Seeing the forest and the trees - Environment/Australia
John Blay; 6/2/08;
The Forest Wars; By Judith Ajani; MUP, 368pp
A Million Wild Acres; By Eric Rolls; Penguin, 465pp
And They’re Still Falling: Women’s Voices from the NSW South East Forests; Compiled by Olwyn Broder, Moira Collins, Venie Holmgren and Anabel Macdonald; edited by; Claire Lupton; Ginninderra Press,144pp
Patriots: Defending Australia’s; Natural Heritage; By William J. Lines; University of Queensland Press, 416pp
Convincing Ground: Learning to Fall in Love with Your Country; By Bruce Pascoe; Aborginal Studies Press, 304pp, $39.95
Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers; By Philip Jones; Wak Textefield Press, 440pp, $49.95 (HB)
“We drive beside the river towards Eden to enterthe battlefield. The bush is cratered (we pass through the lens of the evening newsreel) trees torn and blasted, gullies ripped clean, topsoil bulldozed into roads.”
These visions, recorded in a notebook in 1972, were my first taste of the forest clear-felling near Eden in southeast NSW. The experience changed the course of my life. And I was not alone: such scenes brought into play an army of volunteers prepared to fight the forest wars.
See: The Australian Literary Review; No Internet Text
Time and again I’ve been drawn back into those forests, walking their length and breadth to make note of the changes. Indeed, the past six years seem mostly to have passed in the wilds under canvas.
After being fixed on one region for so long, I figured it would come as a breath of different air to see how others are writing on the vexed themes of nature and conservation. In these desperate climate-change times, can literature help us measure what is important to keep on behalf of future generations?
One of the traditions of writing about Australian countryside has been in favour of an Australian order of things, the particular harmony of it, and against the colonial governments and importation of foreign ways by the squatters and their minions. The true wisdom and sense of fair play belong to those in touch with the land, such as the ordinary selectors, the battlers, Tom Collins, Dad Rudd and the drover’s wife. Some writers, including Judith Wright, Mark McKenna and, most recently, Alexis Wright, have also sought to explore how white society might find accommodation with natural and Aboriginal Australia.
Charles Harpur started it. He was the first native-born Australian writer and the first to sign himself “An Australian”. In the 1850s, adding notes to his poem The Temple of Infamy, he thundered:
… such political earthworms always identifying social progression with the vulgar “go-ahead” principle. But let them not be trusted … Wherever there are palaces there are hovels. It should be our wisdom then in Australia to have as few of either as possible. Wherever mansions are numerous, and gentlemen (in the useless sense of the word) as “plenty as blackberries”, there also poor houses abound and paupers starve in heaps .. .
In notes to The Kangaroo Hunt Harpur lamented the extinction of many birds, comments that were the inspiration for Judith Wright’s exquisite poem, Extinct Birds.
Noting how Harpur thought himself immortal, being a poet, she asks is he not immortal where she found him, “in love and hope along his careful pages? / the poet vanished, in the vanished forest, / among his brightly coloured extinct birds?”
And likewise, in the same spirit, I must note Eric Rolls’s contribution to writing about the Australian landscape. Reviewing A Million Wild Acres in 1981, I wrote: “Few could read this book and not have their perception of Australia deepened.” I would go higher in my praise today, for his work on the beloved Pilliga Scrub has proved a classic. Before something can be kept for the future, we have to know what there is to value. In the first paragraph he writes: “It is busy with trees, with animals and with men. It is lonely and beautiful. It is a million wild acres. And there is no forest like it.”
He proceeds, over 500 plainspoken, wonder-filled pages, to prove this point. After the book was first published by Sue Ebury and Robert Sessions at Thomas Nelson, Penguin purchased paperback rights in 1984. Sales over the years have been solid and perhaps the most fitting tribute to Rolls’s achievement is that it remains in print. Although Rolls, who died in October aged 84, ranged more widely in later works, I would suggest he was all the time working to illuminate that place to which he held a long-term connection. It was his story, an emblematic part of his heart.
Some aspects might be approached differently now, others seem dated. But it’s untouchable. The narrative with its pastoralist-as-poet over-view is rock solid. As he said then, so truly, by way of epigraph: “I have built a forest. It is the opportunity to build what one loves into something permanent that makes this very difficult game worthwhile.”
