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Emotion, Space and Society 10 (2014) 79e86

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Emotion, Space and Society

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Unruly grasses: Affective attunements in the ecological restoration ofurban native grasslands in Australia

Lesley Instone*

University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW 2308, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 17 December 2012Received in revised form6 October 2013Accepted 22 December 2013

Keywords:AffectInheritanceMore-than-human geographiesHumaneplant relationsUrban grasslandsEcological restoration

* Tel.: þ61 2 49216637.E-mail address: Lesley.instone@newcastle.edu.au.

1755-4586/$ e see front matter � 2014 Elsevier Ltd.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2013.12.013

a b s t r a c t

This paper explores affect as an ‘angle of approach’ for re/considering the work of ecological restorationin urban spaces. My focus is on the more-than-human affective dimensions of the reintroduction ofnative grasses in Melbourne’s (Australia) urban parklands. Sara Ahmed suggests that ‘affect is what sticksor sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values and objects’ (2010, 29), and here I extendthis notion to think about the restoration of grasslands not as primarily material transformations (towhich we might react), but as the recomposition of the ’ideas, values and objects’ that constitute urbanpark naturecultures. The paper highlights the role of affective relations in the inheritance of landscapesthat do not attract widespread positive affection. It employs Sara Ahmed’s concept of the affect alien as afigure of nonconformity, to uncover how the affective resonances of grasslands might open new possi-bilities for attuning to the complex and multiple naturecultures of postcolonial lands.

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Most Australians have never seen a flourishing native grassland(Kirkpatrick et al., 1995: 11), and when they do, some see a complexand fragile ecology, but many see an untidy and undesirable‘weedscape’. Temperate grasslands in southeast Australia that wereonce extensive and flourishing are now over 99% destroyed orhighly modified (Williams, 2007; Kirkpatrick et al., 1995). In Vic-toria for example, less than half a per cent of the plains grasslandsof central Victoria thrives today (Australian Government, 2011).Likewise the grasslands that originally spread from the westernedge of the Melbourne CBD are today reduced to small fragments,the most intact of which are now threatened by urban expansion(Williams et al., 2005: 36). Some grass species are extinct and someare listed as threatened, but more importantly the complexmultispecies assemblage that previously bound grasses, humans,animals, insects, grazers, and more, into flourishing native grass-lands are largely in tatters. These circumstances highlight efforts toprotect and restore grasslands, and attention has focused ondeveloping scientific and technical practices of grassland revege-tation. However, mobilising conservation interest, the generalpublic and government authorities towards grasslands has provedchallenging in urban areas. The disregard of grasslands by many

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raises questions about the future of landscapes that do not attractwidespread positive affection.

This paper focuses on the affective relations of grasslands byreflecting on efforts in inner urban Melbourne, Australia’s secondlargest city, to restore and revegetate the precolonial grassy eco-systems that originally covered what is now the western edge ofthe CBD and much the western and north-western suburbs. It de-rives from qualitative fieldwork in Melbourne, drawing on fieldnotes, site analysis, photographs, observation, media reports andmanagement documents. The complex overlap of cultural andbiophysical dynamics that constitutes ecological restoration oftengenerates a high level of contestation over restoration goals andpractices (Robertson et al., 2000; Trigger and Head, 2010). This isthe case in Melbourne, where strong and often opposing emotions,for and against grasslands, provide the catalyst for this paper. Myaim is to extend exploration of the less tangible aspects of resto-ration activities and to investigate the more-than-human di-mensions of the affective qualities of urban grasslands and theirrestoration.

The recognition that restoration is as much cultural as bio-physical is growing. Issues of difference, identity and belongingdrive restoration activities as much as ecological assessments(Trigger et al., 2008). Sentiments and passions permeate prefer-ences about nature and such cultural dimensions can influence thechoice of one type of nature over another, whichmay favour certaingroups and certain activities over others (Gobster, 2010: 229;

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Palamar, 2010). These observations have stimulated growingattention to the emotive dimensions of ecological restoration,especially in urban areas where the intersection of social andrestoration actions are heightened and social acceptance is key toproject success (Gobster, 2010; see also Nature and Culture SpecialIssue, 2010). Attention has focused on the emotional investmentsthat motivate people to become involved in, or support, ecologicalprotection and restoration, and how emotional attachment to aparticular desired state of nature accords with restoration out-comes (DiEnno and Thompson, 2013). Likewise Frey (2008) showsthe role of emotions in making judgments about what constitutes‘good’ ecological restoration. Trigger and Head (2010: 235) note theways in which plants forge emotional connections that attach us toplace. Researchers also emphasise the emotions as a conduit to-wards a more respectful relationship with the planet (Cornforthet al., 2012), and towards apprehending the agency of thenonhuman world and its affective dimensions through ‘reciprocalrelations of consequence’ (Seaton, 2013: 24).

Shifting thinking beyond the emotional attachment (positive ornegative) of individual subjects, and beyond the mobilisation ofemotional attachment to foster the preservation of nature, Smithextends emotional ecologies to the more-than-human world sug-gesting a prepersonal sensuous affection where we are called intorelation with the Other (2013: 2). Drawing on the work of Levinas,Smith gestures towards an affective emotional ecology wherehumans and nonhumans are drawn into and constituted by ‘pat-terns of worldly illeity, the traces and the responsibilities to theotherness of the “natural” world that calls us, despite our-selves’(2013: 2). Emotional encounters, he suggests, can both involve andalienate us without conscious choice and these encounters ‘echothrough and continually disturb our lives’ (Smith, 2013: 3). Such anapproach shifts thinking from nature ‘out there’ with which wemight form an emotional attachment, to emotion as a constitutiveelement of entangled naturecultures (Haraway, 2008).

