On the Western Australian State Government's Refusal to Effectively Protect Julimar 'State Forest' from the Threat of Mining (and other exploitation)

 

Herald Patches

 

(i) 2024: now

 

The minister for environment considers

Julimar forest’s availability for mining

 

            more important than its preservation.

            The chief executive officer of Chalice

 

couldn’t agree more, and praises

the official refusal to ‘sterilise’

 

            the forest’s ‘potential’. This is not

            surrealism but a radical departure

 

from the unconscious. There is violence

in city offices that spills out beyond

 

            low maintenance office plants, spills

            into the forest where fewer images

 

move as marsupials, lift as cockatoos.

Rhythm heralds consciousness.

 

 

(ii) 2019: prior

 

Rhythm heralds consciousness.

We seed an awareness in the vibrissae.

 

            Each livid patch, each resounding itch

            brings attention to the greater body.

 

One appears, then others. They will

scratch till the skin is damaged

 

            beyond repair. Make holes that can’t heal.

            A full scale ‘green’ battery industry

 

charges the assault. It’s a psychology

that goes back years. Take the 2019

 

            Indo-Pacific Defence Conference

            held at Crown Towers in ‘Perth’,

 

with a keynote on ‘defence industry

applications for WA's battery

 

            minerals and resources expertise’.

            ‘Green’ revolution destroying

 

all it contacts then making atopic collapse.

A minister’s or miner’s dream journal.

 

            A billionaire’s spacewalking view

            of Earth. A dermatologist’s similitude.

 

 

(iii) now unto ‘the future’

 

A dermatologist’s similitude.

Lost trees heaped for burning

 

            when up on the rise the house

            of the Big Whites overheats.

 

Largesse in the ore. Workers’

accommodation. Minesite infra-

 

            structure heralding State sanction.

            Words on the signs or the signs

 

themselves can be changed ipso facto.

Skill set. Application. Blue pencilled,

 

            each patch is forgotten. Bubble chart

            of raw data. Species lists. Red list data.

 

Environmental scientists, technicians,

supervisors, co-ordinators: on payrolls.

 

            Higher education for the conscious

            and unconscious. Illustrators.

 

Consumers. And open cut or under-

grounded into  the discursive,

 

            the body map

            is drilled into place.

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

 

Supervivid Depastoralism

 A new book for those interested — Supervivid Depastoralism.

Cover Painting by Stephen Kinsella

Book description: I don't sleep much or very well (I have a recent book of poetry entitled Insomnia!), but, when I do, I often have supervivid dreams. It is said that in the time of Covid-19, many people are speaking of having more vivid dreams than usual, and though the poems in this manuscript are not-specifically 'Covid-19 poems', at certain points of the manuscript they certainly make contact with this overwhelming reality and condition of crisis. But this is essentially a book in a lifecycle of trying to confront and consider the impacts of colonial agribusiness mono agricultural practices on Australia, and how it is or isn't possible to write about these issues within the conventions of the pastoral tradition of literature. Can 'pastoralism' and environmentalism intersect in meaningful ways or is it all a colonial ruse? As a committed environmentalist and human rights landrights justice campaigner, my poetry necessarily considers the place I work out of (largely wheatbelt Western Australia), and the problems of writing poetry 'about' rurality and ecology, as well as addressing the ongoing colonialism. This new book is an attempt to push my anti, post, counter, and radical pastoral to the point where it also becomes a means of considering where agricultural culpabilities intersect with personal histories and behaviours, where creativity that comes out of a critique of invasive and damaging wrongs is in itself up for question. So this is a work of self-critique, questioning, and also aspiration to vividly confront and find ways through this crisis of presence. The 'Australian Pastoral' is a construct, a propaganda device that suits all sorts of oppressive modes, and is easily a place to retreat into even when it is being questioned: I am trying to bring all this into eclogic discussion, to contest it further as part of a long and linguistically diverse process of contestation. This book 'connects' with other books on 'pastoral' I have written over the decades, including other recent work (in progress) on odes and eclogues (longer pieces largely) - but this is a collection of shorter poems. The book could be subtitled: Eclogix.

    John Kinsella

Please Stand Up and Protect Julimar Forest Against the Rapacious Designs of Chalice Gold Mining Company

To understand what is going on in the name of 'clean energy' (a dubious expression that so often distracts from massive environmental damage and exploitation), see this piece of propaganda in the district newspaper.

And here is my poem of protest — feel free to use as suits in resisting this grab for forest and bush in the name of 'protecting climate' (while actually contributing to the damage of climate). This pegging and aim to establish this mine in the region is an appalling ecological travesty and a crime against the biosphere. Write, speak, peacefully resist in all possible ways. This mining project is a great wrong in the making.

Government and Private Industry Destroy Yet Another Pocket of Bushland in Perth (Kiara)

See Hannah Barry's article on this latest abuse of nature by government and developers in Perth, Western Australia. And my poem in response to this catastrophe:

Deathwish Imposed on Kiara Bushland

Landcorp and the developers

win always in their deathwish

endgame collusion — the killing

off, the erasing to say, This is how

it always was — old growth

just photoshopped into a history

you never had — we give you what

is: dead space to grow our buildings,

‘providing’ you places to live

where orchids and skinks,

singing and calling birds

are written off, out of the image.

Remorseless. Who do they make us?

These self-appointed speakers

for the land that was never theirs?

Housing the spirits of killed flora

and fauna as people will wonder

what it is that’s not quite right

with the air the pollen record

cemented over? Bottlebrush Drive.

           

            John Kinsella

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.