The first time I went to Boh Meh Bird's house2 I took my shoes off on the porch and saw a laundry basket mounded with leaves. Brassica-yellow flowers still on some of the stalks. Eh Moo, my co-researcher3, said 'oh, that's taple mi, it's the wild spinach we use in our cooking'. He said it flatly, the way you'd say, 'the toilet is on the left.' He didn't ask her where she'd got it. She told us anyway, 'close to the creek near the football fields.' Boh Meh was smiling at me. Eh Moo translated: she hadn't met an Australian interested in wild plants before. She found it funny.

A few weeks later, Taw Meh invited Eh Moo and me for a walk through Coniston, a working-class suburb of Wollongong — a steel and coal city snaking between the Escarpment and the Pacific, two hours south of Sydney. Just as we were leaving her front gate, she pulled the grass back at her feet and three edible species appeared: Centella asiatica. Brassica juncea. Taraxacum officinale4. Gotu kola, mustard green, dandelion. 'Food seems to be everywhere,' I said to Eh Moo. He translated. Taw Meh nodded. 'Yes, we know these, they are like from back home.' Eh Moo added on his own behalf: 'knowing that you can find these plants here helps us feel like we belong.'

At Eh Moo’s kitchen table I ate my way through pounded peanuts, bracing chilli, raw onion sliced thin, pork belly slow-cooked in lemongrass and ginger and spices I couldn’t alight on, steamed rice, soured greens. I noticed a vegetable I recognised in one of the dishes — bitter melon, mixed with chilli, peanut, onion, garlic, and chicken salt. I reached for it. Eh Moo intercepted: ‘oh sorry, you might not like that, it’s bitter.’ I told him my family makes pavakkai. I grew up eating it. Eh Moo’s expression changed. He smiled. ‘We love the bitter. English food does not have the bitter, not much sour.’

Karenni cultural norms didn't try to do away with bitter. They didn't autotune it away with a focus on sweet, fatty and salty. Jennifer McLagan notes that bitter is the only flavour humans have to learn — have to be taught to navigate and develop discernment around. It is a phytochemical repellant saying: "Don't eat me, unless you really know." Bitter plants are full of mixed messages. They say no and mean it, until a flavour steward like Boh Meh or Ni Meh cajoles them toward the kitchen. Then the no becomes a yes.

The English language has five words for what food does to the mouth: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami. Karenni has eight. The extras are ahwal — ginger-warmth, but not chilli’s spiky heat — atakiah — the menthol-clear that opens the breathing, what eucalyptus or peppermint does to the sinus — and ah-heh, the sharp bite of chilli.

Karenni has its own articulation of umami, teh-saw, the fermented-salty that English had to borrow from Japanese. English speakers were eating it anyway (Vegemite is umami on toast), they just needed a Japanese food scientist to name it5. Heat and physiological impact aren’t classified on the official flavour plane. In summer, Eh Moo told me, the soup is sour, to keep the body cool; in winter chilli and ginger do the warming work, bitter to help it all digest.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Ni Meh, a Karenni wild foraging expert, took Eh Moo and me through the Wollongong Botanic Gardens one morning. Botanic gardens are imperial spaces, designed to be looked at and almost never tasted. The Wollongong Botanical Garden does admit one exception: Towri Bush Tucker Garden, opened in 2012, where visitors are invited to 'pick at plants to learn about their use in Aboriginal culture for food and medicine.' The exhibit frames edibility as cultural curio. Ni Meh walked past it without stopping, continued along a path in the dryland collection, crouched at a prostrate bottlebrush, and pointed at a carpet of Centella asiatica growing as a weed underneath it.

Centella asiatica eaten raw from the side of a footpath has a slight bitter edge in the same timbre as the fermented sour of Brassica juncea, but more direct. Then she pointed out Amaranthus. Then Galinsoga parviflora — a South American plant that escaped from Kew Botanic Gardens in 1796, now growing as a weed in Wollongong, where Ni Meh picks young leaves for her soup. Three edible species in three square metres. I asked her how she knew. Eh Moo translated her shrug: 'she just knows.'

Ni Meh crouched, crushed leaves between her fingers, smelt them, tasted them. Fifty years honing this. James Gibson spent a career arguing that perception is active inquiry: that it is "the looking, listening, touching and sniffing that goes on when the perceptual systems are at work." Gibson forgot taste — or rather, decided it couldn't do perceptual work at a distance. That's probably right. But watching Ni Meh, I wasn't so sure. Ingold built on Gibson to argue that ecological knowledge is practical, "knowledge about what an environment offers for the perceiver." Between them they almost described what Ni Meh was doing under a bottlebrush in a colonial botanic garden. Almost. What she was doing wasn't just perception; it was a calibrated interrogation. She was asking the environment a specific question in a specific gustatory language, and she could only taste the answer because she already knew what her palate wanted. Neither Gibson nor Ingold had a word for that. As far as I can tell, no one quite does.

Later, Ni Meh, Eh Moo and I drove up to Mt Keira, in the Illawarra Escarpment State Conservation Area. Keira is Djeera in Dharawal. Grandmother mountain, she watches over all things, all of us coming and going6. We pulled up at a riparian zone near a creek and Ni Meh led us to a stand of Canna indica. The canna lily, native to the Americas, is listed by the NSW Department of Primary Industries as an environmental weed. Poisoning it would be an environmental mercy. Karenni people call its starchy stalks pothy. They strip the outer layer, boil the interior, serve it with chilli, or steam it for salads. Karenni families in Melbourne place special orders for Mt Keira pothy.

The stand of canna has not been sprayed yet; that’s another story. Ni Meh filled a grey plastic shopping bag with creamy green stalks and handed it to Eh Moo for his kitchen. I looked over my shoulder. We weren’t doing anything illegal. It still felt edgy. That night I ate pothy at Eh Moo’s place. He blanched it and served with chilli. The stalk slid between my teeth like leek and bamboo. It tasted of podalangai and lotus root.

Terroir is a French word the wine industry uses for the way a place inhabits its produce. A Burgundy vigneron will tell you that one row of vines tastes different from the row beside it because the Kimmeridgian limestone breaks differently under the topsoil at the eastern end of the slope. The word travels well: to cheese in Wisconsin, to potatoes in Maine, to jamón from the dehesa7 and, to peppercorns in Kampot. That’s because the mystique of terroir was always about the people tending a place as much as the place itself.

The plant doesn’t make the flavour; the relationship does.

Terroir names the fact that flavour is the legible trace of a relationship between organisms, lithosphere, weather, and culturally deliberate human attention8. The wine industry has spent two centuries developing the vocabulary for this. The Karenni women have it without the jargon, and they apply it to the wild mustard that grows on a verge near a soccer field in Wollongong. The plant's bitterness is a response to the disturbance. Ni Meh and Boh Meh's pleasure is a response to the bitterness. Ni Meh stripped the outer stalks of the pothy at Mt Keira with authority. Eh Moo gave off a faint pride — his culture witnessed, respected. I found it transgressive and exciting. That's an ecology of desire.

