About

About this blog

As a species, we humans are brilliant environmental manipulators. The agricultural and industrial developments of the last ten thousand years have created an array of complex ecological niches in environments across the globe, many of which simply wouldn't exist without the influence of people. However, while we're quick to recognise the impacts of industrial and agricultural societies on our landscape, we're often unaware or or unable to see the ways in which hunter-gatherer societies have created and maintained their own cultural landscapes.

This blog looks beyond the supposed 'wilderness' of prehistoric environments to dispel the myth that explorers from agricultural and industrial societies happened upon untouched landscapes as they intruded on 'undomesticated' parts of the world, and to illustrate the range of cultural practices and behaviours employed by non-agricultural, non-industrial societies to construct their own unique environmental niches. The remnants and legacies of these past cultural landscapes are still visible today, and provide a vital insight not only into the way we were and are, but the path we make for our future.

“The past lives on in art and memory, but it is not static: it shifts and changes as the present throws its shadow backwards. The landscape also changes, but far more slowly; it is a living link between what we were and what we have become. This is one of the reasons why we feel such a profound and apparently disproportionate anguish when a loved landscape is altered out of recognition; we lose not only a place, but ourselves, a continuity between the shifting phases of our life.” - Virginia Woolf, as referenced by Margaret Drabble (A Writer's Britain: landscape in literature)

About me

I've spent several years working as an archaeologist specializing in cultural heritage management in Australia's western third. During this time, I've been privileged to witness and to learn more of the resource management strategies practiced by the Aboriginal men and women with whom I have worked. For Australia's Aboriginal peoples, cultural practices, spiritual beliefs and the living and geological environment form parts of a cohesive, dynamic system within which all life operates. Over time, my interest in these resource management practices grew, and I'm now (as part of my PhD research) investigating the ways in which the Noongar people of southwestern Australia modified and interacted with their environment during the late Holocene (roughly the last 4000 years).

For more details about my research, feel free to check out my Academia page.