In The Forest Wars, Judith Ajani would apply economic reasoning and a view of past mistakes to restore order to the countryside. A forest industry research and policy expert at the Australian National University, she employs straightforward prose to lay down the view from ecology headquarters. We see the politicians and public servants in Canberra stumbling about in search of policies. Key players in the states fumble their opportunity to deal with competition between native forests and plantations. We see the influence of forest philosophers Richard Sylvan and Val Plumwood and their seminal 1973 work (as Richard and Val Routley), The Fight for the Forests: The Takeover of Australian Forests for Pines, Wood Chips and Intensive Forestry, but meantime, the chip-mills are chomping through native forests while politicians, unionists and big business broker the next deal. After due consideration Ajani astutely cuts the Gordian knot, recommending we end the clear-felling of native forests and move to plantation processing.
Occasionally we glimpse the troops on the ground, as when Ajani describes some of those who helped turn the tide more recently in Western Australia:
Doctors for Old Growth Forests and Men and Women in Suits spoke as responsible and concerned citizens, like (celebrities Liz) Davenport and (Mick) Malthouse. The campaigning positively engaged Aboriginal leaders, religious groups, scientists, the National Trust of Australia (WA), many activist groups in the southeast, some local councils, tourism associations, parts of the bureaucracy, Rachel Cleland (widow of a founding member of the Liberal Party), the Greens, the Democrats, the Labor Party, the National Party and a breakaway political group called Liberals for Forests under the leadership of Dr Keith Woollard .. .
This is a complex web of political engagement and Ajani does well to provide a clear-sighted view of the machinations. But what are the battlers saying at ground level? In And They’re Still Falling: Women’s Voices from the NSW South East Forests some 23 women tell of their involvement in fighting for forest conservation. It demonstrates the pains, perils and joys of a remarkably diverse group. The rawness still shows through. We hear of careers foregone, marriages breaking down, arrests, camaraderie, breakthroughs, court cases and the quiet desperation of not knowing whether their sacrifices will have any influence on saving the forests.
Anabel Macdonald tells of the empathy her group felt for the families of loggers and truck drivers, as well as the shock of ending up in Sydney’s Mulawa prison. Petra Thompson tells of the time that “one of the Department of Forestry guys drove up so close behind me trying to bully me off the road, that he hit the back of my horse’s legs with his four-wheel drive”. And ecologist Heather Meek writes that “plant and animal surveys in the region had been grossly inadequate or non-existent or token, because the forestry authorities believed they should not be required to do them. They had lost sight of their responsibility as custodians of the total ecology of the forests.”
Maya Middlewater adds: “I also have nothing good to say about the peak groups because, to put it plainly, they shafted us. I know I did a lot but it never felt like it was enough. I wanted to do more. As it was we used more of our resources than we could afford. Personally, I am proud of what we did and glad too.”
The tone is unpretentious as these women look back on the battles to save the Tantawangalo and Coolangubra, their celebration tinged with a hint of regret that they did not achieve more. They brought such diverse approaches to saving their forest landscapes that I was surprised to find on the cover of Patriots: Defending Australia’s Natural Heritage the claim that author “William J. Lines charts the emergence of a national movement, whose campaigners and members are forging a new Australian identity enmeshed in nature and committed to its survival.”
How strange. Lines goes on to paint a picture of heroes and villains. Only a few of the former meet his rigorous if somewhat eccentric standards. He’s happy enough with Milo Dunphy but feels compelled to give Judith Wright a few slaps: “With a dogmatism deriving from her blinkered view of justice for Aborigines, she would not tolerate any questioning of the myth of the ecological Aborigine.” Jack Mundey is deluded linguistically. Bob Brown is an “incorrigible humanist”. Nugget Coombs and anyone else who happened to stand up for Aboriginal causes cops the biffo.
Lines writes off many as “self-obsessed humanist academics isolated in concrete academies”. Those who don’t share his view are condemned as “ignorant and careless of nature”. He sees how a “new class of intellectuals consolidated their group identity through adherence to left-wing politics, minority causes, women’s liberation, anti-racism and Aboriginal land rights”. Lines argues that “the focus of what came to be known as the environment movement shifted. The issue was no longer about saving nature from humans: environmentalists were more interested in saving humans from themselves and building a heaven on earth.” And so forth. His stance is holier-than-thou and he clearly does not include humans in nature.