I asked Boh Meh why she didn’t plant taple mi at home. Eh Moo translated her answer. It doesn’t taste the same. The plant requires the football-field verge to develop the bitterness. Cultivation kills it while the shriek of the mower enlivens it. The flavour is a result of the plant’s relationship to a specific patch of repeatedly disturbed ground.

The Karenni women I worked with were practising terroir as demandingly as the wine industry. They tracked specific patches of ground across the suburbs of their new homes in Wollongong. They called each other when the spring growth came up at the right verge and when the bracken ferns were unfurling their koru across the gullies of the Escarpment. The pleasure is in knowing the terrain: the geography of yum. These women are phytochemical connoisseurs. They are walking ground that Wadi Wadi people have read this way for tens of thousands of years. Ni Meh tracks plant compounds — alkaloids, glucosinolates, organic acids — that industrial agriculture spent the twentieth century deleting from commercial plants. McLagan has devoted at least three serious books of culinary anthropology to inviting bitter, fat and offal back to the table.

They were always on the Karenni table.

Boh Meh once told me, through Eh Moo, ‘don’t drink water, eat more of sour.’ I’d been struggling with a chilli that overwhelmed me. She passed me a bowl of taple sha, the fermented form of taple bu and taple mi. I ate it. The fire quelled. I asked her how she made them. She’d collected the leaves at the football field with her friend, pressed them into a bucket, covered them with the water she’d just used to soak rice. Lactobacillus from the rice + leaves from the verge + a few weeks in a glass jar + a calibrated taste = something like kimchi with more mustard grip.

I didn’t know where the rice came from, maybe India? Maybe the industrially irrigated paddies of Northern NSW? The leaves came from ground that ratepayer money mows. The bacteria, wonderfully omnipresent, have been doing this work with the carbohydrate infused water for as long as people have grown rice. The women carried the knowledge across borders. The bacteria were already wherever the women landed — in Mae Hong Son, on a kitchen bench in a rented house in the Illawarra.

Boh Meh's friend texts her when the taple mi is flush at the football field. Ni Meh fills her shopping bag with pothy. Taw Meh pulls back the grass at her front gate and shows me the dandelion. They feed their families and even enjoy feeding stray cultural geographers. The chilli is a-heh, the taple mi is akieh-a-sha, the pothy is crunchy and bright. The flavours are a-sha and akieh and ahwal and teh-saw — a sensory vocabulary for a cuisine without a cookbook on Australian shelves. The first Karenni restaurant will fix that. I’m gonna call Eh Moo.

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Trivandrum thatha told my father not to leave India, not to leave Bharat, not to cross the ocean: Samudrolanghana, Kala Panni. He warned him. Dad left. First to the US, then to New Zealand, then to Australia, and back to Aotearoa. My father thought if it was good enough for the vellai karan it would be good enough for us. We’d migrate to a cold country, a place where A/C wasn’t just for the rich. It was always on. A place without sweat and two-stroke motors clogging his pores, clogging our fate. If the British and the French and the Portuguese could do it, why should we hold ourselves back with self-effacing superstition?

My father was a product of the non-aligned Cold War world. He grew up on Russian and American Frontier dreams: Eastwood and Sputnik. In 1991 India “opened up” under Manmohan Singh. We liberalised. I watched the Simpsons on the neighbours’ TV in the socialist colony built by the Reserve Bank of India. The same year my parents left to turbocharge their CVs and our hope. My mum completed her MBA in record time, typical TamBram woman — Dean’s list, new blue jeans, Pittsburgh Penguins windcheater, bright red pottu between her eyebrows. My sister and I stayed in India, kids at the Krishnamurti School in Hyderabad. We were asked to swallow amnesia about our parents’ whereabouts. Our mythology is: easy, we know this kind of sacrifice is low-level tapas. Tejas the rocket achieved liftoff to Indian nationalist cheers. What’s a little two-year gap in the coordinates of your parents? They moved from Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Delhi, Mumbai, flying middle-class, leaning in.

My mother’s father, Bangalore thatha, died in 1993. One of the mid-rise apartment-dwelling middle-management villagers performed the last rites. That’s a son’s job. My parents and my uncle didn’t make it in time for the electric pyre. They then moved heaven and Indian bureaucracy for our passports. We moved as far as one could, from Hyderabad to Hāwera. So far, so diaspora tale. Put down roots, do some Bend it Like Beckham shit and call it a day.

We moved again: Palmerston North, Auckland. I took the baton: England, Australia, Spain, Australia. On terra nullius four different places. 2022, when applying to Border Force (good name ScoMo) for my PR, I tallied up 37 houses in 35 years.

Voldemort split his soul into seven pieces to cheat death. Each horcrux took a piece of him and hid it. Each split made him harder to kill and less human. A soul split too many times becomes disjointed, like a shoulder, like a knee.

2026, it’s Easter break here. Two friends tell me two stories I had no memory of.

James, a baritone pure mathematician, reminds me of the time we thought it would be pretty good to hide behind some bushes on a road corner with a tray of eggs to lob at cars driving by. We were 11. 1999 Palmerston North. James and I played rep cricket. Whack. A white bus pulls over; this fat guy bursts out. We leg it into the reserve close to the Manawatu River. Fat guy was a Vietnam War vet. Fat guy is fast, he’s on me. “What the hell are you lot up to, ey?” Three of us got nabbed by Merv Hughes: James, me, and some other kid maybe Chris or Matt. Now on the cusp of 40, James has moved to Melbourne, with nearly as many stamps on his passport. We’re having a few beers at the Lincoln Hotel. “Sorry to tell you, man, it was you who got us caught. Aaron and I got away. Remember how that guy made us come around to his place the next day so we could clean his bus? How his wife gave us Pepsis on a tray after?” Yeah, I do. But I don’t remember Aaron being there. He was only the best man at my wedding and the guy who gave the eulogy at my dida’s funeral. Memory is dodgy. Sure. That’s not the point. James just handed me a shard of what was jointly ours. The memory wasn’t in my brain. It was in James’.

James gave me Palmerston North. Clare: Andalucía.

Last week in Gariwerd by a fireplace, Clare, a friend from undergrad, says, “I can’t believe you smooth-talked the Guardia Civil to let us off with a warning.” I don’t remember the episode. “We were in Grazalema. It was pissing down. We were camping on the side of the road in some national park. They shone their high beams at us. Assault rifles slung over their backs. You went full Andalus accent and then you told them something about kangaroos and I swear you started hopping. That totally shifted the vibe. They calmed down. We weren’t illegal migrants crossing.” I don’t remember the interrogation. I recall the rain. Clare kept both. Another shard.

I’m a Palakkad Iyer. Atreya Gotra. Trivandrum thatha had an Abhivadaye — the recitation by which an Iyer locates himself through named rishis. It’s the Mihi. You say who you are by naming who you descend from. Thatha died in Trivandrum. He wouldn’t be caught dead in Hāwera, where news of his aneurism reached us in 1997. My dad is the eldest son; did he light the pyre? No. Too Far. Each time my father leaves, or I leave him (it happens a lot), I ask him to help me with the Abhivadaye so I can take his blessing. “Anantha-sharmana…asmiboho.” It lands like song lyrics that don’t stick. That sticks in my throat.

