Making Animals Public: Inside the ABC's natural history archive

ie w Making Animals Public ev Inside the ABC’s natural history archive SU P Pr Gay Hawkins and Ben Dibley w First published by Sydney University Press © Gay Hawkins and Ben Dibley 2024 © Sydney University Press 2024 ev Pr Sydney University Press Gadigal Country Fisher Library F03 University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia sup.info@sydney.edu.au sydneyuniversitypress.com.au ie Reproduction and communication for other purposes Except as permitted under Australia’s Copyright Act 1968, no part of this edition may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or communicated in any form or by any means without prior written permission. All requests for reproduction or communication should be made to Sydney University Press at the address below: A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia. P ISBN 9781743329719 paperback ISBN 9781743329696 epub ISBN 9781743329702 pdf SU Cover image: David Parer filming King Penguins at Lusitania Bay, Macquarie Island, 1975 © D. Parer & E. Parer-Cook. Cover design: Nathan Grice We acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which Sydney University Press is located, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and we pay our respects to the knowledge embedded forever within the Aboriginal Custodianship of Country. w Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Crafting televisual animals Captivating viewers Early natural history television on the ABC Pr 2 ev Part One: Capturing 1 Cages and cameras Screen animals before television ie vii 1 25 29 45 Part Two: Provoking 3 Developing the natural history genre How animals and the media apparatus interact 67 71 4 93 P 115 119 SU Making-of documentaries Turning working animals into natural history animals 6 137 Conclusion Political animals 163 References 177 Index 187 Part Three: Inhabiting 5 The Nature of Australia series Nationing nature After nature, after animals Inhabiting a damaged planet v Introduction ev ie w Crafting televisual animals SU P Pr Soon after the invention of “the box”, a new species was observed roaming across the small screen: televisual animals. Their origins and behaviours were complex. Partly a product of exhibitionary practices that had emerged in zoos, museums and cinema, these televisual animals were primarily the result of the strange media ecology that was early television. This ecology supported animals that were extraordinarily dynamic and expressive, narrated and usually set to music. It also nurtured animals perfectly naturalised to fit the medium and happy to perform on cue for the pleasure and edification of their human observers. For if this new species hadn’t been convincing and fun to watch, it certainly wouldn’t have survived in the extreme conditions of television. Today there are many different subspecies under the broad category of “televisual animals”. Consider the long evolution of Disney animals and their imperative to be cute, animated and funny, or the grand tradition of wildlife TV and its showcasing of animals that are timeless and spectacular. Then there are the apex predators hunting and killing for ratings, or political animals posing questions about human exploitation and abuse. The list goes on. What it shows is that the only thing these subspecies really have in common is their shared habitat: television. After that, it’s the differences that really matter: the myriad techniques and mediations used to turn the material reality of 1 Making Animals Public SU P Pr ev ie w an animal into a televisual reality; the different interactions and contact zones televisual animals generate with audiences; and the multiplicity of concerns that make these animals public and also make publics interested in looking at them. The particular subspecies under investigation here is the “natural history animal”, a unique breed usually sighted in pristine natural settings with little evidence of human civilisation.1 More specifically, we’re interested in natural history animals that began inhabiting the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) television service soon after it first went to air in 1956.2 Other animals in related media environments will also be investigated, but our primary focus is the cultural and political evolution of the ABC natural history animal. Like the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the ABC was the product of a governmental commitment to building a broadcasting institution in the interests of informing, educating and entertaining populations. These commitments were seen as essential to the effective operation of a democratic national culture. Animals were implicated in this governmental project from the very beginning. The ABC’s inaugural moment began with an animal soundscape. The first national radio broadcast in July 1932 started with the song of a lyrebird that filled living rooms and drew people to their radio sets.3 As ABC radio audiences grew, listeners encountered talk about animals in everything from news bulletins, to rural programs, to the children’s hour. The type of talk was immensely varied: information about cattle prices, how to manage diseases in sheep, stories and songs with animal characters and sounds, a naturalist describing the insect life in his backyard. In these soundscapes, mediated animals became present and palpable on radio, inhabiting listeners’ everyday lives and imaginations. The introduction of television in 1956 was a major shift in the institutional ecology of the ABC. TV meant that animals could now 1 2 3 Bousé 2000, 14–15. The ABC became a corporation on 1 July 1983. Prior to that it was the Australian Broadcasting Commission. Although funded by the government, it is an independent statutory authority operating under the provisions of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act 1983. Australian Broadcasting Commission, Annual Report, 1933. 2 Introduction SU P Pr ev ie w be seen and heard; the issue was how to visualise them and why this was important. What role could televisual animals play in realising the purpose and charter of the ABC? Which animals were best suited to the liberal humanist project of public broadcasting and how should they perform? How should animals be represented in order to generate pedagogic or entertaining or political effects? These questions drive the historical and empirical focus of this book, and we explore them through a series of case studies that are loosely chronological. However, we are less interested in detailed institutional changes in the ABC than in the shifting cultural techniques that crafted natural history animals and made them public and potent for audiences. To this end, we begin with an exploration of some early sightings of animals on Australian newsreel and cinema screens long before the arrival of television. These animals were public in the sense that they were visible and distributed across various communication networks, but they were not yet “public” in a governmental sense. They were not significantly burdened with collective concerns about animal realities or human–animal