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Introduction

Four turning points led the development of today’s sustainability discourse . Firstly, Thomas Malthus expressed concern about population and resources in 1826. Secondly, in 1962 Rachel Carson worried about environmental impacts in Silent Spring (Carson , 1962). Then, on 26 April 1986 when a nuclear reactor accident in Chernobyl was shown to have global distribution of its radioactive fallout, bans were adopted that affected sheep farms in England’s Cumbria by 20 June 1986 (Wynne, 1989). An epistemological shift was now clear; the risky undertakings in one place were unpredictably volatile and the negative effects could spread regardless of age, income, or political and geographical boundaries. Later, the United Nations’ incorporation of sustainability into the international environmental legal structure as Agenda 21 in 1992 ensured that the shared environmental precariousness of our times could not be ignored.

Gradually, sustainability narratives of global proportion became familiar, even commonplace in the rhetoric of modernity. We live in interconnected risk societies (Beck, 1992) whose sustainability discourses often describe these times as precarious and unsustainable. There is an industry to do the necessary calculations: measuring overpopulation, ecological footprints, the carrying capacity of land, the relationship between air pollution and human health, the rate of species extinction.

Sustainability discourses call for due but cautious attention from educators and educational researchers; after all, the term ‘sustainability’ itself has come to have hundreds of definitions (Dobson, 2000 as cited in Bonevac, 2010, p. 84) and has been criticised as being a “plastic word” capable of meaning just about anything (Porksen, 1989 as cited in Mitcham, 1995, p. 322). Sustainability narratives press upon educators to attend, not just to the slogans, policies, quantifications, and apocalyptic messages but to deeper situated meanings such as the politics of language, difference and complexity (Gough, 1998; Gough & Gough, 2003; Tuck & Yang, 2012) and the need to disrupt colonialist epistemologies (Whitehouse, Watkin Lui, Sellwood, Barrett, & Chigeza, 2014).

Sustainability discourses are the situated by-product of our times, and like all discourses, they all contain representations and systems of meanings (Howarth, 2009, p. 311). In this chapter I engage with the loaded sustainability concept from a position at the edge of post-qualitative research (Lather & St Pierre, 2013 as cited in Somerville , Chap. 2). This chapter re-imagines sustainability in precarious times by focussing on the undercurrent that exists in all sustainability discourses and the back-stories of particular places. The discussion that follows concerns questions expressed elsewhere about colonising discourses (Gough, 2000; Gough & Gough, 2003; Rose, 2004) and blind spots in environmental education research and policy (Gough, 2002, p. 22; Hursch, Henderson, & Greenwood 2015; Madden, Higgins, & Korteweg 2013; McKenzie, Bieler, & McNeil, 2015; Tuck, McKenzie, & McCoy 2014).

In this case, I am concerned with how the environmental sustainability discourse ’s embedded representations and systems of meanings work in Australian ‘postcolonial ’ times in Australia’s urban places. The aim here is to consider three compelling contemporary urban concerns, namely decolonisation , biodiversity, and urban development and their place within the Australian sustainability discourse . It is an attempt to step towards an urban intercultural sustainability discourse .

Does the Sustainability Discourse Connect with the Decolonising Australian Discourse?

The largest scale of the sustainability discourse is generally presented at the ‘world’ level (Folke et al., 2002) and increasingly, through the global concept of the Anthropocene (see Greenwood, 2014; Nordic Environmental Social Science Conference, 2013). For this chapter the ‘nation’ scale of Australia takes precedence over larger scale world views to consider how sustainability discourses connect with Australia’s decolonisation discourses. While these decolonisation discourses are related to important international discourses (e.g. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the 2011 Third International Decade for the Eradication of Colonialism) and I am mindful of critical work which shows how readily decolonisation is misused to privilege whiteness, attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 3), I am looking for Australian decolonisation discourses as they can be encountered in Australia’s second largest city, in everyday urban Melbourne. I mainly looked for performances of reconciliation and education and in environmental sustainability contexts. However, whatever the form of these discourses, they are not easy to find. In Australia, the most conspicuous expression of connection between decolonisation and sustainability discourses is found mainly in reference to remote areas in relation to resource management and tourism (see Altman, 2003; Department of Industry, Tourism and Resources, 2007; Howitt, 2001; Langton & Longbottom, 2012; Preuss & Dixon, 2012).

