Introduction to Australian Wetland Cultures: Thinking About (and with) Swamps

Abstract

Among the most fertile and biodiverse ecosystems on the planet, "comparable to rain forests and coral reefs," wetlands are integral to sustaining human and more-than-human lives. As a catchall designator for swamps, marshes, sloughs, bogs, billabongs, and other highly mutable water bodies, a wetland is "a place that has been wet enough for a long enough time to develop specially adapted vegetation and other organisms." The indispensable functions performed by wetlands include filtering debris and pollutants from water, protecting human settlements from storm surges, and providing habitat for birds, animals, plants, and other organisms. Often likened to "biological supermarkets" in popular science writing, some wetlands generate ten times the biomass of an average wheat field. Indeed, the largest wetlands complex in the world, the Pantanal of Mato Grosso in Brazil, comprises 200,000 square kilometers (or 77,000 square miles), comparable in area to the entire United Kingdom (see chapter 9 of this volume). Acting as a "natural switch-board" between the La Plata and Amazon River basins, the Pantanal has a remarkable range of faunal, floral, and fungal species.