The notion of an affective emotional ecology alters register fromindividual emotions to encompass a broader and generative paletteof relations between humans and nonhumans that does not residein the body and is not possessed by the person (Anderson, 2006:735). ‘Life’, says Lorimer (2008: 552), ‘is composed in the midst ofaffects’ and it is in the sticky, complex, unfixed and fleeting mix of‘properties, competencies, modalities, energies, attunements, ar-rangements and intensities’ (Lorimer, 2008: 552) of humans andnonhumans that worlds are made in specific times and places. AsAnderson (2006: 736) notes: ‘The emergence of affect from therelations between bodies, and from the encounters that those re-lations are entangled within, make the materialities of spaceetimealways-already affective’. Grasslands, bodies, insects, weather,conservation management plans, feelings, movement and more,together affect and are affected by each other. As entangled re-lations they unknot subjects and objects and ‘instead attune to howaffects inhabit the passage between contexts through variousprocesses of translocal movement’ (Anderson, 2006: 736).

To explore urban grassland restorationwithin affective registers,I draw on the work of Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour and SaraAhmed. From Haraway I adopt the notion of inheritance as the af-fective and agentic qualities of worlds received and worlds made:the things we have to grapple with beyond our choosing and towhich we remain accountable (Gane, 2006; Haraway, 2007). In-heritance composes and animates naturecultures, shaping theorientations of bodies to pasts, presents and futures (Haraway,2008). Thinking with the agentic and affective qualities of inheri-tance situates discussion within the here and now of specificgrassland relations. In exploring the possibilities of Haraway’s(2010) question of ‘how to inherit’ (see also Gane, 2006), I alsoengage with Latour’s notion of ‘learning to be affected’ (2004),

which I take to mean the practices through which bodies of allkinds open to being reconstituted through affective attunement. Itemphasises that learning occurs in collective and mutually consti-tuted relations, and that worlds are re/made through engagementand encounter across all manner of difference (Latour, 2004). In thissense ecological restoration signals more than a physical environ-mental change, but rather a practice of re-orientation, a ‘learninghow to inherit’ and a ‘learning to be affected’, through whichhumans, grasses, insects, and all manner of things come to articu-late new patterns of materiality and affect. Most centrally I draw onSara Ahmed’s work on affect (2010a,b, 2008), and translate anumber of her related concepts into the more-than-human realm.Ahmed’s notion of orientation (2006) provides a link betweenwhatwe inherit and how we attune to its affects in various ways. Mostimportantly, I develop Ahmeds’s notion of the ‘affect alien’(2010a,b), a figure of nonconformity, to provide insight into thecomplexities of restoring ecologies that may arouse negativejudgements and adverse human passions, such as urban nativegrasslands. I situate the affect alien in a post/colonial inheritance ofmessy relations to develop a richer more complex story aboutecological restoration and the bodies and affects it assembles and isassembled by.

Naturecultures are always situated and particular, and the paperbegins with the notion of inheritance, with its particular ‘orienta-tions’ and ‘contingencies of contact’ (Ahmed, 2006), as a conduit tounderstanding the contexts shaping the affective resonancesencompassing contemporary Melbourne grassland restoration.

1. Inheriting grass/lands

Present day Australians live with a meagre inheritance of nativegrasslands, an inheritance complicated by colonisation, Indigenousdispossession, pastoralism and conservationism. Donna Harawayargues that history is inheritance and that things are never simplythere; we are deeply implicated in the conditions of inheritance inpersonal, political and intellectual ways (2008, 2010; Gane, 2006).But more than this, inheritance is never just material, never onlyhuman. Inheritance is agentic; it moves bodies, shapes stances,mediates vision, influences preferences and directs choices. Asmuch affective as material, inheritance is an ongoing project(Derrida 1994 in Haraway, 2010: 1). For Haraway the notion of in-heritance poses the question of accountability which she sees as a‘coming to terms with the world we live in’ in ways that force ‘thequestion of “what is to be done”’ (Gane, 2006: 145). Haraway’snotion of inheritance provides a fresh starting point for rethinkingecological restoration as affective and agentic. She reminds us thatthere is never just one story, and that tracing inheritances provides‘resources for making connections rather than imagining that wecan start from scratch’ (Gane, 2006: 151).

Engaging with Haraway’s notion of inheritance, Ahmed (2006)highlights the bodily stances and attunements, the mix of socialand biological, that constitute inheritance as ‘the contingency ofcontact where things coming into contact with other things shapeswhat we receive’ (Ahmed, 2006: 196 n8). The range of emotions,bodily postures, aesthetic orientations, contestations, fears andpleasures that constitute the ‘contingency of contact’ betweenhumans and urban grasslands shape the specific affective attune-ments that are materialised in restoration practices. In these terms,the specificities and varieties of human-grass encounters ‘matter’ inlearning how to inherit in respectful more-than-human ways,where ‘fleshy’ inheritance is not always human nor is it determi-native. Native grasses are thus an active inheritance and their af-fective dimensions both mobilise and hinder efforts to restoredamaged ecologies.

