As a largely unexplored group of organisms, fungi are ecologically complex members of the Australian biota. Fungi represent non-human alterity and interstitiality-neither animal not plant, beautiful yet evanescent, slimy and lethal, and eliding scientific categorisations. Donna Haraway's notion of 'companion species' and Anna Tsing's 'arts of inclusion' remind us that sensory entanglements are intrinsic to human-fungi relations. Drawing conceptually from Haraway and Tsing, this paper will examine examples of poetry from John Shaw Neilson, Jan Owen, Douglas Stewart, Geoffrey Dutton, Caroline Caddy, Michael Dransfield, Philip Hodgins, Jaime Grant and John Kinsella that represent sensory involvements with fungi based in smell, sound, taste and touch. For Stewart, the crimson fungus is archetypal of danger, ontologically ambivalent and warranting physical distance. For Caddy and Dransfield, fungi are nutriment around which social and personal events transpire, whereas for Kinsella, fungi express concisely-as part of an ecological milieu-nature's dynamic alterity.

Based in oral traditions and song cycles, contemporary Aboriginal Australian poetry is full of allusions to the environment. Not merely a physical backdrop for human activities, the ancient Aboriginal landscape is a nexus of ecological, spiritual, material, and more-than-human overlays-and one which is increasingly compromised by modern technological impositions. In literary studies, while Aboriginal poetry has become the subject of critical interest, few studies have foregrounded the interconnections between environment and technology. Instead, scholarship tends to focus on the socio-political and cultural dimensions of the writing. How have contemporary Australian Aboriginal poets responded to the impacts of environmental change and degradation? How have poets addressed the effects of modern technology in ancestral environments, or country? This article will develop an ecocritical and technology-focused perspective on contemporary Aboriginal poetry through an analysis of the writings of three significant literary-activists: Jack Davis (1917-2000), Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920-1993), and Lionel Fogarty (born 1958). Davis, Noonuccal, and Fogarty strive poetically to draw critical attention to the particular impacts of late modernist technologies on Aboriginal people and country. In developing a critique of invasive technologies that adversely affect the environment and culture, their poetry also invokes the Aboriginal technologies that sustained (and, in places, still sustain) people in reciprocal relation to country.

Examining how poets engage with and mediate botanical life, 'Plants in Contemporary Poetry' affords a glimpse into the ontologies, epistemologies, and semiospheres of flora and, by extension, the natural world. Highlighting the botanical obsessions of seminal poets writing in English today, the book calls attention to the role of language in deconstructing the cultural codes that limit an understanding of plants as intelligent beings. Ryan argues that, as poetic thought harmonizes with vegetality, writers gain direct knowledge of, and profound inspiration from, the botanical world. Plants in Contemporary Poetry provides a timely intervention in the prevailing tendency of ecocritical scholarship to date to examine animal, rather than plant, subjectivities and life-worlds. A sensuous return to vegetal being is actualized in this study through a focus on the contemporary poetries of Australia, England, and the United States.The lively disquisition traverses a cross section of contemporary poetic genres from confessionalism and experimentalism to radical pastoralism and ecopoetry. Through readings of eight poets, including Louise Gluck, Les Murray, Mary Oliver, and Alice Oswald, Plants in Contemporary Poetry centers on the idea of the botanical imagination and proposes a unique conceptual model the author calls vegetal dialectics. Drawing from developments in neuro-botany and contributing to the area of critical plant studies, the book also develops phytocriticism as a method for responding to the lack of attention to plants in ecocriticism, ecopoetics, and the environmental humanities.This ground-breaking study reminds readers that poetic imagination is as important as scientific rationality to appreciating the mysteries of plants on an increasingly imperiled planet. The book will appeal to a multidisciplinary readership in the fields of ecocriticism, ecopoetry, environmental humanities, and ecocultural studies, and will be of particular interest to students and researchers in critical plant studies.

Through the poetry of Australian writer and activist John Kinsella (b. 1963), this article emphasizes the actual, embodied-rather than metaphorical-dimensions of the death of plants vis-à-vis the pressing international context of accelerating botanical diversity loss (Hopper) and the anthropogenic disruption of floristic communities globally (Pandolfi and Lovelock). On many levels-scientific, ecological, social, metaphysical-a fuller appreciation of plant life necessitates an understanding of their decline, decay, and demise. Toward a more nuanced appreciation of plant lives, the discussion draws a distinction-but aims to avoid a binary-between biogenic and anthropogenic instances of plant-death. Considering the correlation between vegetal existence, human well-being, and our co-constituted lives and deaths, I assert that a more encompassing and ecoculturally transformative outlook on plants involves not only an acknowledgement of their qualities of percipient aliveness but also a recognition of their senescence and perishing. Kinsella's poetry reflects such themes. His 'botanical melancholia' derives from the gravely fragmented locus of his ecological consciousness: the ancient, native plantscape existing as small, disconnected remnants within the agro-pastoral wheatbelt district of Western Australia. Consequently, rather than a marginal occurrence in his work, plant-death is essential to Kinsella's enunciation of a form of Australian radical pastoralism. His poetry provides a counterforce to the idyllic textualization of botanical nature as existing in an unimpacted Arcadian state of harmony, balance, and equitable exchange with the built environment (Kinsella, Disclosed 1-46).