relations, nor were they expected to improve or educate populations. They were there to amuse and fascinate human observers but not to pose questions to them. In its early years, ABC television nurtured a variety of new animals. Just like radio before it, televisual animals popped up in numerous programs manifesting all sorts of behaviours from cute and charismatic to anthropomorphic. However, it was with the development of the distinct format called “informational and documentary television” that the ABC began to identify the new medium’s special appeal and capacity for visualising animals.4 Almost as soon as it commenced broadcasting, ABC television screened nature programs imported from the BBC like the chat show Look (BBC, 1955–1968), which involved animal footage interspersed with interviews with wildlife cinematographers and naturalists. Gradually, the ABC began producing a scattering of locally made “nature films” in which animals were displayed and discussed as representative subjects of the natural world, a place that was promoted as both important and newly accessible thanks to the wonders of television. It was also a natural world that 4 Australian Broadcasting Commission, Annual Report, 1957, 25. 3 Making Animals Public SU P Pr ev ie w was to be increasingly framed through a settler-national lens as an “Australian nature”, which ensnared televisual animals in relations of colonial power. These early natural history animals rapidly became very popular and very influential. By the 1970s they had gained ascendancy over the many other animals roaming the screens of ABC TV and were identified as having a special role to play in educating and informing audiences. Hence the establishment of their own enclosure, the Natural History Unit, which was set up in 1973 to consolidate and co-ordinate the production of nature programs.5 The animals captured and contained in this unit had a range of duties. They were expected to inform audiences about everything from the secrets of nature, to scientific facts, to threats to the environment, to national identity. The natural history animal was becoming a public servant, obliged to captivate and bind audiences to animals in certain ways and to generate various public effects and values. This transition from the animal as entertainment to the animal as public object and public servant signals a range of political questions that inform our analysis. Paralleling our historical perspective is a more pressing concern with how natural history animals have been made public and the effects of this complex process. Our aim is to investigate how natural history animals emerged and how these creatures acquired the capacity to generate distinct forms of public interest and public value. In the case of the ABC, for example, how did they become implicated in the wider political rationalities of this broadcaster? Were they recruited to service the ABC Charter, enrolled to give expression to pre-constituted values and national culture? Or were they involved in helping to shape and define these terms by producing specific animal inflections for the categories “public” or “national” while simultaneously emerging as a remarkable new species? Central to our argument is the assumption that these categories are unattached abstractions that are configured and given meaning through the generative effects of making and circulating media content. The issue is: How were animals implicated in this process? What sorts of animal performances were seen as best suited to creating public 5 Australian Broadcasting Commission, Annual Report, 1974, 32. 4 Introduction SU P Pr ev ie w interest or informing national audiences? What kinds of publicness did natural history animals generate and how were audiences invited to gather around them? And what positive effects were assumed to flow from watching them? In posing these questions, we are less concerned with the representational adequacies or excesses of natural history animals on TV than with how they were made into what Noortje Marres and Javier Lezaun describe as “devices of the public”.6 By the 1980s, especially with the screening of the internationally celebrated series Nature of Australia (ABC, 1988), made for Australia’s bicentenary, natural history animals on the ABC were celebrated for nurturing environmental awareness, supporting conservation, making previously inaccessible or disappearing species visible, communicating science and much more. The rise of the televisual natural history animal on the ABC was judged as good for audiences, good for the nation and good for the environment, but what about for the animals? How did their capture and containment by public broadcasters produce new realities for them? And what questions did these animals come to pose to us? These questions drive this study. In pursuing them we want to trouble two familiar critiques of natural history animals on television and wildlife TV more widely. The first is a significant critique from the huge field known as media studies; the second is the lesser known but growing field of eco-media. Both these fields have devoted a lot of time to investigating the representational inadequacies and troubling effects of natural history animals. Across numerous studies, media analysts have exposed everything from the exploitative conditions of production central to these programs, to the excessive use of special effects and techniques of simulation, to the proliferation of spectacular purified natures that no longer exist. In this line of thinking, the nature and animals portrayed in natural history television are considered so fabricated, so removed from the reality of a degraded anthropogenic world, that they operate in the realm of pure fantasy.7 Far from supporting “environmental awareness” and conservation, natural 6 7 Marres and Lezaun 2011, 489. See, for example: Chris 2006; Cubitt 2005; Louson 2018; Mitman 2009; Pick and Narraway 2013 for a sample of these critiques. 5 Making Animals Public SU P Pr ev ie w history animals are accused of fuelling popular denial about the state of the planet. In a brutal review of David Attenborough’s legacy, George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian newspaper that the television naturalist had created complacency, confusion and ignorance by refusing to show audiences the reality of serious ecological collapse and massive species decline.8 The second critique resonates with this but comes from philosophically inflected animal studies. Here, the “electric animal”, as Akira Mizuka Lippit terms it,9 is judged as a spectral effect of industrialisation. As animals were removed from the phenomenal world, they were displaced into the simulated and virtual worlds of zoos and cinema. In this process, they became available to humans as communication devices, as symbols of new structures of thought about nature and the superiority of the human subject. For Lippit, these technical animals are pale versions of their real selves, a lasting reminder of the destruction and disappearance of animals. They may now be abundant on screens, and humans may be comfortable being surrounded by them, but electric animals manifest a technical echo not a living voice.10 Both these critiques are rich and politically astute and signal significant trouble in the televisual Edens that natural history animals often inhabit. But they also have some serious limitations. In the rush to identify cultural and ideological effects, the mediated vitality and realities of these animals are often diminished. There is too much focus on representations rather than on how they are composed and accounted for, and how these textual animals acquire affective and political capacities. For us, the key issues are what has actually come to count as a “natural history animal” on ABC television and how these animals have been variously composed over time. More critically, we ask in what ways have these televisual creatures provoked new modes of knowing animals and new modes of becoming affected by them? What has been at stake, politically, in making animals visible and public in this particular way? What new forms of political attention and 8 Monbiot 2018. 