Abhivadaye is a Mihi with an emphasis on genealogy. Unlike a Mihi, it doesn’t detail landscape. I learnt that via Māori generosity — at least in the early 2000s this curry-kid could access a Mihi. Taranaki was “my” maunga. I clung to that Mihi until 2019, when presenting at a conference of geographers in Auckland, I changed my Mihi mountain to Baw Baw, the top of the watershed of the La Trobe River and the Yarra. I didn’t ask the traditional owners, the GunaiKurnai. I’ve got the scrappy Abhivadaye and the illegitimate Mihi. So long as my dad is alive, I can echolocate by the Sky.

When an Iyer introduces himself to an elder via Abhivadaye he’s not saying his name. He’s reciting vertical coordinates. A patterned library of fathers going back thousands of years, to one of the seven rishis in the sky, the lineage positioning you within it. My mother always stands to the right of my father when I seek their blessing. The Abhivadaye doesn’t name her; it doesn’t give me latitude and longitude on Earth either. His initials have them.

My father’s initials are LR. They stand for his paternal village in the watershed of the Bharathappuzha, “the River of Bharata”. It rises in the Anaimalai Hills of Tamil Nadu, cuts west through the Palakkad Gap, and empties into the Lakshadweep Sea at Ponnani. My ancestors on my father’s side followed its course beginning in the 15th century. A drought drove them west. The libations of the Vedas and Puranas —tarpana most of all — are nothing without water. Lekshminarayanapuram is the place. Ramanathan is Trivandrum thatha. I am Ananth. My son is Narayan. What is his watershed?

Watersheds hold you until you go. What’s left in them when you’re gone are horcruxes.

The liberal subject believes the self is portable. An economy that requires me to sever the relationships that held me calls it progress. Under this logic, it’s routine debasement dressed up as choice.

I’m not against moving. Drought drove my ancestors to move, famine and war and poverty and imagination have moved people for as long as people have been people, so let’s not get precious about it — my father moved to claim a demographic parity with the white man that his father hadn’t thought to demand. He was right to. Moving is ancient and sometimes necessary. It can be a dark art, but sometimes it’s the only art you’ve got. That’s not what I’m excoriating.

Serial migration: there’s a number past which the soul destabilises. No amount of mobility-as-freedom mythology talks you back into coherence. At scale, this produces placeless goop-people, moving so many times that coherence itself becomes optional, citizens-of-the-fucking-world. Still moving, still bullshitting continuity.

You don’t feel it while it’s happening. You feel mobility. You feel agentic. You feel full of optionality. It’s only later, when you realise that your memories aren’t held within you alone. They’re held in trust by people and place who knew you, who hold you afloat.

Die where my grandfather died? Thatha wanted Thiruvananthapuram. He got it. With the exact serving of dosa and molagai podi. Ammama told us he went peacefully. The sacred order wasn’t violated. Surely Shiva, our ishtadeva, wouldn’t be sentimental about moving across mountains and over seas. The material relationships that constitute coherence were severed. Serial migration has done me over. That’s all.

William James understood the self isn’t something you have. It’s something you do. Habits constitute you. I have no habits in Palakkad. None in Lekshminarayanapuram.

Someone once asked me where my special place is. It was Mark Yettica-Paulson, a Bundjalung man, on Wiradjuri Country, 2020. During the lockdowns, it was Hazel Creek, Warragul. Now, after three years in Melbourne, it’s Bellbird Picnic Area, where Wurundjeri spur drops down into Birrarung. There’s a huge stinking noisy flying fox colony up the river. A family of Kookaburras that show up anytime we’re there. Once a grey-headed flying-fox pup had got separated from the colony and we didn’t know how to help it. My kids asked me lots of questions. I didn’t know how to tell them that though its family was only 400 metres away, it probably wouldn’t make it. It’s a funny nook in the river sitting under the mansions of Kew. I take my kids. I take my wife. I take my niece and nephew. I take my parents when they’re in town.

One afternoon Narayan fell asleep on my chest while I lay on the grass, unable to move but super hungry, so I ordered Uber Eats. The delivery guy found us. I ate goat curry and naan flat on my back with my son breathing on my sternum. Very un-Brahmin food. I’m still a newcomer to that bend in Birrarung, bending what it means to break with the past and seep into where I am.

Maya Ward walked Birrarung in 2003, 21 days from the mouth at Narm Narm up to the source, following a Wurundjeri Songline. She later wrote The Comfort of Water about it. Ngamatji but not pretending otherwise. A settler pilgrim forming the habits that might, given enough decades, amount to self-coherence along a specific stretch of water. I don’t know her ancestral watershed — maybe, like mine, it’s shedding. What she’s doing isn’t return. Most of us can’t return. There’s nowhere to go back to. The Thiruvananthapuram my thatha died in doesn’t exist anymore either: it’s all IT parks, Uber autos. Gulf money turning brides-to-be into coat hangers for gold.

So, it’s habituation in habitat or nothing. Whether that amounts to consecration or whether it’s just slowing the leak, I can’t tell. I’m a conflicted diversity consultant and a geographer with a nascent entelechy. A self is only anything in sustained relation: to people, to place, to some sense of a past that isn’t yours alone. So maybe not a self. More rhizomatic? Some kind of very good anti-horcrux where the integrity of the soul is held in suspension. Maybe that’s the fourth P. That’s my prayer.

The habits I’m trying to form, I only know how to want because thatha had the full thaali. The Abhivadaye, the dosa and molagai podi at the end. I’m bootstrapping from the afterglow of his formation and my father’s choice to leave and leave again. Narayan will have different substrate — unrecognisable to thatha. He will have his appa being cringey and sincere trying to float parts of his soul along the Birrarung. You can live on inheritance for a while. You can’t form a self on residue forever. I’m looking for consecration in this watershed.

Narayan is three. We’re three years in.

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I am Tamil by ethnicity, a New Zealander by nationality, and my culture — if I’m going to be vulnerable — is that I am a proud Subaru Outback owner. I mention this because I have skin in the game, and its melanin does too much work, for better and for worse.

I spent three years working with two communities in Wollongong: Karenni humanitarian migrants from Myanmar, and Portuguese Australians whose families arrived decades earlier. As part of my PhD fieldwork, I was trying to understand how they grow and gather food, what knowledge they carry from their countries of origin, and how that knowledge adapts to the soils, seasons, and social conditions of coastal Dharawal Country.

The question of ethnicity and ecological knowledge was central to my research. What I didn’t expect was how much of my time would be spent figuring out how to describe who they are with respect to what they did and how they knew. Why? Because race, ethnicity and culture circulated in both casual conversation and academic literature with an imprecision that began to worry me.

Environmental debates around carrying capacity and food security in Australia and much of the Western world are increasingly hostile toward ethnic minority migrants. The hostility has a familiar shape: people who don’t belong here are straining our resources, degrading our landscapes, misreading our ecology. What I found in Wollongong was the opposite. The Karenni participants I worked with were foraging ‘weeds’ through a cultural lens that mainstream Australian environmentalism would have a hard time producing. They also grew produce in lands others deem marginal, employing specific knowledge and imagination, thus enlarging what counts as urban agriculture. Portuguese participants built manufactured hortas — home food gardens that combine welding, formwork, water management, and intimate biological knowledge into something with no English equivalent.

