tom m wilson

[Today I'm going to publish a bit of writing by Julia Denton-Barker (my mum). She has recently written a retrospective piece about a farm in Cornwall where she lived many years ago. Reading it doesn't just make me sad for the loss of the traditional English farm and associated folkways, it also makes me reflect on the immense difference between producing food in England prior to the 1960s, and producing food in Australia today. The former seemed to allow a kind of humane intimacy between humans and the land, while the latter most often seems to lack such any such rapport. Anyway, time for me to stop writing.]

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Why do some people love nature and some people are just rather indifferent to it? Developmental psychology tells us that early exposure – as we are growing up – to woods, fields and animals encourages biophilia, the human tendency to affliate with wild nature.

In some families there is a tradition of owning animals and of regularly spending time out in nature. My mum comes from England, and her family have always been nature lovers. What follows is a snap-shot of how one family carried its love of nature down through the generations.

This is my great-grandfather and his children – my grandmother and my great-uncle – somewhere in England about 1904.

Stepping down to the next generation, my grandfather, Ralph, loved to walk in nature, up fell and down dale. His favourite writer was William Wordsworth, the poet from who wrote the words which are the title of this blog entry. My grandfather and grandmother lived first in the Welsh border country, then on a Cornish dairy farm, and then on a Spanish island. Clearly my mother was influenced by some of these environments – not to mention the constant companionship of various dogs – as she grew up and turned into a woman.

She moved to Australia and had two sons, me and my brother. For a while we lived in Denmark, a small town in the south-west corner of Australia, surrounded by towering karri trees to walk under, sun dazzled inlets and grassy fields. My mum and my dad took us on plenty of camping trips and we were always accompanied by dogs and cats while at home. One of my mum’s favourite poets is Gary Snyder, and her favourite novelists, Wendell Berry.

I and my brother both love nature as adults, and I think our parents actions when we were young may have had something to do with this. I thank them for imparting a love of nature to us. The child is father to the man.

I am writing this retrospective blog entry in 2007, and very recently we human beings tipped over the point where there are now more people living in cities than outside of cities. As Gary Snyder has said, what we need now more than anything is people who love the world. Knowing this, I hope most fervently that all these new urban citizens take their children out into the world beyond the pavement.

In 1996 I lived in the U.S. for the year. I was in their charming parlance, a ‘resident alien’. I was an alien in San Franscisco, north of the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County. One of the points of cultural association that I have come to increasingly appreciate since I have left this country was City Lights Books, a bookstore in the city.

It isn’t City Lights I love really, but the associations that hang around that geographical location. Lawrence Ferlinghetti started the shop in the early 1950s and it became a gathering point for certain beat poets, such as Gary Snyder. In 96′ I was sitting in a bookstore by the name of A Clean Well-lighted Place for Books in Marin listening to Snyder, the old man with the creased, experienced face, give a reading from his book of poems Rip-Rap and Cold Mountain Poems, however it wasn’t till more recent years that I came to realise the value of some of Synder’s limpid moments of being in the natural world expressed in his poetry.

In Snyder’s world sometimes nothing has meaning, except ‘that which is seen is truly seen’. Read ‘Piute Creek‘ and you might understand what I’m talking about.

And then there were the woods, the redwoods…

These are the tallest trees on our planet: redwood trees. It’s not a mark of rectitude to talk in cathedrals, so I’ll be quiet about this place.

In winter I was in Yosemite National Park, and I looked up at ‘El Capitan’, as had Ansel Adams before me. Where Adams looked, saw and photographed some of the most perfectly composed black and white compositions ever, errant stone monkeys have looked at El Cap and scaled it, intoxicated by a visceral sublime. Before such people knocked about rocks, John Muir walked around Yosemite, writing prose about the place which expressed a truly ecological imagination, and inspiring the president Theodore Roosevelt to protect the joint.

