Australian men talk about becoming environmentalists

The discourses of environmentalism are not peculiar to Australia or to the West, or even to men. But in this chapter, written in collaboration with Hilary Whitehouse, we explore the take-up of environmental discourses by a small group of men living in the northeast corner of Australia. What these inteiviews allow us to do here, in this chapter, is to exainine the complex relations between a particular discourse, environmentalism, and a particular set of landscapes in the tropical north of Australia, as they both constitute and are constituted by the men in our study. Before we begin, it is important to give some indication of the cultural and political elements of the landscape with/in which environmental discourses in Australia are taken up. In the following story of traveling into the far reaches of the Australian desert, Robert Dessaix touches on some of the most salient features of that landscape. He describes traveling from his safe, familiar city landscape and inoving farther and farther away from anything he recognized, towards a place called Patjarr in the Gibson desert