These communities weren’t straining the ecology. They were expanding what ecological competence looks like, and who gets counted as having it. To say that clearly, I needed the right terms. The ones available kept collapsing into each other.

Race, ethnicity, and culture circulate as if they’re interchangeable, a loose cluster pointing at the same territory: what you look like, where your ancestors are from, and what you do over Christmas, I mean “the holiday season”. They share an all-too porous border. These terms deserve more careful tending:

• Race is the bluntest instrument. Categories built on physical attributes: skin, features, hair, loaded over centuries with social meaning, power, and violence. The scientific basis has been discredited; what stubbornly persists is racialisation. Australia dropped explicit racial classifications from official statistics in 1975, substituting the softer language of ancestry and ethnicity. The racial profiling stayed put so too did insidious features of systemic racism.

• Ethnicity happens to you, a product of which family you were born into, which borders existed when your grandparents were alive, which borders were drawn by which colonial power when your great-grandparents were alive. Precise, but only when compared to the categorical blur of race.

• Culture operates differently. It’s the software, not the hardware — beliefs, practices, norms, ways of making meaning that communities transmit and reproduce. The word itself is a clue. Culture shares its Latin root with cultivation: to grow, to tend, to attend to land. Culture moves. It spreads vertically through generations and laterally, with effort. It often jumps ethnicity, crosses borders, gets learned and unlearned within a single lifetime. Sure, we can be born into a culture but not with a culture.

Ethnicity tells you who. Culture explains why.

Where you’re from might correlate with how you’ve learned to relate to the world. It doesn’t cause it. That gap — between correlation and causation — is where the three terms come apart, and where something more consequential opens: the difference between fate and practice. If behaviour follows from ethnicity, people are locked into something resembling ethnic fate. If it follows from culture, it can be learned, contested, changed. I’m making an argument about human agency.

I’ll grant that most conflate these without intent. And I’m not going to pull people up with a new edition of ‘things you can and can’t say’. But often enough, the conflation isn’t just imprecision. It’s motivated, and the motivation runs in multiple directions.

Racial essentialism is the obvious one: the assumption that groups behave as they do because of something intrinsic to the group. This logic holds even when the attributed behaviours are positive. To notice or praise an ethnic group for their ecological wisdom is structurally identical to blaming one for ecological ignorance or their relationship to authority. Both treat contingent, learnable practices as the fixed expression of ethnic affiliation.

There’s a multicultural version of the same error, one I’ve watched play out in progressive spaces, including ones I inhabit. Question what someone does and you’re attacking who they are: “it’s my culture, how dare you!”. The identity categories that rightly command protection end up shielding things that don’t need defence. In my own community, there’s real work to do on gender norms that should embarrass us into action, if we examined them honestly. Conflating culture with ethnicity doesn’t just immunise those norms from outside scrutiny: it makes internal critique feel like betrayal.

This isn’t a new problem. Arun Agrawal, also ethnically Indian, spent decades making a similar argument about I/indigenous knowledge. The lower case indigenous carries no ontological primacy. It tells you who arrived first, not how they think, know or behave. The upper case Indigenous is categorically different: it names a political project grounded in the historical and ongoing facts of colonial dispossession. The political stakes of the term are real and worth defending: sovereignty, autonomy, recognition. But the claim that indigenous knowledge constitutes a categorically distinct system, sealed off from other ways of knowing, doesn’t survive scrutiny. The categories bleed.

Knowledge travels. As it always has.

Agrawal's target was the well-meaning development scholar who, without meaning to, essentialised the very communities they were trying to elevate. The anti-racist impulse to document and celebrate — whether it's the ecological knowledge of certain migrant communities, the artistic traditions that ‘flow naturally’ from particular lineage, or the communal values said to distinguish non-Western peoples from individualist ones — can reinstate the same ethnic determinism it set out to challenge. My quarry is the logic of attribution: the old trap of confusing correlation for causation. The problem hasn't gone away. It's just moved into different institutional homes.

The beneficiaries of this confusion are an unlikely coalition. On one end, ethno-nationalists who need culture to be the fixed property of bloodlines, it’s the logical infrastructure of their politics. On the other, the multicultural industry: funding bodies, diversity consultants (I am a conflicted one myself!), identity-oriented organisations who have built entire programs around the premise that culture is something ethnic communities possess and others should venerate. These programs only work if culture stays anchored to ethnicity, because if culture is learnable, transmissible, and not the fixed property of any group, there’s nothing to curate or reify. Celebrate, yes. Fixate on, no. The business model requires the conflation. The confusion serves both ends. One uses it to vilify. The other uses it to invoice.

Writing into this territory is fraught. I’ve spent most of my life in Australia being asked, more or less explicitly, to speak as an Indian, a Tamil or, the annoyingly vacuous ‘person of colour’ quasi-racial category, to carry my ethnic group’s position into every room I enter. I was once invited to speak at an academic conference to bring ‘diverse’ perspectives. I narrowed my brow. The organiser, to their credit, sat with it and eventually acknowledged they had been looking for a high-quality diversity hire.

Demographic diversity matters; representation is real and necessary. But the price of entry is so often identity performance: show up as your ethnicity first, your thinking second. After all, ‘he’s speaking from his Hindu-Tamil-Indian lived experience’ — the epistemic sacred cow du jour.

Arguing that culture and ethnicity are distinct, that knowledge travels and can be learned across ancestral lines, risks being read as a dismissal of Indigenous sovereignty, or cover for cultural appropriation, or liberal universalism papering over structural racism. Thomas Chatterton Williams has spent years making a structurally similar argument about race in the American context, dismantling essentialist categories from inside them, at personal and political cost. The risk he names, and that I recognise here, is that clearing conceptual ground can be appropriated by those who want to argue structural racism no longer exists because race is a fiction. I know, serious risks. What I’m less willing to accept is the alternative: categorical conflation that inadvertently arms actual racists or gives systemic racism a pass by making learned practices look like innate group properties. That risk is the larger one.

This wrangling grew out of how my fieldwork was aligning with my personal observations as a facilitator in ‘diverse spaces’. So, when I met Eh Moo (while we were both carrying buckets of water at Green Connect farm in Wollongong) I wanted to be alert to how I approached our collaboration. He and I worked closely over three years where I employed him as a community co-researcher to help me navigate the linguistic and cultural gradient that lay between me and the community he was embedded in. He is Karenni, a former refugee, now a father of two, an Australian citizen, and a key figure in his community. He’s not curating a Karenni identity for outside consumption, he’s becoming something new, the way migrants do when given the latitude.

Eh Moo and I are both figuring out how we relate to this colonised country, with our respective apparent ‘races', ethnicities and cultures. So is everyone on this continent.

