thomas m wilson

There are those who don’t have a deep spiritual connection with nature.  Their lives will always be limited, despite how much meaning they may find in dressing well, in the arts and in social relations between solid walls.

And then there are those who will understand the following poem by Raymond Carver:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
(from ‘Last Fragment’)

Beach spinifex would have been one of the first thing British folk saw when they piled off their ships in 1829 in south-west Australia.  It is still growing in 2008 at Port beach.

Then as they stepped past the sand dunes and climbed up some of the hills they would have walked through old groves of Melaleuca lanceolata or Ti Tree.  These are harder to find in Fremantle in 2008 than beach spinifex, and I wonder why people don’t plant these beautiful trees in their gardens around town.  The trees above are actually growing in a corner of John Curtin High School, my old alma mater.

And then there were the locals to meet.  I don’t have any photos of the original people around Fremantle, but this is an image of some original peoples of the East Kimberley from 1910.

Last night I and a group of my friends watched ‘The Tracker’ (2002).  Aboriginal societies, of which there were hundreds over the continent were, like humans everywhere, not entirely guiltless of ecological destruction, for example causing the extinction of the marsupial lion.  Some societies had habits that appear very strange to modern, Western sensibilities, such as consuming the flesh of other humans in some circumstances.  None of them had soft beds to sleep on at night or antibiotics or an advanced culture of respect for the rights of women (women are forcably abducted in many of the Aboriginal myths and stories that I’ve read collected by Ronald M. Berndt).   However these first Australians did have much that we Westernized Australians lack.  For example: tightly bonded communities, plenty of free time, regular participation in the arts, and a deep bioregional consciousness.

In ‘The Tracker’, along with Rolf de Heer’s other great Aboriginal film ‘Ten Canoes’ (2006), the director represents human life in the Australian landscape as a passing subset of the greater natural world.  de Heer does this, for example, with camera shots which start focussing on the human protagonists and then slowly zooming out into a panaroma of wooded mountains until the humans dissapear into the grey-green distance.  And de Heer is right to represent the first Australians in this way.  For these people the Australian land is not there to be concreted over in globalized homogeneity and then mostly forgotten about, but is invested with stories and symbolic significance, intimately known and interacted with, and recognized as the abiding context of human life.

Last night, in the warm night’s air of Fremantle in early summer, I followed the Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil stepping along the woodland paths in a fictional 1922 and breathing life into the nomadic ways of the first Australians.  As I did this I found that I was passing over the littoral of this country, and travelling inland.

At Fremantle Prison imprisoned men painted pictures of nature on thick walls.  That is tensioned razor wire at the top of the above limestone wall.  This mural was painted in 1991, just before the prison was closed as a functioning place of incarceration. Some of the paintings done by Aboriginal men remain, fading now as they are weathered by the elements, but still poignant.  Beneath the razor wire they dreamt of open eucalyptus woodland.

Scenes of natural landscapes have been shown by numerous researchers in the field of psychology to be good for our mental health.  E. O. Wilson has proposed a theory of biophilia to give an evolutionary explanation for this: we evolved along with a rich diversity of species in the rift valleys of east Africa and a propensity to find psychological comfort and aesthetic pleasure in a diversity of natural life is easily activated in our pathways of mental development.  Biophilia is a part of human nature.

Many of us who live in Fremantle but who aren’t locked up physically in Fremantle prison seem to forget to praise the earth.  This brings me to invoke the famous words of W. H. Auden from his elegy for W. B. Yeats:

‘In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise.’

Auden was talking to the figure of the poet, and talking about the power of literature and poetry to raise our spirits and give us profound existential satisfactions.  But I want to use his words for my own present purposes.  Even as we are free to roam around the streets of our towns and cities we can suffer a kind of spiritual incarceration.  What do I mean by this?  I mean that the concrete nature of your every day environment can become the prison of your days.

