On Species: Narrative, Indigeneity, Ecology, Afterlife
Hosted by the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne, 4 December 2013
(with ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Fire Stories Conference 5-6 December)
Level 1, Alan Gilbert Building, University of Melbourne
Supported by the Macgeorge Bequest
Abstracts and Biographical Notes
Keynote Speakers
Ursula K. Heise Legally Gone: Endangered Species’ Laws and Culture
Macgeorge Visiting Speaker
Biologists claim that humans are currently confronting the sixth mass extinction of species in the history of
life on Earth, with human activity as the major cause for the first time. A multitude of books, films,
photographs, websites, paintings and other art works have sought to document and mourn disappearing
species over the last few decades, while scientists and policy-makers have crafted global databases, red
lists, and laws to protect them. This presentation will compare the endangered species laws of Bolivia,
Germany, and the United States to explore to what extent they are shaped by internationally shared
policies or by distinctive national and regional cultures. Endangered species laws, as legal and cultural texts,
embody particular conceptions of cross-species relations and of risk that need to be considered in parallel
with aesthetic representations of endangered species.
Ursula K. Heise is a Professor of English at UCLA and a faculty member of UCLA's Institute of the
Environment and Sustainability. Her books include Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism
(Cambridge University Press, 1997), Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of
the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), and Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur
[After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture] (Suhrkamp, 2010). She is currently working on a book
entitled Where the Wild Things Used To Be: Narrative, Database, and Endangered Species.
Peta Tait Cute Pet or Nuisance Pest? Ecologies of Human Emotions and Kangaroo Bodies
From the fictional Skippy to the reality of road kill, kangaroo bodies are surrounded by contradictory
emotions. The ways in which humans develop emotional feelings for one animal and, even for a species,
might seem to favour all animals. But human emotions can be an animal trap. This paper explores a politics
of emotions and bodily feelings in relation to kangaroo performers and decorative images that point
towards ecological contradictions.
While labelled a gentle mother and a cute curiosity internationally, the kangaroo has been viewed as an
aggressive fighter or a pest in Australia, which supports hunting or ‘harvesting’. The kangaroo body was and
is treated like an unlimited natural resource.
Kangaroo species have only recently been more carefully studied in their respective ecologies (Jackson and
Vernes 2010; Simons 2012). Of interest in this paper how human sensory encounters with other animal
species are body based and implicate feeling responses as well as cognitive ones (Merleau-Ponty 2004;
Acampora 2006). A surprise encounter with a kangaroo in grassland feels different to an expected viewing
of a kangaroo ‘body’ in a zoo preserve. How can the imposition of human control over other species bodies
be unravelled at the level of a species phenomenology of the body and ecology? Human-animal encounters
produce visceral responses such as a bodily alertness even cautious wariness, and, importantly, through the
processes of seeing, smelling and/or hearing. Perhaps for other animals, the encounter is more about
sound and smell than sight. Yet it repeatedly implicates a sensory perception of the strangeness of the
other’s animal body. Human feeling responses and emotions are potent, unstable fleeting conditions but
they are not species neutral. Nonetheless unexpected live human–animal encounters might be potentially
positive because these are immediate and direct with rapid bodily responses that can initially short circuit
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cognitive precepts and possibly even emotional patterns. Sentimental decorative kangaroo bodies might be
all pervasive in Australian culture but kangaroo emotional ecology is not protected.
Professor Peta Tait is an academic scholar and playwright with an extensive background in theatre,
dramatic literature, performance theory and creative arts practice. She researches in the interdisciplinary
humanities fields of emotions, body theory and gender identity. Professor Tait's recent books include Wild
and Dangerous Performances: Animals, Emotions, Circus (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Circus Bodies
(Routledge, 2005) and Performing Emotions (Ashgate, 2002). She has published in journals
including Theatre Journal, Modern Drama and Performance Research. She is sole writer of 5 produced
plays, co-writer of 2, and writer for 3 contemporary performances. Professor Tait began working at La
Trobe University in 1996 and was awarded a personal chair 2004. She was elected to the Executive Board of
Performance Studies International 2005-2009, and her visiting professorships include NYU Performance
Studies in 2000 and the University of Helsinki in 2010. She regularly receives international invitations to
present on circus body phenomenology.
