Emeritus Professor Lesley Head unpacks the deep entanglement of nature and culture with Lana Nguyen from A Climate for Art, challenging the Western divide that separates urban life from the natural world. She critiques the notion of a “pristine” wilderness as a colonial fantasy, advocating instead for a recognition of landscapes as culturally shaped and historically layered. Reflecting on Indigenous sovereignty and intergenerational responsibility, Lesley reframes hope not as passive optimism but as an active, grounded practice of strengthening social fabric and caring for the present to nurture future possibilities.
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Cultural Landscapes
Radio Climate with Lesley HeadHi Lesley. Could you please tell us who you are and where we are?
Hi Lana. My name's Lesley Head. I'm emeritus professor of geography at the University of Melbourne, and we're in a pod in a library in a building on the campus of the University of Melbourne When we first spoke, we spoke about the different layers of the place that is the University of Melbourne.
Can you speak us through the different layers that you perceive?
So if we think of the physical layers, then obviously the current campus is quite a mixture of very old buildings and new buildings, and it's a construction site.
Always something going on, something being renovated and fixed. Underneath that landscape, we can think of what it might have looked like 250 or 300 years ago, where it would've been a open grassy woodland, Wurundjeri Woiwurrung country, which it still is, but then under much more direct Wurundjeri management.
So there would've been lots of burning happening in the grasslands, burning to encourage hunting and to manage the plant foods. And one of the ways we can think about the connections between those landscapes is the story of the eels which travel down the streams. The streams which are still underneath the campus.
So over on Bouverie Street, where the geography building is, there's a drain out there in the Bluestone Gutter where allegedly you can see the eels migrate up and down the, uh, the drains tracing the path of where the ancient stream was. I've never actually seen them, but I'm sure they're there.
So if you imagine a creek line going through the campus of the University of Melbourne down to what's now Elizabeth Street and draining into the Yarra Birrarung River, we can think of those connections. So that's just the physical landscape, but there's also the landscapes of memory and attachment, which many different people have brought to the place over a long period of time.
And when we first spoke about this interview, speaking about these different places, you said that it was really important to reconceptualize these urban spaces as something that's within our idea of nature. Um, could you speak to that and the links to your work around that as well?
Sure. Well, it's probably more about rethinking nature to include the urban spaces.
That's important for a number of reasons, one of which is that most of us live in cities, but any city is underpinned by its connections to distant places. And the need to rethink it has come from the fact that we tend to think of nature as somewhere out there, somewhere remote. Particularly in the Australian context, we often think of the outback, distant places.
But if we can imagine urban life, whether it's the sandstone and bluestone of the university campus, whether it's the food we eat, whether it's the building materials that are all around us, all of those are material expressions of nature that underpin the life we live in cities. So the very metabolism of cities is really, very much connected to those underpinnings.
But also I think we need to, and we've got much better at this over time, is thinking of all the lively connections we can still see in bush remnants, in birds, in the weather. There's lots of ways in which the natural world impacts everyday life in cities.
So in your recent book, Beyond Green, you speak about the need to dismantle and rework the divide between nature and culture. Could you speak a bit more to that?
So the divide between nature and culture is a quite profound divide, particularly in Western thought, and has developed over several thousand years, but particularly in the last few hundred years. It needs to be dismantled for several reasons, one of which is that it's quite inaccurate.
So what we call culture and what we call nature are threaded through and together in lots of different ways. For example, the very atmosphere around us bears the signature of human activity in the form of greenhouse gases.
And as we were talking about before, we live in a very transformed physical landscape that has been transformed as a result of human and cultural activities. So there's lots of evidence from different parts, different disciplines really, including disciplines like archeology, which illustrate the long signature of human activity on the landscape. There's lots of evidence of the connections. But because we're so embedded in and threaded through what we call the natural world, the hope of doing anything about the crises we face, including the climate crisis, require us to not think of ourselves as outside that world, but to be part of it.
