Roots, Rupture and Remembrance

Abstract

Why do certain landscapes become contested sites for claims about identity? In responding to this question, we approach landscapes as assemblages of human and non-human elements that reach beyond the confines of their immediate physical and temporal locations. Our empirical focus is a small group of pine trees in a Tasmanian suburb, where remnants of human and non-human migration are inscribed and live on in the landscape and in human memory. We demonstrate how the trees simultaneously invite and resist purification through binaries such as nature and culture, wild and domestic, then and now. The histories and futures of belonging assembled in and through these trees are nothing less than active, idiosyncratic and ongoing processes of differentiation that shed light on the working out of postcolonial, globalizing societies and ecologies.