Animal Nation: The True Story of Animals And Australia

Animals can tell us a lot about ourselves. The way we love them as pets, eat them for dinner, make them symbols of the nation or shun them as invaders and pests illuminates much about our society and culture. Animal Nation traces the complex relationships between animals and humans in Australia. It starts with the colonial period, when unfamiliar native animals were hunted almost to extinction and replaced with preferred species, and brings us full circle to the present when native species are protected above all others. It demonstrates that different categories of animals have been used to legitimate or marginalise different human groups in colonial and postcolonial Australia Animals form the focus of intense social and political conflict in Australia. In a provocative and original way, Animal Nation explains why.

ADRIAN FRANKLIN

ThE TRUE STORy OF ANiMALS AND AUSTRALIA

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ADRIAN FRANKLIN

ANIMAL NATION

ADRIAN FRANKLIN trained in anthropology and sociology in the UK and is now Reader in Sociology at the University of Tasmania. He is author of Tourism (2003); Nature and Social Theory (2002) and Animals and Modern Cultures – A Sociology of Human–Animal Relations in Modernity (1999). He is well-known as a panellist on Collectors on ABC TV.

ANIMAL NATION THE TRUE STORY OF ANIMALS AND AUSTRALIA

ADRIAN FRANKLIN

UNSW PRESS

In memory of Wilf, Junior, Bob and Steve. All sadly missed.

A UNSW Press book Published by University of New South Wales Press Ltd University of New South Wales Sydney NSW 2052 AUSTRALIA www.unswpress.com.au © Adrian Franklin 2006 First published 2006 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Franklin, Adrian. Animal nation: the true story of animals and Australia Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 0 86840 890 5. 1. Human-animal relationships - Australia. 2. Animal welfare - Australia. 3. Wildlife conservation - Social aspects - Australia. 4. National characteristics, Australian. I. Title. 304.270994 Design Di Quick Cover photo Jeremy Woodhouse/Masterfile Print Everbest, China

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vii

CHAPTER

1 The Animal Enigma

1

CHAPTER

2 Freaks of Nature?

26

CHAPTER

3 Animals and Aborigines

48

CHAPTER

4 Changing Nature

79

CHAPTER

5 The Australian Dreaming

110

CHAPTER

6 Outsider Animals?

144

CHAPTER

7 The Pussycat Dreaming

166

CHAPTER

8 Animals and Modern Australia

193

Notes

239

References

251

Index

258

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

This study was made possible through funding from the Australian Research Council Large Grant (F0010803) for the Project ‘Sentiments and Risks: The Changing Nature of Human–Animal Relations in Australia’. I would like to thank all of those people in the national survey and follow-up case studies for giving so freely of their time. I would like to thank Aidan Davison, Chilla Bulbeck and Harriet Ritvo for their useful comments on an earlier draft, as well as my colleagues in sociology at the University of Tasmania for feedback on papers that preceded and shaped this book. I would especially like to thank Phillipa McGuinness and Robin Derricourt at UNSW Press for their encouragement, warmth and collegiality, but also for their excellent service to authors. It has been a pleasure working with the Press all the way, and I would like to acknowledge the excellent work of Heather Cam and Rosie Marson. Venetia Somerset played a major role in this book as copy editor extraordinaire, making many important refinements to ideas and text. Lynn Paddock has provided consistent good feedback on the ideas in this book as it matured, and assisted in the development of the manuscript. Thanks are also due to Michelle Whitmore and Phil Patman for research assistance at various points.

As usual, I thank my long-suffering children, Jo, Dexter and Brooke, for putting up with a largely absentee father who also disappears (too frequently) to exotic places without them.

Chapter 1

THE ANIMAL ENIGMA

On a recent trip to Kakadu, one of Australia’s most important and impressive wildlife regions, I was struck by the puzzling and contradictory positions animals find themselves in, relative to their neighbouring and visiting humans. Anyone who has been a tourist to this region will know that animals seem to occupy multiple meanings and roles depending on shifting contexts. So for example, calling in at the Visitor Centre at Jabiru, I was surprised to read in a history of the park that in the 1950s and 1960s it catered to tourist big game hunters. This international tourist elite came to the region before it had park status to shoot crocodiles, kangaroos and especially buffalo. One imagines Ernest Hemingway types, their local agents and perhaps some Aboriginal trackers playing out a colonial scene that had as much in common with Africa or India as it did with Australia. The introduced status of the buffaloes mattered hardly at all in comparison with their quality or distribution or the way in which the country there rendered hunting exciting.1 Other literature and information written in the present tense had the buffalo as a pest whose presence threatened the very viability of Kakadu as an ecosystem and travel destination: their destructive movements were likely to destroy the fragile levees that keep the salt water from the precious freshwater lagoons and billabongs. Certainly I did not see a buffalo, and at first I formed the

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impression that the well-organised Parks and Wildlife Service had removed them. But they were still there. The first sighting of them was made in an upmarket tourist hotel in Darwin. A banner stretched across the outdoor cocktail area announced that buffalo was on the menu. Indeed, buffalo was ‘on’ all over town, and expressed very much in terms of a local delicacy. But more than that, it was clear that buffalo was still a defining icon of the region, a ‘must eat’ option. This was still Hemingway country and its defining features were specific types of relationships with specific types of animals. Heroic types could be seen taking risks with crocodiles, the unpredictable buffalo could take on four-wheel drives, tourists were ‘lost’ at billabongs, dingoes were not fully to be trusted. The postcolonial ‘big game hunter country’ image sits awkwardly with the reality that this is Aboriginal country and that they own a great deal of the land in the area. Tourists do not have many opportunities to get to know the local people, which is a shame, but there is at least one tour they can do with Aboriginal guides and on Aboriginal land. And this for me was the highlight of the trip. However, it soon became apparent that any assumption that Aboriginal people and Parks and Wildlife shared the same attitudes to wildlife was wrong. We were told that Aborigines valued buffalo very highly, that it was their favourite meat and that large numbers were kept in order to provide meat for the community. It was also the case that many other introduced species, including the feral cat (much vilified by Parks and Wildlife), were valued and in some areas even regarded as sacred animals. For essentially urban Australians long used to the apparent need to remove introduced ‘pest’ species, this came as a surprise, a counter-intuitive surprise. For here was a situation where a scientifically based organisation seemed bent on preserving strict animal boundaries and keeping ‘others’ out while traditional owners in the same area seemed more inclusive and relaxed with diversity – accepting change and a new postcolonial world. Then there was the animal classification projected to tourists as if the colonial days of brute exploitation

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and derring-do were still a reality. I could see the confusion circulate among the tour group, most of them white Australians. How were they going to think about the buffalo now? Or about themselves? Or Aboriginal people? Yet another edible offering compounded this dissonance: fresh native animals. One spends considerable time in Kakadu seeing crocodiles, being told about them, or worrying about them. The overall message is that they too are part of the fragile web of life there and this comes across especially for the crocs, because tourists visit as the dry season sets in and consolidates, and many crocs die from a lack of water. The seriousness and precariousness of nature is still fresh in one’s mind as Darwin comes into view for one more night before flying out. In order to make a change from buffalo, fresh crocodile or kangaroo is also on the menu there. Although the food-crocodile is mainly farmed, the menus never make this entirely clear. Yet if it isn’t farmed then it is the selfsame animal that featured in the heroic discourse of the Parks and Wildlife rangers and their quest to save native wildlife. The kangaroo is not farmed and may well have been seen by the tourists, in another guise. Do not imagine that this series of anecdotes from Kakadu is particularly special or to be put down to the topsy-turvy world of tourism. Far from it – they are in fact characteristic of the enigmatic position that animals occupy in Australia. And do not imagine that this is how things are in other countries – they are not. This enigma is uniquely Australian, but its bewildering unfolding is not merely a strange story about the fortunes of animals: it goes right to the heart of Australianness itself, what it is to be properly Australian.

ANIMALS AND NATIONS Animals are significant to most human societies not simply as a source of food or risk but as a rich source of symbols with which to represent complex aspects of our culture, identity and belonging. This book is the result of a study of animals and Australian society,

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but instead of a coherent or unified set of animal symbols and practices emerging with which to locate and understand Australian identity, the results indicate the absence of any such coherence or unity. Animals are tied into narratives about nation and Australianness, but they take the form of enigmas, contradictions and ironies, suggesting that what it is to be properly Australian is not yet clear, cannot be clear for the time being. While this is to be expected in such a young country, it remains nonetheless an important problem to identify and address. How we feel about ourselves works its way through and becomes worked out through our dealing with nature, that entity we need more than anything else to become embedded in, to own, to be naturalised into. Tim Flannery takes this to be literally true, wanting to believe that the land has taken the social imprint of settler society while settlers, as with Aboriginal people, have been formed socially in response to unique and difficult Australian natural conditions. He says that ‘any lasting notion of Australian nationhood must arise from an intimate understanding of Australian ecosystems’.2 Only then, it seems, can we truly be at home and settled in the physical territory and social space we occupy. But this is not an ecological task before us so much as a symbolic social one, and the nation is not the land, its nature and us combined but an imagined community, one conjured from the imagination in modern dreamtime-like journeys of our own. Nations are not natural things; they are carefully constructed things that hold together people who might otherwise fall apart. They are built of myths and stories that miraculously produce common purposes from disparate interests and origins and achieve blood-like bonds from complete strangers. They do so, in part, by giving everyone kinship with a common kinswoman: Mother Nature – and her little helpers, the animals. Her animals are the stewards and signposts along the way on this journey, allies and enemies, dance partners and fellow diggers, and we work out this naturalisation through our nation-building performance with them. As Nicholas Smith argues, ‘ideas of nature,

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native and nation do not only exist in thought; in order to be imaginable they must be represented and given cultural form in narratives, images, symbols, rituals and customs.’3 But equally, these collective representations can change, and, just as Australia shifted from colony to nation, these representations underwent an incredible transformation – a historical journey we are just about to embark upon. This book diagnoses how and why such a journey was undertaken; it documents some of the twists and turns that have been made along the way; it shows how things went wrong and the likely but unexpected direction of its ultimate destination. Through understanding our relations with animals we can come to a better understanding of ourselves.

ANIMALS AND HUMAN REPRESENTATION In this book I am going to argue that in Australia animals pose a particularly difficult problem. It is not a problem about what to do with or to them, although it does have a bearing on this, so much as how we think about them and the consequences of that thought. You might think that we don’t need to think about them because that is the job of biology, zoology, veterinary or agricultural science, depending on the animal concerned. You might think that the whole point of science is that it delivers certainty and knowledge, which of course it can, but not always, not in relation to all questions about the objects of its expertise. Science might be able to tell us about the body functions of a cat but it cannot say anything about its moral standing or value to humans. That is socially, culturally and historically variable and contingent. Science might choose a classificatory framework to distinguish animals but it cannot control how those same animals enter into our language as metaphors, or metonyms, the ways in which the animals come to represent something other than themselves. Neither can science claim any expertise in the relationships that

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humans have with animals; indeed science can say very little that is scientific about such relationships. Science may assign types of space or environment to particular animals, but this is only ever an abstract model because nature itself is not a fixed state and all manner of dynamic properties about individual animals and their interactions with others come into play. Does it need to be stated in our era that the idea of a world of animals entirely among themselves, separate from humanity, is nothing but an ecological fantasy or a biological abstraction? Finally, science may take a view about how the world should be but that is never derived purely from science itself, and indeed scientists’ views have changed a good deal in the course of their own history. So science has only a limited use for all sorts of important questions that relate to the way we must think about animals. One of the most important questions concerns the way animals come to represent things other than themselves and the way this influences how we act towards them. How we think about a cat or a koala depends in large part on what those animals represent to us, a meaning that is often independent of their biology. Those representations will then be influential in our subsequent actions towards the animal. How we then act towards an animal with a specific meaning reinforces the very meaning it represents. When the British anti-cruelty to animals campaigners of the 1820s made the point that animals are like us to the extent that they can feel pain and suffer from cruelty, they were ignored until they made the rhetorical point that by condemning cruelty to animals and encouraging acts of kindness to them cruelty among humans could be undermined and kindness and social order reinforced. In a society anxious about social disorder or even revolution, animals were thought to offer something words or politics never could. Once the social elite were persuaded that a positive human outcome could be established by changing established practice with animals, the legislation was soon passed.4 In a similar way, an animal or group of animals may come to represent, in arbitrary fashion, a particular social group, or maybe

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an entire nation. Once an animal is charged with this representational status, it means that every positive act towards it simultaneously endorses the nation or group that it represents. In this way animals become inextricably tied up with human morality and politics. Inextricably yes, but usually also clearly too, because in the world of representation it is most important for signs and symbols and meanings to be clear. Anthropologists have noticed not only the universal representational use made of animals in the affairs of humans but also the ways in which animals help clarity to be achieved. The anthropologist Levi Strauss famously said that for humanity animals are not only good to eat, they are ‘good to think with’. He meant that whenever and wherever we encounter human dealings with animals we find them bound up both with practical matters such as food and classificatory and moral matters such as where things belong, where boundaries lie, what is right and what is wrong, what we should do. Another anthropologist, Sir Edmund Leach, said that if we consider our own language of good and bad, we find there an animal-based classification that not only marks the good/bad boundary but also actually adds subtle shades, of particular types of bad and particular types of good.5 To be ‘a kitten’ is a particular type of good, evoking soft femininity, playfulness and love that is different from a bee, which evokes the goodness of duty or hard work. To be a lamb is to embody the innocent goodness of childhood, while a mother hen is the attentive good matriarch. To be a wolf, a fox, a bitch, a cow, a maggot or a minnow is to embody a range of opposing, bad characteristics even though the specific animals evoked are not much different in their character roles as mothers, babies or hard-working, loyal creatures. What happens in all cultures, it seems, is that animals allow humans to perform the feat of differentiation: to organise ourselves into different groups and to mark that difference. To maintain a sense of identity and difference we adopt an animal to signify ‘us’ but also, of course, ‘them’. But we also use animals to differentiate

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behaviour, character, morality and types of person. So animals actually perform two very useful tricks of representation for humans everywhere. They allow us to label or address others, as in ‘she is a bitch’, ‘he’s a pig’ or ‘Possum!’ in an endearing way, and to attempt to place people permanently as this or that. This can be and often is a form of social control. However, because animals also enable us to associate particular groups, types or behaviour with particular animals we can, through our attitudes and practices towards such animals, unleash potent social effects, particularly in maintaining an in-group sense of belonging and purpose for ‘us’ (which might otherwise be difficult to do) or maintaining others as outsiders, unwanted or undeserving. There are lots of examples of this type of thing. Steve Baker shows how British Conservative politicians manipulated their opposition to European Union membership through animal symbolism in advertising campaigns. It was not possible to imply on public platforms what was for British conservatives fundamentally dubious about the German or French character, but it could be very effectively implied using animals, in this case the puny and effeminate toy poodle for the French and the ruthless and unacceptably aggressive German Shepherd for the Germans. Against these the solid, loyal, fearless bulldog representing the British could then be spontaneously available for pats and cuddles by the Tory Party chairman, Norman Tebbit.6 Here the object of the exercise was not only undermining others (using animal symbols), it was simultaneously galvanising ‘us’ through our behaviour towards real animals (by being seen to be ‘nice’ to all bulldogs).

ANIMALS AS ‘US’ AND ‘THEM’ In Africa there are societies, such as the Nuer in the southern Sudan, that fear and despise their neighbours, display a great love for domesticated cattle and have a very low regard for wild animals.7 Each act of love for cattle and aggression or indifference towards wild animals subtly reinforces the social order of things in

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and around Nuerland. Domestic values and the importance of social solidarity against outsiders are clearly reinforced through behaviour with animals. Then there are other African societies such as the Lele of Zaire where the chief source of social tension arises from kinship jealousies and suspicion within households and villages, whereas their best and most harmonious relationships are with those living outside. There, domestic animals are despised and seldom valued as meat or ‘beings’, while wild animals and the forest around them are seen as the site of redemption, fertility and peace – of essential goodness, grace and beauty. When tension gets too much in the village a hunt for the much-prized wild animals is organised to restore order and balance.8 Roy Willis contrasts these Nuer and Lele extremes with the Fipa, a Bantu-speaking village-based people near the southern shore of Lake Tanganyika. Unlike the Nuer or the Lele, the Fipa villages contain representative migrants from several ethnic groups and from different parts of the nation. Their principal orientation is towards integration and harmony and they demonstrate a generalised goodwill towards strangers and newcomers. This is also reflected in the way animals are classified and treated. They extend to all categories a ‘good humoured tolerance’, even to rats, mice and insects, and animals invoke an ethic of practicality that extends equally across what we would call domestic and wild species, a boundary that is not particularly marked by them.9 It is not hard to see why animals have been enrolled into our moral, social and cultural affairs in these ways. They are all around us, even in modern cultures such as Australia, and they offer a wide choice of differentiating dimensions. Anything could do that of course, and other things do. But animals are particularly useful because of all things they are most like us, while not being us. We can most easily read similarity into animals if that is what we want to emphasise, while at the same time we can use the fundamental difference of animals if this opposite is required. Seen as a whole, the ‘animal kingdom’ can be given a narrative order that parallels human society in any given place. It is capable of very fine shading

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where that becomes necessary, as it did for the British conservatives, or it provides the blunt instrument of absolute boundaries as it did for the Nuer of the Sudan. Of course, people do not respond to their world from the vantage point of the anthropologist, looking down on matters from a great height and with the benefit of major libraries of anthropology. We are always in the middle of a culture and respond to a world around us that is already formed and already makes sense to us. Thus the response to animals in our world is never neutral, as if it were only their nature or their practical worth that was paramount. What they represent seems always to have a stronger grip on our imagination, and Australians are no different from the rest of the world, now or ever.

ANIMALS AS ‘US’ AND ‘THEM’ IN MODERN NORTH AMERICA, UK AND AUSTRALIA This gets us straight to the heart of the animal enigma in Australia because in this country, as elsewhere, animals have been particularly useful as signifiers of the human world and its values. But while we can point to fairly clear representations elsewhere, in Australia the use of animals as signifiers has become very confused, indicating both a crisis in Australian national identity and an Australian environmental politics that has become inextricably tied to this identity. These are important issues. If you have ever felt that animals are incredibly important to us, you are right. From now on just make a casual note of how often animals crop up in important national issues and political contexts. You will be surprised. How can I convince you of this thesis right from the start? Let me first set the Australian enigma in the context of other modern societies, some with colonial pasts and postcolonial presents and others without. Let me choose the modern societies of North

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America, the United States and Canada, and the United Kingdom with which to compare Australia – along very simple lines that frame what we might call ‘the animal question’. In the United States and Canada, right from the very beginnings of white settler society, the animals found there were not only familiar and similar to those from the settlers’ home shores, they were also better (more exciting versions), bigger and more numerous than those experienced in Europe. Indeed, they were part of the New Eden and Promised Land syndrome that stirred in the minds of the settlers.10 Of course, over time the settlers also imported all manner of domestic animals for food and company, and settled the new continent first and quite extensively as a farming society. Some imported animals escaped and managed to live in the wild, but it was a very tough environment. The ordinary pet cat, for example, found it very difficult both to find food and avoid being food for a formidable chain of predators above it. The horse was not native to North America but it escaped from Spanish farms in the south, was successful in some rangelands and later became an icon of Wild West mythology. These days, the mustang is a species protected under the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971 and considered native. By and large, modern American and Canadian people recognise two main types of animals on their continent, wild animals and domestic animals, and both are positively valued by them. Domestic animals include those farmed for food and those kept for company. The former are perceived as a warm endorsement of the successful partnership between man and beasts as portrayed (in children’s books, cartoons and so on) in contented farmyard scenes, and the production of huge meat surpluses is seen as one of the most important miracles and achievements of Western modernity. Second, domestic animals include companion animals such as cats and dogs. These are critical to a positive sense of family values and routinely play the role of modern humans in cartoons and stories. Ideal families have a kitten and a puppy in the same way they have a girl and a boy and doting parents.

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Native wild animals do not as a category define North Americanness because on either side of the Atlantic the animal categories are much the same, and in any case many of the animals are more or less exactly the same. For instance the North American Moose and the European Elk are genetically identical. The bison from each side have interbred; the bears and of course many of the fish in the sea and marine mammals such as otters and seals are also very similar. Some are distinctive and have been used as national icons, such as the bald eagle (though only in contrast to Europe’s imperial eagles), but mostly the wild animals of America still define America’s essential bounty. They have many types of animals in great plenty. If that was ever in doubt, Walt Disney’s wild life film documentaries made it abundantly clear. In many mutually reinforcing ways, animals in the United States and Canada have thus come to represent some essential values that are critical to their national self-image: natural bounty and fecundity, surplus food and commercial success, loving family values, the assimilation of difference. Although there is disagreement over the precise status of animals, all sides maintain that animals of all kinds are essentially good and so we can say that animals form a stable moral and political unity in the American mind. In the United States and Canada animal rights have emerged very strongly in recent years and feature prominently as a component of environmental politics. In the United Kingdom things are not so different. Although the British are essentially a hybrid mix of ethnicities and migrants, the essential mixedness goes back a very long way, certainly before recorded history, and at any one time people have generally related to the land as natives on the basis of birth as well as descent. If it was ever clear who were the indigenous people, that distinction is no longer recognised or claimed. As an island rather than a continent, the United Kingdom has both a strong and a weak sense of animals as indicative of Great Britain. First, as with the North American countries, there are few categories of animals that are distinctly British and so they have never

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distinguished or symbolised Britain per se. Britain is midway between the cold Arctic and warm Africa, and has winter- and summer-resident birds from both areas. Britain has a very strong and deeply rooted connection with its nature as expressed in literature, poetry, language and regional differences. The history of introductions of species is interesting in that the human settlement of the island after the last ice age is also a history of animal introductions, since there was far less animal diversity at the time the seas rose and cut it off as an island as compared to mainland Europe. Settler hunter-gatherers and herders and invading people such as the Romans brought new animals, including some deer, the rabbit and edible dormice, and since then there have been a trickle of others. By the time of the first scientific classifications in the eighteenth century most animals were considered British wild animals simply on the basis of their wildness rather than their origins. There is nothing more British than a pheasant shoot, perhaps, yet the pheasant is a fairly recently introduced bird. Since the time that Britain became a major trading, colonial and imperial power, animals from all around the world were collected and kept in menageries and zoos. From these some escaped, of course, but few established viable breeding populations. The great exception is the grey squirrel, which has not only naturalised itself but has also displaced the native red squirrel from deciduous woodland in the south. More recently red-necked wallabies from Australia have naturalised themselves in Derbyshire, while Canada geese, muntjac and silka deer, mink and ring-necked parakeets have spread into many areas and there is even the suspicion of big cats at large on some moorlands. There has always been some animus directed at the grey squirrel by naturalists, but among ordinary Britains the grey squirrel is enjoyed both as a woodland creature and as a park and suburban fellow traveller. And the other exotic introductions meet with almost joyful incredulity. Britain has not seen significant numbers of formerly domestic animals establish themselves as wild creatures – one of the things that marks it as very different from Australia.

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There are some cats and a few dogs but generally speaking these tend to live independently as an urban rather than a wild phenomenon and so they have not crossed any symbolic spatial boundary. If anything, something of an opposite movement has been observed: the urbanisation of wild animals. The most spectacular recent city immigrant is the fox and to a lesser extent the badger. Both find rural life tougher than in the past and have discovered a suburban Britain that is only too happy to let them take up residence under sheds and to fill their bowls with food. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of garden shelters offered to wildlife in the city, ranging from bat and owl roosts to hedgehog and insect houses and bird-nesting boxes of all descriptions. Attitudes to domestic species are more or less identical to those of North America although campaigns opposed to factory farming have been more popular and vociferous. So generally speaking, Britain is enthusiastic about animals per se and there is little distinction in terms of worth and importance made between the various categories. Over a million members pay the £40 per year subscriptions for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and powerful memberships lie behind its many welfare and animal rights organisations. On the whole animals have come to represent the collective body of the British people in the sense that to be concerned about animals, especially their welfare, is very much a defining feature of the good citizen. This is extended to wild, introduced and domestic animals equally, in much the same way that British society of all ranks is spread rather evenly across rural, suburban and city locations. In Australia, by comparison, animals do not represent homogeneity but a rather puzzling and unstable heterogeneity within which there are clear indications of boundaries, border disputes and even policies and practices of species-cleansing. Animals rendered the idea of Australia ambiguous even before settlement when a completely new, unclassifiable and morphologically abominable fauna was seen for the first time by Europeans. Settler society was unsettled by nature generally, but especially by the fauna, and set about not only the introduction of domestic

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farm and household species in the familiar colonial manner but also of wild animals that were more aesthetically pleasing, for example familiar singing birds and those more conducive to established dealings with wild animals, especially through hunting and fishing. So there were now two categories of wild animal, one positively valued and preserved, the other despised and the subject of ruinous levels of colonial exploitation for cheap meat, fur and feathers. Professional shooters worked their way through country shooting out the wildlife much as the forests were clear-felled.11 At around the time Federation and independence from Britain became a political reality, and as an Australian national culture began to coalesce, the two wild categories underwent a fundamental and spectacular turnaround.12 The new nation required a clear and unambiguously different representation to distinguish it from Britain and all other nations. Since the introduced wild animals were symbols of a former colonial status they were passed over in favour of the native wild animals, which because of their plight could be ‘saved’, restored, conserved and privileged. Spectacularly, under the growing influence of independence from Britain and Federation, together with the rise of Australian national culture, the relative values placed on the two wild categories were reversed. Henceforth nativeness was to be associated positively with the emergent nation and privileged over the introduced species, who could now be associated with their rejected colonial status. More than that, the acclimatised ‘foreigner’ animals could be cast as endangering true Australian wildlife. In the same stroke, native animals seemed to demand policies of protection while the introduced animals seemed to deserve eradication. Those making such demands were precisely those members of the new Australian ‘high culture’ (artists, writers, academics, scientists), a group typically involved in nation formation everywhere. As symbols of the new Australia they settled on the rather uneasy alliance of sheep and cattle (who provided the economic base for a vibrant country) and native animals (the adoption of which legitimated and naturalised their presence).

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However, the faunal categories of Australia could not be held in a stable manner. As farming penetrated deep into the interior, cats and dogs were brought into most areas and many of those were abandoned or escaped to form viable populations. To these were added other domestic animals such as goats and pigs and soon across wide areas there was a category of animals I will call wilddomestic (anomalous animals that are neither domestic nor wild but both simultaneously). Wild-domestic animals proliferated and adapted successfully to new and difficult local Australian conditions. Horses, donkeys, camels and buffaloes were added to this group as a result of abandoned expeditions and the changing technologies of the outback. It is an irony that they were set free after they had served their time, because these sentimental acts mirror the practice of freeing convicts in order to develop the country. Rather than finding their place in the new Australia, however, they were to be declared outlaws – another anomalous category. Confusingly, Australia produced two categories of animal that were embraced (native-wild and domestic-domestic) and two ambiguous categories that were former favourites (wild-domestic and introduced wild (such as rabbits, foxes and trout). The ambiguity of the latter groups was not resolved positively through either naturalisation (the way of the American mustang) or exoticism (the way of the grey squirrel or parakeet in the UK). As we will see in chapter 6, they were condemned, in various ways, to category annihilation or to individual campaigns of species-cleansing. In a country where more or less permanent migration always threatened to undermine the established though new and fragile sense of nationhood and character and where a strong fear of outsiders developed, aggressive assimilation policies were implemented from 1919 to 1966 that attempted to undermine ethnic differences including Aboriginality, the only ethnicity that might challenge the precariously naturalised former colony. If we can see in the White Australia policies an attempt to assimilate and distil a national purity out of heterogeneity, then by the turn of the twentieth century the illegal immigrant fears produced a generalised

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sense of boundary anxiety and maintenance, a nation prone to infiltration, and natives threatened by outsiders.

THE ENIGMATIC POLITICS OF ANIMALS IN AUSTRALIA It is in this context that animals as categories of outsider come to take on representational meaning, though of course it is not always explicit: it is not so much directed at the specific as at the generalised or potential outsider. In this sense the species-cleansing of outsider categories of animal based on the logic and demands of ecology reinforces the solidarity of human nationalism. Nationalism has always thrived on the rhetorical advantages of ecology. Ecology not only deals with communities that are tied to specific territories but gives them an unswerving sense of order ordained by nature itself. As Ghassan Hage puts it, ‘the ecological fantasy is part of the nationalist fantasy and vice versa’.13 This is why nationalist movements always stress their belonging to the soil, their natural connection to a motherland, their primordial origins and folk histories, even where none of these really existed. In the same way that ecology matches the right organisms to a given ecosystem, nationalism matches the right people to the right territory. A postcolonial society such as Australia cannot make the claim to descend from the Australian land, for this spot was already taken, but it could embody the role of custodian of the land. To be seen to be ruthlessly upholding the naturally given place of native animals against the encroachment of animals that were out of place, ecologically speaking, was an activity that reinforced Australian national legitimacy and values. Each new campaign or policy announcement that promoted native animals or sought the eradication of introduced animals simultaneously reinforced national values – more subtle than the British Conservatives’ advertising campaign against Europe but incredibly robust and effective in forefronting Australianness as a master narrative or dominant value.

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Nick Smith argues that this ploy can be discerned in a media episode in 1996. In October the West Australian Liberal Member of Parliament, Richard Evans, called for the complete eradication of feral cats by 2020 and the introduction of native animals as pets. The story ran alongside and briefly superseded the lather of media attention given to Senator Pauline Hanson and her maiden speech, which emphasised her fears of Asians overrunning Australia. As Smith notes, ‘the media were not blind to the metaphorical parallels between Evans’ remarks and Hansen’s anti-immigration and (Anglo-Celtic) nationalist diatribe. Both of these members of federal parliament advocate curiously analogous statements.’ Hansen’s rally to limit Asian immigration and her criticisms of multiculturalism have resonance with Evans’ call for the extermination of feral invaders. Both proposals advocate the notion of a ‘closed’ Australia, a land where ‘others’ are no longer welcome.14 More recently, the significance of Trish Worth’s so-called slip of the tongue, when she appeared to be equating asylum-seekers with cats and dogs as a potential threat to Australia, was palpable. According to Seven Network News of 31 August 2004, ‘the leaders of the Australian Greens and Australian Democrats have criticised Liberal MP Trish Worth for linking checks on asylum seekers to quarantine rules for pets’ (my emphasis). Significantly, Democrat leader Andrew Bartlett was able to link this episode to the Tampa affair that tilted public opinion in favour of the Liberal’s tough stance on asylum-seekers at the 2001 federal election. He ‘hoped this election campaign [in 2004] would not be marred by defamatory comments about refugees like those involved in the children overboard affair’, saying ‘The whole suggestion that refugees are any sort of threat whether it’s a security threat, whether it’s a quarantine threat, a health threat is just a disgrace’.15 Smith’s evidence for the ubiquity of a ‘closed Australia’ rhetoric expressed through ‘unwelcome animals’ is compelling: from media and political stunts, to election campaigns promising major budgets to fight feral fauna, to the poets enlisted in the Constitutional Convention. Janet Holmes à Court’s speech placed anti-cat emotion alongside the most sentimental of national attachments: ‘We need

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the smell of eucalyptus in this and the feel of red dust. We need to have the feel of swimming in the sea and all those things that make us feel so passionate about this country and love it so much – eating beef and no feral cats.’16 According to Smith, we can only understand the downgraded position of the cat by ‘focussing on their symbolic status in econationalist discourses. Australian eco-nationalism is a specific blend of environmentalist and patriotic sentiments which, in an exaggerated way, positions the feral cat as a rapacious European invader predating on native wild life’.17 More specifically, the cat has fallen victim to our anxieties and insecurities as migrants: Current measures to eradicate feral species are also attempts to homogenise Australian nature. The cohesiveness of this ‘natural’ homogeneity is set against the cultural homogeneity of Australian society. If the distinctiveness of the settler Australian identity stems from the uniqueness of Australian biota, then feral cats threaten not just indigenous nature, but the settler identity. Indeed it has been suggested that the Australian landscape and the national psyche are ‘awash in a sea of otherness’.18 Cats are loaded with conjunctive and disjunctive elements of both denial and recognition of the (human) colonist’s status as feral, but this displacement manifests itself as an anxious sense of belonging. Feral cats embody an identity allegedly founded upon alienation, geographical dislocation and the masculinized conquest … of Australian nature.19

In other words, the animal enigmas to which I will refer are not merely the product of idiosyncratic and contested cultural preferences, relating to questions of tradition and taste. The threads that lead to the animal enigmas are spun from the very making of the Australian nation itself, a process that has its origins in the colonial past and an open-ended postcolonial future. To all intents and purposes, eco-nationalism would seem to be a winning way for Australian nationalists to think about their animals and at the same time reinforce their sense of nationhood, rather as other nations and cultures do. But this is very far from the case, precisely because the lines that separate the favoured animals from the out-of-favour ones are blurred and confused. Cats appear as both favoured domestic animals (as pets) and as vilified other (in

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the wild). Moreover, eradication policies that applied only to feral cats were accompanied by more aggressive policies directed at pet cats in the same package. The same is true for most of the domesticated animals. This breeds confusion and disagreement, especially since it is impossible to distinguish fully between the two. A pet cat that hunts animals by night is no better or worse than a feral cat that hunts by day. Similarly, when the keeping of pet domestic animals is seen as a feeding mechanism for feral populations, the domestic cat and domestic pet-keeping practices also come under suspicion and attack. Increasingly, demands are made for eradication schemes, the banning of cat-keeping and cat-free (and dogfree) housing developments.20 This not only blurs the boundaries but also creates a biopolitical tension across communities, municipalities, regions and the nation. However, it is not only the pet-keeping categories of domestic animals that become confusing but the favoured farmed species also. Once applied, the ecological logic cannot be confined to just one category of introduced animals. Soon the main species, cattle and sheep, come into the frame, and not as a minor afterthought but as the sudden realisation that they are the principal source of damage to the environment generally but in particular the cause of native animal decline. There is now considerable debate as to whether the feral cat has been the scapegoat for an eco-crime committed mainly by less easily controlled graziers and livestock farmers.21 With pets and farm animals marginalised or in doubt in terms of their Australianness, the entire category of animals has become potentially confused. But there is room for yet more confusion. Some introduced species begin to make strong claims for nativeness (or is it citizenship?).

CREATURES OF ENIGMA A door was always left open for a naturalised introduced species ever since the dingo was discovered to have originated from Asia. Despite its devastating effect on native animals (extinctions espe-

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cially), the dingo seems to have served sufficient time to be counted as a native, but the precise criteria for nativeness remain vague and confusing. Whether this is because it was here before 1788 and/or that it was widely established as an Aboriginal totemic ancestor is not at all clear. It is not clear that the criteria are clear, though of course whatever they are will be arbitrary and based on something other than science. Smith argues that the dingo is also caught up in the symbolic politics of belonging: ‘dingo narratives, on the other hand, affirm the notion that colonists can be indigenised … being a relatively recently naturalised Australian gives the dingo its distinctive symbolic potency – it remains open to identification by all colonisers. With this as a precedent any further additions to this status becomes entirely possible.’22 The brown trout and the brumby or wild horse seem likely to follow in the steps (or wake) of the dingo. The brown trout is a ruthless predator that has done untold damage to the underwater fauna of many southern rivers and lakes, but its links to the Australian social elite and its representation of Australian wilderness areas as clean and pristine and its popularity with recreational fishers means that it is ecologically untouchable. When the vilified carp was discovered in Lake Sorrell, Tasmania, no amount of money was too much in order to get rid of it, but the trout went unscathed during this episode; indeed at least one reason for getting rid of the carp was to protect the trout.23 The brumby story illustrates what happens when an animal already widely considered to be deservedly part of the landscape becomes the object of species-cleansing. When NSW Parks and Wildlife were discovered carelessly shooting mares and foals from a helicopter in Guy Fawkes River National Park in 2001, all hell broke out in Australia’s media. The full story will be told in a later chapter but the point to be made here is that ordinary Australians made the case for naturalisation on the basis that the brumby is inscribed on Australian popular memory, culture and history, and that it was party and partner to humans at critical events and eras in the unfolding of the Australian nation. Such was the furore that

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the adamant, ecologically purist National Parks and Wildlife Service were not only forced to stop all such activities, but made to instate the brumby as a protected species within the park. Having examined and documented claims made in relation to the heritage value of horses in the GFRNP, the Working Party concludes that these horses: • are important in the cultural history of the Guy Fawkes area; • have a special association with a group of persons of importance in the cultural history of the Guy Fawkes area, namely the Light Horse regiments; • have a strong association with some sections of communities in the Guy Fawkes area; • are important in demonstrating the principal characteristics of an item of significant national cultural heritage, namely the brumby. For these reasons, the Working Party concludes that the GFRNP horses have significant local heritage value, sufficient to warrant their being managed on this basis.24 Nothing could be clearer about the relative significance of nation over ecology than these recommendations. The clear historical value of the brumby in relation to national military associations makes it immune to the charges of ecological incompatibility. Although the population is to be ‘managed’, even the methods of population control are now softened and socialised: surplus individuals are now made available for adoption, and the program is a success. Adoption is a form of cultural assimilation, a metaphor for political naturalisation. The acid test to demonstrate the truth of the enigmatic character of animal representation and treatment in Australia would be if the most vilified of all introduced animals, the feral cat, could make a similar claim. And indeed, it can, in the most powerful manner. Recent research shows that the cat is considered by Aboriginal people across much of central Australia, where they are also the major landowners, to be a native animal, predating the

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arrival of European settlers and in some districts possessing its own pussycat Dreaming.25 The Aboriginal Land Councils, ecocentric National Parks and Wildlife Services and the Wilderness Society face a difficult if not impossible question to resolve here, but as you will see, this is not the only problem. The problem is distributed into the position of animals throughout Australia, into what they mean, what we should do and how we should do it.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK This book is about how the enigma grew from the earliest days of the colonies, how it became configured in particular ways through the development of Australian nationhood and its later and recent manifestations as eco-nationalism and biopolitics (new political spaces and contests opened up around biological issues). This is the history of an emerging discourse on animals that dominated and still dominates their representation and their management and control. Of course this is also a history of Australia as reflected through its own totemic representations and ecological fantasies. But this book is also about, and needs to be about, the people of Australia and their dealing with animals in the context of their own lives and in their localities and environments. This is where a lot of work with animals takes place and where rather different stories emerge. We will see that part of the enigma has to do with the contradictions between official discourse and policy and the reality of people’s attitudes and practices. However, I will also argue that the enigma can only be resolved through an open-minded look at the ways in which animals have been inscribed and have inscribed themselves on the Australian people and how they relate to each other. The animals have not placed a symbolic filter across their interface with each other; they tend to get on with it and see what happens, and much has happened that makes them inextricably intertwined and interdependent, regardless of ‘category’. Resolution cannot happen if we impose an abstract ideal from the pages of an ecology textbook but

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only if we look at the real anthropology of human–animal relations in Australia and see what actual ecology is possible. This potential ecology differs from the nativist ideal ecology of the eco-nationalists by taking into account and taking seriously the embedded and culturally significant relationships that humans have with animals and what Tim Low has called the ‘New Nature’. Like the human cultural world of Australia, the New Nature is characterised by hybrids and transformations, movements and disturbance – much of it irreversible and none of it completed. It is and will be in a state of becoming something new, but there is sufficient reason to be confident that there is enough human goodwill and interest in this becoming for it not to be something we come to regret. That sufficient reason comes from data I obtained from the first ever national survey of human–animal relations in Australia and the impression I made in focus groups with the many types of people whose lives include animals. Chapter 2 explores those extraordinary days when Australia was first seen and ‘thought’ by European visitors and settlers. It is important to understand just how profound these first impressions were going to be for the environmental history of the Australian continent. The third chapter complements the first but considers an enigma of similar proportions: how settlers and anthropologists tried to understand the relationship that Aboriginal people had with animals, a relation commonly referred to as totemism. There is more than a hint of irony in the way Western incomprehension of Aboriginal totemism was accompanied by a parallel totemic cult of their own. This was expressed very well in the British and colonial Australian obsession with acclimatising the animals through which their own social identity was clearly expressed. This is the subject of chapter 4. The simultaneous arrival of nationalism and the totemic uptake of native animals form the subjects of the next two chapters. They document the criss-crossing work of Australian cultural and scientific elites in the formation of what can only be described as a

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mutually reinforcing symmetry between nationalism and ecology, a social movement that I call eco-nationalism. This giddy and exciting period of purification and boundary maintenance leads not to clarity and resolution but a deepening sense of doubt and contradiction felt by anthropologists and biologists alike. The final two chapters visit contemporary Aboriginal people and their views on the hybrid animal ecologies around them today. And here we encounter and take very seriously their concept of country as an alternative environmentalism; it is one in which people are integrated with the land, not seen as a problem to it, and one where pragmatic and realistic expectations are made of it, and where the animals are taken on their merits – on what they do and not purely on what they represent. Then, finally, I consider my results from the national survey of human–animal relations. Here we find what ordinary Australians think, feel and do with the complex categories of animals in their country. I will reveal how closely their lives are surrounded by animals and how much they mean to them and how this meaning has changed in relation to changes in society and culture generally – but also in relation to their own ecology. I will show how the views of ordinary Australians vary according to their social and cultural characteristics – whose views are consistent with econationalism and whose views are not. I will argue that ordinary Australians’ views on animals seem to be more consistent with Aboriginal attitudes than with their own experts and environmental leadership. And also that their views are more consistent with Tim Low’s plea that a New Nature be embraced and adopted. I conclude that this emerging New Nature and what seems to be a growing popular pragmatism in relation to the animal question promises a way out of the great Australian enigma and perhaps a synchronicity and common purpose, for the first time in our puzzling ecology.

Chapter 2

F R E A K S O F N AT U R E ?

