INVASION ONTOLOGIES - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 193

if they had populated the pre-contact landscape, their features would not have
escaped notice by earlier settlers, or Indigenous people. Yet animals are not
archetypes, nor are traits such as coloration or venom potency invariant. Rather,
these impermanent, sensory and relational characteristics - those operations which
Lucas sees as fundamental to materialisation within a bounded site - are inherently
anthropocentric.
Thus, it was European occupation that proved critical to materialising redback
spiders within the assemblage of the colonial landscape. This was never merely a
physical environment; it was also an imaginative one. Beyond the embodied
experience of envenomation, the redback's visibility required a willingness to 'see'
any spider as dangerous. Yet spiders played little role in Aboriginal or settler
cosmologies until a species appeared whose reputation was, in turn, legitimated by
M¯ori testimony. This operation of historical ontology was as tenuous culturally as
it was biologically. After 1900, the katipo's fearsome reputation subsided markedly
in New Zealand; by 1951, it was questioned whether any human had ever died
from its bite (Hornabrook, 1951: 131-132). In Australia, panic over the redback
has similarly waxed and waned. Rarely, however, has it been acknowledged that
the ontology of its belonging was predicated on an invasion by outhouses.
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