Nancy Cushing, Noticing Animals: Tales from a pilgrimage through more than human Sydney. скачать в хорошем качестве

Nancy Cushing, Noticing Animals: Tales from a pilgrimage through more than human Sydney.

Nancy Cushing, "Noticing Animals: Tales from a pilgrimage through more than human Sydney." 14 November 2025 While reading original manuscripts or the latest scholarly works in the State Library of New South Wales’ Mitchell Reading Room, one cannot help but notice a steady stream of visitors who are there not for research but simply to admire the space. They walk in; their eyes soar; their jaws drop; and they slowly move around the perimeter of the room absorbing the atmosphere. Up high on the eastern wall, the particularly observant will notice three stained glass windows depicting scenes from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. What they might not register is that the most prominent figures in two of the windows are horses. Designer Arthur G. Benfield also included other animals around the borders of the windows, one of them an incongruous furry-eared, apparently smiling, koala. For me, as an animal historian writing about Sydney’s urban history, these windows serve as a handy metaphor. They reinforce that humans like to have other animals with us, whether on journeys, in our homes or in our art, but we tend to insist that this is on our own terms. In this lecture, I talk about Sydney’s colourful parrots in the early colonial period, traces of animals on twentieth century maps and a twenty-first century art installation to try to bring animals out of the background and emphasise their roles, significance and subjectivity. Nancy Cushing is Associate Professor of History at the University of Newcastle, Australia on Awabakal and Worimi country. An environmental historian whose interests range from coal mining to human-other animal relations, she was co-editor of Animals Count: How Population Size Matters in Animal-Human Relations (Routledge 2018), coauthor with Kevin Markwell of Snake-bitten: Eric Worrell and the Australian Reptile Park (UNSW Press 2010) and recently took a slight diversion by writing a book on the history of crime in Australia (A History of Crime in Australia, Australian Underworlds, 2023). Her current project is A New History of Australia in 15 Animals (Bloomsbury). In 2024 and 2025, she is the Coral Thomas Fellow at the State Library of NSW, researching the non-human animals of Sydney. Nancy is on the executives of the Australian Aotearoa NZ Environmental History Network and the Australian Historical Association and a member of the NSW Working Party for the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Unless otherwise noted, seminar content © the presenter. Recording © The University of Newcastle. All rights reserved. https://www.newcastle.edu.au/school/h... This and other presentation recordings are available from our YouTube channel, ‪@historynewcastle2792‬    / @historynewcastle2792