Abstract

Rising to my feet on New Island in the South Atlantic, surrounded by thick tussac grass, a cross section of the landscape enters my mind. There is the sky, the grass and the soil, which is interspersed with thousands of burrows. Each burrow ends in a cavern with a small thin-billed prion chick. I will never experience this cross section as imagined, but it can be otherwise sensed. This thesis is about stories of place, how these develop, how they are encompassed in landscape, and how one might craft stories that positively contribute to sustaining dynamic place relations. The thin-billed prion colony I describe is situated on the Falkland Islands. These Islands are the focus of this research. It was conducted using archival methods and participant-observation across two seasons of ethnographic fieldwork. The settler colonial, ecological transformations that have occurred over time in the Islands, and in the wider South Atlantic, generate and evidence various commodity-narratives with which Islanders today continue to grapple. The Islanders’ negotiations with these narratives are underpinned and influenced by the contemporary management of what Anna Tsing calls ghosts. In the Falklands these are interconnected themes of personal, political and ecological loss, from various perspectives and on non-linear temporal scales. Islanders and visitors to the Islands conducting environmental scientific research and conservation activities are entangled in this context. These researchers and residents have the potential to contribute sensitively to cultivating positive place relationships, and in some cases already are. I analyse their complex acts of knowledge-production, relation, encounter and storytelling. Ultimately, it is imperative to reflect on what stories are told, where, who tells them, and who is listening to generate momentum amidst the ghosts, and a discourse that foregrounds respectful place-relations in the Falkland Islands.