Cape York Peninsula in far north Queensland is a region renowned for its environmental and cultural values. Like other biodiverse regions in the world, Cape York sits at the nexus of important political struggles, as well as social, cultural, and environmental changes. Despite the very human role in shaping the landscape of Cape York, the region remains widely thought of as a ‘wilderness’ to be conserved. In this context, what counts as natural and native matters crucially – as does who gets to decide how species and people are categorised and controlled. 

In this seminar, Mardi Reardon-Smith will discuss her new book, Making Do: Conservation Ethics and Ecological Care in Australia. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Aboriginal traditional owners, settler-descended cattle graziers, and park rangers in far north Queensland, in Making Do Reardon-Smith investigates the complex ways in which people form, maintain, and transform relationships to changing environments among the ruptures of climate change and settler colonialism. She traces the ways that people live with and against tricky non-human forces, including cattle, pigs, weeds, fire, flood, and bureaucracies. The book explores the co-production of care between a variety of people and argues that caring for land, a sprawling, messy, and sometimes violent process, is not just about repair, restoration, or maintenance – but is about bringing into being workable landscapes, liveable worlds, and possible futures.

Mardi Reardon-Smith is a postdoctoral researcher with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) at Monash University. Her research sits within environmental anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) and investigates the social dimensions of environmental management in intercultural and settler-colonial contexts.

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