Middlemarsh: The Hopkins River, Kindred Wetlands and Remarkable People

by Rod Giblett

“One book leads to another; one book grows out of another; one book flows out of others. Flowing is a fitting figure for a book about a river, creeks, wetlands and water. The present volume grew out of a brief discussion of two paintings of wetlands in mid-western Victoria by the nineteenth-century colonial landscape painter Eugene von Guérard. This discussion was part of a chapter on wetlands in Australian painting and photography (Giblett 2020a). It was included in John Ryan’s and Li Chen’s edited collection Australian Wetland Cultures (Ryan and Chen, eds 2020). I also contributed a chapter to this volume on Aboriginal wetland cultures, their sacral water beings and their refraction in Rainbow Serpent anthropology and Rainbow Spirit theology (Giblett 2020e). I take up and develop this discussion in the present volume in relation to particular Aboriginal peoples and places in mid-western Victoria, their practices of wetland cultures and their stories about and images of them, including the Rainbow Serpent." Contents

221 pages, Paperback

Published April 12, 2023

About the author

Rod Giblett is the author of 'Black Swan Lake: Life of a Wetland' (Intellect Books, 2011) and many other books about wetlands. He lived by Forrestdale Lake on the outskirts of Perth in Western Australia for 28 years. He taught and researched at Australian universities for 25 years and is now a writer. He is married to a retired junior primary school teacher who helped a lot with the writing of 'The Dragon and Saint George'.