Abstract
Wetlands in a Dry Land (hereafter Wetlands) assembles a vast amount of valuable archival and ethnographic research into an interdisciplinary study and environmental history of some of the wetlands of the Murray-Darling Basin. Particularly valuable is its ethnography of Aboriginal weaving using native plants, such as sedge, and ‘whatever material is available’ (p. 35) such as raffia, as a means of connecting to and caring for Country in the present and for the future. Succeeding chapters are devoted to informative and valuable case studies of specific wetland sites and to issues with wetlands in the Basin, their use and the role of some ‘more-than-human’ actors and agents, such as malaria, mosquitoes, ducks, pelicans and seals. Acknowledging the role of these actors and agents, and writing them back into history, is one of the invaluable contributions that Wetlands makes to the appreciation of wetlands and should make for their conservation, though Wetlands does not tie its colours too firmly to that mast. It makes the case for ‘reimagining wetlands’ (p. 196, 197) more than for actually conserving them. The former may or may not lead to the latter. Conserving them relies on reimagined and real ecologies.
Despite its protestations about foregrounding gender among its ‘approaches’, ecofeminism is absent from Wetlands, especially in relation to the feminisation of wetlands and the masculinisation of draining or filling them as discussed in the literature. Similarly, class is numbered among Wetlands’ ‘approaches’, but this does not lead to a Marxist ecology of wetlands and a critique of the enclosing of the wetlands commons into private property (and draining wetlands into drylands). Such a political critique is directly pertinent to chapter 5 in Wetlands on pelicans and carp. Wetlands neglects politics, especially the vital role Greens’ politicians and wetland conservationists have played at the state and federal levels in the conservation of wetlands in Australia over the past 30 years, including the ones discussed in Wetlands, and their critical contribution to struggles over water politics and for wetland conservation in the Murray-Darling Basin.
Wetlands is firmly and resolutely placed within the disciplines of ethnography, environmental history, natural history and scientific ecology with many of their strengths and weaknesses. Wetlands demonstrates the strengths of environmental history, such as thorough and exhaustive archival research and assembling a vast array of descriptive and detailed data in accounts of important episodes in the environmental history of the wetlands of the basin.
Wetlands also demonstrates the weaknesses of environmental history. These include the wood not being seen for the trees, with the bigger picture, the longer historical view, the deeper environmental philosophy and the wider cultural context of wetlands in western cultures and struggles over their conservation. These are lost in the overwhelming attention to detail and the failure to theorise what is at stake here environmentally, culturally and politically, such as urban development, farming practices, wetland conservation, land health (including wetland health) and the future of human and more-than-human life on planet earth.
For instance, the chapter devoted to whether ducks are to blame for damage to rice paddies describes in great detail the irresolvable difference between farmers’ anecdotes and scientists’ data. These competing views are permitted to co-exist side by side as merely different ‘imagined ecologies’ operating in implicit functionalism. Yet ducks and wetlands are sites of struggle for competing interests and investments, including ways of making meaning about them in discourses and stories.
The concept of ‘wetland’ is also a site of semiotic struggle. Wetlands’ informative discussion of the history of the concept of ‘wetland’, especially in relation to the Ramsar convention and its adoption by Australian governments, brings to the fore the conflict between scientists, politicians, bureaucrats and NGOs over the definition of wetlands. This invaluable discussion shows how ‘wetland’ entered into scientific discourse and history in the 1960s as a non-denigrative and umbrella term for swamps, marshes, etc. It was then taken up in governmental discourse by politicians and bureaucrats in the 1970s where it became a site of struggle between them, among themselves and with scientists and NGOs.
These, too, are ‘imagined ecologies’, though Wetlands does not theorise them in these terms and what is at stake with them for wetlands, especially as habitat for more-than-human actors and agents, including on farms. Ducks, for instance, do not observe the boundary and distinction between wetlands in the conservation estate and rice paddies that are ‘a kind of wetland’ (p. 16, 118) as Wetlands points out. What is a wetland is a mobile category and cannot be fixed in taxonomy or cartography. Ducks will decide with their feet and wings what is a wetland in ways that humans won’t and can’t. Some farmers are learning to live with ducks in their rice paddies and with the fluid definition of both them and wetlands as waterbird habitat (as Wetlands discusses briefly). An imagined ecology of wetlands could make some proposals for how the principles and practices of regenerative farming might apply to rice-growing.
An imagined ecology of wetlands could also show how cities are learning to live with wetlands by designing wetlandscapes for recreational spaces, water absorption and flood mitigation. Wetlands presents a case study of Toowoomba in south-east Queensland with its history of draining and filling wetlands, culminating in the devastating floods of 2011. This is where the story in Wetlands largely begins and ends, whereas the Toowoomba Regional Council has learnt lessons with the transformation of swamps into ‘park-like recreational areas’, as photographed and briefly discussed in Wetlands, that include swales for flood mitigation not noted in Wetlands. A ‘reimagined ecology’ of wetlands should imagine the future of living and working with wetlands in cities and on farms for their conservation and/or rehabilitation.