They found no gold or spices, only sand, flies, naked savages and a few weird animals.1 ‘I arrived in the country, and found myself surrounded by objects as strange as if I had been transported to another planet.’ JOHN GOULD, The Birds of Australia, 1863 A disbeliever in everything beyond his own reason might exclaim, ‘surely two distinct creators must have been at work’. CHARLES DARWIN, 1836 This was my second lesson in colonial art: you discover your subject at the same time as you discover your audience, but it is an added disappointment.2

At all stages of Australian history the animals of Australia have found themselves at the centre of biological, moral and political puzzles. For its new colonial cultures, animals were perhaps the best metaphors for the strangeness and upsidedownness of Australia. Australian animals that existed outside European taxonomic conventions seemed conveniently to mirror the ‘reject’, ‘deviant’ and ‘undeserving’ status of the convict colony, and such thoughts encouraged the notion of Australia as a failed experiment of the great Creator, or even a poorly realised afterthought.

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Port Jackson [later Sydney] … was upside down at the bottom of the world, but the colony represented an inversion of the accepted order of things for a number of other reasons. Members of the First Fleet seem to have been unprepared for the changed seasons, but a creature like the black swan – both the same as and yet opposite to the northern white swan – would have conformed quite nicely to some of the early theories about what a world upside down might furnish. Similarly, it was assumed that the dark-skinned indigenous peoples must also hold values opposite to the ‘civilised’ values of pale Europeans. Creatures like the kangaroo and platypus, however, were much more disturbing, hinting at a perverted rather than inverted form of nature. Interestingly, John Hunter’s attribution of the supposed freaks of nature to a ‘promiscuous intercourse’ between species served to infect the country with the moral contagion represented by a cargo of convicts.3

It is hard to imagine today quite what Australia was like for those sailing in from Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We have some of their records and diaries to go on, and these give us clues, but often these are written without the emotions that no doubt accompanied them. All of them, whether naval men or scientists, were of an age that required a stern objectivity for reportwriting – no less, no more. So we can be sure in most cases that what they wrote was pretty well what they saw, though not always precisely what they felt. We might have some difficulty in assigning the meaning of some of their more florid and archaic expressions, in deciphering degrees of distaste, disgust, fear or loathing; but the innermost thoughts, fears, expectations and dreads of those who went beyond the known world are never particularly clear. By the time Europeans began to land on bits of Australia, however, we know that most of them were already experienced travellers and well used to a range of difference that most of their contemporaries back in Europe would not experience for themselves for a long time, and even then not at first hand. Although these mariners and scientific men were used to this extreme range of difference in natural and human phenomena, and indeed made their living in the laborious mapping, collecting, describing, classification and importation of its various artefacts and materials, until they

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reached Australia the classificatory devises at their disposal, such as the idea of the Great Chain of Being or the Linnaean (or other) taxonomy, had enabled them to place everything they saw, no matter how different, into a recognisable, familiar family of things. So the tiger might be scarily different from the wildcat of Europe or the American Mountain lion, but even its monstrous figure and dazzling colour could not disguise its belonging to the cat family. Even the most exotic, fragrant and outlandish tree orchids in the tropics evoked, immediately, the more mundane specimens from the bogs of Ireland and meadows of southern England. There was of course a class of anomalous creatures: monsters, mythic animals and those fabled ones reported from other cultures that existed only in the minds and imaginations of those who travelled beyond the known universe. Most of these, like the Loch Ness Monster, enjoyed a life of their own as a homeland monster without ever being officially seen or recorded. Others were those found and examined from abroad but deemed to be hybrid crosses, still unnatural and monstrous, as with the African wapiti, held to be a combination of ‘the stag, the horse, the ox and the dromedary’.4 Hybrids were thought to be aberrations and possibly dangerous but they were as nothing compared to the dangerous class of monsters, true anomalies set against nature and humanity, that had been found before and might be found again on some distant and unexplored shore. Only a decade before the platypus arrived in London, ‘a broadside had featured a large illustration of ‘a Harpy … an amphibious monster now Alive in Spain’, with the ‘face of a man … two horns like those of a bull, Asses ears … and a main [sic] like to a Lions … Breasts like a woman … Wings like a bat … horny claws … two tails, one like a serpents, the other terminates like a Dart’.5 This gives one a clear understanding of the sorts of fears and imaginings that are born in times of great exploration and discovery. Similar imaginings accompanied the more recent heroic ages of science, when genetic breeding, nuclear fission, chemical mutations and cyborgs contributed to a sense of endless mutability and infinite variation and an associated endemic risk.

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The harpy featured on the London broadside was an early media scare but it was modelled on enough reality to be deliciously plausible. The harpy is the most famous of the so-called ‘Manimals’, a human–animal hybrid creature and a product of the ancient Greek imagination, invoking their worst fears and suspicions of ‘uncivilised female nature – wanton and unkempt … evil, rapacious, foul smelling and stricken with unmentionable personal habits’. For shore-dwellers of ancient civilisations they were ‘a menace to food stores, public health and lone travellers, particularly children’.6 Despite belonging to the traditions of ancient Greek mythology, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European mind had something of a grey area where Greek mythology and Greek history were confused, and the harpy enjoyed a vivid life in this twilight. It is perhaps because of such creatures existing in their minds that some of the new finds from the New World evoked the disgust and abomination reserved for anything deemed to be a true anomaly. Some creatures found and transported back to Europe filled many with total disgust, even those among the otherwise broad-minded zoological fraternity. The sloth, for example, clearly gave great offence to the celebrated French naturalist Buffon. Erring from the strictest of objective language, he said of the sloth: No incisor or canine teeth, small and covered eyes, a thick and heavy jaw, flattened hair that looks like dried grass … legs too short, badly terminated … no separately moveable digits but two or three excessively long nails … Slowness, stupidity, neglect of its own body, and even a habitual sadness, result from this bizarre and neglected conformation … These sloths are the lowest form of existence in the order of animals with flesh and blood; one more defect and they could not have existed.7

Here was a harpy-like creature, benign perhaps, but still, unkempt, defective, bizarre and neglected (note the moral overtones of those adjectives), and who knows what else might be out there. So at the time of those first sightings and landings in Australia there was undoubtedly an air of apprehension. It was to be hoped that Australian nature fitted into the European taxonomy, providing yet more extensions that might be useful to trade and industry, to the

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known and acceptable classes of nature. At the same time, always present perhaps, was the prospect and possibility of uncovering monsters, abominations and aberrations. Although Europeans were by then almost masters of the sea, their combined experience had put together a dark side to maritime nature comprising mermaids, monster whales, giant squid and octopus, sea monsters such as the Kraken and freak giant waves. Ordinary sailors, convicts sent to convict settlements and free settlers in the colonies had to run the gauntlet of such fears during their voyages, but more significantly there was time to be enrolled into the mythologies and anxieties of this vile other, opposite nature. In other words, their experiences in the first weeks, months and even decades of life in Australia was mediated by an underlying fear and disquiet. This was not helped in the slightest by reports and scientific expeditions that established beyond doubt that Australia did not conform to the natural world as known to Europeans. Before the first settlements, kangaroos, wallabies and other animals had been brought back and shown to a public always keen to view anomalies, freaks and exotica.8 It was one thing to enjoy the frisson of danger during a momentary gaze, quite another to build one’s home and future with them as one’s only company. We will explore those years of insecurity, fear and disquiet in Chapter 3. But before we do, it is important to understand how Europeans and those living in Australia reacted to these anomalous animals, how the scandal of their discovery created one of the most significant scientific enigmas the world has yet seen, and how important the solution to that enigma was in understanding both the natural world, creation and evolution.

FIRST REPORTS, FIRST SIGHTINGS The disappointing truth about Australia was that once the legend of the Southern Continent had been disproved and the facts of New Holland were known, there was not much reason to go there.9

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Richard White tells us that rumours of a great south land south of Java were elaborated by the Greek, Arab, Chinese and Indian civilisations and some of these tales were of untold riches, palaces, miraculous birds of prey, and kingdoms of women or dwarfs. These came down to European maritime culture, but by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when Europeans first attempted to sail there, their minds were more modestly set on the three principal concerns of the age: to tap into the lucrative spice and related trades, to convert heathens to the true religion, and to add to scientific knowledge. Of these only the last ultimately proved consequential.10 The Spanish set off on two occasions, in 1567 and 1605, to claim the land for Spain and Catholicism, but both expeditions turned back. Portuguese mariners may have been more persistent and sailed down the east coast but if they did they were not impressed enough to return for more. The Dutch were the first to make systematic explorations on the north and west and in Tasmania, and they certainly made some estimation of its worth, but they too saw nothing there to be able to persuade Dutch adventure capital to take matters further. Australia was to take an uncontested Anglo turn not because the British were more tenacious, misguided or lucky enough to find the more fertile east coast first but because of timing and their position as maritime and scientific leaders. The circumstances by which the English came to take more than a passing interest in Australia were ‘due … to a revolution that was taking place in European attitudes to and curiosity about man, nature and science’.11 As White clearly demonstrates, the impact of this revolution can be seen in the rather clear difference between the English voyages to Australia by William Dampier in 1688 and 1699 and by Captain Cook at the end of the eighteenth century. Dampier’s report ‘was full of complaints’, rather like the Dutch, even if his descriptions of fauna, flora and Aborigines were more detailed. He clearly did not like what he saw: the land was poor, fresh water was not plentiful, the trees were stunted and fruitless,

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edible wild animals seemed scarce, the place was fly-infested. Dampier was hoping to find signs in the local people of Australia that they might produce something worthwhile and had a willingness to discover some mutually advantageous trading terms with the visitors. But he was disappointed: The inhabitants of this country are the miserablest People in the world. The Hodmadods of Monomatapa, though a nasty People, yet for Wealth are Gentlemen to these; who have no Houses and Skin Garments, Sheep, Poultry, and Fruits of the Earth, Ostrich Eggs etc as the Hodmadods have: and setting aside their humane shape, they differ but little from Brutes.

In his second visit there are echoes in his description of Aboriginal people of Buffon’s strong and offensive language used for sloths: they had a ‘natural deformity’ and the ‘most unpleasant looks and the worst features of any People that I ever saw, tho’ I have seen great variety of Savages’.12 White says we should understand Dampier’s ungenerous comments in the context of his disappointment at not finding the means with which to convert his magnificent sailing effort into the tangible gains of wealth, future backing and the extension of trade. That there was nothing doing in these terms was grounds enough for his use of the language of barrenness, poverty, nakedness and misery. Dampier was a contemporary of Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, and his reports have to be taken in the light of prevailing norms and values. To men of his age, wealth and technology were the marks of civilisation. They were supremely materialist and it is no wonder they were confused and disappointed when running into those famously religious people who cared not a jot for material things. But White notes a crucial difference between Dampier’s reporting and that of his Dutch predecessors: while theirs was directed absolutely by a hard-nosed search for material gain, Dampier was clearly aware of the entertainment, media and scientific value of the information he could produce. His reports were longer, more detailed and precise and more decorative than the Dutchmen’s. So

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much so that his journal was a major success in itself, not a disappointing epitaph for a failed venture. By the time Dampier was writing, the succession of new information, data, discoveries and explorations was being organised more systematically in Britain through the Royal Society of London – of which Titans of the age such as Isaac Newton became president. ‘Thus they were interested in voyages of discovery for the sake of science, not for the sake of profit.’13 The Royal Society explicitly set out guidelines for explorers so that with each one there might be scientific as well as commercial gain. Far from coming back empty-handed, from now on there was a ready market, audience and celebrity status awaiting returning explorers.

FOR SCIENCE’S SAKE Since the First Fleet Officers did not expect to stay, their diaries emphasized the exotic, the unique: animals, plants and aborigines.14 I stood up … and urged the unfairness of judging animals any more than men, only by those of our own country. FANNY BURNSEY, March 1774

Although we shall follow White’s advice and contrast Dampier with Captain Cook, we should note from these quotations how far this new ethic of popular scientific objectivity, collecting and description – the production of new knowledge – penetrated down through all levels of polite society from humble military officers to amateur naturalists. This was a popular scientific age and the fashion and approval of natural history as a pastime extended from new school curricula to the daughters of the wealthy, to clergy of both conformist and non-conformist types. Clearly the task at hand was enormous and scientific frontiers were being rigorously extended in all directions from the nearest seashore to the farthest oceans and islands. It became a romantic age of collecting, and the thirst and desire for new things became

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something of a precursor for later demand for new commodities, of what today we call consumerism.15 Captain Cook’s global voyages have to be understood in the context of this remarkable age, and indeed his first voyage was specifically to make astronomical measurements on Tahiti so that the distance between the sun and the earth could be calculated. A secondary and secret purpose was to explore the rather vague reality of an Australian continent. How different this voyage was from Dampier’s. The Royal Society was the chief sponsor and benefactor and they made quite sure that the voyage maximised its scientific value. Not only were the latest navigational and astronomical instruments furnished but also great care was taken in instructing and equipping the scientific crew for collecting and preserving all natural materials that came their way. Plants, animals and people were the chief objects of the second, furtive part of the voyage. The division of labour on board Cook’s ships was very different from Dampier’s, with much greater emphasis given to scientific staff. In addition to the astronomers there were two naturalists, including Joseph Banks, two professional artists and a scientific assistant. An excited naturalist wrote to Linnaeus, the mastermind of the European classificatory system for the world, that they had a ‘fine library’, ‘all sorts of machines for catching and preserving insects; all kinds of nets, trawls, drags and hooks … many case of bottles with ground stoppers, of several sizes, to preserve animals in spirits’.16 The spectacular price of £10 000 to purchase this equipment was nothing compared with the spectacular results of its three years’ labour: ‘1000 new species of plants, 500 fish, 500 skins of animals and birds, innumerable insects, rocks and native artefacts and the vocabularies of unheard of languages.’17 According to Richard White, this voyage altered the image of Australia. Although the east coast was not as barren as the west coast, and could support a range of farming enterprises, there was nothing already there in terms of new products for colonial exploitation to entice settlement. The breathless excitement of riches experienced elsewhere was not to be found in Captain

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Cook’s reports. But so much systematic attention had been given to the plants and animals that Cook and Banks could say without any doubt that Australia was hugely important in terms of its absolute difference from the rest of the world. It was a singular place, and a lot followed from that. For one thing, how could such a block of creation be set aside on a single distant continent, so far from those who recognised God and who firmly believed animals and plants were put on earth for their benefit? In his Zoonomia: Or, the Laws of Organic Life, Erasmus Darwin used the new Australian discoveries to underpin his promiscuous intercourse theorem: Such a promiscuous intercourse of animals is said to exist at this day in New South Wales by Captain Hunter. And that not only amongst the quadrupeds and birds of different kinds, but even amongst the fish, and, as he believes, amongst the vegetables. He speaks of an animal between the opossum and the kangaroo, from the size of a sheep to that of a rat. Many fish seemed to partake of the shark; some with a skait’s head and shoulders, and the hind part of a shark; others with a shark’s head and the body of a mullet; and some with a shark’s head and the flat body of a sting-ray. Many birds partake of the parrot; some have the head, neck, and bill of a parrot, with long straight feet and legs; others with legs and feet of a parrot with head and neck of a sea-gull.18

Sir James Edward Smith, the great follower of the Linnaean classificatory system, was unable to explain why Australian animals and plants, but particularly the animals, departed from the world’s nature in such a radical manner. It was almost as if it were a new world: ‘Whole tribes of plants prove … total strangers … not only all the species that present themselves but the genera, and even the natural orders.’ By being so spectacularly unlinkable to the global classification of nature, Australian animals and plants were by definition freakish and bizarre, and the southern continent a ‘land of oddities’. Being predominantly nocturnal, many of the animals were heard long before they were ever seen, and the freakish nature of the general run of creatures licensed the imagination to create monsters. In this way a little black and white dog-like creature that might be mistaken for a mongrel around the back streets of any

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English neighbourhood came to be given the name Devil after its rather lusty snarling when several of its number homed in on a kill. It was not just the singularity of difference but the extreme difference to the point of being opposite that proved to be the most vexatious if not disturbing. So, for example, Banks found a fish that ‘did not particularly seem to prefer water to land’; many of the marsupials had four limbs but preferred to hop on two; foxes were found which had horns and flew; the great kangaroo that might well have kept its admired greyhound-like similarity disturbed European sensibilities when the pouch and its Joey rider were first found, and of course the Australian swan was black, not white. It was almost as if someone was having a bit of a joke with those who dared to sail so far, and while many remained seriously enquiring and objective, there were others who could not really take it all seriously. The much quoted Reverend Sydney Smith wrote as late as 1817 that ‘in this remote part of the earth Nature (having made horses, oxen, ducks, geese, oaks, elms and all regular productions for the rest of the world) seems determined to have a bit of play, and to amuse herself as she pleases’.19 And, incredible as it may seem, even those animals like the koala that today produce upwellings of cute sentimentality did nothing of the sort back in 1811 when George Perry wrote his Arcana. Echoing the disdain Buffon reserved for the sloth, Perry wrote: ‘As Nature provides nothing in vain we may suppose that even these torpid, senseless creatures are wisely intended to fill up one of the great links of the chain of animated nature.’20 As someone who has seen platypuses in the wild on literally hundreds of occasions while trout fishing in Tasmania, I have to dispute George Bennett’s reaction to seeing the platypus as true or honest when he wrote that it ‘conveys to the spectator an idea of something supernatural, and its uncouth form produces terror in the minds of the timid: even the canine race … stare at them with erect ears, and the feline race avoids them.’21 More seriously, Australia could be seen as a place where natural laws had been inverted or, worse, reversed, giving rise to anxieties

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that it was a place that might undo whites, as it surely undid the forebears of the Aborigines. We have to remember that these people did not have the benefit of Charles Darwin’s breakthrough in which all species could be understood in evolutionary terms, as infinitely plastic in their variation. These were still the days when the creationist view of nature dominated and the theoretical concept that had the greatest bearing on the Australian animal enigma was the Great Chain of Being. The Great Chain of Being held that the universe was laid out in a single hierarchy, fixed on Creation, with the highest forms of life at the apex (with God, angels and humans at the top) and the very lowest forms at the base. Observers had noticed a great continuum in the hierarchy, and they assumed that when all knowledge was to hand it would be continuous and without gaps.22 By the time Captain Cook embarked on his scientific voyages there were still some very substantial gaps, notably between humans and the great apes, so finding the missing links was a major scientific objective. The prospect of one more and final continent aroused high hopes that those links would be found. As more and more detail about aborigines was put together it seemed that eventually one of their groups might turn out to be the main primate missing link. Perhaps the Tasmanian Aborigines, who had one of the smallest toolkits ever found, would be the link, though only careful anatomical analysis would prove the case. But if Australian animals confounded the Linnaean system of classification they made a mockery of the Great Chain of Being. Animals were found that were even stranger than foxes that fly or fishes that crawl. In Australia there were animals that seemed on the face of it to be the abominable hybrids of creatures from very different positions on the hierarchy. An amphibious mole found on the Hunter River in southern Queensland appeared to be a hybrid between the high-order mammals the lower-order birds and the still lower order of reptiles. Such a find, rather modest in its own way, had the capacity to cause total chaos and disorder for Western science. If this animal

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turned out to be true, the Great Chain of Being would be shown to be false. Worse still, it cast doubts on the Creation story itself. How could God produce a creature that mocked his own order for the world? And not once but twice, because the echidna was soon grouped alongside the platypus. Such questions went straight to the very foundation of Western belief and created a tension between religion and science. But the moral anxieties caused by these finds gave rise to much hypothesising. One way around the problem was to suggest that there was not one creation but two, with Western civilisation living in the bosom of the perfect creation, while this foul land of Australia was the site of a forgotten and imperfect creation kept separate and distant from God’s more successful attempt. There was thus no point in trying to fit the southern aberration into the northern order, since it was merely a bundle of duds, failed experiments. Whatever the answer – and the answer was not going to be found for almost a hundred years – these questions further undermined the appeal of Australia and European confidence in it as a place of settlement. Indeed, they recommended it as a place of exile and punishment. And since in Britain the problem of housing its growing population of convicts was coming to a head, it was not long before the rather extreme plan of transporting them to Australia was realised, and before too long there was a regular traffic of ships plying between Britain and Australia. While convicts and supplies dominated the southerly leg of the trip, the northern leg, though not to be filled with useful produce for at least a hundred years, was nonetheless surprisingly well stocked with Australiana for the seemingly inexhaustible demand for curiosities in every capital, making sure that almost everyone in Europe was aware of the land of contrarieties. With an embryonic colony in place and with a growing European presence on the land, it became possible for scientists in Britain to obtain access to a growing supply of living and preserved Australian animals. With such major scientific and religious tenets at stake, finding an answer to the enigma of Australian animals entered a new phase.

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THE PLATYPUS SAGA During an English summer the great social gatherings of the people, the so-called Revels, were times of great excitation, carnival and merrymaking. The common people were allowed to let off steam, drink, play and sport wildly, and sex was less regulated by everyday norms. These odd times were characterised by social inversions, notably where plebeians paraded as dukes and dukes served food at table, but the singular character of these ritual occasions was that the world was rendered topsy-turvy. In keeping with this theme, travelling shows appeared offering a glimpse at the truly grotesque. The paying public would queue up to pass through the space of a wagon in which they would briefly gaze upon a deformed or anomalous human body, glass jars with horrible or spectacular body parts, diseases or injuries, or, very commonly, the sight of a monstrous animal from the new world. Preceding the establishment of London Zoo, a permanent peepshow for exotic animals enjoyed a long life at the Exchange. And even when London Zoo was opened, amid its lofty claims to scientific value and usefulness the legacy of the carnivalesque was still apparent: ‘the official marketing policy of the Regent’s Park Zoo stipulated that the public be provided with a steady diet of amazing novelties.’23 This was because the attractiveness of exotic animals still rested on their ability to shock and revolt, and if they became too familiar the effect would diminish. As Harriet Ritvo says, ‘both naturalists and zoological idlers might soon have tired even of duckbills and giant feet’.24 What guaranteed the continuing appeal of these animals was the fact that their oddity was not confined to the merely physical but extended to the level of theory or system. Unlike the giraffe, which although at least equally ‘singular in its structure’ at first glance could upon closer inspection confidently be assigned ‘a distinct genus’ in the vicinity of the deer and the antelope, to which it was ‘nearly allied’, the kangaroo and the platypus did not seem to be nearly allied to anything. While the kangaroo and platypus might guarantee extended

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periods of good gate money, the confusion that made them attractive to a playful public wreaked havoc among the serious fraternities of science. In Newcastle, late in the year of 1799, a woman servant was charged with bringing a medium-sized cask from the harbourside to the rooms of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She laboured with the cask on her head, but with the weight suddenly shifted to its bottom it eventually gave way and spilled its contents all over the poor woman’s head. Amid the foul-smelling liquor two largish lumps fell to the floor. ‘But her dismay and horror was reportedly the greater when looking down she saw not only the small chunky wombat, but the remains of “a strange creature, half bird, half beast, lying at her feet”.’ As Ann Moyal notes, the platypus had arrived in Britain.25 The first serious attempt to unravel the mysterious nature of the platypus was conducted by the naturalist Dr George Shaw, though his first attempt was with a dried specimen sent to him from New South Wales. He described the animal quite accurately and objectively and even gave it the objective, if somewhat understated, name of Platypus anatinus, which means flat-footed and duck-like. Shaw had his doubts and was not going to be as easily taken in as some sailors who were regularly sold prefabricated hybrids made from a mixture of fish and mammals by opportunistic Asian traders. But after careful examination he was convinced of its genuine provenance, though quite what the provenance of the ‘paradoxical quadruped’ was ‘must be left to future investigation’. At first as the key scientific playmaker Joseph Banks sent new specimens to Europe’s prominent anatomists, nothing very new was discovered. Blumenbach named it Ornithorhynchus paradoxus and although platypus was the name that stuck, it had already been used, so the eventual name was a mix of the two, Ornithorhynchus anatinus. Everard Home, an anatomist at the Royal College of Surgeons, also received a specimen from which he was able to distinguish the bill clearly from the bill of a duck in that it was not a proper part of the mouth but an exploratory organ for searching out food. Home subsequently found on exam-

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ination of specimens of both sexes that the reproductive and excretory openings of both sexes converged into one common chamber that in birds and amphibians is called a cloaca. Home was clearly baffled as to where to place it in relation to mammals, with which it shared the characteristics of warm-bloodedness and fur, and amphibians and birds, with which it shared apparent egg-laying and genitalia. He opted for a link classification between these more established orders, whereas most others opted for mammalia. But without any evidence for lactation and suckling, how could this creature be a mammal? As Moyal concludes, at this point, the platypus ‘appeared to inhabit a zoological no-man’s land’.26 Three questions loomed rather large some five years after its discovery: what did the platypus say about the classificatory system used to order the world of nature; how did it produce its young and nourish them once born – or hatched; and what would result from the platypus’s challenge to existing theories of creation? The next significant development was an answer to none of these questions but a further contribution to classification. The French biologist Geoffroy St-Hilaire felt that a new taxon was justified on the basis of the fact that the platypus and the echidna shared four unique characteristics: ‘digits clawed; having no true teeth; a common cloaca opening to the exterior by a single orifice’, ‘and an absence of mammae’.27 A new taxon was fair enough but this did not answer the crucial question of where that fitted into other orders, because it was its relational order that was so crucial. O r d e r, a t l a s t

The matter may have rested there for some time were it not for a fresh report in from a reputable officer stationed in New South Wales who had taken it upon himself, and no doubt very wisely, to actually take a look at the animal in question, in situ. He had therefore dug out a group of platypus nests during the breeding season and taken a good look. On skinning one of the poor animals he discovered milk leaking from her sides, and on closer examination saw definite milk-emitting organs. The specimens in question were

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then sent to a young anatomist, Richard Owen, who confirmed this by comparison with male platypus bodies and published the results in 1832. This also confirmed that the platypus and later the echidna were mammals and did not require a separate order. However, the clincher rested properly on establishing exactly how they reproduced themselves. So in 1832 its mammalian connection was confirmed. How long could it possibly take to resolve its mode of reproduction given that the keenest and best-funded minds saw it as a major scientific question, given the huge rivalry between English, French and other scientists to be the first to find out, and given that Australia was now more accessible and specimens more easy to obtain? Today we might assume the task to take no longer than a year, two at the very most. After all, all one needed was to find live platypuses in the wild, to stake them out at the appropriate breeding season – that at least was well known – and to interrupt them at this critical time through observation, and if this failed to resolve the issue, to resort to dissection. In fact the world had to wait until August 1884 to find out, fifty-two years later, no less. A faunal backwater

Part of the problem lay with communications between Australia and Europe. In the case of botany the colony had a profuse interest and expertise, and amateur and professional botany talked the same scientific language. The same was not so true in zoology. Although, as historian Ann Moyal’s study shows, local Australian amateurs sent in reports apparently confirming, correctly, the oviparous nature of platypus reproduction, the British scientists were suspicious and disdainful of their evidence. But Moyal also sees among the British a reluctance to take Australian fauna seriously: They perceived Australia as a ‘faunal backwater’, a kind of ‘zoological penal colony’, and, while they strove to carry off the laurels of scientific classification and to build personal reputations on their interpretations of specimens that reached them, they viewed Antipodean aberrations and inversions as a taunt to the hard-won truths of European science.28

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At the same time, the British should not take all the blame because despite the interest of some, there appeared to be a profound lack of interest in and commitment to faunal Australia by the new settlers. This is precisely the incomprehension expressed by Flanagan’s Gould in relation to the breathless enthusiasm for Linnaeus and the modern classifying project of his patron, Mr Lempriere.29 As we shall see in the next chapter, the Australian natural order held little appeal to the early settlers, who if anything rather resented it. Many were engaged in using native animals merely as a resource, and a prevailing view was that they would soon be more or less removed from the landscape, much in the way the Aboriginal people declined, though as Charles Darwin observed in 1836, the two factors were not unlinked. On 18 January 1836, Darwin was taken kangaroo-hunting by his farmer host Mr Archer. The sport was bad and the party only succeeded in finding a kangaroo rat that disappeared into a tree hole. In his nightly diary entry the disappointed Darwin wrote: A few years ago since this country abounded with wild animals; but now the emu is banished to a long distance, and the kangaroo is become scarce: to both the English greyhound has been highly destructive. It may be a long time before these animals are altogether exterminated but their doom is fixed.

This is an extraordinary state of affairs given the size of the country, its faunal population and the youth of the colony. However, the early convict settlement in Hobart and Port Dalrymple (Launceston) were saved by native animal meat supplies and their impact had a profound effect. Robert Hughes writes that in one month, 15 000 pounds of dressed meat from kangaroos was eaten, ‘representing a slaughter of perhaps a thousand ’roos’.30 The lack of interest in Australian fauna is actually on record. The first stirrings of the Philosophical Society of New South Wales, which met in Sydney in 1821, waxed gloomy on the subject: Upwards of thirty years have now elapsed since the colony of New South Wales was established in one of the most interesting parts of the world, interesting as well from the novel and

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endless variety of its animal and vegetable production, as from the wide and extending range for observation and experiment … Yet little has been done to awaken a spirit of research or excite a thirst for information amongst the Colonists.31

So it is hardly surprising that the next step towards the solution was made by a young Englishman keen for adventure and acclaim, who travelled to Australia to take a look at the platypus in situ. George Bennett made several expeditions to the riverside and managed to see, shoot and eventually capture live, with the help of Aborigines, numerous specimens. These were not successfully transported back to England as intended, but Bennett was able to dissect fresh platypus females at the right moment of the breeding season. He was able to confirm what others had suggested, that the platypus did indeed produce eggs, but what he was not able to tell was whether they hatched inside the body – ovoviviparously – or whether the creature actually laid eggs. Bennett corresponded with Owen back in London and soon his research appeared in a new paper. The two men decided that it was most likely that the platypus produced its young ovoviviparously. At this point Geoffrey St-Hillaire weighed in, arguing that the entire question was still unresolved and that his theory that the platypus could not be a mammal was secure providing that the secretion from the side of the platypus was not milk but some other substance and that the platypus was in fact an egg-layer like the reptile family it was so obviously allied to. Most agreed with Owen, however, especially when very young platypuses were obtained showing that their duck-bill was as yet undeveloped and therefore they were unimpeded in obtaining milk. In the 1840s Owen pushed on in the old mode of securing fresh bodies even though he knew that only first-hand observation would settle the matter properly. He asked his new agent in Australia to procure specimens at regular periods through the breeding season from September to November. But this plan failed. Worse, he concentrated on a method of proving ovoviviparity using anatomical techniques rather than through observed behaviour –

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which he felt would prove nothing since there was no egg-laying to see. In the absence of adequate supplies of new specimens for more refined anatomical procedures, the years went by and the question lingered on. Bennett, his principal supplier of specimens over a long period, also subscribed to this view and so ignored to his cost the substantial build-up of evidence from Aborigines (who so obviously knew platypus behaviour from thousands of years of hunting and eating them) that the platypus did indeed lay eggs. Nevertheless Bennett’s own son was recruited into the research to obtain detailed information on the youthful platypus, suckling, lactation and sundry other details but not, it appeared, evidence of egg-laying. The problem solved

After labouring along a cul-de-sac for so long, it was not at all surprising that it was an entire newcomer, the 23-year-old William Caldwell, an embryologist from Cambridge, who finally resolved the issue. In late August 1884, on the Burnett River in southern Queensland, he first of all discovered an echidna with an egg laid in its pouch, and then rather excitedly he turned to finding platypuses in a similar condition. On 24 August he shot a female who had laid one egg and was in the process of laying another. The matter was settled once and for all. The platypus was an egg-laying mammal and monotremes (the new category designated for such creatures) were a specialised extension of mammalia. Both StHilaire and Owen had been only half right and thus totally wrong in their gambit for classification. By this time the zoological world had been revolutionised by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, first published in 1859 in On The Origin of Species. This book surrounded the platypus question with an entirely different perspective. Anomalies only exist as an artefact of classifications, which are human creations, ways of trying to tidy up the world and give it a gloss of order. But the natural world is messier, and the source of creation was not a human-like God but the marvellously intricate and specific

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contingencies that coalesce around natural selection, changing environments and survival of the fittest. There is no room for anomalies here; a creature is the best-fit product of specific environments wrought over long time-frames and if its environment changes in any way it may or may not survive. Nature is infinitely plastic and can be stretched and bent into an infinite range of forms. There is no blueprint. The new generation of young biologists who were around at the time Australia was beginning to sense its separate political destiny were all Darwinians. The theory of natural selection enabled them to put a completely different spin on the question of Australia’s general reputation as a land of contrarieties. Far from being odd, these creatures were distinct, new even. Far from being freakish, they were elegant designs, uniquely adapted to specific environments. Far from being senseless and aesthetically unpleasing, they were beautiful, marvellous. And far from being a natural metaphor for the socially and culturally rejected, a colony of miscreants, the new understanding of its creatures provided a powerful metaphor of national inspiration: Australians too must seize their evolutionary moment and see themselves as on nothing less than an evolutionary journey themselves – they too were to be wrought from Australia’s unique conditions, environments and contingencies. It was a very powerful inspiration that was never far from the minds of those who created an Australian nation and nationalism. So there is something more to the choice of natural and in particular animal emblems for the Australian nation. The usual assumption is that the nation was born from political currents and agencies and that once formed, it looked to find apt representations for itself. But it can also be argued that the natural world is not just like an artist’s palette, offering suitable colours and shadings and symbolic shapes. It can act in a more suggestive and inspirational way. As we will see in Chapter 4, the early tales of zoological anomaly, freakishness and rejection compounded a feeling of social and cultural insecurity and rejection among the early settlers; the

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creatures all around them provided a living reminder of their difference, the boundaries that existed between them and a perceived civilised world and a homeland, and their dark pasts. The convicts and their descendants were haunted by a dark past rather as these creature were haunted by an unthinkable creation.

Chapter 3

ANIMALS AND ABORIGINES

The colonisation of Australia involved the meeting of one culture that defined itself as absolutely different from animals with another that defined itself as indistinguishable from animals. Clearly, from such an encounter only misunderstandings and tragedy could follow. The story of the platypus illustrated how routinely European scientists and scientific fieldworkers dismissed Aborigines’ (accurate) knowledge of platypus physiology and procreation. But the inability to translate culture and knowledge went far deeper than that. In addition to classifying Aborigines as inferior in terms of technology, Europeans also entertained the notion that their intellect belonged to an earlier stage of human evolution. In this way the primitive state of Australia as indicated by its fauna was mapped directly onto its humanity. Such a comfortable thought, far from easing the conscience of the colonising powers, produced yet another animal enigma and this too became increasingly focused on Australia. It is routinely conceded that Darwin’s evolutionary theory had a dramatic impact on how people thought about animals (including ourselves as animals), and how Christians in the West felt about the Bible as the blueprint truth of the world. But it also had an enormous, though less widely appreciated, impact on how humans thought about each other. This field of speculation, often called

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social evolution, has had profound implications, not least on the development of Karl Marx’s ideas on revolution as well as the development and elaboration of ideas such as race, ‘the primitive’, civilisation, progress and modernity. Most of us have very little idea about this consequence of Darwin’s evolutionary theory because we think of it as a scientific idea and also because too few of us are taught anthropology, literally the study of humanity, where much of this truly fascinating story is locked away in dusty archives. One of the most important chapters of this story is concerned with a phenomenon called totemism, the religion that characterised Aboriginal Australians. In this system, not only is it believed that people can descend from animal ancestors but also that living people describe themselves as belonging to the same species as their animal ancestor – that they are indistinguishable from their animal ancestor. To European minds in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this could not be taken seriously, or at least, not as an idea that had any semblance to what was considered an acceptable thought. Here was another enigma involving Australian animals: the anomalous state of Australian fauna was seemingly connected with its humanity. The questions were clear enough as they confronted the earliest anthropologists: was this muddle-headedness symptomatic of an earlier, mentally inferior condition of humanity? If not, then how can we explain this strange, seemingly impossible association between humans and animals in rational terms? And, if we can solve what is really going on in totemic thought, how can we explain its origins? So, in order to tell the story of the enigma of Aborigines and animals we will have to reopen some of these dusty repositories. It is only by so doing that we can appreciate why it was that Australian nature and Australian humanity became the subject of such intense curiosity in the nineteenth century and why it was that both became embroiled in a search for answers that would have much wider ramifications.

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THE IMPLICATIONS OF ABORIGINAL TOTEMISM It was not a coincidence that evolutionary theory occurred at a time when European global expansion had been through a particularly intense period. During this time, Europeans had come across many things of which they had little understanding, and the discovery of such enormous difference and variation in the natural and human world forced them to re-examine their assumptions about themselves and especially how they came to be the way they were. While evolutionary theory enabled zoologists to understand that Australian animals were not natural freaks but local adaptations, social evolution posed a far more difficult question since that concerned the very thing that allegedly separated humans from animals: mindfulness, intellectual reflection and a repository of knowledge. And so for humans, it seemed there was a unique evolutionary process. Intellectuals of the time assumed without any doubt that science and Western rational thought were the high point in that evolutionary process, but what came before and why was not at all clear to them. Australia became the focus of a major chapter in the puzzle of social evolution and in no small measure this was because Australian Aborigines expressed this extraordinary relationship with animals. Was it the very starting point of the intellectual evolutionary pathway which some thought began with magic, evolving towards religion and from religion to truth, through science? It is hard to think of a more important question in human history. So, far from finding nice clean lines separating animals from humanity, as was the case in post-Enlightenment Europe, in Australia what was found instead was a disturbing hybrid state of affairs, where the boundary between humanity and animality was apparently dissolved and fluid. While Europeans could see very well that Aborigines lived in a remarkably close way with animals, this in itself was not disturbing and had been seen commonly in most corners of the world. What created the disturbance and the

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subsequent scientific debate within anthropology was that Aborigines claimed not only to have descended from (predominantly) animal ancestors but that they still belonged as individuals and groups to particular animal species. Totemism can be defined as a special religious and social association between human groups (especially clans and lineages) and natural species (predominantly animals) in which the former claim to descend from animals, derive powers from them and thus still belong to the animal kingdom. In this way a man can state that he is kangaroo and make perfect sense. Animals were not the only clan totems in Australia; some were plants, planets, rocks and other natural phenomena, for example water or smoke. But animals were by far the most common type of totem. Put at its bluntest, the world according to this view was governed by animal ancestors whose manifestation and power on the earth was multiple, appearing at various times as animals, humans and objects. The European worldview, by contrast, stipulated that all individual elements of creation were separable and hierarchical, with boundaries separating the major orders, such as between people and animals. Such a way of thinking could not be ignored and to the minds of the earliest anthropologists it indicated that they had found precisely what they were looking for: an example of mankind at the very beginning of social evolution. The story we are about to embark on traces the attempts by anthropologists to understand the origins and meaning of the totemic beliefs of Australian Aborigines. The central figure of this story is the French theorist Emile Durkheim, who never visited Australia himself but who grew to trust the evidence from two remarkable Australian men working in an entirely new way with Aborigines over a hundred years ago. While many anthropologists broadly accept Durkheim’s explanation of totemic beliefs and cults, his analysis of the relationship between humans and animals will also help us to understand why animals have become so central to the social and cultural identity of modern Australians and also why environmentalism and environmental organisations

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such as the Wilderness Society have had such a powerful grip on our imagination. But all this is to come later. First, let us consider the original totem puzzle.

CHARLES DARWIN The puzzle begins in a way with Charles Darwin. In 1871 he published his Descent of Man. For Darwin, human evolution entailed a more complex set of considerations than a simple adaptation to the environment because humans appeared to have evolved along intellectual pathways too. Although not unrelated to the ability to adapt to an environment, intellectual evolution also implied an ever-growing ability to understand the world in which they lived. The question concerned how humans used their powers of observation, memory, language and reason to build more elaborate understandings and capabilities in their world, including social institutions such as religion. Darwin’s book set new agendas everywhere and in anthropology it caused a shift from a main interest in indigenous political organisations that confronted the Western powers in their newly acquired colonies towards an interest in beliefs and rationality. The big questions they were interested in focused on the relationship between biological evolution and intellectual development and whether in fact Darwin’s challenge to biblical truths was overlaid by the more serious possibility that science would replace religion just as religion had seemingly replaced witchcraft and magic. In the late nineteenth century when most Western cultures were dominated by Christian institutions, values and even revivals, it was hardly possible for there to be a bigger scandal, and scandals of this order are the very bread and butter of research and publishing in an age of discovery. The general point that human intellectual evolution had occurred and that it was progressive was already demonstrated by the archaeology of technology; that different strata of soil and rocks revealed progressively better, more sophisticated applications of ideas and techniques. It would seem likely

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that a similar archaeology of intellectual growth could be found. But would human religion, like the solid remains of stone, pottery, metalwork and art, leave traces and clues, survivals of practices and beliefs from previous evolutionary periods? If it did, then the study of this question might be done through theology and the study of well-documented world religions. Equally, intellectuals of the time assumed that contemporary primitive societies could be used to represent the true stages of intellectual evolution, along which Western cultures had progressed in the past. If they could be shown to exhibit different ways of thinking and meaning, then they too would reveal the great pathways along which intellectual evolution moved. Anthropology had, in other words, the prospect of a global laboratory as well as a historic library for the study of human intellectual evolution.