Panel Session Speakers
Vanessa Barbay Painting with blood, fat and shit: Matter and the animal body
Animal bodies are contested territories in an age of post-colonial mass extinctions and human
overpopulation. I explore the representation of animal bodies in painting cross-culturally in Australia. My
particular case study is located in Western Arnhem Land, where representing animals dominates within
cultural production among Kunwinjku-speaking artists. The cross-cultural aspect of my work locates
meaning within the painting materials themselves, first in order to interrogate the striking similarity
between so-called X-ray paintings of animals and the dissection and illustration of specimens in European
culture’s scientific visual tradition known as Natural History. Taxidermy is also implicated in this crosscultural study, which leads to the practice-led component of my research where I deconstruct formative
exposure to taxidermy through my father’s activities as an amateur naturalist and my recent experiments
harnessing the decomposition of animal bodies to produce an indexical form of representation in the
context of painting.
Vanessa Barbay is an exhibiting artist who recently completed a practice-led PhD research project in
painting focussed on the representation of animals in her work and that of rock and bark painters from
Western Arnhem Land. Her research was informed by time spent learning language and culture in
Kunbarlanja from Kunwinjku speakers. She is currently a visiting artist in ANU’s Visual Anthropology Unit
focused on a collaborative project with Yuin artist and childhood friend Theresa Ardler in the creation of
paintings connecting animals, ancestors and place in addition to work that aims to merge Catholic and
Koori cosmology.
Justine Campbell and Sarah Hamilton (co-creators) They Saw a Thylacine (performance)
‘A rare and moving feat of theatrical storytelling’ – Cameron Woodhead, The Age
On an unseasonably cold September day in 1936, the last known Tasmanian tiger died in captivity at Hobart
Zoo. Nearly 80 years after the disappearance of a species, Justine Campbell and Sarah Hamilton tell this
story. On the brink of the sixth mass extinction of species on earth, They Saw a Thylacine bears witness.
They Saw a Thylacine was awarded Best Performance and the Tiki Tour Ready Award at the Melbourne
Fringe in 2013. Next year the show will tour to New Zealand in February and to Adelaide in March. This is
Sarah and Justine's second collaboration. They made A Donkey and a Parrot for Melbourne Fringe in 2011.
In 2012 the show toured Adelaide Fringe and Edinburgh Festival Fringe, receiving critical acclaim.
For further information visit: facebook.com/theysawathylacine
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Justine Campbell is a graduate of the VCA Directing Program. She recently directed Pearl Versus the World
for Jigsaw. In 2010 she wrote and directed Back from the Dead Red for Melbourne Fringe. Justine was
awarded the 2010 Victorian Green Room Award for Best Independent Female Performer for her role as
Lady Jane in The Fate of Franklin (Four Larks).
Sarah Hamilton studied Acting at the University of Ballarat Arts Academy. Sarah was supported in the
development of A Donkey and a Parrot by the Melbourne Fringe's Outside Eye program. She worked under
the mentorship of Ansuya Nathan. Theatre credits include Oasis, Oasis at fortyfivedownstairs and The
Killing Fever at La Mama, both written and directed by Adam Cass.
Stuart Cooke Two Stories of Fire: indigenous creation narratives as a transcultural ecopoetics
As scholars like Ursula Heise have shown, major discrepancies in ecological discourses exist between the
attention to local ecologies on the one hand and, on the other, a need to integrate local experiences into
understandings of global climate change. In my paper I will read two indigenous creation narratives - one
from the MakMak people in the Northern Territory, and the other from the Yanomami of Southern
Venezuela/Northern Brazil. In doing so, I will outline both the compelling similarities and the irresolvable
differences between the narratives. I will use this comparative analysis to propose a trans-cultural
environmental ethics that is predicated on difference and differentiation, rather than generalised,
environmental 'laws' that neglect the complexity of the planet's myriad ecosystems. Such an ethics, I
suggest, will engage with a theoretical 'openness' between disciplinary and ontological categories of
'human', 'animal' and even 'material'. The paper will be oriented towards asking: 1) how small
modifications to a basic narrative structure can produce highly localised accounts of social and ecological
relationships, and: 2) can the existence of this basic narrative structure in two highly distinct, localized
cultures allow us to develop richer, local understandings of larger global relationships?
