I have recently co-produced a multimedia essay on the decline of the critically endangered regent honeyeater. The piece is the product of a collaboration between scholars in the humanities, design, and biology: me, Zoë Sadokierski, Myles Oakey, Timo Rissanen, Samuel Widin, and Ross Crates. It was a pleasure to work with such a talented team of people, and a productive challenge to try to tell this difficult and important story through words, images, and sounds.

You can read/view the full essay here.

The south-eastern corner of the Australian continent was once criss-crossed by the nomadic flight paths of the Regent Honeyeater. For hundreds of thousands of years, they winged their way up and down this vast continent. Today, however, the species is listed as critically endangered and is just clinging to existence. This multimedia essay tells the story of this decline, exploring the complex, co-shaping, relationships between individual birds and their flocks, their songs, and their forests. While these are relationships that might be glossed as being social, cultural, and ecological (respectively), and so belonging to separate domains of life, they are in reality delicately interwoven elements of what it is to be a Regent Honeyeater; relationships that, taken together, have been integral to the emergence and ongoing life of this species. In attending to the breakdown of these relationships in our present time, this essay seeks to develop new resources for storying loss in a time of ongoing extinctions. Bringing text into conversation with images and audio, the essay works to draw the reader/viewer/listener into an encounter with an unravelling world. Ultimately, our aim has been to create an essay in which the conceptual ideas, the design, and the biology of the species described, are brought into some sort of alignment that allows them to become mutually reinforcing elements of a storied encounter. Our reflection on the process of creating this essay are provided in the accompanying exegetical commentary.

This essay is part of a collection of multimedia works being produced for The Australian Journal of Anthropology by the Curratorium Collective (Victoria Baskin Coffey, Jennifer Deger, Sebastian Lowe, and Lisa Stefanoff). Alongside the multimedia essay, we have written a short exergesis reflecting on the collaborative process that is forthcoming in TAJA. You can view the two larger collections that this essay is part of here: FORM and REACH.