jargon-free and written with the pace of a detective story... [Procter] dissects western museum culture with such forensic fury that it might be difficult for the reader ever to view those institutions in the same way again. " Financial Times'A smart, accessible and brilliantly structured work that encourages readers to go beyond the grand architecture of cultural institutions and see the problematic colonial histories behind them.' - Sumaya KassimShoul...

This volume of essays explores the scope for a further extension of ecocriticism across the environmental humanities. Contributors, who include both established academics and early career researchers in the humanities, were given free rein to interpret the brief. The collection is unusual in that it considers collaboration between individuals both in the same discipline and across creative disciplines. Subjects include familiar environments close to home and those such as Iceland and Antar...

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...