In the Melbourne Museum is a collection of rainforest leaves. Wafer thin, they are not part of the forest gallery that gives visitors a taste of Victoria’s modern-day temperate rainforest. Rather, they are part of an exhibition about the tropical rainforest that Victoria was home to millions of years ago. Donated by the late palaeobotanist David Christophel – who explains in a video on the mus ... (read more)
Lauren Rickards
Lauren Rickards is an Associate Professor in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne. She visited the Melbourne Museum as part of a Making Futures event organised by the Anthropocene Campus Melbourne and the Everyday Futures project https://everydayfutures.com.au/about/project/, during which she worked with Matthew Kearnes, Martin Leckey, and David Turnbull to piece together the narrative recounted here.
Sunburnt Country is a fascinating, timely, uneven book. Consisting of forty-one short chapters, it is written by climate scientist Joëlle Gergis, who explores the matter of climate change through an unusual mix of genres: colonial history, popular science, scientific autobiography, and advocacy. The first two of these dominate the self-representations of the book. In particular, it is framed as f ... (read more)
‘Forget everything you know.’ Clive Hamilton’s book pulls no punches from the first words on the cover. Building on a raft of other pieces he has written on the subject, Hamilton’s book is unsurprisingly provocative, blunt, and confident, its style matching the epic physical, intellectual, and ethical drama that is the Anthropocene.
Although the Anthropocene now needs little introduction, ... (read more)