Island Twenty-Three Great Southern Island: Caring for Country

(Extract from: Muse of the Long Haul Thirty-One Isles of the Creative Imagination)

Copyright, Dr Ian Irvine, 2013 all rights reserved. All short extracts from the texts discussed are acknowledged and used under fair usage related to review and theoretical critique contained in international copyright law. Cover image: Spirit of the Falls by Ian Irvine, copyright 2006, all rights reserved.[Photographed in Gariwerd National Park, Victoria.] All other images are by the author including the image of the One Shilling Black Australian stamp. Publisher: Mercurius Press, Australia, 2013. NB: This piece is published at Scribd as part of a series drawn from the soon to be print published non-fiction book on experiential poetics entitled: Muse of the Long Haul: Thirty-One Isles of the Creative Imagination.

Island Twenty-Three Great Southern Island: Caring for Country

A persons perceptions of reality are constrained or limited by encult uration in a particular society or sub-group. In a society that operates on what Laughlin et al calls a fully polyphasic consciousness, all experience is meaningful, regardless of the phase of consciousness (waking, dreaming, trance) during which it arises. In fact, reality, conceived as existing at multiple levels, may be verified by being experienced in different phases of consciousness. Many Westerners, on the other hand, tend toward monophasic consciousness, viewing the normal waking consciousness as the only phase appropriate to the accrual of information about self and world. 1 Some trained listeners have said that a well sung song that contained the correct structural pattern enabled them to touch, reach out, feel and even smell the Ancestor as tho ugh he or she were right there in front of them.2

I didnt originally intend to write this chapter. Many non-indigenous artists, writers and academics seem driven to prove a connection to indigenous Australianssome to the point of manufacturing an Aboriginal lineage! Likewise, Ive met some New Agers whose professed interest in Aboriginal culture was little more than an excuse to package aspects of indigenous spirituality, in particular, for the global spirituality industry. Many Aboriginal people are understandably puzzled by a mainstream given to pogroms of outright racism at one minute and bizarre idealisations the next. Inevitably distrust and cynicism act as legitimate first line defences. Having worked closely with Central Victorias Aboriginal community between 1999 and 2003 it sometimes seemed most appropriate, as a non-indigenous person, to stay silent about Koori perspectives on life, society, the cosmos etc. and simply get on with the job of teaching units and coordinating courses. In fact one of the most important lessons I learnt as coordinator of BRITs Koori unit concerned knowing when to shut up, when to speak little but to the point and when to advocate full-throttle. My Koori managers in the unit, firstly Barry Farey, and later, Peter Kildea, taught me much about this skill, and much else besides. As a non-indigenous person in a key educational position for Central Victorias Koori community I learnt a lot about the day to day stresses experienced by some Koori people. I also learnt a lot about indigenous resilience, sense of community and resistance to systematised oppression. Im writing this chapter because the years coordinating VET courses and teaching units to hundreds of Central Victorias Koori students changed me as a person. The experience also changed the way in which I experience Australia. The changes were gradual, subtle and permanent. My experiences in BRITs Koori unit re-politicised me in certain ways at the same time as it highlighted to me the central importance of community and relationship to people. Barry Farey, BRITs KLO3, was my main introduction to the Koori world-view. He is a tall, warm-hearted and shrewd man who always has the best interest of his people at heart. Back in 1999 he had very little to say to me about Koori spirituality, preferring instead to talk to nonindigenous staff about the necessity of increasing opportunities for his people. Our job as educators was clear: to assist students seeking an education so that they could eventually find dignified work and thus look after themselves and their families. Give a young Koori guy a
1

Lynne Hume, Ancestral Power: The Dreaming, Consciousness and Aboriginal Australians , p.4, Melbourne University Press, 2002. 2 Lynne Hume, Ancestral Powers, p.94, Melbourne University Press, 2002. 3 Koori Liaison Officer

