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This article brings together the ideas of protest and counterculture in a productive engagement. If protest is understood as publicly bearing witness in opposition to something, then countercultures often do this as rejections of dominant cultures that are folded into everyday life in order to create spaces for possible futures. The countercultural experiments undertaken in the region around Nimbin, Australia, are an example of such space creation. Using interviews, presentations, and archival materials collected at a 2013 community conference marking the 40th anniversary of the 1973 Nimbin Aquarius Festival, I will explore these experiments in the context of countercultural protest. The Festival not only gathered together people under the banner of the counterculture, but provided a unique space for gathering around common matters of concern to create an ongoing countercultural community. This community continues to develop practical knowledge regarding sustainable living and innovations in grassroots environmental protest. Keywords: counterculture, environmentalism, social experiments, learning, Nimbin Aquarius Festival, student protest, Introduction Nimbin, in the far northeast corner of New South Wales, Australia, has since the 1970s been the center of a vibrant and adaptive countercultural community. It is, as Australian [...]

This article is underpinned by the hypothesis that if Australia is to reassess and improve its relationship to and use of rivers and river systems, then more holistic ways of understanding rivers, and strategies for representing and communicating this understanding, must be developed and brought together. Held over two days in August 2019 at the Lismore campus of Southern Cross University, 'Speaking With the River' was an interdisciplinary symposium exploring the capacities of creative research practice to develop new understandings of rivers and river systems as simultaneously environmental, cultural, historical and economic phenomena. In this article, we bring together the voices and disciplinary insights from the symposium and the rivers of Northern New South Wales, and we reflect on the way that riverine language ran throughout our discussions and ideas, providing a connective model of confluences and conjunctions for the interdisciplinary enterprise we were engaged in. This article presents perspectives on rivers and river systems from law, history, art and science, exploring common ground and common purposes. Developing a legal framework for recognising the rights and 'voices' of rivers, that is informed by Indigenous knowledges, historical contexts, and scientific understanding, and that employs artistic innovation in representation and translation, is to us the ultimate goal of such an enquiry. While this paper does not undertake the formal steps of developing this framework, it provides the necessary background and instantiates its elements and working methods within the context of the Richmond River in Northern New South Wales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we learn with the environments we inhabit to promote mutual flourishing? This paper argues that environmental arts practice is a key component in the pedagogical process of getting to know where we live and, through a more-than-human intersubjective exchange, enriching our response-ability to the environment. To think through and work towards this pedagogy we explore a small patch of Gaïa - the Rotary Park Rainforest Reserve in Lismore, New South Wales - via a photography and video project that contemplates didactic and interpretive signs along a short walking circuit. Crucial to our contemplation of this environmental arts project are concepts for action that we develop by putting into conversation ideas from the environmental humanities and early childhood education: progettazione, time to learn, provocation and attention. Through aesthetic immersion in, and in dialogue with the forest, these concepts help us conceptualise a regenerative curriculum and relational pedagogy that energise, amongst other things, environmental arts in-the-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rear-view mirror is a metaphoric favourite in popular culture. This exploratory essay positions the rear-view mirror as, predominantly, a quintessentially modern device for reimagining the past and its relationship to the present and future. Combined with that icon of modern economies, the motorcar, it gives a sense of a paved journey towards the future while from the driver’s seat allowing a framed, receding view of the past. With distance that past can be critically held: ‘it now makes sense’. This sensemaking relies upon a spatial rendering of time that makes past, present and future concrete. However, this dominant metaphor of the rear-view mirror in popular culture is supplemented by less certain uses: it can also evoke the uncanny; bring spectres from the past into the present; or heighten our enmeshment with structural power. This essay explores this terrain of the rear-view mirror in examples from radio, song, music video and film, and then questions the efficacy of the metaphor in the anthropocene. The rear-view mirror, then, is an entry point for considering our engagement with the past, present and future, and how and where is our gaze directed and for whom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Our paper focuses on the materiality, cultural history and cultural relations of selected artworks in the exhibition Wood for the trees (Lismore Regional Gallery, New South Wales, Australia, 10 June - 17 July 2011). The title of the exhibition, intentionally misreading the aphorism "Can't see the wood for the trees", by reading the wood for the resource rather than the collective wood[s], implies conservation, preservation, and the need for sustaining the originating resource. These ideas have particular resonance on the NSW far north coast, a region once rich in rainforest. While the Indigenous population had sustainable practices of forest and land management, the colonists deployed felling and harvesting in order to convert the value of the local, abundant rainforest trees into high-value timber. By the late twentieth century, however, a new wave of settlers launched a protest movements against the proposed logging of remnant rainforest at Terania Creek and elsewhere in the region. Wood for the trees, curated by Gallery Director Brett Adlington, plays on this dynamic relationship between wood, trees and people. We discuss the way selected artworks give expression to the themes or concepts of productive labour, nature and culture, conservation and sustainability, and memory. The artworks include Watjinbuy Marrawilil's (1980) Carved ancestral figure ceremonial pole, Elizabeth Stops' (2009/10) Explorations into colonisation, Hossein Valamanesh's (2008) Memory stick, and AñA Wojak's (2008) Unread book (in a forgotten language). Our art writing on the works, a practice informed by Bal (2002), Muecke (2008) and Papastergiadis (2004), becomes a conversation between the works and the themes or concepts. As a form of material excess of the most productive kind (Grosz, 2008, p. 7), art seeds a response to that which is in the air waiting to be said of the past, present and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]