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Ponies Out of Place? Wild Animals, Wilderness and Environmental Governance

Powerful institutions in Australia regularly depict the continent as overrun with fauna variously described as ‘feral’, ‘vermin’, ‘alien’ and ‘invasive’. This paper addresses the issue of ‘animal matter out of place’ through the ethnographic analysis of a long-running conflict over ‘feral’ ponies in Coffin Bay National Park, South Australia. As the Department of Environment and Heritage manoeuvred to eliminate this ‘alien’ presence from the ‘pristine’ landscape of the Coffin Bay Peninsula, local residents argued that the herd was a product of this ecological niche and should remain in its ‘natural’ home. The trajectory of the conflict suggests that the expansion of environmental governance from centre to periphery is by no means as predictable and inevitable as is often anticipated.1