After the whey-faced anonymity
Of river-gums and scribbly-gums and bush,
After the rubbing and the hit of brush,
You come to the South Country.
As if the argument of trees were done,
The doubts and quarrelling, the plots and pains,
All ended by these clear and gliding planes
Like an abrupt solution.
And over the flat earth of empty farms
The monstrous continent of air floats back
Coloured with rotting sunlight and the black
Bruised flesh of thunderstorms.
Air arched, enormous, pounding the bony ridge,
Ditches and hutches, with a drench of light,
So huge, from such infinities of height,
You walk on the sky’s beach.
While even the dwindled hills are small and bare,
As if, rebellious, buried, pitiful,
Something below pushed up a knob of skull,
Feeling its way to air.
Landscape in this poem finally gets inside. It would be difficult to say whether what is being presented here is the image of a real landscape – precisely described, objectively there – or an interior landscape just breaking surface, just coming into existence, into apprehension, of which the external one is a reflection. The poem in fact makes no distinction between the two, and part of its beauty and the pleasure it gives us is that it allows us to enter this state too, in which all tension between inner and outer, environment and being, is miraculously resolved.
‘South Country’ is an important moment in the development of consciousness in Australia. It is a poem that grants permission to us all to be men and women for whom the inner life is real and matters. And it has a special significance for writers: there is a sense in which the whole of modern Australian writing is ‘feeling its way to air’ in this poem – and not just poetry either, but fiction as well – in the same way that a whole line of Russian writers, as Turgenev tells us, came out from under Gogol’s overcoat. But on this occasion what I want to point to is the resolution of that tension between inner life – mind – and the world of objects; between consciousness and environment.
It is in moments of high imagination and daring like the writing of ‘South Country’ that what Henry James called our ‘complex fate’ is most clearly visible, but as a tension that has been embraced, as a complexity that has been put to use, a condition made available to all of us as an agency for grounding ourselves both in a particular world and in our own skin.
3
Landscapes
Towards the end of the sixteenth century, the rich, hardworking little republic of the Netherlands, which was already on its way to becoming the largest economy in Europe, was struck by a craze, which became a mania and led to a second or black economy that threatened to overwhelm the first. It was a craze for tulip bulbs, the rarest of which, by the 1620s, were being exchanged at the rate of a single bulb for a good-sized country estate. At its peak, as on a real stock exchange, only the name of a bulb was needed for a transaction, and a General Bol or an Augustus could change hands for fantastic sums a dozen times in a single day.
This extraordinary phenomenon came about because the tulip, which now grows in vast fields around Lisse and has become, in the popular mind, along with windmills and clogs, a symbol of all things Dutch, was at the time an exotic, brought in, like so many of the plants we associate with the European garden, from the East, in this case from Turkey, via Vienna and Venice, and before that from Persia. Most fruits also came from the East – cherries, peaches, plums, mulberries, apricots – along with a good many of the trees that now make up the recognisable landscapes of the various regions of Europe: the poplars of Lombardy and central and northern France; the umbrella pines of the Mediterranean coast; the cypresses and olives of Provence and Tuscany; the plane trees that shade the streets of London and so many other cities. Imports all, that over the centuries have made the journey west and been acclimatised to create landscapes so deeply associated with particular scenes as to appear essentially and eternally European.
The European landscape is a made landscape, a work of ‘culture’ in both senses of the word.
We need to remember that in the five or six millennia before there were schools of agriculture or bio-technicians, or institutions like the CSIRO, the sophistication of plants and fruits and grasses through which modern foods came into existence was the business of ordinary farmers working with an altogether different form of science: the knowledge that comes from tradition and the questioning of tradition; by trial and error, on the ground.
This is art as well as work. We are makers, among much else, of landscapes. The land under our hands is shaped by the food we eat; by farming methods and ways of preparing and rotating fields; by the ways we hedge or wall or fence them; and by the laws we make for passing them on. We remake the land in our own image so that it comes in time to reflect both the industry and the imagination of its makers, and gives us back, in working land, but also in the idealised version of landscape that is a park or garden, an image both of our human nature and our power. Such making is also a rich form of possession.
Fertility is the essence of it; greenness, both as an actuality and as a metaphor for growth and fruitfulness; a feeling for green seems to be universal in us. And why shouldn’t it be? The new leaf, the return of greenness, is a seasonal fact of the world we live in, part of a cycle that gives shape to our lives and to the way we see living itself. Even for desert people an eye of green is the promise of continuity and rebirth. Anyone who has seen an oasis in the desert will know what a miracle it seems, how immediately it lifts the spirits: a garden, which, to make maximum use of the space, is arranged vertically – pomegranates and peaches under stately date-palms, and, in their shade, all mixed in together, every type of herb and salad vegetable, and geraniums and stocks and daisies. The idea of God’s unpredictable bounty, of Grace as some religions conceive it, is only an extension into the spiritual realm of a vivid fact.
