Abstract: This is the story of cultural fire, animals, and resistance in Australia. Taking guidance from a little patch of land on the mid north coast of New South Wales, Marcus Baynes-Rock tells of the animals engaged with Gumbaynggirr people and their journey to remake the landscape.  It is a story told at a local level but one that resonates across Australia in resurgent land practices that are re-emerging from under the shadow of colonisation. While modernist worldviews, institutions of empire, and global flows of capital bear down like an oppressive weight over the systems of care that seek to take root in the land, people, plants and animals resist. They do this not with the weapons and tactics of past struggles, but with the quiet persistence of ancestral lore. The light from the fires that burn across the land reveals an ancient struggle by which the threads that bind people, animals, and ecologies together resist colonisation. In a time of ecological crisis, they remind us that the Earth is not ours for the taking; that we need to honour the forest creatures and work with them to make the world a more liveable place.

About the speaker: Marcus Baynes-Rock is an anthropologist who studies the cultural interfaces between humans and other animals. In his first book, Among the Bone Eaters, he develops the concept of the Multispecies Commons – a shared cultural space in which humans and spotted hyenas negotiate relations of conflict and coexistence that transcend behaviourist paradigms. His second book, Crocodile Undone, extends the concept of human/animal co-culture to the contemporary domestication processes of some iconic Australian animals. His latest book, The Fire Commons, describes how First Nations people, animals, and plants co-create landscapes via the medium of cultural fire and how the ontologies that underpin these relations resist colonisation. The binding thread in Baynes-Rock’s work is the contrast between the commoditising forces of capitalism that seek to abstract the land’s inhabitants, break them down and repurpose them toward ultimately destructive ends, and grass-roots efforts to democratise co-habitation so that humans, plants and animals all have agency in deciding how the land is lived upon.

This is an open session. Registration link

This event is coorganized with HAS-HUB, ERC ABIDE and the SHIFT Research Group.