SPENCER AND GILLEN Darwin’s puzzle was taken up by British anthropologists, who became increasingly excited at the possibility of accessing information from their growing empire of peoples. At first, their theorising was based on data of a very uneven quality, certainly not generated by scientifically acceptable methods. It was based on the reports of journeys and travels through the new lands, and later by reports and accounts from those who had settled and taken an amateur interest in the people around them. There was a great market for their writings and for sensational claims of dubious veracity, but it was never in such a form that would allow any systematic theorising. So for this reason a point came where the anthropologists had to organise a more orderly collection of data that kept track of and tested their theoretical musings. They did this not by taking themselves off to study Aboriginal people at first hand but by encouraging and corresponding with proxies, people who already lived in Australia and who agreed to correspond with them and conduct fieldwork at their bidding. It was to be another fifty years before the figure of the anthropologist as a heroic expeditioner, living with

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and among the tribe, was to emerge. In the meantime their Australian proxies did much to persuade them of the value of this explosion of fieldwork. Although the race to solve the totemic puzzle involved many anthropologists, it was those who established successful proxy relationships that formed the leading pack. Edward Tylor and Sir James Frazer eventually choreographed the conduct of two remarkable sets of research in Australia, those undertaken by Fison and Howett in the case of Tylor and by Spencer and Gillen in the case of Frazer. However, as it happened, neither of these armchair anthropologists was to produce a satisfactory account of totemism. The accounts produced by their proxies were first made sense of not by a British anthropologist or even a recognised anthropologist anywhere but by a French sociologist. The great works of Spencer and Gillen on the Aborigines of central and north central Australia were published between 1899 and 1904, and these and many other texts on totemic beliefs and cults were pored over with great interest by the eminent French sociologist Emile Durkheim, newly installed as Professor of Sociology at the Sorbonne in Paris. He was unconvinced by all of the explanations of totemism based on them, and in fact he thought that almost all of them were completely on the wrong track. We also now know from their letters that Spencer and Gillen wrote to each other and had been similarly disappointed by all explanations of totemism, sensing that while they were all quite ingenious hypotheses, they seemed very remote from their intimate knowledge of Aborigines and their ritual life. In a letter to Spencer, for example, Gillen wrote: ‘As to the crux, what really lies at the bottom of the totemic notion may never be solved (and certainly not in the Arunta where there has been the most marvellous development of the totemic idea).’1 Indeed, Spencer and Gillen moved on from the theoretical debates and conundrums on totemism and its possible connection with evolution and set out to discover and describe the creative works of Aboriginal religious and ritual life as a worthy subject in

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its own right. This was clearly much needed work and it took them away from dubious theory and the realm of pure speculation. However, the totemic question did not discourage Durkheim, and, once armed with the new materials supplied by their new fieldwork, he set out to make one of the most outstanding contributions to our understanding of religion if not of humanity itself.

THE ELEMENTARY STRUCTURES OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE Emile Durkheim was born in 1858 at Epinal, France. His father was the Chief Rabbi of the Vosges and Haute-Marne. Although on track to follow a long line of rabbis in his family, the intellectual and political ferment of Paris during his late teenage years drew him towards philosophy and the social sciences and then into teaching and writing. During his years at the University of Bordeaux (1887–1902) he wrote some of the most influential early works in sociology: The Division of Labour, The Rules of Sociological Method, and Suicide. In these works he established something we all take for granted now but was then entirely new and controversial: the idea that there is an order of reality that can be called social, that there are social ‘facts’ in the same way there are physical facts, and that there are important social causes at work in the unfolding of history. Between then and the publication of The Elementary Structures of the Religious Life in 1912, Durkheim’s work matured, especially through his involvement in L’Annee Sociologique, the key journal for sociological debate, and a series of important papers. The great American mid-twentieth century sociologist Talcott Parsons wrote of his work on totemism that ‘the great work on religion … was the ripe harvest of a long process of intensive cultivation’.2 In Durkheim’s masterwork, The Elementary Structures of the Religious Life, the great question was not so much deducing how the first religious sentiment and practice occurred but understanding how religions relate to the societies in which they emerge.

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Durkheim’s work had always been concerned with the idea of social order and has to be understood against a background in which understanding and promoting social order in modern Europe, with its rapidly changing industrial base, massive population growth and urbanisation, was the issue of the day. According to one dominant group, the utilitarians, the problem of social order was resolved by natural means: all individuals automatically seek to satisfy their needs and markets automatically make sure that collective order or equilibrium is achieved without the need for any form of intervention other than through individuals pursuing their interests. However, as Durkheim’s earlier work on suicide showed, the serious stresses that the industrial age imposed on its people resulted not in a sustainable social order but social disorder, as indicated, for example, by rising levels of suicide. Durkheim’s book Suicide went on to show, for the first time, that social statistics could reveal the hidden hand of other types of ordering mechanisms. In this case he claimed to demonstrate the effects of different religions on rates of suicide in societies that were in most other respects similar. In a steadily changing social climate, those religions that integrated the individual into a collective structure such as Catholicism appeared to protect the individual from suicide better than those religions, particularly Protestant religions, that emphasised individualism. From this simple if revolutionary case study of religion and suicide, religion and other sorts of social arrangements that produced collective sentiments of a similar kind became critical to understand. Such collective sentiments seemed to promise a different route to social order from either a fatalist trust in the market or the absolute authority of monarchy. Durkheim was not interested in a society dominated by religious authority of the sort we have seen recently in Iran or Afghanistan but by the possibility of organised collective sentiments and norms that he held to be the very basis of all religions. By studying the Aboriginal totemic cults alongside the detailed knowledge of Aboriginal society supplied by Spencer and

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Gillen, Durkheim felt he might have the right mix of materials to demonstrate the social reality of religion as a form of collective spirit. That collective spirit was rich in the sort of moral ties that bind individuals to each other around collectively held values, things that are important to them and that define their essence. For Durkheim, all societies gather these thoughts together and identify two very important and separate realms of human existence: the profane world of everyday life and the sacred world of objects and ritual practices where these collective values are expressed and affirmed. All societies, he surmised, develop a sense of what is sacred to them. Sacred sentiments emerge not from a master plan to order and morally bind all individuals together, but from the experience of living together, from their history and lifestyle. In this sense Durkheim was anti-evolutionary and did not see this feature of Aboriginal life as in any way a forerunner of later stages of humanity. Even modern and new societies develop a sense of the sacred, regardless of whether it takes a religious or a secular form. And since even modern societies represent and affirm these sacred values and norms to each other through rituals, totemic ritual is no different, sociologically speaking, from what we might find today. Indeed, I am going to argue that this is precisely how we can understand some aspects of our relation to the environment and nature today. So why should Durkheim become interested in totemic religion in Australia? Clearly he was not interested in social evolution per se. But he did consider that the study of religion in the simplest type of society would yield valuable information for modern times. His hunch was that all religions were the same in their fundamental social origin and effect; one cannot say that any of them are truer than others since they are all sustained by and relate to an underlying cultural reality, and more importantly, they express it. Although religions are sustained by a variety of illusions, they are all true ‘in the sense that they are stated and expressed in a nonobjective, symbolic or metaphorical form, truths about the reality underlying them and giving them their “true meaning”’.3 For

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Durkheim, Australian totemic cults provided not the prototype but perhaps the archetype, the ‘first case’ that sociologists used to demonstrate this truth about humanity. The irony is that he might equally have taken an example from the French or German cultures of his own day but for the fact that the required level of cultural detail was at that time produced only by anthropologists working exclusively among so-called primitive societies. And even this was in its experimental early stage. Spencer and Gillen’s unprecedented attention to detail and their commitment to what we now call ‘ethnography’, or the translation of one culture into terms that are comprehensible to another, made it possible for Durkheim to investigate his hypotheses, but it is also clear from his writing that he felt that the relatively small-scale, face-to-face character of Aboriginal life would enable him to explore his case with greater clarity. His first job, however, was to evaluate previous attempts to explain totemic thought.

DURKHEIM AND PREVIOUS THEORIES OF TOTEMISM Before we look at the simple way in which Durkheim picked off each of the rival theories we should perhaps consider what he thought was wrong generally with the way these (largely) Scottish anthropologists had set about the task. The problem they faced was the result of the advantages and disadvantages of their times. They lived in a period that benefited from an unprecedented inflow of information about the world and its peoples. Almost the entire world was now not only known to European cultures but also increasingly ruled or administered by them. Information about peoples of the world became fashionably interesting and much written about and studied by travellers, but it also became part of the fabric of colonial government, and anthropological investigations were funded expressly for this purpose. Keeping abreast and making sense of all this information – of varying quality and incredible diversity – was another thing alto-

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gether. Our Scottish armchair anthropologists attempted to get around this problem by lumping many very different societies into a smaller number of categories (rather as biologists assembled species into taxa). When it came to the analysis of totemic societies as the least evolved form of all, all cultures that demonstrated some affinity to animals by descent or who worshipped animals in some way were grouped together regardless of the nature of their social organisation. For Durkheim this was a disastrous method to adopt because like was not being compared with like. A master of putdowns, here is how he spoke of these Scottish anthropologists to his students at the Sorbonne in his opening lecture of 1902–03: One certainly finds interesting insights there … But to a rare degree, the method lacks a critical and discriminating character. In order to prove an assertion, the author does not hesitate to gather together, without distinguishing between them, facts borrowed from the most heterogeneous societies. All the continents are scoured without order or discrimination … The impression emerging from this whirling confusion of facts is itself confused and indeterminate. At the same time, the extreme facility with which all evidence serving to confirm the theses advanced is accepted without prior examination detracts from the authority of the conclusions. Finally, the theories offered to account for the facts are of a simplism that is truly intrepid.4

The other general problem with explanations of totemism prior to Durkheim related to their main concern, to explain intellectual evolution. If these Victorian scholars assumed that they represented the high point of human intellectual evolution and that this was characterised by the establishment of a scientific approach where all knowledge claims were subject to rigorous tests before they were admitted as true, it follows that without such institutional arrangements and scientific procedures, humans in previous periods lived under varying degree of illusion and untruth. It follows again that those living in the most primitive stage were surely capable of quite significant degrees of self-deception and illusion. So here is a general point about which Durkheim was in total, in-principle disagreement, particularly where it applied to

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religion. As we have seen, he took it as given that ‘primitive religions relate to reality and express it’ and that the task of sociology or anthropology was to discover whence those ‘realities expressed by religion come and what has been able to make men represent them under this singular form that is peculiar to religious thought’.5 Yet all the explanations of totemism he was confronted with were based on, as he put it, ‘a tissue of illusions’, ‘inexplicable hallucinations’, or ‘some sort of deep rooted error’.6 So, for example, Tylor’s explanation made both types of error. First of all, his explanation of totemism was not based on the beliefs of people who are most associated with totemism, the clanbased peoples of the United States and especially Australia, but the more complex social organisations found in Java, Sumatra and Melanesia. Second, Tylor’s explanation of totemism rested on explaining the origins of animistic religion, so it is difficult to see how totemism can retain its status as the most primitive form of religion. Animistic religions understand the nature of being in very fluid terms, notably the fluid movement and appearance of the soul between human and animal forms. Such religion was allegedly based on the misinterpretation of dreams, as a window onto a deeper reality, but it does not explain why people should think their soul would take refuge in an animal – of all things. Feebly, Tylor argued that humans do see similarities between themselves and other animals and so could imagine kinship possible. But Durkheim remained unconvinced and defended primitive people as, at the very least, sensible: ‘even if these resemblances are met with, they are uncertain and exceptional; before all else, men resemble their relatives and companions, and not plants and animals.’7 This is an important point because one of the great advantages of studying totemism from the point of view of a handful of Australian Aboriginal tribes in great detail is that it provides very important acid tests for general theories. Spencer and Gillen’s and Howett’s work confirmed that most totemic ancestors were said to

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be animals, but by no means all. So the need for totems to be animals is thereby dismissed. Not only were some totems in Australia rather insignificant-looking plants, but some were inanimate objects altogether such as the planet Venus, smoke, hail or water, while others were quite abstract, such as summer or autumn.8 Finally, and again with the benefit of Spencer and Gillen’s detail, Durkheim was able to dismiss the central core of Tylor’s argument. Classic cases of totemic cults in Australia are simply not a form of animal worship. While animal bodies are always held to be sacred and possess totemic powers, this is no more so than the bodies of the clansmen themselves, and both contain less power and are held in less respect and awe than the abstractly decorated pieces of stone and wood, churingas, that are used for rituals and that are kept hidden in secret sacred sites. F.B. Jevons’ theory was dismissed for similar reasons. Jevons thought the origin of totemism was based on the wishful aim of protection from dangerous natural forces. By creating ties of kinship, natural forces would naturally ally themselves with their human clansmen and leave them alone. Although Durkheim felt that religion is never merely based on an instrumental wish such as this, or even a technique of self-preservation, there were rather obvious reasons why this was also nonsense. Again, it was a careful reading of his Australian ethnography that gave Durkheim his authority. While some Aboriginal groups did have as their totems such fearful natural forces as thunder or the sea or fearsome animals such as snakes and large kangaroos, the fact was that most of them were ‘among the most humble that exist’.9 Flicking through Spencer and Gillen, one comes across an abundance of insignificant creatures that serve perfectly well as totems: witchetty grubs (which are mainly invisible in the roots and trunks of wattle trees), little frogs, water, the hakea tree, an edible bulb, and the bandicoot, a small, timid nocturnal marsupial. Durkheim could not resist further taunts: ‘also if it were only a question of making allies and defenders, they would have tried to make as many as possible: for one cannot be defended too well.’10 But the fact

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remained: across the entire continent of Australia, Aboriginal clans only ever had one totemic species. Then there were theories that claimed the origin of totemic cults to derive from individual totems, so that totemic religions sprang from the individual practice of adopting a species that would protect its human adoptee. This is rather like the familiar Western practice of individual luck charms or mascots. In the case of Frazer’s individual protection theory, Durkheim was scathing: ‘it presupposes a thoroughgoing idiocy on the part of the primitive which known facts do not allow us to attribute to him.’ ‘Why should Aborigines’, asks Durkheim, ‘choose the precarious bodies of hunted and migratory animals in which to hide and protect their cherished souls from harm? Indeed, why should he think it safer in the body of an animal than in his own?’11 Moreover, ‘it is a strange way of sheltering it to place it in a material form exposing it to risks at every instant. But above all, it is inconceivable that a whole people should allow themselves to be carried into such an aberration.’12 Again, Durkheim was able to aim the detail of Aboriginal culture against a rather dull-edged general explanation. If individual totems were in origin the safe havens of their Aboriginal soul, then one might expect a clan to try to get all of their neighbours to avoid hunting and killing their totem, but this is not the case at all. Only clansmen avoid killing and eating their own totem and rather than extend this interdiction to other clans, they actually held rituals to ensure the survival and prosperity of their totem such that their neighbours would have plenty to eat. But an even more compelling objection can be raised against this argument, namely that if it were the case that individuals merely chose an animal in which to hide their soul and that these were then handed down by descent, there is nothing to stop clans in the same tribe having the same totemic animal, whereas in fact this never happened. Indeed, the very distinctiveness of each clan’s totem was a clue to its origin as a socially organised and therefore collective arrangement. ‘The carefully regulated way in which the totems and sub-totems are divided up [among the clans] obviously

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presupposes a social agreement and a collective organisation. This is as much to say that totemism is something more than an individual practice spontaneously generated.’13 In addition, Durkheim makes the point that in the Australian material, which he viewed as the most important example of a religion uncontaminated by more complex social organisations and where totemic cults more or less dominated cultural life, there are many instances of individual totems existing alongside collective totems, but ‘in the great majority of the tribes it [collective totemism] alone is found, while we do not know a single one where individual totemism alone is practiced.’14 In this way the individual theories of totemism were dismissed quite convincingly. Andrew Lang’s idea that the naming of clans was itself sufficient to imbue the clans with the characteristic of that animal, and from there through mythic elaboration to the claim of ancestry, still does not explain totemism because it fails to say why totemism contains all the hallmarks of religion: ‘For the fact that a man considers himself an animal of a certain species does not explain why he attributes marvellous powers to this species and especially why he renders a cult to the images symbolising it.’15 So for Durkheim this explanation misses the mark by missing precisely what is critical in understanding the nature of totemism: why it divides the world into a realm of the sacred and a realm of the profane, why some things should be considered sacred anyway and most important, why it was that totemism seems to be inextricably intertwined with Aboriginal tribal and clan organisation. Lang’s explanation made no reference to these and made totemism out to be nothing other than the result of naming and language. For Durkheim, therefore, the starting point was not the accumulated number of instances and descriptions of totemic beliefs around the world but the detailed examination of just one. Although Aboriginal cultures in Australia could hardly be considered identical, for Durkheim they were sufficiently similar, at least in the region covered by Spencer and Gillen, to be considered as a group with certain key characteristics in common.

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DURKHEIM CONSIDERS THE EVIDENCE In trying to imagine how Durkheim went about his analysis of totemism, it is important to read where his own work was taking him at the time, but also to read the Australian sources he read. This I have done. What is remarkable about the works of Spencer and Gillen and truly different from many of the sources that others used is the obvious rapport and proximity that these fieldworkers established with many groups of Aborigines. These do not read like scientific data-gathering expeditions but the sort of knowledge gained from a genuine interest in the lives of other people, and – remembering that anthropological works are produced by the anthropologist and their informants together – from people who seemed keen for their culture to be understood by outsiders, for whatever reason. Reading these books, one can detect a formality and objectivity that was seemingly required by those wishing to be taken seriously by the Western scientific community. In places racist and unnecessarily elitist language is evident, but one can also perceive both men in the landscape covering huge distances, spending a great deal of time talking to and observing people. One perceives their passion and admiration for a culture that was overwhelmingly rich in ritual, the decorative arts and dance but above all the ‘rules and etiquettes’ (their words) by which Aboriginal life was lived. Such a perception from their main published work is confirmed very well in their recently published letters to each other16 and also in their preface to their 1899 volume: It has been the lot of one of us [Frank Gillen] to spend the greater part of the past twenty years in the centre of the continent, and as sub-protector of the Aborigines he has had exceptional opportunities of coming into contact with, and gaining the confidence of, the members of the large and important Arunta tribe, amongst whom he has lived, and of which tribe both of us, it may be added, are regarded as fully initiated members.17

In the preface to their second great work of 1904, they inform us of the benefits of this type of relationship in enabling them ‘to see

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things and to gain information of a kind quite inaccessible to the uninitiated worker, however observant he may be’. As an instance of what this means, we may say that on one occasion, when coming into contact with a strange tribe, in a camp nearly two hundred miles from our last halting place, we were a little surprised to find that the natives knew all about us. They were not only quite friendly, but seemed anxious to help us. Later on we found out that the tribe amongst whom we had last been working had actually, unknown to us, sent on two men to tell the strangers that we were friends, and that they were to show and tell us everything without fear. It may also be advisable to point out that all of our information has been collected at first hand.18

Spencer and Gillen’s two works on Aboriginal religion are not only encyclopaedic and detailed but they are largely based on intimate first-hand accounts of a great range of ritual activity, knowledge and practices, many of which, the reader soon forgets, were expressly only for the eyes and attendance of initiated men of the totemic clan. These were sacred, secret events. We not only read about them but, quite remarkably, we see them too, for Baldwin Spencer was an accomplished photographer and close to 450 photos accompany the volumes. Such is their sensitivity to Aborigines living today that the Baldwin photos are not permitted to be reproduced here. Judging from Durkheim’s uncharacteristically enlivened prose and the excitement with which we are taken through his ‘discovery’ and the careful manner in which the claims are secured, we may be sure that such unprecedented, high-quality ethnographic description had a profound effect on him.

THE SACRED TOTEMIC POWER How then did Durkheim set about a new explanation of totemism? First, he knew that the origin of totemism did not lie with individual totems and their basis in individual fear, hallucinatory delusions or previous experience of animistic religion; apart from

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anything else, none of this emerged from the very detailed Australian material. So he knew that totemism had a clearly collective origin, which in the case of all the Aboriginal groups he considered originated from a quality of the clan as a collective thing. Second, unlike the rival theories, he knew that an important clue lay in how the quality of sacredness, expressed as totemic power, was distributed within Aboriginal religious culture. To repeat, the most concentrated form of totemic power lay not in the bodies of totemic animals themselves but in the churingas, figured representations of the totem on stone or wood. Next in order of sacredness come the animal or plant species that the clan is named after, and after that come the clanspeople themselves, though even then the totemic power is unevenly distributed, favouring men and male hair and organs but also concentrated in blood and other fluids. The thing to grasp is that none of them form the object of veneration but all share in a totemic power that is external to them all. Or, put another way in Durkheim’s precise terms: [Since] all these things are sacred in the same way, though to different degrees, their religious character can be due to none of the special attributes distinguishing them from each other. If a certain species of animal or vegetable is the object of a reverential fear, this is not because of its special properties, for the human members of the clan enjoy the same privilege, though to a slightly inferior degree, while the mere image of this same plant or animal inspires an even more pronounced respect. The similar sentiments inspired by these different sorts of thing in the mind of the believer, which give them their sacred character, can evidently come only from some common principle partaken alike by the totemic emblems, the men of the clan and the individuals of the species serving as totem.19

Here is the crucial idea: it is a common principle or power that surrounds the life, bodies and representations of the clan including the species after which it is named. ‘In other words, totemism is the religion not of such and such animals or men or images, but of an anonymous and impersonal force, found in each of these beings but not to be confounded with any of them.’ And taking into account the highly scattered nature of all these things, nomadic people,

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species and social centres, this force is somehow special to if not confined to the life of the clan. The origin of this force then becomes the critical question for Durkheim to address. It is a difficult problem because while the Aborigines perceive this force as a reality in their lives it remains a largely invisible force that can only be grasped if made visible – by conceiving it in the shape of an animal, plant or representative object or invoking it through ritual. Indeed, the most highly charged objects, the churingas, are clearly human-made patterns and shapes that represent the force, but in doing so they concentrate the minds of the believer in a very powerful way onto something that without doubt truly exists and has a power in their lives. This is what the totem really consists in: it is only the material form under which the imagination represents this immaterial substance, this energy diffused through all sorts of heterogenous things, which alone is the real object of the cult. We are now in a better condition for understanding what the native means when he says that the men of the Crow phratry, for example, are crows. He does not exactly mean to say that they are crows in the empirical sense of the term, but that the same principle is found in all of them, which is their most essential characteristic, which they have in common with the animals of the same name and which is thought of under the external form of the crow.20

Or put another way, what they all have in common is crow-ness. As far as Aborigines are concerned, there is a totemic force, crow, that is common to them, crows and the sacred objects that represent them.

THE SOCIAL FORCE OF THE CLAN The next step required Durkheim to account for this immanent force or principle; how people came to construct this idea ‘and out of what materials they have constructed it’.21 First, the idea quite clearly does not emanate from the animals or plants themselves. As we have seen, many of them are modest, lowly plants and crea-

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tures such as ticks, little frogs, lizards and fish. Equally, the animal or plant is not the centre of the cult, for that exists elsewhere in collections of figurative representations. These hold the secret to totemism because it is what they represent, as material expressions of something else, that really counts. But of what? asks Durkheim. The answer at one level is quite straightforward. The emblematic nature of the totemic objects and designs represents the clan itself. One of the important facts of totemic cults is that within the tribe no two clans have the same totem, and even when some have very obviously originated from the splitting of one clan into two sharing almost the same clan totem, it is always different. But ‘if it is at once the symbol of the god and of the society, is that not because the god and the society are only one?’ How, asked Durkheim, could the emblem of the group have been able to become the figure of this quasi-divinity, if the group and the divinity were two distinct realities? The god of the clan, the totemic principle, can therefore be nothing else than the clan itself, personified and represented to the imagination under the visible form of the animal or vegetable which serves as a totem.22

This deduction was not the complete answer Durkheim was looking for because no matter how compelling the solution was he still needed to account for this belief and the form in which the belief was expressed. Nonetheless, making the breakthrough that the clan and the totemic power were one thing allowed him to look carefully into the practice of clan life and ritual for an answer to both these final questions. He begins with a discussion of the very obvious ways in which society, all societies in fact, have ‘all that is necessary to arouse the sensation of the divine in minds, merely by the power that it has over them; for to its members it is what a god is to his worshippers’. This is not a far-fetched idea at all. I can quickly relate to this through my own memories. Memories of awe and fear on my first day at school, and indeed almost every day at school, invoked the idea of a superior power not only in the school itself, but a greater

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power that existed in the life school prepared me for. It was always a daunting world of expectations, moral responsibilities, sanctions, opportunities and rewards. I never related to it as ‘society’ partly because, as Durkheim says of totemic cults, it is an abstraction or feeling. In place of our consciousness of it we have only a sense of it and unless it finds a means of expression through religious or other collective sentiments, symbols and rituals it may remain the vague idea of a power at large in the world. But Durkheim was very clear that it was not based on just the raw power society wielded over us. It was always intertwined with a moral sense of responsibility of the sort one feels when one belongs to something that one respects. This I can also relate to through my school experience. While it was something of a frightening power I was not given to conform merely because it was powerful but because I did respect it, was proud of it, and proud that I was a part of it. Its power was in part built from respect and the authority given to it by its constituent members. Modern nationalism has washed over many people and countries in a similar way, sweeping them along, always making great use of emblems and symbols. Although many might think that in this case here is a cult of people who very obviously understand their nationalist religion and all that is sacred to them as deriving from the economic, military or cultural might of their society, it is surprising how often it is dressed up as deriving from a natural phenomenon. Society represents itself as a natural phenomenon, arising from the motherland, a common blood, born from the soil, emerging from mythic ancestors and destined to act organism-like as one people. The Nazis papered over the massive ethnic and cultural mixing resulting from the political unification of separate German-speaking states in the nineteenth century, using natural metaphors and an invented German mythology. Even if one has never sensed the greater power that nationalism generates among its followers in times of great political and military ferment, it is difficult to miss the lesser passion aroused by national sporting teams during international tournaments.

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Moreover, sociologists of the contemporary period have discovered that postmodern secular society is just as vulnerable to totemic religiosity as the Aborigines, even if it is less sophisticated and shorter lived. The Italian sociologist Michel Maffasoli has called the sentiments and religiosity that coalesce around shared leisure interests in Western cultures ‘neo-tribal’. In order to demonstrate this, Maffasoli had to relate them to special social conditions that emerged in the 1990s, but Durkheim had in effect to do the same thing with Aborigines. How precisely could they have come to imagine the social power of the clan as a mystical force surrounding them, acting on their world? To provide an answer to this Durkheim summarised the way in which Aboriginal life was set in two contrasting periods: the profane, ordinary world of gathering foods, travelling to new hunting and gathering grounds, sleeping, looking after children, making fires and so on with the religious life, and the sacred, special world of births, deaths, initiations, marriage and rituals. In a great many Aboriginal tribes these two conditions of life provide a very different and geographically separate social environment for the individual. Because marriage rules require that one must marry outside the clan of which one is a member, the everyday groups or bands consisting of married couples, their children and their children’s children tend to be people from different clans. And because these bands tend to forage in defined areas, if not territories at some considerable distance from others in the tribe, it means that when clans meet for their sacred business, a great deal of excitement is generated as people are reunited after long periods apart. All people are born into a clan and this is usually determined according to whether one must join one’s mother’s or one’s father’s clan – both types of rule are found in Australia. Unlike bands that deliver bread-and-butter items, clans hold great power over an individual in terms of their responsibilities to protect each other, to uphold quite onerous ritual and religious obligations, over matters relating to law, punishment, marriage, initiation, birth and death. Indeed, all of the momentous aspects of human life-chances are

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governed by clans. Unlike the dispersed daily wanderings of the bands, the clan life and ritual are focused around key sacred sites, not least the site where it is believed their totemic ancestor emerged during the Dreamtime when the earth was first animated with people, animals, weather, plants and so on. And it is to the clan centres that clan members return, often over great distances, for their sacred totemic business. It was those sacred rituals to which Spencer and Gillen were privy, as well as the more open gatherings or corroborris, that Durkheim returns to in order to screw home the last bolts of his explanation. How did they perceive this clan force and how did it become embedded in, and indistinguishable from, the symbols and emblems of their clan? So far we have ritual objects playing their part in this as a focus of thought, but they only truly come to life through performance. According to Durkheim, a mood of excitement is generated from the very time messengers are despatched to summon clan members; ‘everything changes’ from the mood of the everyday that he described as ‘uniform, dull and languishing’.23 Once the clan is assembled, ‘a sort of electricity is formed by their collecting which quickly transports them to an extraordinary degree of exaltation. Every sentiment expressed finds a place without resistance in all the minds, which are very open to outside impressions; each reechoes the others, and is re-echoed by the others.’ The key word in Durkheim’s description of these occasions is effervescence, a crescendo of physical and mental activity in which individuals are carried outside themselves by the collective effects of their actions, perceiving the world in a very different way: The initial impulse thus proceeds, growing as it goes, as an avalanche grows in its advance. And as such active passions so free from all control could not fail to burst out, on every side one sees nothing but violent gestures, cries, veritable howls, and deafening noises of every sort, which aid in intensifying still more the state of mind which they manifest. And since a collective sentiment cannot express itself except on condition of observing a certain order permitting co-operation and move-

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ments in unison, these gestures and cries naturally tend to become rhythmic and regular; hence come songs and dances. But in taking a more regular form, they lose nothing of their natural violence; a regulated tumult remains tumult. The human voice is not sufficient for the task; it is reinforced by means of artificial processes: boomerangs are beaten against each other; bull roarers are whirled … This effervescence often reaches such a point that it causes unheard-of actions … They are so far removed from their ordinary condition of life, and they are so thoroughly conscious of it, that they feel that they must set themselves outside of and above their ordinary morals. The sexes unite contrarily to the rules governing sexual relations. Men exchange wives with each other. Sometimes even incestuous unions, which in normal times are thought abominable and are severely punished, are now contracted openly and with impunity.24

Durkheim also included an extended description of a ritual observed among the Warramunga which took place at night and which adds further to the ritual effects on perception that Durkheim was trying to describe. Commencing at nightfall, all sorts of processions, dances and songs had taken place by torchlight; the general effervescence was constantly increasing. At a given moment, twelve assistants each took a great lighted torch in their hands, and one of them holding his like a bayonet, charged into the group of natives. Blows were warded off with clubs and spears. A general melee followed. The men leaped and pranced about, uttering savage yells all the time; the burning torches continually came crashing down on the heads and bodies of the men, scattering lighted sparks in every direction. ‘The smoke, the blazing torches, the shower of sparks falling in every direction and the masses of dancing, yelling men,’ say Spencer and Gillen, ‘formed altogether a genuinely wild and savage scene of which it is impossible to convey any adequate idea in words’.25

So these ritual occasions produce an extraordinary state of consciousness through the excitement of anticipation, the singing and dancing that went on for hours on end or all night; the rhythmic pulsing and coordination of voice, musical instrument and body; the extraordinary transgressive sex, the smoke and the light-

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shows from fires and burning torches. This spectacle, Durkheim believed, created in the mind of the participant the presence of a power that was above and beyond the mere collective efforts of the clan: the sum was far greater than the parts. Yet this power was at the same time anchored specifically, exclusively and secretly in the clan to which they were members through their performance. It was a power therefore that spoke directly to them yet could only be invoked when their clan assembled. For Durkheim, ritual performances such as these established a reality for what he calls the world of sacred things: One can readily conceive how, when arrived at this state of exaltation, a man does not recognise himself any longer. Feeling himself dominated and carried away by some sort of an external power which makes him think and act differently than in normal times, he naturally has the impression of being himself no longer. It seems to him that he has become a new being: the decoration he puts on and the masks that cover his face figure materially in this interior transformation, and to a still greater extent, they aid in determining its nature. And at the same time all his companions feel themselves transformed in the same way and express this sentiment by their cries, their gestures and their general attitude, everything is just as though he really were transported into a special world, entirely different from the one where he ordinarily lives, and into an environment filled with exceptionally intense forces that take hold of him and metamorphose him. How could such experiences as these, especially when they are repeated every day for weeks, fail to leave him with the conviction that there really exist two … mutually incomparable worlds … the first is the profane world, the second that of sacred things.26

That these occasions are the source of religious sentiments, the perception of the parallel world of the sacred and the association of an external force with the clan, is confirmed for Durkheim by the fact that these are virtually the only occasions in which religion is practised among Aborigines. The contrast between the everyday world of the profane and the religious world of the sacred is absolute, so what occurs during them is critical. But even with the idea established that the clan must be the

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power invoked as an external power and an understanding of how that power is perceived as such, Durkheim still felt his explanation incomplete. ‘We must still demand how it happens that these forces are thought of under the form of totems, that is to say, in the shape of an animal or plant.’27 The answer to this is quite simple: ‘It is because this animal or plant has given its name to the clan and serves as its emblem. In fact, it is a well-known law that the sentiments aroused in us by something spontaneously attach themselves to the symbol which represents them.’ So for Durkheim it is important that at the time of great ritual effervescence some kind of connection to the totemic symbols be made. The detailed descriptions of Spencer and Gillen, not to say the copious photos taken, confirm that the one thing that stands out on everything and everybody at such times was the clan symbol. It is on the churingas of course, on the bull whirrers, on shields, masks and headdresses and even etched into the sand on which they stand, the trees around them and on the rocks nearby. But also flashing around them on backs and chests of the clan participants are large-format clan symbols, as obvious and standardised as academic gowns, sports or military uniform. How could this image, repeated everywhere and in all sorts of forms, fail to stand out with exceptional relief in his mind? Placed thus in the centre of the scene, it becomes representative. The sentiments experienced fix themselves upon it, for it is the only concrete object upon which they can fix themselves. It continues to bring them to mind and to evoke them even after the assembly has dissolved, for it survives the assembly, being carved upon the instruments of the cult, upon the sides of rocks, upon bucklers etc. By it the emotions experienced are perpetually sustained and revived. Everything happens just as if they inspired them directly … while the generations change, it remains the same; it is the permanent element of the social life.28

This is why Aboriginal sacred objects are such powerful things, why they are so closely guarded and objects of such secrecy and such lethal laws for those who break them. It is an awesome power concentrated and harnessed inside small insignificant-looking bits of

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stone and wood. With characteristic simplicity Durkheim wraps up the complex and crucial role that sacred objects and symbols play in the foundations of totemism. ‘In a general way, a collective sentiment can become conscious of itself only by being fixed upon some material object; but by this very fact, it participates in the nature of this object, and reciprocally, the object participates in its nature.’29 We have now seen how Emile Durkheim solved the difficult question of totemism, the enigma of people who are at the same time animals. For him the power that Aborigines perceive all around them as an external force was indeed an accurate perception, not the fault of inferior, sloppy, deluded or hallucinatory thought. They were also right in thinking the power resided in their clan totem, though, as we have seen, the mystery of how it got there was difficult if not impossible for them to deduce. It always seemed to them to be an external force, acting on them in the most crucial aspects of their lives, and it would have been impossible for them to see how the power of the clan itself contributed to this sense, especially since during clan rituals it appeared to emanate from the clan’s symbols. A perception of a superior, external force in their lives was heightened during rituals that defined a different world from that of the everyday, the sacred world. It was during magical moments where song, dance and trance-like states occurred and where the normal world was turned topsy-turvy that individuals experienced this other world as a solid reality, a tangible if somewhat mysterious and ill-defined world but one that was unmistakably theirs alone. Their clan emblems emblazoned on everything and everyone present became inextricably fixed to this sacred world and became the most powerful objects in their life, to be kept secret at clan centres and to be brought out only for ritual. In a sense then, the symbols were quite arbitrary except that within the tribe no two clans could possibly have the same one. Durkheim did venture a thought on why it was that animals dominated their choice, although we know that certain plants were also chosen. He felt that they had to be chosen for some reason that was associated with the clan, possibly around the special sites of clan

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gatherings. Perhaps these animals or plants were characteristic or prevalent at these places in the way that micro-environments often favour one species in particular. In the end, it does not matter for Durkheim since almost anything unique would fit the bill. Once the symbol had been animated by the life of the clan in the manner Durkheim conjectured, it took on a life as both protector and power in clan life but also as their original ancestor. Individuals may come and go, but in and through these totemic ties to places, objects, species and symbols the clan maintains a permanence in the landscape. It is the beginning, the past and the future. Durkheim’s theory, like all theories close to a hundred years old, are vulnerable to new reflections, reinterpretations, new evidence and, it has to be said, changing fashion and politics. It has not come out unscathed though it is still in many respects alive and well, with some of the best scholars of our times still employing those concepts and ideas worked out in relation to totemism in Australia. I have seen it employed in the analysis of football hooliganism, youth cultures, nationalism, pilgrimage, tourism, and, as we shall see later on, of environmentalism. The great anthropologist EE Evans Pritchard said that Durkheim’s theory of totemism ‘is more than just neat; it is brilliant, imaginative, almost poetical’, though he added that it was still ‘a just-so story’.30 This is not such a condemnation as it sounds. Some aspects of his theory, such as the origins of religious experience, cannot be firmly grasped since it all happened so long ago, so we have to imagine an explanation that best fits the known facts – though as we shall see later on, it is possible to follow the birth of a new cult involving nature in contemporary times.

THE LIMITATIONS OF DURKHEIM’S ‘JUST-SO STORY’ Such questions as Durkheim posed to himself went out of fashion as anthropology got out of its chairbound phase and went out into the real world, treading the path of Spencer and Gillen and attend-

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ing to things that anthropologists could see and ask questions about. But coming up with a ‘just-so story’ that may or may not be true is still not that bad. We certainly know that his rival theorists were almost certainly pursuing silly or mad notions about the origins of totemism, and in the process venturing into racist evolutionary waters. More to the point, Durkheim was always looking for a just-so story that the Aborigines could have imagined for themselves as well as one that made sense to people such as us, looking from the outside. Durkheim’s just-so story makes sense and has a humanity about it that is plausible and dignified. His use of trance-like states as a way of breaking loose from our human world and making fusions with the natural world are currently very voguish among theorists seeking to explain the dramatic nature cults of our own times.31 Evans Pritchard chides Durkheim’s notion of social reality for deploying a mix of physiological and psychological terms in his explanation of ritual effervescence.32 But why should sociologists be restricted to purely social explanations, as if the world was purely social? This is clearly not what Durkheim had in mind. Today I think we would probably want to say more than Durkheim without rejecting his contribution out of hand. We might want to reconsider those external forces and objects in the environment and Aboriginal relationships with the natural world and get our fieldworkers to provide as accurate a picture of those as Spencer and Gillen did of their social and ritual life. For most of the ethnography available to Durkheim contained practically nothing relating to what we these days want to discover about indigenous cultures and their environment. So pitiful was this detail that Durkheim was able to describe it all on the profane side of life, as ‘uniform, dull, and languishing’. We know, for example, that hunters and gatherers become as entranced by and as excited about the plants and animals they rely on as they do on ritual occasions, and the techniques required to read a landscape and garner food from it require an altogether sharper intellectual stance that was allowed for at the beginning of

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the twentieth century. That this landscape was also a landscape of powers, appearances, disappearances, deceptions, sudden bounties, extraordinary weather, perfect conjunctures and the ways in which the human body was able to tune into this and make all manner of sensory connections has led recent social theorists to avoid any essential division between humanity and the natural world.33 It is not very far from there to considering ourselves related to nature – the essential thought emanating from totemic cultures in Australia. The close proximity and ritual significance of animals to Aborigines assisted in separating them from settler society. They were both part of a disquieting primitivism that shocked and disturbed an embryonic community already prone to an insecure and isolated self-image. Certainly they were not sufficiently selfassured to embrace Australian nature and peoples as part of their self-identity and future. Indeed, as we shall see in the next chapter, both the Aborigines and Australian animals were denied and excised from the landscape. Through a process I am going to call ‘Britainisation’ they were not just removed but replaced. The animals were replaced with a range of introduced and acclimatised animals, mainly from Britain, while an attempt was made to transform Aboriginality through policies and practices of assimilation. We will see in particular how this massive ecological reordering was achieved and with what ironic consequences. We will see, for example, that the more successful and at home this made them feel, the less they felt the need to cleave to their sacred British nature. As the felt need to assert Britishness waned, so Australian nationalism began to bond itself, rather late in the day, to Australian nature. Not only that, but nationalism was consolidated through a latterday championing of the somewhat down-at-heel Australian species and privileging of them against the now rejected British and other foreign interlopers. This extraordinary about-turn is the subject of chapter 5.

Chapter 4

C H A N G I N G N AT U R E

… the same ragged gun trees, reminding you of men with dirty tattered shirts … the same charred, prostrate trunks like blackfellows knocked down in a drunken squabble … the same black stumps, like foul decaying teeth … the same not grass, but graminaceous scurf, as if the earth had got ringworm.1 Colonial art is the comic knack of rendering the new as the old, the unknown as the known, the antipodean as the European, the contemptible as the respectable.2

This chapter reveals how British settlers of all ranks executed one of the most extraordinary and audacious acts of environmental intervention. They sought, at first informally and then quite systematically and institutionally, to introduce British wildlife into Australia, to transform Australia into a likeness of Britain. At the same time, farmers, hunters and bounty-hunters were systematically clearing away the native animals in a manner so cold and calculating that it betrayed their absolute lack of affection or admiration – or connection to them. Although the clearing of natives and the introduction of their replacements were done independently and separately, the overall effect was unmistakable: native animals were being replaced by introduced British wildlife. The Australian panorama was not only

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being remade in the likeness of Britain through the establishment of a farming and pastoral landscape, but it was to be accompanied by the wild animals, birdsong and plant life that complete its natural history. It was a British or Imperial dreaming, for it was from British dominions rather than Britain alone that the new nature was imported. With only the benefit of a zoological training, Tim Low, the author of Feral Future and The New Nature, can only see it as ‘a madness’. But we will be able to unpick its underlying origins and rationale. One thing is for sure: we need to track back to understand who these new settlers were and how they experienced Australia.

THE NEED TO CHANGE THE LANDSCAPE Why should this have happened? Why would an emerging colonial state predicated on world travel and governed by those who had seen the world and extolled the virtues of natures beyond the UK as the exotic sublime, wish to make such a drastic fabrication? Why would a culture so in the grip of the romantic imagination, with a deep spiritual affection for forests, wild natures and wildlife wish to so tame and domesticate the one remaining continent of unrivalled pristine nature? Where was the same awe, respect and reverence given by the North Americans to their nature? Why, in a country where the very basics of life were so hard to procure, would Britons go to such lengths to acclimatise their own nature? In this chapter, this enigmatic process of Britainisation will be described and accounted for. What clearly lies at the root of this seemingly mad activity was an association not so dissimilar from the totemic cult we saw in the previous chapter; it is to do with the symbolic and metaphoric power of animals to bind a community together. Here we consider how a socially disembedded, rejected and exiled society built a sense of collectivity and its emblematic and ritual expression through the importation and nurturance of a nature that was perceived to express who they were.

