Thank you thank you friend 😇

@sighmonger.bsky.social was patient and generous, and the article's final section draws on their important work. Sarah carefully read an earlier draft, doubting whether the verb "reckon" belonged in the essay. Final thanks to the anonymous reviewers and journal editors whose efforts were essential!

This first started as a paper for last year's @austhistassoc.bsky.social conference at Flinders Uni. My thanks therefore to Fiona, as well as @lynetterussell.bsky.social and Rohan, and everyone in attendance at the conference for helping me think through these ideas and their implications.

I happened to be working through these questions at the same time as I was reading Sontag's and Fanon's works on language and metaphor, and also at the same time I was doing some RA work on Fiona Probyn-Rapsey's brilliant Cultural Impacts of Introduced Animals project.

ahistorical. In this article, I call the metaphors "shock troops of Empire", "co-colonisers" (among others) into question, arguing that these function in part to assuage settler colonial guilt; and burden the sheep with a colonising culpability that is not their own.

for my PhD thesis. Those writers' characterisations of the sheep they brought with them—when read with animal agency in mind—seemed to tell a different story from that offered by the secondary sources. The demands of that latter genre invariably draw us to metaphors that are in fact unhelpful and

Frozen Love. Once you have heard it your life will be forever changed. It is a masterpiece.

DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR 🎶

(And yes, that is a screenshot of me editing the BN wikipedia page as soon as the news came through 🤓)

It is the quintessence of '70s Cali folk. Stevie's vocals are at once crisp and tremulous. Lindsey's guitar arrangements are complex and complimentary. As a historical artefact the album is fascinating. And a final word of advice: do please be seated and give your full attention to that final track,

Buckingham Nicks is easily one of the most important albums of the twentieth century, shaping the direction of FM and pop/rock for decades to come. It is also one of the most underrated. It never reached the full audience it deserved, and, until today, was never fully remastered and re-released.

So many of the tracks for which the FM c.1974–2018 lineup are best known were born of the Buckingham Nicks recording sessions. "Rhiannon", "Crystal", "Never Going Back Again" (listen carefully to "Lola My Love" and you will hear a guitar part that later became "The Chain" on 1977's Rumours).

The drummer happened to be visiting California in search of a new guitarist and male vocalist to join FM, and on hearing Frozen Love, immediately invited Buckingham to join. He agreed, on the condition that Nicks also be allowed to join. The rest, as they say, is history.

The album is little known, even by FM fans. But the record's closing track, an epic seven-minute duet featuring Stevie's glorious tremolo, Lindsey's searing guitar solo, harmonies, and a swelling string accompaniment, piqued Mick Fleetwood's attention.

on 5 September 1973. The 10-track LP was warmly received, but failed to garner critical acclaim and was ultimately taken off Polydor's catalogue shortly thereafter. Consequently, pressings are extremely hard to come by, and a few CDs were only made for the Japanese market—also very rare.

Lindsey committed all his time to improving his iconic travis picking finger style technique. The duo played gigs together through the early '70s and were generally well received in the emergent soft-rock Cali hippie scene. Their first and only record as Buckingham Nicks was released with Polydor

Stevie worked as a waitress and as a cleaner for the band's manager, Keith Olsen (a reference to which side hustle appears in the opening to a demo version of "Sara" from the Tusk album's 1978 recording sessions), finding time to write lyrics around that busy schedule.

From the band's formation in 1967 until 1974, FM was principally a British blues band. Their lineup changed many times through that period, notably with Peter Green's lamentable departure in 1970. Meanwhile over in California, Buckingham and Nicks had dropped out of college to pursue music full time