george main
I’m a
curator and environmental historian at the National Museum of
Australia. I’ve always had a deep interest in places, in their
particular histories and characteristics. Growing up in the Cootamundra
district in southern New South Wales—where hills, creeks and wide
paddocks build a boy’s heart and mind—played a big role in developing
my areas of interest and concern.
So, I’m especially interested in how we imagine and engage with rural places, those productive regions in which we are all ecologically embedded. As anthropogenic climate change begins to further undermine the productivity and ecological wellbeing of many places throughout rural Australia, I think there’s an even greater need to address the nature of our relationships with those scattered places that nourish us. How might we honour those ties, or establish new ties, to foster ecological wellbeing and natural productivity?
Working at a museum provides unique opportunities to consider and challenge inherited western beliefs that cast the domains of people and nature, of mind and matter, as fundamentally separate and opposing. Here, stories arise from stuff. Visitors are invited to make some sort of sense of the world and their lives, to generate meaning, via the engagement of their own bodies with real things, with sounds and images and other people, in a space, at a place.
So, I’m especially interested in how we imagine and engage with rural places, those productive regions in which we are all ecologically embedded. As anthropogenic climate change begins to further undermine the productivity and ecological wellbeing of many places throughout rural Australia, I think there’s an even greater need to address the nature of our relationships with those scattered places that nourish us. How might we honour those ties, or establish new ties, to foster ecological wellbeing and natural productivity?
Working at a museum provides unique opportunities to consider and challenge inherited western beliefs that cast the domains of people and nature, of mind and matter, as fundamentally separate and opposing. Here, stories arise from stuff. Visitors are invited to make some sort of sense of the world and their lives, to generate meaning, via the engagement of their own bodies with real things, with sounds and images and other people, in a space, at a place.
Recent Selected Publications
- Main, G. ‘Turbulence - a note from Scottsdale’ in John Reid and George Main (eds), Scottsdale, ANU School of Art, Canberra 2007.
- Main, G. ‘Pinchgut Creek’, Australian Humanities Review, Issue 39-40, September 2006.
- Main, G. Heartland: the regeneration of rural place, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2005.
- Main, G. ‘Red Steers and White Death: fearing nature in rural Australia’, Australian Humanities Review, Issue 33, August-October 2004.
- Main, G. ‘Pathways’, in Mandy Martin (ed.), Land$cape: Gold & Water, Land and Water Australia, Canberra, 2003.
- Main, G. Gunderbooka: a ‘stone country’ story, Resource Policy & Management, Kingston, 2000.
- Main, G. Of Beauty Rich and Rare: fifty years of CSIRO Wildlife and Ecology, CSIRO Wildlife and Ecology, Canberra, 1999.
