The dynamics of human environment interactions in late Pleistocene and Holocene highland New Guinea: a study of the Ivane valley. The project will investigate how access to starchy plant foods facilitated the movement of colonizing peoples into new environments, and was critical to survival in Sahul (Ice Age Australia/New Guinea). It will aid in understanding the dynamics of human responses to the impacts of climate change.
Redeeming the Great Barrier Reef. Science, romanticism and indigenous knowledge in the cultural and ecological history of the reef, c.1850-1950. This project shows how, in the late-nineteenth-century, scientist W Saville-Kent, journalist EJ Banfield and castaway Narcisse Pelletier, and their intellectual successors, helped transform widespread popular fear and distrust of the Great Barrier Reef by inaugurating positive and holistic scientific, literary and ethnographic analyses of the region's e ....Redeeming the Great Barrier Reef. Science, romanticism and indigenous knowledge in the cultural and ecological history of the reef, c.1850-1950. This project shows how, in the late-nineteenth-century, scientist W Saville-Kent, journalist EJ Banfield and castaway Narcisse Pelletier, and their intellectual successors, helped transform widespread popular fear and distrust of the Great Barrier Reef by inaugurating positive and holistic scientific, literary and ethnographic analyses of the region's ecology.Read moreRead less
Cultures of Coast and Sea: maritime environmental, cultural and ethnographic histories of north-east Australia, 1770-2010. Using new cross-disciplinary approaches and methods, this collaboration between university scholars, museum curators and a philanthropic foundation will study the impact of maritime and marine environmental and cultural change on the peoples and habitats of the Great Barrier Reef and the Torres Strait from the eighteenth century to the present.