ABSTRACT
The Forest Gallery in the Museum of Melbourne presents a complex amalgam of differing regimes of time, and different forms of expert knowledge alongside diverse relationships to a specific place, the ash forests of the Dandenong Ranges. In the gallery, fire appears as a power that shapes and will shape the landscape, an agency that may never be fully determinable. The Forest Gallery contextualizes ecological melancholy, relating the emotion to publically symbolic dimensions of loss in The Clearing, creating what Witcomb has called a pedagogy of feeling. The Forest Gallery in Melbourne oscillates between these positions, between indeterminacy and regeneration. It is the understanding that the gallery repoliticizes the representation of nature and the inherently dualistic discourse of colonialism. Graham Huggan negotiates an all too common ecocritical persuasion that the sources and manifestations of climate change are difficult to represent to argue that climate change lends itself to a futural aesthetics.