9 Lippit 2000. 10 Lippit 2000, 21. 6 Introduction SU P Pr ev ie w inattention about human–animal relations and plural worlds has the rise of the televisual natural history animal generated? Approaching animals from this perspective reconfigures many of the concerns already swarming around screen animals and opens up a whole new set of issues. For a start, it challenges the idea that natural history animals on the ABC were merely surfaces on which existing ideologies and forms of power over animals were inscribed. Sometimes, this was definitely the case. There is no question that many natural history animals have carried a range of symbolic and representational burdens. They have been rendered passive objects of human curiosity, definitive representatives of their species, capable of revealing scientific facts and aesthetically spectacular. But they have been much more. To confine natural history animals within the framework of representation, and to deploy critique of these representations as the primary mode of analysis, is to erase the presence and potency of these mediated creatures. Of course, these are not embodied animals; they don’t bite back.11 They are composed and “factitious”, but they are also often vital, compelling and affecting. They have a televisual life that is built up through everything from narrative, to camera points of view, to soundtracks, to the force of their being but also, most critically, in the interest and curiosity that comes from audiences watching them and being lured by their performances. As Vinciane Despret argues, showing an interest, feeling the pull of animals on the small screen that enchant or move or terrify us, is an opening out to being transformed, to caring.12 Our claim is that many natural history animals have prompted audiences to view the world differently, to acknowledge multispecies plurality, even to become more ethically attuned or obligated to nonhuman others. This claim is not universal: the diversity of natural history animals and animal stories means that there is no singular “ABC natural history animal”; there are, instead, situated animals with differing capacities to pose questions and to be affecting. 11 Despret 2016. 12 Despret 2016, 130. 7 Making Animals Public Approaching ABC animals: Mediation and mediatisation SU P Pr ev ie w How then to investigate these animals and to understand the ways in which they became televisual? Our experience in the ABC archives and watching hours of footage shows that making natural history animals was generally a complex and messy process involving myriad human skills and practices, technical apparatuses and cultural conventions. While this institutional media apparatus and ecology unquestionably shaped these animals to fit particular demands, it was never a top-down process of complete capture and containment. At the same time as animals were corralled into the public broadcasting environment and its constraints and conventions, they also pushed this environment into new configurations and provoked new communicative techniques. The origins of these natural history animals, then, were in the practices and event of wrangling them to become televisual and public. ABC animals were public in the literal sense that they circulated in accessible free-to-air networks and addressed different audiences. But they were also public in a more performative sense. These animals called publics into being; they generated new interest in animals – what they were, how they should be observed and why they mattered. Not only did ABC animals become implicated in enacting the governing logics of public service broadcasters (PSB), translating the rationalities of public broadcasting through their bodily performances, they also generated encounters with audiences in which new and different interactions between humans and animals were made possible. In pursuing the changing practices and cultural techniques involved in making natural history animals on the ABC, we want to shift understandings of “making” from a predominant focus on media production practices to include a more ontological orientation. We are interested in how animals practically got to be on ABC TV and how they were made real in this context; how their performances depended on particular styles of reference that rendered them plausible in this setting. Our interest is in how natural history animal realities and worlds were composed in various sites and on various occasions within the ABC. We want to know what kinds of habits and manners of being these animals came to display on television and how these versions of animals were organised and framed. This ontological orientation 8 Introduction SU P Pr ev ie w assumes that animal realities on television are not self-evident; they have to be crafted and they have to be explained and accounted for. Understanding animal modes of being or ontologies on television, then, is an empirical process focused on investigating the myriad practices that composed ABC animals and how these practices emerged and changed. What kinds of technologies, knowledges, visual techniques and conventions made animals televisual and justified them as the way natural history animals were meant to be? And how did animals, themselves, participate in or resist these framings? Which particular animals and animal qualities were privileged in the drive to render them televisual, and which were excluded? How did these animals perform and how did these performances configure the human viewer? How did public animals provoke new human dispositions, interests and concerns? For just as ABC television made animals public, it also made publics that learned to be affected by these animals in new and various ways. The approach we develop in this book draws on three key theoretical inspirations: science and technology studies (STS), screen studies, and philosophically inflected animal studies that examine “animalities” or how animal worlds are created. The idea of animality disrupts reductive or mechanistic models of animal behaviour and investigates the diverse textures of animality – for example wild, domestic, technical or televisual – and their imbrication with the “human”. This hybrid conceptual toolkit challenges many of the assumptions underpinning existing media studies of televisual animals, especially around issues of authenticity and fabrication. Within the very broad and conceptually diverse field known as “media studies” there has been growing interest in the rise of wildlife or natural history television as a genre and the unique characteristics of these screen animals. Beyond a focus on the historical evolution of the genre and its political economy within the global television industry,13 there is also a rich body of work exploring the technical and creative practices involved in capturing and creating animal content for television.14 Many of these studies document and critique the extensive use of 13 See Chris 2006; Cottle 2004; Mitman 2009. 