Simon Farley

Simon Farley (PhD in History, 2024) “Alien Hordes”: A Cultural History of Non-Native Birds in Australia

From 1788, settlers introduced a host of organisms to the Australian continent. They did so largely deliberately, with high hopes, and often viewed these species with immense fondness. Yet now many of these species are labelled ‘invasive’ and killed at will. This about-turn requires explanation. This thesis traces settler Australians’ changing attitudes towards nonnative wildlife from the late 1820s to the present. Taking a longitudinal approach and focusing in particular on wild birds, it describes how the language, imagery and sentiments surrounding non-native wildlife changed over this period, as well as accounting for why these changes occurred. I closely read public texts – books, lectures, pamphlets, parliamentary debates and, above all, articles from periodicals – in order to uncover the suppressed colonial and racial anxieties underlying seemingly rational and scientific discussion of avifauna. I use species such as the house sparrow, the red-whiskered bulbul and the common myna as case studies to challenge established narratives about the rise and fall of the acclimatisation movement in Australia and to explain why the settler public’s hostility towards and anxiety about non-native wildlife grew so dramatically over the course of the twentieth century. 

Much has been written about non-native wildlife in Australia, but little of this is adequately historicised; almost all of it is highly scientistic, taking for granted the current (and much contested) orthodoxy of ‘anekeitaxonomy’, that is, the classification and judgement of species by their geographical origin. Although the great reversal in attitudes may appear to be justified by ‘improving’ ecological knowledge, I argue that it is best understood in the context of settler colonialism as a system that generates ideas about who and what belongs to the land. As settlers’ understanding of their own belonging in the continent has changed, this has influenced their perceptions of and attachments to wild animals, native and non-native alike. Ultimately, this is not a story of empirical fact but one of culture, values and how these have changed over the course of Australia’s colonial history.

Supervisors: Professor Zoë Laidlaw, Professor David Goodman