RGSQ Lecture Series
RGSQ recommends that all attendees at this event be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or exempt.
Emeritus Professor Lesley Head
University of Melbourne
We are pleased to announce that the 2023 J P Thomson Medal will be awarded to Emeritus Professor Lesley Head. The Honourable Chief Justice Helen Bowskill, who will be Acting Governor of Queensland at the time, will present Lesley with the medal. The J P Thomson Medal is the most prestigious award given by The Royal Geographical Society of Queensland. It was established in 1900 to honour Dr James Park Thomson, the Society’s founder. The award recognises Lesley’s high qualities of scholarship and her contribution to the discipline of geography.
Following the medal presentation, Lesley will deliver the Thomson Oration on the topic, The social life of Australian nature: the case of Barka/Darling River ecocide.
Abstract
Geographers have shown that the ways we frame nature and environment affect how we manage them. These framings are often taken for granted and need to be exposed before they can be discussed and changed.
The powerful modernist framing of Big N Nature and Big S Society leads to misdiagnoses and inappropriate solutions. As extreme weather and environmental hazards become more intense under climate change, politicians increasingly invoke Big N Nature to downplay their own agency and responsibility. Witness the Barka/Darling River fish kills of 2019, the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20 and the NSW/Queensland floods of February 2022.
The lecture focuses on a particular example of this naturalising trend, using the case of another wave of Barka/Darling River fish kills, at Menindee in March 2023. Menindee is in socio-ecological crisis, but official declarations maintain that the fish deaths are due to ‘natural’ causes. Lesley examines the collapse of the river system, showing how it and its people were made vulnerable, not by nature but by historical socio-political processes and recent management decisions.
Menindee and its grieving community provide a harbinger of future changes. Climate change is exacerbating the intensity and complexity of socio-ecological crises and testing how we govern the environment. Can we imagine nature and ourselves differently to stave off the worst of those crises?
Emeritus Professor Lesley Head
Lesley is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Melbourne where she was Head of the School of Geography from 2015 to 2021. Prior to that, she worked for many years at the University of Wollongong where, for the final five years, she was an Australian Research Council Australian Laureate Fellow and Director of the Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research.
Her research examines human-environment relations, both conceptual and material, to understand how humans have physically changed earth’s systems, how we think about our place in nature, and how these two things are connected. Her research – focused on long-term changes in the Australian landscape and the interactions of both prehistoric and contemporary peoples with these environments – has positioned her as an international leader in geographical debates about the relationship between humans and nature.
Lesley’s leadership of the geography profession is evident in her current role as President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, as a former Chair of the Australian Academy of Sciences National Committee for Geographical Sciences, and as a former President of the Institute of Australian Geographers.
Please note: If you have registered to attend the lecture via Zoom, the lecture link will be emailed to all registrants closer to the lecture date. This lecture may be recorded. If you have any questions, please email us at info@rgsq.org.au.