In your book, you speak about, or you ask a question of: What does it mean to call a landscape cultural? And I'm really interested that, by that idea because I think there's a lot of ongoing assumptions, particularly from settlers, that we carry out in the idea of what art and culture is. Like, we see it as a painting on a wall rather than a landscape that has changed, and we… There's a bound that we create with what culture is in our minds, and I'm really interested in, yeah, what does it mean to call a landscape cultural?
Yeah. Well, cultural is a term that's got as much baggage as natural, I guess. But, a cultural landscape, again, we can think of it in both the physical and the more metaphorical way.So a cultural landscape as originally discussed in geography was one that has been physically transformed by human activity, whether it's clearing of vegetation, building of buildings, all the different human imprints, imprints we might see on a physical landscape. In recent decades, a lot more attention has been paid to the less material and more metaphorical connections with landscape.
So thinking of landscape as a place of memory, a place of connection, place of attachment. And of course, those two things are related. There's lots of ways in which if you're attached to landscapes, you'll transform them. So that's a particular view of cultural connection that's become much more nuanced and interesting, I think, in geographic research over the last few decades.
I'm also really interested in your perception of how we see environmental culture at the moment, so the environmental movement and, um, how cultures of nature operate in so-called Australia. So I guess in your book you speak about some of the ways that they're limiting our capacities to deal with the crisis of climate change because of the method in which they perceive the world, and I'm really interested in making that clear and sort of making it denaturalized. What is the culture of nature in so-called Australia?
So one of the central arguments in the book is that environmental thought, as we understand it in Australia, even though it often positions itself in opposition to modernity as in something that's contesting development, for example, actually grew out of the same intellectual heritage as the development ethos or modernity itself.And the expression of that, or one expression of that, is this idealization of the pristine in the past and the idea that we can go back to some sort of pure nature that doesn't have people in it, doesn't have human impacts in it. A key expression of that in the Australian context is the wilderness idea, which we might talk about separately.
So the argument in the book is that that strain of environmental thought is not only historically inaccurate, but really doesn't equip us well for the volatile present and future that we're experiencing, the kind of upheavals that we're already going through, but we're going to go through more.
And so if we can let go of that past ideal, which in many ways was based on a colonial fantasy, we'll be much better equipped to, to face the challenges that we have in front of us.
In your work, you quote Chelsea Watego's phrase, "Fuck hope, be sovereign." Does this speak to a need of the realignment of our futures to the present? And do you see this idea of hope as a continuation of the Enlightenment and the ideals of progress that what you were just speaking about?
Yeah, if I can just answer the second part first there.I think in many ways, some aspects of hope as we experience it and talk about it are a continuation of those Enlightenment ideals of, of progress, this kind of optimism about the future and the idea of moving forward.
I think what Chelsea Watego was saying, and she was talking to First Nations people, to Mob, that First Nations people haven't had the luxury of hope in the Australian history that as they've experienced it, and therefore as I read her work, she's telling people not to be kind of bought off by the false promise of hope, that things will always get better. Just, you know, give us time, things will always improve. And so she's talking to, to mob about don't be distracted by the ideals or the false promises of the settler culture and, you know, be sovereign in our own terms.Now, what are the implications of that for the rest of us who aren't indigenous? I think, one is just to listen and be very aware that, you know, what some of us might think of as apocalypse has already been experienced by indigenous communities in Australia and elsewhere. But it also is part of the thinking that's pushing us towards, different kinds of thinking about hope, not as an emotion of optimism or positivity, but as a more grounded, active practice.
Yeah, I really like in your work how you're redefining and reframing a lot of these concepts and trying to push them into a direction that, you know, is working towards a world that we need.In this, there are different concepts that you're still sort of unpacking. We spoke briefly about wilderness, and I have read before Deborah Bird Rose reframing wilderness and talking about wild country. So, calling land out of relation wild, so instead an urban space is wild country because it's out of step with the relationships that we need, or Bruce Pascoe talking about Indigenous peoples, the true conservatives. Why do you think these conceptual and linguistic reframes are important, and what methods should we use to expand this reframing? I guess your book is one of them, reshaping nature and culture. But yeah, I'm interested in the methods and why this reframing on a linguistic level is really important.
