A Post-Wilderness National Park: Naturecultures of Destruction and Recuperation in the Castlemaine Goldfields

Authors

  • Lesley Instone University of Newcastle, Australia

Abstract

This article tells a story of how the cultural values and resilience of a mined landscape has been a motivation for listing it as a National Park. In the 1850s, the area that is now included in the Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park was devastated by intense goldmining practices. These, and later mining phases, left the area scarred, denuded, and thoroughly altered. Despite the destruction and changes, life asserts itself in new and continuing forms to create an emergent multi-temporal, multilayered landscape; a hybrid intermingling of overlain histories and natures that constitute a post-wilderness national park.

Author Biography

Lesley Instone, University of Newcastle, Australia

Lesley Instone is a more-than-human geographer whose work explores the multivalent entanglements of humans and nonhumans in Australian settings. She has a particular interest in how affect, encounter, and contingency shape relations, identities, and worlds. She can be reached at lesley.instone@newcastle.edu.au.

Downloads

Published

2017-06-16

Issue

2017

Section

Summer

License

Copyright (c) 2017 CC BY 4.0 Lesley Instone

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.