decent job, he told me one day, and you watch, half of the other so-called problems everyone is talking about will disappear. He gets money each week, he feels worthwhile, part of society, he can look after his family, hes not bored and feeling excluded Barry was talking a language I understooda language that demands we address economic and race based forms of oppression. Politics matters to Aboriginal Australiano concession was ever gained from the nonindigenous community without activism, consciousness-raising, organising and sometimes a fight. Ever since 1788 its been unite or go under, maintain hope or perish with despair. Its sometimes exhausting to work in a Koori organization because youre constantly battling subtle, insidious forms of mainstream racism. In retrospect, I knew nothing of real value about Aboriginal Australia before working at BRITs Koori unitdespite a long term interest in Aboriginal culture and spirituality. Thankfully there great staff working there at the timeboth indigenous and non-indigenous who could quickly get me up to speed on a range of issues. 4 Despite being a member of the oppressor culture I was always made to feel welcome, valued, useful, etc. whilst working in the unit. In many respects the unit was a mini Koori world-unto-itself. It had to be to attract and keep students who may have had a tough time in mainstream education due to being forced to conform to non-indigenous cultural codes, expectations, etc. In the Koori unit traditional and contemporary Koori values of relationship, family and community held sway, contributing to an extremely positive educational environment for both students and staff. The alienation, competitiveness and managerial aloofness found in many mainstream workplaces was absent in the Koori Unit. It was probably the best job Ive ever had in terms of staff-management relations. Inevitably I did learn a lot about traditional Aboriginal beliefs during my time in the unit. In particular we went on several camps to important Victorian and New South Wales sites Gariwerd National Park, Lake Condah and Lake Mungo, for examplethat helped me understand the link between Koori history, modes of social organisation and spiritual beliefs. Looking back on that time, what I learnt from books about Koori history, kinship systems and spirituality merges with memories of exploring rock-art sites, millennia old fish-traps and sanddunes thick with ancient cooking sites (also the bones of extinct animals and fish eaten tens of thousands of years ago by Aboriginal people). At a certain point I began to see the Australian landscape differently. Slowly it struck me that alongside the dispossessions and massacres perpetrated on Aboriginal people another disaster involving the destruction of indigenous flora and fauna had also taken place. In the early 2000s the Central Victorian landscape suddenly made sense to me. I began to see a postapocalyptic landscape of extinguished species, deforestation, increased salinity (due to rising
4

For example, Di Dempsey (fellow writer and Melbourne Age book reviewer), Bruce Stevens, Stuart Williamson, and Katie Christensen.

water-tables and land-clearing) and so on. The idyllic oil painting clich of a paddock with sheep and a lone straggly gum no longer seemed idyllic to mebecame almost a celebration of vandalism. Where were the other trees, the under-storey, the native grasses and the native animals? It was as though being among the Koories allowed me to see the land as they saw and understood itas a result there were some melancholy truths to confront. Around the same time I became interested in the poetry of Western Australian poet John Kinsella and from 1999 on we exchanged occasional emails and books. His is an uncompromising vision of precisely the melancholy I describe above. His poetics represents a post-Romantic, post-colonial truth-telling about country. In his poetry and prose he refuses to see the Australian landscape in terms of either sentimental Romanticism or the productivity paradigms of Western economic expansionism. In 2004 or so I also became interested in the Jindyworobak poets in an attempt to trace the collapse, in particular, of British ways of seeing the landscape among twentieth century nonindigenous poets. I eventually delivered a paper on the topic at an ASAL5 conference in Perth (2006). In part I was exploring themes raised in a conversation Id had with a local Koori elder. At one point Id asked him: What is the most important thing a non-indigenous person living in Central Victoria can do to show respect for Aboriginal culture? Hed thought about my question for a moment before answering fairly definitively, One thing would be to take care of the land. It is not my place to discuss what I learnt about Koori culture and spirituality during my time at the Koori Unit. For many Victorian Koories the old beliefs and knowledge systems remain active and thus it is up to them to share it or not as they wish. Suffice to say that I came across many interesting resources concerning traditional Victorian Aboriginal beliefs. Due to the devastating impact of colonisation on indigenous people in this part of Australia, however, the task of reconstructing languages and belief systems has been more difficult than elsewhere. Nevertheless, important archaeological and linguistic work has been done and much of this knowledge is finding its way back to Koori communities. I remember feeling very excited when I came across Aldo Massolas 1968 classic Bunjils Cave whilst working in the Koori Unit in 1999. The book links specific Koori beliefs and stories (which are different of course for the different Victorian tribes) to particular aspects of the countryside. The entire landscape including its flora and faunalooked different to me after reading that book. For traditionminded Koories stories exist in the landscapethe landscape is their library. The rest of this chapter will discuss the unique way of seeing country that crept up on me due to my time in the Koori Unit. Caring for Country Re-visioning Central Victoria As a result of living out in the bush; my contact with the local Koori community and reading Australian poets like Judith Wright and John Kinsella, Ive become more and more interested in the unique ecology of my regionthe box ironbark country. I am not a trained ecologist or botanist, rather Im a poet/writer and a landowner (caretaker?), however, my gradual cognitive and poetic reprogramming clearly opened me up to a deeper ecological understanding of this country. Its an opening up that has progressed in fits and starts over almost quarter of a century. At every stage creative and eco-psychological perspectives seemed to work in tandem.