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The art of the time offers a few important clues as to how this process began. The very first images made of Australia coincided with the fashion back in Europe for the exotic sublime, and for this even gum trees were frequently ‘omitted’. ‘Discoveries’ encouraged a new category of experience to be admitted to the canon of art: the exotic, and this rapidly gained popularity, especially among Romantics. Such a view transformed the formal scientific, botanical and zoological drawings that had been fashionable into versions that were aesthetically interesting and, above all perhaps, collectable. English ideas about Australia changed as its oddness transformed into exotica and scientific intrigue, and visiting artists expected and painted the exotic even where, as in the case of Thomas Watling’s View of Sydney Cove, none really existed – it was ‘pure self-hypnosis’, says the art critic Robert Hughes.3 A certain artistic licence was used in the representation of Australia and although its strangeness and weirdness were included, it is also true that much of the nature was denied and given a Romantic gloss. This extended to views of the inhabited areas such as the Sydney Harbour area (scrubby plains painted as exotic tropical forest) and of indigenous people who were painted after the image of noble Greek warriors. Such commissioned artwork was not unrelated to the need to make Australia attractive to free settlers and other colonial personnel. This was a deception that resulted in much misery. From the point of view of the settlers themselves, some time down the track, the allure of Australian nature diminished dramatically through experience. During the early colonial period the Australian landscape and its nature was reported in terms of its primitiveness, its lack of ‘civilisation’, its strangeness and its ugliness. We can tell from the diaries of explorers that after a relatively short time the extravagant and astonishing differences billed by the boosters of colonial Australia soon passed into a commonplace, and even, it seems, to a widely reported monotony. What gave Australia its monotonous tone were the eucalyptus trees: ‘across old Australia eucalypts’, says the botanist Pyne, ‘comprised some ninety-five per

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cent of the constituent tree species’.4 Travellers complained about the lack of variety and change in the landscape. Even the most alert and enthusiastic of them were prone to write of this effect. In 1839, for example, Charles Darwin, the indefatigable admirer of nature per se, wrote: ‘The extreme uniformity of the vegetation is the most remarkable feature in the landscape of the greater part of New South Wales … whether the stumps [of trees] were more or less black was the greatest change which varied the uniformity, so wearisome to the traveller’s eye.’5 Moreover, it also had an unnerving effect on Britons, who failed to find it as attractive as other Pacific landscapes (the more worked-over, gardened landscapes of the tropics and islands). Georgiana Molloy wrote of her disquiet as a newcomer to the Australian bush: ‘This is certainly a very beautiful place – but were it not for domestic charms the eye of the emigrant would soon weary of the unbounded limits of thickly clothed dark green forests where nothing can be descried to feast the imagination.’6 This theme emerges strongly in almost every account, and the felt need to change the landscape is inescapable. ‘Nowhere else had settlers so utterly failed to identify with their new landscape; nowhere else was man’s environmental impact so patently reprehensible.’7 A similar emotional response to the environment influenced early Australian/colonial poetry and delayed the adoption of the Romantic imagination that dominated the English vision of the landscape: ‘The foundations of poetry and landscape art in Australia were laid down in the closing part of the eighteenth century, and were more Gothic – rational, picturesque or Gothic – than romantic, even though what was happening in the colonies was contemporary with actively revolutionary movements in European artistic, no less than political, history.’8 Certainly, interpreting Molloy, the biotic community, the trees, flora and fauna were deemed beautiful in themselves. But the qualities that disturbed and unsettled the European mind had to do with the aesthetics of landscape: in England, landscape beauty was founded on a human-constructed (humanised) nature where both

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humans and nature coexisted. Even the allegedly wild landscapes of the Lake District were highly fashioned (dry stone wall and stone field divisions, tree plantations, ‘herds’ of domesticated animals or the ritually hunted animal, bridged streams, weirs, railways, even evidence of mining and tourists). Thus in Australia it was the perceived absence of humanisation of the landscape that looked so profoundly ‘wrong’ – true wilderness was not romantic, partly because there was insufficient human presence to make that possible, as well as the fact that individual biotic categories were not a readable system of signs as they were in the familiar home landscape. Louisa Clifton was brought to Western Australia by her father in 1841 and wrote her diary as the bush was being transformed into homestead. On Wednesday, 26 May 1841, some fifty days after arriving in Australia, she wrote: ‘It is astonishing how much the hand of man improves nature (unless particularly picturesque), throwing an air of interest upon a scene otherwise tame and unstriking.’ A distance of half a mile I should think has been cleared of bushes and trees which are left in lines on each side of the road which is very wide, and being still green with vegetation looks tempting for a ride on horseback. It is wooded down to the water’s edge, but not with many pretty trees, the banksia prevailing, which is particularly ugly. We sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree while Papa used his hatchet in opening in parts a peep of the waters of the inlet looking now rather angry, now bright and blue as the squalls which we have had frequently today play upon or pass over its surface.9

Back in England, Australia failed to stir the exotic romantic sublime reserved for many other parts of the Pacific, and influential critics often used Australia metaphorically as the place of abomination. The star of London’s literati, William Hazlitt, described Van Diemen’s Land, today ranked so highly for its natural beauty, as ‘barren, miserable, distant, a place of exile, the dreary abode of savages, convicts, and adventurers’.10 Of course, another paradoxical British error was to miss the extensive Aboriginal intervention in the Australian landscape. Aboriginal fire

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technology created the one type of landscape that appealed to the European mind (parkland grasslands), yet Europeans perceived the landscape as ‘wild’ and the land ‘virtually uninhabited’.11 The fine expanses of grasslands, the balance of open and closed spaces, the mosaic character of vegetation that resulted from patchwork burning and the intricate networks of tracks through the bush that the Aboriginal people had created, all made the island, Tasmania, an attractive prospect for English settlers. Here was no howling wilderness but meadows and parks, inhabited by a people ‘so few in number and so timorous that they need not be mentioned’.12 At a more mundane level one can say that early colonial life was also hard and left little time, energy or inclination for aesthetic appreciation. As Ronald Conway said, ‘The first settlers in Philip’s time had grappled with a forbidding environment so as to be merely housed and fed.’13 ‘Forbidding’ is a key word in the sense that nature seemed not to be a benevolent force as it was experienced in the highly ordered British landscapes and in tropical climes, but rather, nature pushed against the would-be settler, creating an angry and aggressive response. It is for this reason that Conway wrote: ‘The economic staple which was to justify the colony after 1820 was, of its nature, well-adapted to the growing pattern of cheating rather than conserving the environment.’14 Perhaps because of this lack of long-term emotional investment in the landscape, settler society felt ambiguous and ambivalent. As Martin Mulligan and Stuart Hill comment, ‘they came to conquer wilderness, but were often left feeling disappointed and deluded.’15 Early settlement necessitated clearing native forest (unlike in the tropics where many native trees were often simply more selectively planted) and establishing pasture for British farm species. Bolton’s Spoils and Spoilers devotes an entire chapter to this process, which is entitled simply ‘They Hated Trees’, by which he means Australian native trees. Trees in such vast forests were believed to be unhealthy at that time and the speed with which the native forests were cut down, often using cheap Chinese labour, was unparalleled.16 ‘The first Europeans in New South Wales may

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well have been oppressed by what they saw as the vastness of its forests. To most settlers, trees were just a nuisance to be cleared to make room for building or farming.’17 David Horton describes a colonising mentality that saw bush and scrub as mere ‘rubbish vegetation’ in need of clearing.18 But it was not only the unending forests of trees and the enormous hard labour required to work with them. The early settlers had to tackle vast populations of native animals, especially grass and clover eaters such as kangaroos, wallabies and possums, whose populations exploded in response to the decline of Aboriginal hunting and the planting of cereals. The anger and frustration of farming under such pressure was captured by the writer ‘Steele Rudd’ (Arthur H. Davis): Slowly and reluctantly we left that roaring fireside to accompany Dad that bitter night. It was a night! – dark as pitch, silent, forlorn and forbidding, and colder than the busiest morgue. And just to keep wallabies from eating nothing? They had eaten all the wheat – every blade of it – and the grass as well. What they would start on next – ourselves or the cart-horses – wasn’t quite clear … We lost no time in lighting the fires. Then we walked through the ‘wheat’ and wallabies! May Satan reprove me if I exaggerate their number by one solitary pair of ears – from the row and scatter they made there was a million.19

By the mid-century Australia had become something of a killing field for its indigenous animals, whose presence and fertility seemed inexhaustible. The naturalist George Bennett was moved to describe this as ‘the war of extermination recklessly waged against them’. They might have been valued food for the starving fledgling colony, but their food value was often denied. Antoine Fauchery, for example, in his Lettres d’un Mineur en Australie of 1857 described the ‘execrable flesh’ of native animals.20 It is worth noting Drew Hutton and Libby Connors’ remark that concern for conservation and preservation of native wildlife did not emerge until the 1890s.21 But the demand to Britainise Australia rested not merely on the active push of native animals against farming or the failure to appreciate primordial landscapes as beautiful. It also drew on

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nostalgia and homesickness among a people for whom their own nature was extremely significant. According to Ronald Conway, early settler society cleaved to whatever urban gentility could be reproduced in Sydney: They were rarely prepared to consider the possibility of the wilderness that lay beyond the nineteen counties. Australia’s first community was formed by outcasts from a heartless, inhumane society. Yet, judging by the letters which have come down to us, gaolers and free settlers alike thought of the parent society in England with longing, as exiles. If life were to be endured, Sydney should be made as much like an English town as possible.22

It was not only in Sydney that this impression can be formed. In Port Philip, Charles La Trobe complained to the London publisher John Murray: You, my dear Sir, have never been transported 16,000 miles from civilisation and cannot imagine what it is to be cast so far beyond the reach of the thousand daily means of improvement and enjoyment which they possess who breathe the air of Europe. I have called our present position Exile and so it is to all intents and purposes.’

According to Conway, this view was expressed everywhere, even half a century after the foundation of Sydney: ‘Governor Gawler can be found expressing the same sentiments from the tiny community of Adelaide, while the letters sent home from Swan River were the most doleful of all.’23 To individual testaments in letters can be added the poetry inspired by human attempts to acclimatise to an Australian environment and rural economy. This is a highly gendered poetry in which women faced oblivion and sorrow and where men became bitter and gloomy. George Essex Evans (1863–1909) wrote the heartfelt battler poem ‘The Women of the West’ in which a powerful contrast between origin and destination was made: They left the vine-wreathed cottage and the mansion on the hill, The houses in the busy streets where life is never still, The pleasures of the city, and the friends they cherished best: For love they faced the wilderness – the Women of the West.

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Life in the wilderness replaced ‘the roar and rush, and fever of the city’ for ‘the lurching coach wheel, or the creaking bullock chains,/O’er the everlasting sameness of the never ending plains’. To judge from this tradition of poetry it was an insecure, temporary gamble of a life in which those things that defined Western femininity were compromised: The red sun robs their beauty, and, in weariness and pain, The slow years steal the nameless grace that never comes again; And there are hours men cannot soothe, and words men cannot say – The nearest woman’s face may be a hundred miles away.24

The resulting female character the poets conjured was captured best by the bitter, hardened woman of Henry Lawson’s Past Carin’: Through Death and Trouble, turn about, Through hopeless desolation, Through flood and fever, fire and drought, And slavery and starvation: Through childbirth sickness, hurt and blight, And nervousness an’ scarin’, Through bein’ left alone at night, I’ve got to be past carin’. Past botherin’ or carin’, Past feelin’ or carin’, Through city cheats and neighbours’ spite, I’ve come to be past carin’.

Louis Esson’s ‘The Shearer’s Wife’ evokes the hard physical labour of bush life for a woman but also the boredom and lack of aesthetic payoff: I patch and darn, now evening comes An’ tired I am with labour sore Tired o’ the bush, the cows, the gums, Tired, but must dree for long months more, what no tongue tells, The moon is lonely in the sky, Lonely the bush, and lonely I.

This enduring sorrow contrasts with the on/off enthusiasm and energy of the men, which eventually goes the way of resignation and despondency. The poets of this sensibility are Lawson and Adam Lindsay Gordon but also John O’Brien (P.J. Hartigan) and his gloomy character Hanrahan:

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And so the chorus ran ‘It’s keepin’ dry, no doubt.’ ‘We’ll all be rooned’ said Hanrahan, ‘Before the year is out.’

Such fatalism was based on past experience and the anxiety related to the determined effort that had been made to make things work despite the odds. As David Malouf makes clear, the early colonists were determined and creative, affording most if not all of the amenities available back home within the first two decades. It was, moreover, ‘an inventiveness and industry beyond the mere making do … [It was] a determination to create a world here that would be the old world in all its diversity.’25 In 1870 Adam Lindsay Gordon committed suicide after hearing that his claim to a Scottish estate had been turned down. In 1873 Marcus Clarke was asked to write a preface to a collection of his poems and as Mulligan and Hill note, this became something of a defining moment in the history of early white settlement in the Australian bush. Summoning all the force of Gordon and other poetry, art and literatures, Clarke wrote of the ‘strong and disturbing influence that Australian landscapes had on those who venture into them’.26 In 1862 the Art Gallery of Victoria offered a prize to inaugurate its intention to purchase works of Australian art. In describing the winning entry, a mountain landscape by Nicholas Chevalier, Marcus Clarke offered the following similar, moody remarks: The Australian mountain forests are funereal, secret, stern. Their solitude is despair. No tender sentiment is nourished in their shade. In other lands the dying year is mourned, and falling leaves drop lightly on the bier. In the Australian forests, no leaves fall. The savage wind shouts among the rock-clefts. From the melancholy gums, strips of white bark hang and rustle … All is fear inspiring and gloomy. No bright fancies are linked with the memory of these mountains. Despairing explorers have named them out of their suffering – Mount Misery, Mount Dreadful, Mount Hopeless.27

Summing up, Conway argued that ‘Australia was not to be hoped for as a New Zion as the Pilgrim Fathers thought of the New

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World; it was not even the source of plunder – human and material – offered by the Gold Coast of Africa. It was a depressing environment to be muffled as far as possible by the familiar, the nostalgically remembered.’28 Some have said that this extreme view was produced in the aftermath of Gordon’s suicide; others (for example Bernard Smith) have said it also projected something of the guilt experienced by whites in the absolute displacement of Aboriginal people from the land, while yet others, such as Mulligan and Hill, say that this is a selective and one-sided reading of Clarke, who went on to extol the virtues of the Australian landscape, how ‘the dweller in the wilderness acknowledges the subtle charm of this fantastic land of monstrosities’. More recently, the ‘weird melancholy’ that was evidently in Gordon’s own work, and those of his contemporaries and forebears, has been challenged by Eric Rolls, whose new book Visions of Australia claims to ‘remake the perception of Australia’. Rolls disputes the generalisation that Europeans did not find Australia beautiful. Rather, such a view derived from ‘the eyes of settlers trying to build farms with insufficient land, insufficient money and insufficient knowledge’.29 As we will see, this was not an insignificant group and the new opinion he has found is rather exceptional. With one hundred recorded opinions, ‘selected’ rather than sampled, from those ‘who saw the land one hundred to three hundred years ago’, he claims that ‘they transform the modern notions of a harsh landscape into a garden of wild flowers’. I am not sure his evidence is as convincing as that. While it has to be conceded that some did indeed see beauty where others did not, Australia failed to inspire the same aesthetic response that the European homelands had, or most of the other new lands. To say that it did contradicts what we tend to emphasise today, that it can be a difficult place to live and requires a different approach and, presumably, a different sensibility and aesthetic, from that developed in Europe.30 It is also true that Rolls’ selection came from one of several ‘types’ of viewer whose subsequent positive writings were biased by various forms of self-interest or privilege.

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Included in these types we can group together those who wrote guides for Europeans interested in travel, prospecting and settlement in the new land. Accounts such as those by Charles Jefferys in Tasmania, c. 1819, and William Kingdom Jun. in the Bathurst Plain, c. 1818, bristle with their estimations of the land’s bounteous resources and livelihoods. As Rolls himself admits, Jefferys’ ‘description of the great extent of open country in the east and centre led too many settlers to believe that the whole of Tasmania held similar country’.31 There can be no doubt that such euphemistic surveys and guides contributed, alongside the early exotic art, to the very melancholy that Rolls seeks to dispute. Another type very prominent in Rolls’ selection includes those commissioned or encouraged to survey or otherwise explore new tracts of land. Inevitably these people passed quickly through the landscape and were inclined to make snap judgments about its utility or prospect. These are very often nothing more than a litany of claims for the land, should it be lucky enough to fall into the right farming or landowning hands. The claims of excellent pasturage with minimum tree cover and understorey became the trademark of these reports and diaries, often written in a breathless, excited tone. Related to this type were the scientific expeditioners, plant collectors and other explorers. We can be sure, however, that their pleasure at seeing new forms of creation related not necessarily only to their own aesthetic sensibility but to their own careers, professional interests and publishing potential. We have to remember that these were exciting times of discovery and the market for reports of new finds, new astonishing country and resources was considerable. Many of these writings were published and sought after. We can hardly expect exaggeration or spin to be absent when it was so craved. In still others, the positive view was formed during what were clearly very favourable and unusual conditions rather than on any reliable period of experience. Hence we have Jaques Arago, an officer draughtsman aboard the French scientific ship L’Uranie, providing a view of Sydney in the spring of 1819, based on a five-

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week stay from 18 November. Sydney is evidently at its verdant best and covered with new flowers. Then there is Arthur Mason’s 1896 description of the Nullarbor Plain after rains: ‘The country had the appearance of an immense farm, covered with all varieties of grasses, flowers and shrubs … The flowers were beautiful to see and consisted of Sturt peas, marguerites, daisies and everlastings.’ Also included was Lionel Gee’s description of the Tanami Desert after 111/2 inches of rain: ‘Everything is green, bright, and at its best. Broadleaved climbers twine and twist among the trees and bushes, creepers sprawl along the ground, curious herb plants and grasses grow between the clumps of Spinifex, and patches of luxuriant bunch-grass are seen here and there.’32 Finally, there are more than just a few accounts originating from Australia’s landed bourgeoisie living a life of considerable comfort and ease. Hence Annabella Boswell, who lived, according to Rolls, in ‘the biggest and most beautiful country home built in New South Wales’, supplies a very positive view of her immediate environs. ‘I was delighted and scrambling up the western side of the farthest hill – but in imagination travelling into cloud land, when I was cruelly called back to lunch. It really is a pretty place. We had luncheon under a shady bank – and with our sandwiches was a bottle of port wine!’ Equally, the gentleman Sir John Jamison’s participation on the exploration up the Warragamba reads much like a sporting holiday for the broadacre landowner – which he was. His observations were primed by an ‘abundance of ducks’ and a ‘river plentifully supplied with very superior perch, mullet, herrings, gudgeon and eels’. Coal deposits caught his eye, as did a great many other mineral and geological potentials.33 Finally, the selection includes what must be the archetypal account of the colonial dream: a land of extraordinary, free plenty. This is what fired the imagination of so many settlers but so miserably failed to turn up on closer inspection. Here is David W. Carnegie at Shiddi Pool, Western Australia, in 1896: ‘the pool was a favourite resort for hundreds of birds – crows, galahs, parakeets pigeons and sparrows and numerous dingoes. Of the bronzewings,

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which at sundown and before sunrise lined the rocks in hundreds, we shot as many as we wanted. How thick they were can be judged by the result of one barrel, which killed fourteen.’34 And here is A.C. Grant in the Chinchilla area of Queensland, 1863–65. He begins his report of ‘immense numbers of wild escapee cattle’, some twelve thousand on the Chinchilla station alone. But the land of plenty is boundless: ‘The bush was full of life, of beast and bird … It might be that we would hunt a kangaroo if he came temptingly near, or we would procure wild honey or scrub turkey eggs during the noon day spell, or fish in a waterhole which never previously had been disturbed by the hand of an angler.’35 So these extraordinary expeditions and extraordinary lives and the market for stories extraordinary did produce strings of superlatives to describe Australia and they in turn lured the unsuspecting dreamers from a cruel and heartless land. But the overwhelming tendency, once the settler had settled, was to miss home, resent the bush, and try to imagine a better future. That imagination was powerful. Combined with the huge scope to transform and change their so-called empty land, it is hardly surprising that they imagined this landscape of difference, anomaly and hostility metamorphosed into another Britain. By the time Anthony Trollope travelled in Australia in the 1870s he was to bemoan the fact that everything around him was perfectly familiar and homely. He was after a touch of the exotic, but for thousands upon thousands of miles all was Britain personified, from the trains to the farms, to the parks and gardens and from bush to city. How did that happen?

BRITAINISING AUSTRALIA Self-help, like charity begins at home. One of the first attempts to Britainise Australia, therefore, was in domestic and municipal gardens. Large collections of English flora were imported and planted widely.36 Indeed, inventories of the earliest ships to Australia showed that garden plants were one of the most significant and longed for imports: ‘Imported plants became a living

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memory for immigrant women in colonial Australia, that kept their homeland alive in their recollection, giving it a timeless aspect that became a metaphor for a place of perfection; a place that could be used as a blue-print in this new land.’37 New histories of early gardeners in Australia illustrate the extent of this passion. For example, Paul Fox details the lives of six colonial gardeners including Thomas Lang, who alone ‘imported more than a million plants into the country’.38 Municipal plantings and park layouts also tended to favour English trees, which in turn Britainised townscapes. According to JA Daly, Adelaide was at first no more than a collection of huts and tents’, but by 1850 a visitor described it as ‘resembling an English town. English trees replaced Australian natives; they planted gardens of lavender and musk, wore English fashions, attended church at eleven.’39 Britainisation extended everywhere in fact: the landscape itself was slowly transformed through surveys, maps and nomenclature of land,40 and even representations of Australian fauna were Britainised. Tasmania was subdivided into Englishnamed counties. Early landscape painters ignored the distinctiveness of the eucalypt form and painted European trees instead. While native animals often came to be known by an original Aboriginal name, sea fish were almost entirely Britainised: completely different species were given names such as bream, whiting, perch, garfish, cod, flounder, mackerel, hake, mullet, herring, anchovies and so on.41 In the place of dark, endless native forests the new pastures supported a rural society that held on to British values and tastes. Aside from the recognisably British lawns, plants and trees around homesteads, there was a keenness to establish a rural culture and that was modelled on Britain. During the early nineteenth century this hinged on establishing a hunting and angling calendar. The Britainisation of Australia did not begin or end with the centres of colonial life, designed around farmsteads and in town centres. It permeated a wide variety of places and sites from the farming lands, the coastal strip and out into the wilderness beyond.

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It enrolled people from all quarters and all stations of life. The surest signs of home and the most welcome friends to share their empty landscape came from their own animal kingdom. Aside from making the landscape familiar, Britainisation recognised that the landscape is consumed in a very sensual way. Not just birdsong, therefore, but the song of recognised birds became the centre of much nostalgic longing. A letter sent home from Ann Gore, living near Lake Bathurst in 1837 made unfavourable comparisons between Australia and England: I daresay you would fancy the scenery must be very pretty from the trees being all evergeen, but I can assure you it is not to be compared to old England, the white gums which is the principal tree growing in this part of the country is very ugly, the Mimosas are very pretty as also many of the flowers but they have very few of them any perfume, there are great many parrots of every variety and Black and white Cockatoos not any of the birds sing with the exception of the Magpie which has a kind of a whistle.42

One can still walk through the gardens of Battery Point Hobart or the Botanical Gardens in Melbourne and hear the blackbird singing in spring, and on more remote paddocks and plains the skylark is a permanent sonic fixture. The English sparrow, greenfinch, goldfinch, robin, thrush and blackbird were all highly sought after and acclimatised. As Goodman remarks, ‘The silence troubled them in Australia, and they liberated thrushes, blackbirds, larks, starlings, and canaries in large numbers, hoping to fill the skies with melodious reminders of home.’43 The taste of familiar game, of venison and trout, rabbit and hare became the prize for the extraordinary efforts to procure and acclimatise them. But then there were the muscular leisures that took you out on horseback or along creeks, marshes and scrub where every sense was used to bring you in range of these prized quarries. There were a variety of ways, then, some planned, others accidental, through which the landscape obtained its new ‘old country’ look. The first though least effective in Australia was the habit of the early mariners, while exploring new routes and territories, to

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plant useful fruits and vegetables and release useful animals where they might provide food for returning or wrecked comrades. Captain Cook’s second Pacific voyage, for example, released pigs on Bruny Island. When he returned in 1776 two more pigs were released but he held back the decision to release cattle, sheep and goats ‘from a persuasion that the natives, incapable of entering into my views of improving their country, would destroy them’. According to Tim Low ‘they did not survive’.44 The most famous of these planned plantings, the garden of the French explorer D’Entrecasteaux (built 1792–93), has been known about for many years and even searched for, but until 2003 it remained unfound. Its low stone walls were discovered in February of that year and although unprepossessing were at least the very oldest European artefacts in Australia. According to Richard Ely, ‘A hope expressed by the expeditioners in establishing the gardens was that their “gift from the French people to the natives of the new land” would provide an example for the Aboriginals, to demonstrate to them the usefulness of European plants and perhaps foster in them a motivation to sustain the plots.’45 Certainly the expeditioners made ‘brief, though amicable, contact with the local inhabitants on both visits, particularly their second. That the aboriginals were aware of and interested by the novelty of the plants was noted by d’Entrecasteaux, but it seems unlikely that these hunter-gatherers would have taken any interest beyond possibly harvesting some of the crop for their immediate use.’ The import of animals

D’Entrecasteaux landed and released three goats on Bruny Island with the most preposterous hope that European animals might effect some kind of social evolution: We landed a young he-goat and a she-goat with kid, putting up prayers that the savages might allow them to propagate their breed on the island. Perhaps they may multiply in it to such a degree, as to occasion a total change in the manner of life of the inhabitants, who may then become a pastoral people, quit without regret the borders of the sea, and taste the pleasures of

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not being obliged to dive in search of food, at the risk of being devoured by sharks.46

How a Frenchman could think it possible to give up fresh crayfish, oysters and abalone for goat products beggars belief, but these were strange times. Tim Low has charted this sort of activity in his Feral Future. It is clear that although there were more instances of this, as in Nicholas Baudin’s liberation of poultry and pigs on Kangaroo Island, it mainly relates to survival strategies practised by an increasingly experienced class of explorers and the first stirrings of the age of global acclimatisations, where the enthusiasm for exchanges of global industrial production spawned a parallel exchange of ecology. The world was to be improved – that was the project hailing from Europe. Far more important was the introduction of escapees and ‘releasees’. We have already come across the breathless description of herds of wild escapee cattle roaming across southern Queensland and northern New South Wales in the 1860s. AC Grant described them as escapees from Chinchilla station that had made their way up country via Charley’s Creek. They were in pretty good order by and large: ‘Some of these creatures were quite as wild as American Bison, especially the old cows and bulls. The latter were huge, heavy animals, with great humps of flesh and having innumerable cuts and scars on their thick hides, savage, gloomy and treacherous looking.’ In fact, escapees began to populate the continent from almost the very first days of European settlement: cattle from the First Fleet ran off, not to be seen again for another six years. Pigs were another problem escapee and they too made their dash soon after the establishment of Sydney. As settlement proceeded during the nineteenth century, fanning out across the continent, other escapees relate to travel, transport and exploration. Horses, ponies, donkeys, oxen, buffalo and camels were all employed in the major expeditions, for routine travel and colonial haulage. Many escaped their tethers or stables but many were also released once they were no longer required.

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One is tempted to believe that the special form of affection people had for these animals determined this course of action rather than slaughtering them for meat. Of all of these animals the most important was the horse, now numbering some 100 000, though this is a number decimated by recent droughts and cullings. The horses so liberated soon became wild and established themselves in many areas where there is ‘open or lightly timbered plains with a flat to rolling topography’.47 Quite how they acquired the Australian name brumby is disputed. ‘Banjo’ Paterson clearly thought it was Aboriginal in origin, though others hold to the story that it dates back to when a certain Major Brumby abandoned his selection, horses included, in 1804. The infamous rabbit It’s grand to be a rabbit And breed till all is blue And then to die in heaps because There’s nothing left to chew. 48 FROM ‘BANJO’ PATERSON, ‘It’s Grand’.

The rabbit and the fox were examples of individual or ad hoc introductions or stockings. Curiously, the rabbit was not easy to establish in Australia; indeed it followed on from the particular difficulty the English had in establishing the rabbit in the medieval period. It was not surprising that the rabbit was brought to Australia with such high hopes: it was easy to ship and handle, it was hardy and prolific, and it was held in great affection by the British, who liked the decorative way in which it completed woodland edge and hedgerow scenes. It was also a practical proposition for those first settlements where food was the main anxiety. Between 1850 and 1860 one Lincolnshire (UK) warren produced 30 000 animals a year from a 3000-acre site. The rabbit was liberally released by sailors in the eighteenth and nineteenth century on the subantarctic islands, including Macquarie Island, and as far as the Pacific tropical islands, including Hawaii. Every mainland explored by Europeans had rabbits released and many of the

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Atlantic islands too. The First Fleet imported domestic rabbits and they were regularly imported after that, but these only went wild in Tasmania, where even today strange-coloured rabbits can still be seen in remote places. The first successful acclimatisation of wild rabbits recorded is credited by Eric Rolls to Thomas Austin, who imported twenty-five wild English rabbits and released them in 1859 on his property in southern Victoria. Eric Rolls illustrates how rapidly the rabbit went from venerated animal to pest in Australia. ‘Sometime in the 1850s a man was charged at the Colac (Vic.) Police Court with having shot a rabbit, the property of John Robertson of Glen Alvie. He was fined £10. A few years later, Robertson’s son spent £5000 a year in an attempt to control rabbits.’49 In the early days, shortly after Austin made his successful introduction, the shooting opportunities on his property were marvelled at and many sought to emulate such bounty on their own property. Seven years after his original introduction of twenty animals, Austin was shooting over 14 000 rabbits a year for sport. Where a living from the land was often seen as difficult, such mathematics were nothing short of miraculous – at first. As the news spread so too did batches of rabbits and it is believed there was a period of simultaneous releases across much of Victoria and South Australia, but also at Canning River in Western Australia, the Shoalhaven River in New South Wales, and Woody Island in Queensland. By 1875, the animal was well established in the western districts of Victoria, in South Australia at the southern end of the Flinders Ranges and around Sydney. The South Australian and Victorian infestations had merged by 1879 to cover one large area from Spencer Gulf to northeastern Victoria. In 1881 farmers began abandoning their properties in the Mallee and the Wimmera, and by 1890 the rabbit population in southeastern Australia was out of control.50

Their spread was called ‘the Grey Blanket’ that was likely to smother Australia. Despite systematic attempts to fence them in and the valiant attempts of shooters and trappers, the West

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Australian border was reached in 1894 and the coast by 1906. The Gulf of Carpentaria was reached in 1910. Today, 4.5 million square kilometres are occupied by around 300–400 million rabbits. Acclimatisation programs

Had the rabbit disaster occurred a little earlier, then the final way in which Australia became Britainised through introduced animals might never have happened, or at least it might not have been so enthusiastically welcomed. However, just as Australia was Britainising in an ad hoc way, the French launched what was to become an institutionalised program of acclimatisation on a global scale. This not only served to justify what had been practised in Australia but added an institutional framework, with branch acclimatisation societies in most states. These gathered together enthusiastic naturalists, farmers and landowners with scientists, government officials and the universities. Such a group proved powerful enough in their respective localities to push through quite dramatic introductions, as we shall see in the case of the brown trout in Australia. The first world acclimatisation meeting was held in France, the brainchild of the anatomist Isidore Geofroy Saint-Hillaire. The idea was simple enough: ‘The prospect was nothing less than to people our fields, our forests and our rivers with new guests; to increase and vary our food resources, and create other economical or additional products.’ Tim Low has called their ideas ‘mad dreams’, but as we have seen, from the point of view of the culture and experience of the new settlers in Australia it sounded the right notes. That first meeting called for the establishment of acclimatisation societies in all nations and states of the world and it was incredibly successful in every continent of the world. The British were quick to establish their society in 1860, linked as it was to the popular support and advancement of such institutions as the newly established London Zoo. In Australia acclimatisation societies were set up in Victoria in 1861, with South Australia and Queensland shortly after that and Tasmania and Western Australia bringing up the rear in 1895 and 1896.

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Mad it may seem to an Australian environmental writer at the start of the twenty-first century, but not to an educated scientist working in Sydney in the year 1864. Far from it. The following passage from a speech by Dr George Bennett at a New South Wales acclimatisation meeting shows how emotionally detached his audience were from native animals, how little they valued them commercially or otherwise, and how keen they were to recreate Australia anew using ‘choice’, which can be taken to mean ‘highly valued’ animals. Such animals of choice were determined not by their appropriateness to an environment but their economic, aesthetic and sporting value. And since this was by and large a choice exercised by those from a British cultural heritage, such a program was likely to fuel further Britainisation: Another object of this Society is that of stocking our waste waters, woods, and plains with choice animals, making that which was dull and lifeless become animated by creatures in the full enjoyment of existence, and Lands before useless, become fertile with rare and valuable trees and plants, teeming with excellent fruits, variety of foliage and gay and brilliant flowers.51

However, nowhere was the project to Britainise the Australian landscape more systematic than in the formal and informal introductions of British wildlife. The introduction of English songbirds occurred very early on. In the United States there were no such introductions, but in Australia a wide range of English songbirds were established, informally but especially by the acclimatisation societies – an irony indeed in view of the rich birdlife of the Australian continent, some superb songsters among them. Songbird keepers and aviarists were recorded early in the colonial period. According to Professor McCoy of Melbourne University, an enthusiastic acclimatiser of British birds: There was no doubt that those delightful reminders of our English home would even now have spread from that centre over a great part of the colony, and the plains, the bush and the forest would have had their present savage silence, or worse, enlivened by those varied touching, joyous strains of heaventaught melody, which, our earliest records show, have always

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done good to man – which, in all times have been recognised among all varieties of nations or taste, as sweetening the poor man’s labours, inspiring the poor with happiest thoughts and softening and turning from evil even the veriest brute that ever made himself drunk or plotted ill against his neighbour.52

Clearly the Britainisation of nature was seen as having a civilising influence. In a similar vein, sports were important organisers of the coloniser’s landscape and they were no less on the minds of the institutional acclimatisers. Some have argued that the relationship between sports in Australia and the environment went deeper than a mere wish to maintain cultural practices. According to John Stratton, who takes cues from Richard White and Bill Mandle, sports in England emerged in a form that reconciled bourgeois values of nature and civilisation.53 The natural aggressive tendencies of humans were tempered by rules of games, played out in a natural terrain that was similarly ‘civilised’ or controlled (the English grass field/lawn). But Stratton argues that the neat environmental symbolism of this reconciliation failed to work in Australia, where the climate and the biotic order were allegedly so disturbing to English sensibilities. ‘In Australia then, sport did not mediate and reconcile the lived-in nature with civilisation but rather provided a bulwark, a protection against this new, unnatural environment.’54 Animals of the chase

One of the first groups to miss home life and be in a position to recreate it in Australia was the military, for whom, at the time, foxhunting was enjoying its greatest popularity and participation. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century it was far and away the most popular sport in Britain. It had developed as an entirely new sport, mainly encouraged by an acute shortage of deer, the traditional chase quarry. In Australia, until foxes could be brought over later in the century, other animals were hunted. By as early as 1803, imported chital deer (an Indian substitute for the British varieties that were eventually imported) were in the colony and being bred for hunting.

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Stratton suggests that the general refusal to consider Australian animals suitable for hunting is another illustration of British ambivalence about Australian nature. There is no doubt that these English animals were imported for hunting and possibly much preferred, but whether it was because the Australian candidates were disliked in the way Stratton suggests is an interesting question. The hunting of animals in England took several forms. Stratton’s principal examples (fox and deer) are chase sports animals, pursued by a pack of hounds and by riders on horseback. Such animals need to have both the speed and the stamina to provide a ‘good run’. A good run consists of a chase over a distance of some 12 kilometres or so at a speed that is ‘exhilarating’ on horseback. Not all animals are capable of providing such a chase and we have to ask whether in the main areas of early settlement in Australia there were Australian native animals that made good chase substitutes for the English sport. The answer is yes. Eric Rolls documents the history of the earliest hunts in Tasmania, Sydney and Melbourne and shows that native animals were used with great ‘sporting’ satisfaction. In Tasmania, the first chase animal was the Forester kangaroo. This animal had extraordinary speed and stamina and Rolls documents one pre-1840 hunt where one was chased for 18 kilometres over land before it took to the sea, swam out for at least 3 kilometres, turned back exhausted and was killed on the shore. Far from being considered an inferior colonial substitute, this animal was written about in hallowed terms. However, the Forester kangaroo was also being shot for its skin by professional shooters and the supply of hunting animals diminished very quickly. Tasmanian devils and wallabies were also hunted but they were inferior, giving chase for a maximum of 20 minutes. In order to increase sport with these animals, therefore, several packs were formed in 1842, using the shorter-legged beagle, but the main hunts thereafter were for naturalised deer. Deer therefore became the principal chase quarry not because the English had to hunt English nature but because perfectly suitable Australian quarry had

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been shot to near extinction. By the 1860s the Melbourne Hunt became more dependent on imported chase animals. Eventually huntsmen successfully naturalised the fox in Australia, but according to Rolls, ‘no one benefited by their coming because by the time that there were enough to hunt there was little interest in hunting’.55 The problem with the Britainisation project was that a British biotic community and landscape could not be stabilised in Australia. The sport of fox-hunting depends on a fixed number of foxes or fox dens being known to any district hunt so that they might ‘stop’ the majority underground leaving the unlucky few ‘stopped out’ to provide a day’s hunt. Whereas the fox in England was relatively easy to control for the purposes of sport, the fox in Australia, once introduced, reproduced and spread very rapidly over country where the necessary degree of surveillance and control was unfeasible. It was then impossible to keep a pack of hounds on a singular scent and such confusion of scents rendered the hunt chaotic and confused. Indeed, from the 1880s onwards fox-hunting declined in Australia. The brown trout

The miraculous spread of the fox would have been impossible were it not for the even more incredible establishment of the rabbit. Contrary to Stratton’s argument, the rabbit was first naturalised in Australia, as we have seen, not as a superior sporting hunt animal but as a food item for the early settlers. In Australia, rabbits spread so quickly and so alarmingly that they only provided a very short period of popular ‘rough shooting’. Thereafter they were a pest so out of control that they seriously threatened food supplies throughout Australia and were wanted for neither food nor sport. The same cannot be said of the introduction of brown (and later rainbow and brooke) trout, described by Rolls as ‘a welcome experiment’.56 By 1788 the British were well on their way to being a nation of anglers and angling was keenly sought in all colonial territories.57 Several native species of trout and salmon were common in the

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United States and Canada and these, together with the freshwater bass and pike, formed the basis of an extensive and intense angling culture there. In Australia, however, there were no salmonids and not all areas had any recognisable substitutes. This was most keenly felt in Tasmania, where the only reason given for the introduction of British salmonids by its official historian was the absence of suitable native sporting species.58 The importation of trout to Tasmania, and from there to other cool areas of Australia and New Zealand, was different from the introduction of sporting animals in terms of the social class and the nature of the importing lobby. The rabbit, fox and deer were liberated in Australia by a small number of keen landowners acting independently in order to establish private game runs on their land similar to those available to the English gentry. Trout and salmon, by contrast, were imported by an organised lobby of enthusiasts from all stations of colonial society who were keen to establish the species in as many of the lakes and streams as possible for public access: Dwelling upon each [river], though it may not far exceed the dimensions of a rivulet, you shall ever find persons who tell you confidently that to them, and them alone, was entrusted the honour of depositing the first young fish. It is evidence at least to the importance they attach to the subject that, according to their own showing, three fourths of the male population of the country have with their own hands deposited salmon and trout in the rivers.59

Why was a broad cross-section of Tasmanian society so exercised and enthused by the introduction of trout? While it is indeed true that dry-fly fishing for trout on chalk streams became a quintessential icon of the privileged southern English middle class, it is also true that in many south-western, northern, Welsh, Scottish and Irish areas, wet-fly fishing for trout was a popular sport across all social classes. Because Tasmanian migrants were well represented by the latter groups, a popular ‘trout aesthetic’ was already in existence and was possibly the cause for some degree of homesickness. In addition, the available angling in Tasmania was considered poor

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relative to its potential. While Walker is correct to attribute the enthusiasm for trout to the absence of equivalent sporting fish, it is the case that some native species did provide angling of a quality considered worthy of recording and writing about,60 but to all intents and purposes the trout was brought in because of the absence of ‘sporting’ freshwater fish in a landscape that so obviously suited it. The first attempt to bring the trout to Australia was in 1841, the whim of an enterprising ship captain trading between London and Hobart. This resulted in nothing more than the realisation that only fertilised ova could be sent such a distance. Later in 1852, the British government, with the support of Tasmania’s LieutenantGovernor, Sir William Denison, agreed to send a ship carrying 50 000 ova of salmon. The idea was an alluring one, not just for sport but also maybe for a new and valuable industry. This experiment failed because the water taken to keep the eggs alive became too warm in the tropics. A notable Tasmanian pastoralist, James Youl, who had retired and moved back to London, took an interest in the problem and teamed up with another London-based member of the Australian Association in London, Edward Wilson. These two were prominent in acclimatisation efforts in the Colony, and Wilson later founded the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria. In typical Victorian fashion they toyed with the idea and then experimented with using ice to provide a steady flow of cool water over the ova for the duration of the voyage, some 100 days. They enlisted the help of Robert Ramsbottom, a leading Scottish salmon breeder who agreed to help assemble the ova and the contraption to keep the trays of eggs under a flow of cool water – and stay with them for the first part of a voyage. The steamship Curling left Liverpool on 25 February 1860, but after only 59 days the ice had all melted. Undaunted, Youl and Wilson despatched another shipment with more ice in March 1862, a voyage funded and organised by the newly established Salmon Commission in Tasmania, but the ice gave out after only 79 days. Some of the ova had been placed in a moss-filled wooden box and

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these had survived much longer, thus giving the experiment further hope of future success. Youl and Ramsbottom continued to experiment in London, this time by seeing how low a temperature the ova could tolerate. It turned out that they did not need water at all, nor air and could stay perfectly healthy for the required time if kept at around 32 degrees Fahrenheit. A new shipment was prepared in such a way that a load of salmon ova could be kept at around this temperature. Moss-lined wooden boxes were to be used under sawdust with a massive load of ice all around. At the last minute the supply of salmon ova was delayed and desperate calls for alternatives resulted in offers of both salmon and trout ova. Although not originally wanted, the trout ova were accepted gratefully. A fast clipper, the Norfolk, was chosen for the journey, and its owners, sensing that something worthy was happening, assisted the project at considerable cost. Meanwhile back in Hobart, a salmon pondrearing station was built at Plenty on a mountain stream connected to the River Derwent, and Hobart Town eagerly awaited the arrival. It very interesting how excited the town and the country people of Tasmania were when the steam ship Victoria made the last leg from Melbourne into Hobart. The Mercury newspaper reported that vessels in the river dressed in their gayest colours; no salute was fired for fear of damage to the ova, but ships dipped their ensigns as Victoria came up … Crowds gathered on the shore and every dinghy and small boat in harbour went out to see her.61

The Victoria unloaded the ova onto the river steamer Emu, which was to take the ova the last lap to the confluence with the Plenty. There it was met by a team of ‘40 to 50 stalwart men of the Derwent Valley [who] waited to carry the cases of ova to the Salmon Ponds and several horse-drawn carts were ready to transport the remaining ice’. The ova had survived the journey and were placed in the hatchery where large numbers hatched and spawned, by 1872, a population in New South Wales, Victoria and New Zealand. The salmon did not acclimatise and establish a wild population but the trout, ironically enough, never looked back.

