CACHE Member Success: Associate Professor Emily O’Gorman’s Publication 2022 Nautilus Book Awards Silver Winner

CACHE congratulates our centre member, Associate Professor Emily O'Gorman, on the award of a 2022 Nautilus Book Awards Silver Winner in Ecology & Environment for her publication Wetlands in a Dry Land: More-Than-Human Histories of Australia's Murray-Darling Basin.

O’Gorman’s book, Wetlands in a Dry Land was published University of Washington Press in 2021. Emily O’Gorman asks, what has counted as a wetland, for whom, and with what consequences? Using the Murray-Darling Basin—a massive river system in eastern Australia that includes over 30,000 wetland areas—as a case study and drawing on archival research and original interviews, O’Gorman examines how people and animals have shaped wetlands from the late nineteenth century to today. She illuminates deeper dynamics by relating how Aboriginal peoples acted then and now as custodians of the landscape, despite the policies of the Australian government; how the movements of water birds affected farmers; and how mosquitoes have defied efforts to fully understand, let alone control, them. Situating the region’s history within global environmental humanities conversations, O’Gorman argues that we need to understand wetlands as socioecological landscapes in order to create new kinds of relationships with and futures for these places.

The full list of winners is available at the Nautilus Book Awards website. For more on Emily’s work, see her Macquarie University profile, her website, and engage with her on Twitter.

Image courtesy of A/Prof. Emily O’Gorman. E. O’Gorman, Wetlands in a Dry Land: More-Than-Human Histories of Australia's Murray-Darling Basin (2021), University of Washington Press.