And nature in Australia?
Over and over again, what the early settlers and explorers have to say of the landscape they encountered here – Cook and Banks in 1770, Tench in 1788, Oxley on the Western Plains in 1817, Mitchell in Victoria in 1836 – was that it resembled, with its half dozen trees to the acre and its rich grasses, a ‘gentlemen’s park’. This was the highest form of praise.
What they were referring to was the eighteenth-century style of English landscape-gardening practised by Capability Brown, as opposed for example to the regimented paths and geometric garden beds of Le Notre and the Italian gardens of the time, all playful fountains and mythological fantasy.
The English garden was an open woodland, planted or ‘improved’ to look like nature itself, or rather, nature as it appears, in idealised form, in the paintings of Poussin and Claude. What our gentlemen explorers found remarkable was that what, in England, Nature merely aspired to was in this new place Nature itself.
They were mistaken of course. What they did not see was that this nature, too, was a made one. They did not see it because they did not recognise either the hand of the maker or the method of making. Which was not, as in Europe, by felling with axes what was already there, but by forestalling new growth with the use of fire; by using fire-sticks to create open forests where new grass would attract grazing animals and make spaces wide enough for easy hunting. As Eric Rolls put it in A Million Wild Acres, ‘Australia’s dense forests are not the remnants of two hundred years of energetic clearing; they are the product of one hundred years of energetic growth,’ because indigenous people were no longer there to manage them.
The landscape the first settlers came upon was, as we now recognise, a work of land management that native Australians had been practising for perhaps thousands of years. They had, over that time, created their own version of a useful landscape, a product of culture, and a reflection of it, every bit as much as the Italian o
r French or English; and they may earlier, we now believe, have changed the elements of the continent’s vegetation; not by importing new and more competitive species, as Europeans did, but accidentally, and once again through their use of fire.
Before their coming, a large part of Australia had been covered with dry rainforest; the Araucarias (bunya and hoop-pine) that still cover large areas of southern Queensland and northern New South Wales, and the Antarctic beeches of which a small stand still remains at Springbrook in the hinterland of the Gold Coast. The eucalypt, though it was already on the move, was a minor component of the ancient landscape. The wider use of fire destroyed the rainforests and favoured the species that were resistant. The eucalypts and sclerophylls took over.
If you drive north from Sydney to Brisbane you come to a natural border, some way south of the political one, where the first bunyas and hoop-pines and silky oaks begin to appear. For me this is always a kind of homecoming to the spirit country of my earliest world, the familiar green, subtropical Australia that was for a long time the only Australia I knew. A world that was always lush green, evergreen.
In a continent as large as ours, there are many kinds of landscape, each of them typical of a particular region, no one more authentically Australian than another. I mention this because I am always taken aback when I hear Australians of a certain turn of mind claim that we will only be fully at home here when we have learned to love our desert places. My Australia, the one I grew up with, and whose light and weather and range of colour shaped my earliest apprehensions of the world, was not dry or grey-green: it was dense and luminous. The old idea that everywhere in Australia looks the same, the myth of the great Australian uniformity, was just that, a myth that was meant, I think, to confirm an Australian need, as if in this too the landscape was to be our model, for a corresponding conformity in the body social and politic. You need perhaps to believe in the idea of diversity, before you develop an eye for it in the world about you.
We can all learn to appreciate kinds of landscape other than the one we grew up with, to see what is unique and a source of beauty in them. But the landscape we most deeply belong to, that connects with our senses, that glows in our consciousness, will always be the one we are born into.
What indigenous Australians passed on to us, or rather, what we took from them, was not untouched nature, or at least not in the places where we and they settled, but a made nature, which we went on to remake in our own way.
The land had received the imprint of culture long before we came to it. It had been shaped by use and humanised by knowledge that was both practical and sacred. It had been taken deep into the consciousness of its users so that all its features, through naming and storytelling and myth-making, had a second life in the imagination and in the mouths of women and men.
Here are two visions from that world. The first is an extract from one section of the best known of all Aboriginal song cycles, the Moon Bone Cycle, known, among so many that are not, because it has been so vividly translated for us by the anthropologist, R. M. Berndt:
Up and up soars the Evening Star, hanging there in the sky.
Men watch it, at the place of the Dugong and of the Clouds and of the Evening Star.
A long way off, at the place of the Mist, of Lilies and of the Dugong.
The lotus, the Evening Star, hangs there on its long stalk, held up by the Spirits.
It shines on that place of the Shade, on the Dugong place, and on the Moonlight clay-pan.
The Evening Star is shining, back towards Milingimbi, and over the ’Wulamba people.
The second part of Song 30 from the Djanggawul cycle was also translated by Berndt.
We walk along making the country, with the aid of the mauwulan rangga.
We put the point of the rangga into the ground and sing all the way along, swaying our hips.
Oh, waridj Miralaidj, our heads are lolling in weariness!
Our bodies ache after our long journey from Bralgu!
