Down the Rabbit Hole of Invasion and Extinction: Confronting Australian Settler Colonial Legacies

• In Event: 34.046 - Inhabiting the Tensions and Potentials of Decentering the Human in Anticolonial Educational Research

Abstract

The earth’s current ‘sixth mass extinction’ event is the first to be caused by human action (Ceballos et al. 2017). However, these actions are far from universal. They are clearly differentiated by the racialized geo-politics of post-industrial European imperialism, capitalist resource extraction, and colonial invasion. As a case in point, the Australian continent has only become a hot spot of anthropogenic extinction in the last 200 years - since its First Nations custodians were dispossessed by British colonial invasion, and the land progressively cleared for European-style settlement and industrial agriculture. Today, Australia holds the dubious status of having one the highest species extinction rates on earth, including the loss of 35% of the world’s mammals (Woinarsky et al. 2015). My research responds to these sobering planetary scale ecological challenges by investigating how they work out on local, settler-colonial grounds, in the everyday interactions between young children and urban wildlife.

In this paper, I unpack some of the tensions and conundrums facing a small group of non-indigenous Australian children as they confront and respond to the entangled legacies of invasion and extinction prompted by their unfolding relationship with local wild rabbits. My first objective is to expose and interrogate the binary settler logic of separation and dissociation that deflects responsibility for the decimation of country, and the concomitant loss of indigenous plants and animals, onto non-human invasive species - in this case onto the wild European rabbits. My second is to open up the space for a more convivial response, based upon an alternative logic of interconnection and an ethics of mutual responsibility.

Central to the interdisciplinary perspectives that inform this paper is the dialogue I establish between a common worlds’ perspective on early childhood and pedagogy, and an environmental humanities perspective on extinction. The former is premised upon the understanding that children live and learn in a more-than-human world not just a society (Common Worlds Research Collective 2018) and the latter approaches extinctions as singularly complex bio-cultural events that require radically new kinds of responses (Rose et al. 2017). Both perspectives work to interrogate and reconfigure the place and agency of specific humans within the environment. By combining these perspectives, I show that children’s relations with other species have the potential to illuminate some alternative ways of responding.

Drawing from a larger Canberra-based common worlds multispecies ethnographic project, ‘Walking with Wildlife in Wild Weather Times’ (Taylor & Rooney 2016-2017), I offer a selection of illustrative stories about young children’s material-semiotic encounters with rabbits. These stories feature the ways in which the children confront and respond to the settler colonial legacies of extinction and invasion. They are based upon my observations of the children’s mixed affects and responses to wild rabbits while walking in urban parklands, and to settler-rabbit representations in a children’s book and a museum exhibit. They reveal the transformative potential inherent in these children’s desire to seek connections with wild rabbits while acknowledging the ecological conundrum they pose, and actively resisting the dissociative separations of binary settler logics.

Author

• Affrica Taylor, University of Canberra