PLATYPUS PUBLICATION
PLATYPUS is a print publication recognising unseen Australian icons at the intersection of stolen land and culture in the Anthropocene. It is not afraid to express ideas through casual poetry, political and visual jest and bold gestures.
Awareness of the sensuous existence of all lifeforms involves listening and tuning in - this publication is an offering to do so together; a way to share and connect over what is essential and necessary in a queerer way. Homophobia, transphobia, racism, classism, sexism, extractivism and capitalism inform the dominant and narrow views of our environment and help to justify its exploitation... What if we could rearrange, rather than erase or suffocate?
PLATYPUS, the publication, is swimming somewhere between the field and paper- a rare breed of strange parts that make a unique and beautiful whole. As something which is tricky to categorise, but once seen for its beauty, humour and evolutionary brilliance, it’s not hard to love or get excited about.
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ENERGY CALLOUT
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PLATYPUS Essentials: 00-02 ENERGY CALLOUT
What is PLATYPUS Essentials?
PLATYPUS hopes to deepen our relationship to the Essentials – water, energy, food, shelter and waste– and the infrastructures that shape our unsustainable lives. This transdisciplinary, print publication is unique in its approach to ecological crises. It is guided by First Nation’s cultural practice, artmaking, critical discussion, poetry, humour, queer ecology; and unlike other arts publications it is informed by fieldwork.The Essentials series insists on staying in trouble together whilst imagining a future that feels fuller, brighter, vaster and more empathetic.
What is the 00-02 Energy book?
The second book in the Essentials series wishes to publish the very tangible realities and varied economic, environmental and queer experiences of “energy”, while also providing an imaginative and somewhat practical guide for the future. Like the first book 00-01 Water, 00-02 Energy will be composed of two parts. The first part is [trans*mission], a foundational toolkit inspired by queer methodologies, and built from fieldwork that grounds the research for the issue in a living Australian context. The second part is [distribution], a print-platform for art, poetry, critical discussion and many other forms of literature (anything that can be printed in a book – dream big but within a few spreads).
00-02 Energy Method
The [Trans*mission] part of 00-02 Energy is inspired by a field trip in the Bowen Basin, a region of Central Queensland which has come to characterise Australia’s energy (coal) market since the1860s. In April 2025, 4 PLATYPUS artists rode pushbikes 400km across Baranha, Biri and Giya lands, through regional mining towns, from Moranbah to Abbot’s Point coal port near Bowen. This methodology of pedal power helped us grasp the spatial organisation and scale of these sites of extreme entropy, and the histories, cultures and ecologies of regional areas and major industrial towns in CQ. This, as well as continued conversation and research into the geopolitical landscape of CQ, forms the foundation for this book.
What we are looking for
The printed book hopes to create a poetic, accessible and incisive cross-section of community knowledge of and connection to energy on this continent. We are looking for nuanced approaches to the idea of energy that stoke the possibility of beyond-coal futures. We are searching for creative approaches to print publishing from artists, writers, non-artists and non-writers alike, that expand our community's understanding of energy and power.
This book hopes to hold many overlapping things — the slippages, the source, the smut, the strata, the open cut, the overburden, the fossils, the ecotones and the biota. The Platypuses want to know: What does it take to truly transition? Where does energy come from and where does it go? Might energy justice come from the sky, from deep within or from an unexpected source?
The sun is transforming matter into sweet blooms and desiccations with an energy that is material and infinite. To keep apace with the demands of new technologies, energy markets are expected to double. In Newcastle, coalmining slowly becomes weapons manufacturing in a change that marketing departments call a ‘green transition’. All the while crabs make homes in the sunless depths of the ocean. Let us know what you think is crucial to the energy conversation…
Acknowledgement
PLATYPUS acknowledges the Jagera and Turrbal People, the Traditional Owners of the land, sea and sky that facilitates creation of this publication. PLATYPUS acknowledges the 80 000 years of Aboriginal cooperation, with the lands, waters and skies of this continent. We acknowledge the Darumbal, Bayali, Gangulu, Gayiri, Wangan, Gabalbara, Baranha, Biri, Giya and Yuwi lands on which we spent time for this book. We pay our deepest respects to Aboriginal Elders to come and continuous. We acknowledge that climate change here is intimately linked with the capitalist imperative of land extraction and the military industrial complex .We stand in solidarity with all First Nations communities and their non-human kin. And we ask going forward: what does “growth” truly look like beyond human exceptionalism, capitalism and its colonial institutions, the violent patriarchy and the carceral industrial complex?
Sleep on it. Or wake up?
2024
Journal / Queer Field Guide
00-01 WATER
00-01 WATER is the first book of the PLATYPUS
Essentials series. Each book will explore the 5 essentials-
Water, Energy, Food, Shelter and Waste - through an
unconventional research project (Queer Field Guide) and a
curated book of emerging and prominent artists and writers . [thirsty] is the first Queer Field Guide located in Mparntwe (Alice Springs), a colonial settlement in the central desert that also happens to be the queer capital of Australia... It’s counterpart [swallow] is a collection of talented artists and writers from across the continent expressing water as more-than-a-resource.
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2023-2026
5 Essential books housed in a box
PLATYPUS Essentials
PLATYPUS Essentials imaginatively engages with the necessary; being the state of the unavoidable - It is clear what is essential - food, water, shelter, energy, waste - just not how or why to engage more deeply? This new series of art books by PLATYPUS asks what is the moral imperative of the misunderstood, engineered scapes that facilitate life as we know it and how do we begin to show empathy toward something outside of our worried minds? How do we begin to respect water and food as more-than-a-resources? How do we contemplate shelter for more-than-humans? How do we map lines of power, and how do we more deeply connect to the Bin Man? How do we deepen our relationship to all ecologies, especially those outside the traditional notions of what is “natural”?
2022
Toilet poster
BOM (with feelings)
Do you have the hots for the weather, are you just glad to have it in your life or would you prefer it to fuck off? Climate is the build-up of weather conditions over a long period of time. Therefore, we can’t create a relationship with climate without first dating the weather. Weather, in all it’s glory, is the ultimate informer of place and is predicted to one day be a rude interruption to our daily lives. Therefore, it is important to know whether you should “break up now”, “sleep on it” or “stick together till the end” now, in order to save much heart-ache and devastation later on.
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2021
Journal / Cookbook
SALTY
This issue, SALTY, is about exploring the sticky nuances of the mangroves and mudflats and to celebrate the most beautiful and mundane cultural icons in my life- my family. My mum, a cyclonic, Italian work-aholic and in contrast my father a calm but distant tug- boat of kindness. It will share through poetry, art works and anecdotes stories of climate change and rituals/relationships around salt-water and food and navigating queerness in a quintessential Australian/Italian nuclear family PLUS an Italian secret recipe book....
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2020
Journal
I SAW IT FIRST
I still live through the stories I have been told by those who have seen it first... “I saw it first” acknowledges that seeing potential in something is important. But is this true? Australia’s capitalist culture and cruel history like the statement forgets the long, strong and beautiful relationship the land has with Aboriginal people. It rewards ownership over something that wasn’t there to be owned in the first place. This first issue attempts to take the power away from viewing this special land as a commodity and instead gives it back to feeding the potential of the things we love and wish we could afford to see- even if is just a hopeful glimpse...
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