After reading ‘Piute Creek’ you’ll perhaps understand why I was interested to visit the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, a Zen monastery in secluded valley of the dry southern moutains in California. I was here for a few days, and although I didn’t actually spend that much time meditating, I spent plenty of time walking down the valley, along a creek which provided relief from the heat.

In the south of California I also explored the world of the Spanish monks who had come here in 1771. At Mission San Antonio I participated in an archeological field school, where after study was over for the day I saw cougar flash across the fields, and was woken in the morning to the sound of coyote wailing like tormented banshees. Some hot nights I would stand in the mission quadrangle… you could hear only the soft splashing of the fountain, see the see the lambent cream of the adobe walls topped by the orange of tejas. One evening I remember the moon was particularly large and bright as you looked up past the cypresses. A monk walked past the other side of the tree-filled square. The air had a comfortable warmth to it for my t-shirt and shorts shod body.

So I was skirting my way around the crass and commercial parts of California. It then found my way to another desert monastery: Joshua Tree National Park. Here I had intimations of the south-west of the U.S. that Edward Abbey writes about in his books (yes, I know he wasn’t writing about California, but for me there are certain associations between his books and this place). Abbey, if you don’t know him, was a savage, funny, and incandescently intelligent voice out of the American desert. Read him at your merry peril.

Finally, in my last American adventure, I helped onboard the good sloop The Clearwater. The Clearwater is a ship which sails down the Hudson River in New York State, delivering a positive environmental message to school kids to clean up the Hudson. It has as its founder and patron spirit, Pete Seeger, that great voice of politically progressive American folk music. In fact I went to Pete’s 80th birthday party, at his house on a hill above the Hudson. We need more voices like Pete Seeger’s in this world.

Here I am, standing on deck, giving a hug to a New Yorker who followed our floating hippy bandwagon down the Hudson. The rusts, yellows and reds that are the autumn colours of New York State made a fine backdrop for a river voyage.

These are just some snapshots of the points of interest on my personal map of America. It took some clever navigation all those years ago, but I did learn that the US isn’t all blaring soap operas and endless billboards.

On Australia’s Radio National this morning the current Liberal Minister was exposed as having a history of involvement in the corporate rape of the earth. Liberal Minister helped expand a forestry company in 1991 – Axiom Forest Resources in the Soloman Islands. This guy streamlined this company’s efforts to cut down Pacific Island rainforests. The company was allowed to cut 33 thousand cubic metres per year, which is more than would have been sustainble for the whole of the Solomons (remember they were only allowed to log some of the country). The now Australian federal Minister for the Environment earned a neat twenty five million Australian dollars for his work. Should we trust this kind of operator to look after Australia’s heritage?

This is John Soane. He is an aboriginal of the British Isles.

A few years ago I was in England for the first time, and I thought a bit about belonging to a land and a landscape. My ancestors all came from England to Australia at various times in the past. Australians speak English, it is our mother tongue. But if you pick up a volume of poetry by any number of celebrated and dead poets who write in this language you’ll find poems with titles like ‘May Morning’ or ‘June Day’. When you come from Australia and pick up John Clare’s poem ‘July’ and read the first line – ‘Loud is the summer’s busy song’ – then you feel a strong sense of incongruity with your own experiences. In Australia July is the middle of winter and noon doesn’t ‘burn with its blistering breath around’, it is actually pretty cool (Peter Porter has commented on this in a poem about reading Midsummer Night’s Dream).

So Australia obviously needs its own literature of nature, and we have a bit of it, here and there. But my point is that the English landscape does have a small influence, through the circuitous route of English literature, on life in Australia.

Anyway, when I was in England a few years back I got interested in the kind of aesthetic sense expressed by people people like John Soane. Soane’s house is open to the public as a museum in London, and shows the visitor what the nineteenth century English gentleman with an interest in architecture could do to make a pleasing environment. Beyond that I went out into the country and entered the world of the English country house and its estate. Despite the lamentable political circumstances associated with the creation of such places hundreds of years ago, I found myself pleased and calmed by the order and beauty to be found in some of these houses and their woods and gardens.

