It was as much the story of the criminal Elias Rosenwax as it was the tale of heroism featuring the Fijian policeman, ‘Evarama’, in 1871. The real-life event included all the literary elements necessary for a narrative of high adventure: a criminal, a chase, an exotic location, subterfuge, and the criminal’s eventual capture with the assistance of an unlikely hero in a thrilling climax. While the textual trace of this event remains all but forgotten, the extant nineteenthcentury ephemera detailing the encounter endures as a cogent genre of literature. This paper explores the incident with a view to detailing Evarama’s major significance in the performance of Fijian identity during a period dominated by grand colonial narratives featuring highly stylized ethnographic displays of the ‘native’ Other. His cultural impact as a Fijian, his reification in popular culture as a celebrity, and his active engagement in the construction of his public persona counterpointed the static fashioning of Fijian identity so common in the era’s ethnographic exhibitions, public performances, photographic displays and anthropological presentations. Evarama’s popular presence in colonial culture makes it possible to identify the operation of a particular kind of fashioning of culture: individual expressions of racial identity as social performance — a practice of the public self.

Val Plumwood (1939Plumwood ( -2008) ) was a founding intellectual and activist in the global movement that came to be known as ecofeminism.

During Baz Luhrmann's childhood in a small country town in New South Wales in the 1960s and 1970s, his father operated the local picture theatre. It's a detail much mentioned by Luhrmann in interviews, and often included in biographical sketches of him. His Wikipedia entry, for instance, notes that: 'He was raised in Herons Creek, a tiny rural settlement in northern New South Wales, where his father ran a petrol station and a movie theatre, both of which would influence his son's film-making' ('Baz'). An interview with Luhrmann that appears on various fan websites likewise states: 'Mark Anthony Luhrmann grew up in rural Australia and it was at his father's movie theatre that he first became enthralled by the world of movies and the power of story telling' (Fischer

Honeybees have long excited the interest of philosophers and natural historians. In ancient times tracts on them were written by Aristotle, Aristomachus, Cato, Varro, Pliny, Palladius and Virgil, and in the early modern period scientific studies began with Jan Swammerdam, who combined scientific method with piety in his Bible of Nature (1737), Raumur who devoted a volume to honeybees in his Notes to Serve for a History of Insects and Franois Huber, who did not allow his own physiological blindness to hamper his New Observations of Bees (1789) (Maeterlinck). For ardour, however, no one could surpass Maurice Maeterlinck, whose Life of the Bee (1901), probably the most famous of all treatises on the honeybee, suffuses the idea of the bee with nostalgia for Edenic vistas of fruitand flower-laden domestic abundance and tranquillity.

A portrait of Australian flying fox life in the Anthropocene illuminates startlingly familiar stories. These animals are participants in most of the major catastrophic events, as well as contestations about rescue, of contemporary life on Earth: warfare, man-made mass death, famine, urbanisation, emerging diseases, climate change, biosecurity, conservation and local/international NGO aid. They are endangered, and are involved in all four of the major factors causing extinctions: habitat loss, overexploitation, introduced species and extinction cascades. My account of flying foxes in Australia rests on the understanding of species articulated vigorously and eloquently by Donna Haraway (42): we and others are entangled in knots of species who are co-shaping each other in layers of reciprocating complexity. I seek to engage both the living warmblooded beings whose lives are threatened and the excruciatingly dynamic deathscape that is surrounding them/us. Positioned, like much of life on Earth today, in zones of increasing conflict and terror, the lives and deaths of flying foxes tell us that there is no way out of entanglements within multi-species communities. Rather than seeking to erect more impenetrable barriers against others, relational ethics for living and dying in the Anthropocene urge us to assume ever greater mutuality and accountability as intra-dependent members of the suffering family of life on Earth.

Australian Humanities Review is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal featuring articles, essays and reviews focusing on a wide array of topics related to literature, culture, history and politics.

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