ABSTRACT
The Australian colonists’ proud claim to eat meat three times a day was sustained by a radical reshaping of the Australian environment after 1788. Flocks and herds of introduced animals grazed, rooted and roamed their way outward from ports of arrival, crafting, along with their human co-colonisers, a new landscape of pastures, yards and sheep walks. In both celebratory and critical histories of nineteenth-century pastoralism, mounting tallies of sheep and cattle numbers have been relied upon to represent the advance of this process. This chapter complicates the narrative by drawing attention to an introduced species which came to be seen as unfaithful allies, focusing on the animal trouble caused in the Hunter Region of New South Wales during the turbulent 1840s and 1850s by free-living pigs. Drawing upon colonial statistics, impounding records and newspaper correspondence argues that animals which blurred the boundary between domestic and wild extended the reach of the meat-made environment beyond the paddocks into townships, gardens, hills and gullies, with implications for native plants and animals and the Indigenous people who relied on them.
