‘King of Fish’ or ‘Feral Peril’: Tasmanian Atlantic Salmon and the Politics of Belonging

The focus of this paper is Tasmanian Atlantic salmon, and the ways in which this object has served historically to enact, to produce, and to challenge key boundaries and continuities in the construction of Tasmania as a distinct place in the world. Tracing the object and its trajectories in time and space, I shall argue that the making of place involves practices, images, and experiences that connect and disconnect a place to significant places elsewhere. It is argued that both species and the spaces they inhabit are sustained by hybrid networks which stretch across time and space and thus escape the timeless boundedness and genealogical purity inherent in contemporary visions of nature.