Indeed, Australia’s post-contact relationship with nature is still evident in today’s Melbourne. Our long history of attempted erasure of indigenous (local) biodiversity in the state of Victoria was established at contactFootnote 1 (Dunlap, 1997) and now emerges in contemporary sustainability discourse in recognition of the multiplicity of threats to Australia’s biodiversity (National Biodiversity Strategy Review Task Group [NBSRTG], 2010). I understood the impact of European settlement on local (indigenous ) biodiversity in ecological terms related to genetic diversity (plants, animals, and micro-organisms), species diversity (the variety of species) and ecosystem diversity (variety of habitats, ecological communities and ecological processes) until I needed to learn how to acknowledge Melbourne’s traditional owners through my role with a small environmental organisation in Melbourne’s north, Merri Creek Management Committee. While I had some acceptance of the unfortunate impact on biodiversity as part of the early European struggle to acclimatise to Australian conditions (Anderson, 2002) the difficulty to accept the ongoing Australian preference for introduced species as a social norm became complicated. It is not difficult to conceive of Australia’s pervasive cultural commitment to introduced species as political and determined.

I did not link my environmental knowledge as a geographer, environmental campaigner and educator with decolonising ideas from anthropological, archaeological and historical sources until I began to connect with local Aboriginal people in my working life and reconsidered the Australian history of suppressed Indigenous stories (Reynolds, 1981, 2000, 2013; Stanner, 1968).

As a non-Indigenous author I note here my departure from others’ research to relate decolonisation to sustainability (see Ens, Finlayson, Preuss, Jackson, & Holcombe, 2012; Howitt, 2001) not only through my inclusion of an experimental research strategy using arts-based inquiry (Finley, 2008; McNiff, 2008; Somerville , 2007, 2010, 2013) but on my urban focus in Melbourne. This arts-based approach was essential to help me to muddle up biodiversity knowledge with Aboriginal presence in Melbourne and deep map the possibilities for an intercultural sustainability, that is, accept layers of knowledge and tease out connections between two relatively separated spheres of my knowledge: local Wurundjeri stories, past and present, and indigenous biodiversity. This next section attempts some synthesis using several sources of visual material to explain and present a re-knowing of urban landscapes in urban Melbourne.

Seeing More to Know More: The Powerful Role of Visual Images

I came to decolonised sustainability questions through biodiversity conservation projects in landscapes around Merri Creek in Melbourne’s north. Initially I had no appreciation that I was on Wurundjeri Country and placed myself and my work in relation to the water catchment of the Merri Creek. There was little to go on to ask what the contemporary socio-cultural and Aboriginal connection to indigenous flora and fauna was. This meant being prepared to work towards this question from the margins of my knowledge and available sources. From this distant research place I was provoked by Victorian Wathaurung artist Bindi Cole’s photograph, Am I black enough for you? (Cole, 2007). The image shows Bindi Cole with six family members, formally facing the camera for a portrait in a typical suburban lounge room wearing casual clothes, plus blackened faces and red headbands (Cole, 2008). Am I black enough for you? overtly plays with more grounded ongoing talk about Aboriginal status, identity, and belonging in relation to all other Australians. Its place in the racial controversy at the timeFootnote 2 connected to the highest levels of legal discourse (Soutphommasane, 2015) but remains highly significant, especially as a statement of troubled coexistence in the contact zone of contemporary suburban Australia where over 70 % of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders live in urban locations (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS], 2010).

