Journal articles on the topic 'British Museum (Natural History). Department of Zoology'

This article outlines the significance of some of the discoveries in natural science made in India and the Himalayas by the Schlagintweit brothers, who were eminent nineteenth century scientists and explorers employed by the East India Company to carry out survey work. The mainly natural history subject matter covers zoology, botany, geology, surveying and ethnography. The article also describes how various specimens were collected and transported to the United Kingdom their investigation by scientists and their eventual places of custody in various institutions. Although there are specimens collected by the Schlagintweits in German institutions, the present work concentrates on the collections that were originally housed in the India Museum of the East India Company before its dispersal in 1879. The paper was written whilst working at the India Office Library and Records, London, which is a department of the British Library, and the notes refer mainly to material held there.

This paper describes the botanical prints and drawings collection in the Botany Library, Department of Library Services, British Museum (Natural History). A short history of the collection is followed by details of acquisitions policy, curation, conservation and uses made of the collections. A selected bibliography of works, including those relating specifically to the Collections complete the paper.

As a senior scientist working in the Fish Section of the Department of Zoology at the Natural History Museum, Alwyne (Wyn) Wheeler was a regular library user and well-known to library staff. Always amiable and helpful, and possessing a broad general knowledge of natural history as well as expertise on fishes, Wyn interacted with library staff at all levels. A close working relationship developed where he contributed to section library management and collection building. He also published catalogues of some of the library's most important art collections. This paper celebrates the collaboration between Museum scientist Wyn Wheeler and librarians at the Natural History Museum.

The opportunity to study some of de Koninck's (1883) type specimens from the Institut Royal de sciences Naturelle de Belgique (RMNS), specimens from the British Museum of Natural History (BMNH), and from the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University (MCZ) has provided insight into the taxonomic relationships of some polyplacophoran taxa. It is evident that errors have occurred in relating various specimens to taxa which differ significantly. Two examples of this related to a Devonian species in Germany and a Permian species in the United States National Museum of Natural History (USNM) are clarified and illustrated.

Collections of insects in the museums are a part of natural heritage. Their preservation presents complexity, but is relevant for scientific, educational and exposition tasks. The history of entomological researches in the territory of Kemerovo region is described, the problem of discrepancy of data in references on stories of collecting entomological material to the maintenance of museum entomological collections in the region is analyzed.The generalizing research on existence and history of completing of entomological collections in the Region’s museums was never carried out earlier. 6 museums with such materials, the collections of the Department of Zoology and Ecology of Kemerovo State University and a number of private collections were revealed. Also detailed description of large collections of Kemerovo State University (materials of the Museum, the Department of Zoology and Ecology) and the Kemerovo Regional Museum of Local Lore is provided for the first time. The example of particular collections allowed observing the general regularity of merge of private collections with museum funds. Unambiguous leadership of of Kemerovo State University collections in quantity of units of storage and their importance is established. They are actively used and involved in research, educational, exposition and exhibition life of the University and the Region (with active support of private collections).

During the course of fieldwork by a joint Argentine-American expedition to Seymour Island (Elliot et al., 1975) during the austral summer of 1974-1975, a number of brachiopods were collected from the Late Eocene La Meseta Formation. A representative collection of these brachiopods was sent to E. F. Owen, Department of Palaeontology, British Museum (Natural History) for study. Owen (1980) published a revision of the brachiopods from Seymour and nearby Cockburn Islands. The study was based on material collected by W. N. Croft of the Faulkland Islands Dependencies Survey (now British Antarctic Survey) and the material which I sent.

A catalog of types of Neotropical Pierinae at the Department of Entomology, Natural History Museum, London, is presented. The collection contains type material of 324 taxa (296 represented by primary types). Each entry includes the species-group name, followed by the generic name, original combination quoted from the original publication, type locality, type specimens as specified with their labels, and notes about current taxonomic status. To increase the stability of nomenclature, and to fix the identity of several species-group names, lectotypes are designated for 116 taxa.

Laurence Alfred Mound became interested in taxonomy after two postgraduate periods at the British Museum of Natural History (now the Natural History Museum) in London where he discovered biological diversity and the endless variety of living things. While working in Nigeria and the Sudan, and studying variation in whitefly populations, he gained an appreciation for the great differences within species in behavior and morphology under varying environmental conditions. He was appointed to the British Museum of Natural History in 1964 where he worked on the taxonomy of thrips, whiteflies, and aphids until he retired as Keeper of Entomology in 1992. He now lives in Canberra, Australia, serving as an Honorary Research Fellow, CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences at the Black Mountain Campus. Driving questions motivate him and provide insight into his thinking of the natural world: Why are there so many species of insects, yet so few species of thrips? Why so many at one place but so few at another? Do environmental and host plant factors drive the astonishing levels of morphological variation seen in single species? If so why? Why do so few thrips vector plant viruses, but why are those few so successful? Why are so many thrips associated with Acacia trees in Australia but so few on other plants? To address these questions and as part of his ongoing efforts to document the biodiversity of thrips, Laurence Mound has established 90 new Thysanoptera genera, and described 641 new species of thrips. These taxonomic designations are new hypotheses inviting scrutiny and study. At the time this document was written Laurence’s research articles had been cited almost 1,300 times. Here we review Laurence Mound’s career to this point, and we discuss the quality and quantity of his remarkable accomplishments in taxonomy, as well as highlighting his distinctive personal characteristics.

The type specimens of 717 chalcidoid species described by taxonomists from the Department of Zoology, Aligarh Muslim University, India, and their depositories are tabulated. Table 1 lists the holotypes and other type specimens of the species deposited in the Natural History Museum, London, England (BMNH), National Zoological Collections, Zoological Survey of India, Kolkata, India (NZSI), Forest Entomology Division, Forest Research Institute, Dehra Dun, India (FRI), National Pusa Collections, Division of Entomology, Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi, India (NPC), and the Insect Collection, Department of Zoology, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India (ZDAMU). The holotypes and lectotypes of 700 species are distributed as follows: BMNH (175), NZSI (34), FRI (28), NPC (131), and ZDAMU (332). The holotypes of 17 species could not be located in ZDAMU, but all of these species are represented by paratypes. A further 23 species whose types are not located in ZDAMU are listed in Table 2.

Liberonautes chaperi (A. Milne-Edwards, 1887) n. comb. is redescribed from the holotype from Ivory Coast and from new material from Ghana. The present study introduces 12 newly discovered specimens, including 4 males, from the collection of the British Museum (Natural History), London. New evidence from comparisons of gonopod structure leads to a suggested reassignment of this species to the genus Liberonautes Bott, 1955. A key to distinguish between the species of the genus Liberonautes is provided.

Georg Josef Camel (1661–1706) went to the Spanish colony of the Philippine Islands as a Jesuit lay brother in 1687, and he remained there until his death. Throughout his time in the Philippines, Camel collected examples of the flora and fauna, which he drew and described in detail. This paper offers an overview of his life, his publications and the Camel manuscripts, drawings and specimens that are preserved among the Sloane Manuscripts in the British Library and in the Sloane Herbarium at the Natural History Museum, London. It also discusses Camel's links and exchanges with scientifically minded plant collectors and botanists in London, Madras and Batavia. Among those with whom Camel corresponded were John Ray, James Petiver, and the Dutch physician Willem Ten Rhijne.

Globonautes leonensis n.sp. is described from three specimens from Sierra Leone, in the unnamed collection of the British Museum (Natural History), London. Globonautes monodosus Bott, 1959 is revived and redescribed from the holotype from Guinea. The gonopods of the holotype of Globonautes macropus (Rathbun, 1898) from Liberia (the type species of the genus Globonautes Bott, 1959) prove to be different from accounts in the literature, and throw into question the identity of Bott's species. The genus Globonautes is redefined, and a new key to distinguish between the species of the genus is provided.

The New York State Museum was created by State legislation in 1870 out of the old State Cabinet, which held the specimens collected by the State Geological and Natural History Survey, James Hall, then State Geologist and Palaeontologist within the Survey, was named Director of the Museum. Hall's need to possess and study vast quantities of paleontological specimens required space for collections storage and processing. His collections became the major supply of specimens for the Cabinet and eventually the Museum. After the original Survey was disbanded, in the early 1840's, Hall's presence gave the Cabinet a definite geological character. As the chief geological scientist, Hall considered the geological research of the Cabinet and later the Museum as a product of the "Geological Survey of New York," even though no formal designation of such a unit was ever proclaimed by state legislation. After all, other states were forming geological research units similar to Hall's and calling them geological surveys. It made sense for good communications for Hall and his predecessor State Geologists to refer to their staff as the New York State Geological Survey. Eventually, through a series of other legislative acts, most importantly in 1904 and 1945, the Museum was made the formal administrative home for the Geological Survey and, thus, its guardian. Museum Directors, therefore, have had the principle role in determining the fate of geological and paleontological research within the Geological Survey, After 1926, when the first non-geologist became director, the Museum's research scope grew faster in other natural and social history areas, such as botany, entomology, zoology, archaeology, ethnology, and history. This expansion is exemplified by the addition of a State Historian to the Education Department in 1895. During its 150-year history the Geological Survey has moved six times, and it is now housed in the Cultural Education Center in the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza, Albany, New York.

In 1891 Axel Johan Einar Lönnberg became a Doctor of Science and a Fellow of Zoology at the University of Uppsala. From 1904 to 1933, he served as head of the Vertebrate Department of the Royal Natural History Museum of Stockholm where after his expeditions around the world he worked the collected material himself. Although he was specialized in ornithology and the fauna of his homecountry Sweden, Lönnberg worked on so many different zoological groups “that since the days of Linnaeus hardly anyone has known so much about so many branches in zoology as Lönnberg” (Anonymous 1943). One of his special interests was to educate his Swedish countrymen about their native animals and he accomplished this during many years as editor and multiple author of the journal Fauna och Flora.

Captain Edward Belcher was instructed by the Lords of the Admiralty to conduct a Surveying Expedition of the various coasts and islands in the Eastern Seas using H.M.S. Samarang. During this voyage from 1843–1846, Assistant-Surgeon Arthur Adams, made a significant contribution to the collection of natural history specimens, and together with fellow officers J. Richards and W. Browne, he prepared numerous drawings used by Belcher to illustrate the Narrative of the voyage. Later, Adams collaborated with Adam White (an Assistant in the Zoological Branch of the British Museum) to describe the Samarang Crustacea, published jointly with Lovell Reeve on the Samarang Mollusca, edited the Zoology of the voyage of H.M.S. Samarang and was the author of Notes from a Journal of the Natural History which was published in the Narrative of the voyage by Belcher. In his Natural History, Adams provided detailed accounts on some of the crustaceans collected with formal descriptions of species new to science thereby making these names available. The history, nomenclature and validity of the crustacean species cited in this work is discussed and a list of the available names is tabulated.

The proposal by Tarrant et al. (2008) to refer the holotype of Rana hymenopus Boulenger 1920 to Amietia fuscigula isrejected. The holotype has been re-examined and, using external morphological and osteological characters, found to begenerically and specifically distinct from A. fuscigula. We refer the holotype to the genus Strongylopus Tschudi as a validspecies, S. hymenopus. The provenance of this specimen is established as South Africa, presented to the British Museumby Sir Andrew Smith, accessioned in 1858, and currently recognised in the Natural History Museum, London as Bouleng-er’s Rana hymenopus holotype. Some consequences of retrieving the name hymenopus from the synonymy of A. fuscigula are noted.

The bethylid genus Foenobethylus Kieffer, 1913, unstudied for almost a century, is redescribed and assigned to the subfamily Pristocerinae based on a preliminary phylogenetic assessment. Four new species: F. bidentatus n. sp. (Brunei), F. elongatus n. sp. (Malaysia), F. emiliacasellae n. sp. (Thailand), and F. thomascokeri n. sp. (Malaysia) are described, based on males only, as females remain unrecognised in this genus. All specimens are deposited in the Department of Entomology, the Natural History Museum, London, U.K. The type species F. gracilis Kieffer (Philippines), although unrepresented by any traceable specimen, can be distinguished from these species based on the original description. A key to the five known species of Foenobethylus is provided.

We recently proposed a subfamily, Chantiinae Pritchard and Baker, 1962, containing the genera Chantia Pritchard and Baker, 1962 and Diadromus Athias-Henriot, 1960 in the family Phytoseiidae (Chant and Yoshida-Shaul 1986). We have since learned that the genus group name Diadromus Athias-Henriot, 1960 is preoccupied by Diadromus Wesmael (1844) (Insecta: Hymenoptera). The name Chanteius Wainstein, 1962, which was treated in our 1986 paper as a junior objective synonym of Diadromus Athias-Henriot, 1960, therefore becomes the valid name for this genus. In view of this change in nomenclature, the two genera in the subfamily Chantiinae as proposed in our 1986 paper are Chantia Pritchard and Baker and Chanteius Wainstein.We are grateful to Dr. Ian Gauld of the British Museum (Natural History) for having brought this homonymy to our attention.

André Marie Constant Duméril (1774–1860) was at first an anatomist: on August 7, 1799, he was appointed chief of the anatomical works at the Paris Faculty of Medicine. As such, he helped Georges Cuvier in his anatomical researches, and from 1797 onwards he copied out his lectures; later, starting from 1802, he took the place of Cuvier to teach Natural History. Cuvier was grateful and stimulated him to work at the Paris Museum. Cuvier was convincing and effective: on June 16, 1803, he could offer Duméril a position as assistant of Lacepède1, who was head of the herpetological and ichthyological department of zoology. In his turn, Duméril had to be thankful, and he wrote a Traité d’Histoire Naturelle (1804), in which his “friend” Cuvier was greatly acknowledged; the author made clear that this work was a Cuvier’s “order”.

