Near Goomalling: Oak Park Concretions

            
poem-texts by John Kinsella, photos by Tracy Ryan

CASE 1: These concretions were prepared in late spring and displayed in early autumn. The gap was part of the process between text as conceptual and text as installation. In situ, they become integral parts of place, if temporary ones. After the fact, they are representational: of that moment, of the history of Oak Park. Between preparing text and displaying it came the devastating summer. There are no more edges, no more ecotones — the blurring is not liminal, but sharp lines of demolition. No benefits and richness and plethoras where habitats contact and overlap, but the scribble of damage. What is given way to is the reality of the vestigial or the remnant. Not a condition of healthy and unhealthy, but of different states of decay. It’s a brutal reality — the land set aside is dying, and rehabilitation is a gesture. The farmed land feeds the nature-reserve land with its residues. Does that mean one should resign oneself to this? Of course not. But the edges need to be unmapped, need to be denied, to grow over into an ambiguity, which is what the romantic ecologists wish as edge and liminality. ‘Habitat’ is extinct as useful terminology — its colonial residues are toxic.

CASE 2: In photographing the words, one had to be careful to avoid the couple who were come across on a bench installed near the saline (dry) lake, caught in flagrante; one turns away. Nature walking. Nothing of Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, though you might think the couple thrill to the idea, nature in decay around them. But there is life: swamp sheoaks, bobtails, bush flies, mosquitoes, rabbits, roos, willy wagtails playing the trickster in acacias nearby: all the transliterations of their name (djitty djitty, jiddy jiddy...). All the perching birds watch on suspiciously, as we won’t watch, as we avoid and scuttle away, giving the realm of place to the love-makers.

CASE 3: To mention an edge doesn’t give us an edge. To note the gnamma hole worked over centuries to make deep water-storage now full of beer cans and cigarette packets, the granite a radon machine, is not to participate in custodial presence. It is not scenic, and visiting is not participatory. The machine of the water place is altered with the ticking-off of points on the walk. Journey to the centre of the earth. Discovery wearing down to bare bones.

CASE 4: This spiral of husbandry taking us far away from a source point at any given moment. The wild-oats scenario: chokes out native grasses, and then the poisons used to eliminate it alter the bio-chemistry of the soil, the place as a whole. Metaphor and data overlap, compete, leave blank dead areas and the sand in a state of unrest, vulnerability, as unstable as the texts printed with industrial ink on recycled commercial paper with the costs imposed on environment far away. The slippage of textual activism, the polyfilla that is poetry. Yet this is not a denial of the living world but rather an affirmation. As Shelley writes in Prometheus Unbound (IV, Ione): ‘How every pause is filled with undernotes,/Clear, silver, icy, keen, awakening tones/Which pierce the sense and live within the soul’... We might have an inversion of seasons and basic climatics, but the same resolution life has to find a way is what drives this act of witness, presence and participation.

CASE 5: For some, and maybe for many of those whose land this is and will eternally be (going forward, going back, in the depth and dimensions of here and now), place is a location (technically, a set of co-ordinates, a specifically quantifiable and locatable set of points using the planets, the stars... a wider sense of time and place) that cannot be erased by the destruction wrought through colonial invasiveness. The texts are not sonorous, but they might be words plucked from a song, or sounds from those words might form harmonics with words from the song of place. That’s wishful supposition, but it’s also aspiration. It seeks to appropriate nothing, and will leave no discernible physical mark. The desire behind these concretions is to leave little signature, to do little or no damage, to acknowledge and maybe vicariously participate in a health of locality, place, timelessness. But a conceptual imprint is left and is magnified by the images being blogged or published or displayed, even if they are ignored. And that is an imposition the poet and the reader/viewer must process and be accountable for.