They far exceed the conceits of today's dominant white settler narratives of “improvement” and “protection.” As in all other parts of Australia, this valley has been made and remade by many actors, human and nonhuman, not just those featured in the heroic white male settler histories of the last 200 years.ĭespite white settler projections of untamed land/wild nature tropes onto the country (and upon which both “improvement” and “protection” narratives are predicated) there is growing recognition that prior to British colonisation, it was the sophisticated land management practices of Indigenous people, such as controlled seasonal burning, that ensured that much of the Australian landscape appeared more akin to a carefully cultivated and manicured “estate” than an unpeopled wilderness. Its legacies are ancient, multiple, complex and ongoing. This valley is not just a pastoral-conservationist assemblage.
A sparrow catches her eye and she wonders what to make of the mess of inheritance. She unpacks the car, careful not to tread in the piles of wombat poo. As she enters her house she's greeted by the kookaburra and magpies who frequent her verandah. At her place she lets the dogs out of the car and they rush off to harass the water dragons along the creek. Her exhaust gases mix with a soft breeze carrying smells of gums and manure. She is on her way to her home in the conservation reserve at the end of the valley. She drives down the valley past the paddocks and fences, sheep and cattle, past the 1080 poison signs warning of baiting for dingoes and wild dogs, and the kangaroo and wombat road kill. The interludes are inspired by Kathleen Stewart's performative technique of taking everyday incidents from our own lives and relating them in the third person ‘she.’ 4 We hope this tension between the ‘we’ of the musings, and the ‘she’ of the interludes, opens an intimate space of affective engagement for the reader.
It is in this place that we are implicated in the intractable realities of human and more than human settler colonial relations that are played out on a daily basis. More specifically, through a series of interludes and musings, we think and write from a small rural valley community in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. We are thinking and writing from the Antipodes, from the messy legacies of Australian settler colonialism that we have inherited. 3 In this article, we pick up on some recent feminist debates within the environmental humanities to think about the question of inheritance through the paradoxical figure of the Anthropocene. Beyond this, it also matters what semiotic/material nodes or figures we think through, 1 where we think from 2 and whom we think with.
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