In this paper the primary types of Centris bees described by the British entomologist Frederick Smith deposited in the Natural History Museum, London and in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Oxford, United Kingdom were studied. To stabilize the application of some names, lectotypes were designated for C. agilis, C. apiformis (= C. aenea Lepeletier), C. ardens (= C. varia (Erichson)), C. aterrima, C. cineraria, C. concinna (= C. dentata), C. crassipes, C. dentata, C. difformis, C. discolor, C. elegans, C. ephippium, C. festiva, C. ignita (= C. agilis), C. insignis, C. insularis, C. maculifrons, C. melanochlaena, C. mexicana, C. modesta, C. nitida, C. perforator, C. personata (= C. longimana Fabricius), C. plumipes, C. rubella (= C. ferruginea Lepeletier), C. semicaerulea, C. simillima, C. tarsata, C. thoracica (= C. domingensis Dalla Torre) and Anthophora dimidiata (= C. nigerrima (Spinola)). Centris perforator nom. rev. and C. modesta nom. rev. are withdrawn from the synonymy of C. fuscata Lepeletier and C. obsoleta Lepeletier respectively, and consequently revalidated. Centris fulviventris Cresson and C. simillima are removed from the synonymy of C. lanipes (Fabricius), proposing the revalidation of the first species and the second one as its new junior synonym. Centris insignis and C. insignis scutellaris Friese are proposed as new junior synonyms of C. laticincta (Spinola). The critical study of the primary type of C. aterrima, for a long time a misidentified species, allowed for proposing C. anomala Snelling as its new junior synonym. As result of this synonymy, C. apache new species is here described based on specimens incorrectly considered as belonging to C. aterrima. In addition, a lectotype for Centris clypeata Friese (= C. nigrocaerulea Smith) is also designated.

The life of Vadym Oleksandrovych Topachevsky and his contribution to the development of science is considered. V. O. Topachevsky was the most famous palaeomammalogist of Eastern Europe, long-term head of the palaeontological department of the now National Museum of Natural History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, director of Schmalhausen Institute of Zoology of the Ukrainian SSR, founder and editor-in-chief of a number of important Ukrainian zoological publications, and academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Vadym Oleksandrovych was at the origins of systematic palaeontological expeditions to key sites of the Quaternary period, participated in the development of serial collections of small mammals and of the research techniques of faunal complexes based on the analysis of samples characterising the micromammal fauna of a particular section. Research by V. O. Topachevsky is devoted to such fundamental branches of zoology as taxonomy, phylogenetics, historical faunistics, evolutionary morphology, and zoogeography. The scientist paid much attention to biostratigraphy and palaeogeography. He solved complex issues of taxonomy and parataxonomy in relation to extinct and modern representatives of fauna, justified the establishing of a number of new to science taxa of extinct mammals. Among the outstanding achievements of Vadym Topachevsky of great importance is the creation of a comprehensive association scheme of development of communities, which explains the changes in the fauna of small mammals of the late Pliocene, Eopleistocene and Pleistocene of the Northern Black Sea Region, as well as the development and justification of the biozonal stratigraphic scheme of the late Miocene and Pliocene of the Eastern Paratethys. He is the author of 8 monographs and supervisor of 11 candidate and 2 doctoral dissertations. Vadym Oleksandrovych formed a powerful scientific department and prepared a worthy scientific change, the works of which are well known to specialists. His achievements were awarded the Order of the Badge of Honor, the titles of Academician of the NAS of Ukraine, Honoured Worker of Science and Technology of Ukraine, and he won the I. I. Schmalhausen Prize of the NAS of Ukraine. The palaeontological exhibition of the National Museum of Natural History NAS of Ukraine was named after the scientist in 2005. The list of Vadym Topachevsky’s main scientific works is given as well.

The turbulent history of Warsaw resulted in great losses in Polish zoological museums and archives especially during First and Second World War (Kazubski 1996; Fedorowicz & Feliksiak 2016). However, before 1939 Warsaw’s zoological collection deposited in the State Zoological Museum (now called: the Museum and Institute of Zoology Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw—MIZ PAS), especially the department of neotropics, used to be one of the best developed and well cataloged collections in Europe. There were also many holotypes of mammal species stored here after Polish expeditions to the neotropics. As a result of these events current bibliography and on-line databases (GBIF, VertNet) up to now did not mention the location of holotypes of collected taxa or even recognize them as missing (Ramírez-Chavez et al. 2014; Patton et al. 2015). We reviewed the collection to estimate the presence and status of the surviving descriptive types (holotypes). The aim of this study was to order our knowledge about the holotypes taking into account especially information about lost specimens and to explain the contradictory information about their status in the present. In 2015–2016 all type specimens in the MIZ PAS collection of neotropical mammals were revised. During revision relevant information from specimen labels was compared with the data provided in the original descriptions contained in publications from the end of nineteenth century (Taczanowski 1881; Thomas 1884; Stolzmann 1885; Thomas 1893; 1894). The results were compared with the collection databases of the Natural History Museum in London (http://data.nhm.ac.uk). Systematics and species nomenclature were followed by Wilson & Reeder (2005). Zoological nomenclature types were followed by International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN). The results of the revision are presented as a systematic list.

The collection of diplopods identified by H. Lohmander during his visit to Kyiv in 1927 was considered to be lost, but it is rediscovered now in the Zoological Department of the National Museum of Natural History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv). It includes syntypes of two species and two subspecies that were described from Kyiv and its vicinities and are still valid with one former subspecies currently recognized in species status: Brachyiulus jawlowskii Lohmander, 1928, Leptoiulus semenkevitschi Lohmander, 1928, Megaphyllum kievense (Lohmander, 1928) and Polydesmus montanus ukrainicus Lohmander, 1928. Findings of L. semenkevitschi and P. m. ukrainicus are especially valuable, because there are no other specimens in known collections and both taxa are officially protected in Ukraine by its Red Book. Catalogue of syntypes is provided with high quality photos. The list of 31 millipedes species from Kyiv and its vicinities in the Lohmander’s collection provided with his identifications and notes on current taxonomical status is given.

The Swedish marine nematologist Carl Allgén (1886–1960) published 185 scientific papers on parasitic, terrestrial, limnic and especially marine nematodes between 1921 and 1960. Among them are also some papers on species of suctorians found mostly on desmodorid nematodes. He described about 70 new genera and over 800 new species and subspecies of nematodes. Allgén left a large collection of nematodes to the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm and it is now deposited in the invertebrate collection of the Zoology department. The collection comprises about 4500 slides in total, with about 310 slides containing type specimens collected from the Arctic to Antarctica. Allgén’s publications have to a large extent been ignored by scientists working on marine nematodes, likely because of the poor quality of many of his species descriptions. The authors want to remind the scientific community about the existence of Allgén's collection, its availability for study and its importance for nematode taxonomy and systematics. A complete list of Allgén’s publications, a list of all species described by him, and a list of type material available is presented.

The facts and figures related to the 80-year history of formation and development of the Faculty of Chemistry and Biology of Ternopil Volodymyr Hnatiuk National Pedagogical University are provided. The main stages of foundation, development of the faculty, achievements of the teaching staff in educational and research work are highlighted. The structural elements of the faculty are characterized: the department of botany and zoology, general biology and methods of instruction of natural sciences, chemistry and methods of its teaching, laboratory of biology and ecology “Holytskyi botany and entomology preserve of the university", agrobiological laboratory, “Educational laboratory of morphology and systematics of plants - herbarium”, educational and methodical room “Zoological Museum”, laboratory of ecobiotechnologies and basics of health, laboratory of experimental biology, Botanical Garden, within which the Biblical Botanical Garden was launched in 2019. The following qualifications and majors are enlisted, in particular: bachelor’s degree - 014 Secondary education (Biology), 014 Secondary education (Biology and human health), 014 Secondary education (Chemistry), 014 Secondary education (Natural sciences), 202 Plant protection and quarantine; master’s degree - 014 Secondary education (Biology and human health), 014 Secondary education (Chemistry), 014 Secondary education (Natural sciences), 091 Biology, 102 Chemistry. Considerable attention is paid to scientific work, in particular research laboratories: cytoembryology, plant physiology and microbiology, ecological biochemistry, comparative biochemistry and molecular biology, ecology and biotechnology, ecotoxicology and bioindication, chemistry of unsaturated compounds, as well as scientific and methodological center of natural sciences. It should be emphasized that the faculty creates ample opportunities for postgraduate work, and PhD studies both TNPU-based and in other educational and scientific institutions, as well as for scientific publications in «Scientific Notes of Ternopil Volodymyr Hnatiuk National Pedagogical University. Series: Biology.» (category B) and “Scientific notes of Ternopil Volodymyr Hnatiuk National Pedagogical University. Series: Chemistry ". Career counselling is an integral part of work carried out at the faculty. Prospects for further development of the faculty are outlined.

A complete taxonomic catalogue of the Stick and Leaf-insects (Phasmatodea) recorded or described from the mainland China (excluding Taiwan) is presented. 241 valid species are listed, which are currently attributed to 50 genera, 5 families and 7 subfamilies. Genera and species are listed alphabetically. All available type-data is provided based mainly on literary sources for species described by Chinese workers from 1986 to 2006, including documented depository of typespecimens. The catalogue therefore also provides complete lists of the type-material of Phasmatodea housed in the following Chinese institutions: Administration of Baishuijiang Natural Reserve (ABNR), Beijing Forestry University, Beijing (BFU), China Agricultural University, Beijing (CAU), Geological Museum of China, Beijing (GMC), Inca Science Ltd., Chongqing (INCA), Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing (IZCAS), Department of Biology, Nankai University, Tianjin (NKU), Northwest Sci-Tech University of Agriculture and Forestry, Shaanxi (NWAU), Institute of Zoology, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an (SNU), Institute of Entomology, Sun Yat-sen University (ICRI), Shanghai Institute of Entomology, Academia Sinica, Shanghai (SIES), Tianjin Natural History Museum, Tianjin (TMNH), Zhejiang Museum of Natural History, Hangzhou (ZMNH). The known distribution of each species, inmeans of provinces is provided as well. 14 species are shown to have been recorded from China in error, several of these based on misidentifications. The “Phasmatodea-like” fossil taxa described from the Late Jurassic Yixian Formation of North Hebei and West Liaoning are listed in a separate section. Two new generic synonyms are recognized: Arthminotus Bi, 1995 synonymised with Lopaphus Westwood, 1859 (n. syn.) and Dianphasma Chen & He, 1997 synonymised with Parasosibia Redtenbacher, 1908 (n. syn.). The genus Linocerus Gray, 1835 (Type-species: Linocerus gracilis Gray, 1835) was erroneously synonymised with the mediterranean Bacillus St. Fargeau & Audinet-Serville, 1825 and is here re-established in Phasmatidae: Pachymorphinae: Gratidiini (rev. stat.). Relationship to Clonaria Stål, 1875 (= Gratidia Stål, 1875, = Paraclonaria Brunner v. Wattenwyl, 1893), Sceptrophasma Brock & Seow-Choen, 2000 and Macellina Uvarov, 1940 is obvious. 21 species are transferred to other genera (new combinations): Asceles dilatatus Chen & He, 2004 and Asceles quadriguttatus Chen & He, 1996 to Pachyscia Redtenbacher, 1908, Arthminotus sinensis Bi, 1995 to Lopaphus Westwood, 1859, Baculum dolichocercatum Bi & Wang, 1998 and Baculum politum Chen & He, 1997 to Medauroidea Zompro, 1999, Dixippus hainanensis Chen & He, 2002, Dixippus huapingensis Bi & Li, 1991, Dixippus nigroantennatus Chen & He, 2002, Dixippus parvus Chen & He, 2002 and Entoria bobaiensis Chen, 1986 to Lonchodes Gray, 1835, Sipyloidea obvius Chen & He, 1995 to Sinophasma Günther, 1940, Paramyronides biconiferus Bi, 1993, Paramyronides leishanensis Bi, 1992, Lonchodes chinensis Brunner v. Wattenwyl, 1907, Lonchodes confucius Westwood, 1859 and Phasgania glabra Günther, 1940 to Phraortes Stål, 1875, Gratidia bituberculata Redtenbacher, 1889 and Leptynia xinganensis Chen & He, 1993 to Sceptrophasma Brock & Seow-Choen, 2002, Prosentoria bannaensis Chen & He, 1997 to Paraentoria Chen & He, 1997, and Mantis squeleton Olivier, 1792 to Phanocloidea Zompro, 2002. Acrophylla sichuanensis Chen & He, 2001 remains of unknown generic assignment, but is shown to be not a member of the Australian genus Acrophylla Gray, 1835. Furthermore, as Baculum Saussure, 1861 is a neotropical genus and most Old World species previously attributed to this genus are now listed in Ramulus Saussure, 1861, all Chinese species described in Baculum Saussure are consequently transferred to Ramulus Saussure. Other changes of specific placements are based on published literature and concern to the following three synonymies not recognized by Chinese workers: Abrosoma Redtenbacher, 1906 (= Prosceles Uvarov, 1940), Necroscia Audinet-Serville, 1838 (= Aruanoidea Redtenbacher, 1908), Lopaphus Westwood, 1859 (= Paramyronides Redtenbacher, 1908). Megalophasma Bi, 1995 is transferred from Necrosciinae to Lonchodinae. Four lectotypes are designated and three new specific synonyms revealed. A lectotype is designated for Rhamphophasma modestus Brunner v. Wattenwyl, 1893, the type-species of Rhamphophasma Brunner v. Wattenwyl, 1893, in order to fix this genus and species. The male paralectotype is shown to be a male of Parapachymorpha nigra Brunner v. Wattenwyl, 1893, the type-species of Parapachymorpha Brunner v. Wattenwyl, 1893. Clitumnus porrectus Brunner v. Wattenwyl, 1907 is synonymised with Bacillus ? artemis Westwood, 1859 and a lectotype designated for the former (n. syn.). A lectotype is designated for Oxyartes lamellatus Kirby, 1904 in order to fix this taxon and confirm the synonymy established by Dohrn, 1910 (= Oxyartes honestus Redtenbacher, 1908, = Oxyartes spinosissimus Carl, 1913). Paracentema stephanus Redtenbacher, 1908 is shown to have been erroneously synonymised with Neohirasea japonica (de Haan, 1842) and here synonymised with Neohirasea maerens (Brunner v. Wattenwyl, 1907) (n. syn.). In order to fix this new synonymy a lectotype is designated for Paracentema stephanus Redtenbacher, 1908. Finally, a biogeographic analysis of the Chinese phasmid fauna is presented. This includes brief background information on the topography and biogeography of China along with maps showing the seven zoogeographical subregions currently recognized as well as the 4 municipalities, 23 provinces, 5 autonomous regions and 2 special administrative regions of China. A summary of the taxonomic compilation of the fauna is provided and its relationships with neighbouring regions, of both the Palaearctic and Oriental realms, are discussed. A study is presented on the distribution of the taxa and species densities of each province / autonomous region. Recent ecological studies are summarized and list of the host plants of 42 different species attached. The pest status of certain species which have become of serious importance for agriculture in China is briefly summarized based on literary sources.

