Noticing Animals: Tales from a pilgrimage through more than human Sydney

In this special lecture, Associate Professor Nancy Cushing will provide an overview of her Coral Thomas Fellowship, 2024 – 25 project at the NSW State Library. She highlights some of the animals that have helped to make Sydney’s history and how they have enriched human lives. In doing so, she seeks to bolster efforts to sustain multispecies living in urban places as we face an increasingly uncertain future together.

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 furryeared, 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.

This will be a version of the lecture originally delivered as the Coral Thomas lecture on 22 October 2025.

Also available via Zoom - but please register so that we can let you know of future similar events:
Online Via Zoom: Zoom meeting ID: 840 8370 1154 Password: 814478