But we can see through the walls.  We can remember the green fields behind and beyond.  Listen to the voice of the American poet W. S. Merwin:

GREEN FIELDS

By this part of the century few are left who believe
in the animals for they are not there in the carved parts
of them served on plates and the pleas from the slatted trucks
are sounds of shadows that possess no future
there is still game for the pleasure of killing
and there are pets for the children but the lives that followed
courses of their own other than ours and older
have been migrating before us some are already
far on the way and yet Peter with his gaunt cheeks
and point of white beard the face of an aged Lawrence
Peter who had lived on from another time and country
and who had seen so many things set out and vanish
still believed in heaven and said he had never once
doubted it since his childhood on the farm in the days
of the horses he had not doubted it in the worst
times of the Great War and afterward and he had come
to what he took to be a kind of earthly
model of it as he wandered south in his sixties
by that time speaking the language well enough
for them to make him out he took the smallest roads
into a world he thought was a thing of the past
with wildflowers he scarcely remembered and neighbors
working together scything the morning meadows
turning the hay before the noon meal bringing it in
by milking time husbandry and abundance
all the virtues he admired and their reward bounteous
in the eyes of a foreigner and there he remained
for the rest of his days seeing what he wanted to see
until the winter when he could no longer fork
the earth in his garden and then he gave away
his house land everything and committed himself
to a home to die in an old chateau where he lingered
for some time surrounded by those who had lost
the use of body or mind and as he lay there he told me
that the wall by his bed opened almost every day
and he saw what was really there and it was eternal life
as he recognized at once when he saw the gardens
he had made and the green fields where he had been
a child and his mother was standing there then the wall would close
and around him again were the last days of the world.

The walls close around us – we are cut of from the natural world.  The animals migrate before us – we no longer see wild animals in our lives.  For Merwin’s character Peter this means that the world is ending.  His life is ending, but more than this: the more-than-human world is ending.

Peter’s life in an old chateau becomes life lived in a benevolent prison. As the condemned man in Fremantle prison dreamt of a rolling Australian woodland, so Peter dreams of the gardens and green fields of France beyond the chateau’s walls.  Beyond and behind the walls lies the mother, the natural world.  And Peter has learnt how to see through the walls.  In an Australian prison an Aboriginal man projects his dreams of the open woodlands of his home through the medium of paint onto a limestone wall.

Most of us do not have our freedom denied in so literal a sense.  Most of us are not imprisoned.  Despite this it remains for us caught in a more metaphorical prison of concreted days to really learn how to praise.

The Australian federal government yesterday released its plans to reduce carbon pollution by 5% by 2020 (compared to 2000 levels).  I thought that after eleven years of conservatives in parliament house in Canberra, that this year, with a brand new government, would be a turning point.  I was wrong.  I, and many other Australians, have been let down.  Today in the centre of Perth the Greens Senator Scott Ludlum spoke on behalf of all us who feel frustrated by the news.  He was on the RTR program Understory this evening, and said that the governement may as well have done nothing as release this paltry 5% target.  With government inaction like this the time has come for the community to stand up and protest.

The truth is that physics does not do bargains with lobby groups or make fudges or compromises.  The climate does not care about us, or our our political arguments and discussions.

The climate crisis we are now facing is very simply explained.  If the melting ice in the Arctic is the canary in the coal mine, then the canary is dead.  It is time to evacuate the mine.

This is a map drawn by Captain James Stirling in 1827, when the captain was exploring the area prior to setting up the Swan River Settlement of British immigrants in 1829.  Click on the above map and it will enlarge so you can read it better.

Kallip is an old Nyungar word meaning ‘a knowledge of localities; familiar acquaintance with a range of country… also used to express property in land’ (Moore 1884b:39, from Sylvia J. Hallam, Fire and Hearth: A Study of Aboriginal Usage and European Usurpation in South-Western Australia, Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1975, p.43).