We are making country, Bildjiwuraroiju, the large sandhill at the Place of the Mauwulan.
What we did when we came here was lay new forms of knowledge and a new culture, a new consciousness, over so much that already existed, the product of many thousands of years of living in and with the land. This supplemented what was already there but did not replace it, and cannot do so as long as any syllable of that earlier knowledge exists in the consciousness of even one woman or man.
A land can bear any number of cultures laid one above the other or set side by side. It can be inscribed and written upon many times. One of those forms of writing is the shaping of a landscape. In any place where humans have made their home, the landscape will be a made one. Landscape-making is in our bones.
I want to go back now to those eleven ships of the First Fleet and turn to another part of their precious cargo: the seeds and cuttings, all carefully labelled and packed, that were to be the beginning of a new landscape here; all of it the work of one man, Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, founder of the great gardens at Kew, Cook’s companion on the voyage of 1770 and the man who first suggested Botany Bay as the site for a colony (he had the advantage of having been there).
If Lord Sydney and Governor Phillip were the fathers of the new society that grew up here, Banks is the father of the new natural world that came with it; not just the gardens that Grose saw as early as 1792, ‘that flourish’, as he says, ‘and produce fruit of every variety – vegetables are here in great abundance’, but, in time, of the wheatlands of the Darling Downs and the Western Plains, the orchards of Tasmania and the Riverina and the Granite Belt in Queensland, the vineyards of the Hunter and the Barossa and Margaret River in the west. Of the tree plantings, too, in country towns, some now so old and established as to form part of our national heritage; of our Botanical Gardens, and of that special fondness we have here for exotic imports from South America and South Africa and Asia: the jacarandas we like to plant so that they will bloom in vivid combination with our native flame trees, the bauhinias and poincianas and African tulip trees of our suburban streets, the camphor laurels and Benjamani figs and deodars of older gardens.
We can imagine Banks, the ‘amoroso of the Tahitian Islands’ as Manning Clark called him, fifteen years after he had last been there, stepping back in imagination to the far side of the globe to play a godlike little game with himself, and with a whole continent, by doing what no man in history had ever done before: telescoping into a few hours and a single occasion what might have taken centuries – millennia even – in the natural course of things: the equipping of an arkload of plants suitable for a place, as he recalled it, with ‘a climate similar to that of southern France’ – apples, cherries, apricots, nectarines, red and white beets, early cauliflower, celery, sainfoin, nasturtium, broccoli, York cabbage – the makings of a very practical little garden of Eden, with due care taken for the good health of those it was to feed and with nice problems to be solved on the ground, since only trial and error, and a flair for inventiveness and guesswork, would determine which of the several varieties he had chosen would actually ‘take’ in a place where the soil and seasons were as yet unknown. Where the soil, as it turned out, lacked minerals and large animals to manure it, and the seasons were not an alternation of hot and cold, as in Europe, but of Wet Season and Dry.
Some of these plants had already made the slow journey westward from China and Persia, and had travelled on from Europe to the new Europe of the Americans. Others – tomatoes and maize and peppers and potatoes – had made the journey in the other direction, from west to east. Now they were to feed the even newer Europe in Australia. They were to make the landscape we all live in here – and live off as well – and whose produce we have sent out for the best part of 150 years to feed the world.
All this once seemed a bold and triumphant exercise, typical of the belief, which has been central to our culture, that nature is there for our delight and use, to be adapted and improved and made fruitfu
l; the belief that intervention in the workings of Nature – by divine injunction in the seventeenth century, out of civic duty later – is part of what it is to be human.
These days we are less sure. This is because we have begun to be aware at last of what such radical intervention may mean, especially in a continent like ours that has turned out to be more fragile than we first understood and less naturally suited than we believed to the kinds of farming and pastoralism we have imposed upon it.
Eric Rolls, a poet as well as an historian, who writes better about the Australian landscape, with more affection and a keener eye for its intimate life than any other man here, describes what the earliest settlers found when they first came upon it. ‘The surface was so loose that you could rake it through your fingers. No wheel had marked it, no leather heel, no cloven foot – every mammal, humans included, had walked on padded feet. Our big animals did not make trails. Hopping kangaroos usually move in scattered company, not in damaging single file like sheep and cattle … Every grass-eating mammal had two sets of teeth to make a clean bite. No other land had been treated so gently.’
The damage since has been severe: the breaking up of the soil and the trampling of the grass by hoofed animals, indiscriminate clearing, erosion, the draining of swamps that has led to salination through a rise in the water table, the damage to our rivers through excessive irrigation and through chemical pollution.
This degradation of the environment is one reason why we no longer feel triumphant. Another is the doubt many of us have about whether our particular way of doing things is the only way, the only human way – a doubt, by the way, that would not have occurred to our predecessors: it only occurs to us because we began, a few decades ago, to interest ourselves in comparative anthropology; in the way other cultures see the world and interact with it.