This is a postcard I have of Belsay Hall, a property run by English Heritage (the British government), one of the most beautiful of all country houses. It is in Northumberland, and the quarry where the stone for the house was taken from was turned many years ago into a sunken garden, which winds under the canopy of overhanging trees.

I normally are much more interested in wilderness than planned gardens, but this winding walk through the limestone walls and ravines is enough to make me feel some affinity with the great tradition from the 18th and 19th centuries of English landscape gardening.

Soon I was doing a couple of weeks voluntary work for the National Trust. I stayed at Felbrigg Hall and worked, along with a bunch of around twenty other volunteers, at Blickling Hall, in Norfolk. In the evenings all the tourists had left the area, and I wandered about the place. It was a warm evening at the end of May, and I was sitting in the walled garden by myself, watching the doves flit around the tall dovecote and listening to their soft coos. I got up and walked through the gardens behind the house to the orangery and breathed in the thick aroma of the many camelias kept in there. With moments like these, why, I asked myself, don’t more English people volunteer to do this kind of thing?

At one point I found myself opening up the pyramid shaped mausoleum in the middle of the woods at Blickling. The door to the mausoleum is made of iron and weighs a ton. I fitted the old iron key to it and swung it open, a slow, sepulchral creek echoing inside the tomb. I thought of what kind of person John Hobart must have been to have wanted a pyramid in the middle of the woods to be his tomb. Did he really felt he belonged to England? Then I left this musty resting place and walked into the woods around the pyramid. I saw a barn owl fly above me and across to a nearby tree. It landed and watched me. I sat down for a minute and watched it. I kept walking and deep in the woods I found the old deer ditches that bordered the medieval park, now green and leafy dingles. I could hear buzzing, rustling, hooting and scurrying around me. There was the smells of the forest, the wind on my face and the soft earth under my feet. Tall trees rose from the sea of purplish blue bells in front of me.

I’ve never been there, but I just noticed on the National Trust website that Wallington, another estate with lots of woods, this time in Northumberland, has an opening for volunteers this May. If I was in England, I’d do it. The great thing isn’t just helping out with running the gardens, but is being able to wander around the place when all the day trippers have gone home.

Australia has a lot more original wilderness and previously undescribed species of life still kicking around, and I feel a strong sense of belonging on this southern land. On the other hand I can’t help feeling like an aboriginal when I’m treading along under ancient silver beeches.

[Thanks to Linda Zacks for letting me use her illustration.]

What is my take on politics and climate change in this election year in Australia? As you’ll see from my recent blog entries, I’m not a fan of the current government.

The Labor Minister for the Environment is Peter Garrett. He is actually now called the Shadow Minister for Climate Change and the Environment, a move that you might think was made to hint that his party takes the climate crisis seriously. Labor proposes to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, cut Australia’s greenhouse pollution by 60% by 2050, establish a national emissions trading scheme; substantially increase the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target, and build greenhouse gas triggers into Australian law.

What do I mean by this last bit about greenhouse gas triggers? The Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBCA) is the single most important bit of national law relating to nature. In its four or five years of operation it hasn’t done much about the two major threats to biodiversity: greenhouse gases and land-clearing (it has had a few minor successes, like protecting flying foxes in Queensland). State laws are more important when it comes to protecting the environment. But the EPBCA could become important if it had a greenhouse-gas trigger built into it, so that when a proposed development was considered and it was going to pollute the air with too much carbon it would be rejected. Labor, it seems, might build such triggers into the EPBCA.

But then I have a feeling that Labour here would be like Labour in England right now. Plenty of talk about climate change, and even some targets, but they probably won’t actually keep to the targets for reductions of emissions by 2020. Despite the green-friendly rhetoric, Labour in Britain looks set to fail to deliver sufficient reductions.

