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'This volume is dedicated to Deborah Bird Rose (1946—2018) who is deeply missed by many in the extended cultural studies community. Her unforgettable creativity, initially as an anthropologist working with the Yarralin people the Victoria River District, produced Dingo Makes Us Human (1992). In Reports from a Wild Country (2004), Deb took an Indigenous-inspired philosophical turn to consider what decolonisation might look like if it were attentive to Yarralin ontologies. Then, in Wild Dog Dreaming (2011) she turned to fully-consider relations with the more-than-human in a time of extinction. More than explicating or exploring the persistence and power of Indigenous cultures, Deb invited readers to learn from those who have triumphed despite invasion and colonisation. The power of her work makes her reader feel country and be inspired to move our feet differently across land as a ‘nourishing terrain’. Her capacity to evoke and hold out for kinship between human and non-human animals was vital and inspiring. So, it seems fitting that this volume is titled ‘Extinction’ given Deb contributed so much to alerting us to the multiple orders of extinction, be it the silencing of country when its stories were lost or the vulnerabilities of flying foxes. Her blog featured these simple words against a photographic image of a sunset over what looks like desert country:
‘Deborah Bird Rose
Love at the Edge of Extinction’
(Katrina Schlunke, Chris Healy Extinction)
Notes
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Dedication: This volume is dedicated to the memory of Deborah Bird Rose.
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Only literary material within AustLit's scope individually indexed. Other material in this issue includes:
Allyson Green : Exceeding the Limits of Reconciliation: ‘Decolonial Aesthetic Activism’ in the Artwork of Canadian Artist Meryl McMaster
Hugo Reinert : Requiem for a Junk-Bird: Violence, Purity and the Wild
Thom van Dooren: Moving Birds in Hawai'i: Assisted Colonisation in a Colonised Land : Assisted colonisation in a colonised land
Anna-Katharina Laboissière : Collect, Save, Adapt: Making and Unmaking Ex Situ Worlds
Joshua Schuster : Coral Cultures in the Anthropocene
Rick De Vos : Inundation, Extinction and Lacustrine Lives
Michael Smith : (A)wake for ‘the Passions of this Earth’: Extinction and the Absurd ‘Ethics’ of Novel Ecosystems
Laura McLauchlan : A Multispecies Collective Planting Trees: Tending to Life and Making Meaning Outside of the Conservation Heroic : Meaningful work outside of the conservation heroic
Kelly Enright : Exhibiting Extinction: Martha and the Monument, Two Modes of Remembering Nature
James Hatley : There is Buffalo Ecocide: A Meditation upon Homecoming in Buffalo Country
Contents
- Between Distances and Homecomingi"It is rare for someone to walk the mountains of Bhutan and see albatross dancing. It is", single work poetry (p. 1)
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Extinction : Stories of Unravelling and Reworlding,
single work
criticism
(p. 23-28)
'We live in a time of almost unfathomable loss, and we are called to respond.
'Extinction challenges our thinking and writing. Such overwhelming disappearance of ways of being, experiencing and making meaning in the world disrupts familiar categories and demands new modes of response. It requires that we trace multiple forms of both countable and intangible loss, the unravelling of social and ecological communities as a result of colonialism and capture, development and defaunation and other destructive processes. It brings forth new modes of commemoration and mourning, and new practices of archiving and survival. It calls for action in the absence of hope, and for the recognition and nourishment of new generativities: new modes of assemblage and attachment, resurgence and reworlding, commoning, composting and caring for country .' (Publication abstract)
