Thinking About Inheritance Through the Figure of the Anthropocene, from the Antipodes and in the Presence of Others

Abstract

Abstract Modes of thinking matter. In this article we engage with the figure of the Anthropocene as the impetus for rethinking the messy environmental legacies of Australian settler colonialism that we have inherited. We do this rethinking in a small rural valley community, where the intractable realities of human and more than human settler colonial relations are played out on a daily basis. We also try to do this rethinking collectively, in the presence of other animals with whom our inherited pasts, our mundane everyday presents and our uncertain futures are inextricably enmeshed. What comes of all this thinking is a common account of mutual multispecies vulnerabilities and of collective agencies that recasts the dominant tales of a singular Anthropocene and the conventional human-centred inheritances of a rural Australian place.