G o a t
Capra aegagrus hicrus
—Feral
Goathand Co-op
In the bioregion of Wombat Forest in Dja Dja Wurrung Country (Victoria, Australia), Meg Ulman and Patrick Jones from the collective “Artist as Family”, who are part of the Goathand Co-op, engage in a multispecies and commoning practice between goats and humans. The term commoning encapsulates diverse struggles for the commons—shared land and earthly resources that belong to, and affect, the whole community. By recovering and reclaiming this terminology, the collective promotes public space as a shared natural and cultural resource. I view the commoning performances as weaving relations with and through the land’s fluid multispecies and elemental assemblages. Through managed goat browsing and sensitive land caring practices, the Goathand Co-op is helping transition weedy, fire-prone forest into biodiverse, grassy woodland.
Wombat Forest has a complex ecology of native and non-native species where non-native gorse (Ulex), broom (Genisteae), and blackberries (Rubus) thrive in a fire-prone forest of gum trees (Eucalyptus), in part at the expense of the native ecosystem.
Goats (Capra aegagrus hicrus) were first introduced in Australia through European settler colonialism in 1788. Now feral goats (descendants of escaped, abandoned, or released domestic livestock) can be found across 28% of Australia. Unmanaged goats have a major impact on native ecosystems through over-grazing and competition with native animal species as well as domestic livestock. Asking who is feral and for whom tells us something about the dominant biopolitical order of inhabiting the world.
The state categorizes the goats as “pests” and the plants as “problem weeds.” These categorizations are found on the institutional website of the State Library Victoria (Australia) in reference to the goats and introduced vegetal species. Such terminology has the taint of bioxenophobia. Such binary thinking of good-bad, alien-invasive does not hold in that bioregion. By introducing a managed goat herd to the public lands, the Goathand Co-op is reimaging the promises of what we deem to be pests and weeds, redirecting the impact of goats towards multispecies commoning practices in the Wombat Forest.
Despite this human management, however, it is the goats who run the show: thriving on the introduced vegetal species, moving through the commons, and weeing and excrementing at will. In doing so, they are building the soil while lessening the thick non-native vegetation where the seedbank of native species has been waiting for the right conditions to flourish. The goats often tend to escape human delimited patches of the commons by jumping through the fence. A message sent by someone reads: Goats out. We have to run to attend them. Sometimes it feels like they are managing us.
Michał Krawczyk
Griffith University
—Meanjin (Brisbane, Australia)