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Ahmed (2006: 125) suggests our ‘point of arrival’ is important asan active relation of reception, and like Haraway she stresses thatreception is not about choice, but about dealing with wherewe findourselves in the world. Hence the work of inheritance encompassesmodes of orientation. Orientations are both historical and perfor-mative: they take us beyond individual subjects and emotions andthey assemble worlds in particular ways. Our orientations are oftentowards the familiar taken for granted world (Ahmed, 2006).Translating orientations into a more-than-human geography ofgrasslandsmeans paying attention to theways inwhich objects andbodies of all kinds e human and nonhuman e are aligned in acontingency of contact, and how our ‘angle of arrival’ contoursparticular orientations. For example we could consider the bodilyorientations towards familiar neat, green Europeanised landscapesand how those orientations shape specific urban natures andbodies. Conversely, we could attune to the dis/comfiture of nativegrasslands where we might lose our bearings in unfamiliar, yellowand scratchy fields, where usual parkland activities such as strollingand picnics are challenged.

Inheritance, and our orientations from and to it, is thus not justabout material resources but about inheritance practices (Dominy,2002: 22) where landscape relations become embodied in waysthat naturaliase particular natureculture relations and ‘script themphysically, sensually, emotionally, cognitively and socially as part of“habitat”’ (Dominy, 2002: 22). In colonised settings such asAustralia, inheritance is always already political, emotional andaffective. The paltry inheritance of grassy ecologies is testament tocolonial practices of dispossession, exploitation, settler land man-agement, pasture ‘improvement’ regimes and a historical prefer-ence for European plants. These preferences and stances percolateinto the present as inheritances that shape conventions of whatlandscapes, natures, plants and animals are preferred and valued. Inaiming to revalue native grasslands, and being able to conceptualisethem as ‘habitat’ where we might comfortably live, novel orienta-tions, other bodily stances and different affective attunements arecrucial to take us ‘otherwise’ than dominant attitudes towardstreeless spaces. For settler Australian urban bodies shaped throughthe inheritance of lawn and its bodily postures of greenness andcivil culture, native grasslands pose a challenge. Many urban Aus-tralians find native grasslands, especially those in or near cities,unattractive and threatening, characterising them as ‘a snakeinfested patch of weeds’ and demanding their elimination(Jefferson, 2009; Wyatt, 2009). The western inheritances of order,purity, and categorisation are confounded by the messy, scratchy,clumpy, brown, unmown and multispecies nature of Australiannative grasslands. In attuning to native grasslands, urban residentshave to deal with connections and associations not of their creation.They have to face Haraway’s question of how to inherit (2007) insituations where obligations and accountabilities are not always ofour choosing and alliances are not always convivial.

2. Restoring grasslands: values and preferences

Despite the dire circumstances of native grasslands, both thepreservation of remnant communities and the re/establishment offormer grasslands have proven difficult and are highly contested inurban spaces. Grassland environments have not figured promi-nently on the Australian conservation agenda (Kirkpatrick et al.,1995), unlike forest actions which have received widespread andconcerted attention. Environmental actions for trees and foresthave been popular concerns with attention focused on redressingthe extent of colonial land clearance (Hutton and Connors,1999). AsFrawley (1991) notes, grasslands are largely ‘invisible’ to the com-munity resulting in little pressure from the public for their pres-ervation. Likewise the Victorian National Parks Association (VNPA,

2000: 1.2) states that: ‘The destruction of grassy ecosystems, incontrast to forest conservation, is not usually a political decisionbased on the values of conflicting land uses and lobby groups.Instead, grassy ecosystems are usually destroyed by a series of“mistakes”’. Ignorance and little regard for grasslands havehampered their conservation status. Similarly, a preference fortreed landscapes underpins many ‘beautification’ programs thatmay end up destroying grasslands (VNPA, 2000: 6.4).

In Melbourne efforts to both restore and preserve grasslandremnants have been growing since the 1980s, spurred on by therise of the native plant movement and changing sensibilities about‘nature’ in the city. However, native grasslands do not rate highly asWilliams and Cary revealed in a survey of landholders that found alow aesthetic appeal of, and regard for, native grasslands, and anegative response to treeless environments (Cary and Williams,2000; Williams and Cary, 2001). Such a dearth of positive affec-tion towards grasslands complicates the morally riven native/aliendivide in Australia and the judgements of good and bad thataccompany such categorisations (Trigger et al., 2008, 2010). Froman ecological restoration perspective, the notion of ‘nativeness’‘derives from ascribing European settlement as an ecologicalbaseline’ (Trigger et al., 2010: 1071) which activates a moralimperative of how things ought to be; that native nature is morallybest, what we should want, and how things ought to be (Head andMuir, 2004; Trigger and Mulcock, 2003; Warren, 2007). The native/alien dichotomy drives debates over what belongs fermentingjudgements about identity and difference into the how, what andwhere of urban ecological restoration. However, the alignment ofnativeness and worthiness are often muddled as Head and Muir(2004: 207) found among suburban gardeners who applied vary-ing notions of nativeness, from purist to mix-and-match strategies,often combined with a sense of guilt associated with not likingnatives as it was perceived to be an unpatriotic position. The val-uations of good and bad provoke strong reactions for and againstgrasses, and a range of emotions in-between, highlighting theemotive dimensions articulating with the restoration of urbangrasslands. Orientations towards nativeness can also be frustratedby attraction to familiar landscapes. For example, the changesproposed or brought about by restoration activities can be stronglyopposed on aesthetic grounds as people seek to maintain familiarenvironments, plants and animals. In urban areas, proposals torestore precolonial natures that involve the removal of existingexotic tress and lawns can elicit emotive reactions and opposition.Such was the case at Royal Park, a large inner urban parkland to thewest of Melbourne’s CBD, when the city council adopted a plan to‘naturalise’ a Europeanised parkland with native tress and a nativegrassland (AILA, 1985a,b). Those in favour of the new design wereexcited by the possibility of recreating the native grasses thatoriginally covered the western half of Melbourne. But many wereangry that the historic uses of the park for sport and recreationwould be compromised by ‘nativisation’, and others opposed thereplacement of familiar lawns with native grasses that grow thickand tall, and which are excellent habitat for snakes and lizards(Instone, 2010). People’s orientation to familiar parkland naturemay confound ecological priorities.

Similar multiple and often polarised and ambivalent stanceshave accompanied other efforts to recreate native grasslands inMelbourne’s urban area. For example, the community-based pro-gram run by the Merri Creek Management Committee (MCMC,2009) to revegetate Merri Creek, a creek that runs though thenorth-western suburbs of Melbourne joining the Yarra River at theinner suburb of Collingwood, has prioritised community engage-ment to engender positive attitudes towards grasslands. However,these efforts have been only partially successful and significantresistance from the community remains. For example, a 2007

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evaluation of MCMC community engagement activities (Bainbridgeand Bouzalia, 2007) found that despite a high level of effort toengage the community there was little increase in local involve-ment in grassland planting days and that a fear of snakes continuedto dominate. Bainbridge and Bouzalia also found that ‘long grassand lack of comfortable shady gathering spaces makes grassland aconfronting place for many locals’ (2007: 2). On a grassland picnicactivity run by MCMC people expressed discomfort with therustling grasses and stated a preference for ‘nice clean’ areas and‘shady trees and short grass’ (2007: 11). Bainbridge (2009) notesthat scientific and conservation awareness remains well in advanceof the public valuing of grasslands, and that illegal vehicle entry,dumping, and fear of snakes remain significant issues for MerriCreek.

These reactions to Melbourne grasslands reveal the affectivesense of dis/comfort that the native grasses can engender. Snakes,messiness, rustling and treelessness provoke emotional responses,a sense of unease, and in some cases a feeling of lurking danger. Thenative grasses contrast strongly with the desire by some for neat,clean and shady park spaces. These feelings and associations pro-vide a complex and conflicting affective grasslands ecology forrestoration ecologists, locals, and managers to negotiate. Tuning into the affective qualities of grasslands suggests a more-than-humanagency (Lorimer, 2005; Whatmore, 2006) and vibrancy (Bennett,2010) that mixes with the cultural, emotional and biophysical dy-namics of ecological restoration. The affects that emerge from therelations and encounters (Anderson, 2006) between these hetero-geneous bodies, Sara Ahmed suggests, are the glue or stickinessthat ‘sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, valuesand objects’ (2010a: 29). From this perspective grasslands can beunderstood as both more-than-material and more-than-humanspaces and places, and their restoration apprehended as not only amaterial transformation (to which we might react), but as arecomposition of the ‘ideas, values and objects’ that constitute ur-ban park naturecultures.

3. Grassy spaces of affect

To attempt to unravel the threads that weave the affectiveregisters of grassland restoration I draw on two aspects of SaraAhmed’s work on happiness (2010a,b) and expand these into themore-than-human realm of grassland restoration. Firstly, I’mparticularly drawn to the way Ahmed excavates the sticky relationsbetween affect and judgemente the link betweenwhat we like andwhat we think of as good e and how these relations support aparticular telos that works to align things in ways that appearnatural and inevitable. Secondly, I’ll locate Ahmed’s figure of the‘affect alien’ in the grasslands to disrupt the apparent inexorable-ness of native restoration in order to suggest alternative pathwaysfor thinking and practicing restoration. I’ll deploy these concepts toquestion the apparent self-evidence of ecological restoration as‘good’, not to flip it into the ‘bad’ camp, but to counter dualisticcategorizations and the affective judgments they embody.

3.1. The affect of judgement

To consider the affective dimensions of judgements about ‘na-ture’ I stretch Ahmed’s work beyond its concern with humanbodies, social identities and the semiotics of objects that canmodulate affect and engender affective states. I posit a lose corre-lation between nativeness and happiness and judgements abouttheir value on the contention that ecological restoration, likehappiness, is considered a social good, what we should want andstrive for. Ahmed suggests that: ‘To experience an object as beingaffective or sensational is to be directed not only towards an object,

but to “whatever” is around that object, which includes what isbehind the object, the conditions of its arrival’ (Ahmed, 2010a: 33).In this way objects and affects package up a broader, often unac-knowledged, inheritance that takes us towards certain, often un-stated, outcomes. In the case of happiness, Ahmed shows how theexpectation to be happy acts as a normalizing constraint that in-vests certain objects as ‘good’, and directs us towards certainchoices. There’s a sense in which happiness e or rather a certainmode of happiness e becomes a duty.

In the case of ecological restoration, objects and affects aresimilarly sticky and caught together so that to adopt ecologicalrestoration as a value is to also (often unconsciously) embrace arange of concomitant judgements about nativeness, nation andexotics. Ecological restoration promises a better world, a right way,and an ideal moral order that normalizes the native/alien binaryand the ecology encountered on European arrival as the ‘good’ and‘true’ ecology. The ecological restoration script and practices, likethe happiness script, gathers objects and affects to direct us to-wards a particular ideal. We’re seduced down this path by theapparent naturalness of these choices e what could be more nat-ural than native nature? There is also an element of ‘duty’ here;duty to be a good environmental citizen, and as Head and Muir(2004) note above, this links also to a perceived patriotic duty tolike native plants.

Good and bad affects circulate in tricky and multiple ways andtravel along different relational networks. We are often oriented tobe predisposed towards certain objects in the expectation that wewill find pleasure in them. Cultural values of discipline and regu-larity often dominate reactions to particular landscapes (Nassauer,2004; Plumwood, 2007; Trigger and Head, 2010), and are used todrive ‘improvements’ to re/establish a look of order and apparentcare. In Australia Trigger and Head (2010: 245) found a widespreadpreference towards neatness and tidiness and the associated valuesof ‘order, beauty, and happiness’, and a dislike for the perceivedmessiness of nature among urban residents. ‘Tidiness’, they state,‘appears to be valued for a complex set of reasons that includesocial respectability, a certain moral quality, and the stress occa-sioned by mess’ (Trigger and Head, 2010: 245). Similarly, asPlumwood (2007) notes, even efforts to protect endangered nativeplants may come to naught in the face of desires for neatly mownand ordered landscapes. In public spaces, Plumwood notes, the ‘waragainst nature aims to eliminate independent agency, and is wagedunder the banner of tidiness, order and respect’ (2007: 64). In asmall Australian country cemetery, Plumwood toiled to save anendangered remnant native grassy vegetation community that, dueto the neglect of the cemetery, had been able to flourish. Despiteher efforts, and despite the endangered status of some of the plants,the local community insisted on ordering and ‘neatening’ thecemetery with the aid of mowers and herbicides. ‘Natives’, shesuggests, ‘disrupt rigid, instrumental categories of control’ (2007:64). Equally, cultural values can drive feelings of anger, loss andoutrage, especially in relation to older urban parks, such as RoyalPark, when domesticated nature is cleared to make way for ‘unruly’and untidy plants such as native grasses. For example, at Royal Park,the removal of introduced species to make way for the native treesand grasses of the winning park design, was characterised in themedia as ‘vandalism’, ‘ripping out’ and other pejorative terms, andthe proposed more naturalised landscape was characterised as‘anti-people’ (Instone, 2010).

Judgements create expectations that may limit our willingnessto be affected and constrain what is experience-able. But the re-lations between judgements and affects are not fixed, and goodfeelings can turn bad, or vice versa. Such flip points are often theresult of ‘awkward encounters’ (Hitchings, 2007) where thingsdon’t line up in expected ways. So for example, one can have

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positive feelings towards native nature as ‘good’, but have thosefeeling turn bad when confronted, for example, with bleak grass-lands, boggy plains, arid landscapes and other messy, unconform-ing environments. These ‘conversion points’ (Ahmed, 2010a: 38)register the shift from good to bad or bad to good in our relationswith objects that we assumed would bring us pleasure. Thisdisquieting shift is the work of the ‘affect alien’, Ahmed’s figure ofdisruptive potential. The affect alien is an unsettling figure thatconjurers feelings of disquiet and ambivalence in a way that canprompt re/thinking and alternative engagements. The figurationhighlights the agency of the other as well as highlighting what is atstake in our efforts to domesticate it.

3.2. Grassy affect aliens

Ahmed’s figure of the ‘affect alien’ provides a tactic by which tofurther pursue the ambivalences and paradoxes of dualistic align-ments of objects, affects and judgements. Ahmed deploys the affectalien as a critical figuration in her work exploring the norms ofhappiness, and it occupies the ‘gap between the promise ofhappiness and how [we] are affected by objects that promisehappiness’ (2010b: 42). Ahmed’s affect aliens, ‘feminist killjoys’,‘unhappy queers’ and ‘melancholy migrants’, are figures that aresomewhat at odds with norms and conventions, they grate againstthe grain, they don’t laugh when they should, they’re out of stepwith the mainstream, they’re difficult, uncomfortable and unrea-sonable. They are at odds with the dominant happy family ideal ofhappiness and reveal how happiness works as a form of socialcontrol. The figure of the affect alien displaces the telos of happi-ness, and thus opens up the possibility of other futures, other waysof living, other modes of happiness. Affect aliens are a sort of kill-joy that also ‘open a life, . to make room for possibility’ (Ahmed,2010b: 20). While Ahmed’s figure of the affect alien is focused onhuman sociality, it is nevertheless a useful notionwhen confrontedwith naturecultures that engender anxiety and displeasure, andthat confound human expectations and dominant norms of urbanlandscape appreciation and bodily orientations.

