Timothy Neale

• BA (Hons), MA, PhD
• DECRA Senior Research Fellow at Deakin University

In this special issue on ‘extraction’, we think critically about two urgent and entangled questions, examining the political economy of mining and Indigenous interests in Australia, and the moral economy of Indigenous cultural difference within Cultural Studies and Anthropology. In settler colonial states such as Australia, Indigenous cultural diff...

Within certain settler colonial nations, Indigenous peoples are increasingly becoming present and influential in the agencies legally responsible for the management of their ancestral territories, their environments and their hazards. On the Australian continent, for example, Aboriginal peoples are becoming more formally involved in the management...

It is becoming apparent that changes in climatic and demographic distributions are increasing the frequency and social impact of many ‘natural hazards’, including wildfires (or ‘bushfires’ in Australia). Across many national contexts, the governmental agencies legally responsible for ‘managing’ such hazards been called upon to provide greater fores...

Despite widespread acceptance that their emissions accelerate climate change and its disastrous ecological effects, new fossil fuel extraction projects continue apace, further entrenching fossil fuel dependence, and thereby enacting particular climate futures. In this article, we examine how this is occurring in the case of a proposed onshore shale...

Internationally, fire and land management agencies are increasingly using forms of predictive services to inform wildfire planning and operational response. This trend is particularly pronounced in Australia where, over the past two decades, there has been an alignment between increases in investments in fire behaviour analysis tools, the training...

During an unprecedented crisis of bushfires, the staff of emergency management control centers in southeast Australia pause to perform rites with their political leaders. They reenact decisions that have already been made and generate divinations of fiery futures that are unlikely to occur. Their work, like that of others in large centralized techn...

Over the past 15 years, international climate policy and governance practice have shifted from a linear model of carbon emissions management to a circular model. Whereas the former primarily focused on reducing absolute emissions, the latter focuses on balancing emissions sources and sinks. Australia, a major global exporter of ‘old’ carbon resourc...

First Nations peoples are revitalising diverse cultural fire practices and knowledge. Institutional and societal recognition of these practices is growing. Yet there has been little academic research on these fire practices in southeast Australia, let alone research led by Aboriginal people. We are a group of Indigenous and settler academics, pract...

Mitigating climate change requires us to constrain combustion in a double sense: decreasing both the use of fossil fuels and the flammability of the biosphere. Fire management by Indigenous peoples in Australia's northern savannas has been presented as a solution to offset the former and assist with the latter, leading to the foundation of a region...

A green paper is a preliminary report published to stimulate discussion, which details specific issues, and then points out possible courses of action in terms of policy and legislation. This green paper outlines principles for enhanced collaboration between land and emergency management agencies (‘agencies’) and First Nations peoples in southern A...

Unrealistic expectations in society about science reducing and even eliminating the risk of natural hazards contrasts with the chaotic forces of these events, but such expectations persist nonetheless. Risk mitigation practitioners must grapple with them, including in the cycles of blame and inquiry that follow natural hazard events. We present a s...

Catastrophic and unprecedented wildfires have unfolded across fire-prone landscapes globally over the last three years, with highly publicized loss of human life, property destruction and ecological transformation. Indigenous peoples within many nations have persuasively argued that traditional fire management can enhance existing wildfire mitigati...

What are we talking about when we talk about decolonization? In this article, we differentiate between epistemic and reparative decolonizing approaches and then consider the differences between postcolonial and decolonial modes in two fields: histories of science and, separately, museology. Touring these fields leads us to affirm the need for schol...

A submission to the 2020 Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements.

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation with members of the Karrabing Film Collective – Lorraine Lane, Linda Yarrowin, Cecilia Lewis, Sandra Yarrowin, and anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli – interviewed by anthropologists Melinda Hinkson and David Boarder Giles. The Karrabing Film Collective are a community of Indigenous Austra...

Views of fire in the contemporary physical sciences arguably accord with Heraclitus’ proposal that ‘all things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods.’ Fire is a media, as John Durham Peters has stated, a species of transformative biochemical reactions between the flammable gases found in air, such a...

An introduction to An Elemental Anthropocene.

