Clare Archer-Lean

It is this idea that is relentlessly battered by international capital, as we are asked to forgo belonging, and to accept that any place is the same as any other, that apart from purely functional aspects, the land has no personality, no infusion of spirit. Big stories are failing us as a nation and will probably not save our natural environment (i.e. us) from the greed and stupidity and indifference that assail it. (Lucashenko, "Not Quite" n.p.)

This paper responds to Indigenous futures' intersection with reading and reception practices. Indigenous futurisms have always been storied and cultural. We contribute to existing research by considering Grace Dillon's Indigenous Futurisms paradigm in conversation Mary Graham's relationality, bringing both in proximity to literary form and reception. 'Indigenous relationality' as proposed by Mary Graham, Elder Scholar of the Kombumerri clan of the Yugambeh Nation (2014) is a core principle in moving from an excavating close reading of Indigenous cultural texts. We interrogate sometraces of coloniality in reception of Indigenous cultural artefacts, practices that fail to recognize the energizing realities of Indigenous futurism as fundamentally relational. Finally, we offer some emergent modes of reading practice, with a particular focus on Lystra Rose's young adult speculative novel Upwelling (2022). We reflect on the place of Country and generative reading in literary and cultural studies and critical Indigenous studies.

This paper outlines the emergent findings and theoretical foundations of Reading Climate: Indigenous literatures, English and Sustainable Futures, cross disciplinary research in Indigenous Studies, Education, and Literary Studies. Our team investigates epistemologies for the teaching of secondary subject English and tertiary courses and how they might be productively reworked. We draw on ‘Indigenous relationality’ as proposed by Mary Graham, Elder Scholar of the Kombumerri clan of the Yugambeh Nation as a core principle in shifting English pedagogy from text-focused close reading. We investigate how a move from exclusively close-reading approaches is important because of the ways in which such a scholarly practice is premised on both potentially canonical and thus Eurocentric intertexts, and the abstraction of the text from cultural and authorial sovereignty. Further, close reading limits the use of textual artefacts, and the knowledge contained within them, to literary concerns of structure, features, devices, effects, and audiences. Here we show how reader relationality involves the reader's reflective stance, the writing's contexts, the guidance of the writer, and the function of the reading process. This paper contributes to and extends approaches to English arguing that inclusion of Indigenous writing in curriculum includes but must go beyond text selection and adoption.

This paper shares findings from a 2022 pilot project called ‘Reading Climate'. Indigenous speculative and climate fiction was centred to contribute to existing research on anti-colonial approaches to secondary school subject English in Australia. The broader project (continuing through 2024–2026) is a collaboration between Indigenous and white settler researchers based at universities across two Eastern Australian states. The core research questions of the pilot study were: How do English teachers engage with Indigenous ways of knowing and understanding Country? How do English teachers engage with Indigenous fiction in the content of climate education? What, if any, factors prevent teachers from engaging with Indigenous fiction, particularly speculative and climate fiction? Findings from the book clubs show significant diversity in terms of teachers’ pedagogical confidence with and knowledge of Indigenous climate fiction and highlight the ways in which a lack of confidence can both perpetuate the colonial project of school English and limit the interdisciplinary potential of literary study. Further, findings from the book clubs offer insights into the kinds of approaches to teacher professional learning that might support anti-colonial, climate-aware approaches to school English.

This essay reports the findings of a survey of almost 300 respondents from every Australian State and the ACT1, all of whom had graduated in the past two decades with a graduate or postgraduate qualification in English Literature. We asked participants to reflect on their experience as tertiary students: what had studying English meant to them at the time? How has studying English affected their working and their personal lives post-graduation? The data collected counters neoliberalist myths about the lack of value in humanities education. Using a mix of quantitative and thematic analysis of the survey data, we argue for lifelong benefits for students graduating with a major in English.

Australian teenagers have grown up with abundant choices in digital screen entertainment including social media, gaming, and global streaming video services such as Netflix. This participatory audience study investigates how, why and to what extent Australian teenagers engage with drama and movies in their daily lives, including Australian stories. The research findings show that Australian teens enjoy watching long-form screen stories on their favourite streaming services and that on-demand delivery is critical to their viewing preferences. Although many remember with affection the Australian drama they watched as children, teens now place a low priority on a screen story being Australian. A sophisticated audience that particularly values diverse and inclusive representation, teens’ deprioritising of Australian content – and linear television – has profound implications for policy, for Australian screen production and for public service broadcasters the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Special Broadcasting Service.