14 See Bousé 2000; Gouyon 2016. 9 Making Animals Public SU P Pr ev ie w techniques such as reconstruction, staging and re-enactment, as well as the use of stock footage or imprinted or domesticated animals to simulate animal realities in the wild.15 Then there is the post-production work of editing, narration, special effects and laying down soundtracks in order to create convincing and entertaining natural history animals. While media studies accept these production techniques as structurally necessary to making animals that are suitably televisual, lurking between the lines is a lingering anxiety about the distorted or fabricated nature of TV animals. For Phil Bagust, “special effects” have become so fundamental to wildlife and natural history TV that the result is animals that are fantastically enhanced and largely simulated.16 Derek Bousé echoes this point when he notes that wildlife media convey the natural world in terms set down by the medium not reality: “wildlife film and television depict nature close-up, speeded-up and set to music, with reality’s most exciting moments highlighted and the ‘boring’ bits cut out”.17 At the heart of these observations is the implication that media representations of animals are never able to adequately capture the preformed or authentic nature of animal being. The expectation that animals must instrumentally service the economic imperatives and cultural protocols of the format, that they be obediently and properly televisual, is seen as undermining any substantive commitment to actuality.18 The cumulative effect of these critiques of media animals as “constructed” is that they are implicitly equated with the fake and unreal. This confirms Bruno Latour’s observation about the fundamental problem with the idea of construction: “either something was real and not constructed, or it was constructed and artificial, contrived and invented, made up and false”.19 The contrived and made-up nature of animals on the ABC is a given. The challenge is how to get beyond the real/unreal opposition and the moral anxieties this seems to generate about what “the media” 15 16 17 18 19 See Bagust 2008; Chris 2006; Mitman 2009. Bagust 2008, 213. Bousé 2000, 3. Mitman 2009. Latour 2005a, 90 (emphasis in original). 10 Introduction SU P Pr ev ie w do to animals. Bousé describes this anxiety as “simulation and its discontents”.20 He argues that when investigating screen animals, the issue is not real versus unreal but how the relations between reality and realism are configured. Rather than yearn for a referent in the wild or critique these animals as fabrications, televisual animals need to be understood as creating their own fields of reference, their own accountability relations that establish what is plausible in this setting. The challenge, as Phil Bagust argues, is to understand the nature of these accountability relations and how they are generated in distinct media ecosystems.21 For Bousé, techniques of media construction draw attention to the conventions of realism and meaning-making, not the unreal. The work of constructing a televisual animal involves the double process of signification: making something real and making sense of it at the same time. This resonates with debates in STS about the making of realities. In this field, construction has acquired a militantly performative meaning and is akin to Bousé’s account of realism as a “reality effect”. John Law, for example, argues that constructing realities involves three interrelated processes: the making of particular realities, the making of particular statements about those realities, and the creation of inscription devices that produce those realities and statements.22 Because realities are multiple and constantly in the making, and because they are not independent of the devices used to represent them, they are difficult to essentialise. Instead, the challenge is to investigate how particular entities or realities come to seem the way that they are, to analyse how they are done. Enacting or performing realities demands a focus on the practices and techniques involved, not with the aim of assessing their representational adequacy but with the goal of understanding which bodies, discourses, technologies, objects and so on are brought into relations to assemble this reality. This theory of reality prompts a range of philosophical questions about the independence of an external or anterior reality, “out there”. Two brief points can be made about this. First, the outside world is 20 Bousé 2000, 9. 21 Bagust 2008. 22 Law 2004, 31. 11 Making Animals Public SU P Pr ev ie w independent of us and in the process of enacting realities it pushes back and participates in how realities are done. Animal bodies and behaviours, for example, have significant force and agency in configuring the technical practices and inscription devices that are deployed to make them televisually real. As many histories of the evolution of wildlife television reveal, filming animals often involves significant technological innovation and ingenuity to accommodate their elusive, aggressive or strange activities. Second, this anterior animal reality is not necessarily pure or authentic or unmediated. As Latour23 and Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp24 insist, we can never be outside of mediation. Anterior reality, as Law describes it, is: “a large hinterland of inscription devices and practices already in production”.25 The issue, then, is not where does an unmediated or real animal live but how does this particular animal reality come into being? This STS or performative approach to reality makes it possible to investigate how natural history animals on television are enacted and their various reality effects. It also challenges the assumption that media observe and represent an unconfined fixed reality. Instead, the activity of television production has to be seen as a provocation or event that calls forth various animal realities. These realities are always partial and always crafted, and plenty of the world is excluded, neglected or othered. The critical point is that the idea of enacting or provoking reality begins from the assumption that natural history animals on the ABC had to be done rather than discovered. Focusing on the ontologies that ABC natural history animals display and how these were assembled enables a shift from a representational idiom to a performative one.26 Rather than critique the adequacy or accuracy of animal representations in relation to an authentic animal reality, we want to investigate how ABC animals emerged as contingent outcomes of numerous situated practices and devices; how these animal realities were mediated and composed; and their particular cultural effects and productivity. More critically, we 23 24 25 26 Latour 2005a. Couldry and Hepp 2016. Law 2004, 31. Muniesa 2014, 10. 