Category: publication

We are excited to announce the publication of The Anthropocene and Visual Culture in Australia, edited by Linda Williams and Helen McDonald and published by Routledge.

Blurb

Australia is gaining a reputation as the proverbial canary in the coal mine of global environmental change. The driest inhabited continent on earth, Australia is now exposed to rising planetary temperatures and an increase in disastrous events such as massive bushfires, floods, and warming oceans. At the same time, urban development, extractive agriculture, and mining are eroding Australia’s distinctive natural habitats, driving its mammal extinctions to the highest rates in the world.

This edited collection features writers from various fields in visual culture, history, and ecocritical theory who give timely accounts of how Australian visual media represents, interprets, predicts, or obscures such environmental events in relation to the Anthropocene. The chapters focus on the visualisation of Australian ecology across a range of media including ancient rock art, television and film, photography, visual art, digital maps, and AI.

By bringing Australian critical perspectives to the challenges of the Anthropocene, this book offers a new environmental approach to Australian culture in the context of the global issues of climate change, extinction, and colonialism.

Table of Contents

1. Visualising the Anthropocene in Australia 
   Linda Williams & Helen McDonald 
   
   SECTION I: ENVISIONING COUNTRY 
2. Country and Crisis: First Peoples’ Art in the Age of the Anthropocene 
   Lynette Russell & Myles Russell-Cook
3. Visualising Deep Time: Australian Rock Art, Television, and Climate Change 
   Helen McDonald
4. Film and Television in the New Age of Fire 
   Belinda Smaill 
   
   SECTION II: COLONIAL IMAGERY 
5. Presentism and Anthropocenic Unawareness in Early Western Australian Settler Art: The Case of Thomas Turner 
   Richard Read 
6. True History of the Kelly Gang: Shame and Regret – Nostalgia and Anthropocene Aesthetics 
   Sean Cubitt 
7. An Ecological Aesthetic: Kant after Tillers in the Enlightenment to Come 
   Ian McLean 
   
   SECTION III: WITNESSING EXTINCTION 
8. Extinction Imaginaries and Affect in Australian Art 
   Linda Williams 
9. Crocodiles, Colonialism, and Australian Television 
   Chris Healy & Timothy Neale 
10. Life’s Too Short: Imagining Oceans Past, Rejecting Tuna Futures 
    Rick de Vos 
11. Shadow Places and the Public Arts of Extinction 
    Donna Houston & Marco Amati 
    
    SECTION IV: REFRAMING THE LAND 
12. Australian Photography in the Anthropocene 
    Daniel Palmer 
13. Wild Country: Revisioning Regional Australia 
    Clare McCracken 
14. Attention is All You Want: Machinic Gaze and the Anthropocene 
    Liam Magee & Vanicka Arora 
15. Towards a Critical Anthropocene: Approaching Australian Art Exhibitions 
    Janice Baker

Critic’s Reviews

This in all senses timely collection offers a sustained, material and critical engagement with visualizing the Anthropocene in the key context of Australia. When governments are saying there’s nothing to see here, this collective project amounts to a substantial rebuttal that researchers everywhere will want to study.

Nicholas Mirzoeff, 
Professor, Department of Media, Culture and Communication, NYU

Williams and McDonald’s outstanding collection of essays delivers a sweeping as well as meticulously detailed account of Australian visual culture in its engagement with the environmental crises that are often summarized as “the Anthropocene.” In its emphasis on visual production from murals and paintings all the way to photographs, television, film, and digital imagery, this book shifts the emphasis of the Environmental Humanities from history, philosophy, and literature to visual cultures. Even as the essays integrate visual works with global theoretical perspectives on the Anthropocene, they foreground the specificity of Australian experiences of environmental crisis, bringing together analyses of the “imperial visuality” of colonialism and of the “counter-visualities” that have emerged from First Nations visual expression as well as activist environmental image-making. The interdisciplinary spectrum of disciplines in the volume, which includes First Nations scholars as well as experts from art history, film studies, and urban studies, turns Williams and McDonald’s collection into a distinctive, innovative, and important contribution to the expanding field of the Environmental Humanities.

