Nicholas Gill

I am a human geographer with interests in environmental management and rural cultures. My research focuses on rural areas, particularly on cultural and social aspects of land management, land use change, and environmental conflict. In my research I aim to bridge conventional natural resource management research and research on cultures of nature. I am interested in how people occupy landscapes and seek to inhabit, use, protect, and conserve those landscapes, usually simultaneously, and in ways that defy neat compartmentalisation of these activities. My past research has encompassed pastoral culture and land in Central Australia, Indigenous pastoral enterprises, heritage, and history, the cultural politics of bushfire management and prescribed burning, regenerative grazing, and household sustainability. I have been interested in natural resource management and stewardship in rural areas characterised by lifestyle-oriented rural landholders. This has led to research on weeds, biosecurity, and bushfire management.

I work with agencies on public good natural resource management issues such as invasive species, biosecurity and bushfires. I am collaborating with the NSW NPWS to investigate biosecurity risk reduction and recreation in the Kosciuszko National Park. This has included trialling and evaluating biosecurity hygiene stations for bushwalkers. I currently supervise a PhD project jointly funded by the NSW NPWS and UOW that expands this work across multiple recreational activities.

I am currently Communities Node Leader for the NSW government funded NSW Bushfire and Natural Hazards Research Centre and chief investigator for the BNHRC project "Learning together to live with fire: Can Indigenous cultural burning practitioners catalyse new models of broader community resilience for bushfire risk?"