Dr Rebecca Hamilton – Conserving Australia’s misremembered natural heritage

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Conserving Australia’s misremembered natural heritage: The need for a long-term perspective by Dr Rebecca Hamilton from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Seminar presented on Friday 23 April 2021 at the Australian National University

0:00 Presentation by Mathieu Leclerc
00:57 Seminar
36:25 Questions

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Archaeology and history, being associated with unearthing human worlds of the past, are commonly overlooked in the practical management of today’s natural landscapes. In Australia, conservation policy is often embedded in the physical sciences, with targets directed at the preservation or restoration of pre- or early- European ecological benchmarks. For example, federal and NSW environmental legislation strives to protect “Endangered Ecological Communities” (EECs). These supposedly represent remnants of naturally occurring groups of plants, animals and other organisms. In many cases, however, classifications of EECs are made in the absence of any long-term data, making it unclear as to whether the “natural” community that is being protected is indeed “natural”. This talk draws on geoarchaeological, historical and Traditional Ecological Knowledge to reconstruct the long-term socio-ecological history of Sydney’s once-extensive freshwater wetlands – classified as an EEC under the Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016 (NSW). In doing so, it demonstrates that what is being conserved today is remarkably different from the pre- and early- European landscape, and highlights how quickly we can come to “misremember” landscapes of the past. This highlights the importance of long-term, multidisciplinary data from both the social and physical sciences for developing evidence-based conservation policy.

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Account managed by Mathieu Leclerc (https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/leclerc-m)