Rivers, Memory and Migrancy: Everyday Place-Making in Changing Environments

Abstract

This chapter discusses and compares three multi-disciplinary projects in Australia in which mobility was a characteristic of the human population involved. The first involves Aboriginal people and fishing on the upper Darling River and its tributaries, where the Aboriginal people had been forcibly removed in the mid-nineteenth century from areas of traditional ownership. In the second, Vietnamese people had moved to Australia during the 1970s and 1980s to take up new lives around the Georges River in Sydney. In the third case, Bangladeshis had migrated, usually voluntarily in the 1990s or early 2000s, from their homes in the megacity of Dhaka to Sydney’s south-western suburbs, also along the Georges River. In each case, the human communities were seeking to deal with very changed conditions, which were often restrictive, disempowered and socially uncomfortable, by engaging with the more-than-human world of animal and plant species in the environment. In each case, fish, river resources and the practice of fishing were often sites of engagement with the environment, but the life history interviews invariably showed that this was far more than a question of either subsistence or recreational consumption of food resources. Instead, whole social worlds were being referenced, remembered and enlivened in the interactions between people and environments. In each project, therefore, life history interviewing allowed new—and often unexpected—analyses to emerge, which took the collection of natural science data into more useful outcomes than would otherwise have been possible.