As part of Australia’s commitments to net zero by 2050 and related sustainability goals, combating extinctions and biodiversity loss is a key aspiration. One of the most significant drivers of biodiversity loss in Australia is the presence and spread of invasive species. Sometimes intentionally introduced to the island continent of Australia as livestock, companion animals, or ill-fated biocontrol measures, and sometimes finding ways into new ecologies of their own volition, invasive species are the target of concentrated efforts to control. One significant species is the cat (Felis catus). Classified variously as feral, stray, or domestic, cats kill an estimated 2 billion native animals each year in Australia. As such, environmental practitioners are working to find solutions to minimise and mitigate the harms that cats present to native species and biodiversity. Many of these imagined solutions are technoscientific in nature.

This project will explore ethnographically what kinds of affordances are generated by emerging technologies for human-environment and multispecies relationships in the context of invasive and introduced species. Through several case studies investigating the nexus between conservation, multispecies relating and technology in feral cat control and urban domestic cat ownership, this project will ask in what ways are emerging technologies and imagined technological futures enabling and constraining in terms of human-environment relationships. Further, this research will explore how new forms of relationality are realized in everyday and quotidian contexts, in conservation and land management work, and human-environment relating in urban spaces. Finally, the research will interrogate how imagined, future, and emerging technologies for cat ownership and control articulate with sustainability goals. The research will address these overarching concerns in several different settings, including National Parks, conservation stations and pastoral leaseholds in Cape York Peninsula, far north Queensland, and in domestic and community spaces in Melbourne/Naarm, Victoria.

In the aftermath of the 2019/2020 bushfire season, increasing emphasis has been placed on the importance of communities’ understanding bushfire risk and the role of vegetation management in reducing that risk. This project aims to assist fire and land management agencies continued efforts to improve community safety by identifying, developing, and assessing the effectiveness of community engagement activities in relation to vegetation management. Phase 1 will scope current community engagement practices for vegetation management by agencies and Phase 2 will identify the community stakeholders’ engagement needs and preferences about vegetation management.

Vegetation management is a process undertaken to maintain community safety and protect the environment. However, vegetation management can be challenging, and it requires the involvement of different stakeholders to achieve success. There is a long history of agency-led community engagement for vegetation management in Victoria. However, as the impacts of climate change exacerbate the challenges faced to protect communities and ecosystem function, so too does the need to assess where, when, and how agencies engage with communities. This knowledge will provide the evidence-based foundation for integrated and collaborative cross-agency improvements.

For more on the project see the project website at Natural Hazards Research Australia.

The Indigenous Australian medicines project is an Australian Research Council funded project which explores how Australian regulatory systems can better support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Traditional Knowledge (TK) holders to commercialise their traditional medicine. The project focuses on the case study of the mudjala plant and aims to work with the Kimberley’s Nyikina people to generate new anthropological methods for documenting TK related to traditional medicine, new models for regulating traditional medicinal products, and pharmacological insights into traditional methods of activating the plant. In addition, the expected outcomes include unlocking the significant, untapped potential for Indigenous Australians to benefit from the development of traditional medicine products regulated by the Therapeutic Goods Administration.

This project brings together lawyers, anthropologists and biochemists from the Australian National University, the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, and Griffith University with partner organisations Kimberley Land Council (KLC), and Walalakoo Aboriginal Corporation (WAC), and Indigenous Research Collaborators from the Nyikina Mangala community. The research is also guided by an Indigenous Advisory Group comprising of Mr John Watson, Ms Annie Milgin, Mr Anthony Watson, Mr Gerry Turpin, Mr Luke Williams, and a KLC representative.

For more information see the project website here.

This thesis is an anthropological study of people involved in land management in Cape York Peninsula, Australia. It investigates how this diversity of people come to belong in meaningful ways, examining the multi-layered and intercultural situations in which people form, maintain and transform relationships in changing environments. Contemporary Cape York is a site of complex land-tenure arrangements, political struggles and environmental change. Based on 14 months of field research with settler-descended graziers, Aboriginal traditional owners and Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service rangers the thesis investigates how these diverse groups of people articulate, value and experience their social, cultural and practical connections to land. By attending to non-Indigenous people and Aboriginal traditional owners, the analysis grapples with the friction of intercultural engagement in the region. A key argument is that social and cultural differences between groups of people are not fixed or stable. Instead, through various kinds of interactions, social differentiation and cultural norms and practices are re-worked, making an indeterminate space of intercultural encounter that can result in both new forms of difference and inequality, and, importantly, partially shared environmental knowledges, practices and ways of relating to land. Developing the analytical concepts of intercultural mediation and friction, this thesis thus examines how forms of belonging and difference are enacted, experienced and transformed relationally. It contends that relationships to land and forms of belonging are mediated by property rights, manual labour, conservation initiatives, bureaucratic interventions, cattle, fire, seasonality, climate change and invasive species. In the interactions and contingent collaborations among people as well as between people and more-than-human forces, meaningful relationships to land are continually co-produced and reworked. This ethnographic study contributes to a growing body of scholarly work in anthropology and related disciplines that attend to the details of intercultural and multispecies relationships, and to questions of human and non-human belonging in settler-colonial states.

This thesis forms the basis for my forthcoming book, Making Do: Conservation Ethics and Ecological Care in Australia, which is under contract with Stanford University Press.