Tom M. Wilson

The American poet Jane Hirshfield is the author of the following poem.

Optimism

More and more I have come to admire resilience,

Not the simple resistance of a pillow whose foam returns over and over to the same shape,

But the sinuous tenacity of a tree

Finding the light newly blocked on one side

It turns in another

A blind intelligence, true

But out of such persistence

Arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs

All this resonace, unnretractable earth.

In her portrait of the rising sap of evolution the poet intimates something I feel when looking on the green, emergent life of a forest or woodland.  It is this unfolding, endlessly optimistic spirit in the wood, leaves and mitochondrial pulse of life that provokes a feeling of… you fill in the blank space.  I’m sure endless numbers of cliche-ridden poems have been written to fill that blank space in, many of them harping on spring time in the British Isles.  In the cliche-free language of Dylan Thomas it is ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’.

Like Hirshfield I can’t help but admire the persistance of evolution: that meandering and long-flowing river that has brought us turtles, figs and mitochondria.

Karakamia….  275 hectares owned and managed by the conservation NGO the Australian Wildlife Conservancy.  One hour’s drive east of Perth in the Darling Ranges.  In Nyoongah, the original language around here:  Karak: cockatoo.  Mia: home.

Last night I was there.

After arriving we passed through an electronic gate, and past the electrified wire fence that extended for 9kms around the edge of the property.  As we drove through Karakamia towards the little hut that is the visitor’s centre I saw elder marri trees standly with an aged dignity uncommon in much of the Perth hills.  Not only that but there were huge trunks strewn about the earth here and there, left to decay and some of them suitably inhabited, no doubt, by furry little animals.

After a preliminary talk about the history of Karakamia I and my group of friends began our two hour guided walk through the property.  The moon was full and shone down through a gauze of cloud.  The air was warm and slightly humid.

It has been a long, dry summer, and the understorey was full of old leaves that crackled in the still night as you walked over them.  Making our way along the darkened path down a west-facing slope we heard a rustle in the dry leaves to our right.  Lisa, our guide, swung her spot-light in the direction of the noise and highlighted a furtive quenda, otherwise known as a southern-brown bandicoot.  The quenda doesn’t hop like the macropods, it does an ungainly trot through the undergrowth on all fours.  Its coat was sleek and shined in the torchlight, a sign of its good health.  Its brown nose was long, almost like an ant-eater, and pointed down to the soil where it foraged for insects in.  Its little black snout was wet and shined in the light.

We left the quenda to the peace of a summer’s night and continued on down the track.  The torch beam caught the silvery tracery of a spider web.  The torch sought its quarry and a frighteningly large Golden Orb Weaver was in the limelight.  The spider waved its arms in protest at the intruders.

Onwards.  Crackle, crackle, crackle.  Then Maria said stop, and pointed forward at the ground.  The light was shone, and at our feet stood the tiny figure of a woylie, or burrowing betong.  It looked up at us for a few moments, a fraction of our size and unsure of what was going on as it stood under this sudden downpour of intense light.  Then it bounced off into the jarrah understorey.  Bounced rather than bounded I should add.  As I’ll explain this later.

Walking through the bush on this balmy summer night I could almost feel myself walking through a historical drama.  I was appropriately attired for a colonial costume drama from the 1890s and after a dinner party late one night we’d decided to take a stroll out through the little known Australian bush under the full moon.  We had wandered down a cart-track under the full moon, through the jarrah trees and the banksias.  The place still echoed with the spirits of its Aboriginal companions.  The marsupials of the forest were still healthy and ever present.   If disturbed one bounced away or wandered off through the shrubs.  The place was still wild.  You could feel the pressure of wildness.  Back in 2009 reality, the spirits of the bush are still in residence.

The walk finished and we retired for a drink at the visitor’s centre.  As we were about to leave Karakamia, about ten o’clock, I made my way to the small gravel car park by myself.  A small brown shape appeared before me on the edge of the gravelled area.  I stopped.  It was a woylie.  I sat down on the ground.  The sound of the others from the verandah of the visitor’s centre came to me in snatches of laughter and talk, but I was mostly enveloped in the calm of the warm night in the forest.  The towering shapes of old marri trees in a long-disused field spread out to my west.  The little woylie eventually became used to my shape and started, slowly,  towards me.

How can I describe its movements?  It hopped forward in diminutive, elegant bobs.  As it hopped forward and moved past me to my right, incredibly close, I was entranced by the way in which its head pointed forward and down and it made its rapid jumps with a mixture of flowing confidence and touching smallness of motion.  I’m used to seeing Western Grey kangaroo’s bound, and compared to that easy, long roll, the gait of the woylie is entirely different.  It is like seeing a cougar run across a field in the mountains of California, and then later watching a chipmunk scramble along a rocky path.  And in fact that was the next thought that came into my mind: I’ve seen many squirrels and chipmunks in America, but not once while growing up in Australia did a woylie bounce past my family’s tent.

