Deflowering Karri Country: settler-colonial seductions in the Commercial Travellers’ Association collection
Simon Farley is a writer, theatremaker and PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne’s School of Historical and Philosophical Studies. They are researching settler Australian attitudes towards non-native animals from the 1820s to the present.
The karri is a tree of gargantuan proportions. This species of eucalypt can live for up to three hundred years, growing above sixty or even seventy metres in height.[1] The straight, towering trunks of a karri forest dwarf any human who walks among them. Karri grow only in high-rainfall areas of southwestern Australia.[2] The karri forests on Noongar country, south of Perth, were one of the few heavily wooded parts of the continent when British colonisation began.[3] It was not until the 1870s, however, when settler Australians began to log them intensively.[4] Over time, the region developed an ambivalent reputation – both rugged wilderness and industrial frontier, a place apart from ‘civilisation’ and yet providing the raw materials for that civilisation.