Stuart is a lecturer in creative writing and literary studies at Griffith University on the Gold Coast. A critical
work, Speaking the Earth's Languages: a theory for Australian-Chilean postcolonial poetics, was published
by Rodopi in 2013. He has also published a collection of poetry, Edge Music (IP, 2011). He is an Associate
Editor for Environmental Humanities.
Michael Farrell ‘Poorfella Sheep’ or ‘Jolly Jumbuck’? Empathy and Agency in Key Sheep Texts
The sheep was once regarded as Australia’s primary economic resource. I propose to
give a paper on the sheep as it appears in a range of Australian literary texts, focusing on affect and agency.
Paddy Roe’s reference to ‘poorfella sheep’ in Reading the Country corresponds to sympathies expressed by
Ngarla stockmen in Ngarla Songs. I read these texts alongside a range of other affects in Banjo Paterson’s
‘Waltzing Matilda’, Barbara Baynton’s stories, and a David Campbell poem. I compare these literary texts
with live export controversy news reports, and uses of the word ‘sheep’ in social media.
Michael Farrell has a PhD in Australian literature from the University of Melbourne. He is the co-winner of
the Peter Blazey Prize for 2013. His current research concerns affects and ecologies in Australian poetry.
Michael's poetry book open sesame was published by Giramondo in 2012.
Suzie Fraser Representing empire and identity through indigenous species: the stag window at Werribee
Park
The site and structure of Werribee Park mansion, south-west of Melbourne, stands as a monument to the
cashed-in rewards of Empire. It was built by immigrant Scots in the 1870s. The spine of the entrance hall of
this mansion is revealed through an imposing etched window series, at the centre of which is featured a
heroic stag image (based on a painting by the English artist, Sir Edwin Landseer). This paper will argue that
the iconography of this window series – which also features an array of ‘huntable’ game animals from
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Britain and Australia – illustrates the centrality of indigenous species narratives in promoting cultural
identity and, in this case, demarcating a carefully crafted imperial dominion in colonial Victoria.
A little bio: I'm a final-year PhD candidate in the art history department at UniMelb.
Suzanne Fraser is a PhD candidate in the art history department of Melbourne University. Her research
areas include: nineteenth-century Scottish and British art, national identity, empire studies, and indigenous
studies. Her thesis looks at the role of Scottish art in the cultural territories of colonial and immediately
post-colonial Australia.
Carol Freeman Dreaming of Angel Island
Engraved on terracotta rocks on Angel Island in the Dampier Archipelago, Western Australia, the figures of
two striped animals seem to float in the sun-dried air. They are believed to represent thylacines, now
extinct over the whole of Australia. This paper will explore Aboriginal beliefs associated with drawings of
animals and some European representations of the thylacine, as well as contemporary responses to the
images in this area in the media, in films such as Red Dog and on Internet sites. I also interrogate absences
― including a lack of clamour about industrial development that places this, the largest rock art site in the
world, in as much jeopardy as some of the species that were so carefully incised on these rocks thousands
of years ago.
Carol Freeman is an Associate at the School of Humanities, University of Tasmania. Her work on
representations of animals, bioethics, and the role of popular culture in wildlife conservation has appeared
in animal studies and zoological journals, as well as essay collections such as Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts
(2012) and Animal Death (2013). Her book Paper Tiger: A Visual History of the Thylacine was published by
Brill in 2010. She is co-editor of an international collection of essays, Considering Animals: Contemporary
Studies in Human-Animal Relations (2011) and editor of the quarterly Australian Animal Studies Group
News Bulletin since its inception in 2008.
Ken Gelder Colonial Modernity, Species and 'The Friar Bird's Sermon'
Jussi Parikka has talked about the mobilisation of animals and insects into 'technological modernity', as a
particular way of making them visible. I want to look at the way native species in Australia were mobilised
in the framework of colonial modernity. Species classification and species extinction happened almost
simultaneously: someone like John Gould is important here, for example. Species visibility thus bring two
competing but intertwined realities into play. I want to look very briefly at a colonial animal fable, E.J.
