Drag performers in Australia perform anthro-decentric laments for and beside endemic nonhuman species. They catalyse a public exteriorization of multi-species grief and rage in response to compounding losses in a situated, contested Anthropocene. Approaching queer performance beside intersections in new materialism and the environmental humanities, this article proposes drag as a device of speculative fabulation – of story-telling or fable-making in-the-present for generative, undefined outcomes in un-promised futures. Imbricating qualitative visual and textual analyses with autoethnography and a methodology informed by avian ecology, the article shares stories of ecological laments in the context of contemporary Australian performance, art and culture. It presents a brief review/revue of performances by artists based in Warrang (Sydney): Vallarie Van Gogh dances as a burning human-galah hybrid; Latai Taumoepeau goes to war as a monstrous coral reef; Phasmahammer (Justin Shoulder) bends mythology and matter imagining post-apocalyptic memories of birds.

Brenton Heath-Kerr was a performance artist living and working in Sydney, Australia, who died of AIDS-related complications at the age of 33 in 1995. Heath-Kerr designed, wore and staged interventions in disruptive costumes in the Sydney nightlife of his time. Grappling with declining health, his designs came to address his own mortality, exemplified by an intervention in the now unwearable costume ‘Self Portrait in Latex’ (1994). Rubber objects trouble the archival project, becoming ‘vulnerable’ or ‘unruly’ under different systemic conditions. ‘Unruly rubber’ considers the queer-ecological dimensions of latex, its material affinities in Heath-Kerr’s designs, in kink ecologies and in fashion more generally. Drawing from a framework of new materialism and queer theory, beside qualitative visual analysis, the argument proceeds with attention to archives, ephemera and the anecdote. ‘Unruly rubber’ asserts the agency of latex in queer assemblages, which continues to enact with and upon human design, desire and experience today.