Rainbow serpent rustling wind, field’s a floor of toads, they sing! beetles fret, stalks loom high, workers restless, dawn draws nigh

Abstract

The first house I lived in, standing at the edge of a sugarcane field in Halifax, had holes in its roof. Not long after being repaired, the holes in the roof would appear again. Located in one of several isolated settlements producing sugarcane along the Bruce highway in Far North Queensland, Australia, broad spectrum pesticides are to this day released to increase the production rate of sugarcane crops. Working through the displacement of networks, contexts and histories that seem initially entirely external, the aim of this Master's thesis is by the means of archival research, fieldwork and critical fabulation to exemplarily understand how we are all continually implicated in settler colonial history and global food logistics. What can we learn from the people and more-than-human actors impacted by the sugarcane industrialisation in Queensland, Australia between the 1860’s-1940’s and today? What can the arrangement and annotation of archival documents, photographic practice and storytelling lend to intervening in such systems from my own positionality within this tangled web of relations?