This paper provides a quantitative and general description of the Lyell Collection kept in the Department of Earth Sciences at the Natural History Museum of London. This collection started to be built by the eminent British geologist Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875) in 1846 when the first specimen reached the Museum. The last one entered in 1980 donated by one of Lyell’s heirs. There are more than 1700 specimens, mainly hand specimens with 93% of the fauna and flora from the Cenozoic of the Macaronesian archipelagos of the Canaries and Madeira. Those specimens that belong to the Lyell Collection with certainty have been databased and imaged. Currently they are being geo-referred automatically with the rest of the site geo-references at the NHM. This collection could be increased by a couple of dozen more specimens with those specimens located in the same drawers, but they do not have collector details. The work of data collection of these specimens was implemented over a year from 2016 to 2017, including annelids; brachiopods; bryozoans; echinoderms; scyphozoans; bivalves; gastropods; scaphopods; trilobites; plants; reptiles; fishes; and mammals. Access to the specimen-level data is available through the NHM data portal with the images associated. This is the first time that a description of the Fossil Lyell Collection dataset is available in the literature.

George Taylor was a major British figure in flowering plant taxonomy during the period from 1930 to 1970. A Scot, he was trained at Edinburgh University and was first employed (in 1928) in the Botany Department of the British Museum (Natural History) as assistant in the herbarium, then as Deputy Keeper of Botany and finally as Keeper, coming into contact with all the influential currents of plant taxonomy of his day. This experience, coupled with his life-long interest in gardening, made him the ideal person to become Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew when Sir Edward Salisbury retired in 1956. Taylor spent 15 very active years at Kew, and then, at an age when most are thinking of retiring, took on a new career as Director of the Stanley Smith Horticultural Trust, a post which he held for 18 years until illness made it impossible for him to continue. Over this long period, his influence on flowering plant taxonomy and gardening in Britain and abroad was enormous and widely recognized.

Geoscience collections have data needs that are broadly consistent with, but differ in important ways from, biology collections. Non-paleontology geoscience collections have received particularly little attention because they do not fit easily into the biodiversity framework that encompasses most natural history collections. Here we describe efforts to apply controlled vocabularies to the rock, mineral, and meteorite collections of the Department of Mineral Sciences in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. Controlled vocabularies encourage consistency in usage of terms, connect related terms and concepts, and simplify discovery and re-use of data. Developing and implementing vocabularies for geoscience collections is a key step in better integrating these collections into the broader natural history landscape. The Mineral Sciences collections contain approximately 450,000 specimens collected over 150 years. Specimen records therefore contain a large number of archaic terms and vary widely in the quality and amount of descriptive metadata available. We targeted four fields judged most likely to benefit from using a vocabulary: rock/mineral classification (using terms from the British Geological Survey Rock Classification Scheme, the International Mineralogicial Association's list of minerals, and other sources); rock microstructure (using terms from GeoScience Markup Language, or GeoSciML); stratigraphy (using MacroStrat); and collection locality (using terms from GeoNames and the Global Volcanism Program). This process highlighted many of the challenges of grafting vocabularies onto existing data of varying age and quality, including: A lack of comprehensive, widely used vocabularies for geosciences Ambiguities in usage between the specimen database and the controlled vocabulary Widespread use of archaic terms that must be defined or replaced Difficulty shoehorning vocabularies into databases not designed to accommodate them Tension between the needs of data management and collection management A lack of comprehensive, widely used vocabularies for geosciences Ambiguities in usage between the specimen database and the controlled vocabulary Widespread use of archaic terms that must be defined or replaced Difficulty shoehorning vocabularies into databases not designed to accommodate them Tension between the needs of data management and collection management Even with these difficulties, implementing vocabularies has made it easier to retrieve and interpret specimen data, especially for queries of rock/mineral classification and locality information, and is a useful step in encouraging wider use of data from the collections.

Well, you couldn't control the situation to that extent. The world just comes in on top of you. It creeps under the door. It falls out of the sky. It's all around. (Leunig) Like the world that cartoonist Michael Leunig describes, ambience is all around. Everywhere you go. You cannot get away from it. You cannot hide from it. You cannot be without it. For ambience is that which surrounds us, that which pervades. Always-on. Always by-your-side. Always already. Here, there and everywhere. Super-surround-sound. Immersive. Networked and cloudy. Ubiquitous. Although you cannot avoid ambience, you may ignore it. In fact, ambience is almost as ignored as it is pervasive. For the most part, our attention is given over to what’s in front of us, what we pick up, what we handle, what is in focus. Instead of ambience, our phenomenal existence is governed by what we bring into the foreground of our lives. Our attention is, almost by definition, occupied not by what is ambient, but what is salient (Jaaniste, Approaching Ch. 1). So, when Brian Eno coined the term Ambient Music in the 1970s (see Burns; Radywyl; and Ensminger in this issue), he was doing something strange. He was bringing ambience, as an idea and in its palpable sonic dimension, into salience. The term, and the penchant for attuning and re-thinking our connections to our surroundings, caught on. By the end of the twentieth century, it was deemed by one book author worthy of being called the ambient century (Prendergast). Eno is undoubtedly the great populariser of the term, but there’s a backstory to ambience. If Spitzer’s detailed semantic analysis of ‘ambience’ and its counterpart ‘milieu’ published back in the 1940s is anything to go by, then Newtonian physics had a lot to do with how ambience entered into our Modern vernacular. Isaac Newton’s laws and theories of gravity and the cosmos offered up a quandary for science back then: vast amounts of empty space. Just like we now know that most of an atom is empty space, within which a few miserly electrons, protons, neutrons and other particle fly about (and doesn’t that seem weird given how solid everything feels?) so too it is with planets, stars, galaxies whose orbits traverse through the great vacuum of the universe. And that vacuum Newton called ambience. But maybe outer-space, and ambience, is not actually empty. There could be dark matter everywhere. Or other things not yet known, observed or accounted for. Certainly, the history of our thinking around ambience since its birth in physics has seen a shift from vacuity to great density and polyphony. Over time, several ‘spaces’ became associated with ambience, which we might think of as the great scapes of our contemporary lives: the natural environment, the built environment, the social world, the aesthetic worlds encountered ‘within’ artefacts, and the data-cloud. Now is not the time or place to give a detailed history of these discursive manoeuvres (although some key clues are given in Spizter; and also Jaaniste, Approaching). But a list of how the term has been taken up after Eno–across the arts, design, media and culture–reveals the broad tenets of ambience or, perhaps, the ambience of ambience. Nowadays we find talk of (in alphabetical order): ambient advertising (Quinion), aesthetics (Foster), architecture (CNRS; Sample), art (Desmarias; Heynen et al.), calculus (Cardelli), displays (Ambient Displays Reserch Group; Lund and Mikael; Vogel and Balakrishnan), fears (Papastergiadis), findability (Morville), informatics (Morville), intelligence (Weber et al.), media (Meeks), narratives (Levin), news (Hagreaves and Thomas), poetics (Morton), television (McCarthy), and video (Bizzocchi). There’s probably more. Time, then, to introduce the authors assembled for this special ‘ambient’ issue of M/C Journal. Writing from the globe, in Spain, Ukraine, Canada, United Sates, and New Zealand, and from cities across Australia, in Melbourne, Canberra and Perth, they draw on and update the ambience of ambience. Alison Bartlett, in our feature article, begins with bodies of flesh (and sweat and squinting) and bodies of thought (including Continental theory). She draws us into a personal, present tense and tensely present account of the way writing and thinking intertwine with our physical locality. The heat, light and weathered conditions of her place of writing, now Perth and previously Townsville, are evoked, as is some sort of teased out relation with Europe. If we are always immersed in our ambient conditions, does this effect and affect everything we do, and think? Bruce Arnold and Margalit Levin then shift gear, from the rural and natural to the densely mediated contemporary urban locale. Urban ambience, as they say, is no longer about learning to avoid (or love?) harsh industrial noises, but it’s about interactivity, surveillance and signalling. They ambivalently present the ambient city as a dialectic, where feeling connected and estranged go hand-in-hand. Next we explore one outcome or application of the highly mediated, iPhone and Twitter-populated city. Alfred Hermida has previously advanced the idea of ‘ambient journalism’ (Hermida, Twittering), and in his M/C Journal piece he outlines the shift from ambient news (which relies on multiple distribution points, but which relays news from a few professional sources) to a journalism that is ambiently distributed across citizens and non-professional para-journalists. Alex Burns takes up Hermida’s framework, but seeks to show how professional journalism might engage in complex ways with Twitter and other always-on, socially-networked data sources that make up the ‘awareness system’ of ambient journalism. Burns ends his provocative paper by suggesting that the creative processes of Brian Eno might be a model for flexible approaches to working with the ambient data fields of the Internet and social grid. Enter the data artist, the marginal doodler and the darkened museum. Pau Waelder examines the way artists have worked with data fields, helping us to listen, observe and embody what is normally ignored. David Ensminger gives a folklorist-inspired account of the way doodles occupy the ambient margins of our minds, personalities and book pages. And Natalia Radywyl navigates the experiences of those who encountered the darkened and ambiguously ambient Screen Gallery of the Australian Centre for Moving Image, and ponders on what this mean for the ‘new museum’. If the experience of doodles and darkened galleries is mainly an individual thing, the final two papers delve into the highly social forms of ambience. Pauline Cheong explores how one particular type of community, Christian churches in the United States, has embraced (and sometimes critiqued) the use of Twitter to facilitate the communal ambience, 140 characters at a time. Then Christine Teague with Lelia Green and David Leith report on the working lives of transit officers on duty on trains in Perth. This is a tough ambience, where issues of safety, fear, confusion and control impact on these workers as much as they try to influence the ambience of a public transport network. The final paper gives us something to pause on: ambience might be an interesting topic, but the ambience of some people and some places might be unpalatable or despairing. Ambience is morally ambivalent (it can be good, bad or otherwise), and this is something threading through many of the papers before us. Who gets to control our ambient surrounds? Who gets to influence them? Who gets to enjoy them, take advantage of them, ignore them? For better or worse. The way we live with, connect to and attune to the ambience of our lives might be crucially important. It might change us. And it might do so on many levels. As is now evident, all the great scapes, as I called them, have been taken up in this issue. We begin with the natural environment (Bartlett’s weather) and the urban built environment (Arnold and Levin; and also Radywyl). Then we enter the data-cloud (Herminda; Burns; Waelder, and also Cheong), shifting into the aesthetic artefact (Waelder; Ensminger; Radywyl), and then into the social sphere (Cheong; Teague, Green and Leith). Of course, all these scapes, and the authors’ concerns, overlap. Ambience is a multitude, and presses into us and through us in many ways. References Ambient Displays Research Group. “Ambient Displays Research Group.” 25 July 2006 ‹http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/CS/io/ambient/›. Bizzocchi, Jim. “Ambient Video: The Transformation of the Domestic Cinematic Experience.” Media Environments and the Liberal Arts Conference, 10-13 June 2004, Rochester Institute of Technology, New York. 26 July 2006 ‹http://www.dadaprocessing.com› [third version of this essay]. Cardelli, Luca. “Mobility and Security.” Lecture notes for Marktoberdorf Summer School 1999, summarising several Ambient Calculus papers by Luca Cardelli & Andrew Gordon. Foundations of Secure Computation. Eds. Friedrich L. Bauer and Ralf Steinbrüggen. NATO Science Series. Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Foundations of Secure Computation, Marktoberdorf, Germany, 27 July - 8 Aug. 1999. 3-37. ‹http://lucacardelli.name/Papers/Mobility%20and%20Security.A4.pdf›. CNRS. “UMR CNRS 1563: Ambiances architecturales et urbaines”. 2007. 9 Feb. 2007 ‹http://www.archi.fr/RECHERCHE/annuaireg/pdf/UMR1563.pdf›. Desmarias, Charles. “Nothing Compared to This: Ambient, Incidental and New Minimal Tendencies in Contemporary Art.” Catalogue essay for exhibition curated by Charles Desmarais at Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, 25 Sep. - 28 Nov. 2004. Foster, Cheryl. “The Narrative and the Ambient in Environmental Aesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism 56.2 (Spring 1998): 127-137. Hargreaves, Ian, and James Thomas. “New News, Old News.” ITC/BSC (October 2002). 3 May 2010 ‹http://legacy.caerdydd.ac.uk/jomec/resources/news.pdf›. Herminda, Alfred. “Twittering the News: The Emergence of Ambient Journalism.” Journalism Practice (11 March 2010). 3 May 2010 ‹http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a919807525›. Heynen, Julian, Kasper Konig, and Stefani Jansen. Ambiance: Des deux cơtes du Rhin. To accompany an exhibition of the same name at K21 Kuntstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf, 15 Oct. 2005 – 12 Feb. 2006. Köln: Snoeck. Jaaniste, Luke. Approaching the Ambient: Creative Practice and the Ambient Mode of Being. Doctoral thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2007. 3 May 2010 ‹http://www.lukejaaniste.com/writings/phd›. Leunig, Michael. “Michael Leunig”. Enough Rope with Andrew Denton. ABC Television, 8 May 2006. 3 May 2010 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/transcripts/s1632918.htm›. Lund, Andreas, and Mikael Wiberg. “Ambient Displays beyond Convention.” HCI 2004, The 18th British HCI Group Annual Conference, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, 6-10 Sep. 2004. 18 Oct. 2005 ‹http://www.informatik.umu.se/~mwiberg/designingforattention_workshop_lund_wiberg.pdf›. Manovich, Lev. “Soft Cinema: Ambient Narratives.” Catalogue for the Soft Cinema Project presented at Future Cinema: The Cinemtic Imaginary after Film at ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, 16 Nov. 2002 - 30 March 2003. McCarthy, Anna. Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. Meeks, Cyan. Ambient Media: Meanings and Implications. Masters of Fine Arts thesis, Graduate School of the State University of New York, Department of Media Study, August 2005. Morton, Timothy. “Why Ambient Poetics?: Outline for a Depthless Ecology.” The Wordsworth Circle 33.1 (Winter 2002): 52-56. Morville, Peter. Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become. O’Reilly Media, 2005. Papastergiadis, Nikos. “Ambient Fears.” Artlink 32.1 (2003): 28-34. Prendergast, Mark. The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Trance, the Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age. London: Bloomsbury, 2000. Quinion, Michael. “Ambient Advertising.” World Wide Words 5 Sep. 1998. 3 Aug. 2006 ‹http://www.worldwidewords.org/turnsofphrase/tp-amb1.htm›. Sample, Hilary. “Ambient Architecture: An Environmental Monitoring Station for Pasadena, California.” 306090 07: Landscape with Architecture. 306090 Architecture Journal 7 (Sep. 2004): 200-210. Spitzer, Leo. “Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics (Part 2).” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3.2 (Dec. 1942): 169–218. Vogel, Daniel, and Ravin Balakrishnan. “Interactive Public Ambient Displays: Transitioning from Implicit to Explicit, Public to Personal, Interaction with Multiple Users.” Proceedings of the 18th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. Large Public Displays session, Santa Fe. New York: ACM Press. 137-146. Weber, W., J.M. Rabaey, and E. Aarts. Eds. Ambient Intelligence. Berlin: Springer, 2005.

