Editorial: The Environmental Humanities in the Asia-Pacific Region (and Beyond)

Works Cited
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Notes

1. Rod Giblett is the author most recently of Wetlands and Western Cultures: Denigration to Conservation (Lexington, 2021) and Black Swan Song: Life and Work of a Wetland Writer (Hamilton, 2021). The present article is drawn from the introduction to a book entitled Middlemarsh: Life-Stories of Remarkable People and Watery Places in Western Victoria. It is currently under consideration for publication. Another article drawn from a later chapter in the book has been published recently: “People and Place of Hissing Swan: Kaawirn Kuunawarn, Lake Connewarren, the Weatherlys and ‘Connewarran’ Station,” Victorian Historical Journal, vol. 92, no. 2, 2021, 379–395. He is Honorary Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities in the Writing and Literature Program of the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia.

2. For the cultural and natural history of the Yarra River, see Giblett (Modern chapter 8) and its references.

3. Despite a recent shift in acknowledging the importance of wetlands for ancient Mesopotamia and “the invention of the city” some writers on the topic persist in calling this time and place the birth, or dawn, of civilization as signalled in the title of their books; see Wilson (401–402, n1).

4. For a brief discussion and illustrations of Aboriginal eel traps and ‘game nets’ in ‘well-watered areas’ of Australia (such as mid-western Victoria) with no mention and mapping of wetlands here (nor anywhere else in Australia for that matter), see The Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia (Arthur and Morphy 27–28, 53, 66, 148–149), yet another disappointing instance of wetlands being written out of geography, history and cartography, of an atlas being an instrument of colonization and neo-colonization, and of aquaterracide (the genocide of wetlands). For further discussion of wetlands being written out of geography, history and cartography, maps as an instrument of colonization and neo-colonization, and proposals for the decolonization of wetlands, especially in relation to Perth and Melbourne, see Giblett (Postmodern chapter 3; Modern chapter 5). For decolonization of nature and deconstruction of the nature-culture binary, see Giblett (People), aquaterracide, see Giblett (Postmodern) and paludiculture, see Giblett (Wetlands).

5. This is a Marxist economic theory of value and critique of political economy. Both ‘land and labour’ are the creators of value and wealth. This theory respects and values that the economic base has an environmental foundation. For further discussion, see Giblett (People chapters 1 and 2).

6. For the history and politics of improvement in England, especially the creation of ‘pleasing prospects’ in English rural landscapes, see Williams (122–123; see also Giblett New chapter 10). For the history and politics of the enclosure of traditional wetland commons into private property in the English Fens, see Giblett (Wetlands chapter 3). For ‘the Australian gentleman’s park is Aboriginal country,’ see Giblett (People 91–94). For ‘the biggest estate on earth,’ see Gammage. For the economics and politics of ‘the commons’ and recent proposals for ‘commoning land’ and ‘decolonizing nature,’ see Obeng-Odoom.

7. For further discussion of decolonizing nature in general and wetlands in particular, first proposed in the early/mid 1990s, see Giblett Postmodern 74-76.

8. Flooded rice paddies are, as O’Gorman (16, 100, 105, 118) points out on several occasions, “a kind of wetland,” certainly as far as ducks and other species are concerned. The boundary between the two is permeable, as she relates later with birds, frogs, insects and plants crossing it in the case of a couple of swamps and a rice-growing irrigation area in the Murray-Darling Basin (O’Gorman 97–119).