Fitting into Country: Ecology and Economics in Indigenous Australia

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Notes

¹Jesse is a member of the Karangpuru people whose homeland is around the junction of the Victoria and Wickham rivers in the Northern Territory of Australia.

²Among Australian indigenous peoples, the Dreaming is creation and continuity. The Dreaming ancestors are the creation beings who continue to be alive “in country” today and whose life-giving actions shape and organize the living world.

³This walk was made in Victoria River country, northern Australia, in the years 1980–1995.

⁴Simon Schama Landscape and Memory (New York: Fontana Press, 1995), p. 10.

⁵Erazim Kohak, “Varieties of Ecological Experience,” in R. Cohen and A. Tauber (eds.), Philosophies of Nature: the Human Dimension (London: Kluwer, 1998), p. 267.

⁶Barramundi is an Australian freshwater fish.

⁷For our non-metric readers, 45° C equals 115° F.

⁸Bateson called such fit the patterns that connect. What holds fit in place is the flow of benefits, as Life comes forth and lives in country: Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Toronto: Bantam, 1979).

⁹On the cultural construction of survival as a scarce resource, see: Zygmunt Bauman, “The Holocaust's Life as a Ghost,” in F. Decoste and B. Schwartz (eds.), The Ghost of the Holocaust: Writings on Art, Politics, Law and Education (Winnipeg: University of Alberta Press, 2000).

¹⁰Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters (Melbourne: Reed Books, 1994), p. 84.

¹¹The contrast between “complementarity versus competition” is part of a wider debate about the evolution of life, often one with strongly gendered overtones. Lynn Margulis, for example, argues that much of life on Earth has come about through symbiosis rather than elimination; yet, the idea that new species arise from symbiotic mergers among members of old ones “is still not even discussed in polite scientific society.” See Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet (New York: Basic Books, 1998), p. 6.