Conversing with the Undead in Australian Woodlands

Abstract

In the 1980s an Australian comedy duo performed successfully across the English speaking world. Their name, Los Trios Ringbarkos, was a neatly absurd reference to products of a practice which, for over a century, had transformed the land from Aboriginal to European priorities and management habits by ring-barking, removing forest tree by tree. Though the duo made no further reference to it, their name showed its centrality in agriculture and in the Australian foundation myth, reconfigured the ideology and parodied the Britishness of the national narrative Show more