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True to the entire episode, trout fingerlings were carried in cans to almost every lake and watercourse that would support them by volunteer men of the district, or in the case of highland areas, by emerging angling societies from the cities and townships. In this way acclimatisation locked those men, their descendants and their socialised angling fraternity into a continuing relation with the introduced trout and those acclimatised landscapes. The postscript to Low’s chapter on acclimatisation, ‘one of the most foolish and dangerous ideas ever to infect the thinking of nineteenth century men’, is that acclimatisation societies survive here to this day. The most venerable, the Ballarat Fish Acclimatisation Society, dates back to the 1870s … They run a hatchery that supplies brown and rainbow trout to farm dams. Up until the 1950s they freed stock into rivers and streams but when the Victoria opened a government hatchery they were ordered to close down, then later allowed to continue their activity by selling to farmers.

Low tells of the continuing prestige that membership of this society bestows and how there are still others operating in New South Wales. The oldest, the Monaro Acclimatisation Society established in the 1930s, still has twenty-three branches. The Britainisation of hunting and angling, then, can be understood in both nostalgic and practical terms. The voracity of the colonial impact on Australian flora and fauna cannot be overstated and quickly depleted local populations for sporting purposes. European species were brought in originally, as we have seen, following the English estate practice of raising and preserving game for private and spatially restricted purposes. The form of hunting responsible for such devastating losses of indigenous species was known as ‘professional shooting’. Some of these shooters were little more than young Englishmen from wealthy backgrounds with a passion for shooting, having an adventure in the colonies and paying for their trip through the sale of pelts and, occasionally, meat. Judging from the memoirs of H.W. Wheelwright,62 their success at depleting wildlife of all sorts

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kept them on the move. Very few species were not shot and Wheelwright’s memoirs speak without sentiment or remorse of the finer points and difficulties involved in shooting koalas, wombats, eagles and parrots. Indeed, after an extended stay in Australia, Wheelwright returned to England and the published record he left is little more than another commercial venture. As the title suggests, this was a guide to the field sports available in Australia, and at this time the quarries were indigenous species. However, perhaps the most significant single reason for the killing of so many indigenous animals must be attributed to farmers and pastoralists by whom, during this period, they were seen as agricultural pests either because they competed with European stock animals or because they destroyed crops.

BRITAINISATION AND BEYOND Britainisation can be thought of as the extension of that aspect of nationalism everywhere that is anchored in historic and mythic connections with a specific nature. Such constructions, which seemingly define and circumscribe their own natural claim to space and territory, were extended for a long while in Australia through some of the most intriguing experiments and enterprises. Ultimately colonies lose their nationalism of origin as individual loneliness gives way to society, as new generations cannot relate personally to it and as new historical accretions seem to suggest that something different, something new is filling its place. That something new, something different was of course, Australia. And once Australia sensed itself, sensed its difference and sensed its destiny, then it too would have something to say about nature, and would define itself also through new relations with animals. But what this relationship was to be and with what animals provides the basis for an enigma. Although native animals were to be the new icons of Australian identity, part of the problematic nature of post-colonial cultures is precisely that they are neither

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colonial nor yet free from their colonial past. While Australia wanted to embrace indigenous animals and mantle itself with their authenticity and natural belonging, it was still tied in countless ways to its other animals, some of which were still objects of desire and some of which simply would not go away. This resulted in unclear and ambiguous boundaries of classification, especially between the categories wild, domestic and native, which proliferated as we saw in chapter 1. The enigma was further compounded because the categories and boundaries used could slide back and forth between types of animals and types of humans in Australia in the metaphoric play of language and politics. Just as an emergent Australia could usefully use the solidity and undisputable reality of nature for its symbolic social solidarity and development, the nature at its disposal was dissolving into something that seemed to be framed more by its cultural components and constructs.

Chapter 5

T H E AU S T R A L I A N D R E A M I N G

Sudden that hour she knew That this far place was good, This mighty land and new For the soul’s hardihood. For hearts that love the strange, That carry wonder; The Bush, the hills, the range, And the dark flats under. 1 FROM ‘Emus’ BY ‘E’ (MARY FULLERTON)

Mary Fullerton wrote ‘Emus’ when those working, living and being born in Australia no longer defined themselves solely in relation to Britain. They no longer defined themselves as successful (or unsuccessful) opportunists there to make a fortune, intrepid adventurers, heroic and patriotic explorers and surveyors or long-suffering women at the sides of such men. The mood of their written legacy changes from one of impermanence and fear to one of pride, solidity and a golden future. The epiphany of naturalisation captured by Mary Fullerton’s retrospective poem was initiated and confirmed by the sight of a group of ten emus marching slowly and confidently from the farmstead out to the great bush beyond. This was also something of a totemic moment since the emus were both emblematic of the newly confident and secure Australians, at last embedded in the land-

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scape, but also because these Australians, like the emus, had had to adapt to a common landscape in which they shared a common ancestor or founding story. This is no misinterpretation of Mary Fullerton but the kernel of her nation-building poetry. Here she is again, from her poem ‘Return’: All here again, the beast, the bird, the bush, Expelled for many a year … If I return, then why not they? We are all native here.2

It is difficult for us today to conceive of a world without Australia, but it is worth remembering that Australia as we know it was made, not found. Because of course Australia is first and foremost a political and cultural entity, created during the great period of nation-building in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and nations are quite arbitrary divisions of the globe. Australia did not have a social or cultural unity when Aboriginal peoples dominated the landscape, nor did they have a name for the continent on which they lived. Indeed, they had no notion of an entity the size of continental Australia and although Aboriginal tribes travelled over vast areas of space, none encapsulated the area of modern Australia. In other areas of the world where indigenous peoples, or at least those who had lived in them for a long time, became caught up in this arbitrary division of the globe into nations, the nation-builders did everything they could to build strong links between the people and the land and its nature, as if nations themselves were as inevitable and natural as the other species living in them. Indeed, the idea of nation refers to birthplace and belonging, and when we accept outsiders as members of nations we call that process naturalisation. Certainly there was no such thing as Australia during the early navigation period, when Europeans first came across what we now call Australia. Until it was successfully circumnavigated in 1803, it was commonly thought to be not one but two continents. Tasmania was an island close to the continent but it did not have the connection to the mainland that it has today, one of its six states.

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Nations are not easy things to understand because they seem deceptively obvious to us. Even when the great period of nationbuilding began from the mid-nineteenth century, the founding social scientists of the period, Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx and Max Weber, never stopped to consider the nature and implications of this social revolution. While Weber and Durkheim paid little attention to them because they thought they were essentially natural outcomes, Marx thought them temporary aberrations that would be superseded. In the previous chapter, however, we have seen the strength of national sentiments in the lives of those who were forced, or who had chosen, to make a life away from their national culture. And we sensed how national myths weave into the national psyche a sense of attachment to land and nature, how certain animals in particular came to be emblematic of ‘the people’, rather like the way Aboriginal totemic animals helped them to think of themselves and maintain themselves as a corporate body. But we also learned from the consideration of totemism that animals are experienced sensually and intimately by those who live close to them and not just symbolically. The two types of experience are not separate but mutually reinforcing: nature inscribes itself on those who engage with it but in the same moment society inscribes itself on nature (the moment when totemic associations are founded). For this reason we could hypothesise that the curious period of Britainisation would come to a close once former national nostalgias and rituals fell away and the Australian land, fauna and flora began to inscribe itself on the souls of Australian inhabitants. The period characterised by Britainisation did indeed come to a close in the last quarter of the nineteenth century – as a result of a number of processes. First was the maturation of an Australian society: some families could count back five generations’ worth of residency; an Australian ‘establishment’ was well formed; and an Australian political, economic and cultural agenda replaced or at least vied with the British. Nostalgia for Europe could now be framed as something that happened only to some recent ‘migrants’. The ‘bush’ was by then a known and familiar landscape and, in a

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manner reminiscent of Europe a hundred years earlier, the extent of its destruction was perceived as shocking and regrettable, and it became the object of an Australian Romanticism. ‘The literary and artistic nationalistic movement of the 1890s also affirmed an Australian view of the landscape in which the Australian bush featured prominently.’3 Literature, art, tourism and travel, nature study and the trailing out of suburban life into the bushland fringes were all implicated in the inscription of Australian nature, particularly animals, on an Australian sense of self. It was not merely that Britainisation faded in the strong Australian sun: it was being actively replaced by Australian nationalism, and the effect that had on human–animal relations can be summarised as ‘Australianisation’. Australian nationalism emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and was tied to financial success in pastoralism, mining and farming and also to what David Malouf identified as less colonial and ‘more confidently provincial’.4 All of these rural industrial success stories contributed to the romance of the landscape and Australian nature was gradually drawn closer to a sense of national identity. Animals and plants were directly implicated in Australian nationalism. Australia’s process of separation from British origins and its distinction from other Western cultures was achieved, in part, through identification with ‘the unique Australian biota’. As Mulligan and Hill argue in their work on Australian environmental pioneers, ‘it is possible to detect [from the 1860s onwards] the stirrings of a new sensibility, or attentiveness, that could challenge the characterisation of Australia’s natural heritage as being inferior and low in value.’5 Major social, cultural and commercial institutions used Australian nature for corporate identity including the federal government, all state governments and, later, Qantas. National symbolism was overlaid by a popular culture rich in animal–nation themes in which good citizenship is linked to conservation-mindedness for indigenous species. Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, for example, carries a preface which says, ‘Humans, Please be kind to all Bush creatures and don’t pull

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flowers up by the roots’. And long before this, in 1899, Ethel Pedley prefaced her famous Dot and the Kangaroo with the following dedication: ‘To the children of Australia in the hope of enlisting their sympathies for the many beautiful, amiable and frolicsome creatures of their fair land, whose extinction, through ruthless destruction, is being surely accomplished’.6

Mass national sentiments for Australian animals accumulated: the koala, for example, made its first appearance in print in Norman Lindsay’s Magic Pudding in 1919. Legislation to protect animals from hunting, particularly commercial hunting, dates from 1860 when certain native wildfowl received a ‘close’ season protection in Tasmania. From the last quarter of the nineteenth century a trend was set to protect more and more native species.7 Like the complex manner by which modern urban Australia came to terms with its emerging national identity, Australian naturalisation was achieved in part by creating totemic and practical social identification with Australian nature and by establishing practices that perform this association. Animals were the most significant set of signifiers of this identity claim, though Australian flora and forests were widely implicated too. So too was the generic idea of ‘the bush’, a hybrid of nature and culture. Nationalistic development created two moments of naturalisation. First, largely through high cultural interventions in economic development, literature and the arts, nationalism promoted and sustained a sense of origin and belonging to the Australian bush, with bushland creatures that were metaphors and metonyms for Australia. This created a nativism, a mentality established among Australia’s founding white ancestors who made Australia by embedding themselves in its tough nature. Urban Australians replayed and performed this embedded culture through education, approved leisures (Australian nature study, camping, bushwalking, fishing), ritual meals (the BBQ, damper and tea during camps), and particularly through a form of pilgrimage tourism. This nationalism combined, unproblematically for a while, quite different categories of totemic animals: the newly adopted native animals and the introduced pastoral animals that still formed an important

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economic base of the new country. While these were quite different, they were unified in their simultaneous occupation and tenure of the bush as an anthropocentric hybrid of Australian culture and nature. This romantic, pastoral aesthetic was a reworking of the British legacy but one that would not last. The second moment, created largely through science, land management and ecology, but also through the expanded Australian Academy after the mid-twentieth century, promoted and sustained a different biocentric romantic fantasy in which the sullied and horrifically hybridised bush was sidelined in favour of pure wilderness. Rituals of engagement were replaced with purificatory rituals: taking part in protests, growing exclusively native gardens, supporting eradication of introduced species, low-impact bushwalking in extreme wilderness areas and so forth. Eco-nationalism was not so much the celebration of settlement and belonging as the defence of what was perceived to be a threatened basis for a separate and unique Australia. Again, it is curious how numerous high cultural sources converged on this issue, providing science with an opportunity to enlarge its operations as much as claim nature once again as a ‘natural’ right. It was explored by literature and art very early on.

‘SEEING THE LAND IN A NEW LIGHT’ In the 1880s and 1890s, this new attentiveness to the Australian bush began to dovetail with attempts to define a distinctive Australian identity, which, in turn, was fuelled by a growing desire to overcome an exaggerated deference towards English culture.8

Artists in Australia provide a good insight into the Australianisation process. It is probably not a good idea to see artists as truly creative, in the sense of being completely detached from their times, their publics or their market. Christopher Allen’s book on Australian art makes clear at the beginning that ‘artists work not

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alone but in relation to social reception, apprehending, anticipating and in turn shaping the experience of a community’.9 Further, ‘artists’ works become factors in the development of an “Australian” culture, and they grew to be better and more important artists for responding to what was tacitly asked of them’. So Australian artists helped to define a new sense of Australianness. How? It might be helpful, rather than to reel off a potted history of this process, to summarise first the stages through which this new sense emerged and how it transformed itself even further. ‘The stirrings’ of a new sensibility towards the Australian landscape began in the mid-nineteenth century, through the works of Eugène von Guérard, Nicholas Chevalier, Abram-Louis Buvelot and others, but while this showed the more confident and at-home look of a farming landscape, there was still some of the old dread in the expanse of trees and frightening mountains in, for example, Chevalier’s The Buffalo Ranges of 1864. These paintings placed something of a distance between the artists and the landscape and allowed the viewer to remain remote and detached. The style of Australian landscapes changed to what is now known as the Heidelberg School, under the leadership of Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and Louis Abrahams. They painted not from a distance, giving the perspective favoured by English eyes, but from within the forest itself. ‘They sought to paint among the trees and, in so doing, they found a new kind of beauty in a neglected environment.’10 In their camps in the Heidelberg district ‘they saw beauty in the peeling bark of the Victorian bluegums, set among the dry sclerophyll forest that had been anathema to earlier generations of artists in Australia’.11 The other trademark of the Heidelberg school, apart from the frequent use of their leitmotiv, the axe, was the use of narrative themes in their work. This presses home the enduring presence of their white, now native human subjects and in the case of McCubbin’s The Pioneer of 1904, a transformation from settler despair, through rural contentment to civic growth – a narrative that traces, precisely, the path to Australianisation. Arthur Streeton, a later Heidelberg artist, inno-

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vated with light, taking the viewer out of the forest shades and into the blinding white light of a fair day almost anywhere in Australia. Together these artists captured visually and represented back to their Australian audience what was a growing tide of Australian nationalism. These paintings were bought by the national and state galleries and were seen as a popular public media. Streeton, perhaps more than the others, became the look of the new nation. Apart from showing Australians at home and relaxed, going about the business and routines of Australian pastoral life and economy, Streeton emphasised a very new thing that produced a new sensibility to the natural world: an ‘idealised image of peaceful coexistence between people and nature … to inspire people with visions of a coexistence’.12 This Australia did not strike the viewer with the same overwhelming force of nature. The axe had done away with the huge swathes of forest, allowing humanity a firm grip on the landscape and a more intimate association with natural species. It permitted the liberty of assuming some creativity or authorship of the landscape for those relatively new to the land. The Heidelberg School emphasised not the vestiges of English rural culture but those things, such as the big shearing sheds, that were quintessentially Australian. People did not ride horses in the genteel and leisurely manner of the English but in a muscular, workaday manner after the style of ‘the man from Snowy River’. Essentially, then, these were rather overdone mythic paintings that forced a major break with the past and allowed other artists to consolidate as well as shift the line of flight Australia was taking into its own self-defining future. Hans Heysen followed in the sense of continuing the new cult of the gum tree. As Mulligan and Hill say, ‘he converted trees from framing devices into subjects’, with close attention to texture, surface and colour. An ecological sensibility was clearly evident in his work when with some drama he showed a lone eucalypt remaining on the landscape while its former ‘mate’ was dragged away by the bullock team. The ironic title for the piece, Lord of the

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Bush (1908), could not have escaped anyone or left them feeling particularly pleased with themselves or even proudly Australian. Here was announced a period of self-criticism, a reaction that often follows the first flushes of nationalism, but in this case, a taking stock of the bigger picture. Was this how we want to live on the land? The Heidelberg School was in one sense still a charter of the changed nature of animals in Australia. Like the new settlers, the new acclimatised animals seemed at ease and at home. No native animal appears to unsettle the picture of transformation and acclimatisation. But this was not to last. Margaret Preston’s work from the 1940s onwards reintroduced Aborigines back onto the landscape, a long period after the time when Roberts painted the sad pictures of a defeated people back in the mid-nineteenth century. Explicitly looking to define a properly Australian art, her subject choice was an exercise in self-naturalisation: she chose native blooms and native, that is to say Aboriginal, art. This paved the way for and developed an interest in Aboriginal art both historically and in a number of new forms inspired and encouraged by white impresarios. The work of Albert Namatjira and the dot art of the Papunya Tula group of artists not only added authenticity to the art collectors’ and national gallery’s sense of Australia, but it further emphasised the place of animals as icon and emblems of Australia. It also made Australia confront its fear and loathing of the desert interior and helped make a shift from the coastal strip to the interior as the spiritual home of Australia. Sidney Nolan made his debut in the late 1930s but made his major impact after the Second World War by taking existing bush myths of Australia and making parodies of them and some of the art that established them. Burke and Wills emerged from Nolan’s work not as heroes but as buffoons; they should not be made Australian heroes since they made no effort to adapt to the desert, they ignored Aborigines who could have helped them survive – with ease – and they compounded their hero-worshipping audience’s fear of the interior. As Mulligan and Hill say, ‘only a fool would enter

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such country with an attitude of mastery rather than humility or at least the stoicism represented by the camel’.13 More than this, as Tim Bonyhady’s study of the Burke and Wills phenomenon argues, ‘the hero to fool transition also reflects a growing criticism of their “more general inability to understand the land”’.14 Here Nolan’s contribution was to extend a growing ecological disquiet that, while critical of Australia, further separated Australia from its colonial and cultural origin by identifying its own new agenda. But this was not merely the one-way thinking in which humans redirected their energy and activity in the landscape, Nolan also forced a backbeat realisation that the land had become inscribed on us through myth. Tim Bonyhady quotes art critic Harry Talock saying that Nolan’s work has ‘a curious hypnotic power’ that gives the reviewer ‘the sensation of seeing and knowing our country, both in its landscape and in its legend, for the first time’. A lot of things were happening for the first time as the Australianisation process unfolded. Russell Drysdale, perhaps Australia’s greatest artist in the postwar period, brought together the sympathetic interest in everyday life with a surrealist humour that allowed a great deal of reflection on who Australians were, now that they had arrived and recognised themselves as such. After an early career as a war artist and artist of East Coast culture, in 1944 Drysdale was commissioned by the Sydney Morning Herald to paint the interior regions of western New South Wales. From this very early painting expedition into the remoter regions Drysdale discovered a very different Australia from the one Australia represented to itself, largely from the Heidelberg days. This Australia contained themes of agricultural despoliation and failure, rural poverty, drought and environmental degradation mixed with the view of a culture and taskscape15 (literally the landscape of human work and dwelling) that was unsustainable. By contrast, his paintings also showed how easily Aborigines live in this land and renewed debate about their place in Australia. As Christopher Allen wrote of his experience painting Aborigines and poor whites in the interior, ‘the subject of the settler’s confidence or anxiety is always ultimately

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the viability and legitimacy of his tenure on the land; and the Aborigine stands for a natural belonging.’ Drysdale wrote an essay in 1962 in which he expressed this further: The unemotional meeting of Mesolithic nomad and civilised man in the Great Victoria Desert may seem normal because the scale of time and environment is too large to wonder. To discover a man lost five years gone is an event of great emotion. To find a man from the last Ice Age is too remote for joy of solitude. Too difficult for immediate response, too damned odd anyway. So nobody remarks and the courtesy of a cigarette breaches a span of time beyond the reach of history. Curiously it is not the fact that you met him in the mirage, or of what he is that astounds you. It is that he should be there where no man should be, and not just within his forbidding landscape but part of it.16

Drysdale used completely different colours from the Heidelberg school to paint Australia – the reds and ochres of the interior. While the favoured landscape of the Heidelberg school was pasture and groups of odd gum trees giving their Australia a bleached goldenmeadow look, an aesthetic based on sheep and cattle husbandry, from Drysdale on artists used the most ubiquitous colours, reds and oranges, and painted bare hills of rock, scrubby plain and desert, an aesthetic based on native animal adaptation to environment that at the same time problematised the pastoral economy. In popular national songs the word ‘sunny’ and references to the coast shifted in favour of ‘our great red land’ and the interior. This was now not a tough nature beaten into shape by muscular righteousness but a fragile and much degraded nature defeated by an uncaring exploitation. As with all national thinking, Drysdale’s Australian nature was under threat from ‘outsiders’: enemy natures that were out of place, invasive and competitive. Much of his art seems to suggest that the planting of British farming and land management (or the lack of it) was unsustainable, leading to degraded landscapes and a culture of rural poverty. It is almost as if Australian rural health is critical for the health of the nation. Drysdale’s series of work showing Aboriginal people and culture did not so much use them as signifiers of Australia as

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find inspiration in them as a way forward in custodial thinking, in finding a way to live happily and sustainably on the land. The same message is also received most powerfully through his animals sequence of paintings. Drysdale painted the rotting carcasses of British farm animals that failed to thrive in the wrong place in much the same way that he painted the domestic remains of their human owners, settler huts destroyed and lying as rubbish in the landscape. This foreboding spectre of a shattered existence for white Australia was most brought out in Man Reading Newspaper, a surrealist work where a man seemingly at home reading his newspaper is in fact presiding over the collapse and disintegration of his home. It is a spectacle that, as Geoffrey Smith observed, ‘only heightens the viewer’s sense of unease’. I also perceive an uneasiness in the series of rabbiting paintings where poor white men (painted wiry and thin to the point of starvation and out of proportion to the landscape) scrabble about in very poor rocky country trying to eke out a living by catching rabbits using equally wretched-looking dogs. They look as if they are scraping the barrel, but the fact that the rabbit and the settler have been washed up together in this state is surely the powerful message of this work. By contrast, we see Emus in a Landscape of 1950 (perhaps echoing Mary Fullerton), picking their way nonchalantly and confidently through this wreckage in their expert meanderings through the same landscape. This showed ‘Australia’ in the much greater span of glacial time, not the time of modern history but its longer-term past and trajectory over which great empires and great species thrive or perish. In Native Dogger at Mt Olga (1958) we see Drysdale making a tie-in between two creatures supremely at home in the Australian desert, a camel and an Aboriginal man. In the next chapter I have more to say about the curiously empathetic relationship between Aboriginal people and introduced species in their country, but the contemporary art critic Horace Stamp seemed to pick this up from Drysdale’s canvass when he remarked ‘they are pictures of strange beauty and rather terrifying’.17 Further pictures of native animals,

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the Death Adder (1950), Brolgas at Giru (1950) and Wallaby Hunt (1950), all create the same impression. Arthur Boyd also confirmed a view of Australians as in need of ecological revision, a movement we could call eco-nationalism. His works appealed to the general ‘we’ and used national stereotypes to contribute to this improving national project. As Mulligan and Hill remark, ordinary Aussies were ‘depicted as clumsy looking, lobster-red sunbakers who were too large for their own boots’. For art historian Tim Bonyhady, ‘no other artists have made Australians appear so like blights on the landscape.’18 We can understand eco-nationalism to be charting a period of intensification and purification of Australianness after an initial period of symbolic construction. First, Australians emerge as a distinct opposite and other to the British, but then the legacies of the colonial past as they continued unreflexively forward require acts of purification and salvation. The sheep and cattle are not the centre of a pastoral idyll but the leading edge of ecological catastrophe. In the same way, rabbits warn of the dangers of human experimentation with a natural Australian order. So Australianisation becomes a critique of the Britainisation project, and in doing so identifies things native as the new blueprints and inspiration for future emphasis. Until Drysdale, one was hard pressed to find native animals in any Australian art at all, and indeed it was mainly in his work that a non-romanticised and non-picturesque image of Aborigines appeared. It is curious that after Drysdale, Mulligan and Hill’s history of ecological pioneers finds no more artists who took eco-nationalism forward. The tying together of national themes and Australian wildlife was henceforth to become increasingly championed by a new type of actor in the landscape. These new pioneers took notice of pioneers like Drysdale who defined the new agenda, but from then on the key thing was making changes and for that two important ingredients were required: expert knowledge and political activity. Why did artists abandon eco-nationalism from the 1960s onwards? Well, to begin with, any form of nationalism became

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anathema to the new generation, and especially to the intellectual avant garde, and the the Korean and Vietnam wars consolidated that distaste. The art of Australian nature and landscape in the 1950s was on the verge of a serious critique that prefigured the rise of environmentalism some thirty years later. But because a fixation on landscape and Australianisation was seen in its more sinister nationalistic form rather than its ecological form, the avant garde moved away to more lofty international themes, ditching landscape and nature as essentially provincial and backward-looking – defining perhaps the much suspected nativism in which Australia had been immersed for a long while. This is ironic, since the shock tactics of Drysdale’s rotting animal bodies bore a strong resemblance to the new metathemes of contemporary modern art of the nineties and noughties. Modern art critic Matthew Collings says the two big themes today are animals and pornography,19 but the animal art that defines this movement is precisely the shocking state of our relation to nature – as the work of artist Damien Hurst has shown to international acclaim. The Australian art world also moved away from animals in response to an even more virulent nativistic practice that some of its own students had sunk to: commercial art and the profligate use of animals as identifiers of Australianness in trademarks. After a long period of commercial overkill of the animal as signifier of Australianness, native animals acquired a kitsch quality that serious art mostly avoided. Animals and plants were directly implicated in Australian nationalism. In their collection of commercial trademarks as symbols of Australia, Cozzolino and Rutherford underline the significance of Australian animals in the nationalisation process.20 Alongside the map of Australia and the word ‘Australia’, native animals form the single largest category of signifiers. According to Geoffrey Blainey, trademarks were a barometer of nationalism: The new Commonwealth gave birth to scores of trademarks on which stood native animals – even the dingo had his day. We forget that the billboards on railway stations and city streets

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were mass media in the era before radio and television, and that these advertising hoardings were the shrines of the trademark. Indeed commercial awareness of the value of these insignia influenced the new Commonwealth’s own insignia. In the national competition for an Australian flag in 1901, most of the prize money came from the magazine The Review of Reviews and from Havelock Tobacco. The Southern Cross which appeared on the new flag had already appeared in many wellknown trademarks.21

Even more significant perhaps is the speed with which those essentially British signifying trademarks prior to Federation were replaced by Australian biotic symbols. In addition to an endless procession of native animals in advertising, Australian advertisers used (and even invented) mythical animals for Australia, notable among which were the established Bunyip and the entirely new Gazebo (a fictional animal used to advertise a brand of boot polish).

WRITING AUSTRALIA Australian art was produced alongside an Australian literary development that described similar experiences and explored similar themes. Indeed, it is possible to find very nearly exact counterpart movements among Australian prose and poetry. The so-called ‘Bulletin writers’, Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, mirrored the Heidelberg school in that they wrote of a romanticised Australia using the tools of rural legends. These writers identified and then idealised a cultural evolution that took place in Australia. The adaptations, lifestyles, opportunities and differences at work in the transplanted Brits, Irish and other seedstock inevitably produced new cultural forms that could be seen at close hand, experienced or lived and then described in words. This is the magical effect of the pens of ‘The Banjo’ and Henry Lawson: they revealed Australia to be the life and work of Australians, a new and altogether admirable type – quite a simple trick to work though it required just as innovative an eye, imagination and perspective as that of the Heidelberg artists.

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From their new angle an entirely new world is revealed and, it seemed, Australians never quite tired of reading it. Until these writers, as Patrick White suggested in his 1957 novel Voss, ‘nineteenth-century Australians “huddled” into towns on the coast because they were intimidated by the challenge of the wide-open spaces of the vast, dry continent and the “mysterious” Aboriginal people who lived there’.22 Lawson and Paterson not only showed the city that the interior had been heroically Australianised, but that it was good, that it was an Australian tradition worthy of their attention and, perhaps, pilgrimage, as we shall see below. Like Drysdale after him, Lawson was also sent by an Australian newspaper proprietor, in this case JF Archibald, no less, on a trip into the more remote Australia from where most of his foundational work originated. But it is without any doubt that the resulting writing inspired the millions of subsequent touristic trips inland that began later in the nineteenth century and continued throughout the twentieth. Like the Heidelberg artists, these writers idealised the rough-and-ready pastorale of station and ‘run’ life and there was very little mention of the thick gloomy forests or the native animals that so exercised the earlier distempered writing about Australia. Despite this there were here and there references to a new hybrid nature, animals like the brumby wild horse that were imports yet had made such adaptations to Australian conditions that they were to be considered a quintessential element of wild Australia. Australia had new dogs too, just as adapted to Australian conditions as the brumby, and these featured in their work, perhaps immortalised by the dog that ‘sat on the tucker box 5 miles from Gundagai’.23 These were animals that had inscribed themselves onto bush lifestyle and economy to the point where the wild and the domestic were just different moments of an Australian culture than now embraced both. Lawson and Paterson’s work was not just an overdone cycle of nation-building myths. They gave attention to what had hitherto been unseen or sensed, but more seriously, they gave subsequent writers the confidence and the identity to dig even deeper. In prais-

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ing Lawson, his acolyte Miles Franklin said that ‘he quickened their instinctive reaction towards [their country]’. Without Lawson they might have ‘remained “unrooted in the soil of one’s permanent residence” and thereby be “prey to nostalgia – a drug so potent, that uncontrolled it can enervate purpose and defer destiny”’.24 Lawson certainly seemed to have inspired Patrick White’s great foundational novel Tree of Man (1955), a work that complements and elaborates McCubbin’s The Pioneer. Whereas the painting is suggestive of an emerging nation, The Tree of Man lends its characters a reflexive perspective on their destiny as self and placemakers. Stan and Amy Parker are quietened by their experience and perplexed by the absence of norms and structures of familiar culture and landscape. This gives way, creatively, to a permanent state of inner dreaming and imagination, as well as feeling their way by performance to established routines and a cultural aesthetic. The Parkers become Australian subjects, not figures in a landscape, and the saga takes on, as the critic Alan Lawson suggests, the ‘stature of a creation or foundation myth, just as the narrative will later function (on one level) as an allegory of the historical development of European occupation in Australia’.25 Like the Heidleberg paintings, the novel opens with a man confronting a gum tree with an axe, but it elaborated on the significance of the animals Stan and Amy have brought with them and who share their life in the wilderness. Native animals are conspicuous by their absence in the early years, whereas the dog and the old cow become central characters. Similarly for Amy Parker, her rustic home can be completed only by the planting of a white rose outside her kitchen. This lonely single flower taking root and branching out of course symbolises the loneliness and isolation of white women at this time. Mention has already been made of May Gibbs, the author of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. She represents perhaps the most interesting of those writers who wrote naturalisation myths for Australian children which contained encoded messages to be more

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at home in the bush, to seek its enchantment and to care for it as one might care for the characters in the stories. Her gumnut babies were yet more mythic creatures, but they captured very well the slightly fragile self-images that Australians had of themselves when confronted by their more fearsome bush creatures. Through the device of familiarity, adventure and plot resolution, the childhood experiences of these books inserted an Australian natural history where none had been before and prefigured more serious nature study as part of primary school education in modern Australia. While May Gibbs wrote for children, Eleanor Dark wrote for adults during the formative pre-war years of the 1930s. Dark can be likened to Drysdale and those mid-century awakenings. If previous authors celebrated the new Australianness, Dark reminded them that all was not well, that there was work to do if a renewable Australia was ever to emerge. Somewhat out of character for their age, one of her characters, Governor Phillip, is made to say to an ambitious colony-maker, ‘You intend to exploit this land; have a care Sir, that it does not end by exploiting you.’26 And later still in 1946, this time as a fully fledged pre-environmentalist, she tempered praise for the establishment of Australian agriculture by saying that against them must be set the ignorance and greed that used the land too recklessly, overstocking it till pastures become deserts; denuding the warmth of its vegetation till the precious soil is eroded, and the still more precious rivers silted up; felling trees irresponsibly, without knowledge or forethought, using valuable timber for posts and rails, or even firewood; building barbarously with no thought of beauty.27

Here now was an entirely new discourse, a discourse of loss, damage and destruction. Those golden acres came at a huge cost and some of the costs were in an entirely new currency: the despoliation of an authentic native Australia, the very currency of identity and destiny. If the sociologist Emile Durkheim had been around at the time of Dark’s writing and Drysdale’s painting he might have sensed the unmistakable whiff of sacred things emerging and gathering a new set of religious sentiments and practitioners around them. Lawson and Paterson celebrated the profane

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everyday of settler Australia, but ironically that began a process of national community-building, the foundations of a people who could build an even stronger, ritual affirmation of who they were. But for that, like the Aborigines before them, they needed sacred objects around which the power of their collective sentiments could be focused and a future projected. Australians therefore needed sacred objects, emblems or totems that aptly captured who they were, but that would also permit a process of purification, affirmation and renewal. It was largely animals and to a lesser extent plants and natural objects that served this purpose, but their incorporation into the ritual life of the nation required a new form of practice – less art than active performance. In this sense representation gave way to performativity. And we can begin to see the changeover in the life and works of Judith Wright. Just as we began to recognise the Australian landscape as our own, it had become, according to poet and conservationist Judith Wright, ‘bare of any life but our own’.28 Aborigines had been cast aside and contradictory and unworkable foreign traditions and foreign creatures had been imposed upon an ‘Australian nature’. Her work developed a new theme of national consequence: ‘that white Australians will remain spiritually impoverished as long as we fail to overcome the mentality of conquerors and learn to enjoy the land for what it is.’29 For what it is, not what it has been made to be through Britainisation, the conquerors’ land. The diagnosis that Britainisation needs to be reversed is evident in this 1961 exhortation: Australia is still, for us, not a country but a state – or states – of mind. We do not yet speak from within her, but from outside: from the state of mind that describes, rather than expresses, its surroundings, or from the state of mind that imposes itself upon, rather than lives through, landscape and event … We are caught up in the nineteenth century split of consciousness, the stunned shock of those who cross the seas and find themselves, as the Australian ballad puts it, in a ‘hut that’s upside down’.30

Wright sensed an enigma that went to the very heart of Australian life. She knew from her own lived experience that to live a properly Australian life and respond to the land in a manner she wanted,

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one had to do it locally in an embedded and passionate way. From such experiences as she had in her New England home she realised that there was an uneasy tension between people and nature that would prompt ‘unsettled’ feelings and a rethinking of attitudes and behaviour. In an essay on her newfound passion, the conservation movement, she spoke of a ‘renewed humility’ and ‘a more imaginative participation in a life process that includes us’.31 Her imaginative participation found its sacred object in the Great Barrier Reef and the campaign to protect it in the 1960s, and after that, conservation seemed to define her life rather more than poetry, though poetry now became more channelled into conservation too. In this moral work we often find animals essentially involved: We cannot understand that call Unless we move into his dream Where all is one and one is all And frog and python are the same. We with our quick dividing eyes Measure, distinguish and are gone. The forest burns, the tree-frog dies Yet one is all and all are one.

Conservationists and environmentalists talk in a very religious way. They identify pollution and sacrilege and they seek purification, a return to a pure world expunged of sin. At the same time, natural, which is to say native, species are seen as paragons of virtue, the epitome of purity and goodness. Wright is certainly a good example of this religious discourse, even to the point of misanthropy. In this next poem she aligns herself with animals against errant Australians: Die, wild country, like the eaglehawk, Dangerous till the last breath’s gone, Clawing and striking. Die Cursing your captor through a raging eye … I praise the scoring drought, the flying dust, The drying creek, the furious animal, That they oppose us still; That we are ruined by the thing we kill.

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I will return to the conservation and environmental movement in Australia later, but it is important to first sketch an outline of another practice that was very likely critical to the success the movement had from the 1970s to the 1990s. I refer of course to tourism and the pilgrimage to Australian nature (another religious practice) that began and gathered momentum over this period of Australianisation and is itself a sub-process of Australianisation.

PERFORMING AUSTRALIA We can say with confidence that the written word and the painted canvas were a potent source of new ideas and inspiration for the ordinary person and that one of the most important was to produce an aesthetic of the Australian landscape, to aestheticise more and more of its surfaces and textures and to establish the practice of self-renewal through visiting its sacred bowers, sounds and smells. Tourism to natural areas in Australia, I will suggest, did not merely affirm the poet’s or the painter’s vision; the performance of pilgrimage to nature is simultaneously an act of ‘self-making’ and ‘place-making’. It is transformative in ways that cannot be predicted and the very performance of this pilgrimage, walking, seeing, reflecting and sensing, has profound implications for one’s unfolding identity and the geography of one’s life. We fall in love with natural places, but to love a place, as with the love of another person, requires us to perform that role, to try it out, to experiment with being there and doing it. Only then does it become a place. For these reasons the performance and performativity of tourism were crucial to the maturing phases of Australianisation. Bushwalking

The main population centres of Australia leading up to Federation were on the coast and it was after the fashion of British holidays that the seaside dominated the summer vacation

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period and most other leisure time. However, the lure of poetry and Heidelberg school painting brought at first a literary and educated avant-garde out into the forested areas and mountains to walk and to be enchanted by mid-nineteenth-century ‘fernmania’ – both gazing at and collecting fern specimens. The mountains near Melbourne, for example, were discovered at this time as a secret leisure zone of the select few, but tourism to these areas took off in the 1880s in response to the totemic call for a sacred Australian nature. The second waves of tourists were organised around walking and naturalist clubs such as the Field Naturalists’ Club of Victoria established in 1880 (Tasmania followed in 1904), the (all-male) Melbourne Amateur Walking and Touring Club established in 1894 and the Walhalla Mountaineering Association in 1907. By the late 1880s many informal trips were made to areas such as Marysville, Healesville and Warburton, where a growing hotel and guesthouse trade was catering to several ‘qualities’ of tourist from Thomas Cook’s tours down to what we might today call the budget backpacker. Griffiths details the trip of one such solo walker who stayed a night at the Australian Hotel in Marysville on Easter Monday. On that occasion it lodged eighty people ‘although it could comfortably sleep only 30’.32 Another intrepid pair also spent a couple of days in the mountains and forests around Marysville. What did they do? Their diaries tell all: they ‘followed splitters’ tracks, travelled along a corduroy road, gathered ferns, especially the uncommon ones, threw stones at a possum, inscribed their names on trees at the top of peaks, rolled giant boulders down the mountainside and were puzzled [and presumably disappointed that] they saw so few animals’.33 Added pleasures came from rustic Australiana, abandoned as well as working forest industries, cemeteries and talking to authentic elderly ‘locals’. These examples make it reasonably clear that the wilderness aesthetic and movement originated, in its specifically Australian manifestation, from bushwalking and not the other way around.

