Immersive Realities in the “Place of Flowers” and Southern Sea Country, Australia: Slow Science, Artistic Visualizations, and Deep Time Stories of the Earth Otherwise

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).

Annals of the American Association of Geographers

Annals of the American Association of Geographers

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1467-8306

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