12 Introduction SU P Pr ev ie w want to know how they shaped new perceptions and ways of knowing animals. We are indebted to media studies investigations of animals on screen, but we want to put these into conversation with STS and its concerns with how the social is assembled. We see natural history animals on the ABC as unique “reality engines”,27 as creatures that make and mediate the social. This approach assumes that media are thoroughly embedded in shaping everyday social worlds. As Couldry and Hepp point out: “material processes of mediation constitute much of the stuff of the social”.28 This shift from the media and society to the social as mediated opens up new lines of thinking about ABC animals. Firstly, it demands an investigation of the specific practices of mediation that were developed to communicate animals on television; a commitment to understanding the myriad relations and relays that were developed to attach animals to the project of public service broadcasting, to attach meanings to these animals, and to attach audiences to animals. What kinds of mediators transformed and translated animals so that they could comfortably inhabit a televisual environment and domestic living rooms? And how did these processes implicate humans in new social relations with them; how did they provoke new ways of experiencing animals? Equally significant is an analysis of how this emerging species, “the natural history animal”, was connected to wider changes that saw the increasing “mediatisation” of animals throughout the 20th century. Mediatisation is akin to Lippit’s idea of the electric animal or the reappearance of animals in technological forms.29 It led to many animals finding homes in new communication media, and to audiences that became utterly comfortable with encountering them in these settings, comfortable with the particular animal realities these media created. These audiences were at ease with the idea that screen animals were simply another mode of animal being and were open to being affected by them as a result.30 27 28 29 30 Haraway 2008. Couldry and Hepp 2016, 3. Lippit 2000. Lorimer 2015, 120. 13 Making Animals Public SU P Pr ev ie w Mediatisation is distinct from mediation. It refers to those large-scale and proliferating infrastructures of communication that became central to constructing social realities over the 20th century.31 The creation of PSBs is one important example of this transformation. These unique institutions were part of wider changes that incorporated media into everyday life and shaped popular and political cultures. Like all media, PSBs operate in clusters and associations with other communications systems to create aggregates of change and new social realities. So, when it comes to animals on the ABC, we have to consider how the particular mediations and ecologies of television worked in relation to other sites and media for making animals public such as zoos and museums, radio, cinema and newspapers. How were televisual animals connected to other infrastructures of communication that made animals public in the 20th century? And what kinds of changes in social reality did the widespread mediatisation of animals, particularly the rise and normalisation of the televisual animal, prompt? To pursue these questions, a dual focus is required. We need to develop an approach that is attentive to the specificities of how ABC animals were captured and how new realities for them were crafted in this unique broadcasting and governmental ecology. And we need to be attuned to how this species was part of wider transformations that saw the increasing mediatisation of animals and the emergence of new social perceptions and framings of them. If ABC animals emerged from networks of mediation in this PSB, and were also evidence of wider patterns of mediatisation, how can we investigate these interrelated but distinct processes? What conceptual toolkit is necessary for this task that is both a historical study of how a media organisation made a new species of animal and an assessment of how mediatised animals circulated and came to influence wider “social figurations” or durable networks of meaning and communicative exchange between humans and animals?32 By opening up a conversation between screen studies, STS and animal studies, we aim to develop a creative and politically incisive account of how ABC natural 31 Couldry and Hepp 2016, 35. 32 Couldry and Hepp 2016, 64. 14 Introduction Pr ev ie w history animals were realised and how they generated significant cultural and political effects. As outlined, this approach diverges from critiques of wildlife TV that foreground concerns with the unreality of televisual animals and exploitative or ideological modes of vision. We also have concerns about the realities ABC animals inhabit, but they take a different form. We are interested in how these realities were assembled: What material chains and relays involving myriad processes linked animals to the screen and how were these realities framed and authorised? How were audiences and publics implicated in these relays and how did they provoke various intersubjective and political encounters? What kinds of relations were established between humans and animals in natural history programs? Did ABC animals invite audiences to become with them as companion species or become alongside them as distinct but connected; or become sovereign to them: human subjects happy to be educated or entertained by animal objects?33 We want to open up a space for deliberation and political analysis that proceeds from concerns about what kinds of animal–human associations were provoked in this televisual environment and in wider social figurations that the ABC was connected to, such as, for example, colonial, national and ecological dynamics. Capturing, provoking, inhabiting SU P How were ABC natural history animals crafted and what were the impacts of their public circulation? In order to pursue this question and its historical and political implications, this book is organised into three parts. These parts focus on key practices that were fundamental to realising a natural history animal: capturing, provoking and inhabiting. Each of these practices is technical and performative. They foreground the techniques and devices deployed to craft a natural history animal and their reality effects: how these practices made animals that were both credible and culturally durable. They also foreground the political dynamics implicated in making animals public and shifting 33 Haraway 2008. 