ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the subject of the environment in Australia in the context of critique of the modern ontology of human exceptionalism. It addresses the spatial and temporal specificity of Australian modernity to engage with environments as ontological terrain and as sites for the making of human-other-than-human possibilities. Starting with the environment as a practice of colonial displacement, the chapter explores the coupling of nation and nature in Australian history. It considers the contemporary implications of the ongoing collapse of modern experience of nature's stability and remoteness, in the ruins of which stories of the Anthropocene are taking hold. Holding coherence and incoherence apart, the frontier was inscribed spatially through the material project of civilising wild environments. By the 1980s, political activism, centred on the recognition and rights of indigenous Australians, had sufficiently provoked Australian modernity that the legitimacy of the doctrine of terra nullius was under wide challenge.
