Seeding Grounds: Working Beyond Arcadia in the Pyrocene

Abstract

From drought to fire, Australia’s landscapes face multiple existential threats. A response to the tectonic loss of life in the 2019-2020 ‘Black Summer’ bushfires, Seeding Grounds: Working Beyond Arcadia in the Pyrocene, seeks to reckon with Australia’s perception of country that has engendered its ongoing dance with ecological annihilation. Positing the establishment of the Fireline National Park along Kangaroo Island’s ‘Black Summer’ burn scar line, the thesis inverts colonial land management infrastructures in an attempt to cultivate acts of disturbance as a means of growing ecologies forward into uncertain climatic futures. In so doing, Seeding Grounds resists the impulse of a static preservationism, rejecting the preeminent consumption | conservation paradigm in favour of acknowledging that our landscapes are embedded in processes of decay and renewal. Here, the anachronistic mythology of a static ‘Arcadia’ yields to an understanding of country as archival palimpsest, one in which we look – not toward the past – but gently grow into the future.