15 Making Animals Public SU P Pr ev ie w human–animal relations. To capture or provoke animals is to implicitly privilege human control, whereas to inhabit has the possibility of exploring how we live in a common world with animals and share a common fate. While most of the chapters that follow focus on the ABC animal, some other examples have been selected to extend the analysis and highlight different forms of capture, provocation and inhabitation in related media. In Part One we explore the practice of capturing animals for human observation in early Australian screen culture and the various forms of captivation this generated in audiences. Central here is the relationship between cages and cameras. Just at the moment when animals were disappearing from many natural and everyday settings, early screen media often deployed cages to contain animals and facilitate effective visual capture. The question is how did images of captured or hunted animals in newsreels and cinema provoke curiosity in audiences and shape distinct modes of interpretation and engagement? What human dispositions and affects did animal capture on screen provoke: superiority, curiosity, amusement? Chapter 1 explores two examples of pre-televisual capture that focus on endemic marsupials that are in the process of being eradicated from their milieu as it is encroached by settler agriculture. The first case explores the now iconic 1933 newsreel footage showing the last thylacine in Beaumaris Zoo pacing towards extinction in a desolate cage. The second examines The Trail of the ’Roo, a 1931 documentary about a kangaroo cull in the Riverina that also included capturing some live animals for urban exhibition. These examples prefigure the rise of the televisual animal in important ways. Not only do they highlight the technical necessity of containment in crafting various animal realities on screen, they also show different modes of publicness. These animals were public in the literal sense of being visible and in wide circulation, but they were not public in the more political sense of embodying various issues or collective identifications. They were objects of human fascination or entertainment, but their performances were not designed to educate audiences or provoke forms of public interest or concern. The thylacine might be almost extinct, the kangaroos might be terrified of capture, but these animal realities were not framed in ways that called concerned publics into being. 16 Introduction SU P Pr ev ie w With the invention of television, these capturing practices persisted. Chapter 2 explores some of the earliest wildlife TV shown on the ABC. David Attenborough’s first TV show, Zoo Quest (BBC, 1956), went to air on Australian screens in 1960 and featured him on an expedition to the jungles of Borneo capturing orang-utans for the London Zoo. Cages play a critical role in this program and are central to making these animals visible, but there is also a sequence showing Attenborough tracking orang-utans through dense jungle and attempting to capture them on film “in the wild”. In this sequence, the camera is not nearly as effective as the cage as a technology of capture. Orang-utans in remote treetops prove to be very elusive. Dancing Orpheus (ABC, 1962) is the second example explored. This landmark, award-winning documentary was one of the first “nature shows”, as they were called, made by the ABC in 1962. It featured the superb lyrebird. Unlike Zoo Quest, Dancing Orpheus had no humans or cages visible on screen. While the program was narrated by an authoritative male voice, the lyrebird appears alone in a state of spontaneous self-betrayal performing its beautiful natural self. In Dancing Orpheus, making the lyrebird public involved various strategies of aestheticisation that positioned viewers as lucky witnesses to a natural performance that the wonders of television made possible. In both these examples, the animal can be considered as an engine of translatability for various public broadcasting imperatives. The logic of the visual capture and narration is predicated on the imperative of educating audiences rather than merely entertaining them. The lyrebird is valued as aesthetically and scientifically important and therefore worthy of televisual exhibition. The natural history animal was starting to take form. Central to the analysis in Part One is the claim that devices for capturing and containing are not only structurally necessary to making animals public, they also have distinct performative and political effects. For Javier Lezaun and colleagues: “containment is to be understood in the sense of confinement or restraint but also as a holding … containment is close to the notion of a device which can convey an idea of storing, separating, delineating and allocating but also of articulating in discourse.”34 This account of containment 34 Lezaun, Muneisa and Vikkelsø 2013, 280. 17 Making Animals Public SU P Pr ev ie w recognises it as both a form of capture and a dynamic process for making realities. The containment device is not a neutral holder; it has effects and it configures what is contained in two senses: by delineating a boundary and separating things off from the world but also by framing and projecting them back into the world and capturing or orienting viewers to them. The effects of containment are not static, they are dynamic and generative.35 The natural history animal was an outcome of numerous containment processes, but it took a while to be configured within the ABC. In many existing accounts, these animals are assumed to be the product of the Natural History Unit (NHU) that was established in the early 1970s and closed down in 2007. However, this assumption belies the presence of animals across numerous departments in ABC TV long before and after the demise of this unit. It also obscures the complex processes whereby animals became contained and domesticated by the classification “natural history”, which effectively marginalised other realities for them. Evidence from the NHU’s early history shows that in the period before the classifications and cultural codes of the natural history genre had been fully established, there was not always a clear notion of how animals should be captured for TV, or how they might captivate viewers’ interest; what televisual animals might be and how they should perform was uncertain. Codes, conventions and compelling ways of accounting for animals took time to be stabilised before animal performances on TV could be normalised and accepted as believable in this context, before the natural history animal could confidently inhabit television. Part Two explores the processes whereby the actual material reality of animals becomes a televisual reality. The central concept driving the analysis is provoking or intervening to trigger an effect. Provocation challenges that idea that natural history television observes and represents an unconfined reality. Instead, the activity of television production has to be understood as an incitement, an event that calls forth various animal realities. These realities are always partial and always crafted, and plenty of the world is excluded, neglected or othered. The critical point is that the idea of enacting or provoking 35 Hawkins, Potter and Race 2015. 