What struck me, spending time with Eh Moo and others from his community, wasn’t the techniques of farming and foraging alone, it was the persistence in growing and gathering food despite the barriers. The Australian love affair with the lawn, an economy expert at producing precarity, and an overheating housing market all suffocate aspirations to stable housing. These stymie how migrants’ cultural knowledge takes root on these lands. Yet they kept finding ways of farming and foraging when they didn’t have to. Treating food as a transactional commodity remained, for most participants, genuinely alien.

Francis Hjtaru, one of the study participants, put it plainly after we'd spent a morning terracing together at St Therese Community Garden: "There is a certain kind of strangeness from nature... that I am eating the fruit, but I do not know where it comes from. Not knowing where your food came from, this is unpardonable… I call it abysmal ignorance, it's just too much… That's part of adjusting to the developed countries or the Australian society." His dismay is the mirror that ontologically different cultures can hold up to the dominant norms. It hints at the extent of our cultural bereavement.

Callum Champagne worked alongside Karenni people and former refugees at Green Connect from 2014-2022 as Farm Manager. He described what he observed as environmental literacy, mapped in levels. The first: water flows downhill, rocks are heavy. Basic landform and hydrology. According to Cal, many urban Australians struggle here, arriving at the farm genuinely amazed that their veggie boxes come from nearby ground, unable to distinguish a vegetable bed from creek-line rushes. Country Aussies, they do fine. The second level: what plants need, water frequency, growth stages. The third is harder to teach: taxonomic inference, pattern recognition across species. Cal reckons that agrarian folks get to this level. He watched a Karenni volunteer named Nicholas identify an Australian acacia by its leaf structure, cross-referencing it against Asian acacias he knew from home, concluding correctly that it would be good for soil. Nicholas might not have known the nitrogen fixation science but he knew the pattern.

Callum described another Karenni staff member named Shay, a softly spoken man, never one to say something should be done differently, who one day picked up a hoe and terraced a garden bed in a new way. Callum noted it was "twice as fast, with better soil structure". Cal watched, understood, and the whole farm adopted it. “Sounds mystical…but I used to just think of a hoe as smashing something. But it’s actually more than anything moving it. It’s sorta working alongside it.” Tim Ingold argues that this kind of knowledge isn’t stored and retrieved: it’s grown through sustained, embodied engagement with specific landscapes. It’s not a birthright.

You must earn it through attention. Which means it belongs to whoever does the attending for long enough.

Joseph Henrich’s work on cultural learning adds a further dimension. Humans, he argues, are specifically adapted to absorb and transmit culture, what he calls the cultural brain. But cultural transmission requires extended apprenticeship and deep immersion in specific ecological contexts. This is what the stories of Karenni farmers and foragers represent: knowledge grown through practice, in new soils, under different skies. It belongs to whoever does that slow work, not to whoever shares an ancestry with those who did it before them. Which also means it’s liable to be forgotten. Cultural knowledge is more fragile than ethnic markers; it’s hard to entirely lose your ancestry, but you can lose your practice, lose a cultural way of being.

Callum’s three levels aren’t rungs on a ladder you climb by reading about them. There’s nothing mystically ethno-specific about this knowledge. They are sedimentations of a way of being in the world, built through years of moving through landscapes that talk back1. The entry point is perceptual, not intellectual, which is precisely what makes attributing this knowledge to ethnicity such a misdirection. It overstates by making a hard-won cultural achievement look innate. It forecloses the possibility that anyone outside that ancestry could do that patient work.

The practices belong to culture, not ancestry.

Colonisation didn’t just try to dispossess Aboriginal people of land, water and spirit. Country is a proper noun: landscapes made intelligible, made animate, through unbroken cultures of invocation. The colonial project attempted to sever the relationship between attention, practice, and knowing that made Country legible — and it did so in part by insisting that Indigenous ecological knowledge, when they deigned to notice it at all, was the natural expression of a particular race, rather than a profound cultural achievement that had taken millennia to grow.

My transmissibility argument has a limit worth naming. The specific, ceremonially held, Country-bound knowledge of Aboriginal Australians isn’t simply available to whoever pays attention. It belongs to particular custodial relationships that attention alone cannot replicate or replace. The political claim of Indigenous sovereignty rests on exactly this distinction. Culture as practice may be transmissible. Country as custodial relationship is not.

But it doesn’t collapse the broader claim: that knowledge which can travel — the acacia Nicholas read by its leaf structure, Shay’s terracing technique, the commitment to growing food when you don’t have to — gets flattened when culture collapses back into ethnicity. Reduced to bureaucratic talisman: passport, birth certificate, census.

What I witnessed in Wollongong sits within that longer story. Karenni participants reading urban edges for edible weeds, Portuguese elders tending hortas that carry generations of soil knowledge, novel cultural ontologies finding their footing on Dharawal, Wodi Wodi and Yuin Country, in adverse economic and structural circumstances.

The knowledge these communities carry travelled here the way all knowledge travels: in bodies, in practices, in relationships, in the slow work of learning to read a world that has always rewarded those who attend, closely enough.

Karenni and Portuguese migrants in Wollongong don’t just adapt to Australia. They expand what ecological competence looks like. Their practices are cultural and anti-WEIRD2. That expansion, however, only becomes visible when you hold the terms apart. Collapse culture back into ethnicity, even with generous intentions, even in the name of celebrating difference, and what these communities know gets re-anchored to where they’re from rather than to how they’ve learned to attend.

Imprecise use of race, ethnicity, and culture as interchangeable terms does political work no matter the intention.

It gives cover to those who want to treat learned practices as innate group properties and makes it harder to see systemic racism clearly because it obscures the difference between what people are and what they’ve been allowed to become. Race has no business even hinting at explanatory power for our behaviour other than via the complex mechanism of trauma and how racism shapes people across generations. Ethnicity, when it comes to explaining behaviour, knowledge and practice, is often little better than an instrument for the census and collapses into administrative incoherence when you really push it.

What does it mean, in terms of how I live my life, that I am ethnically Tamil? What even is being ethnically Tamil when the Tamil experience is dizzyingly varied: the Sri Lankan Tamil experience, the Indian one, the weight of caste, the diaspora scattered across four continents. I don't have a clean answer. Neither does Eh Moo. Migrants like us are in the process of becoming, syncretic creatures borne of hybridity and movement. This continent is more culturally mestizo3 than it knows. Those cultures are sui generis. The ethnic community is very often the vehicle; the payload is the cultural knowledge. Put that on a form.

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It feels like a decade since the summer of 2019, the Black Summer that razed southeastern Australia and blanketed our collective consciousness. For weeks the sky above Warragul, my home, was the colour of Delhi’s skies. The smoke was ubiquitous: lungs, hair, mind, collecting on windowsills — literal carbon debits. We were inhaling old growth forests we had failed to steward. My instinctive response was a hovering sense of blame — directed at the electorate around me, the kind of place that returns a Liberal MP like Russell Broadbent (not a bad guy) without much fuss.1

I was a PhD-in-cultural-geography (who knows what that is?) inner-city guy living in regional Victoria. I had a baby on the way and I already deeply cared for my new friends and some of my neighbours. They were local business owners, tradies, truck drivers, people whose politics I’d assumed by imputation. I’d never felt such a strong sense of community anywhere I’d lived. I also had maddening conversations at the shops with people who insisted that if more people could clear the "fuel load" from the bush and grazing restrictions on national parks were loosened, we wouldn't be facing this. People in my political sphere knew it was climate change coming home to roost. They blamed Greenies and I blamed them: conservative country folks who had voted for this nightmare. Yeah, both pretty short-sighted positions — I blame the smoke.