The Australian Greens actually would make targets and keep to us to them. Of course the Greens have very little money for campaigning, usually a bunch of thousands, that’s all. If only some philanthropist would donate $2 million for the greens to have TV ads on prime time commercial tv – where an ad costs about 50 thousand to make and four thousand to air for 30 seconds each – just before the federal election. Maybe shouting the truth into Australian sitting rooms that we live in a country on the front line of the effects of the climate crisis would sway a few more politically comotose voters. And after the election we’d end up with a few more compassionate and honest humans in Parliament House. Hard to imagine I know.

Well in the absence of a couple of million dollars, the Greens can do what? At least become a bit more canny….

In 2007 I’d like us in the Green party to remember Guy Rundle (editor of Arena magazine), looking back on the 2004 Australian federal election, and saying:

‘[The Greens] have not yet made the leap from the politics of the New Left to one that addresses contemporary society’.

I support nearly all the policies of the Greens, but I think there is an urgent need for us involved in the Greens to appreciate the cultural and political climate in which we act. In the February 2005 issue of The Ecologist Aidan Rankin wrote of how the European Greens have, lamentably, been captured by an authoritarian and unelectable left. Rankin goes so far as to suggest that a new Ecology Party be formed to remedy the situation. In America, Kevin Phillips recently argued in Harper’s Magazine that the decline of liberalism began because “liberal intellectuals and policy makers had become too sure of themselves, so lazy and complacent that they failed to pay attention to people who didn’t share their opinions.”

This election year the Australian Greens need to ask, how do we start bridge-building with the mainstream, and get more people into parliament,? The dire predictions of climate change make the stakes much too high for us to sit contentedly on an unelectable moral high-ground (even while our membership numbers continue to climb).

The Greens drug policy is hurting the Greens vote. James Norman, Victorian Greens Media Assistant during the last federal election, wrote recently in Arena magazine: ‘One of the key differences between the Greens and the other Australian political parties is that the Greens released extensive policy documents on the party website for all to see months before the election. Most other parties don’t do this.’ The Greens ‘went overboard in making long, detailed policies too freely available. For example the much misrepresented drug policy should simply have read: ‘The Greens support the principals of harm minimisation and wish to see drugs considered as a health, rather than criminal problem.’ Leave it at that. There is no need whatsoever to isolate particular drugs, like heroin and ecstasy, as drugs earmarked for liberalisation. It’s political dynamite.’

If you’re reading this, please join the Greens, run as a candidate, and don’t sit too high up the moral high-ground.

My private and unofficial Eco-Dandyist Manifesto stipulates that a gentleman dresses well. But where to from there?

Hemp is a great plant fibre, environmentally speaking, in that crops of it don’t require the application of large amounts of environmentally harmful pesticides, like the cotton you are probably wearing as you read this sentence. Hemp comes from canibis, and canibis plants more or less just shoot up by themselves. So that sorts out the kind of the plant fibre we’re aiming for (although bamboo is another one worth thinking of nowadays – even softer than cotton).

Making the clothes is next…

Most of the clothes we buy come from Asia, where hundreds of women sit in ugly and noisy factories and do boring work for hardly any money. So why not spend a little more on your clothes and get them made by someone in Australia, or whichever first world country you are probably reading this blog from?

Time to find a bespoke tailor. What’s ‘bespoke’ mean, I hear you ask? It means a tailor that makes your suit to measure your body, by hand. Well, better read the explanation of Thomas Mahon, a tailor on Saville Row in London who writes a blog called ‘English Cut‘.

So now you know all about bespoke tailoring. If you live in Western Australia you might get some hemp from the Margaret River Hemp Company and ask a local clothes designer to go to work.

So is the suit I’m wearing made from bespoken hemp?

No, it came from a local op-shop and cost seventy dollars. Even better for the environment than getting a locally tailor-made hemp or bamboo suit, is going and collecting a suit that was just sitting there unclaimed in an op-shop around the corner (as long as you can find one you really like, that is).

Time to hit play on some Gregory Isaacs and drink a gin and tonic.

