This year's conference of the Association of Australian Studies (Gesellschaft für Australienstudien) is hosted by the University of Cologne. The multidisciplinary conference meeting this year with the topic “Nature and Environment in Australia” addresses debates around Australia which often explore the attachment to place as well as the intrinsic qualities of landscape. Australia’s famously unique nature on the one hand and heated discussions around environmental justice and activism on the other provide a forum for fostering scholarly and creative work that explores the relationship between human culture, natural history and global ecologies. This conference is concerned both with notions of indigenous environmental knowledge, and ideas about how a diverse Australia is responding to global climate change, resource exploitation, land degradation, urban sprawl, and loss of biodiversity.