The Killing Sink is Matt Dunne's debut monograph — a forensic and elegiac account of the systematic killing of wedge-tailed eagles in Victoria, tracing the psychology, tools, and human motivations behind a crime hiding in plain sight across Australia's vast agricultural interior.
About This Book
In 2017, a man reported to police that he had killed more than 400 wedge-tailed eagles over two years at his employer's direction. That disclosure became the entry point for Dunne's sustained investigation into a pattern of destruction that repeats itself across Australia — where eagles are trapped, shot, and poisoned in service of agricultural interests, the distances involved making detection rare. Part true crime, part public grieving, The Killing Sink moves through the sites of these killings, tracing the history and psychology that normalise the destruction of native species. It is a document of what Australia continues to trade away, and a sustained question about whether any of it is worth the cost.
Key Features
- 88 pages of photographic and investigative documentary work tracing eagle killing sites across south-east Australia
- Published by Void, 2017
What You'll Discover
- How a single police report in 2017 exposed a pattern of wildlife destruction that is far from isolated — repeated across rural Australia wherever eagles and agricultural interests collide
- The tools, traps, and methods used to kill wedge-tailed eagles, and the psychology of those who carry out these acts under instruction
- A photographic reckoning with the sites of destruction — the landscapes of south-east Australia rendered as scenes of ongoing, largely invisible crime
- The deeper historical continuity at work: the killing of native species as an extension of Australia's colonial agricultural logic, still playing out in the present
About the Author
Matt Dunne is an Australian photographer and documentarian. The Killing Sink is his first monograph, developed through sustained fieldwork visiting the sites where eagles have been killed across Victoria and south-east Australia.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 88
- Dimensions: 206 x 270 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9786185479213
- Publisher: Void
- Publication Date: 2017
Perfect For: Documentary photography collectors, readers drawn to Australian environmental and cultural history, and those interested in the intersection of landscape, crime, and ecological grief.