Yeah, it's interesting because this is a very long-term work, and so you can work in this area for long periods of time, decades in my case, and you never quite know whether you're making a difference or not. It's very different to, for example, working on a policy or trying to get some activism towards a policy.
In the book, I use the example that goes back to Donella Meadows' work about systems change and the way in which systems change and different wavelengths of things. And she's got a really interesting diagram of a lever, and she talks about deep and shallow leverage. So if we accept that profound transformation of our current social and ecological and economic systems is necessary, then the things that are going to really push us towards transformative change are those deep levers and the concepts that underpin our understanding of the world.
So if we compare it, for example, to tax policy or energy policy or something, that's kind of fiddling around the edges. It doesn't transform the system. But one of the ways in which you can transform the system is to shift the mindsets and the paradigms that underpin our current lives. In practice, all these things have to happen at once, but for those of us who work at the conceptual level, that's you know, where we find ourselves and why we think that's important work.
And of course, we don't know whether we're having an impact or not because these are very long-term changes. But as Dana Meadows also says some of those things can change in an instant. You know, when you have systems change, things can happen very quickly, and it's not necessarily predictable when that will be.
And we've seen a few of those in the last few years, like with COVID. You know, the world was transformed almost overnight. So I'm sure there'll be more crises and opportunities in the future.
Mm-hmm. I really like the distinction of the different levers. And one of the things that we've been thinking about, I guess, in the conversations with COP, there's been a voice that has been growing in terms of bringing a cultural response to climate to the table. Why do you think those approaches have sort of been left off the table and out of policy discussions?
I guess if we go back, uh, 10, 20, even 30 years, a lot of the debates were ‘is the science correct’? Is the science of climate change correct? And so a lot of the debate, particularly from scientists, was trying to have their voice heard in not only a policy sense but in a broader cultural sense.You know, this is a big thing to claim, that humans have historically transformed the world in a way that now threatens all of our survival. So it's not surprising in some ways that that scientific evidence was doubted for a long time. And the scientists themselves, you know, often talk about being gobsmacked by their own findings.
So I think we have had a debate that was framed in ‘is the science correct’? Now, in the last 10 maybe years, it's become clear that the complexity of that debate allowed vested fossil fuel interest to keep distracting us by arguing about whether the science was, was correct or not. So there's all that history of, you know, how is science regarded, and so on.
But in terms of the cultural frames, I think there's a few ways to think about that. One is the, what's the role of culture, as in art and music and displays like the one you're preparing? What's the role of that kind of culture in stretching our thinking, transforming our thinking, putting forward alternatives, provoking people to consider things?
But there's also a much more kind of everyday culture, which is where a lot of my research has focused. This is not to think just of culture as something kind of so-called high culture, opera, art, symphony music and so on, but you know, everyday life and the patterns of everyday life and people's habits and routines and so on.
How are those transformed? How are they stabilized? How do we give them meaning and so on?
Academic Lisa Slater talks about settler and First Nations relationships shifting through the infrastructures of the heart. So a lot of the things, you know, we can have these political arguments, but really it's about that relational level and that feeling level. Your book it is very personally led and you speak from this place of the heart. What do you think the role of our hearts in this work is?Well, it goes to questions of what we care about and where we want to put our energy, where we find meaning and so on. I think it's also about the role of emotions. So going back to that argument about the science, one of the things the scientists have long felt they had to do was take their emotions out of, out of the equation because they were faced with this, um, skepticism and hostility So they had to decouple themselves from their emotions, even when their findings were providing quite a lot of reason to have an emotional response.
So, heart, emotions, feelings, care are all bound up in things like grief, loss, anger. Yeah, the world we care for and the world that we want to leave for future generations.
