A couple of years ago, I worked with Dr Lisa Law on this project. We interviewed people in Smithfield, a suburb of Cairns, and came up with some interesting findings. It was particularly interesting to see just how much time and love people invest in their yards, and what influences they brought from other places they had lived previously.
Dr Lisa Law presents: The Tropical Backyard
Date: Thursday 25th July
Time: 5:30pm for wine and cheese, lecture 6.00pm-7:00pm
Place: Crowther Lecture Theatre, James Cook University, Cairns.
Or RSVP to Carly McKaskill by Tuesday 23rd July on 4042 1211
SUMMARY:
Domestic yards and gardens are everyday places that express people’s social, cultural, and environmental identities. They are also places where people's interactions with nature are engaged with and worked out. This talk elaborates a pilot study of the backyard as an important urban environmental place in a small but ethnically diverse neighbourhood in Cairns. Although the pilot study set out to understand how residents manage mosquito breeding sites for dengue fever prevention, this talk explores the broader issue of how residents make sense of their backyards, especially in terms of how they relate to them as ‘tropical’. Living in Cairns means managing a dearth/excess water during the dry/rainy season, dealing with new kinds of ‘pests’ and being critically conscious of the southern bias of Australian garden retailers and house/garden magazines. These experiences are framed within a longer tradition of tropicality, or a (western) way of making sense of/imagining tropical regions.
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