While Lines has some interesting points to make, they get lost along the way. The reader would be forgiven for thinking that there might be only one philosophical stance to Australian conservation. Or that the movement is monolithic. Among the welter of generalisations Lines claims that “governments would never act in the interests of conservation merely for the sake of conservation. Scrupulously dedicated to the conquest of nature, they would only conserve when forced to by political pressure.”
Certain governments, perhaps. He seems to have overlooked that in 1985 Jeff Angel on behalf of 130 conservation groups called for 60,000ha, or one-quarter of the southeast woodchip zone in NSW, to be set aside as national park. But in January 1997, after initiating a comprehensive assessment and within two years of his election as premier, Bob Carr stood at Pipers Lookout with a view of the forests to announce the 90,000ha South East Forests National Park, and that another 30,000ha would soon be added.
Equating conservation with nationalism, Lines tries to make a case that Aboriginal people are anti-conservation. He suggests that notions of special Aboriginal connections with the land are romantic cant and a kind of racism. He would debunk what he terms “the myth of the ecological Aborigine”. After veiled hints regarding dugongs and high-powered rifles, his evidence comes in the assertion that “the Kuku Yalantji clan said it would apply to hunt cassowary and other wildlife in the Mossman Gorge and Daintree national parks”. When sensationalist extracts from Patriots were published in The Australian, Noel Pearson used his column in the paper the following week to rubbish Lines’s arguments as “examples of the extreme thinking that can pass for mainstream debate in Australia”.
Pearson knows full well that Aboriginal culture is not homogenous. It is not a good idea to cherry-pick to make a thesis. In the South East forests, for example, Aborigines have long played a vital role in conservation issues. Biamanga, a significant new national park overlooking Bega, only came about after long agitation against the logging of Mumbulla Mountain by Yuin Elders, including Guboo Ted Thomas and Percy Mumbulla. This was the first significant battle of the South East forest wars. In May 2007 the park, along with nearby Gulaga, was handed back to traditional owners, who will continue management with the National Parks and Wildlife Service of NSW, where more and more Kooris are finding employment. This is not something that happens overnight.
It has been an unfortunate but common trait, from first contact on, to idealise the Aboriginal people and in the next breath to demonise them. See, for example, the writings of surveyor-general Thomas Mitchell, which refer to the “noble savage” who was “as free as nature first made man”, and yet promote the loss of that freedom.
Sweeping generalisations do not hold up when considered locally or specifically. My experience in the South East forests has shown me it is not wise to consider natural history without reference to Aboriginal land management as the cycle of things goes back to well before the coming of Europeans. Similarly, firestick farming is often thought to mean the old Aborigines burned everything from horizon to horizon. Not so. Read the vegetation. Practices varied from place to place and there were mediating factors. This is a big continent, with many climate zones.
Whether or not the Kuku Yalantji clan do hunt endangered cassowaries, it has no relevance whatever to the Yuin people’s connections with land thousands of kilometres away. Unfortunately, Lines’s misguided text might be used as justification to sever connections with country, to end appropriate cultural practices and for the winding back of land rights.
In the official report of his 1841 journey westwards from Melbourne, the chief protector of Aborigines, G. A. Robinson, wrote that: Among the remarkable places on the coast, is the Convincing Ground, originating in a severe conflict which took place a few years previous between the Aborigines and the whalers on which occasion a large number of the former were slain. The circumstances are that a whale had come on shore and the natives who feed on the carcase claimed it was their own. The whalers said they would “convince them” and had recourse to firearms. On this spot a fishery is now established.
In Robinson’s narration we find the genesis of Bruce Pascoe’s powerful meditation, Convincing Ground: Learning to Fall in Love with Your Country. Its themes centre on his personal explorations of conflicts in Australian identity and Aboriginality. How deep is its influence? What is it that has made us what we are? What owns us? To what extent do we all share identity as a result of our nationality? Where are we going?
On a more fundamental level he refers to how Robinson, beguiled by the night fishing expeditions in which Aboriginal people built fires in the bows of their canoes, noted, “the brilliant fire lights, like floating meteors, have a ‘beautiful’ appearance”. Pascoe adds: These craft were cheap and well fitted to the waterways of Australia but their style has never been replicated by Europeans, preferring instead the heavier and clumsier “boat”, and these days powered by outboard motors designed for power rather than manoeuvrability and noiselessness.
