Ferals and gentrification in urban Australia: place, death and memory

In the city of Newcastle on Australia’s east coast, murky distinctions between feral and native, public and private, domestic and wild are being delineated and firmed as the city rapidly gentrifies. The suburb of Stockton, a peninsula with deep working-class roots, has long been considered an urban frontier, a liminal zone for plants, animals and humans. Here, ferality is entangled with place, with frontier-ness. As the area undergoes changes in step with gentrification in Newcastle and coastal Australia more generally, species once tolerated are being identified as risky and then eliminated. In this article, we focus on two feral species subject to elimination in Stockton, the Thorn Tree and the Breakwater Cats. We argue that shifting nature-city boundaries impacts urban frontiers during periods of gradual, then rapid, gentrification, disrupting the relationship between frontiers and feral ecologies. Second, while literature tends to focus on feral plants or animals, we consider the ways that hardening nature-city boundaries can make both plants and animals vulnerable to elimination. Third, despite their elimination, the Thorn Tree and the Breakwater Cats are subject to memory practices in the community, suggesting that even as the urban frontier amalgamates with the rest of the city, memories of feral co-habitants remain for some members of the human community.