As beautiful as the little fellow was, something is wrong in this scene.  Here I was, thirty years old, sitting on the gravel in the carpark of Karakamia and seeing for the first time in my life the animal that should be so common to my forests and fields, the beautiful little creature that should be such a recognizable feature of the place I come from.  I have spend quite a bit of time in the natural environment in Australia, and I have never before seen a woylie.

To the WA government: Do whatever it takes to bring back our animals.  Don’t leave it to the efforts of private philanthropy.  Make the bush live.

The sketch by Richard Ffarington was done along the edge of the Swan River in the 1840s (from Ffarington’s Folio: South West Australia 1843-1847, Art Gallery of Western Australia, 1986, p.26).  It is a very rare glimpse into what Perth has meant for humans for the vast majority of the time humans have been here.

It is wrong of one nation to go and claim a part of another nation as as part of their country.  Yet that is what the British did where I live in south-west Australia around a hundred and thirty years ago.

Langoulant, 1978.

Early white settlers in Perth dismantled fishing traps and weirs of the Aboriginals, shot their dogs, and took their most valuable hunting pastures.  They then flew the Union flag on the land, and told themselves that ‘the natives’ were a lower race of humans than ‘civilized’ members of the British Empire like themselves (’civilized’ fellows were of course quite civilized enough to die from scurvy rather than eat nearby quandongs).  It all reminds one of the arrogance and madness of tiny troops of Spanish men clambering through South American jungles in the 1500s and proclaiming ‘all this’, as they surveyed another grand vista of beautiful, green forest canopies, as belonging to the Spanish crown.

The banks of the Swan are full of interesting plants like balgas, or grass trees.

The shapes of this country are many oceans of difference away from the hedges and oaks of English fields…

When Captain James Stirling was exploring the Swan River in 1827 he didn’t have an SLR hanging over his shoulder, but he did have a professional artist with him:  Frederick Garling.  This is Garling’s version of what the banks of the Swan looked like as Stirling and the men explored up it.  Here are the men rocking in their hammocks in the warm night’s air in a clearing, one that was probably used by Aboriginals as a campsite:

In 2009 the banks of the Swan look quite different.  Now people who can’t tell the difference between a tuart and a jarrah bed down for the night in surburban monstrosities that have erased the character of the Australian earth.

Ah… the green Sahara of the lawn.  The Perth metropolitan area has plenty of facilities for automobiles and demented suburban hubris, but not quite so many for ecological-niche dependant biodiversity.  As Irene Cunningham says, in Perth ‘green lawns and football are seen as more important than saving the land’ (The Land of Flowers, 2005, p.34).

Jarrah trees of immense size were once common around Perth (full of nesting holes for Twenty Eight Parrots and other local life).  This photo is of a Yanchep road scene from 1935:

Most of the big old patriarchs like this one were cut down for timber.  Although there are a couple of exceptions like Bold Park and King’s Park, you could basically summarise the environmental history of Perth by singing along with Joni Mitchell: ‘They paved paradise and put up a parking lot’.

Many people in Perth have gotten rich through investing in the mining of their state.  Many flaunt their material status symbols.  These same people might heed the words of Clive James from his recent ‘Point of View’ broadcast on the BBC (2 Jan, 2009):

‘Getting rich for its own sake looks as stupid as body building does at that point when the neck gets thicker than the head, and the thighs and biceps look like four plastic kit bags full of tofu.’

The Perth metropolitan area keeps growing outwards, knocking down the tiny patches of banksia woodland we have left on the Swan Coastal Plain. Today central Perth is an unremarkable, steel and concrete central business district with a non-residential core, surrounded by sprawling, car and fossil-fuel dependent suburbs.  But Perth wasn’t always this ugly or badly designed. Perth was a small town from the 1830s till the gold rush of the 1880s and 1890s turned it into a small city.  It was up until the 1940s that it had two and three story Victorian architecture lining long streets like St. Georges Terrace and Hay St.  This was the city of English values 13 thousand kms from England that my grandmother was a young woman in.  It looks much as the West End of nearby Fremantle looks today, except that it has lovely little trams rolling up and down the street.

It is fascinating to think that for my grandmother this was her experience of Perth as a young woman: genteel Victorian stone facades, expansive balconies, trams, bowler hats, bicycles, and generally a quite pretty little city situated on the banks of a healthy Swan river full of prawns and crabs and fish.  The ugly concrete high-rise buildings appeared in the 1950s and then really came into the streetscape in the 1960s and 1970s.  Busy roads and freeways crisscrossed the Esplanade between the city and the river and you could no longer stroll down to the river’s edge after alighting from a tram.  The old Perth went under.

Today in 2009 Perth is not a beautiful city in my eyes.  However the land abides where it hasn’t been skinned by chronically industrious wajelas or white fellas.  Even in the middle of the city, as Wendell Berry writes in his poem ‘In a Country Once Forested’, ‘under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass’.  Let me rephrase that:  in Perth, under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass trees.