Asking, ‘What does Am I black enough for you? bring to sustainability discourses ?’ is a question from the contact zone (Pratt, 1992; Somerville & Perkins, 2003), the place where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people meet the rest of Australia.

Am I black enough for you? demands recognition of urban Aboriginality and, since there were so many nineteenth and twentieth century restrictions affecting cultural continuance for Aboriginal Victorians (Boyce, 2012; Broome, 2005), it is understandable that along the way and into today’s suburban lives, any ‘traditional’ knowledge of Country Footnote 3 has barely survived. In light of the ongoing weak state of contact between Melbourne’s Aboriginal people and the mainstream society and the widespread love affair with introduced species, it is difficult to encounter Wurundjeri Country. It is also not surprising that when those (mainly) non-Indigenous people who are protective advocates of indigenous biodiversity meet traditional owners in the contact zone, today’s Wurundjeri thank them for looking after Wurundjeri Country (Merri Creek Management Committee, 2010).

Arts-Based Inquiry : Confluence of Places and Knowledge

As Bindi Cole’s work demonstrates, images (which are after all mute actors) can be very helpful in disturbing enduring and legendary silences in the Australian contact zone (see Auty, 2005; Stanner, 1968). The development of my own visual material in Wurundjeri Country has been critical to support conversations in shared places of connection and contact with the Wurundjeri community. The development of art prints reanimated ‘known’ places in new ways for me, added data, raised questions, and required learning about how emergent knowledge in non-Indigenous research needed consideration of Aboriginal cultural protocols. Making prints helped me to localise and contemporise links between cultural and natural worlds and accept different forms of knowledge without the need to resolve them. Even volatile places could just be.

When I created Confluence (2011) I made an image showing the confluence of the Yarra River and Merri Creek just outside Melbourne’s CBD which I had initially understood in recreational and ecological ways. Through the making of Confluence I integrated my developing intercultural knowledge in recognition of the Wurundjeri community and the contemporary social reality in that part of Wurundjeri country (Fig. 15.1) .

Fig. 15.1
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Confluence ​Drypoint etching with chine colle and embossing (November, 2011). Source: Angela Foley. Australian Print Workshop, Fitzroy, VIC)

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When I first came to visit this confluence area it was known to me only as Dights Falls, a wonderful bushy place four kilometres from Melbourne’s central business district. It is popular for picnics and walking and an important refuge for birds in drought affected times to enjoy where the Merri meets the Yarra River. However, this confluence area also has an array of embedded pre- and post-contact histories. Some of this background was captured in nineteenth century sketches of boats and busy, early commercial Melbourne. Wurundjeri readings of early times here are tightly held in painful stories of settlement encounters.

I am not occupied with that story in Confluence. Instead, the embossed plant symbolises the colonisation of early indigenous grasslands and the effects on valley flora and waterways. Traces of this ecological story, of ecosystem change through the introduction of foreign species are suggested through the plant’s impression and green stain.

The fine creamy waves are embossed from commercially made string and laid low in the image against the etched tips of Lomandra leaves which refer to Wurundjeri use of these particular indigenous plants for twining which is still practised today. The print’s construction of the winding etched waterways and confluence used burnt umber colouration and recalls early stylistic cartography. The whole image is in fact, an integration of place knowledge using waterways, plants, and cultural references to form a coded production of deep mapping (Lee, 2010; Somerville , 2013).

In the re-imagining of sustainability in precarious ecological , cultural, and urban development terms, deep mapping in this pictorial way is a useful and expressive tool. Confluence is not simply information synthesis and interpretation. It is also a departure from solely text-based research that typically dominates inquiry and is suited to this twenty first century global era of visual communication. Confluence is a social, spatial, temporal product of place in Wurundjeri Country .

Now I turn to Melbourne’s future and the idea of ‘ecosystem services’, which forms a different confluence of thinking and knowing and is an important recent addition to global and local sustainability disco urses .