Special Care Notice This article contains images of deceased people that might cause sadness or distress to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers. Introduction Like many cities, Perth was founded on wetlands that have been integral to its history and culture (Seddon 226–32). However, in order to promote a settlement agenda, early mapmakers sought to erase the city’s wetlands from cartographic depictions (Giblett, Cities). Since the colonial era, inner-Perth’s swamps and lakes have been drained, filled, significantly reduced in size, or otherwise reclaimed for urban expansion (Bekle). Not only have the swamps and lakes physically disappeared, the memories of their presence and influence on the city’s development over time are also largely forgotten. What was the site of Perth, specifically its wetlands, like before British settlement? In 2014, an interdisciplinary team at Edith Cowan University developed a digital visualisation process to re-imagine Perth prior to colonisation. This was based on early maps of the Swan River Colony and a range of archival information. The images depicted the city’s topography, hydrology, and vegetation and became the centerpiece of a physical exhibition entitled Re-imagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands and a virtual exhibition hosted by the Western Australian Museum. Alongside historic maps, paintings, photographs, and writings, the visual reconstruction of Perth aimed to foster appreciation of the pre-settlement environment—the homeland of the Whadjuck Nyoongar, or Bibbulmun, people (Carter and Nutter). The exhibition included the narrative of Fanny Balbuk, a Nyoongar woman who voiced her indignation over the “usurping of her beloved home ground” (Bates, The Passing 69) by flouting property lines and walking through private residences to reach places of cultural significance. Beginning with Balbuk’s story and the digital tracing of her walking route through colonial Perth, this article discusses the project in the context of contemporary pressures on the city’s extant wetlands. The re-imagining of Perth through historically, culturally, and geographically-grounded digital visualisation approaches can inspire the conservation of its wetlands heritage. Balbuk’s Walk through the City For many who grew up in Perth, Fanny Balbuk’s perambulations have achieved legendary status in the collective cultural imagination. In his memoir, David Whish-Wilson mentions Balbuk’s defiant walks and the lighting up of the city for astronaut John Glenn in 1962 as the two stories that had the most impact on his Perth childhood. From Gordon Stephenson House, Whish-Wilson visualises her journey in his mind’s eye, past Government House on St Georges Terrace (the main thoroughfare through the city centre), then north on Barrack Street towards the railway station, the site of Lake Kingsford where Balbuk once gathered bush tucker (4). He considers the footpaths “beneath the geometric frame of the modern city […] worn smooth over millennia that snake up through the sheoak and marri woodland and into the city’s heart” (Whish-Wilson 4). Balbuk’s story embodies the intertwined culture and nature of Perth—a city of wetlands. Born in 1840 on Heirisson Island, Balbuk (also known as Yooreel) (Figure 1) had ancestral bonds to the urban landscape. According to Daisy Bates, writing in the early 1900s, the Nyoongar term Matagarup, or “leg deep,” denotes the passage of shallow water near Heirisson Island where Balbuk would have forded the Swan River (“Oldest” 16). Yoonderup was recorded as the Nyoongar name for Heirisson Island (Bates, “Oldest” 16) and the birthplace of Balbuk’s mother (Bates, “Aboriginal”). In the suburb of Shenton Park near present-day Lake Jualbup, her father bequeathed to her a red ochre (or wilgi) pit that she guarded fervently throughout her life (Bates, “Aboriginal”).Figure 1. Group of Aboriginal Women at Perth, including Fanny Balbuk (far right) (c. 1900). Image Credit: State Library of Western Australia (Image Number: 44c). Balbuk’s grandparents were culturally linked to the site. At his favourite camp beside the freshwater spring near Kings Park on Mounts Bay Road, her grandfather witnessed the arrival of Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Irwin, cousin of James Stirling (Bates, “Fanny”). In 1879, colonial entrepreneurs established the Swan Brewery at this significant locale (Welborn). Her grandmother’s gravesite later became Government House (Bates, “Fanny”) and she protested vociferously outside “the stone gates guarded by a sentry [that] enclosed her grandmother’s burial ground” (Bates, The Passing 70). Balbuk’s other grandmother was buried beneath Bishop’s Grove, the residence of the city’s first archibishop, now Terrace Hotel (Bates, “Aboriginal”). Historian Bob Reece observes that Balbuk was “the last full-descent woman of Kar’gatta (Karrakatta), the Bibbulmun name for the Mount Eliza [Kings Park] area of Perth” (134). According to accounts drawn from Bates, her home ground traversed the area between Heirisson Island and Perth’s north-western limits. In Kings Park, one of her relatives was buried near a large, hollow tree used by Nyoongar people like a cistern to capture water and which later became the site of the Queen Victoria Statue (Bates, “Aboriginal”). On the slopes of Mount Eliza, the highest point of Kings Park, at the western end of St Georges Terrace, she harvested plant foods, including zamia fruits (Macrozamia riedlei) (Bates, “Fanny”). Fanny Balbuk’s knowledge contributed to the native title claim lodged by Nyoongar people in 2006 as Bennell v. State of Western Australia—the first of its kind to acknowledge Aboriginal land rights in a capital city and part of the larger Single Nyoongar Claim (South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council et al.). Perth’s colonial administration perceived the city’s wetlands as impediments to progress and as insalubrious environments to be eradicated through reclamation practices. For Balbuk and other Nyoongar people, however, wetlands were “nourishing terrains” (Rose) that afforded sustenance seasonally and meaning perpetually (O’Connor, Quartermaine, and Bodney). Mary Graham, a Kombu-merri elder from Queensland, articulates the connection between land and culture, “because land is sacred and must be looked after, the relation between people and land becomes the template for society and social relations. Therefore all meaning comes from land.” Traditional, embodied reliance on Perth’s wetlands is evident in Bates’ documentation. For instance, Boojoormeup was a “big swamp full of all kinds of food, now turned into Palmerston and Lake streets” (Bates, “Aboriginal”). Considering her cultural values, Balbuk’s determination to maintain pathways through the increasingly colonial Perth environment is unsurprising (Figure 2). From Heirisson Island: a straight track had led to the place where once she had gathered jilgies [crayfish] and vegetable food with the women, in the swamp where Perth railway station now stands. Through fences and over them, Balbuk took the straight track to the end. When a house was built in the way, she broke its fence-palings with her digging stick and charged up the steps and through the rooms. (Bates, The Passing 70) One obstacle was Hooper’s Fence, which Balbuk broke repeatedly on her trips to areas between Kings Park and the railway station (Bates, “Hooper’s”). Her tenacious commitment to walking ancestral routes signifies the friction between settlement infrastructure and traditional Nyoongar livelihood during an era of rapid change. Figure 2. Determination of Fanny Balbuk’s Journey between Yoonderup (Heirisson Island) and Lake Kingsford, traversing what is now the central business district of Perth on the Swan River (2014). Image background prepared by Dimitri Fotev. Track interpolation by Jeff Murray. Project Background and Approach Inspired by Fanny Balbuk’s story, Re-imagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands began as an Australian response to the Mannahatta Project. Founded in 1999, that project used spatial analysis techniques and mapping software to visualise New York’s urbanised Manhattan Island—or Mannahatta as it was called by indigenous people—in the early 1600s (Sanderson). Based on research into the island’s original biogeography and the ecological practices of Native Americans, Mannahatta enabled the public to “peel back” the city’s strata, revealing the original composition of the New York site. The layers of visuals included rich details about the island’s landforms, water systems, and vegetation. Mannahatta compelled Rod Giblett, a cultural researcher at Edith Cowan University, to develop an analogous model for visualising Perth circa 1829. The idea attracted support from the City of Perth, Landgate, and the University. Using stories, artefacts, and maps, the team—comprising a cartographer, designer, three-dimensional modelling expert, and historical researchers—set out to generate visualisations of the landscape at the time of British colonisation. Nyoongar elder Noel Nannup approved culturally sensitive material and contributed his perspective on Aboriginal content to include in the exhibition. The initiative’s context remains pressing. In many ways, Perth has become a template for development in the metropolitan area (Weller). While not unusual for a capital, the rate of transformation is perhaps unexpected in a city less than 200 years old (Forster). There also remains a persistent view of existing wetlands as obstructions to progress that, once removed, are soon forgotten (Urban Bushland Council). Digital visualisation can contribute to appreciating environments prior to colonisation but also to re-imagining possibilities for future human interactions with land, water, and space. Despite the rapid pace of change, many Perth area residents have memories of wetlands lost during their lifetimes (for example, Giblett, Forrestdale). However, as the clearing and drainage of the inner city occurred early in settlement, recollections of urban wetlands exist exclusively in historical records. In 1935, a local correspondent using the name “Sandgroper” reminisced about swamps, connecting them to Perth’s colonial heritage: But the Swamps were very real in fact, and in name in the [eighteen-] Nineties, and the Perth of my youth cannot be visualised without them. They were, of course, drying up apace, but they were swamps for all that, and they linked us directly with the earliest days of the Colony when our great-grandparents had founded this City of Perth on a sort of hog's-back, of which Hay-street was the ridge, and from which a succession of streamlets ran down its southern slope to the river, while land locked to the north of it lay a series of lakes which have long since been filled to and built over so that the only evidence that they have ever existed lies in the original street plans of Perth prepared by Roe and Hillman in the early eighteen-thirties. A salient consequence of the loss of ecological memory is the tendency to repeat the miscues of the past, especially the blatant disregard for natural and cultural heritage, as suburbanisation engulfs the area. While the swamps of inner Perth remain only in the names of streets, existing wetlands in the metropolitan area are still being threatened, as the Roe Highway (Roe 8) Campaign demonstrates. To re-imagine Perth’s lost landscape, we used several colonial survey maps to plot the location of the original lakes and swamps. At this time, a series of interconnecting waterbodies, known as the Perth Great Lakes, spread across the north of the city (Bekle and Gentilli). This phase required the earliest cartographic sources (Figure 3) because, by 1855, city maps no longer depicted wetlands. We synthesised contextual information, such as well depths, geological and botanical maps, settlers’ accounts, Nyoongar oral histories, and colonial-era artists’ impressions, to produce renderings of Perth. This diverse collection of primary and secondary materials served as the basis for creating new images of the city. Team member Jeff Murray interpolated Balbuk’s route using historical mappings and accounts, topographical data, court records, and cartographic common sense. He determined that Balbuk would have camped on the high ground of the southern part of Lake Kingsford rather than the more inundated northern part (Figure 2). Furthermore, she would have followed a reasonably direct course north of St Georges Terrace (contrary to David Whish-Wilson’s imaginings) because she was barred from Government House for protesting. This easier route would have also avoided the springs and gullies that appear on early maps of Perth. Figure 3. Townsite of Perth in Western Australia by Colonial Draftsman A. Hillman and John Septimus Roe (1838). This map of Perth depicts the wetlands that existed overlaid by the geomentric grid of the new city. Image Credit: State Library of Western Australia (Image Number: BA1961/14). Additionally, we produced an animated display based on aerial photographs to show the historical extent of change. Prompted by the build up to World War II, the earliest aerial photography of Perth dates from the late 1930s (Dixon 148–54). As “Sandgroper” noted, by this time, most of the urban wetlands had been drained or substantially modified. The animation revealed considerable alterations to the formerly swampy Swan River shoreline. Most prominent was the transformation of the Matagarup shallows across the Swan River, originally consisting of small islands. Now traversed by a causeway, this area was transformed into a single island, Heirisson—the general site of Balbuk’s birth. The animation and accompanying materials (maps, images, and writings) enabled viewers to apprehend the changes in real time and to imagine what the city was once like. Re-imagining Perth’s Urban Heart The physical environment of inner Perth includes virtually no trace of its wetland origins. Consequently, we considered whether a representation of Perth, as it existed previously, could enhance public understanding of natural heritage and thereby increase its value. For this reason, interpretive materials were exhibited centrally at Perth Town Hall. Built partly by convicts between 1867 and 1870, the venue is close to the site of the 1829 Foundation of Perth, depicted in George Pitt Morrison’s painting. Balbuk’s grandfather “camped somewhere in the city of Perth, not far from the Town Hall” (Bates, “Fanny”). The building lies one block from the site of the railway station on the site of Lake Kingsford, the subsistence grounds of Balbuk and her forebears: The old swamp which is now the Perth railway yards had been a favourite jilgi ground; a spring near the Town Hall had been a camping place of Maiago […] and others of her fathers' folk; and all around and about city and suburbs she had gathered roots and fished for crayfish in the days gone by. (Bates, “Derelicts” 55) Beginning in 1848, the draining of Lake Kingsford reached completion during the construction of the Town Hall. While the swamps of the city were not appreciated by many residents, some organisations, such as the Perth Town Trust, vigorously opposed the reclamation of the lake, alluding to its hydrological role: That, the soil being sand, it is not to be supposed that Lake Kingsford has in itself any material effect on the wells of Perth; but that, from this same reason of the sandy soil, it would be impossible to keep the lake dry without, by so doing, withdrawing the water from at least the adjacent parts of the townsite to the same depth. (Independent Journal of Politics and News 3) At the time of our exhibition, the Lake Kingsford site was again being reworked to sink the railway line and build Yagan Square, a public space named after a colonial-era Nyoongar leader. The project required specialised construction techniques due to the high water table—the remnants of the lake. People travelling to the exhibition by train in October 2014 could have seen the lake reasserting itself in partly-filled depressions, flush with winter rain (Figure 4).Figure 4. Rise of the Repressed (2014). Water Rising in the former site of Lake Kingsford/Irwin during construction, corner of Roe and Fitzgerald Streets, Northbridge, WA. Image Credit: Nandi Chinna (2014). The exhibition was situated in the Town Hall’s enclosed undercroft designed for markets and more recently for shops. While some visited after peering curiously through the glass walls of the undercroft, others hailed from local and state government organisations. Guest comments applauded the alternative view of Perth we presented. The content invited the public to re-imagine Perth as a city of wetlands that were both environmentally and culturally important. A display panel described how the city’s infrastructure presented a hindrance for Balbuk as she attempted to negotiate the once-familiar route between Yoonderup and Lake Kingsford (Figure 2). Perth’s growth “restricted Balbuk’s wanderings; towns, trains, and farms came through her ‘line of march’; old landmarks were thus swept away, and year after year saw her less confident of the locality of one-time familiar spots” (Bates, “Fanny”). Conserving Wetlands: From Re-Claiming to Re-Valuing? Imagination, for philosopher Roger Scruton, involves “thinking of, and attending to, a present object (by thinking of it, or perceiving it, in terms of something absent)” (155). According