We can’t afford to be politically polarised on a predicament of this magnitude. People don’t hear each other across shrill divides, but what if sections of the electorate could be tuned to hear each other better?

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Temperamental conservatism is not the same thing as voting Liberal or National. It describes a psychological disposition — loss-averse, oriented toward what already exists, attentive to continuity and place. It’s not a unified bloc or a personality type. It’s a moral vocabulary. It’s a set of registers that some people speak fluently and others do not, cannot, or, haven’t learnt to. In practice, the temperamental and political conservative do tangle: the same person who loves this country, hunts invasive deer and is moved by the sight of a wedge-tailed eagle votes in ways that are “against their self-interest.” How might tuning into our inner conservative enable cultures of land stewardship on this continent again?

The first no-brainer response is: take Indigenous cultures of land stewardship seriously. Dismissing Indigenous self-determination isn’t just immoral — it’s ecologically stupid. The rest of the Uluru Statement from the Heart needs to be enacted even in the face of a resounding “NO” to a Voice to Parliament.2 Across the country there are promising glimmers: legal challenges to mining giants, a systematic appreciation and integration of Aboriginal women’s burning practices, a careful revision of imperialist understandings of First Australians as solely hunter-gatherers. A Treaty in my state of Victoria is ecologically literate and centres First Peoples’ ecological knowledge and ontologies. That’s progress, in my book, but there’s a lot more to go and there’s a lot more ngamatji (non-Indigenous in Woi Wurrung) can do. Newer cultures of land stewardship will also need to be part of the mix — ones geared to our many novel ecologies.

The scale of the ecological-climatic predicament, I am arguing here, will require the full set of moral notes: just focussing on preventing harm and caring for “the environment” hasn’t been enough. Shouting out these two or three notes even louder by declaring a “climate emergency” seems wilfully against our self-interest.

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Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind anchors my thinking here. Haidt identified six moral foundations across human societies — tension-pairs organising people’s moral intuitions: 1. Care/Harm, 2. Fairness/Injustice, 3. Loyalty/Betrayal, 4. Authority/Subversion, 5. Sanctity/Degradation, 6. Liberty/Oppression.

In affluent Western nations, progressives tend to be fluent in foundations one, two and six — care, fairness, liberty — while largely silent on three, four and five. Our moral ear is only tuned to the channels we deem worthy. So, half the moral vocabulary the rest of the population carries goes unheard. Temperamental conservatives speak across all six. Which is why environmentalism pitched solely on justice and care leaves them cold.

How do you think flying the Australian flag at a climate rally would go? (I’m not a fan of the flag’s current design either. It is, shall we say, a bit derivative.) How about the slogans: “Take the train; it’s the Aussie way.” Or “Be a patriot and buy organic.” What if progressives spoke about “preserving our topsoil in the interest of national security?” What’s wrong with being nationalistic if that loyalty is trained on respecting Elders and land managers who preserve the sanctity of this land?

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Do “patriot”, “national security interest”, “Aussie way” and “sanctity” make you squeamish? Good. That might be a sign that it’s off-key.

The virtues of loyalty, purity and respect for authority animate those on the political right, while those of us on the left tend to focus solely on preventing harm and ensuring fairness. What if the moral terrain those words trace can be reclaimed? That’s where the temperamental conservative might reach the political one. The collective challenges of climate change and topsoil regeneration require more than harm, care and fairness. Even “climate justice” doesn’t go far enough — it’s still playing in the harm/care register, just with a law degree.

I know, bad faith actors are already using environmental language as cover for nastier agendas. Pauline Hanson invokes protecting Australia’s environment from “migrant hordes.” Dick Smith has drawn causal links between environmental degradation and immigration. Neither champions regenerative farming. Neither speaks seriously about cultures of land stewardship. Pauline and her pals have virtually all the political real estate they want when it comes to mobilising the sanctity/degradation foundation: ‘they’re taking what’s ours and ruining our land’. But they didn’t create all that space — the environmental movement helped empty it. When loyalty, sanctity and love of country are treated as suspect values, gateway drugs to the wrong kind of politics, the people who hold those values don’t disappear. They find other homes. And the movement that excluded them is left wondering why it can’t win the big fights against corporate vested interests who don’t have any moral foundations at all other than the next quarter’s earnings and whether to open the bottle of Grange now—or cellar it a bit more.

The environmental movement won the argument among the Brahmin left but is losing the electorate. Rupert Read’s work on the “moderate flank” makes a related strategic argument — that the space opened by Extinction Rebellion needs to be filled by something far broader and less alienating. “Stop Adani” confirmed what many already felt — that environmentalism had become the property of one class, one temperament, one moral register. The Greens became much more urbane and hectoring — their ecological agenda bundled with a meal deal of social positions, intersectionality tailored for the Brahmin left’s suit. Adam Bandt lost his seat. In inner Melbourne! Turns out people didn’t want their views on land and country to come with care instructions on every other item of clothing. John Gottman spent decades watching relationships die not from conflict but from contempt — the curl of the lip that says you’re a lost cause. Arthur Brooks took that into politics: contempt is hurtful and literally pushes people away. Mario Peucker’s research shows where. The far right doesn’t manufacture alienated people. It finds them progressively untouchable.

Sovereignty was never ceded. Nor should our moral, intellectual and topsoil sovereignty be. But we will cede all three if we keep refusing to work across temperamental divides. So, what would it look like to try?

What if universities gave students a positive and constructive experience of nationalism?

What if higher education courses helped cultivate a stronger sense of collective identity spanning urban/country, producer/consumer and left/right divides?

What if custodianship was a way of regenerating the sanctity of place?

What if patriotism was enlisted in regenerating our biosphere?

Here’s the good news bit of the essay, but really it is good.

Enter, the wonderful people at the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation. Their Land Studio program — coordinated by Laura Fisher and Lucas Ihlein and run on Wiradjuri and Gundungurra Country in the Capertee Valley and Hartley in NSW — brings together creative arts students, farmers, Indigenous custodians, Landcare groups and artists for three or four days at a time. They do cool stuff like fencing, contour drawing, building soil carbon, hanging out by the fire presumably drinking frothies. The city/country divide, the farmer/greenie divide, the producer/consumer divide: all present in the one paddock.

Working that soil is a patriotic act — a way of defending the sovereignty of this country. It is not owned by the right.