I’ve been thinking about New Zealand recently, partly because of a related essay I wrote a while back which is soon to be published. I’m not going to say much about the essay here, but I will say something about the land that is the South Island.

Looking back through my journal I find the following from my time there in 2004:

“Not only seeing nature, but also smelling the wet earth and the fast flowing stream at the bottom of the valley. Further up we passed through a high ridge and looking down on the scene below made me think: well, there is nothing left. It isn’t possible to see any more impressive topography on this blessed planet. D. H. Lawrence said he only felt a deep sense of the religious in his world travels when he arrived in New Mexico. My New Mexico.

Being here, these experiences of green mountain ringed plains, dell-filled beech woods, pine bordered, iridescent lakes, drift wood tossed shores, gives me a grounding in extra-human meaning, meaning outside the realm of human artifacts and social interactions. I’m glad to have had this time, its memory will help me persist through the knocks and setbacks that are endemic to suburban day-to-daying on my return to Perth.”

There is a way in which Wallace Stegner’s comment that ‘a place needs a poet’ is meaningful. Peter Jackson has, in a way, sung these beech woods, and given them added significance. I have a chapter in a book called ‘How We Became Middle Earth’, which is forthcoming later this year. It is out with Walking Tree Press – check it out.

I haven’t taken any good photos of New Zealand… apart from the following one of the farming country near Christchurch. The shades of green in this land are so deep compared to Australia!

Although I don’t have a great gallery of New Zealand photography, I can direct you to a few photos taken by others. These photos will give you some idea of what I’m talking about.
The river flows…

The clouds drift…

Mt Cook stands guard…

Now look into the lake, and wash away your mental clutter…

Mass of twisting white spirits, frozen in their silent decade-long dance in a clearing of the south-west,

ancient lives towering from the floor to the canopy,

tumbled granite boulders, with a window in the karris out over the land and the southern ocean and the swell’s boom,

clear sight… peace in his heart.

My new gallery of nature photography can be viewed by following the link on the top right hand side of this page.

In 2oo2 I was on Reunion Island, in the middle of the Indian Ocean. At the time I wrote in my journal: ‘I have seen the beauty of nature on a tropical island, been fascinated by the workings of the physical world around us, realised that I am part of the biosphere – something much bigger than my personal problems – discovered how pressing is the need to conserve and restore global biodiversity, and found new direction in my life in wanting to help do that.’

When I was on Reunion the place had a 43% unemployment rate, plenty of bad drivers and groups of men drinking rum on the side of the street in the middle of the day. Despite some of the problems on the island, being in a very different cultural framework – the French speaking, Creole eating tropical scene with a little bit of African influence – allowed me to see nature like an alien on another planet. I read E.O. Wilson’s The Diversity of Life for the first time. Wilson and the land both inspired me, and thus this blog entry has to be about both. Wilson’s prose in his book Consilience – which I also read while I was there – put me on a new path, bound up in his broader conservation ethic, to approaching my own life. The tone was amelioristic, in control, optimistic, rational, autonomous, fascinated, and knowledge-hungry.

Reunion is a volcanic cone poking up out of the Indian Ocean. The somewhat undisturbed south-east is called the ‘sud sauvage’, the wild south in English, and it is crested by this constantly unpredictable volcanoe, the Piton Fournaise. This mountain is three thousand metres from the sea to the top. Dribbles of dark lava come down the south-east slope.

The interior of the island is sometimes dry, sometimes lush, but nearly always slashed by very deep gorges and outrageously tall mountain peaks. This beach is typical of the island. I don’t love the French habit of leaving cigarette buts everywhere in the sand, but I do love the fact that you can float in a pool at the end of this beach and see the warm colours of live coral beneath you. You can see what a great place it was to be reading about the workings behind the diversification of species of life on earth.

The rivers that flow to the sea carve deep gorges full of icy water holes, like this secret spot…

So this is the tropical crucible within which I first heard the uplifting and philosophical voice of the greatest prose stylist of modern science. Thanks Edward O. Wilson. Partly because of your writings, everywhere I walk on this earth I feel I belong, as part of the biosphere.

