The tropical backyard: performing environmental difference

This paper extends debates investigating the importance of domestic yards and gardens in shaping identities and the everyday practices and performances of human–nature interaction in a tropical city. It presents findings from a pilot study investigating backyards in a small but ethnically diverse neighbourhood in Cairns, Australia—a site that raises questions about the normative constructions of “nature” in much of the literature. The paper explores how Cairns residents make sense of their backyards, especially in terms of how they relate to them as “tropical”. Living in Cairns means managing excess water during the rainy season, dealing with new kinds of pests, and being critically conscious of the temperate bias of Australian garden retailers and house/garden magazines. The paper frames these experiences within a longer tradition of tropicality or a (western) way of making sense of/imagining tropical regions and environmental difference. In so doing, it opens up a new cultural geography of the suburbs, displaces normative constructions of “nature” and shows how the legacies of European colonialism still play out in a dominant Australian culture.