The digital story Thylacine Dream is intended to stimulate critical thought and investigation into the relationship between species extinction and scientific communities. As such, the work responds to the cross curricular priority within the Australian Curriculum to explicitly address and ensure teaching and learning extends beyond understanding the ways social, economic and environmental systems interact to support and maintain human life and towards a deeper felt appreciation and respect for the diversity of views and values that influence sustainable development by participating critically and acting creatively in determining more sustainable ways of living. ( ACARA, 2020)
My experience during professional placement at the Melbourne Museum working with the team at the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Australia has shaped the focus of my teaching practice as a Teacher Librarian towards using cutting edge technology to increase access and engagement of communities with the biocultural heritage that is our collective asset. In particular, my mentor Nicole Kearney has impressed upon me the importance of communicating in the sciences in order to better achieve sustainable outcomes to meet the challenges of the era of mass extinction. One of the ways, educators can guide and support learner inquiry is by reinforcing learning materials with links to persistent digital identifiers, which allow readers access to source documents that often reveal lost memories and impressions that reveal the intimate relationship between humans and native species in Australia.
As such, I have chosen as the subject of the short digital story, the now extinct species of the thylacine. Significantly, recent advances in genetic engineering have seen a radical revisioning of the potential of revitalisation of the 3,300 year old marsupial. The intent of the narrative, therefore, is to present the audience with a cyclical narrative that examines both humanity’s capacity to extinguish and reanimate with science. The motivation is to have audiences reconsider the driving pulsation of scientific inquiry, to question the kindness of curiosity, as it were.
Likewise, the piece is intended to stimulate critical discussion around the intersection of technology and memory, contextualised within the contemporary crisis of species loss. The paradox of progress and taxonomic subjugation is intended to be produced through the juxtaposition of archival footage of the last living thylacine, Benjamin, and a preserved corpse confined within a glass tube. As such, the piece also provokes dialogue around the Australian experience of incarceration and freedom, science and nature.
Overall, Thylacine Dream presents an opening venture as an author in the space of digital literature. As a reflection of the impact of the focus on Inquiry based Learning at Charles Sturt University, I would like my text to function as a node which allows students deeper access into the network of natural history that is so much a part of the Australian story. In this manner, learning communities may begin to reflect on the past choices and motivations which have lead to the devastating consequences of mass extinction we face today.
Implicit within any conversation regarding historical relationships to land and country are the impacts of colonisation. Thylacine Dream takes a critical perspective on the issue of colonisation by examining the difference between intersection and vivisection, acknowledging the massacres of progress which extended into the lives of native animals. I would like to take the time to further incorporate and engage the biocultural perspectives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in future work in relation to alienation in biosemiotic relationship between humans and animals in Australia.
Finally, most significantly the work seeks to engage viewers with imagining the restorative potentials of new technologies, which through their engagement with information and data sets sourced from not only the remains of ancient specimens but also vast literatures biocultural heritage, preserved in text and significantly when discussing issues of cultural preservation, oral literature. By embedding the holographic image of the reconstructed thylacine at the end of the work, it is intended to shift audiences towards the realisation that when underwritten with the values of sustainability, expressed in the Australian curriculum, technological progress can play a powerful role in reconciling an ever increasingly disbalanced ecosystem, both in Australia and globally.
Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA]. (n.d.) Sustainability (Version 8.4). https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/cross-curriculum-priorities/sustainability/