Association for the Study of Australian Literature.

There have been distinct phases to this process and each phase has involved either: 1) prolonged and direct experience of aspects of the box-ironbark region unencumbered by what Ill call an urban consciousness, and 2) encounters with particular people or texts that have reshaped my cognitive and emotional understanding of the landscapeIve already mentioned discussions with Koori people, also camps to the Gariwerd National Park, Lake Condah and Lake Mungo. However, I should also mention visits to a local native plant nursery, as well as encounters with a number of books on local flora and fauna: e.g. Chris Tzaross Wildlife of the Box-Ironbark Country; Bendigo City Councils Indigenous Plants of Bendigo, and Lunt, Barlow and Rosss Plains Wandering. I also came across a fascinating article by John Bennett entitled Forest of Mirrors and, more recently, the eco-poetics of US poet Gary Snyder as well as the theorising of D. Abram, in The Spell of the Sensuous, have influenced the way I think about the natural world. For many years I was more or less soul mute to the Australian landscape. In retrospect I carried European Romantic notions of landscape/nature around with meI guess this was the foundation of my youthful environmentalism. I wanted to feel a part of Central Victorias natural world but was unable to without, in a sense, attempting to recreate European notions of a green Eden. On the blocks of land I co-owned near Wedderburn I wanted pine trees, oaks, European fruit trees, etc. and felt devastated when they refused to grow in the arid landscape. I felt most at home in the bush during the winter with the rain falling! Such perspectives also coloured my poetic treatment of Central Victorias landscape. The keys to overcoming my alienation turned out to be the experiences and readings detailed above. They gave me a new understanding of country. I found at a certain point that a process of revisualization occurreda peculiar phenomenon that I still find hard to describe in purely rational ways. I say this because in retrospect every aspect of this opening up has involved an acknowledgement of tragedyof a deep and abiding sadness in the land, its flora and fauna, and, on occasion, encounters with metaphoric ghosts and apparitions that spoke of an ecological apocalypse. These days I sometimes wonder whether my initial difficulty in responding positively to the Box-Ironbark country was not so much to do with my lack as to do with the fact that on the whole it no longer exists in anything like its original state. Some statistics are in order, today only 17% of the original Box-Ironbark vegetation remains, i.e. 170,000 hectares of one million at point of contact (Tzaros, 2003, p.29). Similarly, of South East Australias original grassland plains and grassy woodland, once a major part of the Central Victorian ecological system only 1% remains covered in native vegetation, needless to say the biodiversity repercussions have been profound, 8 of the 26 mammals (almost a third) that depended on grassy ecosystems (excluding bats) are either extinct in our region or totally extinct, e.g. the Pig-footed bandicoot, the white-footed Rabbit rat and the lesser stick nest rat. The situation is also serious for many indigenous plant species, for example 31% of Victorias endangered plant species are plains species. Three plains plant species are now totally extinct. (Lunt 1998) Top-soil erosion and

