Helping achieve energy justice: Adam Fish

09 Oct 2026

Edition 13 2026

A recent project with the Eastern Kuku Yalinji in Far North Queensland advocated for a community-led solar and battery system.

Associate Professor Fish in the School of the Arts & Media is a cultural anthropologist, an archaeologist, documentary video producer and interdisciplinary scholar. He employs ethnographic, participatory and creative methods to examine the social, political and ecological impacts of new technologies.

Prior to UNSW, Adam was a senior lecturer and a reader at Lancaster University in the UK for eight years.

“When I saw a job offer for UNSW for a Scientia Fellow, I applied. It’s an extraordinary program to recruit talent, and it gave me an opportunity and the freedom and financial support I needed to begin my project on the use of drones in marine conservation which became a book.”

Adam grew up in southern Idaho, which he described as a “very rustic and rural area with a great number of Indigenous Native American communities within an hour's drive”.

“As a young lad, you know, it's kind of romantic and absurd, but I really wanted to emulate some of the sustainable and relational and kinship responsible practices of First Nations communities. So, I spent a lot of time camping, fishing, hiking, backpacking and practising bushcraft,” he said.

Adam worked and lived on the Colville Indian Reservation in north-central Washington state for a number of years as a tribal archeologist. His full-time job was to help identify threatened sacred, archeological and cultural heritage sites. He also alerted the tribal, state and federal governments when those lands were about to be inundated with a dam or destroyed through a logging operation.

“Those sites are sacred to Indigenous people, and there are laws that protect them. The archeology I was doing for and on behalf of Native Americans was an opportunity to enact ecological conservation and cultural preservation and to push against some of the ravishes of industrialisation.

“It's been a personal, professional pursuit and, indeed, a personal pursuit for me,” he said.

The Eastern Kuku Yalinji

Adam has been working for a number of years with the Eastern Kuku Yalinji of the Wujal Wujal community, in Far North Queensland, to help advocate for a community-led solar and battery system.

“We're now in the midst of them being able to achieve some energy independence and energy resiliency with a solar system that’s currently being installed. I've worked with Elders Kathleen and Francis Walker there, and it's been really rewarding to see that happen.

“I do collaborative work, helping to empower and publicise their aspirations and their voice through documentary cinema. I've made a couple of documentaries with them that have been screened for energy ministers in Queensland and for the federal government.”

A man standing by a river — Nannie Kathleen Walker said: 'The Microgrid is an opportunity for us to give something back to our people: education, clean water, power'. Photo from Have Our Own, Adam Fish.

Adam said he is interested in social justice and energy justice – which is the right to energy.

“But I'm also interested on a philosophical level because Indigenous peoples have a profound understanding of what energy is. It’s not just as a source of power, but as a kind of ancestral power that flows throughout all living beings.”

Adam said with a recent grant from the British Council – Decolonising the Just Transition: Energy Epistemologies and Energy Justice in three Indigenous Communities – they will be able to measure the social impacts of the Eastern Kuka Yalinji project.

Watch the short documentary Have Our Own about Indigenous ownership of the renewable energy industry in Australia, the US and New Zealand, featuring the remote Wujal Wujal community of Far North Queensland.

Read about Adam’s work in Arts, Design & Architecture’s Creating Impact series.