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Ironically then, bushwalking began from a will to be in the wilderness landscape and from a developing sense that the wilderness was an important and beneficial experience for (some) humans. Once clubs were established in most states, it was not long before favourite walks were under threat of logging or development of some kind. And owing to the sorts of people enrolled into these clubs, often from the educated governing classes of their state, they were able to lobby government from positions of privilege and establish campaigns. They were universally, it seems, a home for the few voices of scientific expertise relating to the value and significance of wilderness, and such voices in the early twentieth century commanded great respect and authority. While the outdoors movement had begun much earlier and was spurred by a generalised love affair with colonial-adventurist derring-do, the first bushwalking club of a kind we would recognise today began in 1914. Under the legendary leadership of Myles Dunphy, the small and exclusive all-male Mountain Trails Club (MTS) in Sydney not only blazed a trail through more and more areas of bush but shaped the very culture of bushwalking as a way of life. They innovated clothing, footwear (and footwear for their dogs), bush prams for their children, the first packs developed for Australian conditions, the first commercial outfitters such as Paddy Palin, and they also engaged in ‘place-making’: literally naming new areas, locations and landmarks, making fine maps and showing how to access more areas of bush and wilderness. The MTS was an exclusive and solidly professional male cult – referring to themselves, for example, as the bush brotherhood.34 Bushwalkers ‘produced nothing to profit Government’, wrote Dunphy, ‘except a kind of sane citizenship in the Australian democracy’. Bushcraft then involved living off the land for the duration of a walk, including shooting animals for food, but also making useful things for that temporary lifestyle.35 As the bushwalking craze spread across Australia in the early twentieth century, initially far more exclusive than it is today, it gathered together a bundle of distinguishing characteristics. The bushwalkers were from univer-

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sity-focused circles, they were affluent and young, they became entwined in preservation politics, they were amateur naturalists, and they included both arts and science circles; their affluence, however, did not run to car-ownership. The entire bushwalking enterprise was initially fuelled and underwritten by the railway companies, and here Sydney and Melbourne took the lead. One important but rather obscure reason why wilderness is important in Australia is not because there are no other places of great natural beauty, but because those areas are in private ownership and largely out of bounds. Because Australian land was parcelled up according to an aristocracy model of land-ownership, rights of way were not built into landholdings or created between them or along waterways. Compared to rights of way enjoyed in Britain and Scandinavia, for example, Australia and New Zealand have very few. To get out into the country, Australians have to travel considerable distances to the national parks. The first national parks were created in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and during the twentieth century, and it was the railways that developed them by building lines into them and scheduling trains for weekend and holiday periods. In order to create a wilderness aesthetic and a market for a travelling public, the railway companies employed the new advances in photography, and before long, the Edwardian city was covered in photographic posters of wondrous and exotic spaces now within reach of the city-dweller. There was quite a craze for it. The crowds filling trains from Melbourne and Sydney, wilderness-bound, concentrated minds in Hobart and particularly the Director of the Government Tourist Bureau, who also held responsibilities for the railways. He supported the newly founded Hobart Walking Club (established in 1929) and he also commissioned photographic expeditions into wilderness areas to attract more tourists, to hold them longer and to wow them with ever more superlative wilderness country. Victoria became envious and the photographer John Watt Beattie became famous. By 1912 Victorian Railways published Picturesque Victoria,

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taking tourists to more and more areas opened up by more and more tracks and trails. Over the same period the Tasmanian Field Naturalists were out whenever they could be cutting and maintaining tracks on Mount Wellington, most of which have been kept up until the present. However, it was in the 1930s and through ‘hiking mania’ that such inland trips turned attention away from the coast and towards the mountains. The decades following the Great War were a period of widespread celebration and rediscovery of the Australian countryside. The experience of war caused many people to recoil from urban industrialism, and it was after 1920 that the Heidelberg school of Australian impressionist painters became most revered. Tramping with book and pipe, rejoicing in the open air, seeking out the oldest inhabitants of settlements, pottering around country cemeteries.36

‘Noble arks’ for native animals and plants

The first of Australia’s youth hostels opened at Warrandyte at the beginning of 1938, and from then on the motor car became a more common way of arrival and touring. But in addition to walking, nature study and Australiana, those heading to Healesville would take in what was to become a more characteristic and essential stop: to gaze at Australia’s sacred remaining fauna in ready-made viewing facilities. The Sir Collin MacKenzie Sanctuary for Australian Fauna opened officially in 1934 on part of the site of the former Coranderrk Aboriginal Station. As Tom Griffiths says, There were sinister continuities between these two reserves for indigenous life, both very popular tourist sites in different eras, one a ‘show place’ of Aboriginality and ‘primitive’ humanity, and the other a sanctuary for ‘low degree, slow breeding and altogether archaic mammals’. Both enclosed ‘remarkable survivals’ and constituted Australian research parks in the ‘problem of world evolution’.37

Ghassan Hage has referred to these sorts of processes as part of the nation-building effort in which nature is increasingly domesticated.38 Far from championing wildness and the separation of

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humanity from nature, these national processes bring the wilderness into more human control and management in its name. The model of course is the Garden of Eden, and the project consists of restoring humanity to perfection. Eco-nationalist language is rich in both its diagnosis of the Fall and the path back to grace, but it was built on earlier forms that did not share its biocentric model. In the first half of the century the domestication of Australian nature went hand in hand with both the maintenance and extension of an unproblematic pastoral economy and the spread of suburbia. This is evident in the construction of what Tim Low calls ‘noble arks’ for native animals and the first attempts to domesticate native plants for suburban gardens. In 1925 Sir James Barrett wrote in his book Save Australia: ‘We wish to order our civilisation that every species of plant and animal indigenous to the continent is preserved in such circumstances that they may live their natural lives and reproduce their kind.’39 Around Australia at such places as Wilsons Promontory, Kangaroo Island and Maria Island, sanctuaries were set up not so much to conserve ecosystems but as ‘safe receptacles into which animals could be deposited’ away from the scourge of the fox. The model is of course similar in some respects to previous attempts to ‘save’ Aboriginal people on protected reserves. But as Low argues, ‘the idea drew more from tales of Noah’s Ark than from any grasp of biology. Animals from hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles away were thrown together onto islands of forest, usually to die quick deaths.’40 The manner in which native plants were first adopted in Australian gardens and gardening also followed a domestication model. Philippa McMahon shows how the ‘Australian border’ established at Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens in 1887 as an ‘all in together gardenesque type of arrangement’ came under renewed thinking in the late 1940s. Far from being a national spectacle in a state museum of nature, the idea took shape to render these plants suitable for adoption by Australian gardeners. In their natural state and their ‘untidy habit of growth they were unsuitable for domestication into

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the suburban garden’. Therefore a ‘native plant breeding programme’ was initiated to ‘develop improved, better-looking and more predictable forms’.41 Native plants were bred to have brighter colours, longer flowering periods and more compact shapes. And once these had been achieved the new varieties were to be passed over to commercial nurseries for mass production and retail to the public. As with the setting up of ‘noble arks’, modernising Australia was not to be compromised or changed by embracing native species as their own: Unlike the bush garden approach which took off in the 1960s and 1970s, the idea with the native garden plant breeding project was to change the plants to fit with current gardening practices and tastes. There was no hint that gardening may need to adapt in some measure to accommodate such plants. The project was not about bringing the bush to the suburbs, it was rather about suburbanising the plants. And also unlike the bush garden, while trying to increase the Australian content [they] were not hoping to produce native gardens, as such, at all. The idea was to ‘reproduce plants that will successfully compete in the average garden with the other plants grown therein’.42

How was McMahon to understand this domestication process? Not surprisingly, she draws on the rhetoric of Australian nationalism of the period: ‘The 1950s in Australia has been portrayed as an era of heightened social conformity. An aspect of this, assimilation, was an overarching ideology which was applied to newcomers and indigenous Australians. It would seem here that the demands that were being made of people were being projected onto plants.’43 But at the same time, precisely because assimilation was such an ideology it operated through social conformity, both of the human body and the nature of garden plants. Assimilation, we can say, was projected onto plants and animals alike, but once it was established as a natural model in and through them as domesticated or nationalised species, its light was beamed back to society in a powerful way. There is nothing more convincing than the naturally self-evident and this is how nationalism works – through natural metaphors.

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Eco-nationalism

Throwing stones at possums, gazing at archaic colonial survivals, hunting and planting native plants in suburban gardens and being disappointed that nocturnal animals did not make a show during a midday walk were attitudes to nature that would change dramatically in the last quarter of the twentieth century as econationalism began to change these parks and reserves and nature practices into a more organised conservation-toned movement. The last gasp of forest-oriented recreation was the creation of the ski runs and facilities in the 1930s and 1940s, but when the national parks were declared in the wake of the push and pressure from the likes of Judith Wright, we can detect the slow creep of ‘biocentricity’, the ecology movement’s turnaround answer to anthropocentric use of mountain, reserve and forest for human pleasure and recreation. The shift was in fact quite complex and layered. The first conservationists had been champions of the ‘wise use’ of resources; then there developed a movement to preserve aesthetically pleasing or spiritually uplifting places. The ecological vision shifted the emphasis to non-human values: the preservation of biodiversity, the protection of gene pools, the integrity of ecosystems, the independent rights of animals and plants.44

While this is true, a new ‘wilderness aesthetic’ gained pace among a middle-class elite, especially through bushwalking circles, who dominated not only a nature politics but also the consumption of its wilderness landcape.45 Such a selective purification process, however, leads me to disagree with Tom Griffiths that values were now ‘non-human’, because the emphasis is still very much to do with human values: just because they are naturalised to seem external to the human world does not mean they are external. While the biocentric experience was genuine and apposite in a practical sense, it simultaneously heightened and privileged a sense of Australianness precisely at a time when a clear national identity was difficult to frame. This was the era of flux: it was post-White Australia, mid-multicultural Australia, and pre-One Nation times. It was an

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Australia that could express and be rocked by boundary anxieties, as the Tampa affair of 2001 made perfectly clear. This last point can be made more emphatically when we presently look with more focus at the gathering energy around the ecological and environmental movement in Australia. But to conclude this brief consideration of the walking, hiking, park-visiting, native-gardening phenomenon that accompanied the artistic and literary flurries of eco-nationalism in the twenty or so years either side of Federation and the birth of the nation, we can see that this embodied, hands-on performance was both intensive and popular. Entire generations of Australians performed these pilgrimages to see and do things with a nature that was more or less foreign to their forebears. Although we can perhaps find stages in the path towards fullblown environmentalism, very often each successive movement produces the conditions from which the next can develop. It is only when one is aesthetically turned on by an object that curiosity and beauty can produce the welling up of sympathy and empathy. It is only by tramping deep into forests that one can really appreciate what they are and what one loses by felling them. And it is only when one comes to see, understand and think about the other sentient beings like us who occupy the same national lands that one comes to think how that relationship ought to be, what principles come into play in order to answer it. But in addition to all that, these seemingly ephemeral and relatively shallow experiences of Australian nature did something quite profound. They enrolled Australian nature into the constitution of Australia itself. Aboriginal people were not made citizens until 1967, but the new totemic foster-ancestors for white Australia had naturalised Australian wildlife a hundred years before – in exchange for their own naturalisation. The roots of Australian environmentalism reach back into those halcyon days of innocent nature leisure. Even those far from the front lines of conservation and later green politics are affected; those trips to nature and its subsequent demise had a powerful

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effect on them. The young Barry Humphries (aka Dame Edna Everage) was taken regularly to Healesville to the family shack and to ‘so many happy bushland holidays’. He played in ‘an old messmate’ (Eucalyptus obliqua) where a tree house and a telephone line back to the shack were built for him. There were family picnic spots ‘on a ferny knoll beside badger creek – where many a platypus lurked’. On an ill-fated return to this childhood dream place he found it newly built over and transformed: As I recklessly turned the car around, not even daring to grieve that lost idyll of childhood, I saw a sign outside the display home. It exhibited, in an enlarged photograph, the developer himself, Wayne Acropolis, in natty suit and tie, extending a fat foreshortened hand of welcome to the passing motorist, and from his lips a large balloon framed these words: HAPPENING HEALESVILLE WELCOME TO PLATYPUS PLAZA YOU COULD BE HAPPY HERE !

46

The full irony and anger such an encounter engenders is only possible from the perspective of one who has known and visited the place, its creatures and its beauty. In this sense there is a strong content to the politics of environmentalism that derives from experience from growing up or becoming familiar with specific places and the animals one shares it with. The success of environmentalism depended on these active experiences with nature, but it was distributed across all nature categories of Australia and not confined to the native category that environmentalism championed. For this reason the animal categories of Australia split emotional and cultural identification rather than producing a national unity.

AUSTRALIANISATION AND THE GREEN TURN Durkheim explored the manner in which human beings continue to divide the world into sacred and profane, maintaining that even modern men and women need ritual

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experiences of a mystical kind. Whereas the sacred provides a social representation of the good in relation to which actors seek to build communities, the profane defines the image of evil and establishes a zone of pollution from which humans strive to be saved.47

Australianisation was not simply about preserving the native species that so invoked nation: it subsequently became about eradicating those species introduced by the British during the colonial period, purifying an Australianness in the name of ecology or ecosystemic unity. The seemingly sensible and worthy dimension to environmentalism and ecological thinking has a darker side that many are not aware of. For one thing, as Ghassan Hage and others point out, ‘it is mainly nationalist ecology that operates the fusion between the national and the natural fantasy, seeing the nation as both a social and a natural domesticated space’. Under Nazi Germany, for example, this was made explicit ‘where the wilderness was conceived as a “German cultural good”’. Nazi writers such as Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl made links between the preservation of forests and the preservation of the German race: The German people need the forest. And as much as we need the wood to warm the human exterior … the forest is also necessary to warm the human interior. We ought to protect our forests, not simply to keep our stoves hot in winter but so that the pulse of the people can continue to beat with a joyful warmth and for Germany to remain German.48

The Nazis were also responsible for the most extensive animal rights legislation ever passed, but its complex nature clearly shows how native German animals were not only protected but elevated socially above both foreign animals and undesirable foreigners. The Nazis worked within a new paradigm. Accepting the logic of modernism, they abolished the line separating human and animal and articulated a new hierarchy based on race, which placed certain species-races of animals above races of humans – eagles and wolves and [wild] pigs [German indigenous animals] in the new human/animal hierarchy were placed above Poles and rats and Jews.49

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In this way, as Hage notes, the ecological fantasy is part of the national fantasy and vice versa. The Nazis are an extreme case but it is possible to detect a degree of slippage from ecology to nationalism in more recent writing. Hage finds it in the environmental sociology of Ted Benton, for example: The fight to preserve features of one’s environment from destruction is not (or not solely) a form of instrumental action, in which some external object is protected because it is contributory to one’s vested interests (the value of one’s property, the quality of the view from the back windows or whatever), but rather because it is included in one’s sense of self and so is inseparable from one’s personal well-being.50

As Hage writes, ‘uncritically it ends up laying the grounds for the commonsense construction of the “perturbing other”, without perceiving the necessity of the presence of this “other” for the very construction that is being described. More importantly, such a conception bears an uncanny resemblance to nationalist modes of ecological thinking where Benton’s unspecified space becomes the social of national space.’51 It is easy to discover essentially similar statements from Australian scientists in which the slippage from ecology and ‘the scientific facts’ to nationalism can be discerned. The following was taken from the Biodiversity Community Network’s web pages: It is only over the past decade or so that we begin to realise we can no longer take for granted, as a free gift of bounteous nature, the once abundant clean air and waters, fertile soils, pest-free landscapes, and the species richness of any of the diverse ecosystems of Australia … The lust of colonisation, the profligate bubble of progress, and even the integrity of our so-called multicultural society are increasingly suspect. Scapegoats are aplenty. We have broken most of the ecological rules. Means have become ends. We tremble on the brink of the new Millennium … And yet we glimpse, we feel a dawning awareness. We, the human species, are not separate from nature, from and through whom or which we evolved. We, the only species with reflexive

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consciousness, are kin with the now suffering Earth. Indigenous people know that. We must now accept our role in co-creation, as the most potent ecological force, as the consciousness of the Earth and her infinite variety, and thus our ethical responsibilities.52

Reading this, one can fall into the trap of thinking this is decent and reasonably environmentally sound, and authenticated by an appropriate authority. But there are some points where the statements drift from aspects of ecology to specifically Australian ethical and political advocacy. The first paragraph speaks of a sullied Australian landscape, but in what sense was it ever fertile or bountiful and what does pest-free mean in ecological terms? In sociological terms the reference to ‘pests’ clearly indicates a relationship of domestication. It means that the so-called wilderness and native species are being domesticated by Australian science and related eco-naturalistic organisations. This is setting up a notion of Australianness as a pure essence, whereas it ignores the prior colonisation by Aboriginal people, their burning and their domestication and further the introduction of the dingo and the extinctions attributed to it. Even if it takes the 1788 deadline as the beginning from a fall from grace, it is not at all clear why that point is taken to be a point of scientific equilibrium and aesthetic beauty. The second paragraph identifies the origins of this despoliation or fall from grace. One can perhaps understand why colonisation and progress are on the list, but what is multiculturalism doing there? Could he possibly mean immigration or immigrants? Is multiculturalism somehow breaking the ecological rules, and if so how? In the third paragraph the author begins to talk on behalf of, or as the ‘consciousness of’, the earth itself. Although it seems as though this is a universal humanity aligned with the earth, we must remind ourselves that the subject of this statement is Australia, not the world. He is part of a ‘we’, but who are this ‘we’ if not Australia? This is, unwittingly perhaps, a form of nationalist rheto-

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ric with many antecedents. It identifies a legitimate human–natural constituency who are already part of its natural being, and it is a call to arms, a call to their ‘common’ and ‘sacred grounds’. Clearly we cannot be different and have separate cultural compositions since there is a singular imperative, the nation and its nature, which in order to be ‘in order’ must become one and the same. In their 2004 policy documents the Australian Greens have a specific policy on animals; as far as I know they are the only political party in Australia ever to do so. In it the themes of insider and outsider animals, protection and eradication coexist alongside contradictory claims about animal rights. The Greens know full well that their anti-introduced animal policies are vehemently opposed both by animal rights and welfare groups, among whom other green parties expect support, and by ordinary Australians. Thus their laid-down principles include one that ‘animals have intrinsic rights, separate from the needs of humans who have consequent responsibilities to ensure that animal rights are respected’. Another seemingly sensible and consistent principle is that ‘there is a need to ensure that native animals and their habitats are protected and cared for’. However, this clearly establishes for native animals greater rights than, or privileges over, other animals. Fudging somewhat, one of their consequent goals aims to ‘ensure the most humane and effective means available are used when control of introduced animals is sought, and [to] develop humane population management methods such as fertility control’. This is the language of eradication and forced sterilisation, which is difficult to square with any other notion of animal rights and in particular with the specific practice of rights towards feral animals by Animal Liberation Australia, who see this activity as expensive, ineffective, unethical and ‘fiddling while the world burns’. One can indeed understand why native animals should be looked after but given that they are most endangered by human action, the concentration of blaming and killing of feral animals becomes anthropologically interesting.

Chapter 6

OUTSIDER ANIMALS?

For a long while, in the crossover between Britainisation and Australianisation, the aesthetic of native species did not grow at the expense of all introduced species. The rabbit was of course an unmitigated economic disaster, but less obtrusive species carried on unnoticed or in a manner by now familiar to Australians wherever they occurred. Some were still hunted, some were appreciated still, while others, like the brumby, continued to be used as a rural resource. They were so multiply embedded into the fabric of modern Australian life and landscape that they did not stand out as separate and different. Rather, their former classification as wild or domestic animals continued irrespective of their current ‘living’ arrangements. Since the mid-1970s, however, and especially from the 1980s onwards, part of the ‘green turn’ was to group them together and bracket them off as outsiders, that is, unwanted outsiders. New terms for them crept in and spread, from the innocuous ‘introduced’ or mildly positive ‘exotic’ to the emotivenegative ‘feral’ and ‘pest’. Their status is revealed quite well through the position of hunting in Australia and elsewhere. Since most Australian hunters hunt introduced or exotic species that have been increasingly identified as a threat to Australian indigenous species, if not the Australian environment itself, hunters have been insulated from moral blame in Australia rather more than they have in the United States or the United Kingdom. In these

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latter countries all animals were at this time raised to the position of an oppressed minority and became the beneficiaries of positive reforms. They were seen as the stable, essentially good and sane other to a destructive, mad and imbalanced humanity.1 Hunting was therefore seen as one of the worst crimes against the environment and was roundly criticised by most political parties. As killers of animals, a certain distaste for their sport was common enough in Australia, but this was pushed into the background by their association with the popular and growing enthusiasm for ‘species or environmental cleansing’. All the while they are killers of foreign interlopers they are at the same time heroic defenders of a fragile Australian natural/national purity. That quest was championed by other powerful groups who jumped onto the eco-nationalism bandwagon: conservationist scientists, ecologists and greens. Australian science and environmental governance promote what Macnaghten and Urry have called ‘a naive realist perspective that assumes that environmental issues progressively come to light simply from scientific understandings’.2 They argue that a ‘sociologically informed inquiry looks to the cultural and political conditions out of which environmental issues emerge, and thereby to a more informed account of the social consequences’. In brief, it is argued here that nationalist sentiments in Australia influenced the sorts of values scientists promote, as well as their findings, but that both values and findings are disguised within a discourse of pure science. The nationalistic obsession with native purity is easily illustrated, for example, by the language used in scientific and government publications on the environment. This is clearly illustrated in the recent publication Pest animals in Australia: A survey of introduced wild mammals.3 First, it is never clear from such works why the consequences of human introductions of non-indigenous species are not simply accepted, particularly since eradication measures would in most cases prove prohibitively expensive and be unlikely to succeed anyway. This is the case with the fox and the cat, which are the subject of the most heated antipathy.4 Although

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the impact, particularly of the fox, is regrettable and certainly the future movement of any animal has to be treated very carefully indeed, the science seems to show both variable impact and only remote possibilities of successful eradication. In other words the science seems to show beyond reasonable doubt that Australia is an irretrievably hybrid or what Tim Low calls a new nature. In which case, what is the purpose of the ubiquitous vilification of one category if not to preserve the notion or theoretical possibility of a pure Australianness? Second, what makes these animals pests in scientific terms is not their country of origin but their being ‘out of ecosystem’ or in the wrong ecosystem or ecology, one that has evolved in their absence. Pollution has been described by anthropologists as ‘matter out of place’,5 and this biological construction of ‘organisms out of place’ is essentially similar. However, owing to the nature of colonial and postcolonial Australia, a great many Australian species have also been moved out of their original ecosystems and are living in many other places. This mobility and adaptability occurred as a result of both accidental and purposeful introductions, some by humans and in other cases by the natural movement of the species themselves or by their hitching rides on such things as cargo ships, trains and cars. While this movement of Australian species is occasionally recognised as a problem, as with some populations of koalas in Victoria, by and large these species or populations are not referred to as pests, though strictly, biologically speaking, they are. So we need to ask ourselves why they are not referred to as such. Why indeed, do they enjoy privileges denied to other ‘out of ecology’ species? And the answer is simple enough: if they are from Australia they are natives – different rules apply. But the point to be made here is that these are not scientific but social and political rules. Another good example is the lyrebird in Tasmania. Recent research has shown that it is spreading through extensive areas of rainforest, and as it does so, its continuous digging is fundamentally changing the soils and the vegetative structure. Although it is seen by researchers as a species worth eradicating (they say that a

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‘targeted lethal virus might do the trick’6) it is not referred to as a pest by Parks and Wildlife authorities in Tasmania. Indeed, the premier tourist short walk through rainforest in Mount Field National Park is called the Lyrebird Nature Walk. Third, and a related point, it is never clear when nature has to be ‘stopped’ for the purposes of deciding who is in (native) and who is out. Nature of course is a dynamic, continuously changing phenomenon and we know that really very dramatic changes occur and that change is the constant state, not the equilibrium favoured by ecology. This renders the idea of indigeneity problematic over the long term – the very term that warrants its legitimacy. But the orthodoxy in Australia holds that native animals are those that were here at the time of white settlement. However, this traps environmental action in the enigma of an ecosystem they can never aspire to restore: the extensively burned pre-colonial landscape of Aboriginal Australia, or indeed the dominance of acacias on the continent before they were displaced by eucalypts. By this logic the dingo that came before whites visited Australia is a native animal but the brumby is not because it came just after. According to Pest Animals in Australia, the extent of introduced species in Australia is one of the highest in the world: ‘about 20 mammals, 30 birds, 21 fish, several amphibians, 500 invertebrates and 1500 plants have been introduced and have subsequently become naturalised, in Australia.’7 Introduced animals acquire pest status if they ‘compete with’ or ‘threaten’ any native animals. Here there is a purity of mind that is out of kilter with the complexity of the issue, which breeds yet another enigma. Some introduced species, for example, are now necessary for the survival of current communities of native species, yet may compete for the same food eaten by other native species, yet not threaten them with extinction.8 The rabbit in Tasmania is a good example here. If it were eradicated the Wedge-tailed Eagle numbers might plummet. While the ecological science of the interface between native and introduced species is dominated by studies of predation and competition, there is very little on the new relationships worked

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out between native and introduced species. A native goshawk cares little for the classificatory character of its next prey. There has been a great deal of mutual adaptation, learning, inscription and embedding going on between these species to the extent that we can point to an extensive new ecology that is neither purely Australian nor, significantly, not-Australian. This is the nature of postcolonial fauna. As I will show in the next chapter in a section on feral cats, the science of the cat’s impact on native wildlife simply does not square with policy recommendations made in its name. In other words, there is an apparent absence of evidence required to sustain the wholly negative and condemnatory attitudes towards these animals. If the attitude does not come from the facts then it must come from elsewhere. That elsewhere is a nationalism that inculcates an intolerance of hybridity, mixture and classificatory disorder – even on those landscapes such as postcolonial Australia where that is a distinguishing feature. Indeed, it is the very threat of disorder and impurity that drives the desire for order. It may be understandable that humans don’t want to see species disappear, but it is less clear why the disappearance of species is any less ‘natural’ than their preservation. An equally plausible view might be to accept humanity as simply another agent of nature, and to accept the changing mix and balance of species as inevitable or given. Such a view might be further supported by a sentimental view, that animals should not pay such a high price for human folly, or an animal rights discourse which holds that animals should be protected or left alone, certainly not exterminated simply because they were moved out of their native range by humans. It is certainly the case that over the longer evolutionary scale humans have moved species considerable distances away from their ‘home’ range, as have other ‘natural’ forces such as floods, tides, strong winds and so on. So we see here the subtle force that national history exerts on natural history and science. Native animals and plants appear in such government documents as Australia’s Environment as the

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subject proper; it is almost as if they were the natural citizenry. It is a selective history of Australia’s past selecting in only some of its constituents. Introduced species, on the other hand, appear like illegal immigrants, and are of interest only in terms of their negative impact on the natives. The sacred and the profane are sorted perfectly. Consequently, introduced species have to be ‘managed’ while natives have to be ‘conserved’. According to the latest government publication on the Australian environment, ‘the management of introduced species involves two essential components. These are: monitoring of populations and impacts and the application of control techniques.’ In other words, surveillance and extermination.9 This species-cleansing has gained a pace since the early 1990s. Numerous examples can be found across Australia but none illustrated its mainstream character more than Earth Sanctuaries Ltd, the feral-free enterprises of Dr John Wamsley. After establishing his model sanctuary at Warrawong based on the methodology of ‘feral fencing these habitats, eradicating the feral animals, reintroduc[ing] the wildlife which once lived there’, and managing them ‘in a sustainable (both financially and environmentally) manner’, he set out to develop a sanctuary ‘in each of the major habitats of Australia – more than 80 in total’. Such a venture ‘would dedicate over 1% of the Australian landmass to the sustainable conservation of Australian wildlife’ and to judge from its website in September 2003, the financial side of his operation made these sanctuaries work hard for their living. These spaces of pure nationalism offer not only the sort of paying activities normally found in parks and wildlife park areas, zoos etc. – guided tours and educational activities – but also offered is accommodation, a ‘shed café’, conference facilities, and spaces for wedding receptions, functions and school trips. These native animals now confined within the perimeter fence must suffer the disturbance of the restaurant, which seats ‘up to 90 guests for lunch or dinner and up to 150 guests for a cocktail function’. Far from adapting human activities to the needs of these rare and endangered species,

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weddings at Warrawong ‘offer a range of music to complement the mood of your wedding. An area can be set aside for a small band, DJ, jukebox and dance floor’. Despite this, Wamsley’s efforts were otherwise consistent with Australian eco-nationalism and indeed this was highlighted in 2003 when he received the Prime Minister’s Award for Environmentalist of the Year. In Australia the nationalism that drove species-cleansing dated back to the 1850s when, as Ann Moyal argues, a distinctly Australian science emerged from the nascent nationalism. Self-government and the emergence of a separate Victoria and Queensland combined with an upsurge of self-awareness that found expression in a spirit of optimism and equality and … a growing sense of self-motivation and responsibility in the country’s intellectual life. In science these sensations were keenly felt … This ‘reality of newness and freedom’ irradiated the individual scientist at work and moved him to cast off the old sense of unquestioning reference to expertise overseas.10

From then on a radically new scientific agenda appeared that was undoubtedly tinged with nationalism. It was a separate, distinct and autonomous Australian natural history, and ‘Australianness’ thereby became a value that had hitherto not existed in those more rarefied international debates received from the old country. Indeed, Australianness progressed from a human value to a scientific reality, a separate and fragile reality that was nonetheless a socially constructed one. Of course, all environments are managed or at least heavily influenced by human activity, and most of the so-called wild areas are becoming nothing more than museumised nature. But this is not a random process. Environmental sciences are strongly linked to government environmental policy, which in turn draws on and reinvents discourses of nation. In brief, the resulting practice is not much more than the management of a national collection of wildlife. As with all collections, there has to be a collection policy, selection criteria and so on. In Australia, the collection policy is tied closely to a nation-formation process, but both practices are

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made to appear natural or scientific rather than based on moral, cultural or political choice. Some scientists fall under the spell of nationalism and see discourses of nature not as the invention of nationalism but as an artefact of Australian nature: For [Australia] has the highest number of new settlers of any ‘new’ lands, and it has an extremely difficult and unusual ecology. Perhaps this accounts for what outsiders perceive as the obsession Australians have with defining themselves. It arises from a frustration born of the long-felt inability to live in harmony with the land. It comes from the dismay one feels when seeing the extraordinary beauty and complexity of unique environments wither – even from an apparently gentle touch by a European hand – and from the floods and bushfires that constantly remind Australians that the land does not hold them comfortably. It is now clear, I think, that any lasting notion of Australian nationhood must arise from an intimate understanding of Australian ecosystems.11

Science and government scientific organisations have exerted a profound influence over lay practices in the natural environment and that of course, as we have seen, begins in suburban gardens. Eradicating the exotica from South Africa, Europe and China and planting native species in as pure a manner as possible in Australian gardens, that is, those that are native to particular regions, soils and climates, has become something of a register by which the purity of Australianness can be measured.12 Australianisation as the complex manner by which modern urban Australia came to terms with its emerging national identity was achieved, in part, by creating totemic social identification with Australian nature. Animals were the most significant set of signifiers of this identity claim, though Australian flora was widely used too. The Australian biotic community provides a field of signs that specify appropriate naturalisation activities: the appreciation and protection of indigenous species and habitats and the control and eradication of non-indigenous species. The growth in popularity of indigenous species can be related to the post-Federation nation-building years, where the search for

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distinction and identity culminated in the adoption of biotic totems and a reworked reverence for clearly Australian fauna and flora. What symbol could work better in this project than Australia’s unique biotic order? It was robust, attractive, recognisably similar, but at the same time unique: few other symbolic structures were so obviously appropriate to Australia in the early twentieth century. It too was vulnerable to contamination from outside – both from colonial remnant cultures such as the British, or from later migrant groups. We have to be ever vigilant. The carp found in the highland lakes of Tasmania, most likely introduced by Polish or other ethnic minorities for whom the carp is a sacred festive food, was most vociferously and expensively attacked by the scientists from Tasmania’s Inland Fisheries Commission, and fresh funding of an order never before seen was given by the federal government for this particular crusade. The active preservation of Australian wildlife underscores the significance of Australia as a worthy, promotable and legitimately protected idea, but it also provides an aching need for the spatially misplaced postcolonials to be in nature: In fact, the term [nature] is systematically ambiguous, being either a general or inclusive term applied to the essential quality of everything or a specific and exclusive term applied only to that which is beyond human culture. Precisely the same ambiguity pervades the mythology of eco-nationalism in Australia, with nature simultaneously positioned, geographically and historically, as the place where Australians are not (the indigenous wilderness) and the place where Australians can find their true selves. Furthermore, it is clear that nature as essence and nature as other are systematically related, respectively signifying adaptation (a sense of being at home in the world) and maladaptation (a sense of being alienated). And as Flannery explicitly states, maladaptation is cultural. To be, like the Mitsubishi Pajero, ‘perfectly adapted to Australian conditions’ is to be natural rather than cultural. And yet the quest to be natural is itself cultural.13

This is an irony that has hardly begun to occur to Australians. Such clarity of thought is always masked behind the more dominant

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emotional responses we have to our nationalism and the nature that authenticates it.

T H E C U LT U R A L TA X O N O M Y OF AUSTRALIAN ANIMALS But in fact the very acts of national purification worked out through policies and practices on animals turns out to be selfdefeating. This is the thesis of this book. Because the object of their endeavours, which is to form, through an appropriate taxonomy of animals, a clear and proper sense of Australianness, cannot disregard the nature and ‘culture of nature’ that has emerged during Australia’s history. There is no going back: this is the truth of a postcolonial modern society. The current wisdom on animals has established a confused and contradictory set of boundaries in which animals seem to suggest social and cultural flaws and fissures, anxieties and doubts in the national makeup rather than certainties and confidence. This is evident in the proliferation of categories and the ambiguous boundary-crossing of certain animals. As I argued in chapter 1, animals rendered the idea of Australia ambiguous even before settlement. The resulting introductions of more familiar fauna produced two categories of wild animal, one positively valued and preserved, the other despised and exploited. At around the time Federation and independence from Britain became a political reality, and as an Australian national culture began to coalesce, the two wild categories underwent a fundamental and spectacular turnaround.14 The new nation required a clear and unambiguously different representation to distinguish it from Britain and all other nations. Since the introduced wild animals were symbols of its former colonial status they were passed over in favour of the native wild animals, which because of their plight could be ‘saved’ – restored, conserved and privileged. The authors, artists, scientists and politicians who comprised

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Australian ‘high culture’ constructed a sense of Australian nationhood through the championing of native wild species. At the same time the domestic livestock industries were making Australia rich. So sheep and cattle and native animals were shaping up to be representative of what it was to be properly Australian. However, the expansion of the farming lands and the final exploration of the continent resulted in the creation of yet another category of animals. Horses, goats, pigs and others escaped from farms, and the inland spread of farms brought cats and dogs into all areas. Across wide areas there was now a new category of wilddomestic animals: animals that were neither wild nor domestic but both, and who bore the opprobrium of the label ‘feral’. To this group was added the released and escaped animals from colonial expeditions and transport: the donkey, camel, horse and even buffalo. So the new Australia had two positively endorsed categories, native-wild and domestic-domestic, and two categories that had changed from highly valued to ambiguous, the introducedwild and the wild-domestic. The latter two were ambiguous in that they were of indeterminate use and meaning. They could have been embraced as different and exotic in the way they were in Britain, or they might have been naturalised like the mustang in the United States. How they were thought about seemed to depend on the contingencies of the developing postcolonial state and the self-confidence of the nation. In the post-White Australia era, with its shifting ethnic population, multicultural rhetoric and the proliferation of a sinister racist minority politics, it must come as little surprise that the ambiguously positioned animals were mantled with outsider status. Brumbies

Brumbies illustrate the fact that introduced species cannot be treated as a singular category, even if the vacuous definition ‘pest’ (which is defined, as we have seen, as any species that competes with or undermines native species – a status they could hardly avoid even if they were entirely benign) is often successfully pinned

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on them. Of course all animals have environmental impacts, so the issue at stake is less to do with their impact than how they are valued in and of themselves, especially in national, popular, scientific and ecological discourses. What matters most in Australian biopolitics is how these social constructions conflict and how they determine the particular way in which Australian nature is contested. This can be illustrated by looking at how different animals invoke multiple narratives and opinions, from the ecologically most benign to the most serious. In the popular imagination the idea of eradicating the brumby from the Australian landscape is something that undermines rather than improves the national estate. We would be erasing the memory of a valued social association and an important part of the collective nation-building effort. The brumby indeed connects settler society to the land in stories of exploration, and its naturalisation simultaneously legitimates settler society. Their footprint on the landscape is acceptable, as is ours. For these reasons ecologists struggle to make their eradication proposals stick. (See also chapter 8.) The cat

The cat does not have this strong historical claim on national sentiments or a role in nation-making fables, and its carnivorous habits together with its traditional associations with darkness and witchcraft render it problematic and ambiguous. Added to this, it embodies some unAustralian social values: it is a loner, it lives independently of its (human) mates and it is superior (a superadapted animal) and aloof (needing nobody). As Smith remarks, ‘there is a range of mythological sources for anti-feline sentiment, much of it purely symbolic’ and ‘what a “real” dingo or cat “is” may have little to do with the self-evident logos of folk taxonomy’.15 Yet these sources slide in and out of scientific and ecological discourses barely noticed. The feral dog has nowhere near the same degree of vilification as the feral cat. Despite being a very serious bush killer and interbreeding with the dingo to the point of almost complete hybridisa-

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tion,16 the domestic dog remains one of the most popular and loved animals in Australia. Here again, it is its social and cultural life that proves more important than its ecological life. While the cat embodies unAustralianness, the dog is the opposite: dogs are mateand friendship-oriented; they are dependent on society; they like to please and to cooperate; they enjoy company, play and activity with humans and they know their place and ‘fit in’. Like the brumby, they can also claim a significant role in the making of Australia, from the sheep dogs of the Golden Fleece to the companions of the lonely squatter. The rabbit

The rabbit did untold harm to many native species, and it is clear that its impact was perceived as most seriously against farmers and their introduced species. The ecologically concerned urban majority care less about them than native animals and so rabbit biopolitics in Australia hinges more on this impact. Here opinion divides. Short of a safe new biocontrol technology coming on line (and the release of biocontrols is now widely frowned on and feared), its eradication is widely believed to be a hopeless cause and one that would also have serious consequences on many native species that have grown dependent on it. Paradoxically, the rabbit is protected by the logic of non-introduction. At present the rabbit has few supporters other than the animal rights lobby, but at the same time it seems to be asserting its nationality simply by its very grip on the land. Have we become resigned to the presence of rabbits here even if we are not quite as pleased to have them around as the Aboriginal people we encountered in Chapter 3? It seems that this is the case. Efforts to eradicate them will continue, but in the meantime their participation in the Australian wildlife food chain and the adaptation of so much wildlife to them means that they might one day be accepted as a more permanent part of Australian nature. They could go the way of the dingo, which was, after all, an ecological nightmare in a class of its own.

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The dingo

‘… a very dangerous situation wherein they are not tame and they are not wild.’17

The dingo is widely held responsible for a raft of extinctions in Australia in the 4000 years since it first appeared. Its appearance coincides with the disappearance of the thylacine on mainland Australia, for example,18 and is almost certainly the reason why the Tasmanian devil was confined to Tasmania. It also wreaked havoc with the pastoral economy, finally forcing the country into building the 10 000kilometre ‘dog-proof’ fence from Queensland to South Australia. In common with those native animals despised and exterminated by the colonial impulse in Australia, the dingo was reclassified by eco-nationalism in two ways. First, in the 1990s it was deemed to be an Australian native animal in reappraisals of its status by both Rolls and Corbett.19 It was also in the 1990s that the dingo began to be used to symbolise wilderness nature for the ecotourism industry in places such as Fraser Island.20 Second, in 1993 it was reappraised by the Australian Kennel Club, who designated it as an Australian dog. Then, more recently, the dingo achieved endangered status as a result of interbreeding with feral dogs and the more isolated Fraser island population was elevated to the status of pure strain dingo. Despite this ecological beatification the dingo proved that in the biopolitical arena nothing is guaranteed. At the height of its career as a heroic native animal the dingo played a significant role in the trial of Lindy Chamberlain in 1982, a woman who was convicted of killing her newborn baby Azaria, but who always claimed she saw a dingo take the child from the family tent at Uluru. While there was a significant amount of evidence to suggest that dingoes were near the baby’s tent at the time of her death and that dingoes were fully capable of carrying her away and consuming her with barely any blood spilt, this was systematically ignored. Indeed, the only expert witness on the feeding behaviour of dingoes was disregarded by the prosecution in favour of a London-based forensic scientist with no knowledge of dingoes whatsoever.