salinity problems continue apace throughout the region and we are now feeling the effects of over a century of water wastage. London Plane trees still line many of Bendigos roadways with their massive thirst for council delivered water in summer! During my three year stint in Wedderburn, an old gold mining town north of Bendigo, I remember coming across whole paddocks of fire-blackened tree stumps. Many trees had been cut down for firewood or for use in mines during the 19th century. The original box and ironbark woodland, the thin and slow growing whipstick plantations (pocketed with ruddy mallee trees) have never quite recovered. The under-storey of these former woodland areas is virtually nonexistentfor most of the 20th century the ideal settler landscape consisted of vast paddocks of introduced grasses or unsustainable irrigation dependent crops. To this day there are farmers who refuse to plant native vegetation belts between sheep runs or crop paddocks, despite the evidence that failing to do so represents a kind of ecological suicide. Even as a farms remaining red gums, ironbarks or box trees sicken showing the familiar symptoms of die back due to rising water tables, loss of under-storey, introduced fertilizers, salinity, etc. some farmers refuse to fence off areas for juvenile native trees and under-storey. In a sense then our entire region resembles the site of a profound natural disasteran eco-system that has evolved over millennia is suffering due to what amounts to cognitive dissonance among its European inhabitants. Change is certainly occurring, but not quick enough for many environmentalists. It takes a conscious act of imaginative reconstruction to even begin to see this region as it was prior to invasion; as it appeared with its ancient trees and a naturally evolved under-storey of wattle, tee-tree, myrtle, mint-bush and so on. Similarly one has to think creatively to imagine grasslands and grassy woodlands thick with native grasses, heaths and daisies. The local Koories say that in the old days the water systems were crystal clear. The descriptions of the Bendigo Creek prior to invasion are astoundinga new Eden! said the colonists, though that did not stop them muddying and eventually destroying the original chain of billabongs in one short year due to the gold rush. An important re-visioning picture for me can be found in the book Indigenous Plants of Bendigo (p.9); it depicts regrowth grey-box with an intact under-storey of native grasses and plantsparticularly the indigenous Rosy Heath-Myrtle which is shown in full flower. What struck me in looking at that apparition of an image was the vivid and diverse colours associated with native woodland in flower. To me the picture symbolised all that has been lost. Our five acre block consists of mature grey-box, yellow-gum and one or two redgums. The land was used for sheep farming for most of the past fifty or so years and thus despite the relatively intact tree canopy was in pretty bad shape when we bought it. The absence of under-storey and native grasses, and the existence of soil compaction by the sheep, both leading to erosion, were the major issues. Over the past four years, as weve learnt more about what makes for healthy box woodland, and as drought and climate change have shifted the goal-posts, so to speak, weve

gradually weaned ourselves off firstly, water thirsty trees and secondly, non-native trees. Weve concentrated on restoring the under-storeymostly through choosing native plants: silver and black wattles, she and bull oaks, blackwoods, and so on. At the rear of the block weve set aside 2 acres for under-storey restoration the canopy being semi-mature yellow gum. I want to suggest that this care of country has been a profoundly creative experience, thats to say a profoundly poetic experience. On a purely practical level living in the country has given me first-hand knowledge of the behaviours of animals, insects and plants under different seasonal conditions. This has been a form of experiential learning. From a more theoretical perspective Ive found that engagement with the land on its own terms has brought home to me the urgent need for a functional survival oriented eco-poetics (and not just a theoretical one such as one finds among many urban academics and nominal environmentalists whove never lived for prolonged periods in the country). I would suggest that such an eco-poetics would necessarily implicate a transpersonal relational sub-poetics. Summary In concluding this chapter I want to quote from two thinkers who seem to me to best articulate the problematic relationship between diseased philosophical paradigms and our current ecological crisis. Each emphasises different aspects of a possible solution. The first thinker, Gregory Bateson, influenced my environmentalism many years ago, whereas the second thinker, Abram, has been a more recent influence. In a chapter entitled Pathologies of Epistemology from his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Bateson wrote:
Darwin proposed a theory of natural selection and evolution in which the unit of survival was either the family line or the species or sub-species or something of the sort. But today it is quite clear that this is not the unit of survival in the real biological world. The unit of survival is organism plus environment. We are learning by bitter experience that the organism that destroys its environment destroys itself.6

Bateson wrote this in 1973 and to me the passage articulates an awareness that Western paradigms concerning self and other have been in crisis since the Industrial Revolution at least due to ideological errors deeply rooted in Occidental culture. He called for a radical redefinition of self and other (including nature) based upon an expanded notion of relational reciprocity (in particular between humans and nature). Such a notion of mutuality marks a shift from a paradigm based upon unhealthy forms of greedy individualism to one based upon mutuality in relational exchange, it is not so much survival of the fittest as we all survive in
6

Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p. 459.

some way or none of us survive at all. Abram, in The Spell of the Sensuous, acknowledges these early environmentalist critiques of Western intellectual paradigms but takes aim at abstract thinking generally as a root cause of the crisis. As a solution he looks to indigenous animist traditions for a way out of our alienated experience of the land:
Only by temporarily shedding the accepted perceptual logic of his culture can the sorcerer hope to enter into relation with other species on their own terms; only by altering the common organisation of his senses will he be able to enter into a rapport with the multiple non human sensibilities that animate the local landscape. It is this, we might say, that defines a shaman: the ability to readily slip out of the perceptual boundaries reinforced by social customs, taboos, and most importantly the common speech or language in order to make contact with and learn from the other powers in the land.7

Elsewhere in the book he argues that Western secularism must be revolutionised (he seems to advocate a new animism rooted in a linguistic revolution) if we are to correct the current mismatch between human thinking and the realities of global ecosystem stress. Abram traces our current problems to a gradual locking out of animal and plant others from consciousness that began around 1,500 BC due to the shift over from oral (and pictographic writing) culture to phonetic language culture. He argues that the process was more or less complete by the time of Plato and Aristotleever after a labyrinth of mirrors, of abstract human thought reflecting back upon itself in self-perpetuating alienated loops. As a writer/poet such ideas have sent me in search of expansive, non-oppressive modes of creative expression (the search has formal aspectsi.e. How to express contentas well as thematic aspects, i.e. What content to express). From a more local perspective, I suspect that non-indigenous Australians will remain incapable of understanding indigenous Australians if we insist on living inside language codes that implicitly: a) justify oppression; b) deny the traumas inflicted on Aboriginal people in the past and c) inherently alienate us from non-exploitative encounters with country.

Abram, D. The Spell of the Sensuous Vintage, 1996, p9.

Paper Daisies A decade after sheep ripped root and stem from dry earth the paper daisies return. At first they congregate in the shade of large gums then slowly, tentatively they recolonise grassland and clay-quartz incline. Before long they form a yellow throng conversing at noon with native bees, under still summer skies These paper daisies make the landscape cooler externalise without effort the subtle cosmologies of yellow and gold and soften the furnace days the pitiless days

The One Shilling Black

After a week the Kulin chose to meet with Batman, who trod their lands with a hungry eye. Batman communicated his desire to purchase land in exchange for blankets, steel blades, mirrors, beads and a tribute, or rent yearly Land purchase had no meaning to the Kulin However, they had a notion of welcome and temporary usage for strangers. Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800, Richard Broome

The One Shilling Black is seminal, it depicts a tall Koori classic pose, noble, etc. wise and ambivalent, within a dark landscape, (how fitting?) and the Yarra like a blacksnake wriggles between the worlds The (apparent) Symbolism: Progress Made Manifest but also, Guilt Assuaged Look, have we not built a City of God out of the black mans suffering? What was the Koori thinking? The white designer is clearly troubled He shows us Melbourne from the Kooris perspective, from his side of the Yarra, and the city, la ville tentaculaire, is absorbed into black a semiotic intrusion or mere coincidence made euphonic and seedling by history? These days the One Shilling Black is coveted by collectors and historiansto the general public it whispers a nation still mired. And more besides Civilisation is not intimate Civilisation is a fabulous abstraction a mere conjoining of geometric forms,

labyrinthine, a terrifying maze (up close). for black and white alike.

Author Bio (as at June 2013)

Dr. Ian Irvine (Hobson) is an Australian-based poet/lyricist, writer and non-fiction writer. His work has featured in publications as diverse as Humanitas (USA), The Antigonish Review (Canada), Tears in the Fence (UK), Linq (Australia) and Takahe (NZ), as well as in a number of Australian national poetry anthologies: Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Ink Books) and Agenda: Australian Edition, 2005. He is the author of three books and co-editor of three journals and currently teaches in the Professional Writing and Editing program at BRIT (Bendigo, Australia) as well as the same program at Victoria University, St. Albans, Melbourne. He has also taught history and social theory at La Trobe University (Bendigo, Australia) and holds a PhD for his work on creative, normative and dysfunctional forms of alienation and morbid ennui.