Environmental and Colonial Histories

This article is concerned with a pressing question of the 21st century: how do we negotiate places with complex colonial pasts? In the Mid North of South Australia, rugged mountain ranges rise up from stony plains. Adnyamathanha-speaking people have lived here and maintained connections to Country for tens of thousands of years. In the late 1920s, artist Hans Heysen travelled to the area known as the Flinders Ranges and stayed at Aroona, an outstation on a pastoral property, painting landscapes of a dry, uninhabited place. At the same time, a memoir of colonial settler J. F. Howard was printed that openly described attempts at dispossession of Aboriginal people for pastoral interests. With a focus on gardens and food in representations of Flinders Ranges landscapes, this article revisits old material with new concerns, arguing that the intersection of environmental and colonial histories offers productive territory for grappling with complex pasts

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Colonialism · Ethnology · Literature · Memoir · Negotiation · Painting · Project commissioning · Publishing · Social science · Sociology · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · History