Southeastern Indigenous Australian Art as a Practice of Reclamation

Southeastern Indigenous Australian Art as a Practice of Reclamation examines how Indigenous communities in southeastern Australia reclaim Country within urban spaces through art. Focusing on Melbourne/Narrm a city built over drained wetlands and layered with colonial infrastructure, it follows the practices of Boon Wurrung artists Maree Clarke and Mitch Mahoney. Through multi-modal ethnographic research, the author traces how these artists engage with ancestral lands in unexpected places: backyards, university grounds, and city wetlands. Their work challenges settler-colonial narratives that relegates Country as distant, remote or rural, revealing its continued presence and vitality within, above and beneath the city. Bringing together sensory and environmental anthropology, this book highlights how artistic practices function as acts of reclamation and ecological restoration. It shows how Clarke and Mahoney’s work not only revives ancestral knowledge but also complicates dominant environmental frameworks, occasionally clashing with conservationist agendas. Through an analysis of embodied art-making and intergenerational transmission, the book explores how Indigenous-led practices offer alternative understandings of place, kinship, and time in urban settler-colonial contexts. This book will be of value to scholars and students in Indigenous studies, settler-colonial studies, sensory anthropology, and environmental humanities. It contributes to growing conversations about Indigenous sovereignty and urban land politics, particularly in relation to artistic practice and sensory knowledge. It will also interest curators, artists, and activists working at the intersections of ecology, care, and decolonial method, especially those seeking tools to engage with Indigenous communities in nuanced and non-extractive ways.