CANE TOADS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 149

10
CANE TOADS
Animality and ecology in
Mark Lewis's documentary films
Morgan Richards
There is a scene in Cane Toads: The Conquest (2010) that I found unexpectedly
disturbing and sad. Volunteers from the Kimberley Toad Busters are shown filling
plastic bags full of cane toads with CO 2 , before unceremoniously dumping their
lifeless bodies into a mass grave. A solitary cane toad is depicted watching on, a
bystander to the attempted eradication of its own species, as a mournful soundtrack
heightens the pathos. Despite being rendered environmentally aware by countless
public campaigns and media stories detailing the impacts of cane toads on Australia's
native animals and ecosystems, I could not escape an overwhelming feeling of
sympathy for the toad. 1 I was aware of the aesthetic resonances of this scene, of its
overt attempt to manipulate my emotions through the construction of a toad
holocaust, but I still found it incredibly moving. 2 The animality of cane toads, or
an awareness of the devastatingly violent price exacted on these animals for simply
being out of place, an introduced or out-of-ecology species in a foreign landscape,
kept disrupting the stability of my ecological convictions. This sense of ambiguity
is key to writer-director Mark Lewis's approach as a filmmaker and his cinematic
depiction of the complexity that surrounds cane toads in Australia.
Mark Lewis's documentary, Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1987), and its
sequel, Cane Toads: The Conquest (2010), spiral out from the deceptively simple
narrative of how the toad, Bufo marinus , was introduced to North Queensland in
the 1930s as a form of agricultural pest control. But these films are not simply an
exercise in retelling this story and assessing the impacts, ecological and otherwise,
of this invasive species. Instead Lewis radically shifts the framing of his films to
focus on human-cane toad relationships. It is a stance that enables him to disrupt
generic and species boundaries, unsettle conventional understandings of invasive
species, and place the cane toad, quite literally, at the centre of his films. In a
review of Cane Toads: An Unnatural History , writer and anthropologist Michael
Taussig suggested that it deployed an 'extraordinarily effective method of