Saving Bilbies: Eco-Nationalist Narratives, Australian Settler Children, and Endangered Native Animals

• In Event: 61.044 - Big Little Lies: Contradictions, Distortions, and Fictions in Human-Animal Education

Abstract

Just over 200 years ago, the British colonization of the landmass now known as Australia precipitated an unprecedented rate of native species extinctions, brought about by European settlement practices such as land clearing and the introduction of European plants and animals. Native mammals have been particularly hard hit. During these last two centuries, 35% of the world’s mammal extinctions have occurred on the Australian continent, and many of the surviving Australian mammals are on the endangered species red list. One of those is the Greater Bilby – a rarely seen, small, nocturnal, burrowing marsupial that lives in Australia’s arid regions. In the last decade, Australian children have become the target audience of a commercially sponsored national public education campaign to ‘save the bilby’ from extinction, and of a growing body of endangered bilby picture storybooks.
Although it might seem like a self-evidently good move to secure Australian children’s affections for these rare bilbies, and to encourage them to save and protect the remaining endangered bilbies, I regard the eco-narrative tropes and sub-texts of these narratives as an increasingly worrying feature of settler colonial cultural politics. In this presentation, I analyze texts, images and passages from ‘save the bilby’ campaigns and storybooks to tease out the complex mix of messages they convey to their child audiences. I argue that their structuring eco-nationalist settler narrative tropes of invasion, destruction and salvation work to: bifurcate animals into ‘good natives’ and ‘evil invaders’; dissociate settler children from the ‘evil invaders’; displace and/or appropriate Indigenous people and knowledges; and finally position non-indigenous children as the ‘natural’ protectors or saviours of endangered native animals.
My textual analysis draws childhood studies, environmental education and animal studies into conversation with feminist multispecies philosophy (Haraway 2016), critical settler colonial cultural studies (Wright 2017), and extinction studies (Rose et al 2017). I use these interdisciplinary perspectives to expose and question the neo-colonialist paradoxes and solipsism of eco-nationalist settler tropes, and conclude by considering how we might interrupt and augment the conventional wisdom of threatened species stewardship discourses with a decolonizing ethics of environmental reconciliation (Rose, 2004).

Author

• Affrica Taylor, University of Canberra