Meeting “Skippy” in the Bush Capital: Child-Kangaroo Encounters and Entanglements in Postcolonial Australia

• In Event: Child-Animal Entanglements: Postcolonial and Posthumanist “Common Worlds” Perspectives

Abstract

This paper’s purpose is to provoke early childhood researchers and educators to consider what we might learn if we take child-animal relations seriously, and consider how children’s and animals’ lives are co-shaped within the messy, postcolonial common worlds that they actually inhabit. To launch one such tracing, the paper deliberates upon the face-to-face encounters between a group of pre-school children and a mob of kangaroos in the bushlands of suburban Canberra - otherwise known as the ‘bush capital’ of Australia. From here it teases out some of the knotted threads that entangle immigrant-settler children’s and kangaroos’ lives, and which stitch the country’s violent colonialist past firmly into its fraught postcolonial and fragile multispecies present. It traces some the ways in which the kangaroo, as the key symbol of Australian identity, is affectionately mobilized to indigenize settler immigrant Australian children (Franklin, 2011). In stark contrast to this fond shared space that the kangaroo and the becoming-Australian child occupy within the postcolonial national imaginary, the paper also draws attention to the fleshy mortal entanglements of kangaroo and human bodies that litter the histories of Australian nation making. It traces some of these bloody events from the mass slaughter of kangaroos as declared ‘vermin’ in the early colonies (Boom et al, 2012), through to the present day ‘road kills’ and ‘kangaroo cullings’ that are disconcertingly regular events in the nation’s ‘bush capital’.

Theoretically and methodologically, the paper works at the intersection of feminist decolonizing philosophies and the new feminist ecological-humanities. It draws particular inspiration from Haraway’s (2008) situated and entangled ‘queer kin’ bio- philosophies and ethics for a more ‘liveable multispecies world’; Plumwood’s (2002) eco-philosophies for ‘decolonizing nature’; and Rose’s (2004 & 2011) combinings of Indigenous Australian onto-epistemologies and more-than-human reframings of Levinas’ ethics, within a broader ‘ethics for decolonization’.

Consistent with these decolonizing and multispecies ethics, the paper employs a combination of feminist ethnographies and narrative tracings to assemble a collection of multimodal research materials. Guided by Haraway’s (1997) notion of situated ‘modest witnessing’, it draws from a multispecies ethnography in a Canberra bush pre-school setting. The child-kangaroo encounters that it selects from this ethnography are represented through audio-visual recordings, notated field notes and children’s drawings. It also employs Haraway’s (2004) ‘bag-lady story telling’ methods to assemble an unlike and unlikely collection of narratives from Australian children’s literature and television, historical archives and media reportings.

After tracing the continuities and contradictions across these interwoven child- kangaroo encounters and entanglements, the paper concludes by reflecting upon the ethical, political and pedagogical possibilities of this kind of ‘common worlds’ approach to child-animal relations. It considers the implications for children’s learnings about the messy common worlds they cohabit with other species and suggests how this approach might be taken up within other early childhood research and education settings.

The significance of this paper lies in the way it mobilizes feminist decolonizing and multispecies theories and methods to offer creative, politically and ethnically attuned, and ultimately life-worlds affirming new approaches to child-animal relations in early childhood.

Author

• Affrica Taylor, University of Canberra