Do Campo’s practice operates with ‘one foot in the field and one foot in the archive’, and his previous projects have included birdwatching, research into the history carried by animals, video and performance, often involving ecological communication. In his paintings, do Campo traces the history of Sydney’s introduced animals across time from the 19th century to the present. He follows the movement of this expanding menagerie from the Royal Botanical Gardens in the Domain (founded 1816), to the Zoological Gardens Moore Park (1884), and then finally to Taronga Zoo, in Mosman (1916). Mr Macadam waiting for a girlfriend (RGB) depicts the rarely spotted Powerful Owl that resides in a Macadamia tree in the Royal Botanical Gardens. The small rat depicted in the lower left corner highlights how a zoologist or birdwatcher can locate the Powerful Owl by looking for bone remains at the base of trees. The matter-of-fact titles of the works leave our imagination free to wonder about the fantastical pairings of these animals and plants – the owl and the macadamia, indexes of migration, and of our place in the story of colonisation.