On 'Nature Reserves'

The fact that we need 'nature reserves' is an indictment of colonial-capital in itself, but without them there'd be very little 'original' native vegetation remaining and consequently an even greater loss of species diversity, and animal-life in its own rights. I am troubled by the idea of 'reserves' as a statement of ceding what has not been ceded, and of corralling land into parcels that are only allowed to persist because so much of the land around them has been occupied. Further, such reserves are also a form of 'occupation' (if a 'better' version), and exclusion of full rights of traditional ownership. To my mind, these 'nature reserves' should be under local Aboriginal management.

We have just spent a few days in Geraldton (where I went to high school and where my brother and his partner live), and spent time skirting nature reserves to asses their 'condition' and how they are or aren't being respected. Most nature reserves in Western Australia that I have encountered suffer from degradation along their boundaries (especially when they abut rural holdings, mines, commercial, industrial and 'real estate' developments), but also from the dumping of rubbish and incursions by hunters and recreationalists. 

The edges of reserves are as important as the interior, and yet because of their proximity to other modes of 'land usage', they are inevitably negatively impacted. On the periphery of one nature reserve we visited was an array of dumping/rubbish, ranging from building scrap to heaps of grass clippings, from a massive variety of plastic waste to assorted house objects. As one ventures further in, the rubbish becomes 'historic' in the sense that prior (to being a gazetted nature reserve) usage by 'settler' presencing leaves many damaging traces that are only partially absorbed into the restoring/recuperating ecology — rusting tin drums (oil, poison etc), bricks and mortar, garden residues, bottles and so on. 

The rubbish situation wasn't severe by comparison to some instances I've come across, but it was still a marker of frustration (and ecological disdain, even abuse) over space 'set aside' that's not part of the acquisitive accrual of property — of 'ownership' that erases traditional cultural custodianship of country. Rubbishing is an act of resentment against the uncolonial.

Here are a few images of Howatharra, one of the Chapman Valley/Moresby Ranges reserves. Most of the ranges with their incredible flat-topped hills (reaching a height of 183m and around 50 million years old), has been cleared and occupied by farms, but a few nature reserves are scattered across their length and breadth. 

Nature Reserve, Chapman Valley

Following a Kangaroo Trail

Not Vanishing but Appearing!

A clearly sacred place, these reserves would be better maintained and sustained in Yamaji custodianship, and would have a greater chance of 'reconnecting' into a larger, more diverse and complex habitat. For that, we will have to wait for the return of country, but I hope and believe it will happen in time. 

The first image above is of the location/designation sign, the second two are of me 'vanishing' into the 'scrub'. It is an intense and diverse habitat, and I only walked along a kangaroo trail, sidestepping numerous echidna diggings around termite mounds. Honeyeaters could be heard constantly working the myriad plants. I am interested in the visual aspect of 'vanishing' because how we see ourselves in relation to bush is part of a colonial residue that compromises ways of seeing. Of course, I am not 'vanishing' but actually appearing... I am carefully following a trail with a light imprint and will follow it back to the periphery. In the bush, one is constantly appearing and never vanishing. [On the other hand, I am happy to be 'consumed' or 'swallowed' by the scrub  — that is, to become as much one with it as I can... but again, I do not see this as vanishing, as 'loss', but as gain/increase/growth...]

This has led to my rethinking the dynamics of 'prospect' and 'refuge' in that through refuting 'landscape' as a measure of country, I now see open spaces as a 'refuge' of conquest and eco-destruction, and vegetated/rocky/ravined/hilled places as 'prospect '— that is, their apparent closedness is actually an opening out into knowledge if we should choose to look, listen, sense... to understand Aboriginal knowledges of place, to be more sensitised to country itself. For the non-Indigenous person, this can only be done with the intent of respect and a willingness to learn.

Edging the Howatharra Nature Reserve, Moresby Ranges, Western Australia [Argonautica}

The levelled range

Says those canyons of the sea

Aren't like this now, but will be.