Other Confluences: Rapid Urban Development in Melbourne and Expectations of Biodiversity

On a hot evening in early 2014 I joined a packed public sustainability presentation from visiting Professor Thomas Elmqvist from the Stockholm Resilience Centre promoting Urbanization, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services: Opportunities and Challenges (Elmqvist, Redman, Barthel, & Costanza, 2013) and a scientific report linked to the centre’s research recommendations outlined in their Cities and Biodiversity Outlook – Action and Policy (Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity , 2012). The presentation comprised a compelling set of data to predict and model a tsunami of immense and rapid worldwide urban expansion over the next three decades. Afterwards, on checking their website, I saw their own mapping directly into Melbourne’s local areas. I learnt more about the ecosystem services concept for the first time – how nature services people. The website described how trees and plants were producers of oxygen, capable of providing a cooling effect beyond just shade. It noted that in cities, green expanses like parks can ameliorate the albedo effect where heat is trapped in materials like concrete and bitumen. It did not acknowledge indigenous biodiversity. This presented questions: To what extent would the global modelling framework ride roughshod over local initiatives that tried to protect indigenous biodiversity? How could global perspectives appreciate local nuances? Might a globally oriented sustainability initiative focus on a particular construct of ecological values and miss other values?

I reconsidered the UN’s ecosystem services scenarios related to urban development pressures and food. Without intact indigenous biodiversity the ecosystems essential to all food production are jeopardised. Consider current extreme biodiversity threats associated with the animal kingdom in Eight Animal Plagues Wreaking Havoc Right Now (World Science Festival, 2014) and the implications upon food chains.

With relief, I recall one positive local urban biodiversity site amongst the Merri Creek catchment’s renowned indigenous biodiversity which hosts bees and enables honey making in a time of bee colony collapse. This signals the connectivity between our human and more-than human partnerships: bees, indigenous flora and fauna, waterways, food, people. Undoubtedly, few honey producers can say that they are producing honey on Wurundjeri Country or appreciate that intercultural eco-social reality. Where that recognition of Country is growing though, it is in very piecemeal ways and any benefits of integrating intercultural knowledge into the Merri Creek sustainability discourse is yet to emerge.

I argue that the Confluence print contributes to imagining that conversation and articulating further scenarios. While other writers explore urban imaginings for a decolonised approach to sustainability (Ens et al., 2012; Howitt, 2001) my arts-based data contributes differently. As an experimental research strategy (Finley, 2008; Somerville , 2007, 2010, 2013) Confluence helps to envisage what is lacking in dominant sustainability discourses and consider how new imaginative interdisciplinary efforts can support recognition of our differentiated cultural and landscape places.

In making another art print, Writing from the Wings, I came to appreciate the complex human and more than human presence in remnant grasslands in the once vast bioregion of the Victorian Volcanic Plain near Melbourne’s Merri Creek (Fig. 15.2).

Fig. 15.2
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Author at work producing Writing from the Wings (2014) (Source: Angela Foley. Australian Print Workshop, Fitzroy, VIC)

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In Writing from the Wings, the critically endangered Golden Sun Moth reappears depicted as a part of a necklace that floats over the tiny grassland refuge close to Merri Creek in the recently renamed Galgi ngarrk, (Wurundjeri’s Woiwurrung language meaning ‘mother’s backbone’). Galgi ngarrk is innately of Wurundjeri Country , its grassland and creature’s survival dependant on caring community-based environmental advocacy and related planning interventions.

My images occupy lesser known everyday spaces and are intended to reveal an intercultural urban Australian tale of place. They are part of our shared racialised relations which materially occupy an imagined ‘divide’ between ‘urban aboriginal and traditional Australian Aboriginals’ (Fredericks, 2013, p. 4–5) and function as Howard Morphy (2008) explained in Becoming art: Exploring cross-cultural categories:

…material culture – however it enters the discourse of art – is an important source of evidence … to better understand the social conditions and historical interactions of the time of their production (Morphy, 2008, p. 177).

