ABSTRACT
Of the many connections between war and control of nature in the Australian context, responses to the native Australian plague locust (Chortoicetes terminifera) stand out due to the extent and ubiquity of their militarisation. Colonists inherited the Judeo-Christian placement of locusts in a military frame, and in the context of enduring anxieties over the enigmatic and challenging interior from whence the locusts came, settler Australians waged war on locusts using strategies, techniques and even personnel and vehicles deployed in war on humans. This chapter follows the ways in which conceptual and material connections between war on people and war on locusts changed with Australia’s various military engagements. The war on locusts was initially conceived of and operationalised in conventional military terms, as defensive action against a hostile invader. But from the 1970s, after three decades of almost uninterrupted engagement in warfare overseas, Australia was finally achieving the centralised control and increasingly the technological means to make the unruly inland a state space, exemplified by coordinated surveillance and mobile strikes on locust breeding events in their arid heartland. By the 2000s, the locust control rhetoric closely mirrored that of the war on terror. This history of human approaches to an invertebrate species highlights the entanglement of war on humans and war on nature as a key element of modernity.