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According to Linder, from the very beginning of their investigation the police did not believe a dingo could have done it.21 This was based on the fact that to their knowledge there was no precedent for such a dingo attack, and that Azaria Chamberlain weighed 10lbs, a weight they thought too heavy for a dingo to carry over the required distance. The investigating police team were overheard discussing this in a local pub on the first night of their investigation: ‘“How could you possibly convict [the dingo] on this evidence?” he [the prosecuting counsel, Ian Barker] asked, noting the lack of dingo hairs or drag marks by the tent, the fact that no one saw it carrying a baby, and the relatively undamaged condition of Azaria’s jumpsuit. “The case against the dingo would be laughed out of court,” Barker concluded.’22 However, addressing further doubts about the dingo’s guilt, the Australian biologist Les Harris concluded that a dingo could have taken the baby, that a dingo could have removed the baby’s clothing with ease (the clothing was found eventually) and that a dingo or dingoes could have totally consumed the baby (Azaria was never found).23 Despite this and despite the fact that there was a great deal of evidence to show that the dingoes were in the right place, that a dingo had been heard growling by the Chamberlains’ tent, that dingo tracks trailed away from their tent and that a dingo had earlier attacked a 12-year-old girl, it seemed the court, the police, the media and the entire trial did not want to believe in the idea of dingoes as human killers. One of the jurors summarised the centrality of this to the case, telling the press that ‘It came down to whether you believed it was a dingo or not’.24 Eventually, after Lindy Chamberlain had served three years in prison, Azaria’s matinee jacket was found in a dingo lair nearby and the case against her fell apart. Sufficient doubt remained about the ‘killer dingo theory’ for Fraser Island tourism to market the dingo as the centrepiece of their eco-tourism holidays. Indeed, as Peace shows, it was precisely the wild dingoes of Fraser Island with their claim to authenticity and rarity that were highlighted in their promotional materials.25

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This has since backfired because as more tourists flocked in and stayed at the new resort at Kingfisher Bay the dingoes began to acclimatise themselves to their continuous presence, eventually viewing them as a source of food. In 1998 an episode similar to the Chamberlains occurred except that this time both parents saw the baby being carried off and had the opportunity to rescue her, though not before serious injuries were sustained. The case of 14month-old Kasey Rowles confirmed finally the danger that dingoes posed in tourist locations. But subsequently the number of attacks and the boldness of the dingoes to attack singly and as a pack began to grow. As a result the dingo’s reputation and status as a welcome and admired Australian wild dog changed. They were now to be feared, avoided and controlled. No tourist site, even nature tourist sites, can afford to pose a serious risk to holidaymakers, and the dingoes of Fraser Island were culled in the areas nearest the tourist locations. Today there are far fewer dingoes there and a recent ABC team who went there to film them only managed to see one lone dingo in the time they were there.26 (Catalyst, March 2005). According to Peace, the dingo has fallen out of favour as an iconic Australian animal (the so-called charismatic megafauna) not only because it posed a risk to human children but because it transgressed the wild–domestic boundary. It was perfectly OK providing it kept in its place as a wary icon of wilderness; as soon as it became a pest of the campground, scrounging food and becoming socially aggressive to humans it had crossed a boundary that questioned both its legitimacy and its favour. It also undermined the favour that stemmed from its metonymic role as the legitimate settler Australian. According to Smith, as we have seen, the naturalised dingo legitimated the idea of naturalised Australian subjects, that settlers could in time become part of proper Australian life.27 To work in this metonymic manner the dingo had to remain a well-behaved animal, conforming in particular to the image of a tough, independent and efficient figure in the bush. By killing babies, attacking easy tourist targets and scrounging a

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living, that image was irreversibly damaged, making it possible for the dingo culls to be far less opposed than the brumby culls. Cane toads

Perhaps the most cullable animal of all is the cane toad. It poisons a broad swathe of wildlife and might cause a series of extinctions before some eradication solution is found. As this book goes to press in April 2005, the news of their arrival in Darwin is just to hand. This was not unexpected, but it marks another important and sad chapter in the toad’s unstoppable spread across tropical and subtropical Australia. Surely this animal has no backers, no cultural group that has formed a totemic association with it? The history of its introduction in 1935 is interesting in that it was the result of a scientific investigation into the biocontrol of an agricultural pest to sugar cane (seemingly better than a chemical control) and was officially allowed to be introduced by the appropriate national authority and backed by the growers’ association. It came at a time when economic development was very high on priority agendas and wildlife impacts were still very low. Nonetheless, this introduction cannot be attributed to the imperial agendas of the colonial period and must be seen as a fully Australian, modern initiative. And clearly, insufficient homework was done to determine its positive and negative impacts on the country. Its one positive contribution was to make the authorities far more wary of future introductions and better resourced by government in the now ever vigilant quest against unwanted outsiders. At the present time the cane toad is surely the biggest ecological disaster in Australian history and we wait with baited breath to see the full consequences of our folly. But the cane toad demonstrates the dangers of too simple a view of both biopolitics and animal ecologies as having an adaptive as opposed to a fixed ‘nature’. Despite its apparent total lack of saving graces, the cane toad also shows that ecology alone is an insufficient criterion in deter-

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mining the relationships that Australians develop with animals. Against expectations, perhaps, it is not difficult to find those who like the cane toad, who appreciate its presence in their lives and who are angered by those who kill it. Even the cane toad, it seems, has become an object of totemic association and a biopolitics. Just now of course, the Northern Territory is much opposed to the amphibian invaders, but as Lewis found, ‘it’s nevertheless different in Queensland, where the toads have been ensconced for more than fifty years. Queenslanders have had plenty of time to become conditioned and some have developed degrees of benign tolerance.’ Lewis illustrates this point with some examples from all levels of Queensland society. One way in which icons of Australian popular culture manifest themselves is when a giant image of them is built: normally on a road, normally close to their cultural epicentre, often by a charismatic individual with enthusiastic backing from the community.28 In the 1970s a local councillor suggested to a stunned council room that a giant statue of the toad be erected to commemorate its original release in Gordonvale. The idea fell on deaf ears. But by the late 1980s enthusiasm for it had evidently broken out once again, this time backed by several prominent people, including the Gordonvale Chamber of Commerce. Perhaps we can understand why local rural businessmen might back a perverse eye-grabbing gimmick to bolster local tourist trade, but there are other reasons why Queenslanders find themselves attached to the toad: cane toads like to live near humans and express their enthusiasm in ways that humans appreciate. Human suburbs are rich in food, shelter and water for cane toads. Light sources that attract insects also have a magnetic attraction for cane toads. This has made it a great favourite with serious gardeners. Cane toads are also regularly adopted as pets by Queensland children, who have discovered that the toads enjoy tactile interaction with humans; indeed one ranger with the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service reported that they enjoy being handled. It is not only children, however. Elvie Grieg is a Redcliffe

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resident who clearly loves cane toads. She told Lewis that she enjoys their singing but also their friendly presence around the house. She regularly feeds her resident toads but that is not the end of their interaction: I used to sit beside the stove and type. They started coming and would sit on my feet while I typed and I s’pose they were attracted by the tick-tick-ticking. It didn’t occur to me to be frightened of them. The toads used to climb over each other to get the best position on my bare feet, they’d snuggle together and obviously snooze … If anyone tried to hurt one of my toads – there’d be an awful lot of noise and they’d soon realize I wasn’t a lady.29

It is also true that for a significant period the cane toad was one animal that Queenslanders had that southerners didn’t, but equally they were an everyday aspect of life in Queensland, something one might see on a daily basis. So it is not surprising that although an introduced outsider, the cane toad came to represent Queensland and Queenslanders, for precisely the same reason that Aboriginal clans chose a species that distinguished them and gave them a symbolic and ritual centre. Lewis found it significant that the cane toad is so richly woven into popular culture and activities. It is used as a craft resource and stuffed and preserved for tourists to buy. It is raced and gambled on in pubs and community associations. It is used by cartoonists as a metaphor for Queensland, particularly around interstate issues. It is eaten and grown for competitions. It is tanned to make a fine leather for such things as wallets and book covers and it is consumed, smoked and eaten for its narcotic qualities. Altogether then, the cane toad has entered Queensland popular culture at a number of points and its positive totemic status mediates any negative labels that derive from ecological considerations alone. Again, ecological considerations are never entirely ‘alone’ in Australian biopolitics. However, the cane toad also demonstrates that animal ecologies are, despite the certainty of environmentalist predictions, prone to be surprising and changeable rather than fixed. For some time now most of our attention has focused on the

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predicted devastation of wildlife in Kakadu and the Northern Territory. Our concern is based on a simple ecological model that predators there will inevitably eat the toads, be poisoned and die. However, experience from those areas already invaded by the cane toad shows that this is not inevitable. Based on evidence from Arnhem Land and the Northern Territory border with Queensland, the Cooperative Research Centre for the Sustainable Development of Tropical Savannas published an article in 2000 that asked whether the toad’s expansion would be a disaster or a disruption. This evidence suggests that the initial impact results in an extensive population decline of predators and others that are affected by drinking water with toad spawn in it. During this time the toads themselves become extremely large from the absence of competition. Dry seasons can then devastate these toad populations, giving remnant populations of predators a chance to build numbers back. However, over time their numbers bounce back as they learn to avoid eating the toads or find a way around their poison defence system. Both areas considered by the article normalised after a few years and the average size of the toads declined.30 What ecological models are not good at predicting is how animal behaviour will change in response to environmental change, and by and large their view of animal adaptation and behaviour change is very limited. However, as Tim Low argues for Australia at large, the extent of this adaptive, learning behaviour is one of the country’s most remarkable features and may be one reason why it has managed to adapt so well to cities, mobility, introduced species, and the impact of agriculture.31

A S P E C I E S A PA R T H E I D ? So in Australia, unlike the United States and the United Kingdom, animals per se did not and could not come to represent clear lines of social and national identity. Instead they bifurcated into two groups, one of which clearly came to represent nation and the

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other to represent ‘outsider’ or ‘other’, potentially ‘unwanted outsider’ and certainly outsider ‘threatening the nation’. This new taxonomy provided a totemic language of nationalism, but its ability to communicate a clear sense of nation began to break down. This was because some animals had legs in both insider and outsider categories. So, for example, antipathy to the wild feral cat and dog could not be contained there since domestic cats and dogs were feeding the wild populations, and began to be considered unAustralian. Cat-free development zones offered Australians a species apartheid. This simultaneously cast doubts over the place of all hitherto cherished companion animals and egged on nationalist politicians to suggest their replacement by native animals. As biocentrism deepened in the 1990s it was not long before the domestic champions of Australianness, sheep and cattle, came under fire as major ecological misfits. They were blamed for environmental degradation and there were also calls for their replacement with farmed native animals. In the opposite way the wild horse or brumby managed to straddle the domestic/native divide. Because it was not only domestic and wild but at the same time quintessentially Australian, as demonstrated by the vociferous protest at their extermination at Guy Fawkes River National Park in 2001, it was naturalised as a protected species within the park. This is not a one-off. Essentially the same process occurred when in the 1990s the introduced wild trout in Tasmania came under threat from the carp, a species without any Australian colonial credentials. Under these circumstances the trout was also protected from any possible threat from the carp through a lavish eradication program. But the classificatory confusion compounds further when the category pest is factored in. The pest is the most unAustralian of animal categories because it threatens or competes with Australian species in their own homes or ecosystems. Many if not most introduced species are pests almost by virtue of living and breathing, but the ecological model on which this classification rests provides for the inclusion of native animals in this category if they happen to be

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threatening or competing with an animal outside their own ecosystem. In this way most native animals capable of migrating, moving or being moved are also potential pests. And given that modern Australia – as elsewhere – has increased the potential and likelihood of natural mobility to the point of certainty, to a built-in aspect of contemporary ecologies, it means that the once solid category ‘native’ is beginning to break down. While natives can properly, scientifically, only be native to ecosystems, the fact that they retain this status once moved is entirely due to the slippage between ecology and nationalism. It has been a central claim in this book, as in anthropology generally, that the classifications of animals provide a framework for the placement of people, values and behaviour. What does this taxonomic confusion tell us? It might be telling us that the historical series of positions animals have occupied relative to the humans living in Australia have not entirely disappeared and cannot be made to disappear. They still comprise foundational stories in the imagined community of Australia. We therefore need to know how contemporary Australians relate to and articulate their relationships and experiences with animals in Australia. There has been very little research, or data gathered, on this to date despite its centrality as a biopolitical and cultural question. Policy has been allowed to develop primarily within conservationist, environmentalist and scientific communities, as though their expertise is sufficient to deal with it. Clearly, as this book has argued, this is a fundamental mistake. The next two chapters will address this gap first through the important consideration of Aboriginal interests in this question and second through a review of recent data obtained by the author from a national survey on contemporary relations between humans (a national representative sample of all Australians32) and animals in Australia.

Chapter 7

T H E P U S S YC AT D R E A M I N G

If the enigma largely remains for contemporary Australians, if we are essentially still in a muddle over what to do with and think about the animals that share our landscape, we might pause to consider how the traditional owners have thought and acted about the same issues. How do contemporary Aboriginal people view the apparent enigma of human–animal relations in postcolonial Australia? As the traditional owners they have more than just a stake over animals as an environmental issue. Chapter 3 established that at the centre of Aboriginal religious practice individual clans were inextricably associated with single natural phenomena, the great majority of which were animals. Not only do most clans descend from animal ancestors in the Dreamtime, but these species continued to frame their social and spiritual identity in an ongoing and complex ritual life. For these reasons, and given their mainly bitter experience of white settlement and its aftermath, one would be forgiven for thinking that the animal species introduced by the colonists were closely associated, in Aboriginal perception, with the colonial experience and colonists themselves. If native species were associated through totemic cults with Aboriginal groups, then in their minds surely the introduced species were likely to be associated with the colonists in the same manner. If this were true then animals would pose no enigmas for Aborigines. Surely they would

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hold to the clearest certainty: like them, native animals have been wronged and displaced by colonialism and the introduced animals are merely unwanted interlopers. Surely they would share the same views and aspirations as the Wilderness Society, that native animals have to be restored and introduced pest species are best eradicated? Ironically perhaps, this is generally not so, at least among those Aboriginal groups who control very large areas of Australia and who have an everyday interest in the animals around them. Not only do they not share these views but they often actively oppose them. In fact, if anything they tend to have more in common with ordinary Australians, who see animals as largely innocent, sentient beings, deserving of rights and our consideration, than most scientists and environmental purists, for whom animals’ lives are justified only as legitimate and authentic members of specific ecosystems. The key to understanding Aboriginal views of animals around them is their concept of country. Country encompasses not just an attitude to their landscape but their very conception of the world and their place in the scheme of things, and it is through their relation to the natural world around them and their co-dwelling in that world that specific elements take on meaning. The natural world does not exist as a separable world, beyond and different from the human world. And in many ways, Aboriginal people’s views about animals whether native or introduced depend on the stories they can tell about them. Unlike the scientist, they do not deal in absolute categories, classifications, boundaries pure and impure but in the messiness of life itself, in the complex way real life confounds the possibility of such a neat and ordered world. Country is an expression of people who live in and watch at all times the complexities of life itself, whereas notions such as environment, ecosystem and ecology are mere abstract theorisations of it, capable of being influenced by factors other than life itself. Country does not oppose environmentalism but poses an alternative type of environmentalism; it stands proof of the essentially contested nature of nature. While environmentalists always see

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environmentalism as a singular reality and a self-evident imperative, where nature has to be protected and insulated from humanity, and where nature ideally exists as stable and restorable (proper) ecosystems, Aborigines say that humans should be, and in fact have a duty to be, on the land, not excluded from it. They say they have a duty of care for the land but that the land or country is always changing, that it is characterised not by stability but by movement. The very nature of much of Australia requires this movement, and animal species in particular are by necessity on the move seasonally or wandering at most times. At any one locality species can come and go as drought, rains, fires, habitats and food reconfigure landscapes and populations and mixes of species over time. So it is difficult, when in the thick of things in a real-time natural landscape, to maintain the notion that a proper ecosystem exists at any one place, and it would not occur to those living on and from it. Besides, as an integral part of country, where do humans properly belong if not everywhere? Where humans are, properly, is not at all clear in ecosystemic terms, especially for the large numbers of human groups that were always on the move exploiting a large number of types of place – presumably always learning new things and new places to exploit. Country, by contrast to the environmental view, is a dynamic concept born of Australian conditions and stemming from human experience as an integral part of it. Human experience is not passive, however, just taking it as it is, but active, taking an active part in its constitution, and using techniques to maintain and change it. Although Aboriginal clans were not permitted to hunt and eat their own totemic species, they were at the same time responsible for making sure it was plentiful for those other clans that could. So ritual techniques developed to discharge this responsibility. But other techniques also sought to manipulate and change the landscape in their favour, and clearly burning technology was a key tool here. Burning in particular ways, through particular country, at particular times, creates specific new effects. The entire conti-

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nent was transformed through Aboriginal burning into a specific complex of species, with specific forms of movement possible for both animals and humans and with particular landscape forms that would otherwise not be transformed. Disturbing food roots and planting them in new places is another transformative technique, and learning to hunt with dogs obtained from other humans that showed up on their shores was yet another. For all of these reasons the Aboriginal landscape was both a known place and a mystical place where surprise, transition and change existed alongside routine and reliability. Above all though, country is a nourishing landscape, a landscape that affords foods and resources and sustains the humans attached to it. A good, proper landscape or environment in country terms is one that provides and is managed to provide a good supply of human foods, and ipso facto a healthy complement of nourishing conditions for every other species living there. So the manner by which new animals appeared in their world was not entirely puzzling (mystical or sudden new things could and did happen after all) nor, if they happened to be edible and to thrive, were they necessarily unwelcome. While some species were associated with the coming of settler society, as species clearly under their control and influence, many others (as escapees or releasees) probably first appeared to Aborigines out of the blue, as (seemingly) coming from nowhere. But in either case they adopted the pragmatic good sense of all hunter-gatherers. Were they edible? Did they taste good? Would they stay around and reproduce locally? Do we like them? To take the case of the animal most loathed by the environmentalists, the feral cat, is to see how at odds Aboriginal thinking is with Wilderness Society philosophy. This is something they keep quiet about since they hold to a fantasy version of Aboriginal life that is compatible with their philosophy, whereas the reality, country, is quite otherwise. If the Wilderness Society endorsed the Aboriginal notion of country it would require them to abandon their policy of (introduced) species-cleansing.

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FERAL CAT FANTASIES: PUSSYCAT DREAMINGS On 24 October 2002, the ABC broadcast the documentary film Ten Million Wildcats.1 It remains one of the few balanced accounts of the feral cat in Australia in which the scientific evidence is set alongside some of the environmentalist fantasies of the cat as noxious pest and destroyer of Australian wildlife. According to Tim Flannery and other biologists/ecologists featured in the film, the cat has been wrongly vilified by environmentalists and, as it turns out, its diet consists mainly of reptiles (which exist in such numbers that their future is assured) and introduced mammals (mice, rats and rabbits). According to Flannery, only on a few islands and coastal places has the cat made a serious impact on native wildlife, and, at the other extreme, the island of Tasmania has not lost a single native animal due to cats despite their presence there for over 200 years. A recent study in Tasmania reported that ‘the diet of feral cats … was dominated by introduced mammals, in particular, rabbits. Small native mammals were a relatively minor component of the diet, as were birds and reptiles’.2 The study concluded that ‘there is little evidence that cats in mainland Tasmania are having a significant negative impact on the native fauna’.3 And on the mainland as a whole Flannery argued that ‘there is no scientific evidence to say that feral cats were solely responsible for the loss of any native species’, and indeed there are studies that demonstrate this very clearly.4 But belief in the serious environmental damage done by cats seems completely unimpeded by the lack of firm scientific evidence for it. It impedes neither scientific inference nor political demands for eradication policies. So, for example, in his definitive Overview of the Impacts of Feral Cats on Native Fauna, Chris Dickman argues that: acceptable evidence for impact would be any demonstration that cats have caused a decline of 25% or more in the population abundance or geographical distribution of any native species. Unfortunately, unambiguous evidence of this kind does

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not exist. In most situations where cats appear to have caused a population or distribution decline the magnitude of the decline has not been quantified, or factors other than cats may also be implicated. (my emphasis)5

Why the ‘unfortunately’? And why does the compelling test case of Tasmania not count as unambiguous? And why has the feral cat attracted so much blame when it is obvious that most experts blame human-originated habitat loss? Surely no one would advance to the extreme measure of species-cleansing or eradication without firm and conclusive scientific evidence? In fact politicians can be as biased against the feral cat as the scientist in calling for such extreme and costly measures. A glaring example of this is a press statement authorised by the Tasmanian Greens Member of the Hobart Assembly, Nick McKim, in 2003, which advised that: ‘The Tasmanian Greens today tabled a motion calling for the government to take urgent action to control feral cats and flagged the introduction of a two-step strategy to firstly introduce a system of cat registration and de-sexing to control recruitment from the domestic to feral population, and secondly an intensive eradication programme for feral cats.’6 Indeed, feral cat eradication programs are common in Australia and not confined to those areas such as islands where cats can cause extinctions. Ten Million Wildcats showed how the cat had made incredible adaptations to the harsh conditions of the central deserts, and how it had become a favourite food among Aborigines there. These two points were made in a series of scenes in which Mitjii Napanganka Gibson, Sarah Napanganka Daniels and Cindy Nakamarra Gibson, Pintupi women from the Tanami desert, were seen assisting the biologist Rachel Paltridge in trying to understand how cats managed to live in such harsh conditions so successfully and what their diet consisted of. According to the narration, the cats were so common in this area over the past hundred years that ‘they were considered a natural part of the environment by Aborigines of the Tanami desert. They do not consider them to be pests. To them they are food and they have been hunting cats for generations.’

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Rachel Paltridge explained her dependence on her Aboriginal associates: Mitjii and Sarah Napanganka are about sixty years old and they grew up in the bush in Pintupi country. They were totally reliant on bush tucker for the first part of their lives and they have got an intimate knowledge about the animals that occur in the desert. So they are very skilled at tracking cats. They probably know more about feral cats than anyone else in the world. I really regard them as world experts on feral cats. There is no way I would be able to capture cats without the help of the Aboriginal women. But with the Aboriginal women we can always get a cat pretty well when we want it. Cats are not adapted to long distance running. They actually tire out quite quickly. This is how Aboriginal people were able to capture cats. Initially following tracks then eventually flushing them out. Cats become exhausted before humans.

The more you look the more you see feral cats or pussycat, as they are more often known, as a fixed and significant part of Aboriginal life. The senior law man and Aboriginal artist Tjumpo Tjapanangka (born 1929) from the Balgo hills in Western Australia ‘is incredibly fit and strong for his age’ according to his art website. This he puts down to ‘his diet of bush foods. He speaks adamantly of his childhood in the desert hunting for goanna, porcupine, wallaby [and] pussycat.’7 One of the most revealing and full accounts of Aboriginal relationships with cats was produced by Bruce Rose for the Central Land Council (Northern Territory), in relation to land management issues and feral animals generally.8 Because Aboriginal people are very diverse and scattered geographically, with some living as owners on traditional lands while others live outside such areas, it is extremely difficult to produce an account that reflects Aboriginal views in general. Rose’s report is based on an eighteen-month study that spanned many community and outstation types (72 in all) and contains evidence from 400 people of all ages. Despite this potential diversity of views, Rose was able to discern some general attitudes to feral animals:

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The effects of feral animals on the country are not seen as a cause for concern. It is seen as a natural phenomenon that animals eat the grass and raise a bit of dust. To separate the impact of feral animals from native species on these grounds is not seen as logical. People see the contemporary ecosystem as an integrated whole so they don’t see some species as belonging while others do not. In many areas feral animals are looked on as a resource of the country. Their presence confirms that the land is productive and people derive pleasure from seeing them in the wild.9

While these Aborigines distinguished between animals that were -ulerenye or a stranger to the country and those that were -arenye or belonging to the country, many that were once in the former category are now deemed to be in the latter. In the case of the cat the most frequently encountered view is that they were native animals or at least had been in Australia long before white settlement and were now part of the landscape. Such a view is supported by its ‘important role in the diet in many areas’ while ‘its consumption is seen by many to have medicinal qualities’. Most importantly, it was reported that the cat has a Dreaming and is therefore a sacred animal for some groups: At Atitjere people recounted that ‘my country has a Pussy Cat Dreaming. We don’t eat them now, we just keep them as pets.’ Similarly at Mulga Bore ‘respondents also mentioned the cat Dreaming saying that they are no longer taken for food because they now keep cats as pets and don’t want to eat their pets.’ One of his respondents told him: ‘Pussy cat, they have Dreaming story that comes from Apwetyelaneme country near Huckitta Station. We used to eat a lot of that pussy cat but we can’t now because we have too many around the camp. We don’t know if we killing someone’s pet.10 The people from Pintupi–Luritja country, some of whom were encountered in Ten Million Wildcats, also spoke of a cat Dreaming, ‘indicating that cats were covered by Aboriginal Law and therefore a natural part of the environment’. If the most vilified of all introduced animals is the subject of such positive and sacred sentiments by traditional owners, how

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effective can eradication policies be in the long term? As Lesley Head argues, ‘Aboriginal managed land is around three times the size of Australia’s government-managed conservation estate (15% versus 5% of land area), and most Aboriginal managed land is in the arid and semi-arid zones. Any attempt to deal with feral animal “problems” that does not take account of Aboriginal perspectives is doomed to failure.’11

ABORIGINAL VIEWS OF THE FERAL ANIMAL ‘PROBLEM’ Bruce Rose was well aware that as a biologist his language of the environment and the implicit agenda in non-Aboriginal land management discourses would bias the production of Aboriginal opinion. ‘This “agenda” would clearly have influenced the sorts of question I asked, my reactions to the responses provided and would have had an influence on the way people constructed their responses. Communication was a significant limitation on this work.’ These fears were unfounded to the extent that the environmentalist agenda simply served to bring their own contrary perspectives and opinions into greater relief. Put simply, the assumption that traditional owners would support eradication and control policies was met with incomprehension and opposition. Indeed, many found it difficult to understand why rangers were killing instead of protecting animals. Aboriginal people work with a concept of the landscape as it is, as they ‘find it’ and as they work with it. They are not concerned with what a proper Australia should be, with its identity, natural or social, relative to other nations. This can only be the concern of those in the grip of nationalism. Nor do Aboriginal people share the abstract notion of an ecosystem as a stable entity separable from humanity; an abstract notion which nonetheless becomes an empirical reality with which it is possible to deem what (properly) belongs, what fits in, and what does not. Bruce Rose’s study of Aboriginal people’s attitudes to animals shows that their model is

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more pragmatic. It is based on what does work, not what should be. It is based on the way things have worked out over time, but most importantly it is based on a landscape that affords foods to Aboriginal people and that keeps those chains of foods healthy and sustainable. This is the ultimate object of their care of country, not a specific collection and content of species. Aboriginal people’s views on animals is contingent – on many things. The feral horses, camels and donkeys that environmentalists and scientific land managers want to control if not exterminate do not present themselves as pests to Aboriginal people. Rather, their views are dependent on their relationship with them and on the stories that link and make relationships. In the central desert areas, these animals have been co-workers with Aboriginal people through the colonial period. ‘Over several generations Aboriginal people have worked with horses, camels and donkeys and these animals are now seen to have the right to live on the country.’12 Equally, the colonial experience saw many Aboriginal people settled on missions and Christianised. According to Rose this influenced and still influences their views on donkeys and camels. Through their place and role in biblical stories these animals have taken on a religious significance that sits awkwardly with stories of them as noxious pests. The Christian worldview features more prominently in the older members of the community, but not in such a way that it overshadows animal Dreamings. In a moment that illustrates his own fears of bias, Rose suggests to his respondents that ‘the animals without a Dreaming might not know how to relate to the others and may eat all their food or harm them in some other way’. But his respondents disagreed, saying that ‘the interaction of Dreaming and non-Dreaming animals was not seen as a problem’ and some argued that ‘God made all they animals so they fit in together okay’. The story of Christ’s birth gave rise in the opinion of another woman to ‘a camel Dreaming’ which involved ‘three camels who travelled to be with that Jesus’ – a poignant and beautiful translation of ideas. However, as with the cat, many

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introduced species are now simply an important part of their hunting diet and have been so for as long as anyone can remember. The rabbit is particularly important in these communities, but elsewhere other animals commanded a special place. Around Kakadu, I was told that water buffalo is a preferred Aboriginal meat. Rose also asked his respondents about the negative effects feral animals may have on their country. All animals were said to kick up a bit of dust: ‘by far the majority of those spoken to see no reason to distinguish between feral animals and native animals in terms of the effect they have on the country’. Pressing his case further, his respondents said that the country was in good condition and that these animals did not affect the land. The principal way in which feral animals have become embedded in Aboriginal cultures is through use and association: being a part of their daily lives. Horses and horsemanship have been the main work tool for many Aboriginal stockmen as well as a means of personal transport. Wild horses were routinely used as a source of tough, sturdy animals suitable for working in cattle country. Many of Rose’s respondents mentioned this association, arguing that they had earned ‘some status … which required them being respected’; they had earned their retirement ‘and should be left to live on the country’. In any case the special relationship between horses and donkeys and Aboriginal people explains in part why they were not eaten. Rabbits, cats, and to a lesser extent camels, were hunted and eaten, though the rabbit was the most significant of these. In recent years rabbit-hunting was conducted systematically as work projects for the young, though no other animal was hunted in this way. Aboriginal people are aware of a policy to eradicate most feral animals but they neither comprehend nor condone it. ‘The most common response when talking about these projects was the question “what do they want to get rid of these animals for?”’ For many people the rationale for wanting to eradicate feral animals is unclear. For some it indicates that those proposing eradication have a strange and unnecessarily wasteful attitude towards those

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animals. For others it is simply beyond comprehension. The use of ‘rationale’ seems to suggest that while there is a perfectly rational (scientific?) reason behind feral animal control programs, Aboriginal people do not understand them. But this can be seen as a wilful refusal to see feral animal issues as contested and contestable. Feral animal eradication does not follow from the science of land and nature but from moral, cultural, ethical and political discourses. It seems to me that the Aboriginal people who spoke to Rose made a perfectly good case for their view and one can detect a degree of frustration and anger in their response to such programs being imposed on their country. Rose’s report on Aboriginal people’s attitudes to land management issues is posted on the Central Land Council (CLC) (Northern Territory) website, but on the same site the CLC has a page indicating its policy and practice in relation to feral animals. The content of this page suggests that the views expressed to Rose are being largely ignored by a management strategy bent on controlling and eradicating feral animals. Or rather, they are not being taken as the operating principles for their work. For example, the page summarises traditional owners’ views as follows: ‘Traditional owners frequently express concern about feral ungulates in relation to their impact on traditional water sources including rockholes and soakages, the decline of certain important resource plants and environmental degradation in and around living areas.’13 This is the only traditional owner expression cited in relation to feral animals on this page and it is used as a justifying preamble to a series of ‘eradication, export, petfood and removal strategies in the CLC region’. If Rose’s report is an accurate reflection of traditional owners’ views on feral animals then something other than this seems to be informing the land management strategy of the CLC, since it says that ‘camels, donkeys and horses are an increasing management issue on Aboriginal Land Trusts in the CLC region’. The CLC seem to see their job as one of leadership and talking traditional owners into seeing good sense and showing how

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such programs can lead to income and employment. In relation to a program of removal of donkeys and horses and their sale into pet food, for example, the CLC reported that ‘this arrangement provided additional benefits of employment and economic returns to the traditional owners’. Elsewhere the CLC say they ‘facilitated an agreement between the traditional owners … and the NT Government allowing for the aerial shooting of feral donkeys and horses’. Again, although such agreements were no doubt made in a proper manner, and there were indeed some Aboriginal people who felt feral animals were a problem, they do not seem to be in the spirit of views expressed by a representative sample of Aboriginal people. To repeat one of Rose’s conclusions: ‘by far the majority of those spoken to see no reason to distinguish between feral animals and native animals in terms of the effect they have on the country.’

COUNTRY AND TOURISM Aboriginal groups around Australia are aware that they, alongside their country, are the subject of considerable curiosity by a paying tourism public and that tourism might be compatible with their life and country. Indeed, country as adapted to an alternative form of environmental tourism might prove to be every bit as successful as the parks and wildlife tourism conservation model. Whereas the latter emphasises the object of protecting nature from humanity through control of movement, a strict hands-off, don’t touch policy and the encouragement of a largely visual consumption of nature through muscular self-exertion, country is the opposite. Country encourages people to be on the land, and in the landscape. It is hands-on and multi-sensual, including smell, touch and taste. It is not muscular to the extent that walking is an end in itself, a journey marked by the visual capture of landmarks, views and vistas. Rather it is physical but only inasmuch as this is required to fulfil the task of finding food, resources, making things – essentially doing something with country or, as Ingold argues, discovering the affordances of objects in the landscape.14 It emphasises looking for

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rather than looking at; it emphasises doing with rather than doing without. Journeys, and hence the degree of exertion, are not predetermined by an agreed distance, speed and route through the environment but are open-ended, unbounded, unpaced and dependent on what happens during the journey: what is encountered; what transpires; what and how much is found; what is required and what can be used. Moments of intense visual concentration and quietness are counterbalanced by episodes of speed and agility. Some places require a very slow pace while others can be marched through. Most of all it is the practice of dwelling-in rather than visitation-to; feeling at home and creating an ordinary presence rather than feeling at a distance and creating a sense of the extraordinary (that central object of the Romantic sensibility). I first became aware of the differences between the two types of approach in Tasmania. Family holidays were always work-related since the physical performance of trips to National Parks in the mountains or on the coast always involved for me, as an anthropologist of nature, both the observation of ‘management’ and ‘the managed’. We were originally from Britain where the extent and dominance of national parks in human comportment in natural areas was less developed. Although lacking the wild country and extensive humanless forests of Tasmania, the English countryside is nonetheless treasured and considerable numbers of people have always gone out into the country for walks and a wide range of other countryside-related activities: riding, gathering wayside foods, walking, fishing, birdwatching. Today there is considerable pressure to leave the countryside exactly as you find it, but in my experience it is doing something with it that is most enjoyed. This might explain the huge success of the 1972 bestseller Food for Free, a manual of wayside and hedgerow foods and natural herbals. The back cover synopsis reveals a country philosophy in operation: Food for Free by Richard Mabey was first published in 1972, since then it has been reprinted 11 times. An all-colour, revised version produced in 1989 has sold over 30,000 copies in the trade. A guide to over 300 types of food that can be gathered in the wild in Britain, Food for Free explores the history and folk-

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lore of the foods as well as explaining how we identify them and the best ways to cook and eat them. The new edition will bring the subject right up to date. Organized by season rather than food type Food for Free will take us through the year … Food for Free is designed to inspire us to take more notice of what is around us, how we can make use of it and how we can conserve it for future generations.15

This conservation message and its custodial view of the natural world resonates with Aboriginal themes of country and since its first publication these foods have not diminished noticeably despite the book’s success. One reason is because they would be hard to diminish, such is the scale of the rights of way, some 120 000 miles (193 116 km) of them that criss-cross England and Wales and that form the main access to English countryside and countryside foods. The second reason is that at the very most, countryside foods will only form a small, if important, part of a modern diet. Indeed, many of the footpaths were far more used when England was an agricultural society, with relatively dense populations living on the land.16 Marion Shoard urged the British to protect their legal rights of way against landowners seeking to quash them using the example of New Zealand (but it might as well have been Australia) by way of a warning: To appreciate what a remarkable amenity our rights of way represent we have only to consider the situation in less favoured lands. In many respects, New Zealand is more like England than any other country in the world but not like this. There, the absence of a tradition of rights of way makes it virtually impossible for many New Zealanders to walk in the ordinary countryside near their homes. They can approach a landowner to ask permission to walk on his land but this may well be refused. If they are found on private land without permission they can be prosecuted … If they want to walk in the countryside they must look to their nearest (state owned) national park, which may be hundreds of miles away, or to the limited number of ‘walkways’ recently created by statute. In the face of these difficulties, many New Zealanders forget their countryside altogether and head for the beach instead.17

This will be instantly appreciated by Australians too, particularly

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if they have ever considered putting into practice any of the knowledge gleaned from the television program Bush Tucker Man. Captain Les Hiddins is seen by millions of Australians on safari across large swathes of Australia helping himself to bush foods from all manner of sites, but on whose land is he able to do this? There is no disclaimer that viewers should avoid helping themselves to bush tucker in national parks, private or Aboriginal lands, but that must be the reality. It was very different and new for me to enter the disciplinary regime of the Australian parks and wildlife nature experience. On British footpaths one has citizenship rights to be there (and rights to pick wayside foods) as well as responsibilities (don’t destroy any plants/trees and always close gates) but in national parks one feels instantly subject to bureaucratic rules and as a member of the destructive human race, not altogether welcome. On one of our first and many guided nature walks in the National Parks, at Lake St Claire National Park, I remember trailing along behind my young family, all eagerly trying to be near and please the Park Rangers. I remember very vividly my daughter unconsciously letting her hand brush across the tea-tree scrub along the way, and letting herself grasp a leaf after an interval. Spotted by the ranger, she was roundly told to leave the leaves alone, that picking anything was strictly not on. I could see my daughter was mortified and confused by this remonstration and afterwards she lost all interest in the walk. I have always suspected that this episode killed her joy at being in the bush; certainly she was never again to be an enthusiastic bushwalker. It was a scarring episode for all of us and it was very hard to explain what it was she had done wrong, after so many years of enjoying the countryside in a hands-on way. When a child of ten looks at tens of thousands of hectares of bush and asks what difference a single leaf makes it is hard to find a satisfactory answer even if the principle can be identified and explained. After this incident I began to listen very carefully to the discourse of the nature walks laid on for children. They were

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usually interesting little meanders around the main camping or park entrance buildings and were often packed with fascinating things to see and learn. But I noticed that the children were only ever half engaged, and compared, say, to how they became absorbed with rock pools on a beach, this experience was a lesser thing. The main difference between the two experiences was the degree to which the discourse of rock pool and nature walk hailed or spoke to them as individuals. In the case of the nature walk, the subjects of the space they were in was not them or any other human subject that might feast their imagination or ground their experience but a rather difficult-to-grasp abstract entity: the ecosystem. Worse, despite the fact that these places were once gathering places for Tasmanian Aborigines, these abstract ecologies were expressly ahuman: humans did not figure properly or ideally in such places and would only be tolerated if they kept to paths and followed low-impact policies. I am sure my children never expressed it to themselves quite like this but I am sure they felt unwanted there and ‘out of place’. All this contributed to my growing sense of emptiness and ghosts and I could not quite share the same enthusiasm as the continuous waves of apparently green visitors who pulsed cheerfully, confidently and unceasingly along the well-worn tracks that terminated in such places as Lake St Claire. Ironically these muscular long-haul trampers obtained their sense of belonging from the politics of environmentalism: as champions of the ecosystems through which they passed. They appeared to have developed a schizophrenic notion of humanity and the natural world: as saviours of the environment they had a legitimate right to be in nature in a way that others, mere tourists, simply did not. The thought that they were to all intents and purposes mostly tourists too never seemed to occur to them. But as they hauled their massive packs, in essence microcosmic human worlds to be kept strictly separate from the world they visited, including their own excrement, they were the very epitome of tourists everywhere – uncom-

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mitted, unrelated, not at stake; outsiders not seeking a way in. At the reception area of Lake St Claire National Park that summer there was a tired old canvas tent erected as part of the summer events calendar, largely for children. In the tent was a small collection of birds’ nests and eggs, animal furs, jars of preserved animals, different types of shrubs and tree leaves in vases, skins shed by snakes and the bark of different gum trees. The point of this collection was to provide something the children could handle. It was as if the rangers knew that touch and sensual relationships with nature were important. Whether the contents of their old tent were a viable substitute is another question. These partial experiences of nature continued each summer as my three children grew, and the feeling of the potential freedom of the national parks that I began with seemed after a while to be more like a cage. I had learned really very little about these magnificent places. I was used to knowing all the plants and herbs and what they could do; I was used to knowing all the birds and animals, butterflies and insects, but there was actually very little of this everyday natural history, this really useful knowledge. I wanted to know which mushrooms to pick and where I could find them, but this knowledge was not there to have. In its place I was offered yet more big-picture ecology: dubious plant succession stories; models, projections, plans, experiments and management strategies. I was aware of the profound significance of humanity in shaping this environment, its species, its mosaic of communities, its paths and tracks. This place without humans could only sit in my mind hypothetically; it was a place that was to be ‘decided on’; it was conditional on the next policy, the next management plan, pending the results of the next research findings. With each stroke the landscape would change more or less significantly and with each stroke the stories told to children would shift and change. One summer, at Coles Bay–Freycinet National Park, on the east coast of Tasmania, something very different happened. The summer holiday program listed a new activity: apparently a Tasmanian Aboriginal Ranger was offering guided walks demon-

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strating how Aboriginal people used the environment as a resource. We all looked forward to the walk, but on the appointed day it rained and rained. A number of families gathered in the car park, everyone looking apprehensive and disappointed, but things picked up very well once the Ranger showed up. He explained that he was not descended from Aborigines who originally lived in this area but from one of the Bass Strait communities. However, he said that a lot of the natural resources were similar and were widely used across the islands. We were standing in the car park listening, anticipating a long and possibly uncomfortable walk along drenched tracks. At any moment we expected him to lead off to where we were to begin; where the truly ‘Aboriginal’ nature began. But when he had completed his preliminaries, he slowly turned around to the line of dense bushes and trees lining the car park behind him and began looking intently into them. After a while he pointed out an insignificant, really rather nondescript gum tree and told us its name and how it exuded a gum that was widely used as chewing gum. He had us all hooked immediately. But then he pointed to another gum tree with silver leaves and told how moth pupae were gathered from the underside of their leaves and chewed alongside the gum, giving it an intensely sweet bubble-gum flavour. I could see my children were as engaged and delighted as they had ever been. The party moved on and in just a few paces further really rather basic foods and resources were becoming familiar to us. The car park flora changed from a picturesque backcloth to a larder and workshop. We eventually left the car park area and wandered a small distance along the beach, but after over an hour of packed interest and revelations we had scarcely covered 200 metres, such was the density and extent of the bush as a natural resource. We were all sad when it was over and mused on the possibility of advanced classes, classes in different seasons, classes on mushrooms, medicines, useful vegetables and fruits and so on. Others in the group were in a state of shock almost: the profound revelation about plants that had been familiar to them as everyday plants and

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shrubs – with no apparent use at all – were now quite other. It disturbed their rather passive, taken-for-granted world and suggested a parallel, enchanted world existing right under their noses in the spaces vacated so quickly and tragically by Aboriginal Tasmanians. The stories of the uses of these plants held the promise of a reawakening of this world or the reconciliation of this world with the postcolonial world of the present. But none of us knew whether there was much more to come or how much had been permanently lost. We went from reverie to sadness, but nobody seemed to have noticed that the rain had set in even harder. Rain only spoils things for those seeking a clear view, from a distance. Elsewhere in Australia, on Aboriginal land the potential for country tourism is considerable and is beginning to be realised by some. In Kakadu, for example, there are two safari-like tours that take visitors out for an entire day with Aboriginal guides, bringing Kakadu to them as country. The language of their marketing is remarkably different from that of other forms of wildlife tourism. The first of the pages taken from marketing pamphlets explicitly suggest that the Kakadu tourist gaze be abandoned temporarily in favour of seeing it ‘from both animal and human hunter/gatherer eyes’: Participate in one of Australia’s most unique safaris. As a member of a small group, enjoy an exclusive, hands-on Outback experience directly assisting the Aboriginal people of Kakadu. A tour highly recommended for those willing to explore Kakadu from both animal and human hunter/gatherer eyes. Traditional Aboriginal people accompany most tours. Don’t just read about Outback bush life, live it for a day with Kakadu Animal Tracks.18 Four-wheel drive into Arnhem Land guided by an Aboriginal. Visit Oenpellie and Mekinj Valley, see art in its natural state, view spectacular countryside, learn bush skills – hunting and food gathering, learn of traditional land management.19

In 2002 I was following up my national survey of human–animal relations in Australia with some fieldwork in wildlife tourism, and here again the contrast between the country approach of

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Aborigines and the conservation approach of Parks and Wildlife was very evident. In order to see whether it might be possible for researchers to gain anything from participating in these tours, I participated in a sample of them for myself, including Kakadu Animal Tracks. The party of ten was picked up from Cooinda early in the day and we were taken by an unluxurious four-wheel drive vehicle onto nearby Aboriginal land. After a while we picked up Marcia, our guide, from a house beside a billabong. Marcia’s relative had earlier shot a magpie goose for the party to eat later alongside other bush foods we were to gather throughout the day. As this was announced I checked the faces of the party for any sign of repugnance or raised eyebrows. After all, the Parks and Wildlife discourse emphasised the fragile nature of Kakadu wildlife, especially its bird life, and most of the tourists came to see it and look out from the many hides set up at key wetland sites. If anything our stone-dead magpie goose was an icon of these precious tropical wetlands. Furthermore, to judge by the numbers carrying specialised binoculars and cameras, there was a high proportion of bird watchers among tourists to Kakadu and historically they have always been vocally anti-hunting. But there was not a flicker of dissent among the party, and if anything there was a palpable sense of pleasurable anticipation. Perhaps in their minds the undisputed legitimacy of Aboriginal hunting and gathering on their own land was theirs to try, if only for a day. Marcia had also begun to gather some water lily flowers, stems and bulbs from the billabong for our meal and we were shown these and also told about the system of shrinking billabongs and the concentration of saltwater crocodiles in them as the dry season proceeded. We did not venture into Marcia’s billabong since it was quite evident that there were at least two huge crocodiles sunning themselves nearby. The day was spent roaming around from billabong to billabong, from small billabongs to vast drying-out lakes and marsh areas. On the dried-out section of the lake we dug for the bulbs of the eleocharis reed that we were going to roast on the fire

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that evening. We also sampled witchetty grubs that were taken by axe from the base of wattle trees and ate the lime acidness of green leaf ants produced by taking one of their pendant nests and quickly rolling it in our hands before the ants could bite us too much. In this way we covered a great deal of ground and saw and sampled a pleasing day’s worth of bush tucker. We saw water buffalo, agile wallabies, barking owls, dingos, freshwater and saltwater crocodiles, lizards and a great deal of water birds. As we drove to our final destination at the biggest stretch of water in the area before a setting sun, a fire was made and we helped Marcia with the plucking of the goose while others helped Jo the white driver, owner of the vehicle, to make the damper and billy tea. Jo also demonstrated how Aboriginal spears and spearthrowers were used traditionally to hunt wildfowl and local game and everyone had a turn at throwing. After the hard work of the day the food and tea tasted very good and sustained us for the uncomfortable ride back to Cooinda, and for long drives on to our various hotels and camps. It was clear to me that the party had enjoyed themselves in an entirely new and surprisingly satisfying way. They had been allowed to get close and develop a personal sense of ease with the country. We had taken our time, meandering through land rather than seeing sites. Cameras had come out on occasion but were largely left in the truck as an encumbrance to physical hard work. The reproduction of this experience was going to rely more on stories than pictures. At the moment such tours are few and far between and very few Australians have passed through these schools of country. However, it is perfectly conceivable that they could generate a very different approach to being in natural areas, setting up a dwellingdoing perspective rather than one based on the visitor-viewer. Although the Parks and Wildlife authorities would raise doubts about the sustainability of country tourism if practised by more than a mere handful, in a country the size of Australia with its relatively small population there is no in-principle reason why it could not be done.

