Howling into the Abyss of Settler-Colonial Absurdism

A Decolonial Reading of "The Werewolves of Dusty Gulch"

By Dr. Aria Solidarity-Jones, PhD (Oxon), MA, BA (Hons), Certified Ally (Gold Tier)
Published in The Progressive Ploughshare and simultaneously in the Decolonial Dustbowl Review

At first glance, The Werewolves of Dusty Gulch presents itself as whimsical Australiana: a vampire emu plumber, a wallaby apprentice with titanium knees, a hacked rolling pin broadcasting Honklander propaganda, and a clandestine lycanthropic initiative known as Project Howl.

This reading is, of course, profoundly naive.

Beneath its veneer of rustic absurdity lies a deeply troubling text that reproduces settler-colonial assumptions through the intersecting frameworks of eco-socialism, critical animal studies, post-human hydrological justice, infrastructure decoloniality, and what I have elsewhere termed plumbocentrism.

Let us begin with the ducks.

The so-called "Dusty Nine" are not merely ducks.

They are water-adjacent beings occupying a liminal ecological space that has historically resisted anthropocentric categorisation. Their "professional elimination" is framed as mystery rather than atrocity, thereby erasing both their agency and their quack-based lived experience.

RATTY NEWS SPECIAL INVESTIGATION

THE WEREWOLVES OF DUSTY GULCH

Project Howl, the Hacked Rolling Pin, and the Mystery Beyond the Black Stump

By Roderick “Whiskers” McNibble
Chief Investigative Correspondent, Dusty Gulch Gazette
(Expendable, slightly chewed, currently stress-munching popcorn)

It began with murder.

One ordinary evening, the Dusty Nine were bickering over breadcrumbs beside the pond as only ducks can.

By sunrise... there were only feathers.

No blood. No struggle. No heroic last stand.

The Dusty Nine had not been eaten.

They had not been chased. They had been... eliminated.

Professionally. Surgically. Terrifyingly.

Whatever had visited Dusty Gulch that night had not come looking for dinner.

It had come looking for ducks. And the story I discovered will astonish all of our readers, even hardened boom bang bash watchers...

The Ghost Returns

The first thing he noticed was the silence.

Not the silence of an empty harbour. Sydney had never been a quiet place. Even in the deepest hours of night there was always a murmur -  the distant pulse of traffic, the whisper of footsteps along the water, the restless heartbeat of a city that refused to sleep.

But this was different.

This was the silence that comes when the voices have gone.

The fog drifted across the harbour, thick and silver, softening the lights of Circular Quay until the city seemed like a memory of itself. The towers stood above the water, shining and new, but beneath them lay another Sydney -  a city of timber, stone, sweat and dreams.

A city built by hands that had long since disappeared.

Then, through the mist, came the sound of wood against water.

Slowly, impossibly, a ship emerged.

It belonged to another age.