The Anthropocene and Visual Culture in Australia

Reviews / Votes

This in all senses timely collection offers a sustained, material and critical engagement with visualizing the Anthropocene in the key context of Australia. When governments are saying there's nothing to see here, this collective project amounts to a substantial rebuttal that researchers everywhere will want to study.
Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor, Department of Media, Culture and Communication, NYUWilliams and McDonald's outstanding collection of essays delivers a sweeping as well as meticulously detailed account of Australian visual culture in its engagement with the environmental crises that are often summarized as "the Anthropocene." In its emphasis on visual production from murals and paintings all the way to photographs, television, film, and digital imagery, this book shifts the emphasis of the Environmental Humanities from history, philosophy, and literature to visual cultures. Even as the essays integrate visual works with global theoretical perspectives on the Anthropocene, they foreground the specificity of Australian experiences of environmental crisis, bringing together analyses of the "imperial visuality" of colonialism and of the "counter-visualities" that have emerged from First Nations visual expression as well as activist environmental image-making. The interdisciplinary spectrum of disciplines in the volume, which includes First Nations scholars as well as experts from art history, film studies, and urban studies, turns Williams and McDonald's collection into a distinctive, innovative, and important contribution to the expanding field of the Environmental Humanities.
Ursula K. Heise, Distinguished Professor | Department of English & Institute of the Environment & Sustainability, UCLACombining diverse perspectives, including contributions by historians and anthropologists, geographers and urban planners, artists and curators, as well as scholars of visual media, science and technology this volume affords fresh insights into many aspects of Australian visual culture, both Indigenous and settler-colonial, from thehorizon of those earth system changes summoned (not unproblematically) by the term "Anthropocene": an era dated by some to the start of the fossil-fuelled industrial revolution and hence roughly coeval with the British invasion of the continent they dubbed Australia. The first major anthology to examine the history of Australian visual culture across a wide range of media through an ecological lens, this fascinating collection also makes a major contribution to the inter- and transdisciplinary weave of the environmental humanities through its focus on the hitherto under-acknowledged role of visual culture in shaping human perceptions of, and interactions with, other-than-human beings and phenomena, and the more-than-human worlds that, for better or worse, we co-create with them.
Kate Rigby, Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Environmental Humanities, University of CologneThis anthology brings to life different ecological imaginaries, invoked as Australians from rock-engravers to painters, photographers, and film-makers-listen to and reconfigure the dialogue between nature and culture. Without flattening the world into a posthumanist tableau, this book carefully elaborates how, intentionally and by inference, different lines of visual cuture expose the meaning of human impact on our distressed planet.
Paul James, Emeritus Professor of Globalization and Cultural Diversity, Western Sydney UniversityMany of Australia's best thinkers assemble to think about the myriad aspects of visual culture on a continent where the challenges of the Anthropocene-excessive extraction, fire, and drought among them-are a fact of everyday life. Deftly introduced by Williams and McDonald, contributions explore First Peoples' conceptions of Country, anthropological understandings of deep time, the persistence of colonial frameworks in art and popular culture consciousness, and the growing fear of extinction, both natural and human. Eschewing redemptive gestures, these essays map where we are now, visualising these challenges in contemporary conditions.
Terry Smith, Emeritus Professor University of Sydney, Andrew W. Mellon Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory, University of Pittsburgh, & Slade Professor of Fine Arts, University of Cambridge, 2025-2026