Reflections from the Storytelling for Lost and Threatened Places Symposium
Participants were invited to creatively and cautiously approach stories as vital tools for world-making—or unmaking. One of the symposium’s key provocations was how storytelling can illuminate the unequal and “patchy” nature of the Anthropocene, drawing from the work of Anna Tsing and colleagues. While environmental change is global, it manifests unevenly—across landscapes, species, and cultures. Attentiveness to local stories helps us grapple with the divergent experiences of environmental loss and planetary transformation.
A potent example presented at the symposium was Vic McEwan’s work on “Artistic interventions within a contested river system” that explored their collaborative project in the aftermath of the massive “fish kills” in the Barka (Darling) river. These efforts culminated in co-created ceremony, community art performance, and the returning of fish that had been rehabilitated off country back to the Barka river.
Kirsten Wehner spoke about increasing cultural capacity in marginalised communities to tell stories of their lived experience of their local waterways, and as a result to increase care of these places. This theme continued in Emily Potter, Donna Houston and Fiona Miller’s presentation “Repairing places for adaptive futures: Community-led repair work in climate-affected regions”. The presenters spoke of the opportunities of place-based storytelling for listening, making sense, and allowing strength and agency to emerge.
Yet the conversations during the symposium also raised critical tensions. How do we avoid romanticising or appropriating others’ stories, particularly those of Indigenous communities, frontline communities, and more-than-human beings? In her talk on “Stories as leverage: Advocacy, loss and the politics of place”, Tessa Fluence asked “who gets to speak for place; what do we ask stories to carry; who gets to tell them?”
Drawing on thinkers like Tony Birch, Alexis Wright, and Donna Haraway, participants reflected on the ethics and responsibilities of speaking for/with others. Dany Celermajer raised the key question: how do we tell stories accurately, powerfully, ethically and effectively?
A sobering strand of the discussion revolved around “sacrifice zones” and “shadow places”—terms used to describe areas rendered disposable by dominant systems of power and capital accumulation. In examining how certain places are deemed worthy of protection while others are forgotten, the symposium surfaced how storytelling can sometimes enable violence through omission or complicity. But it also celebrated narratives that resist such erasures: stories that stitch together lost connections, preserve endangered ways of knowing, and foster emotional alliances across species and scales.
In her presentation, “A social license to pollute has been decided by those not directly affected”, Lilian Pearce explored the myths created and disseminated by governments, industry, and advertising to shift blame and redirect responsibility for damaged landscapes. Speaking of the toxic inheritance left by lead mining in Broken Hill, she left us with a question loaded with the settler colonial patriarchal privilege of considering (some) places as disposable: “why don’t they just leave?”
In its effort to creatively explore and cultivate capacity for diverse modes of storytelling, the symposium also included a workshop facilitated by Zoë Sadokierski. The workshop engaged the University’s Chau Chak Wing Museum collection to explore a range of different approaches to more-than-human storytelling, including creative nonfiction, visual mapping, sketching and creative writing (drawing, in part on her work with colleagues in A Curious Trail of Animal Tails). Creating a space for inclusive, generative and playful activities enabled attendees from different institutions, disciplines and career stages to spend time together, working through ideas raised in the presentations in small groups.
On Monday evening, UTS Visualisation Institute hosted the symposium community for a program of performances, including short story and poetry readings, visual essays and posthuman drag. These performances complemented the creative practice research presented throughout the symposium: Vahri McKenzie’s socially engaged performance work in ‘shadow places’ around the Mandoon Bilya/Helena River which deliberately resists the demand for academic research to be ‘scaled up’ through its intimate connection to place; Gemma Sou’s instructive presentation on how to translate social research into a comic, making abstract and complex data relatable and private moments accessible; Affrika Taylor’s ‘Grandmother Baglady Yarns’ drawing on Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Carrier Bag of Fiction’.
Ultimately, “Storytelling for Lost and Threatened Places” championed a diverse, experimental, and accountable practice of storytelling as essential to any genuine effort to confront today’s ecological challenges. By staying close to place—its diversity of textures, histories, and communities—and by honouring the multiplicity of stories it holds, we might begin to imagine more just, inclusive, and sustainable futures. In the words of Donna Haraway, this is nothing less than the fraught but necessary task of “storytelling for Earthly survival.”
By Suhasini Gunatillaka, Zoë Sadokierski and Thom van Dooren
Header image: Sydney Environment Institute (Copyright The University of Sydney)