The third image, Writing from the ground up was made after nearly 2 years involvement in the Wurundjeri Tribe Land Compensation and Cultural Heritage Council’s koorong (canoe) project. I entered the print studio to think through Country and reflect on the “inseparable connection between body and place” (Somerville , 2013, p. 59). The new print is a ‘deep mapping’ (Heat-Moon, 1991; Lee, 2010; Somerville , 2010) of that koorong-making experience. The print’s embossing with weeds, shabby torn permit excerpt, blue shape replicating the scar on the eucalypt after the bark was taken and the Plenty River’s path through all this brought together elements which none of the hours of video footage or thousands of photos taken on the making day contained. It is a work of integration and sense making producing unity out of complexity in my intercultural experience of the contact zone (Fig. 15.3).

Fig. 15.3
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Dry point etching with chine colle (Source: Writing from the ground up (2012). Angela Foley. Australian Print Workshop, Fitzroy, VIC)

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Considering how sustainability discourses work as images or written stories of place, sharing and volatility, what is the position of Aboriginal meta-narratives in sustainability discourses ? D’harawal Elder Aunty Fran Bodkin’s stories of cycles and seasons (see Bodkin in this publication’s Preface) is a culturally specific understanding of one’s relationship to the land and cannot be wholly represented through the western terms that dominate sustainability discourses : climate, land, place, resource, region, etc. Australian Aboriginal views of belonging to landscape and wilderness have ancient and distinctly different lineage when compared to other linked Australian concepts (Rose, 1996). Is Aunty Fran Bodkin’s story of land, water, and fire both a story of Country and Greater Western Sydney? How does her story of place, sharing and volatility inform other distinctly mainstream and western sustainability discourses such as those wed to the ecosystem services concept which may increasingly underpin Australia’s urban development ?

Aunty Fran’s story and its potential contribution to sustainability discourse reflects the important budding shift of the sustainability discourse , and the new ways of being, thinking, and acting in recognition of the human entanglement in the fate of the planet (Somerville , Chap. 2). Korteweg and Oakley (p. 141, 2014) point out that “it is these Indigenous peoples who are the eco-heroes in their land, and non-Indigenous people have never been in a place where we needed their stories, good relations and land education more than right now”.

Turning further south now, the question of how decolonisation connects to sustainability discourses is examined further in Australia’s second largest city of Melbourne with a population of around four million people. The goal is to explore how nature is being constructed in the sustainability discourse and how this sits with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander idea of ‘Country ’/caring for Country in local and urban terms.

Country in the Contact Zone

Cooperative understandings between Indigenous Australians and mainstream others in the sustainability literature is set largely in the realm of environmental and economic management and most of that discussion refers to remote areas in the Top End and Central Australia (see Altman, 1987, 2003; Jackson & Morrison, 2007; Memmott & Long, 2002). This trend for remote sustainability practice reflects a form of sharing Country through initiatives such as sustainable economic development through tourism, the recognition of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK ) and ‘two way’ exchanges of knowledge about river systems, wildlife, and resource and land management.

Acknowledging Country in new sustainability contexts introduces the necessary ethical considerations for all decolonisation aspects of inquiry when we might otherwise not recognise the important epistemological and intercultural work needed to link ideas and build new knowledge. Indeed today’s paucity of intercultural work in the urban sustainability context is built on post-contact, postcolonial understanding of colonial narratives, which preserve the severe interruptions to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture that occurred at and since contact. This is work that most of us, including sustainability educators, have not been trained to do and for which there is little established specific literature. This problem alone is what finds Australians in a specific quandary and is central to understanding what it means to live in precarious times. In Australia we are at a juncture of unravelling, albeit ad hoc decolonisation as well as on a trajectory of immense global escalation of urban development . In Pratt’s (1992) terms, Australians find themselves doing place business as usual, working in a contact zone where we may or may not meet in social, geographic, and cultural spaces, where our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and mainstream divisions are preserved or interrogated with difficulty. But now the terms are changing and the stakes are much higher.

