Critical Approaches to the Australian Blue Humanities

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 A. 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), and author of Shakespeare and Place-Based Learning (2023).

'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