1st Edition
Critical Approaches to the Australian Blue Humanities
This interdisciplinary edited collection explores and analyses the field of the blue humanities through an Australian lens. The blue humanities is a way of understanding humanity’s relationship with water and manifestations of what is referred to as the ‘blue’ – reefs, oceans, rivers, creeks, basins, and inland bodies of water.
In its scope, this collection emphasises both the importance of the local and the interconnectedness of Australia with global environmental concerns. It considers how we conceptualise watery spaces and shades of blue in a country where water is often marked by its absence, its ephemerality, its politicisation, and its dangers. Contributors from environmental history, environmental social science, political science, literary studies, creative arts, Indigenous Knowledge, education, and anthropology tackle various entanglements between the human, the more-than-human, and watery Australian spaces in modern culture. It is the first volume to offer a specific, dedicated focus on the intersections between Australian space and the blue humanities, and it offers a pathway for those wishing to explore, critique, and advance ideas around the blue humanities in both research and teaching.
Directly contributing to a growing interdisciplinary field, this is the first book to comprehensively examine the blue in Australia, appealing to scholars, educators, and students working across the humanities and social sciences with an interest in the environmental humanities, ecopolitics, ecocriticism, the blue humanities, cultural geography, environmental history, and the role of place.
Foreword by Steve Mentz
Introduction: Approaching the Australian Blue Humanities: From Entanglements to Sea Country
Claire Hansen and Maxine Newlands
Part 1: Australian identities through the blue
1. Blue Country: Nurturing meaningful relationships in discontinuous environments
Vincent Backhaus, Nailsa Neuendorf, Lokes Brooksbank, and Tahnee Innes
2. Possessing and protecting the Southern Ocean: Connection and mediation in the Antarctic work of Douglas Mawson and Alan Villiers
Alessandro Antonello
3. Writing the more-than-human history of northern Australia’s many waters: Environmental history, the blue humanities, and the challenge of entanglement
Claire Brennan
4. The colour of water
Mia-Francesca Jones
Part 2: Sea Country, Blue Country: from the postcolonial blue to the Great Ocean
5. Sanitary citizenship in the settler colonial city: Race, health and hygiene in interwar urban Australia
Ruth Morgan
6. ‘From the Viewpoint of their Native Element’: Diving in the colonial undersea
Killian Quigley
7. The ‘blue turn’ in contemporary art: Assembling blue methods of research-creation
Jacqueline Chlanda, Léuli Eshrāghi, and Peta Rake
Part 3: Mediating the blue
8. Ecopolitics and ecocriticism: Activists, artisans and the Save the Reef campaign
Maxine Newlands
9. Digital blues: Sense of self and the human-nature-technology connection in Australian aquatic environments
Melusine Martin
10. ‘A dancing creature of crimson and yellow’: Writing the Great Barrier Reef
Jessica White
Part 4: Beyond the anthropocentric blue
11. Moving waters, muddy edges: Ibis in Brisbane
Gillian Paxton
12. A Whale of a Journey: On the connectivity between pygmy blue whales in Indonesia, Australia and beyond
Putu Liza Kusuma Mustika
13. HMS Pandora and the sea: Tracing eighteenth-century Polynesian artefacts and their entanglement with the Pacific Ocean
Jasmin I. Günther
Part 5: Imagining blue futures
14. Colourblindness in/of place: Memory, colonial place and education’s ignorance of the blue
Bryan Smith
15. Eco-art and reeling in anthropogenic adversity
Robyn Glade-Wright
16. Waves of cognition: Towards an Australian blue Shakespeare ecosystem
Alys Daroy, Joshua Zeunert, and Rahul K. Gairola
Biography
Maxine Newlands, (PhD), is Director of the Blue Humanities Lab in Australia, and holds two adjunct research fellowships with the University of Queensland and the Cairns Institute at James Cook University. Maxine’s research specialises in the advancement of novel science, in politics, policy, and marine governance.
Claire Hansen is a senior lecturer in English at the Australian National University (ANU). She is co-chair of the Blue Humanities Lab, the Heart of the Matter project, and the ANU Health Humanities Network. She is an award-winning educator, a researcher on the Shakespeare Reloaded project, co-editor of Reimagining Shakespeare Education (2023, Cambridge University Press), and author of Shakespeare and Place-Based Learning (2023, Cambridge University Press).
“I am energized by the ways in which this collection contributes to emerging conversations specifically in the Blue Humanities and also in the Environmental Humanities more generally. The multi-disciplinary approach taken by this collection opens the Blue Humanities to more dynamic approaches, which is a necessary task as the field continues to expand in scope. This book works to bring diverse methodological and disciplinary thinking to bear on how we understand the role of “blue” within an Australian context, but its insights extend globally and across all Blue Humanities.”
Sid Dobrin, Professor and Chair in the Department of English, University of Florida, USA
“From the cold Southern Ocean to tropical reefs, precarious inland waterways and the blue within art, education, and digital spaces, this book dives deep into the cultural analysis of Australian waters with impressive literary elegance and analytic scope, finding the blue woven through the most pressing concerns of our times.”
Kate Judith, Senior Lecturer at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia
