Dahl Fellowship 2026

I'm very excited to report that I'll be a Dahl Fellow in 2026, alongside Nicole Hodgson and Campbell Young. When there is a press release to link to I'll link that, but in the meantime I can tell you it's to work on my next tree book, Eucalyptus: A Story in Twenty Trees. ‘A Story in Twenty Trees', a book that explores the cultural, ecological, and historical significance of Eucalyptus trees through the lens of colonial exploration and exploitation. Once the word ‘Eucalyptus’ was ascribed to a genus in the late 1700s it entered what Deborah Bird Rose has termed 'epistemological chaos’. These trees have been ‘discovered’, contested, named and renamed. Thousands of pages have been written on the subject of the identification of eucalypts – 510 pages in Baron Ferdinand von Mueller’s ten volume, late nineteenth century Eucalyptographia alone – and much of what is written can be read as a tale of a tale of sound and fury, signifying … confusion. I plan to investigate how settler understanding’s of landscape was shaped—and distorted—by Linnaean systems of classification, settler-colonial history, and the erasure of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ knowledge systems. In contrast to the rigid hierarchies of Linnaean taxonomy, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander systems of classification are contextual, relational, and embedded in Country. The book asks: what might it take to restore meaning, connection, and ecological memory in a time of environmental crisis? It also argues that the instability of the classification of eucalypts is itself a metaphor for unresolved history.