Eclogues and the Fact that Colonialism Thrives in Western Australia — What Can We Do to Stop It? What Can Poetry Do to Thwart Colonialism?

After seeing images of the mass destruction of native bushland in the southwest of Australia near Scott River committed by the Blue Whale Farming Plantation I reach a nadir of anger, frustration and despair. Earlier in the day I have been writing pleading letters to prominent members of the Anglican Church to ask their assistance in trying to stop the grotesque 'development' of native bushland in the Hills of Boorloo/Perth in north Stoneville, a destructive project that would see the clear-felling of at least 200 hectares of 'vegetation', and possibly more (around 60 000 trees plus undergrowth). 

The Anglian diocese 'owns' that land, and the land development company Satterley at their behest is aiming to create a townsite through erasing this rich, diverse and essential hills habitat. The material gain for a supposedly spiritual organisation is obscene in itself, but it further implicates the original colonial project in Western Australia (backed by Canberra), and the consuming of country to disperse the material rewards among a hierarchical organisation. The Federal Government just gave approval for this 'project', and if that is bewildering, put it in the context of the mining and pastoral 'lease' colonialism that rules Australia making such things too often a fait accompli.

This is an unreconstructed colonial country, still emphasising its imperial roots rather than diverging from them. And not that far away from north Stoneville, Chalice has been granted official 'strategic status':  'The Western Australian Premier Roger Cook has granted strategic project status to Chalice Mining's (ASX:CHN) Gonneville Platinum Group Elements-Nickel-Copper-Cobalt Project.' just to make it that much easier for the erasure of habitat (and all it contains) and the imposition of 'green targets' that are industrial-consumer markers of 'climate care', and nothing to do with the well-being of the biosphere and all it contains. It's greed fused with 'progress', and such money is to be made that 'trickle down' arguments abound. If you want the truth of the brutality, you never need to look further than a website like Mining dot com dot Au... it tells it proud and raw, and within the colonial matrix of lip-service and industry-inflected reportage. 

This is what it's like in Western Australia and Australia as a whole — it's a barely mitigated assault on natural ecologies. From a visceral localised hatred of the individual tree found in some (I hope not many) urban (and rural) dwellers, to mass clearing illegally committed by a company with a (presumably unwitting) colonial signifier in its name (as well as an appropriation of an endangered species to boot), to mining companies claiming they are delivering the planet from climate change while destroying entire ecosystems, it's a remorseless furthering of the colonial project to its ultimate end: complete exploitation till every cent of profit is rung from the occupied land. 

Whether there is a 'Labor' or 'Coalition' government in power, the environment suffers. Whether there is a 'Labor' or 'Coalition' government in power, colonialism thrives, if via different routes. The surface gloss of Labor doesn't hide the reality of the damage being done. A conservative government got AUKUS up and running, a Labor government has given it teeth. And so on.

Out of my despair, I constantly ask myself what can I really do? When the bulldozers arrive at Julimar Forest or north Stoneville, I will be there. In fact, I will be reading and recording my 'Bulldozer Poem' before that and getting it out again as a contribution to preventative action. It's obviously best to stop an infection rather than to try to treat it when it's gone too far. And this is the infection of colonialism and capitalist greed. This is the infection of hierarchical governance on all levels: it is the fusion of the corporate, the private and the militarised state. I will read other poems. I will speak. I will write. The powers that be aren't perturbed, of course, but I do hope to motivate others. There are plenty out there caring and acting, and at least Blue Whale Farming Plantation have been held accountable and are having to revegetate the area they destroyed, but it won't and can't be the same as the erased habitat.

Out of my despair I continue to try and act. On the weekend I am teaching a poetry workshop based on the eclogue. I have used this form for almost forty years as a way of bringing opposing voices into a synthesis of refusal to comply with the status quo not only of capital and power, but also the power-structures of literature itself. 

'Literature' (especially as a nationalist mode of monitoring and archiving) is a tool of presentation, of regulating creativity through critical reception, dispersal of texts, and aesthetic co-ordination (and imposition) of public response. 