to Scruton, the feelings aroused through imagination can prompt creative, transformative experiences. While environmental conservation tends to rely on data-driven empirical approaches, it appeals to imagination less commonly. We have found, however, that attending to the present object (the city) in terms of something absent (its wetlands) through evocative visual material can complement traditional conservation agendas focused on habitats and species. The actual extent of wetlands loss in the Swan Coastal Plain—the flat and sandy region extending from Jurien Bay south to Cape Naturaliste, including Perth—is contested. However, estimates suggest that 80 per cent of wetlands have been lost, with remaining habitats threatened by climate change, suburban development, agriculture, and industry (Department of Environment and Conservation). As with the swamps and lakes of the inner city, many regional wetlands were cleared, drained, or filled before they could be properly documented. Additionally, the seasonal fluctuations of swampy places have never been easily translatable to two-dimensional records. As Giblett notes, the creation of cartographic representations and the assignment of English names were attempts to fix the dynamic boundaries of wetlands, at least in the minds of settlers and administrators (Postmodern 72–73). Moreover, European colonists found the Western Australian landscape, including its wetlands, generally discomfiting. In a letter from 1833, metaphors failed George Fletcher Moore, the effusive colonial commentator, “I cannot compare these swamps to any marshes with which you are familiar” (220). The intermediate nature of wetlands—as neither land nor lake—is perhaps one reason for their cultural marginalisation (Giblett, Postmodern 39). The conviction that unsanitary, miasmic wetlands should be converted to more useful purposes largely prevailed (Giblett, Black 105–22). Felicity Morel-EdnieBrown’s research into land ownership records in colonial Perth demonstrated that town lots on swampland were often preferred. By layering records using geographic information systems (GIS), she revealed modifications to town plans to accommodate swampland frontages. The decline of wetlands in the region appears to have been driven initially by their exploitation for water and later for fertile soil. Northern market gardens supplied the needs of the early city. It is likely that the depletion of Nyoongar bush foods predated the flourishing of these gardens (Carter and Nutter). Engaging with the history of Perth’s swamps raises questions about the appreciation of wetlands today. In an era where numerous conservation strategies and alternatives have been developed (for example, Bobbink et al. 93–220), the exploitation of wetlands in service to population growth persists. On Perth’s north side, wetlands have long been subdued by controlling their water levels and landscaping their boundaries, as the suburban examples of Lake Monger and Hyde Park (formerly Third Swamp Reserve) reveal. Largely unmodified wetlands, such as Forrestdale Lake, exist south of Perth, but they too are in danger (Giblett, Black Swan). The Beeliar Wetlands near the suburb of Bibra Lake comprise an interconnected series of lakes and swamps that are vulnerable to a highway extension project first proposed in the 1950s. Just as the Perth Town Trust debated Lake Kingsford’s draining, local councils and the public are fiercely contesting the construction of the Roe Highway, which will bisect Beeliar Wetlands, destroying Roe Swamp (Chinna). The conservation value of wetlands still struggles to compete with traffic planning underpinned by a modernist ideology that associates cars and freeways with progress (Gregory). Outside of archives, the debate about Lake Kingsford is almost entirely forgotten and its physical presence has been erased. Despite the magnitude of loss, re-imagining the city’s swamplands, in the way that we have, calls attention to past indiscretions while invigorating future possibilities. We hope that the re-imagining of Perth’s wetlands stimulates public respect for ancestral tracks and songlines like Balbuk’s. Despite the accretions of settler history and colonial discourse, songlines endure as a fundamental cultural heritage. Nyoongar elder Noel Nannup states, “as people, if we can get out there on our songlines, even though there may be farms or roads overlaying them, fences, whatever it is that might impede us from travelling directly upon them, if we can get close proximity, we can still keep our culture alive. That is why it is so important for us to have our songlines.” Just as Fanny Balbuk plied her songlines between Yoonderup and Lake Kingsford, the traditional custodians of Beeliar and other wetlands around Perth walk the landscape as an act of resistance and solidarity, keeping the stories of place alive. Acknowledgments The authors wish to acknowledge Rod Giblett (ECU), Nandi Chinna (ECU), Susanna Iuliano (ECU), Jeff Murray (Kareff Consulting), Dimitri Fotev (City of Perth), and Brendan McAtee (Landgate) for their contributions to this project. The authors also acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands upon which this paper was researched and written. References Bates, Daisy. “Fanny Balbuk-Yooreel: The Last Swan River (Female) Native.” The Western Mail 1 Jun. 1907: 45.———. “Oldest Perth: The Days before the White Men Won.” The Western Mail 25 Dec. 1909: 16–17.———. “Derelicts: The Passing of the Bibbulmun.” The Western Mail 25 Dec. 1924: 55–56. ———. “Aboriginal Perth.” The Western Mail 4 Jul. 1929: 70.———. “Hooper’s Fence: A Query.” The Western Mail 18 Apr. 1935: 9.———. The Passing of the Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent among the Natives of Australia. London: John Murray, 1966.Bekle, Hugo. “The Wetlands Lost: Drainage of the Perth Lake Systems.” Western Geographer 5.1–2 (1981): 21–41.Bekle, Hugo, and Joseph Gentilli. “History of the Perth Lakes.” Early Days 10.5 (1993): 442–60.Bobbink, Roland, Boudewijn Beltman, Jos Verhoeven, and Dennis Whigham, eds. Wetlands: Functioning, Biodiversity Conservation, and Restoration. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2006. Carter, Bevan, and Lynda Nutter. Nyungah Land: Records of Invasion and Theft of Aboriginal Land on the Swan River 1829–1850. Guildford: Swan Valley Nyungah Community, 2005.Chinna, Nandi. “Swamp.” Griffith Review 47 (2015). 29 Sep. 2015 ‹https://griffithreview.com/articles/swamp›.Department of Environment and Conservation. Geomorphic Wetlands Swan Coastal Plain Dataset. Perth: Department of Environment and Conservation, 2008.Dixon, Robert. Photography, Early Cinema, and Colonial Modernity: Frank Hurley’s Synchronized Lecture Entertainments. London: Anthem Press, 2011. Forster, Clive. Australian Cities: Continuity and Change. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.Giblett, Rod. Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1996. ———. Forrestdale: People and Place. Bassendean: Access Press, 2006.———. Black Swan Lake: Life of a Wetland. Bristol: Intellect, 2013.———. Cities and Wetlands: The Return of the Repressed in Nature and Culture. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. 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(Quoted material transcribed from 3.08–3.39 of the video.) O’Connor, Rory, Gary Quartermaine, and Corrie Bodney. Report on an Investigation into Aboriginal Significance of Wetlands and Rivers in the Perth-Bunbury Region. Perth: Western Australian Water Resources Council, 1989.Reece, Bob. “‘Killing with Kindness’: Daisy Bates and New Norcia.” Aboriginal History 32 (2008): 128–45.Rose, Deborah Bird. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996.Sanderson, Eric. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2009.Sandgroper. “Gilgies: The Swamps of Perth.” The West Australian 4 May 1935: 7.Scruton, Roger. Art and Imagination. London: Methuen, 1974.Seddon, George. Sense of Place: A Response to an Environment, the Swan Coastal Plain, Western Australia. 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IntroductionTasmania hangs from the map of Australia like a drop in freefall from the substance of the mainland. Often the whole state is mislaid from Australian maps and logos (Reddit). Tasmania has, at least since federation, been considered peripheral—a region seen as isolated, a ‘problem’ economically, politically, and culturally. However, Tasmania not only cleaves to the ‘north island’ of Australia but is also subject to the gravitational pull of an even greater land mass—Antarctica. In this article, we upturn the political conventions of map-making that place both Antarctica and Tasmania in obscure positions at the base of the globe. We show how a changing global climate re-frames Antarctica and the Southern Ocean as key drivers of worldwide environmental shifts. The liquid and solid water between Tasmania and Antarctica is revealed not as a homogenous barrier, but as a dynamic and relational medium linking the Tasmanian archipelago with Antarctica. When Antarctica becomes the focus, the script is flipped: Tasmania is no longer on the edge, but core to a network of gateways into the southern land. The state’s capital of Hobart can from this perspective be understood as an “Antarctic city”, central to the geopolitics, economy, and culture of the frozen continent (Salazar et al.). Viewed from the south, we argue, Tasmania is not a problem, but an opportunity for a form of ecological, cultural, economic, and political sustainability that opens up the southern continent to science, discovery, and imagination.A Centre at the End of the Earth? Tasmania as ParadoxThe islands of Tasmania owe their existence to climate change: a period of warming at the end of the last ice age melted the vast sheets of ice covering the polar regions, causing sea levels to rise by more than one hundred metres (Tasmanian Climate Change Office 8). Eleven thousand years ago, Aboriginal people would have witnessed the rise of what is now called Bass Strait, turning what had been a peninsula into an archipelago, with the large island of Tasmania at its heart. The heterogeneous practices and narratives of Tasmanian regional identity have been shaped by the geography of these islands, and their connection to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. Regions, understood as “centres of collective consciousness and sociospatial identities” (Paasi 241) are constantly reproduced and reimagined through place-based social practices and communications over time. As we will show, diverse and contradictory narratives of Tasmanian regionality often co-exist, interacting in complex and sometimes complementary ways. Ecocritical literary scholar C.A. Cranston considers duality to be embedded in the textual construction of Tasmania, writing “it was hell, it was heaven, it was penal, it was paradise” (29). Tasmania is multiply polarised: it is both isolated and connected; close and far away; rich in resources and poor in capital; the socially conservative birthplace of radical green politics (Hay 60). The weather, as if sensing the fine balance of these paradoxes, blows hot and cold at a moment’s notice.Tasmania has wielded extraordinary political influence at times in its history—notably during the settlement of Melbourne in 1835 (Boyce), and during protests against damming the Franklin River in the early 1980s (Mercer). However, twentieth-century historical and political narratives of Tasmania portray the Bass Strait as a barrier, isolating Tasmanians from the mainland (Harwood 61). Sir Bede Callaghan, who headed one of a long line of federal government inquiries into “the Tasmanian problem” (Harwood 106), was clear that Tasmania was a victim of its own geography:the major disability facing the people of Tasmania (although some residents may consider it an advantage) is that Tasmania is an island. Separation from the mainland adversely affects the economy of the State and the general welfare of the people in many ways. (Callaghan 3)This perspective may stem from the fact that Tasmania has maintained the lowest Gross Domestic Product per capita of all states since federation (Bureau of Infrastructure Transport and Regional Economics 9). Socially, economically, and culturally, Tasmania consistently ranks among the worst regions of Australia. Statistical comparisons with other parts of Australia reveal the population’s high unemployment, low wages, poor educational outcomes, and bad health (West 31). The state’s remoteness and isolation from the mainland states and its reliance on federal income have contributed to the whole of Tasmania, including Hobart, being classified as ‘regional’ by the Australian government, in an attempt to promote immigration and economic growth (Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development 1). Tasmania is indeed both regional and remote. However, in this article we argue that, while regionality may be cast as a disadvantage, the island’s remote location is also an asset, particularly when viewed from a far southern perspective (Image 1).Image 1: Antarctica (Orthographic Projection). Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Modified Shading of Tasmania and Addition of Captions by H. Nielsen.Connecting Oceans/Collapsing DistanceTasmania and Antarctica have been closely linked in the past—the future archipelago formed a land bridge between Antarctica and northern land masses until the opening of the Tasman Seaway some 32 million years ago (Barker et al.). The far south was tangible to the Indigenous people of the island in the weather blowing in from the Southern Ocean, while the southern lights, or “nuyina”, formed a visible connection (Australia’s new icebreaker vessel is named RSV Nuyina in recognition of these links). In the contemporary Australian imagination, Tasmania tends to be defined by its marine boundaries, the sea around the islands represented as flat, empty space against which to highlight the topography of its landscape and the isolation of its position (Davies et al.). A more relational geographic perspective illuminates the “power of cross-currents and connections” (Stratford et al. 273) across these seascapes. The sea country of Tasmania is multiple and heterogeneous: the rough, shallow waters of the island-scattered Bass Strait flow into the Tasman Sea, where the continental shelf descends toward an abyssal plain studded with volcanic seamounts. To the south, the Southern Ocean provides nutrient-rich upwellings that attract fish and cetacean populations. Tasmania’s coast is a dynamic, liminal space, moving and changing in response to the global currents that are driven by the shifting, calving and melting ice shelves and sheets in Antarctica.Oceans have long been a medium of connection between Tasmania and Antarctica. In the early colonial period, when the seas were the major thoroughfares of the world and inland travel was treacherous and slow, Tasmania’s connection with the Southern Ocean made it a valuable hub for exploration and exploitation of the south. Between 1642 and 1900, early European explorers were followed by British penal colonists, convicts, sealers, and whalers (Kriwoken and Williamson 93). Tasmania was well known to polar explorers, with expeditions led by Jules Dumont d’Urville, James Clark Ross, Roald Amundsen, and Douglas Mawson all transiting through the port of Hobart. Now that the city is no longer a whaling hub, growing populations of cetaceans continue to migrate past the islands on their annual journeys from the tropics, across the Sub-Antarctic Front and Antarctic circumpolar current, and into the south polar region, while southern species such as leopard seals are occasionally seen around Tasmania (Tasmania Parks and Wildlife). Although the water surrounding Tasmania and Antarctica is at times homogenised as a ‘barrier’, rendering these places isolated, the bodies of water that surround both are in fact permeable, and regularly crossed by both humans and marine species. The waters are diverse in their physical characteristics, underlying topography, sea life, and relationships, and serve to connect many different ocean regions, ecosystems, and weather patterns.Views from the Far SouthWhen considered in terms of its relative proximity to Antarctic, rather than its distance from Australia’s political and economic centres, Tasmania’s identity undergoes a significant shift. A sign at Cockle Creek, in the state’s far south, reminds visitors that they are closer to Antarctica than to Cairns, invoking a discourse of connectedness that collapses the standard ten-day ship voyage to Australia’s closest Antarctic station into a unit comparable with the routinely scheduled 5.5 hour flight to North Queensland. Hobart is the logistical hub for the Australian Antarctic Division and the French Institut Polaire Francais (IPEV), and has hosted Antarctic vessels belonging to the USA, South Korea, and Japan in recent years. From a far southern perspective, Hobart is not a regional Australian capital but a global polar hub. This alters the city’s geographic imaginary not only in a latitudinal sense—from “top down” to “bottom up”—but also a longitudinal one. Via its southward connection to Antarctica, Hobart is also connected east and west to four other recognized gateways: Cape Town in South Africa, Christchurch in New Zealand; Punta Arenas in Chile; and Ushuaia in Argentina (Image 2). The latter cities are considered