Brady's 'The Friar Bird's Sermon' (1897), which works by gathering native species together, making them
visible (even allowing them to 'speak'), and classifying them: but all within the cultural logics of colonial
modernity. This story is a subgenre of the animal fable that owes something to Chaucer's The Parliament of
Fowles — attributing human/citizen characteristics to (in this case) native species, and so inserting them
into the colonial project. Written partly in reaction to Adam Lindsay Gordon's dismissive view of local
species, the story recovers a native ecology but only by suppressing the realities of extinction and burying
the effects of colonialism itself. Brady went on to publish the best-selling paean to Australian settlement
and land development, Unlimited Australia (1918).
Ken Gelder is Professor of English at the University of Melbourne. His most recent books are After the
Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989-2007 (Melbourne UP 2009, with Paul Salzman) and New Vampire
Cinema (BFI/Palgrave Macmillan 2012). Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver are co-editors of the forthcoming
The Colonial Journals, and the emergence of Australian literary culture (UWA Publishing 2014).
A. Frances Johnson Seed map: Bligh’s Appletree: An interdisciplinary, intercultural reading of first contact
encounters in Nuenonne country.
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It is nearly two hundred and forty years since Indigenous Nuenonne people encountered William Bligh,
Bruny D’entrecasteaux and other European navigators on their laybys along the Tasman Southwest Cape.
These expeditions imposed the first European agricultural templates in the form of what were ultimately
ephemeral gardens designed to provide food resources for subsequent expeditions. The gardens were
planted in haste, while botanists and artists made partial documentations of the plants, animals and
landfalls of southern reaches of Van Diemen’s land. The pre-settlement gardens sewn by French and English
expeditions at Adventure and Recherche Bays failed (Duyker and Duyker 2001, Johnson 2012,
D’Entrecasteaux 1808, Labilliardére 1800), though sightings of William Bligh’s stunted apple tree appear in
the historical record, as an ironic recast of the biblical tree in the garden of Eden.
This paper presents work-in-progress from the interdisciplinary, postcolonial project-in-progress Seedmap.
This work to date has undertaken a range of historical, metaphorical ‘graftings’ drawn from recent
investigations into the first European plantings in Tasmania. I re-dramatise and re-visualise these events as
the first manifestations of ‘colonisation by seed’, showing that early colonial encounters between British,
French and Nuenonne Indigenous people were conceived as hopeful intercultural encounters, before the
onset of colonial settler wars in Tasmania.
Amanda Frances Johnson lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. Her art has been
exhibited in Australia and overseas, and her poetry has appeared in many anthologies including Best
Australian Poems 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2013. Her novel Eugene’s Falls (Arcadia, 2007) retraces the socalled wilderness journeys of colonial painter Eugene von Guerard. She has published two poetry
collections, The Pallbearer’s Garden in 2008 (Whitmore Press) and The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool
Street (Puncher and Wattmann 2012) which received the 2012 Michel Wesley Wright Prize. In 2013 she was
shortlisted for the ABR Peter Porter Poetry Prize. She is completing an interdisciplinary, postcolonial
novel/exhibition project Seed Map. An academic monograph Archival Salvage: the Australian poscolonial
novel is forthcoming with Rodopi in 2014.
Pete Minard Valuing the native: River Blackfish vs. Brown Trout in early-twentieth century Victoria
In the early-twentieth century Victorian anglers reported that native blackfish populations were declining.
Some anglers and scientists attributed this decline to competition from introduced brown trout. The
Fisheries and Game Department rejected this argument because of the lingering influence of the midnineteenth acclimatisation movement.
Earlier generations of anglers and scientists had strongly supported the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria’s
trout introduction program, arguing either that trout would complement native fish or that if trout did
drive native fish to extinction it would be no great loss. Valuing native blackfish over introduced trout was a
significant cultural shift by Victorian anglers and scientists and is worthy of considerable analysis.
Pete Minard is due to complete a PhD at the University of Melbourne on the intellectual and environmental
history of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria in early 2014. He has presented at numerous
environmental history conferences and has a strong interest in the transnational history of the biological
sciences, environmental legislation and fisheries and hunting practices. In addition to his scholarly interests
Pete is a successful public historian who has published on mental health history, museum collections and
community environmental groups.
