AustLit

This article is one of the two keynote addresses (the other by Henry Reynolds) delivered at the interdisciplinary conference Colonialism and Its Aftermath, held at the University of Tasmania in June, 2004. Tiffin's article builds upon her ongoing critique of speciesism in colonial and postcolonial discourses. Her analysis here focuses on responses to the 2001 intrusion into the Melbourne Botanical Gardens by a colony of flying foxes. She traces the shifting discourse relating to bats, from colonial texts to contemporary reactions to the bat "invasions" (with Ratcliffe's text between), in order to suggest the permeable nature of "the lines between wilderness and lawn that we are intent on maintaining."