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, digital 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.