Becoming Birrarung: More-Than-Human Histories with an Australian River

This thesis presents more-than-human histories with Birrarung (Yarra River). Revealing how human, animal, and plant relationships with Birrarung have changed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I argue that the settler colonial project at the river was curtailed in many ways by the disparate agencies of the river and its more-than-human networks. Deploying and further developing the field of more-than-human histories, I extend the concept of agency to non-humans, each of whom shaped and was shaped by the river’s own histories in conversation with the Kulin and the newcomers, and this thesis examines some of the tensions playing out there.