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Eco-humanities
Corner
by Libby Robin
The Littoral Zone is billed as 'the first collection of ecocritical essays devoted to
Australian contexts and their writers', and as such it makes an important
contribution to the Ecological Humanities in Australia. But such a billing also
raises questions: why have there been no earlier ones? And why is this excellent
collection published in the Netherlands and the United States, but not in Australia?
The answer to the first question is that it is, perhaps, not very Australian to regard
nature writing as 'high art' - or to use the term the editors use in their introduction,
'belletristic' (that is, of or pertaining to, belles-lettres). Historically, Australian
nature writing has been earthy and popular, rather than transcendental. Australian
nature writers were 'of the people', and they wrote first for daily newspapers, not in
leather bound tomes. While Henry Thoreau, Annie Dillard, John Elder, Barry
Lopez and other North American nature writers are part of an elite canon known
both in their home countries and internationally for their high art, the chroniclers of
Australian places and nature were known in their day as newspaper columnists,
and have been largely forgotten since. In 1996, Tom Griffiths reconstructed 'The
Natural History of Melbourne' (echoing Gilbert White's famous Natural History of
Selborne (1789)). He used the distinctive voices of Donald Macdonald (1859?
-1932) and Charles Barrett (1879-1959), nature writers who have (still) received
little scholarly attention. Griffiths commented that their 'romanticism . made them
marginal to the history of science, and their practical, descriptive
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orientation .placed them outside the study of literature and culture'.1 Their works
were later published in books, but best known through the immediacy of the
widely distributed newspaper column and essay. Robert Zeller in his chapter,
'Tales of the Austral Tropics', and Cheryl Taylor, the leading North Queensland
regional literary critic, made similar points about Ernest Favenc (1845-1908) and
E.J. Banfield (1852-1923), whose work first appeared (respectively) in the
Bulletin, and in regional newspapers ( North Queensland Register, Townsville
Daily Bulletin ). Favenc, Banfield, Macdonald and Barrett were all concerned with
constructing, in Cheryl Taylor's words, 'the new nation's vision of itself'.2 In a
sense, the urge to be national and political in Federation Australia interfered with
the 'purity' of their natural history, and their legacy as nature writers has been
overlooked.
Other writers use visual cues. Green is a colour of exception in Australia. Ruth
Blair and Tony Hughes-d'Aeth use greenness (and its absence) to point to
singularity in their respective regions. Blair writes about the Green Mountains of
South-East Queensland where the mountains are so close to the sea they are green,
not blue. This is a surprise in Australia where generally the eucalyptus oil hangs
heavy in the air, rendering mountains blue from the Darling escarpment in the
West, to the famous Blue Mountains inland from Sydney. Green Mountains are
worthy of comment, and these have many stories. Hughes-d'Aeth writes of absence
in the Western Australian Wheatbelt. He begins with the sharp line between the
muted green of the vegetated inland of his state, and the 'wheat-coloured yellow' on
the satellite image used for weather bulletins. The yellow/green edge follows the
rabbit-proof fencelines, delineating a cropping zone stretching from Geraldton to
Esperance. This is a global contrast, not just an Australian one. The "'clearing line'
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is the most obvious visible sign from space of humans' effect on the planet'(p. 46).
This 'picture taken every day from well beyond the biosphere', displays 'the central
ecological problematic of the Western Australian wheatbelt, which is that of
radical disappearance' (p. 47). The light, bright yellow is where 'in the space of less
than one hundred years, an area the size of Scotland has been cleared of its native
flora and fauna.the satellite tells the story in summary. It's gone.' (p. 47). The
literature of the Wheatbelt is haunted with this loss, even though remnants of
native bush do remain on the ground on a small scale.
One of the privileges afforded Australian ecocritics writing about local places is
the possibility of a personal response: these are their places, and they can add their
own layer to the literary. Bruce Bennett writes of 'a beach somewhere', and
although all the beaches he discusses face west on the Indian Ocean side of the
continent, the 'beach somewhere' experience is something shared by most suburban
Australians. City Beach, Bennett's own beach, is accessible by bicycle from his
suburban home in the 1950s, and in his chapter, we ride with him, grabbing a towel
and racing him to the water. Places are about memory and ecology intertwined, and
this is a particular advantage for those writing about the places of their childhood.
Kate Rigby's childhood place was Canberra, far from the Littoral Zone. However,
her 'Ecopoetics of the Limestone Plains' provides the strongest synthesis of the
ecological, the literary and the personal in this collection. Perhaps it had a
particular appeal to me, because I now live in Canberra, and it is sometimes hard to
find the poetic in a place famous for faceless bureaucrats and ruthless politicians.