This essay narrates the ‘slow violence’, or creeping environmental harms taking place within contemporary environmental governance. It centres on a tall, dense and highly flammable introduced pasture species Gamba grass (Andropogon gayanus), which was listed as a weed across north Australian jurisdictions in 2008. Since this time, it has continued...

As the natural fire regimes of Canada's Boreal forests have been transformed by dynamic social, economic, ecological and political drivers, wildfires have become a locus of increasingly complex land management decisions. But while, in Canada and elsewhere, social researchers have examined communities at risk of experiencing wildfire, the agencies a...

Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholarship has often been suspicious of the role of scientific knowledge and scientists in environmental governance, notably through paying critical attention to the workings of calculative rationalities and techniques. However, recent reforms within certain extractivist regions and nations such as the United S...

Natural hazard management agencies across the settler countries Canada, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States (or CANZUS countries) are presently involved in an increasing range of collaborative and consultative engagements with Indigenous peoples. However, perhaps because these engagements are diverse and relatively recent, little...

Conservation targets perform beneficial auxiliary functions that are rarely acknowledged, including raising awareness, building partnerships, promoting investment, and developing new knowledge. Building on these auxiliary functions could enable more rapid progress towards current targets and inform the design of future targets.

This report was written as part of the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre’s ‘Hazards, Culture and Indigenous Communities’ research project (BNHCRC’s HCIC). The HCIC research project focuses on collaborations between Aboriginal groups and natural hazards management agencies across southern Australia (see further Appendix 3). Th...

In this paper, I examine recent influential accounts of the bushfire knowledge and practices of Aboriginal peoples and their ancestors on the Australian continent, drawing attention to how these accounts accord with problematic and ecomodernist aspects of contemporary bushfire management discourse. Developing a two-part critique of this discourse,...

The present context of escalating environmental risks places increased pressure and importance on our technical ability to predict and mitigate the potential consequences and occurrence of major natural hazards such as bushfire (or ‘wildfire’). Over the past decade, bushfire prediction in Australia, as in many other fire-prone countries, has increa...

With a history of low probability, high consequence flood events in the Hawkesbury-Nepean catchment, the lack of living-memory, experiential flood knowledge or visual cues in the landscape makes mitigation, preparedness and flood risk awareness a challenging task. Such a system inherently contains a high level of the unexpected and incomprehensible...

Pride in Australia's extreme climate has long been a part of Australia's national identity. Today, climate continues to be enrolled in a range of nationalistic projects, including the (re)development of climate science and other responses to climate change. In this paper, we outline some of the contours of the 'Australian national climate', claims...

This book examines issues of environmentalism and indigeneity in Northern Australia through the controversy surrounding the Wild Rivers Act 2005 (Qld) . Like much of the north, one terrain of the Act – the massive Cape York Peninsula – has long been constructed as a ‘wild’ space, whether as terra nullius , a zone of legal exception or a biodiverse...

Humans are ‘fire creatures’ that have used fire for millennia to shape local environments to diverse purposes. Our capacity for combustion has also forced global climatic changes and rendered the planet increasingly flammable, creating the conditions for progressively higher impact bushfires now and into the future. Meanwhile, governments in fire-p...

In this article, I focus upon the recent Wild Rivers Act controversy in Queensland, Australia, as an ‘experimental event’ that drew together a diverse cast of actors – including Indigenous traditional owners, state politicians, bureaucrats, environmentalists, mining companies, the late Steve Irwin, and waterways – to contest the future of a region...

The field of disaster loss assessment attempts to provide comprehensive estimates of the cost of disasters. Assessment of intangibles remains a major weakness. Existing costing frameworks have acknowledged losses to cultural – as distinct from economic, social, human or environmental – capital. However, the inclusion of cultural line items has usua...

Over the past decade, major landscape wildfires (or ‘bushfires’ in Australia) in fire-prone countries have illustrated the seriousness of this global environmental problem. This natural hazard presents a complex mesh of dynamic factors for those seeking to reduce or manage its costs, as ignitions, hazard behaviour, and the reactions of different hu...

