REMAKING WETLANDS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 224

about what constituted 'serious' or acceptable damage. For some farmers, having
any losses to ducks or having any animal seen to be a pest on their farm could have
been seen as unacceptable. In some cases, this approach seems to have been
underpinned by a dominating view of the landscape in which farmers had ultimate
control over what did and did not 'fit' on their farms (see Rose, 2004: 53-72; Rose,
2006: 66-68; van Dooren, 2011: 290). That is, if ducks were not seen to belong
on rice farms, then they would be forced off the farms or killed.
Native pests, the economic value of birds, and hunting
These debates about ducks in rice fields draw attention to some of the wider
histories of how people have understood the relationships between native animals
and agriculture, particularly competing economic views of some native animals as
pests or as helpful to farming through their eating of weeds and other animal and
insect pests. In NSW, the destruction of native and introduced fauna that were
regarded as agricultural pests was legislated for in 1880 with the Pastures and Stock
Protection Act . This Act initiated a system of bounties on particular native and
introduced animals that lasted for 50 years, but did not include ducks or other birds
(Stubbs, 2001: 29-30; Jarman and Brock, 2004: 4). From the mid-nineteenth
century through to the early twentieth century, birds were largely included in
legislation under 'game laws' that intended to conserve game populations by
limiting over-hunting, initially through a series of years of complete bans on
hunting and then through the introduction of 'open seasons' that aimed to protect
birds during their breeding seasons. Many native ducks, including those that later
visited rice fields, took on the role of similar species in European hunting activities
and were included under these laws as game birds (Walker, 1991: 18; Bonyhady,
2000: 14-39; Stubbs, 2001: 26-28; Jarman and Brock, 2004: 2; Dow, 2008: 148).
The first of these Acts, the Game Protection Act 1866 , explicitly exempted two
groups of people: government approved collectors of natural history specimens and
Aboriginal peoples (s13). These exceptions were carried forward in subsequent
legislation.
Native and imported game came under different sets of rules within colonial
legislation. For instance, native ducks were included in the Birds Protection Act 1881
under the general category 'wild ducks of any species' within the broader category
of 'native game', as opposed to 'imported game' such as pheasants (Schedules). In
this period (and also throughout the twentieth century), 'wild' and 'native' were
used almost interchangeably in relation to ducks, and referred to undomesticated
ducks that were also in Australia before British colonial settlement in 1788 (Chew
and Hamilton, 2011: 37). While both native and imported game birds were
protected under colonial laws, for native birds this was to 'prevent destruction' by
enforcing a closed season during the breeding season and for imported birds so that
they could establish and maintain populations for hunting as sport and food ( Birds
Protection Act 1881 , Preamble; see also Mackenzie, 1988: 25-53; Bonyhady, 2000:
14-39; Dow, 2008: 156-160). These measures to protect over-hunting did not