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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how more-than-human memory is used in the regeneration of kinship on Lord Howe Island. It examines how ‘taking the old path’ through historic palm seeding sites on the Island can recuperate kinship connections and orient Lord Howe Islanders’ identity amidst radical change.

Paper long abstract

Taking the ‘old path’ alongside a Lord Howe Islander to Grey Face, a historic palm seeding site on Lord Howe, this paper ethnographically explores how more-than-human memory regenerates kinship relations used in the formation of socio-political identities on the Island. I explore how Grey Face can be understood as an unlikely ruin, one that tells the story of the upheaval of the palm industry, formerly the Island’s main economy, the take-over of tourism, and the consequential increase of governmental control with its associated environmental regulation. This background of upheaval has beckoned unprecedented challenges to the identity of Lord Howe Islanders, leading to increased polarisation between Islanders and the government as well as Islanders and ‘non-Islanders’. Amidst this polarisation and change, this paper examines how Lord Howe Islanders’ engage with powerful memories that are materialised in the more-than-human to make claims of unique belonging forged in kin relations. I argue that memory is essential to identity on Lord Howe Island, and show that, in the face of changing relationships between people, the Island, and the past on Lord Howe, the more-than-human was doing much of the ‘memory work’. Drawing on affect theory and thinking about non-human temporalities, I examine the ways more-than-human memory can be understood. In exploring the socio-political regeneration of identity on Lord Howe through peoples’ engagement with more-than-human memory, this paper also challenges an overly sentimental view of this process by illustrating ways in which the more-than-human may also erase memory and therein certain identities and histories.