Let’s bring it back, geographically, to where I started in Gippsland. Down the road from Warragul is Morwell, in the La Trobe Valley. The Valley’s power stations generate 85% of the state’s electricity It is also home to some of the state’s highest level of disadvantage and poverty. Since the privatisation of the SEC in the early 1990s the hydrocarbon based energy industry has been shedding jobs. The much needed retirement of the famously dirty Hazelwood power station accelerated job losses. Those losses turned into a loss of esteem. Environment vs economy binaries filled the narrative airwaves. Busting those zero-sum binaries is the Earthworker Energy Manufacturing Cooperative. They make solar hot water tanks in a worker-owned factory on Gunaikurnai Country. Unionists and environmentalists, working together. The supposed contradiction between jobs and ecology, between the working class and the green left, dissolved by practice. It’s hard going to make a business case for premium Aussie made hot water tank. My close friend Dan Musil has given a good part of his adult life to this mission. I think he’s a patriot. But as a true quiet revolutionary of the left, he might be a little uncomfortable with my advice: go harder on the positive nationalism. A flag or two more on the website might help the just transition.

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Topsoil erosion, dryland salinity and ravenous bushfires will need a mixture of minds — so-called “progressive” and “conservative” constituents working together. Tiffany Morrison and her colleagues (in Nature Climate Change) argue that three decades of climate action have barely bent the emissions curve because they kept treating symptoms — land clearing, fossil fuels — while leaving the deeper normative conditioning untouched. Vanessa Andreotti goes further: the imagination, the metaphysics we bring to big-ticket items like the ecological predicament is already shaped by the structures we’re trying to transform. I reckon they’re both right — more symptoms of the metacrisis.

Here, we purposefully sully ourselves with seeming moral impurities. We listen for and play off-key — tuning into our inner conservative. Conservatism, in a temperamental sense, is founded on a love and loyalty of holding onto what’s precious. Respecting and learning how a diversity of Australians compose their moral melodies can be an act of inclusive citizenship.

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Written in the aftermath of the 2019–20 Black Summer originally for the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation’s Newspaper, “An Artist, Farmer and a Scientist Walk into a Bar.' Revisited and revised in 2026.

I reckon the metacrisis is the feeling of having the impulse to look something up on your phone and then being plunged into a submerged cave system where, minutes or hours later, you’re wondering whether 2.3 degrees of warming is as bad as what Trump just said and whether he did broker peace, while noting with pleasure that the new Good Food Guide 2026 has been released, but it’s going to be so hard to get to Tom Sarafian’s new place, because now your parents live in New Zealand, the babysitter costs forty-five dollars an hour, you don’t know your neighbours, you haven’t been to the gym, and you have a God-shaped hole in your heart that, yes, YouTube videos and Substack essays do fill, like Snickers bars deal with hunger.

But when they don’t, and all your friends are similarly trapped at home, and your family doesn’t live on their ancestral land — there’s nowhere to go back to, and you resist the call to join a church because you’re a Hindu who struggles to explain to his kids what Diwali is, but you sing Sanskrit mantras to them, relying on your phone to translate them. Then using ChatGPT for ethical clothing ideas so you can buy Aussie-made to support local. Local manufacturing is important and all that.

You acknowledge Country (we Australians pioneered land acknowledgements; colonisation with benefits) idiosyncratically: yes at meetings, no not at restaurants because would that be too close to grace? I’m spiritual but not religious. I have standards – they’re just gibberish.

Anyway each AI search prompt uses more energy than should be permitted so was it a net gain that my new jeans are authentic Japanese selvedge denim but made in Melbourne, I mean Naarm? But at least the global economy is being single-handedly propped up by an AI hype bubble that’s about to consume every drop of water and render human cognitive labour redundant. Don’t worry, though, we’ll coat the world in PV cells so it’ll all be carbon neutered by the time I learn to relate to silicone sentience.

Now I’m feeling: Disoriented, amused, dismayed, shoved around, a little drunk. I’m sure the trauma-informed-industrial-complex has a lot of “he’s got undiagnosed this and undiagnosed that.” Who the fuck knows whether there’s a ‘there’ there to diagnose. What’s it like to be a bat? Look hard enough and it’s bat shit crazy.

That’s most of us, most of the time. It’s at least some of us, some of the time — living according to the logic of the Machine when we’re not playing with our kids or watching bees in the garden or smiling at strangers on the elevator. It’s not just stolen focus or late-stage surveillance capitalism or species collapse, genocide or the climate emergency. As my wife says, it’s the ‘emergency-ing’ of everything.

So. What are we doing?

First (Indigenous) Australians have been ‘gardening’ this continent for over 75,000 years, cultivating what Bill Gammage called the ‘biggest estate’. The (British) Australian dream took a few centuries of theft and colonisation to spread across the suburbs in quarter-acre blocks. Yet beyond this symbolic and foundational Black–White cleavage lies a profusion of gardens that have grown under the tillage of people who do not conform to the ethnic binaries that so often dominate Australian environmental archetypes.

Ethnic minority migrants (people from outside Britain and Ireland) have brought a spectrum of norms and practices to the deep-time human–nature conversation in Australia. A walk through the streets of our towns and cities is evidence that this nation gardens differently depending on where the blueprint for a garden comes from, where it takes root, and when the gardeners arrived.

Ethnic minority migrants have made their homes on Indigenous people’s Country for generations. The first Chinese gold-rush-era miners arrived in the 1860s and established market gardens in central Victoria and across the continent. People from Punjab worked the early sugar-cane fields of Cairns, as did South Sea Islanders who were blackbirded (a euphemism for abducted, slave-like labour) on farms around Bundaberg. Successive migrant groups throughout the twentieth century, especially post–World War II arrivals from south-eastern Europe and the Levant, made their mark on large-scale agriculture and domestic food gardens. Their gardens bore the hallmarks of their cultures. Neat concrete front yards with bouquets of pomegranates, figs, olives, and lemons remain giveaways of the garden craft of people born in places such as Italy, Greece, and Lebanon. Vietnamese people displaced by war and arriving in the 1970s added their own approaches to the productive backyard. More recently arrived people from Burundi and Myanmar are authoring their own edible stories in heirloom corn grown in the community gardens of Mildura and on the steep terraces of the Illawarra Escarpment.

First-generation migrants from resource-poor, agrarian contexts treat material resources with proximity, dexterity, and attentiveness to scarcity. What specific plants people from China, Lebanon, Burundi, and Portugal grow, how they till the soil, lay out their space, and what they do in the kitchen with their produce differs markedly. This diversity is a product of distinct norms, values, and practices in conversation with the social, cultural, and environmental contexts in which people settle.

Some people, such as the now long-retired gardeners in Port Kembla, NSW, maintain strict spatial configurations: productive hortas in the backyard and ornamental jardins at the front. Others, including people from the Congo and Myanmar, try to maximise food production wherever they can, given they do not own their homes. Their gardens are composites of patches beside houses, community allotments, and surprising configurations that veer towards market gardens and community-supported agricultural enterprises, like Green Connect. The form of these gardens continues to change in response to the varied socio-economic conditions of the different eras of Australian history in which people arrived.

Most people I spoke to, when I told them my PhD1 was on the small-scale farming and foraging practices of ethnic minority migrants, felt I should come to their neighbourhood—or the neighbourhood of their childhood—for my fieldwork. There were stories of Macedonian neighbours who lavished visitors with cucumbers, or invariably a woman named Maria daring you to find a better tomato in a shop than the one she handed over the fence—she would always win. Spending several years talking with Portuguese-origin gardeners in Port Kembla and Warrawong, just south of Wollongong, opened a portal to a world of abundant produce: bottles of wine, slices of sponge cake, and bags of whatever excess the season produced. I also noticed very little lawn on their properties—only narrow strips at the front of the house and never at the back.