Take the eclogue, ur-textuality of Western 'pastoral' (though it means 'small poem' its emphasis is traditionally on the song-dialogue... and is underpinned with a bucolic competitiveness that brings certain issues of immediacy into focus), and consider the 'founder' of the tradition, Theocritus (a Sicilian Greek who wrote out of Alexandria and Cos c.300BCE-post-260BCE). Consider his concerns for herders and herds (the 'bucolic'), song, love, sex, humour, mythology, quotidian 'realism', households, 'towns' (see his 'mimes'), kings and hierarchies. It is also worth considering the embedding of slavery, empire and rural production into Theocritus's hierarchy (or faux non-hierarchies) of voices and what he does or doesn't do to question this). See here for J.M. Edmonds' English translation of Theocritus's First Idyll. 

Anyway, my eclogues are about departures and reconstitutions, and if the form isn't always 'anti', the content inevitably is in its (attempted) non-compliance. Traditions are created around texts, and extra compliances obviously imposed, so one is resisting traditions as well as 'original' contexts.

If in the Australian context the machinery of the colonial is resisted by Indigenous sovereignty, culture, knowledge and all attendant rights of being on country, there is an eclogue-ic marginalia of colonial resistance in the broader sense of transportation and punishment of convicts. This may or may not apply to individual convicts, or groups of convicts, but from the beginning of the colonial enterprise the 'undesirable' was either recouped through 'ticket of leave' reward for compliance (at least officially), with aim to eventually becoming a willing coloniser, or 'eternally' condemned as a threat to the empire. 

To stop machinery destroying habitat by direct intervention (locking on, damage of the machines or whatever) is seen as a threat to the colonial state and the law exacts 'revenge'. To stay on the other side of the eclogue and compete with the state you are expected to operate within the state's rules. Even activism such as my own which relies on non-damaging and non-violent interventions is threatened by action if I cross onto privatised land (what a joke). 

How we write about a wrong matters. To do so in uninformed ways with 'literary' aims in mind (even if we would like to think it's otherwise) can feed the state and capital by attenuating the 'literary', giving it legitimacy through adding 'depth', 'range' and 'sincerity' to its make-up, therefore 'legitimising' or making 'authentic' in consumable ways. I am reminded of the failed utopianism of poet Southey as he lapsed into a deep empire conservatism via official acclaim (the most effective weapon of the state to control its errant creative voices!). Southey's apparent radicalism (a very literary radicalism to my mind!) of the 1790s, when he wrote of transportation in his 'Botany-Bay Eclogues' (Oxford, 1794) without (as, sadly, was to be expected) understanding or connection with Aboriginal sovereignty, was a classic case of ambition vs. social issues. This is basic noble savage stuff, dressed up with the idyll to be tainted by the 'rustic' and the 'herds' of colonialism... the intervention is noted, but an awareness of the imposition of literary artifice on the 'native' is lacking. Could this poem have been much more? Likely, but not over the distance and via the literary tropes of 'wilderness' Southey is deploying. The eclogue fails to do any sort of justice.

Welcome, ye marshy heaths, ye pathless woods,

Where the rude native rests his wearied frame

Beneath the sheltering shade; where, when the storm

Benumbs his naked limbs, he flies to seek

The dripping shelter! Welcome, ye wild plains,

Unbroken by the plough, undelved by hand

Of patient rustic; where, for lowing herds

And for the music of the bleating flocks,

Alone is heard the kangaroo’s sad note,

Deepening in distance! Welcome, wilderness,

Nature’s domain! for here, as yet unknown

The comforts and the crimes of polished life,

Nature benignly gives to all enough,

Denies to all a superfluity.

The eclogue here becomes a tool for one set of voices to be privileged over other silenced or absent voices (outside 'observational description', which is a mediated subjectivity via the poet, who observes nothing in a real sense). And this might well be the problematical crux of the eclogue form. With this in mind, I try to push the form's temporal and spatial co-ordinates as much as the conceptual ones so that each 'voice' in itself is multi-layered, and not just performing a binary action within the poet's overall intent/vision/cause. There need to be cracks and fissures in each 'voice' in the 'dialogue' of an eclogue. No voice even in my most oppositional (argumentative) eclogues is meant to be unified and resolvable.

I attempt to use the eclogue to undo the controls of primary industrialising... the crushing notion that those who provide 'organic' and inorganic raw materials to communities should in some way have some kind of primacy over those who don't. Those who manufacture toxic spray to 'assist' farmers in growing grain to 'feed the planet' are as entrenched as values in the colonial equation as the invaders who stole the land in the first place. And this is what my eclogues seek to show through juxtaposition, conversation, artifice, contradictions and also colloquial familiarity. 

