INVASION ONTOLOGIES - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 189

attributes have demonised the blue-ringed octopus ( Hapalochlaena species) or the
white-tailed spider ( Lampona cylindrata ). Unlike the rapid M¯ori-P¯keh¯ consensus
over katipos, however, in Australia popular names proliferated, only stabilising on
the 'redback' moniker in the 1920s.
Furthermore, even trans-Tasman exchange of specimens between museums and
amateur naturalists failed to clearly determine the synonymy or otherwise of the
Australian and New Zealand varieties. Which was the original, and which the
doppelgänger? Which was native, and which the invader? For a time the red-
back was branded 'the Victorian katipo', but by 1900, British and American
arachnologists concurred that 'the New South Wales spider is undoubtedly distinct
from L. katipo' (Anon, 1893: 8; Cambridge, 1902: 253, 5, 8). In the Federation
era, this distinction was not infrequently nationalist. '[W]hatever honour there may
be in possessing it', wrote local naturalist Allan Wight in 1893, 'New Zealand has
. . . a notoriously poisonous spider all to herself' (Anon, 1893: 8).
But what relevance do descriptive attributes - envenomation symptomatology,
spatial distribution, or variations in colouring - have to do with rethinking invasion
ecologies? In the colonial antipodes, these ostensibly inherent traits were not
'objective'. Rather, each was sensory, relational and impermanent. Latrodectus were
not merely observed; they were noticed . As visiting German physician and
evolutionary biologist Richard Semon remarked in 1899, 'This conspicuous spider
seems to be everywhere' (Semon, 1899: 148). The identity of Latrodectus spiders
was not a brute ontology of physicality - of material remains or reliably repro-
ducible phenomena. Rather, a specific set of conjunctions fell into place, rendering
these spiders visible against the biotic and discursive terrain of colonisation. This
materialisation ultimately stabilised an ontology of spiders - and by extension all
arthropods - as transhistorical objects .
Archaeology and arachnids
One reason why I am drawn to venomous animals is that they are so rarely
configured as charismatic. Historically, few human observers have ascribed to
snakes or spiders a meaningful intentionality or subjectivity. Unlike horses, dogs,
or even imitative birds such as parrots, there is effectively nil intersubjective
identification between humans and arthropods (Dirke, 2009: 161-163).
This was certainly true of nineteenth-century Europeans, whether their objects
of scrutiny were domestic or colonial. In 1912, Belgian littérateur Maurice
Maeterlinck wrote: 'We feel a certain earthly brotherhood . . . [with] other animals,
the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb life and the great secrets which they
cherish.' But for arthropods, he added, 'There is no question here of the human
imagination. The insect does not belong to our world' (Maeterlinck, 1912: 9).
Maeterlinck's assertion prefaced Jean-Henri Fabre's The Life of the Spider , the first
widely read text to intimately describe the material world of arachnids. Yet despite
years of close observation, Fabre never ventured to imagine the spider's interiority.
Rather, like its external morphology or venom potency, he declared that a spider's