REMAKING WETLANDS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 216

FIGURE 14.1 An early location map of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, which
officially began operation in 1912.
Source: State Records NSW: NRS 14086, Lantern slides of NSW and the Franco-British
Exhibition, 1905-11. Digital ID: 14086_a005_a005SZ847000020, Map of southern NSW
showing Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, 1908.
Native species of ducks continued to visit the rice fields and they have remained
controversial figures in the region. They have occupied a complex and multifaceted
role for managers, biologists, and farmers: variously portrayed as wild or native and
so belonging, or as agriculturally disruptive and invasive, they have been blamed
for damaging rice crops by some farmers (but not all) and hunted as pests, while
others have valued them as game birds and for their role in eating invertebrates that
damage crops. Ducks have therefore brought together many different sets of
interests and long historical legacies such as maintaining populations for hunting,
the conservation of wildlife, and agricultural economics, all of which came to bear
in the controversies over whether or not they damaged rice crops and how they
should be treated in these areas.
This chapter examines how these competing ideas built up around ducks in the
first half of the twentieth century as commercial rice growing was established and
expanded in this region, which soon became the centre of Australia's rice industry.
I particularly focus on the involvement of two biologists, Kinghorn in the 1920s
and 1930s and Harry Frith in the 1950s, who bring together these different interests
in ducks. Both undertook government research, generated by farmers' concerns,
into whether ducks damaged rice crops. This research reflected a dominant focus
throughout the twentieth century in Australian government science on agricultural