Do you have kallip?  Captain Stirling had more kallip than many contemporary citizens of Perth, but he didn’t have as much kallip as the Aboriginal people with their ecologically attuned awareness of seasons, animal behaviours and landforms.  I try to have kallip.  Where I live is not just a street name and number: I live on a sandy, limestone hill close to the Indian ocean, south and near the mouth of the Swan river.  Stirling’s map is interesting to me as it captures many of the important aspects of the landscape, such as Mount Eliza, the prominence where today’s King’s Park stands, and most importantly, our river. Unlike most maps you will see today that depict the area on a north-south axis, this map makes the river a central point and a part of the landscape that streches out before, you, the viewer.  The Swan is the centre.  As it was for Aboriginal people here.

Come back to 1827.  You are more likely to bump into people on the Swan coastal plain than, for example, in the thick karri forests to the far south.  These people don’t live in tribes, but in what is more accurately described as large extended families of up to fifty people.  Single men camp away from the married men, women and children.  They are lean and walk with the ease of nomads.  Some have headbands with Emu or Cockatoo feathers stuck in the side, rising regally above their faces.  In winter they retreat to the area inland just below the Darling Range, away from the strong and chilly winds coming off the ocean.  They hunt yonga, or kangaroos, at this time.  The men leave the camp in the morning in groups of two or three and use the noise of the wind and the rain to provide cover as they stalk the yonga.  They wear bukas, or long cloaks made of kangaroo fur fastened with a bone pin in front.  Unlike out on uninhabited Rottnest island, the woodland here is full of huge, old djara, or jarrah trees, most with burn marks from past fires, and open green pasture underneath the trees.  The lack of undergrowth here on much of the Swan coastal plain is due to the habit of the locals of seasonally starting small fires.  It creates carpets of lush new growth the next year and good, green hunting pastures.

As the year progresses and summer approaches the people move westwards towards the coast and towards Fremantle.  Beach time!  More people get together.  They step over soft, sandy ground.  Banksia flowers start to glow yellow in the sun.  The people collect them and steep them in little fresh water springs to taste a sweet liquid.  Men climb trees by chipping foot holds in trunks with stone axes, and collect the eggs of parrots from holes in boughs far above the ground.  Sometimes they visit the lakes south of Fremantle, like Manning Lake in today’s Hamilton Hill, and dig for frogs and tortoises, or yargan, in the mud at their edges.  Women kill some norn, or snakes, to eat.  They eat yams and other roots the women of the family dig up with their wonnas, or digging sticks.  In the trunks of decaying balga, or grass trees, they find fat, white moth larvae to eat.  As summer comes on fishing starts to become their main source of protein.  The Swan river is alive and full of healthy shoals of big tailor, cobbler (Tandanus bostocki) and other fish.  The locals fish by herding fish into the shallows and spearing them.  Canoes and fishing hooks are not on the scene, but here and there weirs are used to trap fish.

Witness this land in 1827.  A kwenda ambles along through the understory.  A shy honey possums creeps through the leafy canopy above.  You can hear the sound of Casuarina’s needles soughing in the wind.  The day passes quietly, as it has for thousands of years.  Come to the water’s edge.  A tale is being told around a camp fire at the slow-flowing river’s shore.  Behind the dark face of the narrator the western sky is lighting up another tapestry of coloured cumulus.  A limb cracks and falls off an old Tuart tree further downstream.  All eyes turn in the direction of the splash.  The silence ripples outwards from the Tuart’s speech mark.  Then the other story is resumed.

Later steaming fish are lifted from the ground and unwrapped from paperbark coverings.  The aroma pervades the clearing and the humpies and brings appetite.  Young people laugh and crack jokes.

The evening lengthens.  As the light goes a huge flocks of black swans, hundreds and hundreds of them, suddenly take to the air.  Although it is dark now the rush from the surface of the water is loud.  They are taking off, just out of sight.  Old eyes look out over the barely lit waters.

Old eyes can fail.  Old eyes can flicker, and then close.

It is a deeper shade of black now.  But in the centre the Swan keeps flowing, slow and sure.  Not even forgetfullness can stop it.