Ecologically restored and native environments are meant tobring pleasure, pride and a sense of happy ‘fit’ and belonging forsettler populations. Urban residents are meant to be pleased, and tofind hope and pleasure in the return of degraded and Europeanisedlandscapes to native ecologies. But this is a tricky and challengingsense of pleasure and happiness. Native grasslands are demandingenvironments e they’re prickly, the seeds stick in your socks andburrow through your dog’s fur and into its skin, they like snakes,they love fire, they don’t let you sit down, you can’t just wanderaimlessly through them, and they brown off in summer andbecome a fire risk. Unlike the familiar lawns of public urban parks,native grasslands demand different bodily and affective attune-ments. The grasses are a sort of trouble-maker, they’re spoilsports,disrupting normal park pleasures and demanding high levels ofmaintenance, refusing to ‘look after themselves’ and appearingmessy and unkempt. Ahmed sees the affect alien as both a site ofdisciplining and of resistance, and in the grasslands we can tracethe efforts to discipline native grasses for park settings, by obligingthem to defy their inclination to grow in a patchy clumpy fashion,expecting them to flourish without their precolonial connections toIndigenous peoples and practices, requiring them to be mowed andbaled for neatness and control, and subjecting them to the tech-nologies of maintenance to sustain the purity of the plantings,among other things.

In Royal Park, for example, the grasses refused to conform to theexpected norms of restoration. It was assumed that since Royal Parkwas originally native grassland, that replanting the grasses wouldbe straightforward, that they would be well suited to the place, and

that they would need less maintenance than introduced lawn. Butthe grasses resisted purified categories and the becoming-park-likeof management schemas and ecological restoration imaginaries. InRoyal Park, instead of being easily established in a place where theyonce ‘belonged’ the grasses refused to flourish. They had otherideas than the romantic imaginary of the park designers whoemphasised the aesthetic appeal of sweeping, swaying and shim-mering grasses (although they also do that) (AILA, 1985a). Acrossmore than 20 years since the first attempts to sow grasses in RoyalPark, repeated herbicide applications, irrigation, mowing, soilnutrient control, specialist human labour, numerous replantings,management plans and funds have managed to produce only alargely monocultural plot (Instone, 2010).

The efforts to re/establish the Royal Park grasslands highlightthe dissonance between the grasses as native and the grasses asstruggling in locations where they used to ‘belong’, the limitationsof good/bad valuations, and the contested politics of which natureis ‘good’ for urban parks and ‘right’ for urban inhabitants. Thegrasses not only refused the imaginary of the 1788 restorationscript, they also had to compete with community backlash frompark users such as dog-walkers, picnickers, and sportspeople whowere dismayed at the prospect of native grasslands replacinglawns. The ‘kill-joy’ grasses show how affect can swing from goodto bad depending on context and the contingencies of a particularsite, highlighting the gap between the promise of restoration andits material and affective resonances. The recalcitrant grasses callattention to, and deny, the telos of ecological restoration as a pre-colonial dream. They ‘kill the joy’ of purified categories and ques-tion the possibility of the restitution of colonial wrongs. Theydisrupt a human-centred imaginary of vegetation as passive,controllable and amenable to human intention and management,and they call us to account for our actions in the world. They refuseto travel the pathways of our desired alignments of ‘good’, ‘right’and ‘correct’ with purity, goodness and happiness.

But more than this, the grasses as kill-joy open new possibilities.The unruly native grasses are able to open things up and take uselsewhere than the well trodden path of the usual restorationscript. Their clumpy, scratchy and tall habits encourage a diversionfrom the usual postures of urban parklands. Native grassland inurban park spaces can interrupt our movement, force an awkwardencounter (Hitchings, 2007) and arouse disconcertment (Instone,2010). These grasses make us walk differently and demanddifferent bodily alignments, orientations and stances. They suggestnew body-worlds for the attunement of settler bodies with un-manageable and messy postcolonial ecologies. As Ahmed notes,affect aliens want the wrong things, and in creating life worldsaround these wants they show us alter ways of becoming (2010b:218). In this way, questioning ecological restoration is also astruggle towards the possibilities of more hopeful postcolonialecologies.

In opening to the possibilities of native grasslands as ‘habitat’ (inDominy's sense) we have to learn to be ‘moved’ by other entitiesand to develop capacities in becoming sensitive to what the worldis made up of (Latour, 2004: 206). A ‘learning to be affected’ (Latour,2004) can be provoked by the disconcertments, controversies anddiscomforts engendered by native grasslands as affect alien. Latournotes that learning to be affected is not about choosing to beattuned to a world ‘out there’ through sensitising a pre-existingbody, but about dissolving the subject/object binary and culti-vating an openness to difference, surprise and uncertainty.Learning to be affected is thus a double movement of what affectsand fabricates us and what we affect and fabricate. In this senseaffects participate in the constitution of inheritances of all kinds asgenerative forces that make worlds in specific times and places.‘Learning to be affected means exactly that,’ Latour says, ‘the more

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you learn, the more differences there exist’ (2004: 213). Thegenerative qualities of learning to be affected proliferate articula-tions that enrich inheritance, so that the re/planting of the grassesin inner urban parks provides the possibility of new bodily en-counters that can prompt newawareness and new dispositions thatadd to the world. It provides the possibilities of re-orientationstowards grasslands that would oblige us to be address-able innew ways. As a figure of nonconformity the affect alien givesinsight into the generative qualities of things that rub against thenorm. Instead of positioning the affect alien as a merely opposi-tional or counter position, Ahmed provides a concept that opens upnew possibilities, and other ways of being, outside of a dualisticeither/or framing. The affect alien helps us think what other modesof becoming might emerge when things don’t fit the usual script.The figuremay also help us alignwith the uncomfortable ecologicalconcepts such as ‘novel ecosystems’ (Hobbs et al., 2009) and ‘newnature’ (Low, 2002), that conceive nature as creatively respondingto human impacts.

3.3. Difference among the grasses

The grasses as affect alien also highlight the complex engage-ments of race and ethnicity with Australian environments andsettler naturecultures. Race, class, gender and colonialism rustle thegrasses and constitute their affect and materiality within broaderdimensions that bring to attention the white, settler, middle-classbodies that predominate and manage inner urban Melbournepark space. While the reception of inheritances is not a choice,Ahmed (2006: 125e6) insists that we can shape our orientationstowards objects inways that amplify or disrupt conventional habits.This suggests the importance of drawing attention to the instabilityof the category of ‘the human’ and to insist on a post-humanist, aswell as more-than-human, rendering of the grasses as affect alien.It is not enough to expand human horizons to include nonhumanothers, rather all forms of human-centredness have to be surren-dered in the task of putting ourselves at risk in the process of‘learning to be affected’. Such a shift can help overcome the in-heritance of mind/body and nature/culture dualisms that enacthumanness as separate from nonhuman entities of all kinds andencourage the conceit of human control. In Australia this meansdisrupting the construct of ‘the human’ as a nature-altering beinginvested with racial superiority, civilising authority and the powerof domestication that is the inheritance of European settlement(Anderson, 2007). Ecological restoration thus involves not justmultispecies engagement, but engagement across all manner ofdifference, where the racialised and gendered practices of land-scape management are also re-aligned.

As noted earlier, different groups of people may harbourdifferent preferences for nature and these can advantage the ac-tivities of some over others. In this sense the ‘where’ of ecologicalrestoration is important, especially when restoration projectschange local environments. For example, Melbourne grasslandsalso coincide with multicultural suburbs settled by more recentmigrants. These ethnically diverse multicultural populations inMelbourne’s western and north-western suburbs pose complexquestions of environmental alignment, and rub up against, andarticulate with, both Anglo-settler and Indigenous relations. Today,restored grasslands along Merri Creek for example, occur alongsidemulticultural communities whose varied inheritances shapediverse reactions to restored grassland environments. To helpfacilitate grassland restoration the MCMC have made efforts toengage diverse groups through activities such as cooking withnative plants, picnics, planting days and multilingualinterpretation.

One recognition of the challenges of urban grassland environ-ments for multicultural communities led to The Weaving Lands, acommunity arts project in the northern Melbourne suburb ofBroadmeadows. This was initiated by a local council officer to try toovercome the reception of the grassy environments of Broad-meadows as ‘foreign and uninviting’ (Wyatt, 2009: 452). Theproject involved a multiethnic group of weavers sculpting grassesinto a tree e ‘The Galgi-gnarrak Yirranboi Tree’ or Backbone ofTomorrow e named by Wurundjeri elder Norm Hunter (Wyatt,2009: 447). Wyatt (2009) notes that The Weaving Lands knittedtogether fibres from the local environment ‘in all its unexpecteddiversity and richness’ (454), Indigenous and introduced. She says:

the weaving metonomises the conscription of these lands, thesebasalt grasslands, so visually unappealing, redundant, foreign tothe picturesque sensibilities of Europeans, into culture, intoaesthetic appreciation. The Weaving Lands connotes also ametaphoric weaving e of peoples, migrants from different landscoming together collaboratively in this land, this new socialweave of culture and communities being created here. (Wyatt,2009: 454)

The weaving lands project brought together place, land andculture with everyday suburban life. It acted as a kind of conversionpoint to flip assessment of the grasslands from alien to captivating.It articulates a ‘learning to be affected’ that could help re-orientbodies, grasses, and cultures in new ways. It attempts to weavetogether multicultural and Indigenous ‘ideas, objects and values’and gestures towards postcolonial, multicultural ecologies thatmaychallenge dominant white settler environmental relations.

Grassland inheritances, then, are as much about skin, blood andbodies as they are about species and ecologies. The ‘affect alien’draws attention to the ontological discomforts that ‘kill the joy’ ofimagining a universal, unmediated and direct relation with natureand that confuse contemporary replantings with the restoration ofprecolonial landscapes. Master and improvement narratives (suchas making Royal Park and Merri Creek more natural and morenative), as Anderson (2007) so eloquently points out in relation toAustralian nature, are deeply implicated with notions of race, as arethe settler accounts of nature that are often used to guide resto-ration projects. Further, within a white settler context, it may bethat deep unstated anxieties about the displacement of Indigenouspeoples not just plants, may underpin the affective work of thegrasses as an ‘affect alien’. This is a complex relation where shame,distress, and feelings of being out-of-placemay be generative of thediscomfort of some bodies in native grasslands and the concomi-tant call for grassland removal. As Probyn (2004) reminds us,shame gets in your body, arising in the space in-between the desireto belong and the feeling of being out of place. Hence, it’s not just amatter of forging connectedness to native grasses, or acknowl-edging the agency of the grasses, although that is part of the story,rather as Anderson insists we need to cultivate a sensibility of ‘non-appropriating openness’ to difference (2007: 203).

3.4. Re-orientations to grassy spaces

Orienting ourselves towards a risky openness is a hard task. Atthe start of this paper I noted the inability of most Australians torecognise native grasses and grasslands, facilitated by more thantwo centuries of pasture ‘improvement’ and the ubiquitous spreadof exotic turf grass lawns across Australian towns and cities. Para-doxically, in some cases like neglected cemeteries and roadsideverges, indifference towards native grasses can be useful when itmeans that the grasses are left to their own devices and slip underthe radar of ‘improvers’ and their practices of domestication.

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However, such places are ‘invisible’ in Frawley’s terms (1991) andare hence vulnerable to destruction by ‘mistake’ or ‘beautification’through tree planting. Ultimately affective non-receptivity towardsnonhumans haunts efforts to compose multispecies worlds andtheir concomitant bodily attunements. Affective non-receptivitytowards the grasses, as either desired or detested, is to turn awayfrom the possibility of becoming other and signals an aversion toembracing discomfort and unfamiliarity as a mode of learning.However, rather than being bereft of affect, such indifference sig-nals an intensity of attachment to colonial inheritances that orientus towards particular landscapes and understandings of nature andnot others that may make us uncomfortable or provoke anxiety.This is why the figure of the affect alien is so important. Affectaliens do not tolerate complacency, they disrupt indifference, theyyell loudly in the face of social deafness, and they flaunt themselvesin places where we try to avert our gaze. They are recalcitrant inways that force us to question conventional habits of non-responsiveness to difference that can lead to dire consequencessuch as species extinction, dwindling grasslands, the perpetuationof human exceptionalism and control, and what Hage (2000) calls‘white managerialism’ where both natural environments andmulticultural communities are constituted within a white settlerscript. Indifference and unresponsiveness work against Latour’s(2004) observation that the more controversies, the more articu-lations, the wider the world becomes. From the perspective of‘learning to be affected’ indifference is a premature closing down ofthe complexity of a situation, a lack of curiosity, a denial of therecalcitrance of things, and a hasty unification. Such practices ofsameness encourage the equation of re/plantings, such as those inRoyal Park and Merri Creek, with pre-1788 life-worlds, rather thandiscerning that the world is changed though our articulations. Theyrender invisible the Indigenous peoples and practices that createdthe 1788 grasslands presumed natural by settlers (Gammage, 2011).This repositions ecological restoration as the forging of new con-nections e human and nonhuman e in the here and now, ratherthan the re-establishment of pre-existing, precolonial ones.

The affective qualities of unruly grasses has led me to under-stand grassland restoration as a practice of worlding, an attune-ment, a composing of inheritances, objects and affects, somechosen, others not. It’s a reassembly of materialities and intensitiesin which subjects and object blur, meld and entangle, and wherethere’s no intrinsic or necessary logic or path. The affective powerof native grasses and ‘restored’ sites is multiple, ambivalent andcontingent. They touch us with a mixture of desire, hope, shame,pleasure, loss and sometimes repulsion. There’s a ‘drama of con-tingency’ here where relations of proximity with the grasses canregister aversion or pleasure, disinterest or delight, or odd con-coctions of conflicting sentiments.

There’s no telling where affect will take us e it's not necessarilyone thing or another, good or bad, progressive or reactionary,sustaining grasslands or demanding their removal. But in thegrassland case I want to think of these affective spaces as possi-bilities for other ways of thinking, other bodily postures andecological practices. Those pesky affect aliens disrupt the script,they annoy us, but at the same time are suggestive of other modesof human-nature relations outside the binary codes underpinningmanagement and control relations. They’re spaces in which wemight encounter ideas and bodily stances that attune to modes ofthinking and practice that ask what sorts of encounters, nature,relations and connections are opened up, and which are closeddown, by the affective registers of native grasslands. From the‘angle of affect’ (Ahmed, 2006) ecological restoration of grasslandscan be understood as a re/composition of the ‘ideas, values andobjects’ that constitute and stitch together urban park natures,bodies, plants, park designs, chemicals, aesthetics and so on.

The restoration of urban grassland environments requires notjust scientific and technical effort but community support. Restoredgrasslands have proved to be fragile ecologies requiring ongoingmaintenance and support. This relies on their acceptance and/orrevaluing in the broader community, but especially from those wholive alongside grasslands or those who frequent parks in whichsuch ecologies are being restored. As conservationists and restorershave found, engendering support for native grasslands has been adifficult task. In this regard, the turn to affect is useful for betterunderstanding the complexities of human-grassland relations andthe varied responses to ecological restoration. It shifts thinkingaway from either individual emotional engagement with particulargrass-scapes or the dominant scientific perspective that empha-sises material dimensions. Ahmed’s concept of orientation, herarticulation of the stickiness of judgement and affect, and her figureof the affect alien provide new tools for thinking about howgrassland restoration is constituted, what is at stake, what is beingcalled into question, what is being reinforced, and how particularnaturecultures are constituted in the process. Placed in the situatedcontext of inheritance the affect alien emphasises the constitutivelink between bodies and natures, reminding us that when wechange environments we also change who and where we are, andwho and howwe can ‘become’ and what inheritances we recogniseand leave. Most importantly, attention to the affective resonancesof grasslands opens new possibilities for attuning to the complexand multiple naturecultures of postcolonial lands. Affect can openus to a learning to be affected that can help in negotiating thetensions of Australian inheritances of Indigenous relations, multi-cultural composition, settlement and scientific land management,and for generating new thinking and alternate stances about theworlds we want to co-create and how we can best live in the hereand now. The recognition of more-than-human agencies and af-fects brings to the fore the visceral and indefinable qualities ofecological restoration and a reminder that in forging differentnaturecultures we risk becoming different in the process.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Uses ofAffect Workshop, UWS, and my thanks to the participants and or-ganisers, Magdalena Zolkos & Gerda Roelvink, for valuable feed-back, and to Mick Smith and three anonymous reviewers forinsightful comments.

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