18 Introduction SU P Pr ev ie w reality assumes that ABC animals had to be composed and staged rather than found and documented. Rather than yearn for an unmediated or authentic animal, provocation foregrounds the myriad practices whereby a particular reality is enacted. Making animals public on television was an exercise in extensive and multiple relays of intervention, creativity and mediation – the issue is how were animals provoked and how were their performances authorised and accounted for as credible? Our research in the ABC archives revealed innumerable technical and material interventions into animal worlds in order to make a natural history animal. In investigating these archives, there was no accounting for what you might find. Consider this random sample: extensive correspondence with a conservation biologist about how to safely fly a platypus from Tasmania to the ABC’s Melbourne studio for a film shoot; an expenses claim from a cameraman who’d been living in remote Australia waiting – unsuccessfully – to film a rare bird; requests for a docile domesticated wombat that could stand in for a wild one and endure the rigours of filming. These examples offer rich insights into the complexities of composing a natural history animal: the vast material chains and relays involved in assembling its televisual reality and the ways in which the material reality of the animal had to be both negotiated and provoked. They also highlight the laborious processes of assemblage, the art of bringing about a reality suitable for television. In these processes the “real” animal, the referent behind the representation, was often an elusive element, confirming Michael Lynch’s claim that “referential truth is not an essence that is transported from beginning to end; rather it is a contingent, certified, assessment”.36 Chapters 3 and 4 explore the dynamics of provoking. In Chapter 3 the experiences of filmmakers, artists and scientists working on ABC natural history film shoots during the 1970s and 80s are analysed. Key documents investigated include the 1973 shooting diary of legendary Australian natural history cameraman, David Parer AO, when he was in the field filming the Wildlife of Papua New Guinea (ABC, 1975) series. Here we see how the natural history genre was practically crafted and materialised. We also examine reflections from scientists and 36 Lynch 2005, 37. 19 Making Animals Public SU P Pr ev ie w artists involved in making natural history programs about the challenges and frustrations of wrangling animals. These empirical materials reveal how animal worlds were intervened in, how animals pushed back or refused to co-operate, and how the provocations of TV production incited a reality rather than discovered it. Chapter 4 examines the Sky TV series David Attenborough’s Conquest of the Skies (Atlantic Productions, 2014), which screened on the ABC in 2015. The key focus is Episode 4, called “The Making of David Attenborough’s Conquest of the Skies” (Colossus Productions, 2014). This behind-the-scenes episode supposedly “showing all” revealed the mess and contingency of wildlife production and also the agency of the animal body. It plays off the difference between the disciplined and objectified natural history animal that screened in the official series and the domesticated working animal that was actually used in the shoot and that was an unpredictable “talent”: in this case, a whooper swan imprinted on a human trainer and incited to perform a scientific fact on cue, over and over again. Finally, where did natural history animals live? In Part Three we examine the dynamics of inhabiting. Throughout the evolution of these animals, different locations have been privileged as their “home”. These locations have a profound effect on how animals are represented. Modes of inhabitation shape not only animal habits but also how humans are positioned in relation to them. Are humans part of the same world or looking in on a separate wild, remote or disappearing reality? The most popular places animals have inhabited on the ABC are “nature”, “the environment” and the nation. However, in late 2020 the “planet” entered the scene with some groundbreaking ABC programs on the fate of animals and ecologies in this time of climate change. Each of these sites displaced “the outback”, one of the most popular locations prior to the rise of natural history animals. They also generated distinct animal modes of being and public concerns. “Nature” was very different from “the environment” and posed far fewer questions to audiences. It was often a purified and timeless space, whereas the environment recognised human actions and impacts and invited audiences to accept some level of responsibility for the fate of animals. Chapter 5 explores the acclaimed natural history series, Nature of Australia: A Portrait of the Island Continent (ABC, 1988). Produced as 20 Introduction SU P Pr ev ie w part of the ABC’s contribution to Australia’s 1988 bicentenary, Nature of Australia made visual the geological and biological processes shaping the continent and the species that inhabited it. It did this in terms that were at once both natural and national. Nature of Australia framed the continent’s geology and wildlife as always already national by weaving national time into the fabric of the continent’s deep geological time. Equally significant was how this extraordinary crafting of national wildlife was deemed “safe” in the controversial year marking the advent of the continent’s European colonisation by inserting First Nations perspectives into the final episodes. First Nations’ opposition to the bicentenary events were significant during 1988 and signalled that the celebration was controversial and contested. Nature of Australia skirted around this controversy by acknowledging Indigenous relations to animals and land management, as well as the environmental impacts of white settlement. These acknowledgements were limited and carefully controlled in order to maintain the dominant focus in the series on nationing nature. Curiously mirroring the processes of colonisation that the bicentenary painfully highlighted, this mode of inhabiting was contingent on the subordination of other temporalities – of the evolutionary, of the geological, of the Indigenous – to national time. In Chapter 6 the recent emergence of a planetary focus in natural history or factual television on the ABC is examined. After the Natural History Unit was disbanded in 2007, production of this type of content was generally outsourced to independent production companies. In December 2020 the ABC ran a themed series of programs titled “Your Planet”. In various on-air and online promotions, the focus of the series was described as “the changing environment and solutions to climate change”. Programs like Big Weather: And How to Survive It (Northern Pictures, 2020), Wild Australia: After the Fires (Northern Pictures, 2020) and Reef Live (Northern Pictures, 2020) all invoked a “sense of planet”;37 that is, a deterritorialisation of the links between culture, place and environment and a recognition of how humans, animals and habitats are mutually implicated in whole earth processes. What was so remarkable about these programs about planetary modes of inhabiting was how they evoked ethical effects that disrupted anthropocentrism 37 Heise, 2008. 