The Creative Practice Circle research group, of which I am part, has been tinkering with a project called Not on My Watch, in which we aim to produce creative works related to or representing a threatened species from our region. I have chosen to focus on the platypus.
The upper reaches of the Wambool (Macquarie River) are ideal platypus country. A mix of open and sheltered slow-flowing freshwater coming down from higher country, with well-vegetated and largely native planting. And yet, like virtually all parts of NSW, platypus are infrequent here. They are sighted occasionally both in urban areas and elsewhere, but are much diminished from earlier times. They have an IUCN Red List status of near-threatened.
Enigmatic and beautiful, graceful and yet clumsy. They are unable to see underwater and instead equipped with electromagnetic receptors highly uncommon in mammals.
But how to engage with the platypus? I could try (harder) to see and photograph one in the wild. I’ve tried and failed to spot them on many occasions. But although I enjoy photography, I cannot claim to be especially talented at it. I could turn to a medium which I know well: LEGO. But are plastic bricks the best way to represent this species? No.
The story of the platypus, like many Australian animals, is closely bound to colonisation. Choking of waterways, hunting, agricultural overuse, dams, introduced flora and fauna. These are the challenges the platypus has faced at our hands. And so I decided to do what humans really do best: wander.
Walking has long been an artistic, researchful practice. Even as our urban environments are ever-more geared to motor vehicles, walking enables us to know them better. We can get closer, go slower, see more, talk and listen more at a more human scale when we walk. And to be sure, the conception of walking should not include only the typical upright gait of humans, but also other forms of slower, human-scale locomotion, including the use of assistive devices.
Walking is also a racialised and gendered practice. Walking into a space is an act of claiming that space, at least temporarily, and certain individuals lay greater claim to space through the faults of history, social organisation, money, and power.
And so I walked. I decided this could be my way of figuring out the platypus and its place in the world we have claimed. I did so accompanied by a mobile phone and a handful of applications installed on it. These included the activity-tracking app Strava, on which I had pre-planned a route. I also used a handful of other apps during the walk including an audio recording app, my phone camera, the birdwatching app eBird, and the augmented reality app Pokemon Go. Each of these exists in an intertwined socio-technical system that includes GPS satellites, the global internet, media and technology companies, and many people around the world. Each of them was also present with me during my walk.
There is a practice around the app Strava of using the system’s GPS functions to create art on the digital landscape. My pre-planned route was in the rough shape of a platypus – one of many attempts I’d had to create that shape amid the rigidity of my town’s streetscape in the weeks leading to this walk. The practice of Strava Art represents a curious intersection of technology, body, and environment.
I voice-recorded reflections along the way and these are interspersed through the remainder of this blog.
“It’s a very interesting challenge because in a format like this, you can’t retrace your steps. You can’t undo lines that are done. You’ve just got to adapt as you go.”
There’s something profoundly revealing about this form of physical-digital creation. Unlike traditional art forms, Strava Art doesn’t permit erasure or correction—the body’s movement through space becomes an immediate, permanent inscription. The GPS technology that traces our movements creates a curious paradox: whilst enabling a new form of creative expression, it simultaneously constrains us within its digital parameters. Each step, each turn, becomes data to be captured and displayed. As I navigated the route, the physical landscape and its other users frequently resisted my digital intentions.
“I’m conscious of the potential conflict with other road users like when crossing corners and roundabouts… some of my movements might seem erratic or unusual to others.”
The urban environment presented its own challenges—road crossings, fences, private property—all forcing diversions and compromises to my planned route. These barriers speak to the broader tension between human infrastructure and wildlife corridors. The very obstacles that altered my platypus drawing mirror those that have contributed to the decline of actual platypus populations in the Wambool.
“Even though I’ve walked this road a lot, standing here and looking at this angle makes me really concerned about getting it right. I just don’t think it’s safe or wise to cross the bridge. Which means I have to go behind the fence. And that’s really going to give me two right angles in the back of the Platypus. I don’t know whether the best option right now is to follow the original route and use a technical cheat code. Or alter the route a bit.”
In quieter moments, away from roads and buildings, the project revealed unexpected pockets of nature thriving within urban spaces. At a cricket field’s edge, birds gathered in impressive numbers despite the distant sound of race cars at Mount Panorama-Wahluu.
“I can see why it’s quiet. The ground is boggy. So I’m sure plenty to eat for a bird willing to dig in the mud for it which is most of them.”
The juxtaposition of wealthy car racing enthusiasts at one end of town and people camping by the river at the other highlighted questions of access, priorities, and our relationship with natural spaces. Who gets to determine how we use our shared environments? How might we better align human needs with those of wildlife?
“We need to draw a link between preserving. Wild places and wild things. And the health and happiness of human beings.”
Perhaps this is what made creating a platypus through GPS tracking so meaningful. As my body navigated the landscape, sometimes awkwardly, often constrained, I became more aware of how our built environment shapes movement for all creatures. The platypus, that remarkable mammal that lays eggs and hunts underwater with closed eyes, represents a kind of biological innovation that defied expectations. In tracing its form across the landscape where it once thrived freely, I found myself questioning how we might innovate our relationship with technology and infrastructure to allow all species, including our own, to move more freely.
My completed Strava Art platypus is both art and provocation. It is a digital ghost of a creature increasingly rare in waters where it once was common, mapped by a human body negotiating the very infrastructure that contributed to its decline.