Since Australia’s Indigenous people are always linked with unique bonds to certain areas and specific places (Jackson & Palmer, 2015; Rose, 1996), the advantage of a decolonised approach to sustainability would be to orient the discourse towards both environmental and social justice interests. How can we get there? Is it helpful for Australians to acknowledge traditional owners, be able to name the Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander Country we’re on? What does sustainability mean in the Australian urban contact zone? I consider these questions by exploring how intercultural sustainability can be imagined in urban Australia and argue again for the valuable role of local, visual material amongst the written, word-based sustainability discourse .

Local Urban Places

The importance of place is linked in universal ways within environmental sustainability discourse (Gruenewald , 2003; Somerville , 2013). However, the consideration of place in sustainability discourse in Australia is of special importance when made in intercultural terms. In particular, the intercultural idea of Australian place is distinct from, and unlike that for Canada, Africa, New Zealand and other places with colonised pasts because Aboriginal Australia consists of over 400 different language groups. These language groups were somewhat crudely but usefully mapped by research entomologist, David Horton (1996), to reveal 400 distinct ‘countries ’ in Australia.

This means that, to some inviolable extent, the considerations that inform any Australian sustainability discourse are unique according to their position across so many different traditional owner language groups that make up Australia’s First Peoples. There is no single traditional owner group to invite into mainstream sustainability conversations. To know whose Country that a newly planned development is in requires relationships, networks and a form of engagement that is inclusive. Can mixed methods of exchange support local sustainability decisions in the contact zone by combining text-based, story-based and image-based information?

Questions about sustainable urban futures become complicated when Australia’s traditional owners are factored in. Which traditional owners do artefacts belong to when they are discovered during urban developments for freeways and housing estates? What Indigenous protocols and related laws affect urban development ? What compensations are agreed to for Indigenous people for incurred losses? Most people are unaware of the cultural undercurrent of many developments in Melbourne and the related legal, archaeological, and cultural heritage requirements; the extent of compensation payments and Aboriginal observance of cultural protocols in urban places (see Wurundjeri Tribe Land & Compensation Cultural Heritage Council, 2012).

Sustainability Storylines in Summer 2014

I continue by localising and storying through two personal experiences in Melbourne 2014, summer stories with a possum, a heatwave, dust and maps. These summer stories and the connections between them marked a turning point in my concern about sustainability discourses . I wondered afresh about sustainability, our urban lives, and the tools being brought to imagine the future.

Story 1: Heatwaves

In Melbourne during January 2014 something unprecedented happened. For four consecutive days temperatures sat at the high end of 40 degrees Celsius. I was working at La Trobe University in Melbourne’s suburbs, its campus spread out through hectares of bushland. I walked between the car park and the library across stretches of wooded open parkland with the dreadful hot winds swirling up dust and leaves. Passing the eucalypts and heading towards the concrete path and the brick wall, there on the edge of a dry public water tap sat a small possum. The creature didn’t scamper, flinch, or shy away. Heat brought us face to face, together in place, in cross-species connection and, I reckoned, in struggle about what another stinking hot day might bring. I emptied my bag to find a container, filled it with water, and placed it away among the parched earth beneath the trees. The creature moved towards the water and drank and I moved on to the air conditioned library.

Story 2: Greening Narratives and Impacts on Cities

A few weeks later, a study from Monash University described the 4 day heatwave and its effect on human health by mapping ambulance callouts (Tapper, 2014). The resulting ‘human vulnerability index’ showed the distribution of human risk to be higher around the least green urban areas and lower in the greener parts of Melbourne. I feared the onslaught of proposals that would recommend indiscriminate planting of introduced species. Some other initiatives that support Australian urban greening such as 202020 Vision (Bun, Jones, Lorimer, Pitman, & Thorpe, 2015) which aims to achieve 20 % more urban green space by 2020, promote the use of introduced species. Could some generic, industrialised greening be sold as part of the ecosystems services solution to address the human vulnerability index? As it stands, Australia already spends about four billion dollars per year on weed (introduced species) control activities and lost agricultural production. When does a well-intended ‘environmental’ initiative such as 202020 Vision connect its narrative to major threatening and costly biodiversity narratives such as that from the Australian Government on weeds? Where is the defence of and advocacy for indigenous biodiversity in leading sustainability discourses ?

