Plant-Human Futurisms, Published critical writing (eTropic 2025)

Link to online version in eTropic published 2025

Abstract

The tropics have been first to suffer from the effects of unsustainable practices on land and sea. The Carbon_Dating project (2019 to 2025)—an artwork and cultural campaign designed to provoke a re-imagining of human-grass futures that builds relationships with native grasses—has worked in Far North Queensland, Australia, with two First Nations participants: Mbabaram Elder, knowledge-holder, and ethnobotanist Gerry Turpin, and Kuku Yalanji Master Weaver and artist Delissa Walker Ngadijina. Using traditional knowledge and creative works to forge new imaginaries that selectively choose or refuse those of the coloniser, the contributions of these two participants are an assertion of Indigenous relationalities in the tropics, and offer others a way of re-imagining plant-human futures in the wider world.

This paper appears in eTropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 24(2), 150–173.

Leimbach, T., Armstrong, K., Palmer, J., Walker Ngadijina, D. ., & Turpin, G. . (2025). Plant-Human Futurisms in the Australian Tropics: Native Grasses and the Carbon_Dating Art Project. ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 24(2), 150–173. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.24.2.2025.4097
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Paper Author Biographies

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Tania Leimbach, University of New South Wales, Australia

Tania Leimbach (PhD) is a Lecturer in the Environment and Society Group within the School of Humanities and Languages at University of New South Wales. She has a research profile contributing to environmental communication scholarship and recent discourse in the environmental humanities, particularly theorisations of affect and ecologically oriented creative practice. Tania’s PhD thesis draws on various accounts of agency and the rise of new museology to explore environmental leadership in the cultural sector.

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Keith Armstrong, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Keith Armstrong (PhD) is an experimental artist profoundly motivated by issues of social and ecological justice. His engaged, participative practices provoke audiences to comprehend, envisage and imagine collective pathways towards sustainable futures. He has specialised for thirty years in collaborative, experimental practices with emphasis upon innovative performance forms, site-specific electronic arts, networked interactive installations, alternative interfaces, art-science collaborations and socially and ecologically engaged practices. Keith’s research asks how insights drawn from scientific and philosophical ecologies can help us to better invent and direct experimental art forms, in the understanding that art practitioners are powerful change agents, provocateurs and social catalysts. Through inventing radical research methodologies and processes he has led and created over sixty major art works and process-based projects, which have been shown extensively in Australia and overseas, supported by numerous grants from the public and private sectors.

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Jane Palmer, University of Southern Queensland, Australia

Jane Palmer (PhD) is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Heritage and Culture, at the University of Southern Queensland. She has research interests in the use of ethnographic storytelling methods in post-conflict or marginalized communities, to explore the processes of trauma, grief, resilience and adaptation. She has undertaken ethnographic fieldwork in Aceh, Indonesia and in regional and remote Australia, and has published in the areas of ethics, Australian studies, fieldwork methodologies and futures studies.

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Delissa Walker Ngadijina, Kuku Yalanji Master Weaver, Cairns, Australia

Delissa Walker Ngadijina (b.1990) is a Kuku Yalanji master weaver based in Cairns, Far North Queensland. Brought up in Mossman and Daintree learning traditional practices, Delissa is part of a large, culturally active family. Since 2018 weaving has become a full-time passion and responsibility. Delissa Walker’s works have been collected and exhibited nationally. In 2017 she was a finalist in the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA). In recent years, her woven contemporary works have included wearable pieces featured in First Nations runways. Her cultural focus is teaching weaving at schools and cultural events, ensuring this once almost eradicated practice lives on.

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Gerry Turpin, James Cook University, Cairns, Australia

Gerald Turpin is an Mbabaram man from north Queensland with familial links to Tableland Yidinji, Nadjon, and Kuku Thaypan. Mr Turpin began his more than 30-year career with the Queensland Government, with the Queensland Herbarium's Ecological Survey and Mapping team. He is now a senior ethnobotanist and leads the Tropical Indigenous Ethnobotany Centre (TIEC) at the Australian Tropical Herbarium in Cairns. Mr Turpin works tirelessly with many Traditional Owner groups on Cape York, across Queensland and around Australia. As an Indigenous ethnobotanist, he has a strong cultural commitment to facilitating effective partnerships that support Indigenous communities to protect, manage and maintain their cultural knowledge on the use of plants. Through his work, Mr Turpin has helped ensure that the botanical, biocultural and language knowledge of Traditional Owners is recorded, shared and passed forward to future generations within Indigenous communities. In 2025 he was awarded a Public Service Medal (PSM) Queensland for outstanding public service to Ethnobotany and championing Indigenous science and research.