Immersive Realities in the “Place of Flowers” and Southern Sea Country, Australia: Slow Science, Artistic Visualizations, and Deep Time Stories of the Earth Otherwise
Hunter, Lowell, Williams, Lorraine, Rowe, Cassandra, Lobo, Michele, and Potter, Martin (2025) Immersive Realities in the “Place of Flowers” and Southern Sea Country, Australia: Slow Science, Artistic Visualizations, and Deep Time Stories of the Earth Otherwise. Annals of the American Association of Geographers. (In Press)
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Abstract
This article explores how immersion in deep space-times of the earth, Indigenous storytelling, and virtual realities disrupt dystopian futures shaped by Western scientific perspectives on environmental change and climate events. As a Nyul Nyul sand artist, Larrakia story-keeper, physical geographer, cultural geographer, and creative transmedia producer, we reflect on our journey across First Nations lands through the immersive full-dome film The Earth Above: A Deep Time View of Australia’s Epic History and the exhibition The Fire Within, celebrating the 2024 National Aboriginal and Islanders Day Observance Committee week theme, “Keep the fire burning! Blak, loud and proud.” The Earth Above integrates Indigenous and Western scientific knowledges, highlighting four cultural stories linked by sand artist Lowell Hunter’s footwork along Nyul Nyul Sea Country (Western Australia). One story, about Girraween Lagoon (the “Place of Flowers”), uses a 150,000-year-old sedimentary record to reveal climatic and ecological shifts, interpreted through the Larrakia seasonal calendar. The article shows that science stories (Indigenous and Western) of environmental change when augmented by immersive technologies can engage diverse publics and enact imaginaries of the earth otherwise. This human and more-than-human collaborative praxis of crafting public stories is a slow “pedagogical practice” (Liboiron 2020, 102) of exchange and gift-giving with Country (Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre 1999).
| Item ID: | 88585 |
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| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 1467-8306 |
| Keywords: | exchange, Indigenous knowledge, responsibility, transmedia, Western science |
| Copyright Information: | © 2025 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
| Funders: | Australian Research Council (ARC), ARC Centre of Excellence in Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (ARC) |
| Projects and Grants: | ARC CE170100015 |
| Date Deposited: | 18 Dec 2025 01:23 |
| FoR Codes: | 45 INDIGENOUS STUDIES > 4503 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander environmental knowledges and management > 450304 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander environmental knowledges @ 40% 44 HUMAN SOCIETY > 4410 Sociology > 441002 Environmental sociology @ 40% 36 CREATIVE ARTS AND WRITING > 3606 Visual arts > 360604 Photography, video and lens-based practice @ 20% |
| SEO Codes: | 21 INDIGENOUS > 2104 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage and culture > 210402 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander connection to land and environment @ 40% 13 CULTURE AND SOCIETY > 1302 Communication > 130205 Visual communication @ 30% 28 EXPANDING KNOWLEDGE > 2801 Expanding knowledge > 280123 Expanding knowledge in human society @ 30% |
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