The Value of Story to Think into Country

What else might be jeopardised in a contemporary think-global-act-local sustainability campaign? Does Australia’s hit and miss efforts towards decolonisation impact on these ecosystem services and 202020 Vision sustainability scenarios? With so much new scholarly work and ground breaking publications revising and presenting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander worlds of experience afresh; new commitments to educating our educators to provide Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives at school; and general trends to acknowledge traditional owners across Australia, how might this all connect with sustainability discourse ? Are the heatwaves, dust, biodiversity and urban greening storylines improperly disconnected from decolonising work across Australian education systems , health and conservation initiatives, economic development strategies and revisionist histories? The local storylines are intended to open up and imagine a world to interrupt that disconnect.

Although these few personal encounters of shared vulnerabilities in an urban heatwave help map some parameters to demonstrate the reality of precarious times, they come from just one setting where the struggle to decolonise is highly variable. Sometimes Melbourne’s traditional owners, the Wurundjeri people, are in high profile at public events like the football or leading Melbourne’s celebrated Moomba Parade. But in the literature there is very scant material to understand or acknowledge the contemporary existence of Wurundjeri in Wurundjeri Country today. The storylines themselves bring to light a few of the multiple sustainability discourses , which are related undercurrents of decolonisation in urban Australia even if they sit queerly with other’s stories that testify to contemporary forms of decolonising work across various disciplines (Fredericks, 2013; Jacobs, 2012; James, 2012; Nakata, 2013; Potter, 2012).

The question remains: how can there be an urban Australian sustainability discourse without a meaningful engagement with traditional owners? Illuminating this issue by referring to “natural and cultural resource management (NCRM) in northern and central Australia” (Ens et al., 2012, p. 100) enters into an intercultural sustainability imaginary concerned with knowledge, acknowledgement and voice that highlights broader issues about sovereignty and justice (Howitt, 2001). But it is far from our precarious metropolitan concerns .

Ecosystem Services: Values and Assumptions

What is the Australian sustainability agenda and what is the place of First Peoples in that construct? This is a question that helped me put together the table below (See Table 15.1) drawing on one contemporary sustainable development concept known as ecological services to ask how a globally significant conceptual framework that grapples with the massive escalations in urban areas is attentive to local and cultural values.

Table 15.1 Comparing values in two sustainability narratives
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The United Nations Global Framework on Urban Biodiversity

The current sustainability response from the United Nations global framework on urban biodiversity was published as the Cities and Biodiversity Outlook project (Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity , 2012). It is the first global analysis of urban land expansion from the UN Convention on Biological Diversity coming from Nagoya, Japan 2010, the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) and Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI). Their adoption of the concept of ‘ecosystem services’ in relation to cities and biodiversity is written in urgent terms to conclude that over 60 % of the land projected to become urban by 2030 has yet to be built. They emphasise this as a major opportunity to greatly improve global sustainability by promoting low carbon, resource-efficient urban development to reduce the adverse effects on biodiversity and improve quality of life. The United Nations defend the ecosystem services response to sustainable futures describing pressures:

Roughly 70 % of the world’s population is expected to be urban by 2050 and pressure is mounting as recent studies suggest that the global food supply will need to roughly double in the next 50 years to meet the dietary needs of expanding populations. Global energy demand may increase up to 80 % and global water demand is expected to increase by 55 % between 2000 and 2050. (Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity , 2012).

The Stockholm Resilience Centre’s global overview of ecosystem services features on-line case studies including from Melbourne where I ask: “What does sustainability discourse mean in the urban contact zone?” Consider how two sustainability discourses incorporate different sets of values and can perpetuate implicit and explicit colonial or de-colonial binaries (Table 15.1).