 

No ‘Köppen climate type’

Can address the fragrance

And textures of leaves and bark

 

Afloat in heat. Further into the valley,

River redgums might suggest

An elsewhere but are more here

 

Than anywhere, though

Settler surveys diffuse

To serve their own purposes.

 

In the clefts where water runs

At downpour, there are other names

For erosion. A mistletoe bird's

 

Red is a different red

And the mistletoe differs

As well. From denomination

 

To denomination the stone

Is drawn from roughly

A similar source. The wind

 

Rips the high temps

But not all the way to the core

Of piles of grass clippings (dumped

 

Whether it be a wet year or drought year)

Which heat in and of themselves, interiorly

And dangerously, like more bad news

 

From the fourth estate, while, in addition,

Museum-loads of colonial rubbish

Trouble the roadside ecotones. Not-

 

withstanding, a view to the green-reefed ocean

Is a reflection (if at impossible angles)

Of all that might come again on land.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Big Sky Geraldton and False Claims of Colonial Thieves

By Tracy

Last weekend saw Geraldton's Big Sky Readers and Writers Festival, an annual literary event. This year we all went up because John was there along with Yamaji poet and artist, Charmaine Papertalk Green to read from and discuss the poetry book on which they have collaborated, False Claims of Colonial Thieves.

To quote the website of the publisher, Magabala Books, 

“Papertalk Green and Kinsella call into question what we think we know about our country, colonisation, land and identity. Each poem is part of a striking conversation that surrounds topics such as childhood, history, life, love, mining, death, respect and cultural diversity. This extraordinary publication weaves two differing lives and experiences together and rarely pauses for breath.”

Here are a few photographs from the event for this book, hosted by Trudi Cornish & Nola Gregory, held in the Geraldton Library.

Charmaine Papertalk Green with Trudi Cornish, Acting Manager, Libraries & Heritage

John Kinsella reads at the Geraldton Library

Charmaine Papertalk Green reads from her poems in False Claims of Colonial Thieves

A Poetics of Gradients

By John

We were up in Geraldton last weekend for me to launch a Fremantle Press poetry book (more of this shortly, including the launch speech for those interested), where we saw my brother, visited Flat Rocks, and also the Greenough River mouth, where signs indicate that they are going to clear the entire dunes and surrounding dune ecology between the river mouth and Geraldton itself. The sign even refers to replacing dune ecology with ‘development’. It is brazen and ecologically horrendous. People feel powerless to stop it, as they do so much in this place of bulldozing and laying waste. I have taken notes for poems, and notes for an activist poetics piece, but these mean nothing without direct action. I will write to the Geraldton newspapers and ask if they’d publish an ‘activist poetry article’ about the issue. They might — the year before last, one of the papers ran a series of eight activist articles I wrote about returning to the town of my secondary schooling, a town I am still connected to because my brother lives there.

Poetry for me must work. All the good ideas in the world, all the most finely wrought lines and images, mean nothing if they don’t achieve action. In fact, they become another link in the capitalist chain of production. Value-adding the whole way. Recently I have been reading through essays for an issue of Angelaki I am co-editing, and felt compelled to point out: ‘from an anarchist point of view, collective and individual responsibility are in so many ways one and the same thing, and the obsession with individual action as defining itself against collective responsibility is a contradiction that seems contrived to maintain the status quo.’ I mention this because the personal subjectivity of poetry-making (even within the collaborative) should be read against the communal consciousness of poetics and poetry per se. Whatever form it might take. Poetry is not read in a vacuum.

Lately I have been developing a ‘poetics of gradients’. Now, variations on poetics become absurd after a time, but really the urge to create systems explaining the reasons for writing poetry, and the processes and practices behind this, is a matter of both validating what can seem an impassive activity (outside aesthetics), giving it an activist context, and ultimately purpose. It’s probably unnecessary, but poetry methodologies (or a ‘lack’ of them, according to some — especially when they get risky) are constantly under surveillance (criticism?), and the poetics pro forma becomes an illustration of due process — to show that thought and effort have been applied to a choice.