21 Making Animals Public and connected animal lives to human lives in ways that suggested mutual implication in forces beyond control. Animals as devices of the public SU P Pr ev ie w The chapters that follow show how ABC natural history animals emerged out of various practices of capture, provocation and inhabitation. However, there is another practice that underpins all these – making these animals public. Investigating the dynamics of this practice and its effects is at the heart of this study. We want to understand how animals were authorised, exhibited and circulated by the ABC and how publics were called into being and gathered around them. Central to our analysis is the assumption that there are diverse publics and forms of publicness and various processes for constituting these. But how can we assess these processes and ascertain their political effects? What kinds of “publicness” did ABC animals realise? One approach would be to critically evaluate how effectively ABC animals represented the ABC Charter; to read these creatures as successful or unsuccessful expressions of public value, public interest or citizen engagement. The problem is that this assumes that public value or public interest are the fixed preconditions for making ABC animals, rather than the contingent outcome of how these animals were visualised and circulated. Or to put this another way: ABC animals didn’t express pre-existing normative values for the ABC, they helped to constitute them. They helped make the fiction of “the public” real.38 They provoked new forms of engagement in audiences who were often configured as citizens or publics through their pleasure and interest in watching animals on screen. This performative approach highlights the ways in which publicness was enacted discursively and practically. Just as animals had to be made real in the ABC, so too did their suitability and credibility as public things – as media objects suitable for realising the ABC’s obligations as a public broadcaster, as things worthy of televisual exhibition. 38 Warner 2002, 15. 22 Introduction SU P Pr ev ie w While “public” may be inscribed in the legislative and institutional frameworks that justify the ABC, and while it informs the wider governmental rationalities of the organisation, our interest is in the ongoing processes and techniques of public-making. There is a governmental dimension to this in the sense that policies and entrenched institutional practices and conventions framed how ABC animals were shown: which animals and modes of visualisation were privileged and why. But there is also an experimental dimension to publicness and public-making, and this is what we are more interested in. Our archival research revealed numerous debates about how to capture and engage audiences who were the constant imaginary collective invoked in the dynamics of provoking animals. Which audiences will be incited by this animal content? How will their curiosity be aroused? How will they be captivated and invited to look? How will they be addressed? This fixation with audiences underpins most televisual production, but in the ABC the audience has the potential to be more than a demographic or ratings measure. It is also a site where various calculations about the nature of publicness – what counts as public value or public interest – emerge. Of course, there are numerous other sites, such as in the commissioning process or in the internal allocation of funds, where these calculations happen, but audiences are often privileged. Even so, audiences and publics are not equivalent or interchangeable. They are, however, related, and it is the way they become related and entangled, and how animals are implicated in this, that is of central interest here. The issue is: How did natural history animals make audiences into citizen-viewers capable of distinct modes of public engagement with their screen realities? Some of the ways this happened in the ABC was through invocations of citizen interest or national identity or by making animals matters of concern. In these situations, viewers were invited to comport themselves as audiences and as publics; sharing common identifications or collective anxieties about animals and their habitats and fate. These particular versions of citizenship or national identity were mediated by the form of public engagement, by the way animal realities were accounted for and how these accounts provoked particular modes of viewing and orientations to animals; how they encouraged audiences to watch as a citizen, or as an Australian. These 23 Making Animals Public SU P Pr ev ie w accountability relations implicated ABC animals in ontologies of governance. They made them engines of translatability between governmental discourses committed to educating, informing and entertaining populations and intimate domestic practices of watching in private homes. “Public” communication was made private through particular modes of address, accounts and animal performances that provoked certain conventions, hierarchies and exclusions. That made for very particular animal realities and animal–human interactions. The types of publics and publicness generated in the ABC were diverse and constantly shifting. A significant focus in the chapters that follow is how shifts in publicness involved different engagements or contact zones with animals. In the early years of making animals televisual, the deficit model of the public was in evidence everywhere. This involved a mode of address and accounting for animals that presumed viewers knew little about them and needed to be educated. This pedagogic model configured the animal as an observable specimen and scientific object inviting citizen interest in its strange other world. Watching TV to learn was normalised as a distinct value and quality of the ABC–audience relationship. Animals realised this governmental relationship when they connected watching wildlife TV to becoming an informed citizen. Numerous other genres of public-making were also in evidence. These ranged from engagements with animals as uniquely “Australian”, as creatures who embodied and expressed the nation and invited national identifications, and, in more recent years, animals as public or political issues. The realisation of animal realities that provoked matters of concern, that posed questions to audiences about exploitation and abuse and species loss, is suggestive of “more-than-human” publics.39 It also signals the escape of animals from the confines of the natural history genre with its limited codes and avoidance of too much controversy, and the emergence of animals as political objects and subjects. At the heart of our analysis is a focus on how different publics and modes of publicness are realised and how animals became shifting public and political beings in the history of the ABC. 39 Blue 2015. 24