tom m wilson

In the old chaplain’s house along the front terrace of Fremantle Prison, an old Australian convict site, there is a wide Victorian balcony. As I walked through the front door of this building this morning I looked up at the jarrah rafters on the underside of the balcony and a pair of wide, dark brown eyes looked down into my own. In all his compact, downy splendour sat a Southern Boobook (Ninox novaeseelandiae ocellata). I was happy to see the little visitant from a wilder Australia.

Owls have been on earth since the time of the dinosaurs, proving that their model of body is a pretty good one in the game of evolutionary change. Owls are far-sighted, and are unable to see anything clearly within a few inches of their eyes. Their far vision, particularly in low light, is exceptionally good. Serrated edges on the leading edge of the owl’s flight feathers muffle the owl’s wingbeats, allowing its flight to be practically silent.

The property manager of Fremantle Prison told me that he had come upon an owl inside the prison grounds one night when looking for pigeons. The owl had been two metres above his head sitting on a fence. When the pigeons took off they made a loud noise, but when the owl took flight it was absolutely silent.

The Owl of Minerva was a symbol of wisdom for the Romans. The German philosopher Hegel once commented that the Owl of Minerva only gets going and spreads its wings just as the historical day is coming to a close. Let’s hope he wasn’t right in the context of our historical transition to an environmentally sustainable Australia. May the Owl of Minerva bring his wisdom into our lives before the close of day.

And I hope the little fellow at Number Eight sticks around as well.

Witness a scene on a beach, in a bay around half way up the east coast of Australia.  It is 1770, and forty year old Yorkshire-bred fellow by the name of James Cook stands there with two or three other uniformed white gentlemen.  Cook is Captain of the bath-tubbed shaped British barque the Endeavour.  Cook and his men have just sailed across the Pacific Ocean in their 32 metre long wooden sailing ship, watching Venus transit over the sun while in Tahiti, and then mapping the coast of New Zealand for six months.  They are excited to be standing on the mythical Terra Australis Incognita, that land that the Greeks had surmised must exist in the southern hemisphere to balance the lands of the northern hemisphere.

Cook and the others look inland at another group of men further up the beach.  These men are very dark skinned, have no textiles hanging from their bodies, have very thick beards, less hair than the white fellows on other parts of their bodies, and are holding three metre long spears.

Two worlds stand, suspended in mutual incomprehension.

Let the two worlds stand there for a moment.

The old Australian is nomadic.  He enjoys the prospect of changing horizons and shifting skies.  He is part of a tightly bonded human community.  His community is by no means utopian, and its treatment of women is to be lamented.  But his people know no huge gap between rich and poor.  He uses his hands to make tools and to paint pictures.  When Cook throws down trinkets and ribbons at his feet as a sign of peace and amiability he is indifferent and shows no gratitude.  He is ecologically literate and he reads the shapes and patterns of the natural world with consummate finesse.  He hunts with his brothers and engages all his senses while moving with stealth through the leafy and shadowy present.  His language grew on this land, and its fault-lines fit the fault-lines of this land with an intimate clasp.  His forefathers and mothers have lived full and satisfying human lives here for around fifty thousand years.

The prudish interloper, swaddled in colourful wool and cotton, is loyal to king and country, to King George and to England.  He comes from a society that stopped being nomadic a long time ago, and settled down to agriculture.  His society grew in numbers, got itself a king, and became feudal.  He comes from a world of lamentable inequality.  A young boy has the noose placed around his neck on a scaffold in a London square for a minor theft, while aristorcrats dance to Mozart around the corner in an opulent ballroom.  Convicted British men work as shackled slaves on the banks of the Thames river.  Recently the light of science has started to shine in his land, and a public sphere is forming where people read newspapers in coffee houses, and debate the issues of the day.  Punishments are slowly becoming less inhumane.  Englishmen like the botanist Joseph Banks, the tall man back on the ship, are full of the wonder of science.  Cook comes from a land of ancient and small-scale mixed farms that do no harm to wildlife.  He comes from an economy with a rich diversity of skilled and non-polluting trades and professions, like wheelwrights and shipwrights.  This man speaks my mother tongue.

Two cultures, standing still in time, staring at each other.

Both cultures are deeply imperfect.  But both cultures have much to be remembered.  Both cultures have much to be celebrated.

I love both cultures because both cultures help to make me who I am.

I am Australia.

Literary critics always seem to have something to say. But sometimes they should keep quiet. Today all I want to do is share with you some lines from the poem ‘Still’ by the American poet A. R. Ammons:

I said what is more lowly than the grass?

Ah, underneath a brown crust of dried burnt moss

I looked at it closely and said this can be my habitat

but nestling in I found green mechanisms beyond intellect awaiting resurrection and rain

so I got up

And ran, saying ‘There is nothing lowly in the universe’

I found a beggar

He had stumps for legs

nobody was paying him any attention

everybody went on by

I nestled in and found his life

There, love shook his body like a devastation

I said, ‘Though I have looked everywhere, I can find nothing lowly in the universe.’

I was passing through King’s Park, a park in the centre of the city of Perth, this afternoon. What should I see, but the fabled Gulliver lying prone. Brightly clothed Lilliputians crawled around and over him.

Gulliver was tied down firmly, and the people of Lilliput swarmed about. Gulliver was an old man from the north of Western Australia. The people of Perth saw Gulliver as part of their state, part of their identity. But these southern Lilliputians forgot that Western Australia is twice the size of Western Europe, and that Gulliver’s outlook for the past 750 years resembled nothing most of them had ever seen. Before the Enlightenment period of the eighteenth century that rocked Europe’s intellectual foundations, Gulliver was a seasoned elder. Before the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century, Gulliver was a dignified pillar of the community of vertical beings. Before the great, great grandfathers and mothers of these present Lilliputians were born, this old boab had seen many generations of tribes of darker skinned Lilliputians wandering across the horizon, or maybe stopping to harvest some seeds beneath his boughs.

Adansonia gregorii, is Gulliver’s scientific name. He has six cousins in Madagascar, and one in Africa (yes we were one land far back in the mists of prehistory). Gulliver is cold from the drop in temperature in his new home in Perth, 3200 kms south of where he’d lived for the previous few centuries. He’s been translocated to King’s Park as they were going to build a road through his spot on the planet.  Hopefully he’ll be ok.