Pete Minard is due to complete a PhD at the University of Melbourne on the intellectual and environmental
history of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria in early 2014. He has presented at numerous
environmental history conferences and has a strong interest in the transnational history of the biological
sciences, environmental legislation and fisheries and hunting practices. In addition to his scholarly interests
Pete is a successful public historian who has published on mental health history, museum collections and
community environmental groups.
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Philip Morrissey The narrative philosophy of Bill Neidjie
The late Bill Neidjie was one of a remarkable generation of Aboriginal elders who in the late 20th century
mediated Aboriginal knowledges for a wider audience. These knowledges were individual and specific, and
originated in each elder’s engagement with modernity, rather than being the articulation of a primordial
wisdom tradition. This paper conducts a reading of some of the key themes of Story About Feeling – a
collection of Neidjie’s narratives recorded in October and November 1982 by Keith Taylor and published in
1989. In these narratives Neidjie identifies a universal human subject; defines inter-species concordance,
the relation between nature and culture, and the experience of the Aboriginal sacred, and its effects in the
everyday. Story About Feeling returns continually to the reality of djang and its corollary feeling- - a
modality that is always in excess of any story that attempts to represent it.
Philip Morrissey is the Academic Coordinator of The Faculty of Arts Australian Indigenous Studies program.
In that role he developed the University of Melbourne’s first Australian Indigenous Studies major and
Honours program. He is co-editor of the forthcoming publication The Critical Companion to Kim Scott.
Alanna Myers Of Blockades and Bilbies: Acknowledging Species at James Price Point
In August 2011, researchers captured video footage of a breeding colony of Greater Bilbies at James Price
Point on the Kimberley coast, close to the site of a proposed gas processing plant. The ‘vulnerable’ bilby
had not been officially recorded in the region since 1991, so the footage was a coup for the anti-gas
movement, which subsequently incorporated numerous performative and creative representations of the
bilby into its campaigns. I wish to use this example to interrogate the broader question of how species are
deployed in environmental conservation campaigns. Can their inclusion lead towards what Val Plumwood
calls a feminist appreciation of the ‘fullness’ of so-called wilderness areas, marked by the ‘presence’ of
(human and non-human) others rather than the dominant discourse of ‘absence’ (of humans, of industrial
civilisation)? Or is the potential for meaningful acknowledgement of other species necessarily curtailed by
the highly-politicised setting of the campaign and the wide-ranging goals of the protesters?
Alanna Myers is a PhD candidate in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of
Melbourne. Her research explores the persistence of discourses of wilderness and the wild in
contemporary environmental conservation campaigns, including, most recently, in the fight against climate
change. It interrogates the underpinning cultural logic of wilderness (from its positive reappraisal in the
nineteenth-century through to the present) and questions the ways in which ideas of the wild continue to
surface and circulate in the texts of various stakeholders in environmental conflicts (including
environmentalists, artists and journalists).
Emma Nicoletti Gaming in the Garden: Mobile Geo-Location Games and Species Encounters
Exotic matter—a trans-dimensional energy that has the power to shape people’s thoughts—is seeping into
our world. This is the premise of Ingress, a mobile phone-based geo-location game. Players see and interact
with exotic matter (a "digital species" if you will) via the screen of their mobile phone. However, in order to
play the game, players must physically walk, ride or drive to particular locations where exotic matter is
particularly concentrated: the pixelated representation of exotic matter is represented on a modified
Google Maps interface.
This presentation considers Ingress from an ecocritical perspective. It teases out some of the complexities
that emerge from Ingress’ narrative backstory—particularly the potential for exotic matter to be read as a
literalisation of the impact of digital technologies exert over consumers ways of thinking and acting in
relation to space, its form—particularly the possibilities and tensions that arise from compelling players to
“go outside” and interact with their urban and “natural” environments (experiences which are mediated by
the game and its mobile screen interface, but which also enable chance encounters between human and
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nonhuman species), and its economic context—particularly the use of players geo-location information by
Google to improve it maps.
