Tom M. Wilson

Bagarap Empire is a phrase I have borrowed from Fred Smith, a Canberra-based musician who I met last weekend at KULCHA in Fremantle.  Fred has worked in Papua New Guinea and knows that in pidgin ‘bagarap’ means ‘to go wrong’ (i.e. the root in English would be to bugger up).  My reason for choosing these words to begin will become clear soon enough.

In the 1920s in Western Australia the British government and the Australian government cooperated to create the Group Settlement Scheme.  This scheme saw hundreds of British men and women immigrate to south-west Australia where they were given a bit of land in the forests of the south-west.  Usually they would start up in a location along with around 20 other families.  They were to clear the land – ‘improve it’ – and were given a plot of land to themselves to create a dairy farm. They were paid to clear the land and the government stocked their farms.  When the farm was successful they were to repay the Western Australian government for all the assistance they had been given.  They would often ringbark the karri and jarrah trees.  You can imagine the sight at a plot of land at say, Northcliffe, with a full moon shining down on a field of deathly white trunks and branches.  At the end of the square plot of land they’d cleared would be the wild, dark forest towering up.

A ghostly spectacle, isn’t it?  The British empire sending out unemployed men and women to a far flung land they’d taken in their name and then telling them to kill an ancient, beautiful and biodiverse ecosystem, one that till now had captured and sequestered carbon for nothing and filtered water and provide habitat and native foods.

The following photo is circa 1924.

Guess what?  You can still see that same image today.  With the difference that you would be further north and they are Indonesian men and women standing in a field cleared of lowland rainforest.  I am talking about West Papua.  In a part of Meganesia that is even more biodiverse and critical in preventing global warming through capturing and storing carbon than south-west Australia the Indonesian government has had the arrogance to claim the land as theirs.  And then to skin large sections of it clean.  Like in the Group Settlement Scheme of south-western Australia in the 1920s, the Indonesians now carve out chunks of beautiful forest and set down poor men and women from the homeland.  Like a British family standing in a denuded clearing in the 1920s, I can see an Indonesian family standing in a cleared patch of rainforest in 2009.  Empire-sanctioned violence against culture and nature put them both in new moonscapes.  Welcome to the world of Bagarap Empire.

This would be a sour note to end on.  Sometimes clearing forest is useful for dairy farming.  I mean, I do eat yoghurt after all.  You probably drink milk and eat vegetables.  Too much of the south-west has been cleared, and much of the food south-west Australia grows is exported and this is arguably far from ideal, but certainly not all land-clearing must be evil.  The last image I’m going to leave you with here was taken recently by a guy I know, Stuart Halse, flying low over Denmark, again in the south-west of Australia.  So…  Can you feel the love?

The last few days in Fremantle have been very, very hot – too hot!  The hot suburbs of a Perth suburb in February are enough to make anybody vapid.  The other night I rode my bike down to Bather’s Beach, a beach in the middle of Fremantle.  I was alone and I trod across the warm sand and then down into the area where the water laps the beach.   Although it was 7.30 it was a still and very hot evening.  I dropped my shoulders under the water and started to swim out towards the west.  I dove down and resurfaced.  After five minutes a dolphin suddenly slid its fin out of the water twenty metres away from me, further out to sea.  The fin glistened in the dying light, and then dropped below the surface again.  Without much thought I started to swim quickly out to sea towards it.  As I got towards it I started to swim underwater. There was a slight nebulous fear about transgressing the boundaries of personal space between our species – a not-knowing what happens when you quickly approach Bottle-nosed dolphins underwater in the dusk as a lone swimmer.  But pushing through and past this fear was part of the exhilaration of the experience.  I knew that I wanted to be close to this wild and beautiful Other under the water, and I made it happen.  In a split second I was swimming quickly out to sea and diving down a few metres below the surface.  And then, in the grey underwater light of late evening in Fremantle, without a mask on, I saw a lighter shape out in front of me towards the bottom and heard a high-pitched sequence of querulous sonar beeps.  “Hallo, who are you?”  Seemed to say the sentient Other in the misty atmosphere before me.  There were no other dolphins in the area as far as I could see, so why would this fellow be making vocal signals just as he came into proximity with me?  But the piquancy of this sudden burst of cryptic and alien communication came to me like fresh air.  It was like fresh air coming into a room made stale by human breath.  I started to swim with the large being, dropping down to the bottom and stroking my way forward towards it and past it.  I popped up now and again with wide-eyed excitement.  All day I had been reading about the slow but steady depredations on nature in south-west Australia by white people over the previous century, and to finish this hot summer day with a sudden and unexpected encounter with a large, wild mammal in the sea, five minutes bike ride from where I live was a joy, a needed joy.  I came home to my house feeling revived by an encounter with slippery, muscular extra-human reality.  I came home to my house feeling reassured by the continuing presence of the wild.