Full Description
Australia is gaining a reputation as the proverbial canary in the coal mine of global environmental change. The driest inhabited continent on earth, Australia is now exposed to rising planetary temperatures and an increase in disastrous events such as massive bushfires, floods and warming oceans. At the same time, urban development, extractive agriculture and mining, are eroding Australia's distinctive natural habitats, driving its mammal extinctions to the highest rates in the world.
This edited collection features writers from various fields in visual culture, history and ecocritical theory who give timely accounts of how Australian visual media represents, interprets, predicts, or obscures such environmental events in relation to the Anthropocene. The chapters focus on the visualisation of Australian ecology across a range of media including ancient rock art, television and film, photography, visual art, digital maps, and AI.
By bringing Australian critical perspectives to the challenges of the Anthropocene, this book offers a new environmental approach to Australian culture in the context of the global issues of climate change, extinction, and colonialism.
Contents
1. Visualising the Anthropocene in Australia SECTION I: ENVISIONING COUNTRY 2. First Peoples' Visual Culture, Country, and the Anthropocene. Visualising Deep Time: Australian Rock Art, Television and Climate Change 4. Film and Television in the New Age of Fire SECTION II: COLONIAL IMAGERY 5. Presentism and Anthropocenic Unawareness in Early Western Australian Settler Art: The Case of Thomas Turner 6. True History of the Kelly Gang: Shame and Regret- Nostalgia and Anthropocene Aesthetics 7. An Ecological Aesthetic: Kant after Tillers in the Enlightenment to Come SECTION III: WITNESSING EXTINCTION 8. Extinction Imaginaries in Australian Art 9. Animals and the Anthropocene: Saltwater Crocodiles, Malcom Douglas and Australian Television 10. Life's too short: imagining oceans past, rejecting tuna futures 11. Street Art and Extinction in Cities: intersections between extinction art and shadow places SECTION IV: REFRAMING THE LAND 12. Australian Photography in the Anthropocene 13. Revisioning Regional Australia 14. Attention is All You Want: Machinic Gaze and the Anthropocene 15. Australian Exhibitions and Museums responding to the Anthropocene
