Unmaking Wilderness, Remaking Country

The Geography Victoria Annual General Meeting and Inaugural Lecture

Geography Victoria is an affiliate of the RSV committed to promoting a deeper understanding of people, place and environment — and to celebrating the role of geography in shaping a sustainable future for Victoria and beyond. Its Annual General Meeting will be held on 24 November 2025 at RSV Hall.

Following our AGM, we are pleased to invite you to our inaugural Geography Victoria lecture.

We are honoured to host Professor Michael-Shawn Fletcher (Wiradjuri), a leading geographer and fire ecologist from the University of Melbourne.

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Ticket options are available for the AGM only, the lecture only, or both events. Please join us for refreshments before the lecture.  

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Lecture: Unmaking Wilderness, Remaking Country: Rewriting the Book on Australia

Modern Australia rests on an ecological illusion: the belief in a pristine wilderness that existed before European arrival. This fiction, first codified through Terra Nullius and later reinforced by science, has obscured the deep human authorship of the continent’s landscapes. From Elkin’s “parasite on nature” anthropology to the “wilderness maps” that continue to define conservation today, the same narrative persists: nature as something separate from people, Aboriginal influence as negligible or destructive.

This talk exposes the ecological and epistemic consequences of that worldview. Drawing on palaeoecological evidence from southeastern Australia and Tasmania, it shows that Aboriginal fire use created the very ecosystems settlers mistook for natural. When those systems of care were dismantled, dense forests and catastrophic fire regimes emerged, misread today as symptoms of climate change alone.

To address this, I argue for a deeper reckoning with the ways knowledge is produced and trusted in science itself. We need methods to test the reliability of our evidence and the assumptions that support it, to see how cultural priors shape what is observed and claimed as truth. Restoring Healthy Country therefore requires not only reintroducing cultural fire, but transforming the intellectual foundations of environmental science itself.

About our speaker

Professor Michael-Shawn Fletcher (Wiradjuri) is a geographer, fire scientist and leading authority on how people, climate and landscapes interact through time. He is Professor of Geography and Associate Dean (Indigenous) at the University of Melbourne, where his research examines long-term environmental change using sediment cores, pollen, charcoal and geochemical analyses. His work reveals how Indigenous peoples have shaped and sustained ecosystems for tens of thousands of years — challenging the myth of a “pristine” pre-colonial nature and showing that many Australian landscapes are cultural as much as ecological. He has published extensively in leading international journals, contributed to national inquiries into bushfire management and environmental policy, and appears regularly in media and documentaries discussing Country and environmental stewardship.

Accessibility

We regret to note that the Royal Society of Victoria lecture theatre is only accessible by staircase. If this impacts your ability to attend, please contact us at admin@geogvic.org.au so that we can do our best to accommodate remote participation or provide a recording with the speaker's permission.

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