Culture and nature at the Adelaide Zoo : at the frontiers of 'human' geography

This paper develops a cultural critique of the zoo as an institution that inscribes various human strategies for domesticating, mythologizing and aestheticizing the animal universe. Using the case of Adelaide, South Australia, the paper charts the mutable discursive frames and practices through which animals were fashioned and delivered to the South Australian public by the Royal Zoological Society of South Australia. The visual technologies at the Adelaide Zoo are documented from the time of menagerie-style caging in the late nineteenth century, through the era of the Fairground between the mid-1930s and the early 1960s, up to the contemporary era of naturalistic enclosures when exhibits such as the fanciful World of Primates continue to craft the means for the human experience of nature. Woven into the story are more general themes concerning the construction of nature under colonialism, the gendered and racialized underpinnings of 'human' boundary-making practices in relation to 'non-human' animals and that form of power and possession known as domestication.