Abstract
In 2014 I commenced a postdoctoral project that involved collaboratively planting and maintaining a community garden on a block of land that was once part of the East Armidale Aboriginal Reserve in the so-called New England Tableland region of New South Wales, Australia. At the edge of this block of land is an introduced, invasive willow tree. In this article I write with and alongside the willow tree to interrogate the potential and limitations of anticolonial projects undertaken from colonial subject positions predicated on relations of social and environmental privilege. 
 
 Anticolonial scholarly activism demands a critique of individual and institutional complicity with ongoing colonial power structures. The following analysis offers a personal narrative of what it has been like to be involved in an anticolonial multispecies research project while working within the confines of the neoliberal university. Exploring the intersection of academic, social and environmental ecologies, I position the community garden as an alternative pedagogical and public environmental humanities research site that interrupts the reproduction of settler colonial power relations by cultivating tactics of collective resistance in alliance with the nonhuman world.
Highlights
The following analysis offers a personal narrative of what it has been like to be involved in an anticolonial multispecies research project while working within the confines of the neoliberal university
Exploring the intersection of academic, social and environmental ecologies, I position the community garden as an alternative pedagogical and public environmental humanities research site that interrupts the reproduction of settler colonial power relations by cultivating tactics of collective resistance in alliance with the nonhuman world
While decolonising encounters at the community garden have offered what Elizabeth Povinelli has described as a means of pulling away, ‘a way of being out of the grip’[73] of colonising modes, the discordance between on the ground, community-based research and the practices of the corporate university have produced acute, and illuminating, tensions and dilemmas in my research process and the way I engage with community
Summary
Richard Vale’s childhood memories connect synapses to living and growing botany, so that the new willow and the old remembered willow come to form essential components of what Gregory Bateson called an eco-mental system, and this system conveys resilience and survival.[39] In the wasteland ecology of postcolonised Australia, Sara Morris’s removed willow tree, and its remaining neighbouring sister, evidences the ongoing slow violence[40] of the colonial state, while acting as an ‘elliptical blueprint’ that memorialises ‘what has been, what survives, and what must be restituted’[41] to Aboriginal people.
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