I guess further to that, in your work, you also speak about being a grandmother and a granddaughter and your body enfolding generations. We were all carried as an egg in our maternal grandmothers' bodies. You tie this to paleoecologist Jacqueline Gill's question of what small, quiet things are waiting in the present only to grow in years to come. What would the world be like if we behaved like we carry those seeds within us every day? What seeds do you think we need to carry for the generations behind us and the generations in front of us?
Yeah, I think in lots of ways we're, we're doing it all the time. So, we care for children, we plant plants that will grow in the future. So part of it is recognizing what we're doing already rather than just having to always do new things. But if we use the analogy of planting a tree, for example, let's think about planting a long-lived tree.
If I plant a tree, I won't necessarily live to see the fully grown tree, but that doesn't mean that it's not meaningful for meto plant a tree today and enjoy the process of planting. So it's not about giving up all good things in the present in order to survive some mythical future. For me, it's about finding links between meaningful present day activities and flourishing futures ahead.
So one of the things we can do is think about what are we doing that's harmful in the present that would harm future generations. What are we doing that's beneficial for everyone? Or not even for everyone, but for some people. So there are hundreds and hundreds of different activities that people can be doing that will make the world a better place.
But I guess I would summarize that as saying anything, anything we're doing to strengthen social connections and build networks of I don't like the word resilience, but I'll say resilience here. Build the capacity of the collective of people to respond to unknown changes that we can't anticipate.
But if we strengthen the social fabric, if we're doing anything now to strengthen the social fabric, we're strengthening our capacity to deal with the future.
To link back to the beginning, we're also thinking about that relationship with Country and the places around us as well, and how it informs the way that we are and the way that we see, um, and trying to strengthen those relationships so we can understand how climate is impacting the world around us. And I'm wondering what's the experience of Country that's informed your work and the way that you think?Yeah, I've been lucky to live and work in a lot of different places around Australia. Most of the places I've lived are in the southeast of Australia, Melbourne and the coastal areas of Wollongong. In my work, I've had the opportunity to travel to many different parts of the continent and to engage with lots of different people living in different parts of the continent.
So, including indigenous people whose connection to Country is, has been so profound and which I've learnt a lot from. So I feel connected to lots of different parts of Australia actually. Which is in some ways, a weird thing to say because one of the characteristics of Country is it's a local and regional phenomenon, if you like.
You wouldn't necessarily connect to, to the continent as a whole. But I think I've been fortunate to find ways to be able to attach to lots of different places in Australia.
And as a geographer that looks at human relations and, um, I'm wondering how you feel like people similar to growing our social relations can grow those relationships to place.I guess you also do it through the knowledge building of your work and understanding different relationships and politics of place. But yeah, what do you think the pathways are for people to grow their relationships with place?
Well, one of the arguments in the book is that people are doing it already in lots of very everyday ways. So, you know, suburban gardeners, people growing food, people foraging for resources in different public spaces.There are lots of capacities in the way that people are already engaging with place, whether that's indigenous people, people of settler colonial descent, or more recent migrants. One of the really interesting things I think in Australia is that we've got this incredibly diverse set of cultural resources of ways to engage with nature and place, and we should really be able to draw on this as sources of strength because it gives us so many different options in the future.
So to give an example, there's an example like this in the book, but it's not expressed in exactly these terms. But the Wollongong Botanic Gardens, for example, is a place of recreation and connection for lots of people who live in the city. It's a place that increasingly tries to acknowledge indigenous connection to place because it's beneath an important mountain, and it connects down to the coastal landscape, and there's lots of native vegetation and plant foods that are grown in the garden.
It's also a place of foraging for recent migrants who recognize the food value of different weeds and who forage in the, illegally, mind you, or surreptitiously, I should say, beneath the gaze of, away from the gaze of authority, and who recognize the food value in plants that are considered waste or rubbish or weeds by dominant cultures.
So one single place can have lots of different connections and sources of strength, which might be, you know, differently useful at different times.
I imagine the University of Melbourne and what the different, you know, transformations and methods of reforming and then shifting the landscape of Melbourne Uni could be.It's a good thought.
Thank you so much for your time for chatting to us. And thanks also for the incredible book.
Thank you.