Feral ecologies: performing life on the colonial periphery.

It is said that the European colonial project was in part an attempt to propagate "new Europes" elsewhere on the planet. Having failed to remake the tropics in its own image, European attention was turned to those temperate regions girdling the Southern Hemisphere, which included the south-west and east of Australia, and almost all of New Zealand. The aim of this paper is to examine the performance of life in the colonial periphery. It seems that a peculiar sensitivity to the performative dimensions of life has been percolating through the former colonial for some time, and not always in conversation with discourses on the performative elsewhere. What is notable, particularly at Europe's "antipodes," is the almost pre-emptive conjoining of interest in human and non-human performances. Indeed, as Australian/New Zealand artist John Lyall proposes, the introduced organism running loose in an alien environment might be taken as the paradigmatic experience of the Australian settler society. Lyall has been exploring the permutations of the "feral": the transplanted entity that begins its tenure of a new land as a familiar, domesticated being before passing over the frontier in the direction of the wild and unknown.