Ursula K. Heise, 
Distinguished Professor, Department of English, Institute of the Environment & Sustainability, UCLA

Combining diverse perspectives, including contributions by historians and anthropologists, geographers and urban planners, artists and curators, as well as scholars of visual media, science and technology this volume affords fresh insights into many aspects of Australian visual culture, both Indigenous and settler-colonial, from the horizon of those earth system changes summoned (not unproblematically) by the term “Anthropocene”: an era dated by some to the start of the fossil-fuelled industrial revolution and hence roughly coeval with the British invasion of the continent they dubbed Australia. The first major anthology to examine the history of Australian visual culture across a wide range of media through an ecological lens, this fascinating collection also makes a major contribution to the inter- and transdisciplinary weave of the environmental humanities through its focus on the hitherto under-acknowledged role of visual culture in shaping human perceptions of, and interactions with, other-than-human beings and phenomena, and the more-than-human worlds that, for better or worse, we co-create with them.

Kate Rigby, 
Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Environmental Humanities, University of Cologne

This anthology brings to life different ecological imaginaries, invoked as Australians from rock-engravers to painters, photographers, and film-makers—listen to and reconfigure the dialogue between nature and culture. Without flattening the world into a posthumanist tableau, this book carefully elaborates how, intentionally and by inference, different lines of visual culture expose the meaning of human impact on our distressed planet.

Paul James, 
Emeritus Professor of Globalization and Cultural Diversity, Western Sydney University

Many of Australia’s best thinkers assemble to think about the myriad aspects of visual culture on a continent where the challenges of the Anthropocene—excessive extraction, fire, and drought among them—are a fact of everyday life. Deftly introduced by Williams and McDonald, contributions explore First Peoples’ conceptions of Country, anthropological understandings of deep time, the persistence of colonial frameworks in art and popular culture consciousness, and the growing fear of extinction, both natural and human. Eschewing redemptive gestures, these essays map where we are now, visualising these challenges in contemporary conditions.

Terry Smith, 
Emeritus Professor University of Sydney, Andrew W. Mellon Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory, University of Pittsburgh, & Slade Professor of Fine Arts, University of Cambridge, 2025–2026

Timothy Erik Ström published an article called ‘Exponential Abyss: Technology and Waste‘ in the New Left Review’s Sidecar, and it can be freely read on their website.

Here is a grab quote:

“As cybernetics has supercharged capitalism’s industrial capacities, it has created vast amounts of toxic waste that cascade through supply chains and accumulate across food chains.”

Linda Williams co-authored a chapter called ‘Extinction Rebellion and Non-violent Civil Disobedience’ for the book The Routledge Handbook of Grassroots Climate Activism.

You can see it online here.

Here is its’ abstract:

This chapter explores Extinction Rebellion (XR) in its historical context: from its emergence in Britain, to a global climate movement with viable connections to earlier successful grassroots movements in civil disobedience. Drawing on media analysis we consider some of the ways that the flaws and critiques of XR’s activism, from disruptions to urban infrastructure to less mediagenic yet more publicly engaging appeal to mass civil disobedience, have been framed in the popular imaginary. XR members have been labelled as ‘extremist’ and ‘eco-terrorists’. Yet this practice of discrediting XR can be understood as a form of ‘othering’ aimed at portraying climate activists as anarchists who resist democratic process and reject social values. In response, XR supporters counter that such accusations are overstated and meant to undermine the movement, asserting that an apocalyptic tone and non-violent disruptive civic action is justified, given the severity of the climate crisis. XR’s mission based on the identification of mass grassroots non-violent civil disobedience as the essential factor of social transformation is insightful, and, in our view, the key to its continued success.