Canberrans need counter-narratives like this of our 'designed' place:
Rigby writes about all sorts of writers, including scientific as well as literary, as
she creates her own ecopoetics of a place surprisingly rich with stories:
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The political and the ecological engage awkwardly in this otherwise 'typical
Australian pastoral country'. The place is ecologically national as well, and the
politics of nature are played out here:
More than most other chapters, this one compels the reader to do more than look at
the landscape; Rigby urges us to recognise the 'demonstrably edible' in the
'nourishing terrains, and to seek their continued, or, in many cases, restored
flourishing for the benefit of a more-than-human community of life' (p. 172).
Neither the transcendental romantic wilderness view (the American canon) nor the
pastoral romantic (the classic British genre) work for the Australian landscape and
its peoples. What Australian writers have that other Anglophone nations do not
(with the possible exception of New Zealand ), is a scientifically literate
readership. In Australian (and New Zealand ), places settled by Europeans after the
Linnaean scientific revolution, the language of science interpenetrates the cultural
in writings about nature. Indeed, as I have argued in How a Continent Created a
Nation, science in Australia provides a primary, authoritative voice for nature.
A scientific literary voice emerges throughout this collection, for example in Tom
Lynch's chapter on Literature in the Arid Zone, where the nine deserts of Arid
Australia, '70% of the total landmass', are named initially, but the 'Interim
Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia' is used to locate the actual literary
sites. For example, the ' Tanami Desert bioregion' is an inspiration for Olaf Ruhen's
Naked under Capricorn (1957), Marie Mahood's Icing on the Damper (1995) and
her daughter Kim's, Craft for a Dry Lake (2000). The 'Broken-Hill Complex and
Simpson-Strzelecki Dunefields bioregions' give rise to Myrtle Rose White's No
Roads Go By (1932), Beyond the Western Rivers (1955) and From That Day to
This (1961). While the idea of bioregional writing and a distinctive bioregional
voice has appeal, the fact that an ecocritic must rely on Land System survey
science to name the various literary regions within the Australian arid zone shows
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the extent to which science and culture are interwoven here, and slightly shocks the
reader expecting the autochthonous sense of place implied by 'bioregionalism'.
The idea of the Littoral Zone itself plays with the tensions in the Island-Continent.
The world's largest island/smallest continent has long been a trope, but CA.
Cranston takes this much further in her chapter on islands, where she considers
insularity in its physical and emotional forms, reminding her readers that the
'island' of Tasmania is 'in fact an archipelago state, composed of 334 islands' (p.
221), and that Western Australia has 3,747 islands (p. 222). She is interested in the
spaces between, and the looking out, contrasting with Elizabeth McMahon's
approach to the 'encapsulated whole', another take on the tension between island
and continent in Australian literary imaginings3. McMahon argued that the song
'My Island Home', used in the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympics in 2000,
was a metaphor for the place of Australia in the world. The song and associated
choreography could have been about singer, Christine Anu's home island, Mabuiag
in the Torres Strait - or perhaps Elcho Island, the home of the song writer, George
Rrurrambbu. Or did it represent the single landmass of Australia ? Given the
Olympic moment, perhaps it went further, with the finale representing the
planetary globe, something that spoke to all the athletes present. It is more difficult
to speak about unity in fragmentation, but CA. Cranston makes a case for the
issues of the Australian literary whole being accentuated in the fragments as she
looking closely at the literature of islands: Three Hummock Island and King
Island, (both in Bass Strait, Tasmania), and then that of the tropical North
Stradbroke Island. These islands explicate self-sufficiency in Eleanor Alliston's
memoirs of Three Hummock Island, Escape to an Island (1966) and Island Affair
(1984); in Anne Shimmins' King Island novel Eden Observed (1999) we find the
'salvage and renewal of farming'; and Stradbroke Dreamtime (1972), a prose work
by poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal, captures the 'Aboregionalism' and tension of living
in a cross-cultural world. All these themes are important in all literature about
Australians living in their environment, not just on islands. They are social and
practical, as well as environmental, and they give ecocriticism in Australia an
earthy flavour that makes it difficult to pass off as either transcendental or
'belletristic' in an international sense.
Ecocritics everywhere are concerned with the 'relationship between literature and
the physical environment', as Zeller and Cranston observe (p. 7). In Australia the
scientific precision of a very physical (and not always positive) environment is
ever present. Engaging with ecology in Australia means in Mark Tredinnick's
words, dealing with the 'definitive pastoral enterprise' of clearing land and raising
sheep - and the inheritance of 'paddocks (increasingly saline and eroded)' (p. 123).
