On the 7th September every year, National Threatened Species Day honors the 1936 death of the last known Tasmanian Tiger (Thylacine), to raise awareness of all our native species currently staring down extinction.
Day of the Species is a whimsical confronting biodiversity art initiative started by Carmel Killin on the 19th May 2019 with one tiny drawing of a spotted tail quoll.
This art activism project is an ongoing nation-wide effort to represent each and every plant and animal on Australia’s national threatened species list. As of July 2025, that number is 2,055.
Individual threatened species are hand-drawn onto the back of 3 x 7 cm recycled cardboard. That’s about half the size of a credit card. Tiny!
To date, over 300 art and nature lovers from across the country, and a couple from Europe, have rendered nature’s most vulnerable into tiny 2D existence using textas, paints, coloured pencils and even collage. As more species are constantly added so too does the contributors list grow.
HOW IT STARTED. Carmel first came across Australia’s national list of threatened species when she moved to Melbourne in 2017 and started volunteering with the Wilderness Society.
At that time there were more than 1,700 threatened flora and fauna in the government’s database known as the EPBC Act list.
At some point she started to wonder what it would be like if you could actually SEE all of these species, together, in the one room. What a visual and emotional smack in the face it would be. More engaging than this dry government list of the doomed.
On 19th May, 2019, feeling annoyed and frustrated by the results of the federal election, Carmel sat down at her kitchen table and cut a 3 x 7 cm rectangle from a tea bag box and quickly drew a very rough, weird -looking quoll onto the back of the packaging.
HOW IT PROGRESSED. In February 2020, with unprecedented fires still burning in parts of Australia, Carmel ran a couple of drawing workshops in Melbourne and the Day of the Species project finally sparked some interest.
Then the pandemic hit and suddenly a lot of people were keen to get out their coloured pencils and paints to fill in some of those long lockdown hours.
Day of the Species was set to launch in September 2020 in Melbourne. A world-wide pandemic stepped in to make sure that didn’t happen.
Carmel found herself residing at her sister’s place on the central coast of NSW during the lockdown so on national threatened species day and over one weekend in September, with strict CoVid regulations still in place, forty or so people got to witness the extraordinary sight of all our threatened species (1,799 at that time) huddled in solidarity in the surreal ecosystem of a granny flat styled into a gallery at a private residence in regional NSW.
Below is a 3 minute film about this project. You can find a longer (older) version here.