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Notes
1 The Great Ocean includes Australia and further rim territories, and is an English translation of relational and expansive terms in reo Māori, gagana Sāmoa, ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i, Hako and A Tinata Tuna, among other Indigenous languages of the region.
2 Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) defines two strands of critique as feeding into decolonisation. The first pertains specifically to Indigenous subject positions, but the second demands a critical engagement with how colonisation happened, and what it means for past, present and future. It is worth noting the distinction between ‘decolonial’ and ‘post-colonial’: ‘There is also, amongst indigenous academics, the sneaking suspicion that the fashion of postcolonialism has become a strategy for reinscribing or reauthorizing the privileges of non-indigenous academics because the field of ‘post-colonial’ discourse has been defined in ways which can still leave out indigenous peoples, our ways of knowing and our current concerns’ (p. 24).
3 This distance is iterated by critic Erik Morse (2022), who states ‘Critical ocean studies’ water-borne imaginaries … have ventricles that stretch back far beyond a twenty-first-century eco-poetics. In fact, much of the current artistic fascination with these imaginaries is indebted to a premodern worldview, in which climate was often associated with a sublime, and leaky, volatility’ (p. 69).
4 Lovelock was instrumental in the formalisation of the blue carbon method by the Emissions Reduction Fund, which set the parameters for Australian Carbon Credit Units (carbon credits) to be earned for the restoration of coastal wetland ecosystems through the reintroduction of tides to previously drained coastal sites.
5 The course ‘Living Oceans’ at UQ (MARS1001) was instigated with Bernard Degnan and Sandie Degnan.
6 Season One ran from 19 February to 25 June 2022, and Season Two from 19 July to 17 December 2023.
7 Savanna burning projects were first approved by the Clean Energy Regulator in October 2012, in the Northern Territory and since there are several dozen projects across Northern Australia. See Aboriginal Carbon Foudation: https://www. abcfoundation.org.au/carbon-farming/savanna-burning
8 The Aboriginal Carbon Foundation (AbCF) catalyses life-changing, community prosperity through carbon farming. Their aim is to build wealth for Traditional Owners and non-Aboriginal carbon farmers, implementing carbon projects that demonstrate environmental, social and cultural core benefits, through the ethical trade of carbon credits. https://www.abcfoundation.org.au/
9 Namely, Helena Malawkin and Warren Mortlock from UQ’s Sustainability Team.
10 See sustainability.uq.edu.au/files/27228/UQSustStrtgy2025.pdf.
11 Our full methodology, which is publicly available via UQ’s Public Disclosure Statement on the website of certifying body Climate Active, may be useful to a wide range of educational institutions, galleries, event organisers or other parties.
12 This upgrade was in consultation with UQ Properties and Facilities, a UQ entity that manages facilities across campus.
13 See Guidance - Organisations - Public Disclosure Statement (uq.edu.au).
14 Quandamooka Country encompasses lands and surrounding waters east of what is now known as Brisbane, including North Stradbroke Island. We acknowledge the vital language scholarship by Senior cultural custodian Gaja Kerry Charlton, particularly her most recent text in the Winter 2023 Issue of Meanjin journal entitled ‘Makunschan, Meeanjan, Miganchan, Meanjan, Magandjin’, which outlines the traditional place names of the region.
15 Critical to the development of the workshop was the in-person engagement with essays, reflections, interviews and poems featured published in TCK|SLF. A representative set text was that by senior historian Matariki Williams (Ngāi Tūhoe, Ngāti Hauiti, Taranaki, Ngāti Whakaue) who wrote on Sean Mallon (Sāmoan (Mulivai, Sāfata) and Irish) and Maualaivao Albert Wendt’s (Sāmoan (Mālie, Vaiala)) significant contributions to transoceanic museum practice, including directly challenging the idea of ‘tradition’ or ‘traditional cultures.’ These are terms which are often used by art historians and curators when describing practices of the ever-changing, expansive practices of artists from the Great Ocean.
