Paper short abstract:

Across diverse landscapes in Western Australia, interspecies relationships between cattle and humans are foundational to settler-colonial and emergent forms of belonging. We explore contemporary manifestations of these interrelations, including how they play out in land justice and conservation.

Paper long abstract:

Of Australia’s early settlers, Mayes (2018, 5) points to the central role of livestock and agricultural production in “establishing moral and ontological proprietorship” and a sense of home on unceded and unfamiliar land. Today, there are as many cattle as people in Australia, and cows continue to play a key role in the legitimisation of settler nationalism and belonging, albeit in emergent, and often contradictory ways. Drawing on ethnography from the Kimberley to the Great Southern, we examine how social and ecological relations in Western Australia’s diverse landscapes are mediated through and by cattle. We argue that cattle and conceptualisations of them continue to connect and divide Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, including in struggles over land justice. Cattle are also at the heart of conservation debates, through claims of their potential to destroy or, conversely, regenerate land. We describe how in their relational framing with humans, the treatment of cattle spans commodification to love and connection within farmers’ variable value systems, and we seek to understand how settler-descended and more recently arrived non-Indigenous Australians make sense of their place in the contemporary nation via these interspecies relationships.