Emma Nicoletti is a PhD candidate in the discipline of English and Cultural Studies at the University of
Western Australia. Her thesis focuses on the science fiction novels of British author Jeff Noon and their
representation of the relation between the human and nonhuman other in cultures dominated by media
and virtual reality technologies. Since 2013 she has been the joint postgraduate representative of ASLECANZ, and she edits and contributes to Eco-Critical Connections, a blog showcasing the work of the
organisation’s postgraduate members (ecocriticalconnections.wordpress.com). Her research interests
include science fiction, ecocriticism, cyberculture and poststructuralism, and her work has been published
in the academic journal Colloquy.
Troy Potter Who’s escaping what? A zoocritical reading of Sonya Hartnett’s Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf
This paper considers the plight of the thylacine and how Sonya Hartnett uses this species’ story in Stripes of
the Sidestep Wolf (1999). Unlike earlier representations that see the thylacine as a threat (such as those
which were prevalent during the times of the bounty schemes), Hartnett’s portrayal of a lone thylacine
struggling to survive invites empathy, and the thylacine’s existence is juxtaposed against the repression a
young man experiences living in a dying country town. Adopting a zoocritical approach, I consider how
Hartnett’s narrative explores issues of belonging and survival, and how the anthropocentric representation
of the thylacine positions humans in relation to this species’ extinction.
Troy Potter is a PhD candidate at Monash University, Australia. His research interests include
representations of belonging, gender, sexuality, and disability in children’s and young adult literature.
Lauren Rickards The death of Nature or rebirth of species? Exploring the Anthropocene imaginary
The species is an ambiguous figure in battles about the ontological status of Humans and their relation to
non-Human Nature. On the one hand, the biological origins of the species concept profoundly destabilise
the supposed exceptionalism of Humans, and species-specific analyses have challenged conventional
notions of Human rights. On the other hand, the species is a central figure in utilitarian and romantic
visions of wild nature as biodiversity and their celebration of Human/Nature difference and
complementarity. Given the way species thinking both unsettles and reinforces the Human/Nature
dichotomy, what are the implications of the recent emergence of the Anthropocene imaginary? To some it
heralds the “end of Nature”, while to others the assertion of the Anthro demands a new interest in species
being. This paper explores the role of the species in narratives about Earth’s arrival into the Anthropocene
era.
Lauren Rickards is a Research Fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute. A Rhodes Scholar with
a background in ecology and cultural geography, her current research explores the Human, Nature and
agricultural imaginaries embedded in societal responses to climate change, uncertainty and emerging
discourses about the Anthropocene. Lauren has an interdisciplinary MSc in Environmental Change and
Management and a geography D.Phil. that examined the evolution and performance of British agricultural
ideals in higher education (ideals that were subsequently exported to Australia, and Melbourne University
in particular). Before joining Melbourne University she consulted to government and community groups on
environmental and governance issues in the rural sector. She maintains strong connections with the rural
community and an ongoing interest in the practice, philosophy and politics of collaborative work.
Ellen Smith Ephemeral afterlives in colonial time: the work of Julie Gough
Since the 1990s, Indigenous artist Julie Gough has been producing assemblages of objects and images that
seek to reconfigure understandings of the Tasmanian past. This work implicitly takes up the nineteenth
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century narrative of the vanishing Tasmanian Aborigine and its 20th and 21st century afterlives. At the core
of Gough’s art practice is an ongoing commitment to exploring the potential of the ephemeral and the
discarded material object. This paper considers how the vanishing and the recovered object becomes, for
Gough, a way of thinking a relationship to the past beyond the possibilities of historicism and history
writing. Following the work of Walter Benjamin, critics have argued that the discarded material object of
mass culture epitomizes the disjointed temporality of capitalist modernity, encompassing both its utopic
hopes and their betrayal. This paper considers what the ephemeral object in Gough’s work might have to
tell us about the more radically disordered time of the colony.
Ellen Smith is a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian Centre at Melbourne University where she is
completing a project on Katharine Susannah Prichard's writings about Aboriginal labour in the 1920s. She
completed a PhD in English literature at Princeton University in 2012 and has published articles on the
Jindyworobak movement and Australian modernism and the affiliation between fascism and Aboriginal
rights activism in the 1930s.
Debbie Symons Anthropocentrism, endangered species and the environmental dilemma
This research focuses on two central themes within the environmental dilemma that are inextricability
linked: the precarious position of non-human species in the current climate and the ties between
environmental degradation and free market capitalism.