16 Settler ‘is a critical term that denaturalizes and politicizes the presence of non-Indigenous people on Indigenous lands, but also can disrupt the comfort of non-Indigenous people by bringing ongoing colonial power relations into their consciousness’ (Flowers, 2015, p. 33).
17 Jacques Ranciere’s (2007) influential essay ‘The Emancipated Spectator’ advances a similar concept of education as underpinning the emancipation of the spectator. For Ranciere, the role of the educator is not to ‘teach his pupils his knowledge, but [to order] them to venture into the forest of things and signs, to say what they have seen and what they think of what they have seen, to verify it and have it verified’. Ranciere proposes that a ‘third thing’ (a mediating term — e.g., a work of art, an essay, a performance) can be the object of a shared verification. Exploring this ‘third thing’ and grappling together is what Ranciere sees as necessary for the emancipation of the spectator.
18 The workshop culminated out of numerous visits to Minjerribah, where we learned from generous Ngugi women, weavers and artists Sonja Carmichael and Elisa Jane Carmichael, curator Freja Carmichael, Glynn Carmichael, Blue Carbon scientist Catherine Lovelock, and PhD candidates and marine ecologists Vicki Bennion and Jack Hill. In these visits, we learnt that the embrace and nurturing of Blue Carbon spaces extend to include seagrass forests and serve multiple purposes: the sequestering of carbon in coastal areas, storm mitigation and the slowing of sea level rise, among many others.
19 We sincerely thank Aunty Margaret Kucierek, Sonja Carmichael, Elisa Jane Carmichael and Freja Carmichael for the generosity of their time and sharing while we visited Quandamooka Country. We also thank Mununjali Yugambeh writer Ellen van Neerven, ecologist Renee A. Rossini, Vicki Bennion and Jack Hill for their generosity and leadership during the Summer Workshop.
20 Ensayos is an international research collective that was founded on the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego in Chile and has ‘pods’ in Australia, Norway and Turtle Island /America. Work by Ensayos was included in the second Blue Assembly exhibition Oceanic Thinking (Season Two), and a number of the members attended the summer workshop.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jacqueline Chlanda
Jacqueline Chlanda is a researcher, writer and arts professional and is currently Senior Education Manager at The University of Queensland Art Museum. With a PhD in Art History, English Literature and Philosophy, she previously worked at the National Gallery of Australia and has taught art history at UQ and the Queensland College of Art.
Léuli Eshrāghi
Léuli Eshrāghi (Seumanutafa + Tautua Sāmoan, Persian, Cantonese) is Curator of Indigenous Arts at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, and Curatorial-Researcher at Large at the University of Queensland Art Museum. Eshrāghi holds a postdoctoral fellowship from Concordia University, a PhD in Curatorial Practice from Monash University, and a Graduate Certificate in Indigenous Arts Management from the University of Melbourne.
Peta Rake
Peta Rake is Director and Senior Curator at The University of Queensland Art Museum. She has held roles at CCA (San Francisco), Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Walter Phillips Gallery and Banff International Curatorial Institute (Banff, Canada). Rake holds a Masters in Curatorial Practice (CCA, San Francisco) and Bachelor of Creative Industries (QUT).
Isabella Baker
Isabella Baker is Assistant Curator at The University of Queensland Art Museum. Isabella holds a Master of Museum Studies from The University of Queensland, Brisbane (2018). She has contributed to publications including The Australian, Arts Hub and Runway Journal.
Jocelyn Flynn
Jocelyn Flynn is Curatorial Assistant at The University of Queensland Art Museum and Curatorial Assistant in Asian and Pacific Art, at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. She holds a Bachelor of Humanities (Art History) from the University of Queensland. She has previously worked and volunteered for various institutional, corporate and community art organisations including the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), Metro Arts (Brisbane), and Milingimbi Arts and Culture (NT).
Brent Wilson
Brent Wilson is Senior Exhibitions and Production Coordinator at The University of Queensland Art Museum, and is a visual artist, musician and designer. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (2008) from Griffith University, Brisbane.