Wild urban companions: living with everyday native animals in Brisbane

Abstract

In the subtropical city of Brisbane, encounters with many species of native wildlife are a daily occurrence. For these animals, the human-altered conditions of the city do not pose an insurmountable challenge, but a plethora of ecological opportunities. As they adapt to and do well in association with humans and cities -a phenomenon known by ecologists as synurbisation -they become Brisbane's everyday wildlife, common and taken-for-granted amongst the broader urban crowd. Human responses to this wildlife are often inconsistent and ambiguous. In an era being heralded as the Anthropocene, when we must address the overwhelmingly negative outcomes that human activity has had on most animal species, our obligations to these animals demand more careful reflection. In this thesis, I aim to take Brisbane's synurbic wildlife seriously by exploring how they are companion species and significant others in the composition of collective worlds.In this thesis, I present a series of empirical accounts that challenge anthropocentric assumptions about wildlife that thrives in relation to cities and urbanisation. I illustrate that synurbisation cannot be understood as wildlife simply hitching a wagon to human civilisation, but as an ontologically enactive, political process in which wildlife enters, holds its shape and exerts influence in urban assemblages. As humans and everyday wildlife attune to each other in these assemblages, they become urban together, weaving chains of knowledge and power in an anthropo-zoo-genetic choreography of affect and response. This choreography enacts the city in multiple and specific ways, drawing together ecological, historical and spatial trajectories that extend far beyond urban boundaries. In my first account, I interrogate the idea that Eastern water dragons flourish inBrisbane as a result of learning to tolerate the presence of humans. Taking a more generous approach to the processes at play in human-water dragon encounters, Idemonstrate that this tale of synurbisation is not only about lost fear, but expanded authority and courteous articulation as water dragons influence humans with displays of bravado. By acquiescing to these displays, humans affirm the water dragon's urban dominance and are taught how to live politely with them. Knowledge, trust and 3 confidence circulates as humans and dragons become urban together, circulations that can be woven in to domestic, public and even scientific experiments with them.The second account concentrates on the trickier relationships formed as flying foxes become urban. Aerial, nocturnal and nomadic, urban flying foxes are masters at achieving intangibility with humans as they forage Brisbane's eclectic cultivated forest, weaving loose chains of knowledge in a choreography that often leaves humans feeling somehow lacking. However, flying foxes become far more knowable when they are injured navigating the urban forest. Here, far closer relationships -and tighter chains of trust -form between the animals and flying fox rescuers as humans engag...

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