Here's an eclogue I've written in the height of 'spray season' here... even if you don't use the crap itself, it gets imposed on you and certainly on the habitat. The drift is literal, and it's also ontological, spiritual and political. We are all poisoned no matter how 'distant' its application.

Spray Regime Eclogue

 

 

Wild Oats

 

Cushioning the car-window-toss

of plastic drink container

to wager those carcinogens,

uncomfortable breakdown,

I labour to raise a seed head.

 

 

Glyphosate

 

Every excuse is made for my love

as you wither to root system.

I am non-selective, unbigoted

to de-glyph perennial unwanteds.

 

 

Wild Oats

 

Where native vegetation was excoriated

I stepped in to colour-code for privateering

astronauts (and the rest of them). Inland sea

to push aside, seeds clinging to their suits.

 

 

Glyphosate

 

I do love you, even if my love is broadly targeted.

I wear the marks of my makers down the line.

I love you as I love a herd of weeds.

I love you in the wide open spaces, the corrals.

 

 

Wild Oats

 

I call you out, N-(phosphonomethyl) glycine.

I call you out, Round-Up.

I call you out, evader of class-action suits.

I call to the sun and the earth and your deliverers.

I call through the hierarchies, to your makers.

 

So I keep trying and refuse the despair. Poetry has a purpose, and this is its purpose for me. To resist colonialism, violence, the hypocrisies of capitalism, while connecting respectfully as much as possible with the land itself and all it nurtures. And to push the form further, to show the complexity of any voice placed in a dialogue that is oppositional, I offer below an eclogue in 'signs' wherein each sign is affected by the other. Even a land developer can love an animal or care about the state of climate while destroying animals and climate — if we don't work to understand these contradictions, we'll never address and resolve the issues of damage.

Graphology Superscription 78 Signs of Ecloguismo: a spatial resistance collectivism

 

=, [], @

 

 

P(r)oem

 

Machismo almost destroyed us

in its plays and counterplays

across windrows and furrows,

across spray regimes

and territorial markings,

across closed and open forms.

Sign the alternatives,

sign the tolerances,

stress-test in metal fatigue

open-cut and deep below.

Signs to represent trees

and horizons. Conversations

resolving into the body-

collective, its energies.

 

 

Signs

 

 

=

 

Negating ¹ won’t let me

offer equality, such values

obfuscate a truth: we both

wish to see complete

redistribution of wealth.

The aphid per broadacre crops.

Food per industrial agriculture.

Clouds in the dirt.

 

 

[]

 

I am not saying you’d confine

me to index bracketing, to the single

value, resenting being thrown

into juxtaposition, a contesting

argument. I sign compatibility

as red-tailed black cockatoo

to full moon, a highlight

like a cluster of decades-old

trees on the edge of whittled

‘green space’. This set [I offer].

 

 

=

 

And so we resist form, and yet

are brought into rank proximity,

to be denied what we constitute.

Rufous whistler strikes alarm

and it sounds ‘joyful’.

 

 

[]

 

If it’s concrete to the orb weaver spider

[and you, my friend, seem to sign that]

turning the tree fork into death’s lyre,

does it follow as abstract subtext

bracketed to contain quotes

from a broad range of industry

sources, such as the road widening

destruction of yandee & flooded-

gums crossing a lexical Rubicon?

 

 

@

 

Me? Seems possible. Or it’s an appeasement.

Or ‘integration’. Or theft’. Or an act

of conscience-relief like replanting

saplings you know will be cut back

to their genes if and when you are no longer

around and they become ‘unwieldy’ or outré.

 

 

=

 

I have been co-opted, voicing

the voices that would force open

the everlastings before the sun

has signalled them. Or referring

to a meteor as a shooting star,

overwhelmed by your... our?...

role in it. It burnt me

through foliage. I saw.

 

 

All

 

We are bones left

after the silvereye’s death.

We are Theocritus

thirsting for home.

We are positive

and negative.

We are quantity

and empty.

We resist the survey.

We pass through the controls

placed on topography.

    John Kinsella