I am a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of New England, Armidale. My current project is a collaboration with Armidale’s Aboriginal community to develop a community garden in Narwan Village, East Armidale, a former Aboriginal reserve adjacent to residential properties and opposite the local Aboriginal Primary School, Minimbah.
Through the lens of multispecies ethnography, the garden will be a space to experiment with alternatives to neoliberal, colonial and anthropocentric modes of living, thinking and connecting. The project will expand the notion of community into ideas of ‘mixed communities’ of humans and nonhumans and ask innovative questions such as: Can a plant be a mentor? Can bush foods retain cultural knowledge? Can worms teach us how to develop more sustainable modes of living? Community members will be co-researchers, bridging the gap between traditional and academic knowledges and between localised action and global change.