small by international standards, but play an outsized role in relation to Antarctica.Image 2: H. Nielsen with a Sign Announcing Distances between Antarctic ‘Gateway’ Cities and Antarctica, Ushuaia, Argentina, 2018. Image Credit: Nicki D'Souza.These five cities form what might be called—to adapt geographer Klaus Dodds’ term—a ‘Southern Rim’ around the South Polar region (Dodds Geopolitics). They exist in ambiguous relationship to each other. Although the five cities signed a Statement of Intent in 2009 committing them to collaboration, they continue to compete vigorously for northern hemisphere traffic and the brand identity of the most prominent global gateway. A state government brochure spruiks Hobart, for example, as the “perfect Antarctic Gateway” emphasising its uniqueness and “natural advantages” in this regard (Tasmanian Government, 2016). In practice, the cities are automatically differentiated by their geographic position with respect to Antarctica. Although the ‘ice continent’ is often conceived as one entity, it too has regions, in both scientific and geographical senses (Terauds and Lee; Antonello). Hobart provides access to parts of East Antarctica, where the Australian, French, Japanese, and Chinese programs (among others) have bases; Cape Town is a useful access point for Europeans going to Dronning Maud Land; Christchurch is closest to the Ross Sea region, site of the largest US base; and Punta Arenas and Ushuaia neighbour the Antarctic Peninsula, home to numerous bases as well as a thriving tourist industry.The Antarctic sector is important to the Tasmanian economy, contributing $186 million (AUD) in 2017/18 (Wells; Gutwein; Tasmanian Polar Network). Unsurprisingly, Tasmania’s gateway brand has been actively promoted, with the 2016 Australian Antarctic Strategy and 20 Year Action Plan foregrounding the need to “Build Tasmania’s status as the premier East Antarctic Gateway for science and operations” and the state government releasing a “Tasmanian Antarctic Gateway Strategy” in 2017. The Chinese Antarctic program has been a particular focus: a Memorandum of Understanding focussed on Australia and China’s Antarctic relations includes a “commitment to utilise Australia, including Tasmania, as an Antarctic ‘gateway’.” (Australian Antarctic Division). These efforts towards a closer relationship with China have more recently come under attack as part of a questioning of China’s interests in the region (without, it should be noted, a concomitant questioning of Australia’s own considerable interests) (Baker 9). In these exchanges, a global power and a state of Australia generally classed as regional and peripheral are brought into direct contact via the even more remote Antarctic region. This connection was particularly visible when Chinese President Xi Jinping travelled to Hobart in 2014, in a visit described as both “strategic” and “incongruous” (Burden). There can be differences in how this relationship is narrated to domestic and international audiences, with issues of sovereignty and international cooperation variously foregrounded, laying the ground for what Dodds terms “awkward Antarctic nationalism” (1).Territory and ConnectionsThe awkwardness comes to a head in Tasmania, where domestic and international views of connections with the far south collide. Australia claims sovereignty over almost 6 million km2 of the Antarctic continent—a claim that in area is “roughly the size of mainland Australia minus Queensland” (Bergin). This geopolitical context elevates the importance of a regional part of Australia: the claims to Antarctic territory (which are recognised only by four other claimant nations) are performed not only in Antarctic localities, where they are made visible “with paraphernalia such as maps, flags, and plaques” (Salazar 55), but also in Tasmania, particularly in Hobart and surrounds. A replica of Mawson’s Huts in central Hobart makes Australia’s historic territorial interests in Antarctica visible an urban setting, foregrounding the figure of Douglas Mawson, the well-known Australian scientist and explorer who led the expeditions that proclaimed Australia’s sovereignty in the region of the continent roughly to its south (Leane et al.). Tasmania is caught in a balancing act, as it fosters international Antarctic connections (such hosting vessels from other national programs), while also playing a key role in administering what is domestically referred to as the Australian Antarctic Territory. The rhetoric of protection can offer common ground: island studies scholar Godfrey Baldacchino notes that as island narratives have moved “away from the perspective of the ‘explorer-discoverer-colonist’” they have been replaced by “the perspective of the ‘custodian-steward-environmentalist’” (49), but reminds readers that a colonising disposition still lurks beneath the surface. It must be remembered that terms such as “stewardship” and “leadership” can undertake sovereignty labour (Dodds “Awkward”), and that Tasmania’s Antarctic connections can be mobilised for a range of purposes. When Environment Minister Greg Hunt proclaimed at a press conference that: “Hobart is the gateway to the Antarctic for the future” (26 Apr. 2016), the remark had meaning within discourses of both sovereignty and economics. Tasmania’s capital was leveraged as a way to position Australia as a leader in the Antarctic arena.From ‘Gateway’ to ‘Antarctic City’While discussion of Antarctic ‘Gateway’ Cities often focuses on the economic and logistical benefit of their Antarctic connections, Hobart’s “gateway” identity, like those of its counterparts, stretches well beyond this, encompassing geological, climatic, historical, political, cultural and scientific links. Even the southerly wind, according to cartoonist Jon Kudelka, “has penguins in it” (Image 3). Hobart residents feel a high level of connection to Antarctica. In 2018, a survey of 300 randomly selected residents of Greater Hobart was conducted under the umbrella of the “Antarctic Cities” Australian Research Council Linkage Project led by Assoc. Prof. Juan Francisco Salazar (and involving all three present authors). Fourteen percent of respondents reported having been involved in an economic activity related to Antarctica, and 36% had attended a cultural event about Antarctica. Connections between the southern continent and Hobart were recognised as important: 71.9% agreed that “people in my city can influence the cultural meanings that shape our relationship to Antarctica”, while 90% agreed or strongly agreed that Hobart should play a significant role as a custodian of Antarctica’s future, and 88.4% agreed or strongly agreed that: “How we treat Antarctica is a test of our approach to ecological sustainability.” Image 3: “The Southerly” Demonstrates How Weather Connects Hobart and Antarctica. Image Credit: Jon Kudelka, Reproduced with Permission.Hobart, like the other gateways, activates these connections in its conscious place-branding. The city is particularly strong as a centre of Antarctic research: signs at the cruise-ship terminal on the waterfront claim that “There are more Antarctic scientists based in Hobart […] than at any other one place on earth, making Hobart a globally significant contributor to our understanding of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.” Researchers are based at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS), the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD), with several working between institutions. Many Antarctic researchers located elsewhere in the world also have a connection with the place through affiliations and collaborations, leading journalist Jo Chandler to assert that “the breadth and depth of Hobart’s knowledge of ice, water, and the life forms they nurture […] is arguably unrivalled anywhere in the world” (86).Hobart also plays a significant role in Antarctica’s governance, as the site of the secretariats for the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) and the Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels (ACAP), and as host of the Antarctic Consultative Treaty Meetings on more than one occasion (1986, 2012). The cultural domain is active, with Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) featuring a permanent exhibit, “Islands to Ice”, emphasising the ocean as connecting the two places; the Mawson’s Huts Replica Museum aiming (among other things) to “highlight Hobart as the gateway to the Antarctic continent for the Asia Pacific region”; and a biennial Australian Antarctic Festival drawing over twenty thousand visitors, about a sixth of them from interstate or overseas (Hingley). Antarctic links are evident in the city’s natural and built environment: the dolerite columns of Mt Wellington, the statue of the Tasmanian Antarctic explorer Louis Bernacchi on the waterfront, and the wharfs that regularly accommodate icebreakers such as the Aurora Australis and the Astrolabe. Antarctica is figured as a southern neighbour; as historian Tom Griffiths puts it, Tasmanians “grow up with Antarctica breathing down their necks” (5). As an Antarctic City, Hobart mediates access to Antarctica both physically and in the cultural imaginary.Perhaps in recognition of the diverse ways in which a region or a city might be connected to Antarctica, researchers have recently been suggesting critical approaches to the ‘gateway’ label. C. Michael Hall points to a fuzziness in the way the term is applied, noting that it has drifted from its initial definition (drawn from economic geography) as denoting an access and supply point to a hinterland that produces a certain level of economic benefits. While Hall looks to keep the term robustly defined to avoid empty “local boosterism” (272–73), Gabriela Roldan aims to move the concept “beyond its function as an entry and exit door”, arguing that, among other things, the local community should be actively engaged in the Antarctic region (57). Leane, examining the representation of Hobart as a gateway in historical travel texts, concurs that “ingress and egress” are insufficient descriptors of Tasmania’s relationship with Antarctica, suggesting that at least discursively the island is positioned as “part of an Antarctic rim, itself sharing qualities of the polar region” (45). The ARC Linkage Project described above, supported by the Hobart City Council, the State Government and the University of Tasmania, as well as other national and international partners, aims to foster the idea of the Hobart and its counterparts as ‘Antarctic cities’ whose citizens act as custodians for the South Polar region, with a genuine concern for and investment in its future.Near and Far: Local Perspectives A changing climate may once again herald a shift in the identity of the Tasmanian islands. Recognition of the central role of Antarctica in regulating the global climate has generated scientific and political re-evaluation of the region. Antarctica is not only the planet’s largest heat sink but is the engine of global water currents and wind patterns that drive weather patterns and biodiversity across the world (Convey et al. 543). For example, Tas van Ommen’s research into Antarctic glaciology shows the tangible connection between increased snowfall in coastal East Antarctica and patterns of drought southwest Western Australia (van Ommen and Morgan). Hobart has become a global centre of marine and Antarctic science, bringing investment and development to the city. As the global climate heats up, Tasmania—thanks to its low latitude and southerly weather patterns—is one of the few regions in Australia likely to remain temperate. This is already leading to migration from the mainland that is impacting house prices and rental availability (Johnston; Landers 1). The region’s future is therefore closely entangled with its proximity to the far south. Salazar writes that “we cannot continue to think of Antarctica as the end of the Earth” (67). Shifting Antarctica into focus also brings Tasmania in from the margins. As an Antarctic city, Hobart assumes a privileged positioned on the global stage. This allows the city to present itself as central to international research efforts—in contrast to domestic views of the place as a small regional capital. The city inhabits dual identities; it is both on the periphery of Australian concerns and at the centre of Antarctic activity. Tasmania, then, is not in freefall, but rather at the forefront of a push to recognise Antarctica as entangled with its neighbours to the north.AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by the Australian Research Council under LP160100210.ReferencesAntonello, Alessandro. “Finding Place in Antarctica.” Antarctica and the Humanities. Eds. Peder Roberts, Lize-Marie van der Watt, and Adrian Howkins. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 181–204.Australian Government. 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In PilsenTwenty-six Station Road,She climbed to the third floorUp stairs which were all that was leftOf the whole house,She opened her doorFull on to the sky,Stood gaping over the edge.For this was the placeThe world ended.Thenshe locked up carefullylest someone stealSiriusor Aldebaranfrom her kitchen,went back downstairsand settled herselfto waitfor the house to rise againand for her husband to rise from the ashesand for her children’s hands and feet to be stuck back in placeIn the morning they found herstill as stone, sparrows pecking her hands.Five Minutes after the Air Raidby Miroslav Holub(Calder 287) Holding Still Detonation. Affect. During the Second World War, London and other European cities were subjected to the terrors of aerial bombardment, rendered through nightmarish anticipations of the bomber (Gollin 7) and the material storm of the real air-raid. The fall of bombs plagued cities and their citizens with the terrible rain of explosives and incendiary weapons. A volatile landscape was formed as the urban environment was ‘unmade’ and urged into violent motion. Flying projectiles of shrapnel, debris and people; avalanches of collapsing factories and houses; the inhale and exhale of compressed air and firestorms; the scream of the explosion. All these composed an incredibly fluid urban traumatic, as atmospheres fell over the cities that was thick with smoke, dust, and ventilated only by terror (see for instance Sebald 10 and Mendieta’s 3 recent commentary). Vast craters were imprinted onto the charred morphologies of London and Berlin as well as Coventry, Hamburg and Dresden. Just as the punctuations of the bombing saw the psychic as well as the material give way, writers portraying Britain as an ‘volcano island’ (Spaight 5) witnessed eruptive projections – the volleys of the material air-war; the emotional signature of charged and bitter reprisals; pain, anguish and vengeance - counter-strikes of affect. In the midst of all of this molten violence and emotion it seems impossible that a simultaneous sense of quiescence could be at all possible. More than mere physical fixity or geographical stasis, a rather different sort of experience could take place. Preceding, during and following the excessive mobilisation of an air raid, ‘stillness’ was often used to describe certain plateuing stretches of time-space which were slowed and even stopped (Anderson 740). Between the eruptions appeared hollows of calm and even boredom. People’s nervous flinching under the reverberation of high-explosive blasts formed part of what Jordan Crandall might call a ‘bodily-inclination’ position. Slackened and taut feelings condensed around people listening out for the oncoming bomber. People found that they prepared for the dreadful wail of the siren, or relaxed in the aftermath of the attack. In these instances, states of tension and apprehension as well as calm and relief formed though stillness. The peculiar experiences of ‘stillness’ articulated in these events open out, I suggest, distinctive ways-of-being which undo our assumptions of perpetually fluid subjectivities and the primacy of the ‘body in motion’ even within the context of unparalleled movement and uncertainty (see Harrison 423 and also Rose and Wylie 477 for theoretical critique). The sorts of “musics of stillness and silence able to be discovered in a world of movement” (Thrift, Still 50), add to our understandings of the material geographies of war and terror (see for instance Graham 63; Gregory and Pred 3), whilst they gesture towards complex material-affective experiences of bodies and spaces. Stillness in this sense, denotes apprehending and anticipating spaces and events in ways that sees the body enveloped within the movement of the environment around it; bobbing along intensities that course their way through it; positioned towards pasts and futures that make themselves felt, and becoming capable of intense forms of experience and thought. These examples illustrate not a shutting down of the body to an inwardly focused position – albeit composed by complex relations and connections – but bodies finely attuned to their exteriors (see Bissell, Animating 277 and Conradson 33). In this paper I draw from a range of oral and written testimony archived at the Imperial War Museum and the Mass Observation wartime regular reports. Edited publications from these collections were also consulted. Detailing the experience of aerial bombing during the Blitz, particularly on London between September 1940 to May 1941, forms part of a wider