Birds of prey: Ruby Ekkel, ‘”Making friends with lyre-birds”: Alice Manfield and settler belonging in Mount Buffalo National Park’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Birds of prey: Ruby Ekkel, ‘”Making friends with lyre-birds”: Alice Manfield and settler belonging in Mount Buffalo National Park’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

11Apr25

Abstract: Alice Manfield (1878–1960) was a naturalist, photographer, and mountain guide on Mount Buffalo, in southeastern Australia. She embodied emerging ways of understanding and relating to native flora and fauna, publishing the first known photographs of male lyrebirds and attributing her success to long-term familiarity with these endangered animals and their environment. For credibility and emotional appeal, she also invoked her family’s colonial heritage: the Manfields participated in the dispossession of the local Mogullumbidj people and other Indigenous groups for whom Mount Buffalo, or Dordordonga, was sacred. Drawing on her pictorial and literary archive, this article argues that Manfield connected nostalgia for ‘pioneering’ settler colonialism with what were framed as more enlightened, intimate engagements with the threatened environment. In postFederation Australia, this combination fostered settler territoriality and elided the displacement of Aboriginal people and knowledge. Through her tours and publications, Manfield encouraged deep familiarity with colonised landscapes and strengthened settler affinity with native animals, who were increasingly recruited as affirming indigenes. More broadly, this article is concerned with changing styles of settler-colonial environmental knowledge production and circulation in the early twentieth century, which drew on notions of friendship and benevolent protection while remaining tied to earlier forms of colonial domination.

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