The Anthropocene and Visual Culture in Australia

Australia is gaining a reputation as the proverbial canary in the coal mine of global environmental change. The driest inhabited continent on earth, Australia is now exposed to rising planetary temperatures and an increase in disastrous events such as massive bushfires, floods, and warming oceans. At the same time, urban development, extractive agriculture, and mining are eroding Australia's distinctive natural habitats, driving its mammal extinctions to the highest rates in the world.This edited collection features writers from various fields in visual culture, history, and ecocritical theory who give timely accounts of how Australian visual media represents, interprets, predicts, or obscures such environmental events in relation to the Anthropocene. The chapters focus on the visualisation of Australian ecology across a range of media including ancient rock art, television and film, photography, visual art, dgtl maps, and AI.By bringing Australian critical perspectives to the challenges of the Anthropocene, this book offers a new environmental approach to Australian culture in the context of the global issues of climate change, extinction, and colonialism.

About the Author

Linda Williams is a cultural historian and Emeritus Professor of RMIT University. She has published widely on histories of human‑animal relations and Western concepts of nature. She has curated several international exhibitions on climate change and multispecies imaginaries, and led an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded Project Spatial Dialogues: Public Art & Climate Change which produced the co‑authored book Screen Ecologies: Art, Screen Culture and the Environment in the Asia‑Pacific Region (MIT Press, 2016). She currently leads the Extinction Imaginaries: Mapping Affective Visual Cultures in Australasia ARC project with Saffron Aid and Greenpeace.

Helen McDonald is an art historian and curator, and Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Her books are Erotic Ambiguities: The Female Nude in Art (Routledge, 2001) and Patricia Piccinini: Nearly Beloved (2012). Her recent co‑edited book is Crosscurrents in Australian First Nations and Non‑Indigenous Art (Routledge, 2023) and her latest co‑edited journal special issue is Australian Art and Its Aboriginal Histories, Australian Historical Studies (2023). Her current research interests are rock art and climate change in a global context.