The ‘backyard’ is called the horta by the now long-retired Portuguese-origin residents of homes around Port Kembla, Berkeley, and Warrawong. As the name suggests, it is for horticulture—specifically and exclusively for the cultivation of food, wine, and medicinal herbs. The sides and front of the house are called the jardin, full of ‘ornamentals’: orchids, ferns, and flowers. Typically, men tend the horta and women the jardin. It reflects a mid-century Portuguese-Australian spatial, functional, and gender binary: food and flowers. These hortas resemble the productive food gardens of other migrant groups from agrarian or resource-poor backgrounds—such as the gardens of nonnos from Calabria in West Brunswick or yiayiás from Thessaloniki who have lived in Fremantle for decades—but in Warrawong they hybridised with the area’s blue-collar, heavy-industry culture to produce works of minor infrastructural ingenuity.

Amadeu’s horta is one such grass-free garden. Annual vegetable beds occupy nearly the entire backyard, alongside an immense 35-year-old avocado tree and a flock of chickens. There is an extensive home-made system of water capture, storage, and retention. Vegetables are watered by a drip-irrigation system running on a timer attached to a high-capacity rainwater tank. Strawberries grow in polypipes (PVC) filled with soil and plumbed into the irrigation.

Amadeu had nothing to say in hours of interviews that struck me as ‘greenie’ or discursively pro-environmental. Everything he did, however, appeared to me (admittedly, a bit of a greenie) as prefiguratively ecologically conscientious. The configuration of his horta resembled what permaculturalists might call a closed-loop system. He had never heard of permaculture, though, and having eliminated ‘saving the planet’ as motive, I assumed he must be growing food to replicate a cultural practice. I was partly right and partly wrong. Amadeu shared, via a translator, that “it’s not really about growing food; it’s about keeping my skills up, passing time, and developing skills as well. I don’t even use much of the food I grow—I give most of it away. When I sleep, I dream about how I’ll garden, how I’ll make the most of the horta.”

Amadeu’s trade was in formwork and carpentry; his media were timber and steel. He arrived from mainland Portugal in the early 1980s. His trade and cultural sensibilities were evident throughout the horta. It looked different from many of the other food-focused gardens I had studied as a geographer. Amadeu’s chickens, for example, are housed in an industrially machined run that no fox would dare assail. He built special nesting boxes on a gentle gradient so that eggs—once laid and the hen departed—roll to the front of the hatch for easy collection. The chicken run exists within an elaborately industrial edible environment. He home-makes fertiliser as he learned growing up poor in rural Portugal, mixing the right ratio of chicken and rabbit manure with nitrogen- and carbon-rich plant clippings.

This may sound like standard ‘organic’ gardening practice, but when I looked across the twenty Portuguese-Australian gardens in my study, I was struck by the prevalence of skilful formwork, metalwork, and complex, custom-made water-management systems. The ways seeds were saved and tools housed bore the signature of factory discipline.

The men and women I interviewed ( who often insisted on carrying bags of produce to my car afterwards) spoke of their heyday: swapping labour and ideas and developing novel solutions to the soils they encountered on Dharawal Country on Yuin lands.

Arriving three decades later, on the same Country, are the Karenni people whose homelands are now in eastern Myanmar. I spent three years with my co-researcher Eh Moo visiting the new homes of families who had often never been to their ancestral lands, having fled ethnic persecution. Many, like Eh Moo before arriving in Australia, had spent their entire lives in UNHCR camps on the Thailand–Myanmar border. One woman, Ni Meh, toured me through her garden, brimming with food wherever her landlords permitted. Lemongrass jutted out beside the driveway; taple le (Brassica juncea) grew in neat rows in any surface unclaimed by grass, alongside plants such as choko (Sechium edule), chilli, bitter melon (Momordica charantia), and many others I could not identify. Many were marshalled against fences in a materially eclectic mix of containers—pots, drawers, eskies, buckets, and old paint pails—anything that could house a plant and compensate for the likelihood of having to move house.

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Most of the plants growing in Ni Meh’s garden cannot be found in supermarkets. Ni Meh and her friends could only find approximations that disappointed their palate in the ‘Asian’ grocers of Blacktown and Liverpool of Sydney. Pot plants themselves are unremarkable, but their prevalence in the gardens of Ni Meh and other women I interviewed reflects an approach to growing food guided less by subsistence than by a culturally specific sense of culinary pleasure. Growing food is not chiefly about making caloric ends meet. Seeking pleasing tastes—and doing what is required to obtain them—is characteristic of many migrant gardening cultures across Australia. To garden is to cultivate pleasure, Maslow hadn’t met these women.

Ni Meh’s garden accommodates the certainty that she will have to move. The housing affordability crisis, combined with the economic insecurity many former refugees experience, ensures these are precarious plots. Fortunately, her Karenni spatial sensibilities are not predicated on private property. Ni Meh took Eh Moo (a Karenni-Australian community worker) and me for a walk beyond her house. Within thirty minutes, we stopped to assess, pick, and taste eight plants growing rambunctiously—all doing convincing impersonations of ‘weeds’. I realised that the edges and crevices along the liminal space between the football field and the pavement functioned as gardens, holding the best specimens of taple bu. These are variants of Brassica juncea that do not develop the desired flavour profile when tended to. In their wild form, they are delicious. When fermented for weeks in water from washing rice, they transform into a harmony of a-sha (sour), teh saw (fermented umami), and akieh (bitter)2. I can attest — they go well with blistering hot chilli, slow-cooked beans, and beef with fried onions.

Ni Meh knows she will find the plants she seeks for her dinner table in places shaped by mowers, weed whackers, and neglect. These marginal spaces are among the last holdouts from commercial agriculture, which has tamed the organoleptic properties of many food plants, rendering them meek, ‘pretty’, and bland. Women like Ni Meh of the Karenni community in Wollongong recognise their suburbs as edible—and delicious. Foraged plants dissolve the neat demarcation between garden and suburb. As many First Nations scholars and others have shown, growing and gathering food is not a clean distinction. Eating with Karenni families felt like a re-education of my tastebuds. I could taste how the slight bitterness of Centella asiatica eaten raw from a footpath differed from the spicy sourness of Brassica junceaharvested from riparian zones. Walking with Ni Meh recalibrated my expectations of what an edible world tastes like.

A Karenni man, Jonah, shared with me: “We always look above for what the soil will be.” I agreed in a poetic sense that it is divine. Jonah disabused me of my needless metaphor, “When we lived in my home, we ask why this place is good, more than others? We know, because the soil is coming down from the mountains here. The leaves are collecting from the trees, coming down to make good soil.”

He pointed to ample land beside the train line and asked, “Why is nobody growing vegetables here?” Jonah’s perspective—looking from the train window onto vacant, fertile soils—shows how people from different cultural ontologies, with experience in farming and foraging, mobilise the verb ‘garden’ in ways that enliven the world.

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