When I returned to Australia in 2003 I was saddened to find that the conservationist figure embodied by E. O. Wilson – the affable, well-mannered southern gentleman with a prodigious intellect and stylish approach – didn’t fit very clearly among Australian Wilderness Society activists and Greenpeace recruits.

Still, I have continued to be influenced by Wilson’s outlook on the world. True, I write about novels, poems, and films, and not about the workings of ecosystems. But some science does inform my environmentally- slanted literary criticism. Most of all, I’m humbled by the complex workings of the species of life on this earth; my cosmology places us humans firmly within this natural realm; and much of my spiritual sustenance comes from the creation. Partly thanks to the tone of the writings of an old Harvard professor, I’m still determined and I’m still impressed.

My interest in conserving and marvelling at global biodiversity and the physical planet has caused me to be more: scientific, optimistic, determined, self-secure and impressed by the world. It has created a path of sorts for me in life.

In 2002 I walked from the West Quantocks Hills in Somerset just under the Bristol channel, with the Exeter University Out of Doors Society, to a small village called Bishops Lydeard. This is when the photograph of the path above was taken. It is also the period of my life when I first met John Fowles.

Fowles was right to insist that you can’t capture the experience of nature in words. Of you can’t capture it with photographs either, which is a salient reminder for myself now that I’m more interested in photography. I remember walking through the trees below Fowles’ house in south-west England, with the wind and the grey light gushing past, leaves swaying and turning, my vision moving as I pass, feelings of The French Lieutenant’s Woman and a man and a place so bound up in nineteenth century notions of refinement.

My bedroom was inside the main house, a room that makes one think of well lived in certain country mansions of the 20s a bit, not big but cultured and hailing from an England you’d never guess existed still as you walked down today’s British high street with its mobile phone shops and ugly mall. And Baag, the big, burly tabby who has now sadly passed away, padded around the house… it really is true that having cats around reduces one’s level of background anxiety.

I uses to often walk into the Undercliff, a wooded area west of Lyme Regis. I strode forth, across a section of open county and then into the chaotic topography and jumble of trees and plants. The path winds along and one thinks: well, here is a bit of wild England after all. The blood pumped through my body and I felt alert, but when I came to a particularly romantic spot – it all is that, one really gets a sense of the spirit of the place that must have motivated the romanticism of the FLW, as Sarah calls The French Lieutenant’s Woman – I stopped. And the silence came flooding in from all sides, and I stood thinking how much these lush vines and trees and shrubs on such wildly up and down terrain stimulant a sense of mystery, of promises around corners. Thinking how, regardless of how hackneyed a word it is, there really was a magic to this place. Of the kind that Fowles talks of in his notion of la bonne vaux. The place is an entrée into a kind of invitation to dream. After the contrast of recent city or town dwelling it came onto my eyes with a fresh, possibility-filled and timeless charm.

How easily I could be Charles Smithson setting out into this wilderness. Or how easily the fictional Sarah could come walking down Ware Lane. The place varied every second as I trod along the path which winded and bobbed up and down, under trees and around corners. The magic of a Samuel Palmer English valley, which Fowles has written about, I truly got an inckling of. As my walking boots had given out the previous weekend, Sarah gave me a pair of John’s old shoes to have and walk in. I was truly walking in the footsteps of John Fowles.

I’d like to announce that a new blog has arrived in my home town Fremantle: Freo Stencils.

Of course the British artist Banksy is the acknowledged king of stencil art placed in urban spaces. However this frequently political art form has been taken over by all kinds of people in the community, as is evidenced by this website. With the public space, the agora of Greek civilization, monopolised these days by merchants of mindless consumption, I see stencil art, at its best, as a stand against this culture of consumption, in the manner of Kalle Lasn, the inspirational and courageous Estonian prankster who founded Adbusters magazine.

To the writer of this new blog, I salute you!