'Forest Family' arose initially out of the interest of Rod Giblett in the early pioneering history of his family during the mid-nineteenth century in the south-west forests of Western Australia. The book also arose out of a desire not to write the typical kind of family history that would only appeal to other members of the family. In general, family histories focus exclusively on people, and not on the places and their plants and animals that shaped and affected the family and its history. Such histories tend to ignore or downplay the plants, animals, and places that are agents and players in the family history. These might only have supporting or walk-on roles in the story, and the natural environment might only provide a backdrop against which human action takes place.

FloraCultures is a 2013 pilot project in development with Kings Park and Botanic Garden in Perth, Western Australia, and funded by Edith Cowan University's Early Career Researcher grant scheme. The project aims to develop a model for documenting the plant-based cultural heritage of 30-50 indigenous species occurring in the Kings Park bushland (Figure 1). The FloraCultures initiative (www.FloraCultures.org.au) integrates archival and digital design techniques, creating a unique web portal of potential interest to a range of users- from first-time tourists and amateur naturalists to heritage consultants and environmental conservationists (Figure 2). The initiative reflects the belief that research into environmental heritage (defined broadly to encompass natural and cultural heritage and tangible and intangible theory) is integral to the conservation of flora and fauna in their ecological habitats. The project stresses that the appreciation of biodiversity for its cultural significance helps to sustain broader conservation values.

I have been watching over a particular tree now for about five years. The fire-flowered West Australian Christmas Tree ('Nuytsia floribunda') lives in a small bushland reserve in a Perth suburb, in close connection to a community of banksias and balgas typical of the Swan River coastal plain. In fact, the tree is a hemi-parasite and has to gain some of its nutrients from the roots of host plants to survive. After the long-drawn-out spring rains, the blossoms were notably vivid this year but, unlike other spring seasons, without the sweet, acrid, and stimulating fragrance I have come to associate with its kind. Each of my visits to this tree, no matter what time of year and no matter how long or short, reveals something new to me: a procession of insects harvesting its nectar, a glint of the sun on its irregular canopy, the smell of its leaves after a heavy downpour, and the tactile memory of touching its rough bark. I am increasingly getting to know the Christmas Tree through the uncomplicated yet profound choice of being with this individual.

Why were certain Southwest Australian plants privileged as beautiful, whilst others were considered of no consequence in the aesthetic imagination of colonial European botanists, settlers and visitors? A response to this rather complex question is prompted by a reading of the first substantial published European account of the flora of Western Australia, John Lindley's 'A Sketch of the Vegetation of the Swan River Colony' (hereafter referred to as 'A Sketch'), published in three instalments between 1839 and 1840. Lindley's document represents an early European endeavour to demystify the plant life of the Swan River. Through the publication, the vegetation of the colony was ushered into the global marketplace by a particular style of value-laden scientific writing.

Advances in the science of plants increasingly reveal the sensitivities of vegetal life. Although characterised as contemporary neuro-botany, research into botanical percipience can be traced back at least to Charles Darwin and Jagadish Chandra Bose. Bose developed novel instruments to make visible the endemic semiosis of vegetal life, or what he termed plant script. Despite the thinking of Bose and Darwin, however, a prevailing zoocentric ontology continues to marginalise the capacities of vegetal nature and, what is more, contributes to aspects of climate change, species loss and biocultural disintegration. Set within the New England Tablelands of Australia and invoking principles of interspecies dialogue and poetic collaboration, this article investigates the potential of the creative arts to engage, evoke and elicit plant sensitivities. Rather than constructing them as objects of representation, I consider the possibility of creative exchange with plants in which plant script intergrades with the production of a text. Extending the notion of collaboration in the environmental arts to include vegetal being, the article draws in particular from ideas of agential realism to explore the potential of writing practices to initiate new social, biological, political and imaginative perspectives on flora.

Through the interplay of the creative and the critical-in which both modes of ecological writing exist side by side, in exchange with one another-Thinking Continental presents a timely and distinct contribution to the blossoming of the environmental humanities. The volume consists of three parts, Ground Truths, Watershed Ways and Planetary Currents, each of which ends with a lyrical coda of poems from leading writers on environment, ecology, place, region and the nonhuman. Cross-disciplinary and, moreover, cross-genre, Thinking Continental enlarges the spectrum of recent theoretical work in the environmental humanities, notably Robert Emmett and David Nye's The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction and Ursula Heise, Jon Christensen and Michelle Niemann's The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, both works published in 2017.