project concerning the calculative and affective dimensions of the aeroplane’s relationship with the human body, especially through the spaces it has worked to construct (infrastructures such as airports) and destroy. While appearing extraordinary, the examples I use are actually fairly typical of the patternings of experience and the depth and clarity with which they are told. They could be taken to be representative of the population as a whole or coincidentally similar testimonials. Either way, they are couched within a specific cultural historical context of urgency, threat and unparalleled violence.Anticipations The complex material geographies of an air raid reveal the ecological interdependencies of populations and their often urban environments and metabolisms (Coward 419; Davis 3; Graham 63; Gregory The Colonial 19; Hewitt Place 257). Aerial warfare was an address of populations conceived at the register of their bio-rhythmical and metabolic relationship to their milieu (Adey). The Blitz and the subsequent Allied bombing campaign constituted Churchill’s ‘great experiment’ for governments attempting to assess the damage an air raid could inflict upon a population’s nerves and morale (Brittain 77; Gregory In Another 88). An anxious and uncertain landscape constructed before the war, perpetuated by public officials, commentators and members of parliament, saw background affects (Ngai 5) of urgency creating an atmosphere that pressurised and squeezed the population to prepare for the ‘gathering storm’. Attacks upon the atmosphere itself had been readily predicted in the form of threatening gas attacks ready to poison the medium upon which human and animal life depended (Haldane 111; Sloterdijk 41-57). One of the most talked of moments of the Blitz is not necessarily the action but the times of stillness that preceded it. Before and in-between an air raid stillness appears to describe a state rendered somewhere between the lulls and silences of the action and the warnings and the anticipatory feelings of what might happen. In the awaiting bodies, the materialites of silence could be felt as a kind-of-sound and as an atmospheric sense of imminence. At the onset of the first air-raids sound became a signifier of what was on the way (MO 408). Waiting – as both practice and sensation – imparted considerable inertia that went back and forth through time (Jeffrey 956; Massumi, Parables 3). For Geographer Kenneth Hewitt, sound “told of the coming raiders, the nearness of bombs, the plight of loved ones” (When the 16). The enormous social survey of Mass Observation concluded that “fear seems to be linked above all with noise” (original emphasis). As one report found, “It is the siren or the whistle or the explosion or the drone – these are the things that terrify. Fear seems to come to us most of all through our sense of hearing” (MO 378). Yet the power of the siren came not only from its capacity to propagate sound and to alert, but the warning held in its voice of ‘keeping silent’. “Prefacing in a dire prolepsis the post-apocalyptic event before the event”, as Bishop and Phillips (97) put it, the stillness of silence was incredibly virtual in its affects, disclosing - in its lack of life – the lives that would be later taken. Devastation was expected and rehearsed by civilians. Stillness formed a space and body ready to spring into movement – an ‘imminent mobility’ as John Armitage (204) has described it. Perched on the edge of devastation, space-times were felt through a sense of impending doom. Fatalistic yet composed expectations of a bomb heading straight down pervaded the thoughts and feelings of shelter dwellers (MO 253; MO 217). Waves of sound disrupted fragile tempers as they passed through the waiting bodies in the physical language of tensed muscles and gritted teeth (Gaskin 36). Silence helped form bodies inclined-to-attention, particularly sensitive to aural disturbances and vibrations from all around. Walls, floors and objects carried an urban bass-line of warning (Goodman). Stillness was forged through a body readied in advance of the violence these materialities signified. A calm and composed body was not necessarily an immobile body. Civilians who had prepared for the attacks were ready to snap into action - to dutifully wear their gas-mask or escape to shelter. ‘Backgrounds of expectation’ (Thrift, Still 36) were forged through non-too-subtle procedural and sequential movements which opened-out new modes of thinking and feeling. Folding one’s clothes and placing them on the dresser in-readiness; pillows and sheets prepared for a spell in the shelter, these were some of many orderly examples (IWM 14595). In the event of a gas attack air raid precautions instructions advised how to put on a gas mask (ARPD 90-92),i) Hold the breath. ii) Remove headgear and place between the knees. iii) Lift the flap of the haversack [ …] iv) Bring the face-piece towards the face’[…](v) Breathe out and continue to breathe in a normal manner The rational technologies of drill, dressage and operational research enabled poise in the face of an eventual air-raid. Through this ‘logistical-life’ (Reid 17), thought was directed towards simple tasks by minutely described instructions. Stilled LifeThe end of stillness was usually marked by a reactionary ‘flinch’, ‘start’ or ‘jump’. Such reactionary ‘urgent analogs’ (Ngai 94; Tomkins 96) often occurred as a response to sounds and movements that merely broke the tension rather than accurately mimicking an air raid. These atmospheres were brittle and easily disrupted. Cars back-firing and changing gear were often complained about (MO 371), just as bringing people out of the quiescence of sleep was a common effect of air-raids (Kraftl and Horton 509). Disorientation was usually fostered in this process while people found it very difficult to carry out the most simple of tasks. Putting one’s clothes on or even making their way out of the bedroom door became enormously problematic. Sirens awoke a ‘conditioned reflex’ to take cover (MO 364). Long periods of sleep deprivation brought on considerable fatigue and anxiety. ‘Sleep we Must’ wrote journalist Ritchie Calder (252) noticing the invigorating powers of sleep for both urban morale and the bare existence of survival. For other more traumatized members of the population, psychological studies found that the sustained concentration of shelling caused what was named ‘apathy-retreat’ (Harrisson, Living 65). This extreme form of acquiescence saw especially susceptible and vulnerable civilians suffer an overwhelming urge to sleep and to be cared-for ‘as if chronically ill’ (Janis 90). A class and racial politics of quiescent affect was enacted as several members of the population were believed far more liable to ‘give way’ to defeat and dangerous emotions (Brittain 77; Committee of Imperial Defence).In other cases it was only once an air-raid had started that sleep could be found (MO 253). The boredom of waiting could gather in its intensity deforming bodies with “the doom of depression” (Anderson 749). The stopped time-spaces in advance of a raid could be soaked with so much tension that the commencement of sirens, vibrations and explosions would allow a person overwhelming relief (MO 253). Quoting from a boy recalling his experiences in Hannover during 1943, Hewitt illustrates:I lie in bed. I am afraid. I strain my ears to hear something but still all is quiet. I hardly dare breathe, as if something horrible is knocking at the door, at the windows. Is it the beating of my heart? ... Suddenly there seems relief, the sirens howl into the night ... (Heimatbund Niedersachsen 1953: 185). (Cited in Hewitt, When 16)Once a state of still was lost getting it back required some effort (Bissell, Comfortable 1697). Cautious of preventing mass panic and public hysteria by allowing the body to erupt outwards into dangerous vectors of mobility, the British government’s schooling in the theories of panicology (Orr 12) and contagious affect (Le Bon 17; Tarde 278; Thrift, Intensities 57; Trotter 140), made air raid precautions (ARP) officers, police and civil defence teams enforce ‘stay put’ and ‘hold firm’ orders to protect the population (Jones et al, Civilian Morale 463, Public Panic 63-64; Thomas 16). Such orders were meant to shield against precisely the kinds of volatile bodies they were trying to compel with their own bombing strategies. Reactions to the Blitz were moralised and racialised. Becoming stilled required self-conscious work by a public anxious not to be seen to ‘panic’. This took the form of self-disciplination. People exhausted considerable energy to ‘settle’ themselves down. It required ‘holding’ themselves still and ‘together’ in order to accomplish this state, and to avoid going the same way as the buildings falling apart around them, as some people observed (MO 408). In Britain a cup of tea was often made as a spontaneous response in the event of the conclusion of a raid (Brown 686). As well as destroying bombing created spaces too – making space for stillness (Conradson 33). Many people found that they could recall their experiences in vivid detail, allocating a significant proportion of their memories to the recollection of the self and an awareness of their surroundings (IWM 19103). In this mode of stillness, contemplation did not turn-inwards but unfolded out towards the environment. The material processual movement of the shell-blast literally evacuated all sound and materials from its centre to leave a vacuum of negative pressure. Diaries and oral testimonies stretch out these millisecond events into discernable times and spaces of sensation, thought and the experience of experience (Massumi, Parables 2). Extraordinarily, survivors mention serene feelings of quiet within the eye of the blast (see Mortimer 239); they had, literally, ‘no time to be frightened’ (Crighton-Miller 6150). A shell explosion could create such intensities of stillness that a sudden and distinctive lessening of the person and world are expressed, constituting ‘stilling-slowing diminishments’ (Anderson 744). As if the blast-vacuum had sucked all the animation from their agency, recollections convey passivity and, paradoxically, a much more heightened and contemplative sense of the moment (Bourke 121; Thrift, Still 41). More lucid accounts describe a multitude of thoughts and an attention to minute detail. Alternatively, the enormous peaking of a waking blast subdued all later activities to relative obsolescence. The hurricane of sounds and air appear to overload into the flatness of an extended and calmed instantaneous present.Then the whistling stopped, then a terrific thump as it hit the ground, and everything seem to expand, then contract with deliberation and stillness seemed to be all around. (As recollected by Bill and Vi Reagan in Gaskin 17)On the other hand, as Schivelbusch (7) shows us in his exploration of defeat, the cessation of war could be met with an outburst of feeling. In these micro-moments a close encounter with death was often experienced with elation, a feeling of peace and well-being drawn through a much more heightened sense of the now (MO 253). These are not pre-formed or contemplative techniques of attunement as Thrift has tracked, but are the consequence of significant trauma and the primal reaction to extreme danger.TracesSusan Griffin’s haunting A Chorus of Stones documents what she describes as a private life of war (1). For Griffin, and as shown in these brief examples, stillness and being-stilled describe a series of diverse experiences endured during aerial bombing. Yet, as Griffin narrates, these are not-so private lives. A common representation of air war can be found in Henry Moore’s tube shelter sketches which convey sleeping tube-dwellers harboured in the London underground during the Blitz. The bodies are represented as much more than individuals being connected by Moore’s wave-like shapes into the turbulent aggregation of a choppy ocean. What we see in Moore’s portrayal and the examples discussed already are experiences with definite relations to both inner and outer worlds. They refer to more-than individuals who bear intimate relations to their outsides and the atmospheric and material environments enveloping and searing through them. Stillness was an unlikely state composed through these circulations just as it was formed as a means of address. It was required in order to apprehend sounds and possible events through techniques of listening or waiting. Alternatively being stilled could refer to pauses between air-strikes and the corresponding breaks of tension in the aftermath of a raid. Stillness was composed through a series of distributed yet interconnecting bodies, feelings, materials and atmospheres oriented towards the future and the past. The ruins of bombed-out building forms stand as traces even today. Just as Massumi (Sensing 16) describes in the context of architecture, the now static remainder of the explosion “envelops in its stillness a deformational field of which it stands as the trace”. The ruined forms left after the attack stand as a “monument” of the passing of the raid to be what it once was – house, factory, shop, restaurant, library - and to become something else. The experience of those ‘from below’ (Hewitt 2) suffering contemporary forms of air-warfare share many parallels with those of the Blitz. Air power continues to target, apparently more precisely, the affective tones of the body. Accessed by kinetic and non-kinetic forces, the signs of air-war are generated by the shelling of Kosovo, ‘shock and awe’ in Iraq, air-strikes in Afghanistan and by the simulated air-raids of IDF aircraft producing sonic-booms over sleeping Palestinian civilians, now becoming far more real as I write in the final days of 2008. Achieving stillness in the wake of aerial trauma remains, even now, a way to survive the (private) life of air war. AcknowledgementsI’d like to thank the editors and particularly the referees for such a close reading of the article; time did not permit the attention their suggestions demanded. Grateful acknowledgement is also made to the AHRC whose funding allowed me to research and write this paper. ReferencesAdey, Peter. Aerial Geographies: Mobilities, Bodies and Subjects. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010 (forthcoming). 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Kangatarianism is the rather inelegant word coined in the first decade of the twenty-first century to describe an omnivorous diet in which the only meat consumed is that of the kangaroo. First published in the media in 2010 (Barone; Zukerman), the term circulated in Australian environmental and academic circles including the Global Animal conference at the University of Wollongong in July 2011 where I first heard it from members of the Think Tank for Kangaroos (THINKK) group. By June 2017, it had gained enough attention to be named the Oxford English Dictionary’s Australian word of the month (following on from May’s “smashed avo,” another Australian food innovation), but it took the Nine Network reality television series Love Island Australia to raise kangatarian to trending status on social media (Oxford UP). During the first episode, aired in late May 2018, Justin, a concreter and fashion model from Melbourne, declared himself to have previously been a kangatarian as he chatted with fellow contestant, Millie. Vet nurse and animal lover Millie appeared to be shocked by his revelation but was tentatively accepting when Justin explained what kangatarian meant, and justified his choice on the grounds that kangaroo are not farmed. In the social media response, it was clear that eating only the meat of kangaroos as an ethical choice was an entirely new concept to many viewers, with one tweet stating “Kangatarian isn’t a thing”, while others variously labelled the diet brutal, intriguing, or quintessentially Australian (see #kangatarian on Twitter).There is a well developed literature around the arguments for and against eating kangaroo, and why settler Australians tend to be so reluctant to do so (see for example, Probyn; Cawthorn and Hoffman). Here, I will concentrate on the role that ethics play in this food choice by examining how the adoption of kangatarianism can be understood as a bargain struck to help to manage grief in the Anthropocene, and the limitations of that bargain. As Lesley Head has argued, we are living in a time of loss and of grieving, when much that has been taken for granted is becoming unstable, and “we must imagine that drastic changes to everyday life are in the offing” (313). Applying the classic (and contested) model of five stages of grief, first proposed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying in 1969, much of the population of the western world seems to be now experiencing denial, her first stage of loss, while those in the most vulnerable environments have moved on to anger with developed countries for destructive actions in the past and inaction in the present. The next stages (or states) of grieving—bargaining, depression, and acceptance—are likely to be manifested, although not in any predictable sequence, as the grief over current and future losses continues (Haslam).The great expansion of food restrictive diets in the Anthropocene can be interpreted as part of this bargaining state of grieving as individuals attempt to respond to the imperative to reduce their environmental