INVASION ONTOLOGIES - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 181

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INVASION ONTOLOGIES
Venom, visibility and the imagined
histories of arthropods
Peter Hobbins
In 1988, historian Tom Griffiths planted a time bomb in Australia's natural history
literature. Apparently unintended, this act of temporal terrorism raises intriguing
questions about both what is 'natural' and what is 'historical' in ecology. Under
the rubric of rethinking invasion ecologies, this chapter explores some of the
epistemological and ontological questions raised by Griffiths' disturbing publication,
particularly in relation to arthropods - the phylum of invertebrates that includes
insects, crustaceans and arachnids.
Griffiths had presided over the publication of The Life and Adventures of Edward
Snell , a nineteenth-century diary 'long regarded as one of the treasures of the State
Library of Victoria's Australian Manuscripts Collection' (Snell, 1988: blurb). This
lavish production reproduced Snell's extensive journal for the years 1849-1859,
including his numerous sketches of colonial life, amateur ethnography and natural
history. Among its lively drawings was specimen 35, a 'Venemous [ sic ] black spider
with a red spot on his tail', which Snell encountered near Adelaide in November
1850 (Snell, 1988: 163; Figure 12.1). How he deduced that this petite specimen
was 'venemous' is unclear: the only illness he detailed after the encounter was a
hangover, and Snell made no allusion to either Aborigines or settlers suffer-
ing adverse effects from its bite. A recent immigrant from Britain, Snell likewise
made no reference to related species elsewhere across the globe. Nevertheless, it
is telling that he identified this spider as poisonous when he did not afford the
same status to a large, hairy 'tarantula' encountered nearby earlier that same year
(ibid.: 100).
One sense in which Griffiths' publication comprised a time bomb emerged in
1993, when Australian arachnologist Barbara York Main read Snell's account and
declared it the first known record of the redback spider, now known as Latrodectus
hasselti , anywhere on the Australian continent. Moreover, proposed Main, Snell's
laconic description suggested that these spiders 'were well known (and possibly