Untamed Affections: Contested Care in Settler Women's Interactions with Native Australian Animals, 1880-1950

Abstract

This thesis charts settler women's interactions with native Australian animals from the 1880s to the 1950s, across a diverse range of domains and spaces: from pet-keeping to organised conservationism and from suburban gardens to national parks. Between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, colonial disdain for 'freakish' and largely unprofitable animals like koalas and echidnas gave way to widespread affection, mythologisation, and conservationist concern. Some scholars have recognised the environmental and political significance of this transition, but women's interventions and voices are mostly absent in the historiography. Untamed Affections examines the neglected roles of settler women in shaping dramatically shifting relationships with the environment. By addressing seven modes of interspecies encounter, the thesis enriches and challenges historiographies that sideline women's interventions and that have only recently begun to consider animals as historical subjects in their own right.

My research draws on an expansive range of archives across Australia, with a focus on Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and Tasmania. These sources include several women's personal archives, nature writers' publications and ephemera, newspaper coverage of environmental controversies, photographic collections, bushwalking journals, and the records of conservationist and animal welfare societies. Considered together for the first time, these sources reveal that many settler women cultivated a contested ethic of care, one that cast native animals as emotionally and morally significant individuals meriting human attention and patriotic affection. They did so in their socially endorsed roles as educators and writers for children, and as politically engaged 'new women' who embraced opportunities for more intimate and sustained encounters with nature, experiences that inspired conservationist commitments. Though concern remained uneven across species, some women tried to bring even the most maligned of animals into the circle of care, like thylacines and Tasmanian devils. At the heart of many of these varied and contested encounters was a tension between closeness and distance, and between control and relinquishment.

These emergent forms of care for native animals were complex and often contradictory. Care coexisted with commodification, captivity, and exclusion; public and private records show that apparent affection did not preclude violence or possession. Yet women's advocacy for animals' inclusion within the sphere of moral, domestic, or religious concern had both material and symbolic consequences. They fostered opposition to the fur and feather trades, spurred the creation and protection of national parks, and promoted some species as friendly national icons. Crucially, these reframed icons could be rhetorically enlisted to affirm settler claims to land and legitimacy. Fostering caring attachments to native animals deepened settlers' sense of connection to colonised landscapes and served to erase the long histories of Aboriginal people's profoundly different relationships to animals, as well as the more recent histories of colonial violence and dispossession.

Untamed Affections disrupts the periodisation of Australian environmental action into disparate waves, reframes animal protectionism, children's literature, and pet-keeping as important gendered strands of conservationist history, and points to the oft-overlooked role of religion in shaping women's and men's environmental attitudes. Sitting at the intersection of environmental history, animal history, gender history, and settler colonial studies, the thesis demonstrates the insights that can be generated by a gendered approach to understanding humans' evolving relationships with the non-human world.