Tredinnick's chapter tackles the problem of 'pastoral poetry' in Australia through
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the lens of poet, Robert Gray, from the north coast of New South Wales. While
British nature writing often uses the pastoral to take the reader, in British poet
Terry Gifford's words, 'on a journey from the court to Arcadia and back to the
court renewed'4, both the upper class 'court' and the imagined pastoral Arcadia are
entirely missing from the Australian scene. Contrast Gifford's pastoral with
Australian poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe's term 'squatter pastoral', used to describe
the poems of David Campbell of the Monaro plains, cited by Kate Rigby (p. 163).
The vantage point of the Australian poet is not the mythical classical shepherd of
Arcadia, but the practical bushman and selector. Even the most privileged
Australian squatter has a history of dirt under the nails, while seventeenth century
country squires, like Robert Herrick needed the imaginative tropes of the classics
to conceive their place because their class was a barrier to dirt. In Australia class is
another problematic category, not a cause for celebration.
Judith Wright's oeuvre, both as a poet and a public intellectual, grapples with the
pastoral livelihood and the costs of it, both in displacing the Indigenous owners of
the land and in damaging the land itself. Her work crops up in more than half the
chapters, and while the guiding force of the book is the bioregion, Wright is the
only writer to be accorded a chapter in her own right. She is, in a very real sense,
both bioregional and national - and is an important uniting voice in this book.
Veronica Brady concentrates on her poetry, and 'ways of rejoicing in the world',
but in Blair's chapter, she is the voice of Tamborine Mountain, a lush rainforest
mountain very different from where she grew up on the New England Tableland.
Blair reaches out from Tamborine with Judith Wright to include some of her other
'places', the Great Barrier Reef further north in Queensland, which she defended in
Coral Battleground. Wright's Tamborine home was also the place where Oodgeroo
Noonuccal retreated to write Stradbroke Dreaming, a key text in CA. Cranston's
Islands chapter. Braidwood in the Canberra district was the place of Wright's later
years, and Kate Rigby folds Wright into her Limestone Plains lyricism. Braidwood
is now the place of a Two Fires festival, which celebrates the Arts and
Environmentalism, the two driving forces in Wright's life, in March each year. And
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although New England did not have its own bioregional chapter, there is a separate
interdisciplinary study of land, people and memory in New England, High Lean
Country. Its title echoes the 'clean, lean, hungry country' of Wright's 1940 poem,
'South of My Days', and the poem forms a prologue to the book.
Tredinnick and the other writers who grapple with the pastoral in this collection
confront the issue that in Australia pastoral is about work, not leisure. This makes
it very distinctive from the subjects of high art elsewhere, particularly the
wilderness literature of north America. While Elle Leane's chapter on Antarctica
engages interestingly with a wilderness literature that is, in a sense, 42%
Australian, the Antarctic continent does not represent the birthplace of any
Australians, and her chapter deals with 'exceptional' rather than Australian ecology.
The physical destruction of the ecological systems of Australia by pastoral and
agricultural activity is at the heart of ecocritical engagement. Such destruction
renders both Arcadian and transcendental voices false in the wide brown land.
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The answer to the question of why this is the first ecocritical collection of
Australian writing has taken me on a long and roundabout route through this
stimulating book. The second question - why are Australian publishers not
supporting such a venture? - remains. At a price of 64 Euros (over $100), this book
is not going to reach an accidental popular audience in Australia, the one that
nature writers themselves historically wrote for in newspapers. Our great nature
writers have seldom attracted the big publishing efforts that North American
writers enjoy. 'Nature Writing' is a common category in North American
bookshops, but is seldom found in Australian ones, despite the well-stocked
shelves in 'Popular Science'. The very interdisciplinary nature of place-based
writing demands that it be democratically disseminated, and if the bookshops do
not have the space for such interdisciplinarity, publishers will not be brave enough
to go for big print runs. Google is a great leveller. Perhaps the fact that our
Ecological Humanities corner is in Australian Humanities Review, a free on-line
journal, will alert new readers from the arts, the sciences and the 'generally
environmentally concerned', to the renaissance of writing about Australian nature
that this collection celebrates.
The Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and their Writers was published by Rodopi,
Amsterdam and New York in 2007: 319 pp, ISBN 9789042022188, EUR 64
WORKS CITED:
Atkinson, Alan, J.S. Ryan, Iain Davidson and Andrew Piper (eds) High Lean
Country: Land, People and Memory in New England, (Crows Nest: Allen &
Unwin, 2006)
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Robin, Libby How a Continent Created a Nation, ( Sydney : UNSW Press, 2007)
FOOTNOTES
1.Griffiths, 'The Natural History of Melbourne, in Hunters and Collectors, 1996, p. 122
5. Kathy A. Hibbard et. al 'Group Report: Decadal-scale Interactions of Humans and the
Environment', in Costanza et al. (eds.), Sustainability or Collapse, 2007, 341-375.
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