Conserving Home: The Birds and the Bay: A more-than-human history of the migratory shorebirds of Warn Marin/Western Port

This thesis engages with the role that migratory shorebirds have played in the conservation of Warn Marin/Western Port from colonisation to the present day, and the role that Warn Marin/Western Port plays in the conservation of migratory shorebirds. Placing the more-than- human history (O’Gorman and Gaynor 2020) of the birds’ presence in the bay at the centre of this thesis reinhabits the history of Warn Marin/Western Port with the untold/dismissed stories of the more-than-human world (Lorimer and Hodgetts 2024), and establishes the bay as a multispecies ‘home place’ (van Dooren and Rose 2012). I begin by establishing Warn Marin/Western Port as a multispecies home, and trace the birds’ presence in the bay from pre-colonial times to the twenty-first century. This is placed in the context of Australia’s general categorisation of wetlands since colonisation as extractivist sacrifice zones (Reinert 2018), and examines the role shorebirds have played in disrupting this categorisation by co- creating the bay’s identity as an internationally significant wetland. I examine what makes a place precious, how perceptions of what constitutes ‘home’ in both a human and more-than- human sense fluctuates in Western and Indigenous views of connection to Country, and how these ideas play into the framing of conservation battles. This is informed by an understanding of Warn Marin/Western Port as Bunurong Country. Awareness of the shared imaginary of home, or ‘more-than-human site of coexistence’ (Barry and Suliman 2023), may help to break down ideas of human/nature dualism and motivate future conservation action, and this study investigates if and how understandings of migratory shorebird habitat as home has informed conservation efforts.