Tools, Troops or Escapees? Cattle Trafficking in the Early Years of the Colony of New South Wales, Australia

The colonisation of ‘Australia’ by the British began in earnest with the arrival of the First Fleet in January 1788 in Warrane (Sydney Cove), to establish a penal colony on the lands of the Gadigal. The Fleet consisted of eleven ships, over 1,000 Europeans (mostly convicts) and many hundreds of animals collectively referred to as ‘cattle’: pigs, goats, sheep, horses, poultry, and cows, calves and bulls. Many of the ‘cattle’ were purchased at the Cape of Good Hope (Cape Town) in November 1787 and transported onboard the ship Sirius . They were intended as a population base for animal agriculture in the new colony, and part of a process that Alfred Crosby refers to as ‘ecological imperialism’, a framing, we argue, that has led to a misrepresentation of livestock animals as co-colonising accomplices and tools of colonialism. Through a close reading of the ‘wild cattle’ escapees of the early New South Wales colony, and foregrounding accounts of Indigenous people’s encounters with them, we highlight the significance of the cattle’s desire for escape, arguing that it is more apt to understand pastoralism as colonialism’s tool and not the animals trafficked by it. This shift in focus, we argue, draws attention to the non-neutrality of (ongoing) pastoralism as a colonial practice and provides more solid ground for acknowledging animal agency and autonomy, including from historiographic framings that situate them as mere tools, troops or weapons in two-sided colonial violence.