Encounters on the Frontier: Banteng in Australia’s Northern Territory

Abstract

This paper considers the case of an introduced species that resides in what is now a jointly managed national park in the north of tropical Australia. Banteng {Bosjavani-cus) are a peculiar feral nonhuman animal in that they constitute a potential environmental threat within the domestic conservation goals of the park, but they also hold the prospect of being a major genetic resource in the international conservation of the species. Thus, perspectives on the use and management of these animals are varied between different actors in the park landscape, and are subject to fluctuations over time, especially in response to wider social and political circumstances. This paper argues that seemingly objective views of these animals are actually a series of subjectivities, which have less to do with any concrete aspects of the animals themselves and more to do with the way that particular people orient themselves toward, and within, the landscape.[There is a] tension between, on the one hand, the argument that for humans, 'nature' can only make sense through the various filters of 'social construction' and, on the other hand, the argument that nature has an irreducible positivist reality outside human interpretations.

Geology and discovery record of the Trinil Pithecanthropus erectus site, Java

“…Over 6000 free-ranging pure-strain Banteng inhabit open eucalypt-forest on the Cobourg Peninsula (11.3 o S, 132.2 o E), an area with ~1300mm average annual rainfall. Set free there 170 years ago in the absence of large terrestrial predators, the small introduced population expanded numerically to overspread ~70km -3 (1988) by shifting their diet to primarily sedges, trees and shrubs, with peak grass consumption now being ~40% in the late wet season (Bowman et al 2010, Calaby 1975, Choquenot 1993, Corbett 1995, De Konnick 2014.…”