The work looks at the ways in which contemporary art practice can infiltrate and re-release environmental
data/statistics back into the public sphere, sensitising a desensitised society. It will investigate how art
can bring about a further awareness of the ethical quandary of endangered species, highlighting the
impacts of mankind's capitalist driven markets upon them, through the use of the scientific database.
Debbie Symons was born in Melbourne, Australia and has recently completed a PhD on Anthropocentrism,
Endangered Species and the Environmental Dilemma. Symons' work utilises environmental data to
investigate and interrogate the inextricable links between environmental degradation and free market
capitalism; exploring mankind’s ecological conundrum. Utilising scientific research Symons, illustrates the
immense tally of species affected by mankind's insatiable growth in a format that helps make the
information conceptually manageable. She uses the visual language of universal mediums including maps,
graphs, stock market boards and airport boards to do this. This method helps to clarify the direct impact
humans are having on the environment and endangered species.
Denise Varney Ecocritical Theatre: staging the ‘more-than-human’ world of performance
Awareness of non-human species, both plant and animal, has lagged well behind theatre’s primary focus on
the human drama. The associated human/nature and culture/nature binary oppositions play out in theatre
as character and setting, as metaphor and as landscapes of the human mind. In the modern era, theatre
that aspires to be political or efficacious, or that believes itself to have a transformative effect on human
consciousness, typically stages the social relations of class, race, gender and sexuality and takes on broad
themes of war, justice and human rights. The non-human is represented as space, place, prop, pet,
metaphor or allegory. From the 1990s, however, theatre scholars such as Arons, Chaudhuri, May, Kershaw,
Tait and others have raised an ecocritical awareness within the field while theatre itself is becoming more
overtly environmental in theme and content if not form. This paper discusses two contrasting works from
the mainstream and the fringe that indicate an emerging critical and ethical conscious of the ‘more-thanhuman’ world: The Secret River (STC, 2013) and They Saw a Thylacine (Melbourne Fringe Festival, 2013).
Denise Varney is Associate Professor in Theatre Studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the
University of Melbourne and co-director of the Australian Centre. She has published on Brechtian and
contemporary German theatre, feminist criticism and women’s theatre and Australian Theatre. Her latest
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book is co-authored: Varney, Eckersall, Hudson and Hatley, Theatre in the Asia Pacific: Regional Modernities
in the Global Era Palgrave Macmillan 2013.
Rachael Weaver The Beachcomber in Colonial Australian Literature
Ideas of the beachcomber as part castaway, part vagabond—the ragged figure of the ex-sailor or convict
searching for a better life somewhere in the islands of the pacific—are no longer so familiar as they were
during the nineteenth century. Beachcombing today is more often associated with scanning the shoreline
to collect shipwrecked objects or natural specimens washed up by the sea, in rituals to do with monitoring
and preserving the coastal environment instead of plundering it for trade. This paper will explore the
beachcomber’s changing investments in nature, looking at stories and novels by colonial Australian authors
such as Louis Becke and Gilbert Bishop as well as later, non-fiction works by the writer and naturalist E J
Banfield. It will suggest that Banfield’s 1907 book, Confessions of a Beachcomber, marks a self-conscious
transformation of the beachcomber from tropical-island fugitive to ecological recluse.
Rachael Weaver is a Senior Research Associate in English and the Australian Centre at the University of
Melbourne. She is author of The Criminal of the Century (Arcadia/ASP 2006), co-editor with Ken Gelder of
four anthologies of colonial Australian popular fiction (MUP). Rachael and Ken’s new book, The Colonial
Journals and the Making of Australian Literary Culture, is due to be published by UWA Press in early 2014.
Kirsten Wehner and Martha Sear Stilled lives: Rethinking the National Museum of Australia’s Institute of
Anatomy collections
The National Museum of Australia’s Australian Institute of Anatomy collections include more than 2500 wet
specimens and skeletal material from Australian and non-Australian species. They have a long and complex
history: having been preserved and dissected for medical research, and displayed for public health and
science education, they are now held and exhibited by a social history museum.
This paper will explore the collections’ changing roles, including its shifting relationship to ideas of crossspecies meaning. We will explore how these objects can create understanding in the museum through
evoking embodied experiences for staff and visitors, and consider the impact of preserved animals in
physical and digital exhibitions.