The ‘Caring for Country /decolonised/Indigenous narratives’ column has some of its underpinning concepts and assumptions shown juxtaposed against those in the ‘Natural resource management (NRM)/ecosystem services/postcolonial narratives’ column. Most importantly, the purportedly culturally neutral worlds associated with ecosystem services sit at odds with the reality of actual cultural worlds. Referring to Norgaard (2010), Jackson and Palmer noted that:

In fact, in the landmark Millenium Assessment, for example, scientists found the world’s landscapes to be so differentiated through socialisation that they were confounded in their attempts to value and compare ecosystem services (Jackson & Palmer, 2015, p. 137).

The idea of undifferentiated landscapes and cultures, places that are the same wherever they are, cannot work ecologically and is uniquely difficult in the Australian context where highly differentiated landscapes and cultures are complicated by the fact that Indigenous knowledge of Country is variously owned, private or not considered by Indigenous people to be suitable for sharing with mainstream communities (Jackson & Palmer, 2015; Rose, 1996 p. 138). Australian geographers, Sue Jackson and Lisa Palmer argue comprehensively for a reconceptualision of ecosystem services and lean towards alternative ways of being and knowing the world to orient urban attention on principles of relatedness capable of fostering a public culture of care (2015, p. 135). How will we get there? What way is there to re-imagine the urban intercultural world and practise a sustainability discourse that values nature as sentient and privileges the agency of living beings other than humans?

Conclusion: Deep Mapping for Sustainability

When I first presented this material at a conference in 2014 I acknowledged where I was in Eora country in the land of the D’harawal people, our Sydney meeting place. Later, this chapter was developed from the homeland of the Toorernomairremener Aborigines in Tasmania and afterwards, from Wurundjeri Country in Melbourne. In Australia, recognising Country is to acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders whose idea of Country goes beyond western ideas of nation, landscape, or nature. It is a relational concept that forefronts all creatures and systems and forefronts links to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander family language groups.

In mainstream Australia, acknowledging Country may be done to abide by cultural protocols, to act respectful or parroted for political correctness. Recognition of Country is very uneven in Australia, but is central to the decolonising work of our times (Kowal, 2015). The relatively simple act of acknowledging Country stitches threads towards a patchwork of imagining Australian sustainability today.

Printmaking became central to exploring my own place ontology and created a relational space in which to perceive the importance of an intercultural urban sustainability discourse from a non-Indigenous perspective. The prints work amongst layers of meanings and frame a place between sustainability and decolonisation ’s potentially isolated epistemological arcs with little need for words.

In this chapter I presented a short history of sustainability discourses and outlined the ecosystems services concept being rolled out globally. By comparing two constructs, namely the Caring for Country /decolonised/Indigenous narrative and the Natural resource management /ecosystem services/postcolonial narrative, I identified differing values embedded in these two distinct sustainability discourses within the Australian context. Two recent summer storylines localised the discussion about sustainability discourses in Melbourne’s precarious times. My contribution is to promote cross-disciplinary and imaginative pathways by interrogating new sustainability discourses , adopting deep mapping techniques that embrace arts-based research, recognise traditional owners, connect through Country , interrogate local areas, and cross examine new sustainability discourses .

Knowing the connection between Australia’s traditional owners and urban places sets the stage to value the longest living culture on Earth . From that space re-imagining sustainability narratives could aid our preparations for the predicted tsunami of global urban development . Already the ecosystems services construct draws criticism (Jackson & Palmer, 2015; Norgaard, 2010). The alternate idea of Country goes beyond the idea of landscape or nature. It is a relational concept that forefronts all creatures and systems to optimise the possibility for safe food, good health, and resilience for the risky times to come. When we deep map Country we need not just imagine Country, but we can begin to practise an intercultural sustainability discourse.