impact but also to limit the degree of change to their own diet required to do so. Meat has long been identified as a key component of an individual’s environmental footprint. From Frances Moore Lappé’s 1971 Diet for a Small Planet through the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation’s 2006 report Livestock’s Long Shadow to the 2019 report of the EAT–Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems, the advice has been consistent: meat consumption should be minimised in, if not eradicated from, the human diet. The EAT–Lancet Commission Report quantified this to less than 28 grams (just under one ounce) of beef, lamb or pork per day (12, 25). For many this would be keenly felt, in terms of how meals are constructed, the sensory experiences associated with eating meat and perceptions of well-being but meat is offered up as a sacrifice to bring about the return of the beloved healthy planet.Rather than accept the advice to cut out meat entirely, those seeking to bargain with the Anthropocene also find other options. This has given rise to a suite of foodways based around restricting meat intake in volume or type. Reducing the amount of commercially produced beef, lamb and pork eaten is one approach, while substituting a meat the production of which has a smaller environmental footprint, most commonly chicken or fish, is another. For those willing to make deeper changes, the meat of free living animals, especially those which are killed accidentally on the roads or for deliberately for environmental management purposes, is another option. Further along this spectrum are the novel protein sources suggested in the Lancet report, including insects, blue-green algae and laboratory-cultured meats.Kangatarianism is another form of this bargain, and is backed by at least half a century of advocacy. The Australian Conservation Foundation made calls to reduce the numbers of other livestock and begin a sustainable harvest of kangaroo for food in 1970 when the sale of kangaroo meat for human consumption was still illegal across the country (Conservation of Kangaroos). The idea was repeated by biologist Gordon Grigg in the late 1980s (Jackson and Vernes 173), and again in the Garnaut Climate Change Review in 2008 (547–48). Kangaroo meat is high in protein and iron, low in fat, and high in healthy polyunsaturated fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid, and, as these authors showed, has a smaller environmental footprint than beef, lamb, or pork. Kangaroo require less water than cattle, sheep or pigs, and no land is cleared to grow feed for them or give them space to graze. Their paws cause less erosion and compaction of soil than do the hooves of common livestock. They eat less fodder than ruminants and their digestive processes result in lower emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas methane and less solid waste.As Justin of Love Island was aware, kangaroo are not farmed in the sense of being deliberately bred, fed, confined, or treated with hormones, drugs or chemicals, which also adds to their lighter impact on the environment. However, some pastoralists argue that because they cannot prevent kangaroos from accessing the food, water, shelter, and protection from predators they provide for their livestock, they do effectively farm them, although they receive no income from sales of kangaroo meat. This type of light touch farming of kangaroos has a very long history in Australia going back to the continent’s first peopling some 60,000 years ago. Kangaroos were so important to Aboriginal people that a wide range of environments were manipulated to produce their favoured habitats of open grasslands edged by sheltering trees. As Bill Gammage demonstrated, fire was used as a tool to preserve and extend grassy areas, to encourage regrowth which would attract kangaroos and to drive the animals from one patch to another or towards hunters waiting with spears (passim, for example, 58, 72, 76, 93). Gammage and Bruce Pascoe agree that this was a form of animal husbandry in which the kangaroos were drawn to the areas prepared for them for the young grass or, more forcefully, physically directed using nets, brush fences or stone walls. Burnt ground served to contain the animals in place of fencing, and regular harvesting kept numbers from rising to levels which would place pressure on other species (Gammage 79, 281–86; Pascoe 42–43). Contemporary advocates of eating kangaroo have promoted the idea that they should be deliberately co-produced with other livestock instead of being killed to preserve feed and water for sheep and cattle (Ellicott; Wilson 39). Substituting kangaroo for the meat of more environmentally damaging animals would facilitate a reduction in the numbers of cattle and sheep, lessening the harm they do.Most proponents have assumed that their audience is current meat eaters who would substitute kangaroo for the meat of other more environmentally costly animals, but kangatarianism can also emerge from vegetarianism. Wendy Zukerman, who wrote about kangaroo hunting for New Scientist in 2010, was motivated to conduct the research because she was considering becoming an early adopter of kangatarianism as the least environmentally taxing way to counter the longterm anaemia she had developed as a vegetarian. In 2018, George Wilson, honorary professor in the Australian National University’s Fenner School of Environment and Society called for vegetarians to become kangatarians as a means of boosting overall consumption of kangaroo for environmental and economic benefits to rural Australia (39).Given these persuasive environmental arguments, it might be expected that many people would have perceived eating kangaroo instead of other meat as a favourable bargain and taken up the call to become kangatarian. Certainly, there has been widespread interest in trying kangaroo meat. In 1997, only five years after the sale of kangaroo meat for human consumption had been legalised in most states (South Australia did so in 1980), 51% of 500 people surveyed in five capital cities said they had tried kangaroo. However, it had not become a meat of choice with very few found to eat it more than three times a year (Des Purtell and Associates iv). Just over a decade later, a study by Ampt and Owen found an increase to 58% of 1599 Australians surveyed across the country who had tried kangaroo but just 4.7% eating it at least monthly (14). Bryce Appleby, in his study of kangaroo consumption in the home based on interviews with 28 residents of Wollongong in 2010, specifically noted the absence of kangatarians—then a very new concept. A study of 261 Sydney university students in 2014 found that half had tried kangaroo meat and 10% continued to eat it with any regularity. Only two respondents identified themselves as kangatarian (Grant 14–15). Kangaroo meat advocate Michael Archer declared in 2017 that “there’s an awful lot of very, very smart vegetarians [who] have opted for semi vegetarianism and they’re calling themselves ‘kangatarians’, as they’re quite happy to eat kangaroo meat”, but unless there had been a significant change in a few years, the surveys did not bear out his assertion (154).The ethical calculations around eating kangaroo are complicated by factors beyond the strictly environmental. One Tweeter advised Justin: “‘I’m a kangatarian’ isn’t a pickup line, mate”, and certainly the reception of his declaration could have been very cool, especially as it was delivered to a self declared animal warrior (N’Tash Aha). All of the studies of beliefs and practices around the eating of kangaroo have noted a significant minority of Australians who would not consider eating kangaroo based on issues of animal welfare and animal rights. The 1997 study found that 11% were opposed to the idea of eating kangaroo, while in Grant’s 2014 study, 15% were ethically opposed to eating kangaroo meat (Des Purtell and Associates iv; Grant 14–15). Animal ethics complicate the bargains calculated principally on environmental grounds.These ethical concerns work across several registers. One is around the flesh and blood kangaroo as a charismatic native animal unique to Australia and which Australians have an obligation to respect and nurture. Sheep, cattle and pigs have been subject to longterm propaganda campaigns which entrench the idea that they are unattractive and unintelligent, and veil their transition to meat behind euphemistic language and abattoir walls, making it easier to eat them. Kangaroos are still seen as resourceful and graceful animals, and no linguistic tricks shield consumers from the knowledge that it is a roo on their plate. A proposal in 2009 to market a “coat of arms” emu and kangaroo-flavoured potato chip brought complaints to the Advertising Standards Bureau that this was disrespectful to these native animals, although the flavours were to be simulated and the product vegetarian (Black). Coexisting with this high regard to kangaroos is its antithesis. That is, a valuation of them informed by their designation as a pest in the pastoral industry, and the use of the carcasses of those killed to feed dogs and other companion animals. Appleby identified a visceral, disgust response to the idea of eating kangaroo in many of his informants, including both vegetarians who would not consider eating kangaroo because of their commitment to a plant-based diet, and at least one omnivore who would prefer to give up all meat rather than eat kangaroo. While diametrically opposed, the end point of both positions is that kangaroo meat should not be eaten.A second animal ethics stance relates to the imagined kangaroo, a cultural construct which for most urban Australians is much more present in their lives and likely to shape their actions than the living animals. It is behind the rejection of eating an animal which holds such an iconic place in Australian culture: to the dexter on the 1912 national coat of arms; hopping through the Hundred Acre Wood as Kanga and Roo in A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh children’s books from the 1920s and the Disney movies later made from them; as a boy’s best friend as Skippy the Bush Kangaroo in a fondly remembered 1970s television series; and high in the sky on QANTAS planes. The anthropomorphising of kangaroos permitted the spectacle of the boxing kangaroo from the late nineteenth century. By framing natural kangaroo behaviours as boxing, these exhibitions encouraged an ambiguous understanding of kangaroos as human-like, moving them further from the category of food (Golder and Kirkby). Australian government bodies used this idea of the kangaroo to support food exports to Britain, with kangaroos as cooks or diners rather than ingredients. The Kangaroo Kookery Book of 1932 (see fig. 1 below) portrayed kangaroos as a nuclear family in a suburban kitchen and another official campaign supporting sales of Australian produce in Britain in the 1950s featured a Disney-inspired kangaroo eating apples and chops washed down with wine (“Kangaroo to Be ‘Food Salesman’”). This imagining of kangaroos as human-like has persisted, leading to the opinion expressed in a 2008 focus group, that consuming kangaroo amounted to “‘eating an icon’ … Although they are pests they are still human nature … these are native animals, people and I believe that is a form of cannibalism!” (Ampt and Owen 26). Figure 1: Rather than promoting the eating of kangaroos, the portrayal of kangaroos as a modern suburban family in the Kangaroo Kookery Book (1932) made it unthinkable. (Source: Kangaroo Kookery Book, Director of Australian Trade Publicity, Australia House, London, 1932.)The third layer of ethical objection on the ground of animal welfare is more specific, being directed to the method of killing the kangaroos which become food. Kangaroos are perhaps the only native animals for which state governments set quotas for commercial harvest, on the grounds that they compete with livestock for pasturage and water. In most jurisdictions, commercially harvested kangaroo carcasses can be processed for human consumption, and they are the ones which ultimately appear in supermarket display cases.Kangaroos are killed by professional shooters at night using swivelling spotlights mounted on their vehicles to locate and daze the animals. While clean head shots are the ideal and regulations state that animals should be killed when at rest and without causing “undue agonal struggle”, this is not always achieved and some animals do suffer prolonged deaths (NSW Code of Practice for Kangaroo Meat for Human Consumption). By regulation, the young of any female kangaroo must be killed along with her. While averting a slow death by neglect, this is considered cruel and wasteful. The hunt has drawn international criticism, including from Greenpeace which organised campaigns against the sale of kangaroo meat in Europe in the 1980s, and Viva! which was successful in securing the withdrawal of kangaroo from sale in British supermarkets (“Kangaroo Meat Sales Criticised”). These arguments circulate and influence opinion within Australia.A final animal ethics issue is that what is actually behind the push for greater use of kangaroo meat is not concern for the environment or animal welfare but the quest to turn a profit from these animals. The Kangaroo Industries Association of Australia, formed in 1970 to represent those who dealt in the marsupials’ meat, fur and skins, has been a vocal advocate of eating kangaroo and a sponsor of market research into how it can be made more appealing to the market. The Association argued in 1971 that commercial harvest was part of the intelligent conservation of the kangaroo. They sought minimum size regulations to prevent overharvesting and protect their livelihoods (“Assn. Backs Kangaroo Conservation”). The Association’s current website makes the claim that wild harvested “Australian kangaroo meat is among the healthiest, tastiest and most sustainable red meats in the world” (Kangaroo Industries Association of Australia). That this is intended to initiate a new and less controlled branch of the meat industry for the benefit of hunters and processors, rather than foster a shift from sheep or cattle to kangaroos which might serve farmers and the environment, is the opinion of Dr. Louise Boronyak, of the Centre for Compassionate Conservation at the University of Technology Sydney (Boyle 19).Concerns such as these have meant that kangaroo is most consumed where it is least familiar, with most of the meat for human consumption recovered from culled animals being exported to Europe and Asia. Russia has been the largest export market. There, kangaroo meat is made less strange by blending it with other meats and traditional spices to make processed meats, avoiding objections to its appearance and uncertainty around preparation. With only a low profile as a novelty animal in Russia, there are fewer sentimental concerns about consuming kangaroo, although the additional food miles undermine its environmental credentials. The variable acceptability of kangaroo in more distant markets speaks to the role of culture in determining how patterns of eating are formed and can be shifted, or, as Elspeth Probyn phrased it “how natural entities are transformed into commodities within a context of globalisation and local communities”, underlining the impossibility of any straightforward ethics of eating kangaroo (33, 35).Kangatarianism is a neologism which makes the eating of kangaroo meat something it has not been in the past, a voluntary restriction based on environmental ethics. These environmental benefits are well founded and eating kangaroo can be understood as an Anthropocenic bargain struck to allow the continuation of the consumption of red meat while reducing one’s environmental footprint. Although superficially attractive, the numbers entering into this bargain remain small because environmental ethics cannot be disentangled from animal ethics. The anthropomorphising of the kangaroo and its use as a national symbol coexist with its categorisation as a pest and use of its meat as food for companion animals. Both understandings of kangaroos made their meat uneatable for many Australians. Paired with concerns over how kangaroos are killed and the commercialisation of a native species, kangaroo meat has a very mixed reception despite decades of advocacy for eating its meat in favour of that of more harmed and more harmful introduced species. Given these constraints, kangatarianism is unlikely to become widespread and indeed it should be viewed as at best a temporary exigency. As the climate warms and rainfall becomes more erratic, even animals which have evolved to suit Australian conditions will come under increasing pressure, and humans will need to reach Kübler-Ross’ final state of grief: acceptance. In this case, this would mean acceptance that our needs cannot be placed ahead of those of other animals.ReferencesAmpt, Peter, and Kate Owen. Consumer Attitudes to Kangaroo Meat Products. Canberra: Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, 2008.Appleby, Bryce. “Skippy the ‘Green’ Kangaroo: Identifying Resistances to Eating Kangaroo in the Home in a Context of Climate Change.” BSc Hons, U of Wollongong, 2010 <http://ro.uow.edu.au/thsci/103>.Archer, Michael. “Zoology on the Table: Plenary Session 4.” Australian Zoologist 39, 1 (2017): 154–60.“Assn. 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