Tom M. Wilson

Kia kia. That means hallo in the language that used to be spoken around here.

The following photo was taken near Fremantle in 1890. It is of a local Aboriginal woman standing outside her shelter, wearing a ‘buka’, a cloak of kangaroo skin turned inside out and hitched around one shoulder. She’s holding a long digging stick, or ‘wonna’, which was used to dig for root vegetables and small animals. Her hut is made of branches bent over a single frame in a semi-circle, and then covered in leaves.

Yesterday I was shown around Walyunga National Park by some Nyungar people. It was part of a field trip I got myself onto at the end of a conference I didn’t attend on National Parks in Australia. The day was cool and rainy, and having the ever so soft fur of kangaroo skins draped over our shoulders was useful in keeping warm.

The above photo has no colour. What if we add some colour to this way of life?

The fur of the bukka is such a soft feeling on the skin. Why can’t white people use this obvious clothing material somehow? Using place as a blanket, as it were.

Among other things, we were shown how to make knives with small sticks and bits of sharp quartz stuck into melted marri resin on the end of the sticks. I’ve now got a plan to go and collect some quandongs, a slightly sharp tasting but plentiful local fruit that will be available in the next two to three weeks, as well as the fruit of pigface, a coastal succulent flowering around now. This is the time of year when the first people of Perth would come down out of the hills to the coast and start to harvest frogs, turtles, quandongs and plenty of other bush tucker.

The clay and ochre came from the local earth, and was smeared on my skin. It dries quickly and feels like a mask so that moving your skin in a facial expression pulls on the dried earth. Smearing ochre mud on another man’s face gives you a strange feeling, an atavistic and tribal intimacy. God, I’m sounding like a men’s encounter group devotee all of a sudden! Soon I’ll be wearing a tapestry waist coat and warming my legs over an open fire. Don’t worry, that will never happen.

Biological evolution has only had a few million years of trial and error experience to work out which species should be living on these soils. Aboriginal people have only had a few millenia to work out good ways to live off these species. I’m not suggesting that mums and dads from Cottesloe don arm bands of eucalyptus leaves, wear red-tipped black cockatoo feathers in their hair, and learn to throw a gidgee in the river (although I do love that image!). But white fellas around these parts certainly do need to leave the air-conditioned comfort of Coles and go out and wake up to wear they are standing.

This afternoon I saw this sign in a suburb of Perth sur Swan. The real estate agents were offering me up the dream opportunity of stamping my personal signature on the Western Australian landscape. The signature would be made in angular concrete and two car garage luxury. What joy! In the background I saw that people all around this patch of bare and soon to be built upon earth had already taken up the opportunity to erase all sense of belonging with the land.

As I looked at the sign I rememberd D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence wrote of the Etruscans (a society that had inhabited Italy prior to the Romans) with their wooden architecture and organic connection with the natural world and contrasted this vividly with the arrogant stone monuments of imperial Rome. The buildings of Rome are still there to be seen. The trace of the Etruscans on the landscape has faded leaving few remains.

I passed by this bit of coporate skull-duggery on barren ground, and found my way westwards, up onto Wireless Hill, an area of original woodland and heath. The kangaroo paws glowed up at me, and the Swan snaked by down to the north.

This is what the landscape looks like around here. Idiosyncratic shapes that have evolved for millions of years in isolation from the rest of the green, leafy globe. The first Australians probably walked over this hill on a bright spring morning ten thousand years ago, and maybe their great grand children did so again 180 years ago. I can’t see the signature that they put on the landscape.

Two days ago I watched the film ‘The New World’, written and directed by Terence Malick and released at the start of 2006. This film follows the history of the English arrival on the east coast of the US, at Virginia, and their encounter with the local people of the land. I encourage you all to watch this film - it is one of the most beautiful meditations on the life-giving nature of the natural environment I’ve ever seen, and boasts some superb photography of the forests and waterways of Virginia. But what sprung to mind as I stood on Wireless Hill, is that the native American people leave no heavy and pompous architectural trace in their inhabitation of Virginia as portrayed in this film. Like the first Australians, their’s is an elegant ecological footprint, not a fat boot print.
‘Put your signature on the landscape.’

Would you ‘put your signature’ on your mother? The kind of message I saw on a billboard in the Perth suburbs could only come from a life-world that was blind to the beauty and life-giving qualities of nature. It could only come from a Roman-mentality of arrogance and bombastic immaturity.

Of course we need some kind of shelter, but this shelter should find accommodation within the matrix of a pre-existing landscape.

We need architecture that takes as its maxim: Being with the earth.

 Last night I went to an art exhibition at the Lawrence Wilson at UWA which I enjoyed, called ‘The System of Nature’.  If you’re living in Perth then this exhibition is worth a look.  My friend Holly Story invited me along, and she has a number of works in the exhibition, works which, like many of the pieces in the show, comment on the scientific urge to catalogue and organize.  One of the most interesting pieces is by Gregory Pryor, and is a number of European herbarium catalogue slips with dried specimens of Western Australian flora lying on them.  Pryor hasn’t just laid out these slips, but has placed a rusty old ball and chain over the top of them all, with the names of Aboriginal prisoners along the chain.  The urge to imprison and coerce through the act of naming by colonial newcomers is vividly suggested through this overlaying of human history on natural history.

Another interesting piece is by Janet Laurence and is called Cellular Gardens.  It is a number of Western Australian plants growing in small dishes of soil on long metallic bases, within glass cells.  Laurence reflects that it is evocative of the care and support that our fragile environment needs to survive, but I took it another way.  I immediately thought of the way in which human hubris thinks it possible to take species out of their biological context and have them live in fragmented, artificially supported environments.  The work made me reflect on the impossibility of ever truly doing what Laurence does in this art work.  The ecological matrix that ever species originates in can never be done away with.  That goes for us bipedal mammals as well as little banksia plants.

The System of Nature is on till 7 November at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery.