Middlemarsh: The Hopkins River, Kindred Wetlands and Remarkable People
Middlemarsh: The Hopkins River, Kindred Wetlands and Remarkable People

Author(s): Rod Giblett
Subject(s): Anthropology, Social Sciences, Fine Arts / Performing Arts, Geography, Regional studies, Visual Arts, Environmental Geography, Cultural Anthropology / Ethnology
Published by: Transnational Press London
Keywords: Middlemarsh; Victoria; Australia; wetlands; Hopkins river; environmentalism
Summary/Abstract: “One book leads to another; one book grows out of another; one book flows out of others. Flowing is a fitting figure for a book about a river, creeks, wetlands and water. The present volume grew out of a brief discussion of two paintings of wetlands in mid-western Victoria by the nineteenth-century colonial landscape painter Eugene von Guérard. This discussion was part of a chapter on wetlands in Australian painting and photography (Giblett 2020a). It was included in John Ryan’s and Li Chen’s edited collection Australian Wetland Cultures (Ryan and Chen, eds 2020). I also contributed a chapter to this volume on Aboriginal wetland cultures, their sacral water beings and their refraction in Rainbow Serpent anthropology and Rainbow Spirit theology (Giblett 2020e). I take up and develop this discussion in the present volume in relation to particular Aboriginal peoples and places in mid-western Victoria, their practices of wetland cultures and their stories about and images of them, including the Rainbow Serpent.“

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