ABSTRACT
This part introduction discusses contemporary practices of Australian agriculture and mining in conjunction with ideas of the Capitalocene, Plantationocene and Black Anthropocene. While acknowledging the merits of these broad-brush terms, I point to their limitations in order to show what a cultural perspective can add to the debate. I then introduce this part's two novels, both of which reflect on the developments that have led to the Anthropocene: Carrie Tiffany's Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living and Tara June Winch's The Yield. Instead of suggesting that industrial agriculture and extraction are per se the ‘evil root’ of the Anthropocene, the novels show that farming and mining practices have become a new front line of coming to terms with colonisation. My cosmological readings foreground the centrality of language—not just for constituting colonisation, oppression and exploitation, but also for revitalising culture and environment.
