In 2017, in remote South-East of Australia, a man called the police and reported that he had murdered more than 400 eagles over the last two years at the instruction of his boss. The news coverage of the criminal trial for this act was the starting point for me to explore the wider deliberate killing of the Wedge-Tailed Eagle. ‘The Killing Sink’ is part true crime, part public act of grieving for what has been lost and part exploration of colonial legacies and how they reverberate to this day.
As I looked into this crime I found increasing instances of people all over Victoria committing this crime. I was able to make a map of all the sites where a murdered eagle was killed in the last 10 years. As I drove to each and photographed it I wondered why people would kill these animals. It was, and still is, unclear why.
I had spent years watching eagles and feeling buoyed up as they soared. On a tough day I could watch them and feel my own worries and nerves floating away. Finding so many cases of people killing them hurt me. I wonder, still, how anyone cannot be moved by something so majestic and immense.