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Obviously lands other than national parks would need to be opened up as country and Australia might need to look at other parts of the modern world for country-style models of access and management. So for example, throughout Scandinavia people have considerable rights of way through private and state-owned land and there are communal rights to the gathering of berries and mushrooms, fishing and hunting. As a result, people are much of the time out in nature, and this proves to be a very powerful source of grassroots conservation politics. Hunting and fishing are organised by state organisations and as the population has become more urbanised, the numbers of elk have increased dramatically, resulting in more damage to forests and more danger to road users. For these reasons the state has encouraged elk-hunting. A similar state-endorsed code of hunting arose in the Netherlands where, if uncontrolled, wildlife threatened valuable agricultural and forestry industries. Hunters were seen as the solution rather than eradication by chemical or biological means. Hunters were cast in the role of conservationists. They had to pass wildlife examinations and, in exchange for their shooting licence, they had to put in so many hours of conservation work – much of it in reducing elevated populations of wildlife near farmlands.20 It seems to me that a country philosophy would organise more thoroughly the informal arrangements between shooters and landowners in the control of Australian animal populations, of whatever category. In this way, wherever feral and native animals become overpopulated they become a resource rather than a pest requiring expensive eradication. Some of the tourists we encountered in wildlife tourism parties in Kakadu saw hunting wild pigs as part of the Kakadu experience: ‘part of the interest in pig shooting [for Harry] was curiosity and novelty; it was something he hadn’t done before, and it was something that was done in this region, “so, when in Rome”.’21 The same was true for barramundi fishing. This could be developed in other established areas of tourism and as a way of developing tourism in new areas. However, if some alternative environmentalism modelled on country is in theory possible, it has a long way to go before it can

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effectively challenge the non-Aboriginal models. Whereas the notion of Tasmanian wilderness, dominant in National Parks and Wildlife and Wilderness Society discourse, comes dangerously close to the suggestion of a land naturally or ideally empty of humans and thus denying Aboriginal history its fundamental place in the shaping of the environment,22 in Kakadu it is clear that there is a tension between the two philosophies, resulting in a contested nature. Despite figuring Aboriginal people into the cultural dimensions of Kakadu, it is their past that is emphasised since that ties in most obviously with the rock art. Their present and future is left hanging and ambiguous. So also is their connection with the natural environment, the other iconic landmarks of the park. Marketing typically employs the wilderness metaphor and suggests that the park as it is currently configured is how it always was. The following text featured in a special advertising report published in the Australian in May 2004: tread lightly in kakadu To comprehend the significance of Kakadu’s World Heritage listing you have to walk the land and feel it. You need time to sit and absorb the landscape, observe the wildlife, and admire the Aboriginal people who have lived in this very special part of Northern Territory for over 60,000 years and travelled so lightly on the land that the region looks untouched.23

But of course what visitors see on a typical dry season visit is not at all what they would have seen before the Aboriginal population declined markedly around the turn of the twentieth century. The dry season was a time during which the grassland was repeatedly burned; it was a time of fire and smoke, of blackened landscapes.24 It certainly did not look untouched and fire ecology was a deliberate and significant human intervention in the land that produced very distinctive ecological effects and adaptations. Aboriginal people referred to it as cleaning up the land and the land would be judged to be in poor condition if it were not done. I am not sure how tourists and their friends and relatives would view postcards of the charred remains of wilderness.

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Today, the land management of Kakadu is a partnership between Aboriginal groups and the Australian Parks and Wildlife Service. The interests of the former are more prominent than in the past, but even so, conservation of the wildlife and the visual consumption of it by tourists effectively requires Aboriginal country practices to be hidden. Similar tensions existed at Uluru National Park when Bruce Rose conducted his study in the mid-1990s. This is well illustrated in the following exchanges: They [park authorities] only worry for those bilby. They didn’t survive those bilby because they put them in the wrong area. They put them in the wrong place, no witchetty [Acacia kempeana]. If they put them right here where they got houses they would have been alright. We wanted to have a killer herd for ourselves over this part, but they take the country away from us. That’s all it is, only think for the bilby animals. They have got some other bilbies over near the ranger’s quarters now, and I heard they have three mothers with twins in the pouch. [Bruce Rose] Is that in a better spot over there where they have them? Well maybe but they might be eaten by feral cats, and they are worried about the dingos so they poison them, but what do they think the dingos will eat if they take away all the rabbits from here? They have to eat something and there aren’t many kangaroos around here … the trouble for the kangaroos is that they are blocking off the water holes so they have nowhere to drink. They put a boundary fence around [the park] which stopped a lot coming in. We got no movement in this place now. That’s the main issue around here, we are pushed into a corner. There’s no control for us. They decided to block off all of the roads, even our main roads to get out of the park. Roads that we have established long ago. We don’t go making new roads all the time. We don’t drive off the road to go shooting at kangaroos or anything like that. We don’t do that or shoot kangaroos from close to the resort because we know that is what people come to see. You know we have the right to hunt anywhere in the park, in front of the rangers or the tourists, but we not doing anything like that. We leaving those animals for the tourists to see. We want the tourists to come here, we are building our future on

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that happening, but we want to be able to control where they go and what they see. But we can’t do that if rangers are going to run tours or if they bring in other companies.25

WE ALL BELONG TO COUNTRY We should not be merely surprised by Aboriginal people’s largely positive view of feral animals: we should also be inspired and perhaps a little ashamed. For them there is no enigma surrounding the different categories of animals, native and introduced, or what to do and think about them. They do indeed have the language to distinguish animals that are strangers to the land and those that belong to the land, but unlike modern Australia, which has a need to uphold and purify a sense of the properly Australian and discourage the unAustralian,26 Aborigines are concerned less with a proper and pure notion of landscape than with the integrity and condition of the country in which they live. According to the Aboriginal people Rose interviewed, ‘the worth of an animal lies in its ability to live and flourish in the environment, not its claim to being an original component of the fauna’.27 Here they take life as it unfolds, changes and becomes new. Only a modern national state concerned with a national natural history can evaluate, know about and be concerned about extinctions. Aborigines have seen creatures come and go and tend to believe that one day absent animals will return. To an extent they blame themselves for not looking after the country. But perhaps because their world was never stable, because it was characterised by extreme climatic change, mobility, migrations and circularity and because they take their world as they find it, the advent of feral animals was something to be pleased about if anything – especially if an animal like the feral cat shows up and can stay in desert conditions all year round, long after many others have moved out. Hunters are above all else concerned to be able to find food itself, not necessarily food of a specific and unchanging variety.

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This practical value is paramount. For Aborigines the question of the legitimacy of an animal never arises. The important question is can it become a part of country, can it fit in, breed up? If it can, and if it has, then what was once a stranger now belongs: the distinction evaporates. The feral cat illustrates how an animal can progress further into the hearts and lives of Aboriginal people and acquire its own Dreaming, the ultimate consolidation of its rightful part of the world. I am not sure we should be trying to ‘educate’ them away from such a view. Rather, without in any way altering our concern for native animals, we might finally concede that the ferals are as Australian as we are, that we all, after a while, belong to country.

Chapter 8

A N I M A L S A N D M O D E R N AU S T R A L I A

In future, many more animals will be living in our cities. We should take some pleasure from this, from knowing that animals like to live among us, that we are not simply a destructive force but also an ecosystem engineer opening opportunities for others.1 … the unintended tones of fear of the alien and suspicion of the mixed.2

A year or two ago I was on my usual run through the bush suburb where I live. It’s a mixture of running on asphalt and concrete pavements and along fire trails through remnant patches of bush. The people who live up here do so because the gum trees and dry sclerophyll forest more or less dominate and provide a life in and among trees. Gardens in my suburb vary between those that attempt (and fail to achieve) the English cottage-style flower garden and those that have mainly native plants, but the gum trees make sure that almost everything struggles. Native or introduced, the gardens are reduced to a dry, scrubby imitation of the native undergrowth. I run with my dog every morning on different routes through this place, but that morning I was struck by a new realisation. Practically every house, to all intents and purposes inhabited by environmentally aware families, possessed a dog. We passed no less than twenty-two dogs being walked, and as we ran along we

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aroused the vocal attention of resident dogs in almost every property. At one point I stopped to listen. Sure there were crows and currawongs and wattle birds screeching away as usual, but the bass line was the cry of the domestic dog, seemingly senseless but also, I suspect, reassuringly present and attentive – possibly the most loved members of each household we ran by. Then, often enough there was another sound that I must confess I had never noted much before: cocks were crowing in almost every direction. This suburb rang with the sound of barking dogs and crowing cocks. I ran on, thinking I might continue paying attention to this census of introduced species. How many cats would I see? Not so many, ten. But then cats don’t bark or walk on a lead around here, and then again, it was winter and only 3 degrees, so most of them would be lying by the log stove or tucked up inside a doona. The extraordinary thing was the variety of dogs and the often remarked-upon fact that the dogs and their owners seemed not only well matched but, well, grown into each other. I am sure that the small retired couple with wrinkled skin, glasses that magnify eyes and an odd dress sense bought their two King Charles spaniels because they felt vindicated by them, comfortable and symmetrical. They were extraordinarily similar-looking. Equally, I am sure pure chance hardly came into the choice of Pit Bull terrier for the hardfaced, unsmiling man with the leather baseball cap and military fatigues – possibly a Vietnam veteran. And the affluent middleaged blonde woman with her two pretty girls and their golden retriever said what? White suburban middle-class affluence is no different in wanting their dogs to reflect back something of themselves: in this case their privilege, breeding and civility. I realised then that our relations with animals are far more complex and contradictory than simply finding the correct ecological ‘fit’ with them. Personal, cultural and historical relations with animals are deeply engrained in us. Donna Haraway argues convincingly that we and dogs co-evolved: what that means is that we are not only predisposed to each other, but we are both a

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precondition of each other’s existence.3 We would not be who we were without dogs and vice versa. Long before the advent of modern societies, dogs and humans formed a relationship every bit as natural as anything else, but once formed, our evolutionary pathways became locked in together. The question is, how many other species become locked into the life of different human cultures, and specifically for our purposes here, the cultures of Australia created over varying time-frames? This thought not only homes us in on suburban Australia and ordinary everyday Australians, but it also reminds us what kind of society we are. What seems like a homogeneous affluent suburb, which can be easily reduced by voting or income statistics to one of a handful of ‘types’ of Australian, is in fact a suburb of modern individuals and individualism: the pursuit of individual rather than collective aims, projects, lifestyles and identities is the only thing they all have in common. None of them live in what could possibly be called communities in the traditional sense. Ten years of walking past the hard man has not produced a smile or even a flicker of recognition. Blonde woman says hi, but no more; pleasant indifference, distant cordiality. And the old couple, rather like their spaniels, look as if they would rather bite me than embrace me as a member of their world. True, they have networks of friends and family, but these are highly scattered; their rights and obligations to each other are extremely limited and very far from guaranteed. Family break-up in my suburb is the rule not the exception. Love and family ties exist, as the great sociologist Zygmunt Bauman puts it, ‘until further notice’. I suspect that the old couple see very few other people than the regulars on the dog-walking track. They do stop and speak to selected others, briefly – people more like them than me. The hard man lives alone, drinking alone, one suspects. He recently made his Pit Bull an elaborate leather harness, complete with studs. He talks to him when he thinks he is alone in the bush. Blonde woman is recently divorced and she is more sisterly now with the two girls, closer but less secure-looking.

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These fragile human individualists look for new bonds to centre them in their fluid and fugitive domestic lives. Dogs give them continuous unconditional support and love. This is not to anthropomorphise dogs because dogs are naturally affectionate, supportive and collective, but it is to ‘caninise’ or ‘packise’ humans; we are closer to dogs than we ever were and we peer into their world of difference and experience the world we make together more often. We do put a lot into loving our animals, but the magic in every human tale about their pets is the way their love is returned, the way dogs and cats put a lot into it too. This is not in their imagination. Nationalism, whether with the eco-prefix or not, gives people in contemporary societies what Benedict Anderson calls ‘imagined community’. We are a country of strangers but the nation gives us all a sense of belonging to something, especially through rituals of nationhood. International sports events produce an enlivened though short-lived sense of belonging among the spectators. Econationalism also has an appeal at this level. A love of one’s country, nature and landscape and a wish to preserve it can produce powerful emotions, political support and environmental action. However, like the international sporting occasion it may (and does) prove to be episodic and inconstant, especially since so many other sources of identity and belonging vie for attention in the society of individuals. In fact there are many other animal-focused organisations and values that compete with eco-nationalism and undermine its otherwise monopoly over what is now called biopolitics – the recent realisation that human and social life is increasingly attending to issues that cross the human/biological divide. Many people, for example, are persuaded by those organisations that argue for animal rights. Our close day-to-day relationships with animals combined with a realisation that humanity has been destructive and disregarding of their lives produces what Matt Cartmill called a ‘tender-hearted romanticism’. To be romantic with an animal in this sense does not mean being overly sentimental and inattentive to its animalness but the opposite: to try to imagine its world, to summon up through thought, knowledge and observation what it

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is to be that animal, and indeed to resist anthropomorphising. It means that people relate to animals as sentient beings, with feelings that are similar to our own more than they are different. It means that they relate to them both as a species and as individuals, that their individual being matters. In many places, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, it is common enough to find fellow travellers in both environmental and animal rights organisations, and as the recent protests in Britain over live animal exports showed, the protesters were from an ordinary cross-section of society and not the inner core of hard-line activists. One of the animal enigmas here is that Australian environmentalist and animal rights organisations are poles apart. In order to purify the (deserving) Australian native ecosystems of creatures that have no place there, environmentalists cannot entertain the notion of animal rights since this involves the right to be alone and undisturbed by humans. Australian environmentalist ethics operate only at the level of ecosystems and the species that properly belong to them; only ecosystems and species properly located have rights (ordained by nature itself), not individuals within them. Critically, Australian environmentalists reserve the right to act on behalf of ecosystems, and this means reserving the right to destroy individual animals if they stray or are foolishly removed from their natural place, or to destroy entire species if they happen to be introduced. This is something that animal rights organisations cannot countenance. As far as they are concerned, ecosystems are abstract ideas that do not have a being as such, whereas individual animals, and the manner of their relating to others around them, do. All individual animals have strange stories to tell in these times of transition and change. According to animal rights philosophy (which the Australian Greens now pay lip service to), we cannot blame them and make them responsible for events beyond their control. They are like refugees, deserving of our support, and to kill them for being a species in the wrong place seems like ‘speciescleansing’, a morally repugnant thing (which is precisely what the Australian Greens propose to do).4 Humans use metaphors of their

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social and political world to understand the natural world around them and vice versa. In this regard the environmentalists and animal rights organisations have something in common. Ecological models of nature do not follow the fluid and changing characteristics of evolution but draw on social models of stable communities, the notion of belonging and citizenship (rights in a collective order), the occupation of bounded spaces or territoriality, and the associated language of purity, separation and order. So in Australia the future composition and shape of our nature is uncertain because it depends on the relative success of different contested positions in our biopolitics. While we have a good idea where environmentalism, animal rights and Aborigines stand on these issues, we have very little idea where ordinary Australians figure in such debates. It is little wonder that environmentalist groups and organisations have failed to research this unknown but potentially influential constituency. They know full well that ordinary Australians’ relations with animals are grounded and embedded in history, cultures and experiences that distort and compromise the clear lines of ecocentrism. A good example of this was the public outcry over the shooting of brumbies and their foals from helicopters in Guy Fawkes River National Park, New South Wales, in 2001. Ordinary Australians paid no attention to the science of the situation or its scientific legitimacy, but mainly to its morality. The outcry turned an environmental management issue into an animal rights issue and was vocal and powerful enough to effect an immediate political response. The brumbies went from unwanted pest to protected species overnight. But on the other hand this firm action on behalf of the brumby would not go far enough for the animal rights lobby: why stop there? why not stop eating animals, for example? It is obviously very important to understand Australian attitudes to and practices with animals because these matter and they are going to matter more. And knowing something of their character will show where the most likely future lies and how Australia’s animal enigmas might one day be resolved.

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A NATIONAL SURVEY OF HUMAN–ANIMAL RELATIONS IN AUSTRALIA It was largely in relation to this strategic question that I began a national study of human–animal relations with the late Steven Crook, Professor of Sociology at James Cook University. The results are now to hand and an accurate picture of the current state of play can inform this final chapter. The one thing that is very clear from the hundreds of pages of data is that modern Australians’ lives are not at all different from those in my own suburb: they are surrounded by animals and animal-related activities, our homes are full of animals, we have quite extraordinary lives together with them, the range of relationships is as diverse as it is complex and we are continuously thinking about them and changing the way we act with them. Our survey results make extraordinary reading and suggest that human–animal relations are a major political and cultural issue. The study, Sentiments and Risks: The Changing Nature of Human–Animal Relations, a project funded by the Australian Research Council, took place between 2000 and 2004. It combined a nationally representative survey of 2000 respondents with a series of case studies focused around veterinary practice and relationships with wildlife. The survey was conducted over the phone with Australians over the age of 16 and we randomised the choice of respondent in each household by asking to speak with the person whose birthday was next. This guaranteed that all ages and genders are represented. We also created statistically representative interview targets for all capital cities and state rural areas. As a result of this we can compare rural with urban areas across Australia and we can compare state with state. Because phone numbers were generated for each region randomly, we have a representative range of respondents in terms of class, income and education and can make inferences on their association with particular views on animals and animal-related issues.

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We asked about the animals that people kept on their property, where they fitted into their family and their life, where they were allowed to go in the house and why they acquired them in the first place. We also asked about the wild animals that live around their home, whether they encouraged them, tolerated them or tried to keep them off. In this way we have information on attitudes to a range of animals from insects to reptiles and mammals. Then we asked about their involvement in animal-related activities from feeding wildlife to hunting and riding, to photography, pet shows and visits to zoos. In another section we focused on animals and the risks they pose and tried to gauge respondents’ anxiety levels in respect of such things as dog attacks, snakes, marine stingers, animal or meat-born diseases, spider bites and mosquitos. We then asked which, if any, sorts of meat respondents ate and how frequently they ate it. We included seafood alongside farmed and native animal meat. It was also important to know where respondents stood in relation to the way animals are treated in Australia. Questions probed their agreement or not on a range of contentious issues from factory farming, the killing of native animals as food, the morality of hunting and fishing, animals rights and the use of animals in medical testing. However, because this was the first ever survey of its kind, we had no precise way of knowing whether these views and practices were changing. For this reason we then asked whether respondents were more or less likely to do a particular activity than they did a few years ago. Questions here focused on pet-keeping, eating meat and fish, buying products tested on animals, visiting wildlife and joining or helping animal welfaretype organisations. We then asked about specific relationships with key animal-related organisations. Were they members, supporters, funders or indeed, opponents? Australians, animals and everyday life

We asked all our respondents whether they kept any animals on their property, believing this to be one useful indicator of exposure

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to animals in everyday life. The survey found that Australians had a complex involvement with animals of all categories and that the emotional content of these produces a tension for proponents of eco-nationalism. Of course many Australians regularly encounter animals in their work, in their suburb, in their travels and in their leisure, but most Australians spend most of their non-work time in their own homes. Moreover, this question is a rough-and-ready indicator of the desirability of having animals around, given that almost all Australians have no material need of them. Of course, this assumption is typical of the fairly conventional view of human–animal relations in modernity: that once the need to keep them for food and protection is removed, need has tended to be replaced by less utilitarian desires such as play, leisure, entertainment and company. These data do not speak of or measure needs other than food but they do indicate a less superfluous relationship than is commonly supposed. It can be said with some authority that a large majority, almost 70 per cent, of Australians keep animals on their property (table 8.1). The word ‘property’ may conjure broad acres or at least hobby farms, but in fact the numbers keeping chickens or stock animals are very low indeed, between 1 and 6 per cent, with poultry being the most important, especially in rural areas. So by far the largest category of animals on the property of Australian households are companion animals. The keeping of animals is remarkably similar among all income groups and it is really only in those households where total income falls below $30 000 that fewer than 70 per cent (the average) keep them.

Ta b l e 8 . 1 : D o y o u k e e p a n i m a l s o n y o u r p r o p e r t y ?

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, 3 September 2004. See CJ Soares, ‘The Companion Animal in the Context of the Family System’, Marriage and Family Review 8(1) 1985, pp. 49–62; Cindy Wilson & Dennis Turner (eds), Companion Animals in Human Health, Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage 1998; Alan Beck & Aaron Katcher, Between Pets and People: The Importance of Animal Companionship, New York: Perigee Books, 1983; Aaron Katcher & Alan Beck (eds), New Perspectives in Our Lives with Companion Animals, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983; TF Garrity et al., ‘Pet Ownership and Attachment as Supportive Factors in the Health of the Elderly’, Anthrozoos 3(1) 1998, pp. 35–44; Council for Science and Society, Companion Animals in Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988; PW Salmon & IM Salmon, ‘Who Owns Who? Psychological Research into the Human Pet Bond in Australia’, in Katcher and Beck, New Perspectives in Our Lives with Companion Animals. See AM Hills, ‘The Motivational Bases of Attitudes towards Animals’, Society and Animals 1(2) 1993, pp. 1–11.

Notes to pages 206–231

7 8 9 10

11 12 13

14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

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Josh Schonwold, ‘NIA will fund study about loneliness, its physical risks’, University of Chicago Chronicle 21(5) 2001, pp. 5–9. BBC News, ‘Britain singled out as lonely nation’, 27 March 2000. Lindsay Tanner, Address to The Sydney Institute, 4 May 1999. TF Garrity, & L Stallones, ‘Effects of Pet Contact on Human Well-Being: Review of Recent Research’, in Wilson & Turner, Companion Animals in Human Health. ‘The Truth about Cats and Dogs’. Royal New Zealand Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Press Release, 14 May 2003. P Patmore, ‘Postmaterialism and Party Change’. PhD Thesis, School of Government, University of Tasmania, 2000, p. 244. Postmaterialism is a new form of politics based on values, especially lifestyle values such as clear air and other environmental values, rights (such as those based on sexuality, gender or ability), health options, diet, therapy and so on as opposed to the bread-and-butter materialist politics that focused on basic needs issues such as housing, adequate food, provision of education and work. Postmaterialism kicked in when these provisions were very well established in affluent Western societies after the 1960s. From then on, a new generation championed new postmaterialist causes, often through social movements rather than party politics. Bruce Tranter, ‘The Social Bases of Environmentalism in Australia’, Department of Sociology, University of Tasmania, 1996, p. 177. Low, The New Nature, pp. 275–77. Arne Naess & Helena Norberg-Hodge, ‘Self-realization and society’ 1997, Adrian Franklin, ‘Australian Hunting and Angling Sports and the Changing Nature of Human–Animal Relations in Australia’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 32(3) 1996, pp. 39–56. Adrian Franklin, Animals and Modern Cultures, London, Sage, 1999, pp. 69–74. Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast, Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1993, p. 181. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Participation in Sport and Physical Activities. 2002: 3–10. Bill Bryson, Down Under, London: Black Swan, 2001, p. 19. Burke’s Backyard with Don Burke, Dangerous Dogs, 1997. Michael Keenan, In Search of a Wild Brumby, Sydney: Bantam Books, 2002. Low, The New Nature, p. 47. Low, The New Nature, p. 47. S Marchant et al., Handbook of Australian, New Zealand & Antarctic Birds, 7 vols, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1990–2005. Frances Michaels, ‘How To Design Pests Out of the Garden.’ , 2001, p. 1. Zentralarchiv für Empirische Sozialforschung, Machine Readable Codebook ZA Stut 2450: ISSP 1993 Environment Köln: Zentralarchiv für Empirische Sozialforschung, 1995.

( 250 ) Notes to pages 231–238

30 Low, The New Nature. 31 The Australian Magazine, 9–10 December 2000. 32 Nicholas Smith, ‘The Howl and the Pussy: Feral Cats and Wild Dogs in the Australian Imagination’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology 10(3) 1999, p. 288. 33

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INDEX

ABC Catalyst 159 Ten Million Wildcats 170–74 Aboriginal people 138 art 119 artists 118 assimilation 78, 138 Atitjere 173 attitudes to animals bilby 190 buffalo 176 camel 175–78 cats 170–74 donkey 175–78 feral animals 166–92 horse 175–78 burning technology 142, 168–69, 228 christianity and animals 175 country 166–69, 236 Dreamtime 166 Huckitta Station 173 kangaroo 190 Mulga Bore 173 Pintupi-Luritja 173 rabbits 176, 190 stockmen 176 totemic cults 48–78 writers 125 Adelaide, SA 93, 201–21 Allen, Christopher 115–16 Anderson, Benedict 196 Animal Liberation Australia 143

animals and Aborigines 48–78 acclimatisation 94–101, 103–108, 147 African 238 city animals 228 colonialism 26–38 companion animals 20, 201, 203–212 as family members 208–212 birds 207–208 cats 205, 208 demographics 202–203, 208– 212 dogs 194–95, 202–204, 205 domestic-domestic 154 fish 204–205 household space 210–12 human loneliness 206–207 introduced-wild 154 native-wild 154 wild-domestic 154 see also cats; dogs; birds, etc. feral animals 15–16, 143 as sacred 152 buffalo 1–3, 16, 96 camel 16, 96, 119 cane toads 160–63 carp 21, 152, 164, 233 cats 16, 20, 22–23, 145, 155–56, 164, 169, 170–74, 233–34

Index

animals (continued) deer 101–102 dogs 16, 155–56, 164, 213 donkeys 16, 96 fox 16, 102–103, 145–46 goats 16 horses (brumbies) 16, 21–22, 96, 154–55, 164, 198, 217, 225, 226–27 hunting 225 pigs 16, 96, 225 rabbits 16, 97–99, 147, 156 songbirds 100–101 trout 16, 21, 103–108, 233 see also pests; eradication; species cleansing; companion species livestock 154, 156, 164, 201, 226–27 mythical 124 nation 3–5 native animals 114, 123–24, 148–53, 212–14, 235 as sacred 149 bats 212–13 birds 214 butterflies 212–13 crocodile 1 dingo 21, 157–60 emu 111, 121 frogs 212–13, 214 goshawk 148 kangaroo 213 koala 146 kookaburra 230 lizards 212–13 lyrebird 146–47 mobility 146–47 and North America 11–12 parrots 214 platypus 39–47 possum 137, 212–14 snakes 212 spiders 218, 220 and UK 12–14 wedge-tailed eagle 147 representation 3, 5–8 rights 231–33 risk 218–21 sanctuaries 135, 151

( 259 )

animals (continued) science 5 trademarks 123–24 anthropomorphism 207 ANZACs 217 Arnhem Land 163 asylum seekers 17–18, 138, 238 Australian Bureau of Statistics 217 Australian Greens 143, 234, 236 Australian Kennel Club 157 Australian Universities Press 93 Australianisation 110–43, 144, 235 ‘green turn’ 139–43 see also Federation; nativism; eco-nationalism Baker, Steve 8 Banks, Joseph 34–36, 40 Bartlett, Andrew 18 Bauman, Zygmunt 195 BBC Radio Four 231 Bennett, George 85, 100 Benton, Ted 141 biocentrism 115, 137, 164, 198 Biodiversity Community Network 141–42 biopolitics 162, 196–97, 236–38 Blainey, Geoffrey 123–24 Bolton, Geoffrey 84–85 Bonyhady, Tim 119 Botany Bay 215 Boyd, Arthur 122 Bowman, David 238 Brisbane 214 Britainisation 78, 79–109, 235 ‘Bulletin writers’ 124–25 bushwalking 130–34, 216 Captain Cook 33–35 Canine Defence League 232 Cartmill, Matt 196 cats 15, 20, 22–23, 145, 155–56, 164, 169, 170–74, 205, 208, 233–34 Central Land Council (Northern Territory) 177 Chamberlain, Azaria 158 Chamberlain, Lindy 157–58 Clarke, Marcus 88

( 260 ) Animal Nation

Cobourg Peninsula, NT 238 Collings, Matthew 123 colonial art 80, 116–17 companion animals 20, 201, 203–12 recruitment and human lifecycle 206–207 Constitutional Convention 18 Conway, Ronald 84, 86, 88–89 Corbett, LK 157 Council for Science and Society 202 Country 166–69 CRC Sustainable Development of Tropical Savannas 163 Crook, Steven 199 Daly, JA 93 Dampier, William 31–32 Dark, Eleanor 127 Darwin, Charles 26, 43, 45–46, 82 Darwin, Erasmus 35 Darwin, NT 2–3, 160, 223–24 Dickman, Chris 170–71 Disney, Walt 12 dog attacks 218–19 dog-proof fence 157 dogs 155–56, 164, 194–95, 202–204, 205, 213 Dombrovskis, Peter 229 Drysdale, Russell 119–22, 127–28 Durkheim, Emile 55–78, 127 critics 76–78

feral animals 144, 149, 170–92, 232 Fipa, the 9 fish 93 consumption 222–25 see also hunting and angling Flanagan, R 43, 79 Flannery, Tim 4, 151, 170 Fox, Paul 93 Franklin, AS 15, 132, 145, 188, 207 Franklin, Miles 126 Fraser Island 157–59 Fullerton, Mary 110–11 Gallipoli 217 garden plants 92–93 see also native plants Gibbs, May 126–27 Gordon, Adam Lindsay 87, 88 Gordonvale 161 Gould, John 26 Great Barrier Reef 129 Greenpeace 231–32 Griffiths, Tom 131, 134, 137

Earth Sanctuaries Ltd 149–150 ecology 142, 146–47, 162–65, 167–69, 215, 227–28, 231 eco-nationalism 19–20, 24–25, 115, 122, 135, 137–38, 152–55, 209–10, 232, 233–36 see also nationalism; nativism; Federation Ely, Richard 95 Esson, Louis 87 Evans, George Essex 86–87 Evans, Richard 18, 233–34 evolution 48–49

Hage, Ghassan 17, 134, 140–41 Hamilton Island 224–25 Hanson, Pauline 18 Haraway, D 193, 194–95 Harris, Les 158 Hazlitt, William 83 Head, Lesley 174 Hemingway, Ernest 2 Heysen, Hans 117 Hobart 43, 133, 201–21 Holmes à Court, Janet 18–19 horse-riding 217 Horton, David 85 Hughes, Robert 30, 33, 43, 81 Humphries, Barry 139 hunting and angling 93, 98, 101–103, 107–108, 114, 144–45, 172, 188, 215–16, 225 Hurst, Damien 123 Hutton, Drew & Connors, Libby 85, 132

Fauchery, Antoine 85 Federation 124, 130, 153–54

imagined community 196 immigrants 142, 152

Index

individualism 195 Ingold, T 178 Inland Fisheries, Tasmania 152 Kangaroo Island 135 Keenan, Michael 227 Kingfisher Bay 159 Langton, Marcia 189 Launceston, Tasmania 43 Lawson, Henry 87, 124–27 Leach, Edmund 7 Lele, the 9 Levi-Strauss, Claude 7 Lewis, S 161–62 Linder, DO 158 Lindsay, Norman 114 London Zoo 39, 99 Low, Tim 20, 24, 80, 99, 107, 135, 145–46, 163, 193, 214, 228–33 Mabey, Richard 179–180 Macnaghten, P & Urry, J 145 Malloy, Georgiana 82 Malouf, David 88, 113 Mandle, B 101 Maria Island 135 marine stingers 220 Marx, Karl 49, 112 McCubbin, Frederick 116, 126 McKim, Nick 171 McMahon, Phillipa 135–36 meat consumption 221–25 scares 221 Melbourne 94, 100, 103, 135, 201–21 Melbourne Dog Show 217 Michaels, Frances 230 monsters and anomalous creatures 28–29 Moyal, Ann 40–47, 150 Mulligan, Martin & Hill, Stuart 84, 113, 115, 128–29 multiculturalism 141–42, 154 mustang 154 Naess, Arne 215 Nakamarra Gibson, Cindy 171–72

( 261 )

Namatjira, Albert 118 Napanganka Daniels , Sarah 171–72 Napanganka Gibson, Mitjii 171–72 national parks Cape Solander, NSW 215 Freycinet 183–85 Guy Fawkes River 21–22, 164, 198 Kakadu 1–3, 215, 224 Lake St Claire 181–82 Uluru 190 nationalism 112–15, 122, 150–55, 165, 196, 234 native animals 114. 123–24, 148–53, 212–14, 225–28, 235 native plants 91–93 Melbourne Botanic Gardens 135–36 see also garden plants nativism 114 New South Wales 21–22, 35, 41, 43, 81, 82, 84, 91, 94, 96, 100, 107, 119, 164, 198, 201–21, 230, 232 Nolan, Sidney 118 Northern Territory 54–55, 99, 157–59, 161, 163, 176–77, 185–88, 201–21, 238 Nuer, the 8–9 O’Brien, John (PJ Hartigan) 87–88 One Nation 137 outsiders 144–65 Paltridge, Rachel 171 Papunya Tula 118 Patmore, P 210 Peace, A 158–59 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) 232 pests 141–42, 144, 164, 167 pet shows 216 see also companion animals poultry 194, 201 Preston, Margaret 118 Pussycat Dreaming 166–74 Pyne, SJ 81–82 Qantas 113 Queensland 37, 92, 96, 98, 99, 150, 157, 161–162, 201–21, 227

( 262 ) Animal Nation

refugees 17–18, 138, 238 Ritvo, Harriet 39 Roberts, Tom 116–17 Rolls, Eric 89–92, 98, 157 Rose, Bruce 25, 172–78, 190, 191 RSPCA 231–32 ‘Rudd, Steele’ (Arthur H Davis) 85 Seksel, Kersti 208 Shoard, Marion 180 Show days 216–17 Sir Collin MacKenzie Sanctuary for Australian Fauna 134 sloth 29 Smith, Nicholas 3, 18–19, 155, 159, 233–34 Snowy Mountains 227 South Australia 91, 93, 98, 99, 157, 190, 201–21 species cleansing 14, 20, 149–156, 169 Spencer, B, & Gillen, F 54–55 spiders 218–221 Stratton, John 101, 103 Streeton, Arthur 116 Sydney 21, 81, 86, 90–91, 132, 133, 201–21 Olympic Games 217 Talock, Harry 119 Tampa Affair 138 Tanami desert 171–173 Tanner, Lindsay 206 Tasmania 21, 36, 83, 90, 93, 95, 102, 104–106, 111, 131, 146–47, 152, 157, 179, 181–85, 201–21 Tjapanangka, Tjumpo 172 Thoreau, Henry 215 totemism 49–78 clans 67–76 Durkheim 55–78 ritual 71–75

totemism 49–78 Spencer and Gillen 54–55 theories of 58–63 totemic power 65–67 tourism 130–34, 216, 238 Tranter, Bruce 210 Trollope, Anthony 92 Uluru 157 Van Diemen’s Land 83 Victoria 88, 94, 96, 98, 99, 116, 131, 134, 135, 139, 150, 201–21, 227 Walker, J 105–107 Walmesley, John 149–50 Warrawong Animal Sanctuary 149–50 Weber, Max 112 Western Australia 17, 83, 91, 99, 170–74, 201–21 whale watching 215 Wheelwright, HW 107–108 White Australia Policy 16, 137, 154 White, Patrick 125, 126 Tree of Life 126–27 Voss 125 White, R 31–32, 101 wilderness 133–34, 150, 229 Wilderness Society 167, 169, 203, 225–26, 228, 231 wildlife feeding 200 photography 200 watching 215 Willis, Roy 9 Wilson’s Promontory 135 World Wildlife Fund 232 Worth, Trish 18 Wright, Judith 137 zoos 149, 216

Also published by UNSW Press

REPORTS FROM A WILD COUNTRY Ethics for Decolonisation Deborah Bird Rose Shortlisted for the 2005 NSW Premier’s Awards – Gleebooks Prize Captain Cook was the real wild one. He failed to recognise Law, destroyed people and country, lived by damage and promoted cruelty.

Reports from a Wild Country explores some of Australia’s major ethical challenges. Written in the midst of rapid social and environmental change and in a time of uncertainty and division, it offers powerful stories and arguments for ethical choice and commitment. The focus is on reconciliation between Indigenous and ‘Settler’ peoples, and with nature. ‘In Reports from a Wild Country, Deborah Bird Rose takes us on a moral, temporal and spatial journey to a frontier, to wild country that forges a nation. She meditates provocatively on how relations with land subtend human rights, ecological restoration and reconciliation. Rose’s writing mourns missed opportunities but is ultimately hopeful about ethical possibilities for better human and natural worlds.’ – LIBBY ROBIN ‘What can one of the world’s most modern societies learn from one of the oldest? Deborah Rose, one of Australia’s wisest anthropologists, reflects on what she has learned over many years from her Aboriginal friends and teachers. Together they meditate on how Australians can re-ground their accountability to this time and this place.’ – PETER READ Deborah Bird Rose is a senior research scholar and prize-winning author. An anthropologist by training, she has worked with Aboriginal people in their claims to land, in protecting sacred sites and in collaboratively documenting their relationships with totemic landscapes. Her previous books include Country of the Heart: An Indigenous Australian Homeland, Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture and Hidden Histories: Black Stories from Victoria River Downs, Humbert River and Wave Hill Stations. ISBN 0 86840 798 4

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Animals can tell us a lot about ourselves. The way we love them as pets, eat them for dinner, make them symbols of the nation or shun them as invaders and pests illuminates much about our society and culture. Animal Nation traces the complex relationships between animals and humans in Australia. It starts with the colonial period, when unfamiliar native animals were hunted almost to extinction and replaced with preferred species, and brings us full circle to the present when native species are protected above all others. It demonstrates that different categories of animals have been used to legitimate or marginalise different human groups in colonial and postcolonial Australia Animals form the focus of intense social and political conflict in Australia. In a provocative and original way, Animal Nation explains why.

ADRIAN FRANKLIN

ThE TRUE STORy OF ANiMALS AND AUSTRALIA

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ADRIAN FRANKLIN