News Bulletin - Australian Animal Studies Group

groups are classed as small-scale societies. Their numbers are few, and their way of life is
embedded within kinship. The smallness, though, is actually only reflective of the presumption that
society and kinship only include humans. Once one realises that the groups are multispecies
groups, that country is included, that there are sites and tracks that connect groups, that everyday
life is full of wonders, then the term small-scale seems faintly ridiculous. If institutions are the
measure of all things, then Aboriginal societies seem small. If relationality across species, places
and time is the measure of life, then the west’s self-enclosure seems not just ridiculous but
dangerous.
Matt: Your work has always been concerned with exploring legacies of violence – with the colonial
destruction of indigenous cultures, and increasingly with the dislocation and extinction of other
species of life. How difficult has it been to articulate how these ongoing practices of violence are so
often paired and reinforcing – among those who, with good intentions, still shun this ―dreaded
comparison‖ of sorts, and against those who, more callously, consider neither to be unacceptable
sacrifices for ―development‖?
Deborah: When I was doing the research for my book Hidden Histories, I was told many stories of
almost unbearable cruelty, and of indifference to cruelty. I was taken to places where horrible
things happened. I made recordings, and I transcribed them. Sometimes, sitting on a tarp on the
ground with the tape recorder running, I wondered: why are people telling these stories? Why am I
listening? Why can’t we just forget all this? The answer that came into focus for me was that until
the violence is over, until peace has been made, remembrance is necessary. Remembrance of
violence tells us necessary things about who we are, and how we come to be here. There may
come a time when peace is fully established, when there is a peace that is so generous, so loving,
so open to the future, that all that violence doesn’t really matter anymore. But such a time does not
exist, and we live in this time, not in some imaginary future.
I think similar things need to be said concerning violence to the natural world – to animals, of
course, and to plants, to habitats, to rivers, to mountains, to atmosphere..... There seems to be no
end to the violence of modernity. I don’t find it difficult to articulate the problems. But I can see that
the kind of world toward which my life’s work is directed – a world in which we could start to make
peace – is not on the near horizon.
The comparison between the suffering of humans and the suffering of nonhumans is indeed a
matter that has the potential to cause offence, and so I think we are called to consider why it could
be construed as offensive. For example, when Anglo-Australians denigrated Aboriginal people by
classifying them amongst the fauna of the natural world, the classification was a form of violence. It
was violent because Anglo-Australians were thinking from within a human-only stockade in which
everything on the outside was fair game for exploitation or extermination. To put humans out there
amongst the ‘standing reserves’ and the ‘killable’ was extremely violent. In contrast, if one steps
away from the human-only view of value, and acts from within a kin-based world of entangled life, it
is clear that we humans are part of the fauna. If we and others are to live, and live well, we need to
be comporting ourselves far more intelligently and perceptively than is now the case.
Matt: Terms such as Country and resilience have long been central to your work, and your latest
book Wild Dog Dreaming carries a subtitle that perhaps sums up your most recent focus: Love and
Extinction. How can we continue to do anything, let alone something as difficult as to love, when
we are surrounded by so much loss?
Deborah: That’s one of the great existential questions of our time. For me, it is a matter of
faithfulness. I keep faith with my Aboriginal teachers by continuing to work with what they taught
me, and to hold fast to understandings based on kinship, mutualism, and multispecies sentience
and communication. I keep faith with life on earth (or try to) by continuing to write and to persuade;
I aim to enliven and vivify our understandings, our discourse, our moral imagination. I believe we
have to hold on to the understanding that modernity in its contemporary form is not the only way to
live, and that, in spite of its apparent hegemony, it doesn’t control everything, and it certainly won’t
last forever.
25