Pascoe keeps his focus on the regions west of Melbourne and his writing is strengthened by this particularity. He describes the stone, turf and bark houses of the Port Phillip districts, some of which could have accommodated 40 people, and relates how their inhabitants developed advanced systems of aquaculture and food preservation.
Of Bunurong and Cornish descent, Pascoe’s point of view is deeply, proudly Australian with all the paradoxes that involves. “People of broken and distant heritage like me,” he writes, “usually make the mistake of barging into their rediscovered community expecting to be greeted like the prodigal son. The reality is more difficult, humbling and troubling than could ever be imagined.”
This is much firmer ground than the ranting of Lines. It is local, as conversational as a yarn around the campfire, at times profound, wry or passionate, and concludes on a patriotic note: Let’s bury the stone and steel hatchets and fall in love with our country, let’s share the guiltless embrace of true love while remembering that there is a huge difference between loving your country and simply loving your lifestyle.
Ochre and Rust is as beautifully produced and illustrated as it is written. Philip Jones expresses the country and its people through artefacts that cross cultures. In shimmering prose he makes a significant contribution to the Australian pastoral tradition by including detailed facets of Aboriginal life. Here, I can only consider one part of his remarkable work. The final chapter describes an unprepossessing cake of red ochre, now kept in the South Australian Museum, and how it came to be collected from the Pukardu ochre mine in the west Flinders Ranges in 1904. Jones goes on to observe: The red ochre expeditions can be regarded as archetypal religious pilgrimages. Apart from being long and arduous (up to 500km), the journey was directed to a religious goal of fulfilment involving catharsis and renewal, and the ochre was prized for its own sacramental, transformative qualities. For several weeks, while the expedition lasted, its members also shared a spirit of camaraderie and adventure common to all religious pilgrimages.
Conflicts occurred when cattle and sheep runs appeared across their routes, and traditional water and food resources were spoiled. Not all the new settlers were against the travellers’ interests, for some pastoralists supported Patrick Shanahan’s plea for authorities to conserve the “ochre hill, the contents of which appear to be (to the Aborigines) of as much import as the Bible is to Christians”.
Calling upon a few strange artefacts, Jones evokes not only information but the ideas passing between the cultures of the collectors and the collected. His story grows stems and branches until it opens up like a desert rose among mysteries that lie at the heart of the continent. He places people in landscapes we will never see the same way again.
Isabel McBryde has also written extensively on the ochre trade and exchange networks as an archeologist concerned about conservation of Australian heritage. In particular, she draws attention to Spain’s successful nomination of the Pilgrim Route El Camino de Compostela for World Heritage listing in 1993. In this country we recognise monuments and the like. But do we have procedures for conservation of our long-distance places, many of which have remarkable, multi-layered cultural values?
Such odysseys allow deeper appreciations of landscape, which is to say the country we inhabit and what makes it distinctive in a globalising world. The themes resonate across the continent. Even in the South East forests, history intertwines with ecology to reveal how the countryside has come to be the way it is. Ancient pathways that have been used for countless years can still be discerned in places there. The old-growth trees remain standing in national parks only due to the actions of many thousands over a quarter of a century.
Insofar as we now have a scattering of reserves and parks across the continent, the time has come to fit the jigsaw pieces into broader visions. Surely, state borders should not interfere with conservation issues? And while Lines would rewild the continent regardless of the Aborigines, Pascoe and Jones would, I suspect, more have us move on together and acknowledge a past that stretches further back than a few hundred years.
But do the storytellers, ecologists and poets who attempt to explicate the country make any difference in this day and age? It seems, for example, Tim Flannery has in the long term, while Richard Flanagan made a more immediate impact with his essay in The Monthly last May on the Tasmanian pulp mill debate.
But in skirmishes to come the heroes may well be the specialist researchers who can point new ways forward, academic writers such as Ajani, as much as the battlers standing up for their own bioregion, telling it like it is in the fight against water wastage, weeds, dieback, land degradation, population growth, feral pests, bushfire, disease, the effects of extreme weather events and all the other challenges to sustainability that assail those parts beyond the limits of cities.