Wildfire is a global environmental ‘problem’ with significant socioeconomic and socionatural impacts that does not lend itself to simple technical fixes (Gill et al., 2013: 439). In Australia, a country with a pronounced history of disastrous landscape fires, these impacts are expected to increase as the peri-urban population continues to grow and...

Scientific knowledge and scientific uncertainties play a significant role in the mitigation of natural hazard risk. As such, the natural hazards sector is often represented as 'science-led' or 'researchled'. However, in actuality, relationships between scientific research, policy and practice are neither simple nor linear, and there are presently f...

The 1970s witnessed the emergence of a protest-based environmental movement in Australia. We outline here the history of the unstable meeting of environmentalism and Aboriginal interests, before turning to Marcia Langton's recent critique of the progressive ‘green left’ in Australia.1 We summarise Langton's argument: environmentalists would deny Ab...

Today, there is a shift in the representations of Northern Australia and its environments. While Indigenous stakeholders have come to the forefront of debates, and the existence of ‘natural values’ and Indigenous ownership have become relatively uncontroversial, environmentalists and environmental regulation have been widely criticized. Chapter 2 s...

Scenario exercises have become instrumental across multiple fields, from their original usage in business and military planning, to being ubiquitous in environmental planning and policy formation. This article critically reviews whether there are explicit and imminent divisions between how scenario exercises are used and discussed, with particular...

In this essay, the authors respond to several of the papers included in this special issue. First reflecting on the relation between waters, ‘First law’,1 and settler law, the authors then draw connections between some of the contributions to the issue. Water, the authors contend, is a productive site for thinking through the organs and processes o...

Natural hazards are complex events whose mitigation has generated a diverse field of specialised natural science expertise that is drawn upon by a wide range of practitioners and decision-makers. In this paper, the authors bring natural science research, risk studies and science and technology studies together in aid of clarifying the role scientif...

This issue of Settler Colonial Studies comes out of a long-term collaboration between the guest editors which began, in earnest, with a panel on the theme of ‘Other People’s Country: Law, Water, Entitlement’ at the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference held at the University of Sydney in December 2012. The panel’s topic was drawn f...

This article considers the ‘duplicitous’ functions of the word ‘wild’ in the arguments over the Queensland’s Wild Rivers Act 2005. Certain traditional owners, environmentalist and state groups have deployed the term pragmatically, simultaneously endorsing its usage (through repetition) and disavowing its colonial associations (through explanation)...

History, Power, Text collects together selected contributions on Indigenous themes published between 1996 and 2013 in the journal first known as UTS Review and now known as Cultural Studies Review. Since the journal’s inception, successive editors have sought to open up a space for new kinds of politics, new styles of writing and new modes of inter...

Like many first-time visitors to Borroloola, I went to the towns small museum shortly after arriving to begin anthropological fieldwork in mid-2007. Located in the Northern Territorys oldest surviving police station, which dates from 1887, the museum was created in the mid 1980s as a result of the loving efforts of an amateur historian named Judy C...

The recent focus on the category of ‘culture’ provoked by Peter Sutton's The Politics of Suffering (2009) has revived questions of the meaning and utility of indigenous alterity in Australia. The ‘end of the liberal consensus’, contemporary with a declared ‘end of ideology’ in Australian Indigenous† public policy, has been doubled in ‘post-ethnic’...

This article considers the ‘duplicitous’ functions of the word ‘wild’ in the arguments over the Queensland’s Wild Rivers Act 2005. Certain traditional owners, environmentalist and state groups have deployed the term pragmatically, simultaneously endorsing its usage (through repetition) and disavowing its colonial associations (through explanation)...

The author of the present study juxtaposes accounts by “postmemory” individuals with the fraudulent works of Binjamin Wilkomirski (Bruno Dössekker) and Jerzy Kosinski. Analyzing both phenomena as representative of the dynamics at work in memory of the Holocaust and of other “traumatic events,” the author arrives at a formulation, via Giorgio Agambe...

Recently while tutoring in a first-year humanities course my students and I were rehearsing the received version of (Horkheimer and) Adorno's critique of commodities and their slavish consumption courtesy of The Dialectic of Enlightenment. In an attempt to think of a commodity so replete with cultural capital as to ensure exchange value dwarfed any...