Dr Kirsten Wehner is Head Curator of the People and the Environment program at the National Museum of
Australia. She is a member of the Mellon Australia-Pacific Observatory in Environmental Humanities and a
professional associate of the Donald Horne Institute Centre for Research in Creative and Cultural Practice at
the University of Canberra. An anthropologist by training, Kirsten has curated a range of collections,
exhibitions and films exploring diverse aspects of Australian history and culture, with major projects
including the National Museum’s Landmarks (opened 2011) and Journeys (2009) galleries. She holds a PhD
from New York University and is the co-author of Landmarks: A history of Australia in 33 places (2013) and
co-editor of National Museums: Negotiating Histories (1999). Kirsten’s work focuses on developing
museums’ capacities to build empathetic and ecological understanding, with current projects exploring
place histories, inter-species relationships, re-interpretations of natural history collections and online
exhibition environments.
Dr Martha Sear is a Senior Curator in the People and the Environment program at the National Museum of
Australia. Her PhD in history from the University of Sydney explored the role played by exhibitions of
women’s work in the genesis of colonial feminism. She joined the joined the National Museum in 2005,
having previously been a curator at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum and with the five museums in Hay, New
South Wales. Her research and exhibition work has ranged across many subjects, including taxidermy, the
circus, childbirth, and rural Australian’s responses to heat – but enduring interests have been inter-species
interactions and understanding the history of exhibition-making. Major projects at the NMA have included
the Landmarks (opened 2011) and Journeys (2009) galleries, and she is the co-editor of Landmarks: A
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history of Australia in 33 places (2013). She is currently focused on a major exhibition exploring the intertwined lives of horses and humans in Australia.
Geoffrey Wescott Big, blue, bold and just a little scary – Australians and marine species
Oceans cover over 70 % of our planet and are the origin of all life on Earth. Yet we know little about the
oceans and the species that inhabit them – much less anything about their ecology and their conservation
needs.
In fact apart from some “charismatic mega fauna” mammalian species (e.g. whales, dolphins and seals)
people find the marine environment and marine species a little frightening – think sharks, stingers and
giant squids for example.
This presentation will draw on two examples of people’s reactions to marine species and environments
from Victoria before highlighting how two long term projects have tried to create a more positive and
constructive narrative around marine species in order to enhance their accessibility to the general public
and hence empower marine conservation values and messages.
Finally marine species will be placed in the context of Australians’ emotional attachment to ‘the beach’ and
our coastal lifestyles.
Geoff Wescott is Associate Professor of Environment in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at
Deakin University’s Melbourne (Burwood) campus.
He is a past Chair of the Marine and Coastal Community Network and the Victorian National Parks Advisory
Council and has served on many government bodies including the Board of Parks Victoria and the federal
government’s National Oceans Advisory Group. He is currently a member of the Victorian Coastal Council
and a Director of Zoos Victoria.
Geoff has authored/ edited five books and has published over 170 papers, chapters and articles. He is a
Fellow of the Environment Institute of Australia and New Zealand.
Jessica White A Fluid World: Species and Survival in The Sunlit Zone
Lisa Jacobson’s The Sunlit Zone is a verse novel set from 2020 to 2050 which charts the history of North, a
marine biologist working in a world altered by climate change. Jacobson’s language and setting are both
familiar and mutated, like many of the species North studies after ‘a tsunami hit Gen Corp’s/laboratories
and washed its experiments/into the Tasman sea’ (60). This paper posits that, being neither wholly a poem
nor a novel, the work’s littoral features prompt its readers to envision the consequences of climate change
in a near future, as well as the loss of the unique, illuminated by the disappearance of North’s sister.
Jessica White is a novelist and researcher with a PhD in Humanities and Cultural Studies from the London
Consortium, University of London. Her first novel, A Curious Intimacy was published by Penguin in 2007
and won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award, was shortlisted for the Dobbie and Western
Australia Premier's Awards, and longlisted for the international IMPAC award. It was followed by
Entitlement, published by Penguin in 2012. Jessica’s short fiction, essays and poetry have appeared in a
number of journals, including Southerly, Island, Overland and The Review of Australian Fiction. Her website
is www.jessicawhite.com.au.
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