An animal matrix of co-colonisation

Wherever European colonisers ventured, familiar animals accompanied them. Coaxed along gangplanks, scurrying down anchor ropes, burrowing out of rotting ships’ timbers, imported creatures co-colonised every site of occupation.

More recent literature acknowledges the rich if unequal interweavings of colonising creatures with indigenous species. Where immigrant mice raided settlers’ crops and grain stores, local snakes, hawks and owls dined voraciously. Giant kea parrots learned to rip flesh from sheep shipped to New Zealand. Indigenous ticks, leeches and mosquitoes soon warmed to domesticated herds, travelling literally on their new hosts’ backs to fresh pastures and prey. Unlike the katipo, which remains a coastal species, Australian redbacks and American black widows developed a notorious predilection for haunting toilet seats. Unlikely predators of human buttocks and genitalia, they more credibly feasted on flies drawn to cesspits and poorly plumbed outhouses. Indeed, as Adrian Franklin and Tim Low have demonstrated, the myth of modernity as an era which emptied cities of animals always rang hollow—as billions of cockroaches might testify.⁵

This is not to belittle the devastating environmental impact of imperialism; globalised markets demanded the industrialisation of animal products from blubber to butter, tallow to tanned hides, shellac to salt pork.

Nevertheless, the thriving acclimatisation societies of the second half of the century espoused shuffling only ‘useful’ or ‘innocuous’ species around the globe, from South American alpacas to Atlantic salmon. Seen by some as ‘the paradigmatic colonial science’, acclimatisers’ experiments often went awry.⁸ Likening such zealots to an infamous band of local outlaws, in 1881 a Victorian Parliamentarian declared that ‘Those who introduced rabbits, hares, foxes, and sparrows into this colony had done it a thousand times more injury than the Kelly gang’.⁹ Even failures produced paradoxes. Abandoning their 1860s attempts to establish snake-killing African secretary birds, Australian settlers turned to indigenous kookaburras—a bird similarly lauded for destroying serpents. By the time the Australian colonies federated in 1901, kookaburras had been freighted across the continent to colonise Tasmania and Western Australia, where this ‘local’ species had hitherto never existed. New to the colony in 1840, by 1901 ‘the New Zealand horse’ was declared a ‘far superior animal for military purposes’ than its Australian counterpart.

Little wonder, then, that nominally biological descriptors such as ‘native’, ‘wild’ and ‘vermin’ rarely remained static in imperial ecologies.¹¹ Each colonial setting evolved a unique yet dynamic series of equivalences and hierarchies between indigenous and immigrant species. This matrix operated like the moralistic Hindu game vaikunthapaali, later known to Victorian Britons as snakes and ladders: certain types could ascend in human estimation, while others might slither downward. Repositioning one creature often reshuf­fled the value ascribed to others. New entrants could appear with unanticipated consequences; others might vanish forever through neglect or extermination. Rooted in specific locales, each colonial animal matrix codified commercial, sentimental and moral economies that were bound intimately—through tradition, trade and discourse—to multi­ple sites connected by intercolonial exchange. Importantly, while historians traditionally foreground human agency, people were far from the only active participants. Geography, climate, machines, plants, diseases and the animals themselves all acted—and adapted—to shape each historically specific assemblage.¹²

Within such colonial conjunctions, animals served as metaphors for human characters and societal formations. Invoking biblical, allegorical and heraldic traditions, representa­tions of animals conveyed laudable or detestable qualities. The lion and unicorn embla­zoned on Britain’s coat of arms, or the serpent entwined around the medical staff of Aesculapius, reiterated the purity, antiquity and thus the legitimacy of authoritative insti­tutions wherever they were transplanted.

Moreover, animals in colonial worlds were never mere rhetorical devices. In seventeenth-century North America, the Pilgrims’ unwillingness to corral their pigs and cattle made the animals themselves active agents of encroachment. These beasts were confiscated, killed or mutilated by Native Americans not merely as retribution for damaged crops, but as demoralising physical and economic retorts to the European invaders. Roaming far beyond settler supervision, sheep served similar territorial ends in nineteenth­century South Africa, New Zealand and Australia.¹⁵ Neither were alien animals simply physical vanguards of colonisation. ‘It was not so much the European human that disrupted the world view of the local people’, argues Robert Kenny of the Victorian circumstance, ‘but the animals they brought with them’. Yet this was not an insuperable challenge. Before 1800, no canine had ever existed on the island of Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania). At first, local Aborigines speared European dogs as four-legged invaders. Within a decade indigenous clans—having never hitherto domesticated animals—actively sought, bred and traded dogs as an intimate part of their economy.¹⁶

For the colonisers themselves, structuring animal relations carried its own religious connotations, rationalising European notions of private property as a divine mission of stewardship. Managing this dominion frequently required re-ordering animal hierarchies to accommodate shifting local economies and novel indigenous fauna. Gradually, order was imposed by a systematising culture of display: popular cyclopaedias, zoological gardens and especially the natural history museums that proved staggeringly popular across colonial capitals.¹⁷ But as the katipo inquest opening this chapter illustrates, particularly complex negotiations were required to stabilise the place of ‘dangerous’ animals within each colonial animal matrix.