On Species

The symposium focused on new approaches in the Australian humanities to questions of species and ecology, and looked at the ways in which encounters with species play themselves out in the creative arts -fiction, poetry, visual art, theatre, and so on-and in historical and cultural practice. Ken Gelder looks at Edwin J. Brady's delightful 'The Friar Bird's Sermon: An Australian Fable' (1897) in the framework of colonial native species classification and description. For Stevens, the exhibition playfully challenges normative understandings of biology, ontology and gender and offers an alternative to the hetero-normative dualisms of male-female courtship, reproduction and sexual difference.