This article examines how rising concern for animal welfare in Australia is manifested in increased media coverage of these topics, including growing coverage of animal sentience, rights, and welfare. In Australia, canine existence is often determined by their positioning within cultural frames. Dogs have been integral to Aboriginal social, family, and environmental relationships for generations; however, colonisation brought fundamental changes to these established relationships, with ramifications that have prompted welfare concerns about camp dog populations. The goal of this article is to review existing research discourses and epistemological positioning of the supposed camp dog problem. We are not assessing individual programmes or reporting on fieldwork conducted with communities. Instead, this initial paper reviews some of the current literature to identify ways forward in facilitating Aboriginal self-determining of camp dog interactions in communities.

This paper presents new scholarship on the complex figuration of the animal in Australian fiction through the significantly under-analysed Mateship with Birds (2012). Carrie Tiffany’s acclaimed second novel explores the hidden loves and traumas of post-war regional Australia in explicitly cross-species terms. Contemporary reviewers lauded the novel’s celebration of an authentic Australian farming life. Its animal representation, however, is not simply realism. Rather, it is a complex interrogation of animal as metaphor in human lives, and the consequences of that figurative displacement for both human and nonhuman material existence. I read the novel specifically through Carol J Adams’ the ‘absent referent’ alongside notions of an aesthetics of care, as envisioned by Josephine Donovan, to probe the limits and affordances of mutual and agentic interspecies engagements on the farm. Tiffany evokes a reverence for quotidian animal life and human lives: human lives are animalian. In evoking and exposing the place of animal figuration in the lives of people working, and living closely, with material, nonhuman animals, however, Tiffany intricately interrogates the ways in which, as Adams says, discourses of animality, sexuality, gender, and violence intersect, particularly in a 1950s Australian masculinist, pastoral economy.

Islands provide the opportunity to explore management regimes and research issues related to the isolation, uniqueness, and integrity of ecological systems. K’gari (Fraser Island) is an Australian World Heritage property listed based on its outstanding natural value, specifically, the unique wilderness characteristics and the diversity of ecosystem types. Our goal was to draw on an understanding of the natural and cultural environment of K’gari as a foundation on which to build a management model that includes First Nations Peoples in future management and research. Our research involved an analysis of papers in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, original reports, letters, and other manuscripts now housed in the K’gari Fraser Island Research Archive. The objectives of the research were: (1) to review key historical events that form the cultural, social, and environmental narrative; (2) review the major natural features of the island and threats; (3) identify the gaps in research; (4) analyse the management and conservation challenges associated with tourism, biosecurity threats, vegetation management practices, and climate change and discuss whether the requirements for sustaining island ecological integrity can be met in the future; and (5) identify commonalities and general management principles that may apply globally to other island systems and other World Heritage sites listed on the basis of their unique natural and cultural features. We found that the characteristics that contribute to island uniqueness are also constraints for research funding and publication; however, they are important themes that warrant more investment. Our review suggests that K’gari is a contested space between tourist visitation and associated environmental impacts, with an island that has rich First Nations history, extraordinary ecological diversity, and breathtaking aesthetic beauty. This juxtaposition is reflected in disparate views of custodianship and use, and the management strategies are needed to achieve multiple objectives in an environmentally sustainable way whilst creating cultural equity in modern times. We offer a foundation on which to build a co-management model that includes First Nations Peoples in governance, management, research, and monitoring.

The 2017 marriage equality referendum was conservative in reach-refuting the entrenched marginalisation of queer existence, a challenge to conflations of happiness (in fact, the ultimate "happily ever after"-marriage) and heteronormativity. The marriage equality debate was an ugly realisation of those discourses of exclusion and prejudice implicated in many Western values, and in Australian national identity broadly. In thinking through these issues, I return to Christos Tsiolkas's novel Loaded (1995) for its queering of "happily ever after" myths via film referents. Ari's paradoxical relationship to romantic tenderness is evident in his frequent first-person allusions to various films. A close reading of Loaded and the film's allusions expose both the operation of exclusion and an individual's response to that exclusion prior to marriage equality. Loaded invites reflection on these complexities in a call for the universal right to romantic happiness through its deployment of filmic tropes.