For the past eight years, I have been kayaking around the Barwon Estuary in Victoria, Australia, observing the mangroves closely from the water. I have witnessed changes in their condition and signs of decline, reported my observations, and explored their beauty, vulnerability and importance through my multimedia art practice.
Through the Mangroves from the Water exhibitions, I have also encouraged artists to engage with mangroves and create artworks inspired by them, works that may affect viewers, raise awareness and strengthen connections between communities and these remarkable environments.
Yet, despite years of observation, reporting, artmaking and advocacy, I continue to see the mangroves receiving insufficient attention and protection. When raising concerns with authorities, I have repeatedly encountered the response that funding is limited or unavailable. This has led me to think more deeply about what it means for an environment to be marginalised.
Seeing from the Water
My perspective begins at the micro level. From my kayak, I see the mangroves from the perspective of the water and their roots, rather than from above. My eye is close to the waterline, encountering roots, pneumatophores, mud, reflections, tides and the subtle changes within this intertidal ecology.
‘From the water’ therefore represents more than my physical position; it is a way of seeing. Changing the position from which I see changes what I am able to see.
This intimate observation has gradually moved my thinking from micro to macro: from seeing the individual mangrove closely to questioning the wider systems that determine what we notice, value, fund and protect.
Mangroves, Indigenous Knowledge and the ‘Other’
As I discussed in my PhD research, mangroves have longstanding connections with Indigenous people who have lived in relationship with these environments for thousands of years and understood their significance. This history leads me to question how dominant non-Indigenous perspectives have influenced which environments are culturally recognised, valued and protected, and which remain peripheral.
These questions also intersect with something personal: my thinking about racism, belonging and being perceived as the ‘Other’. After nine years of living in Geelong, I still experience a sense of being an outsider. My experiences have made me conscious of how perceived difference can affect belonging, visibility and acceptance.
Perhaps this is why I naturally recognise similarities between the marginalisation I observe in mangroves and my own experience of otherness.
I have come to think about racism as a way of seeing and treating the ‘Other’, where perceived difference can become a basis for separation, marginalisation or exclusion. This raises a question: can this way of seeing the ‘Other’ extend beyond people and influence how particular environments are perceived and treated?
Mangroves occupy an in-between space—between land and water, rooted in mud and shaped by tides. I increasingly question whether their marginalisation is solely environmental, or whether it also reveals something about cultural ways of seeing and valuing difference.
From Micro to Macro
The micro perspective allows me to see the mangrove closely, to encounter them as a living presence. The macro perspective leads me beyond this intimate encounter to question the wider systems that determine how they are seen, valued, marginalised and protected.
What I observe in the environment and what I experience as a person begin to inform one another. Both lead me to question how we respond to what is unfamiliar or insufficiently understood, and how this unfamiliarity can become perceived as difference, creating distance and contributing to the process of othering
Othering creates distance; my practice seeks proximity.
Through art and repeated encounters from the water, I seek to bring viewers closer to what might otherwise remain peripheral and encourage them not simply to look at mangroves, but to reconsider how they see them.
How do we learn to see people, places or environments as the ‘Other’, and what happens to them once we do?
From the micro perspective of a mangrove root, a much larger perspective begins to emerge.
Zahidah Zeytoun Millie
All images and articles on this blog are © Zahidah Zelda Zeytoun Millie except where otherwise noted. All rights reserved.
Mangroves from the Water (MFTW) 