To cut a long story short, this poetics of gradients concerns writing poetry on a hillside. The physical effort it takes to walk up and down the Jam Tree Gully ‘block’ engenders a different breath, a different instress in the poem. When you sit down to draft a poem on, say, a wild beehive in a split York gum you’ve just seen, you carry the work effort, the work of the gradient into your poem.

Tracy did a wonderful translation of Jacques Brel’s ‘Le plat pays’ — ‘The Flat Country’ — the other day, that really puts the power of surfaces and their angles (or flatness) into a dynamic perspective. There’s this wonderful line (which I give in Tracy’s translation): ‘With a sky so low that a canal lost its way.’ This is describing Belgium. Brilliant. The refrain in the song (poem!) goes ‘The flat country that is mine.’ I have lived a long time on lightly hilly ground at the bottom of a small mountain (or very large hill), with paddocks of stubble stretching out. And now at Jam Tree Gully I am starting to replant a rocky hillside, and to write poems in that space. The differentials, the segment of the line, discovering the nature of the slope, are part of the prosody of the poem’s ‘rise over the run’: m = Δy / Δx (see Wiki on slopes). I have always been interested in maths, and it’s always part of my poetry — sometimes hidden away, sometimes overtly. It’s certainly part of the poetics of gradients, of slope, that I am formulating now. By way of illustration I might copy in a handwritten journal page and include a poem...

from journal: 30/1/2009, Jam Tree Gully, 9.45pm:

Our first night staying over... Kids are asleep and Tracy is in the lounge-room reading (Stendhal). Looking forward to it all being ready for full-time habitation. Lot of work!

Went for an evening walk with Tim and a pair of eagles flew up through the valley and over as perched on large granite boulders — maybe twenty feet over our heads! Incredible. Walking up the steep slope the work on my heart and lungs created the waste, the chemicals, the energy of the poem. A usage of the excess my body produced in providing the work needed to get to the top, to the house. A poetics of gradients, of the hill. You see differently as you walk a slope, you sense differently. The angles of seeing change and you compensate, as does the poem. Even descent brings a work and a caution, the brain creates shorter lines to prevent slipping.

And here’s some poetic work done a few weeks prior:

First Lines Typed at Jam Tree Gully

To hold the walls of valley
downthrust limbs of York gum
liminality, flakes of granite
and lichen scored as sun inland,
glitterati, this Toodyay stone
broken where the building
has opened precipice,
erodability, that movement
where we walk, dislocating
weight of conversation, even
meditation, to contravene
our visibility, perched
up on high, sidereal.

A drawing out, the day
lessens, rampage
of dead and living trees,
entire collapsed structures,
signs of fire as jam-tree bark
blackened crumbles with touch,
all working shadows thin up
the hill, the hill. Kangaroos
stir from their shady places —
the heat so intense at midday
they don’t do more than lift
their head as you approach.

In the dirt, laterite smudgings,
hard-baked patches of sand, coarse-
grained breakdown of quartzite
in its granoblastic glory, a sheen
of mica and feldspar configuring
a sandstone past, a declaration
of origins; what grows in what
was here before? It demands
reconnection or the hill
will despoil to its granite
core and nothing more,
nothing more. Dazzling
anomaly of pyrites, breeze
sharpened with ‘fool’, ‘fool’...
welcome here... don’t cling
together, give us roots
to nest among, cling to.

Common bronzewings heavy across the blank
of an arena we will fill with trees: sandy
spectacle, where horses rounded
on their tails: I see them twitch.

Internal fences down and out. Fewer
divisions. To predict a fate, changes
sweeping over an old old place; ring-
neck parrot feathers no divination.
What has chiacked in place
of undergrowth?

Weebills are here! And mistletoe birds
have been where mistletoe fruits have prospered,
have seeded the jam trees, where nectar-hungry
birds of many varieties test the hardy flowers
drooping in swatches from thin, straining necks;
the parasitic engenders its own chains of being.
I am not asking to be part of it. With time,
something will click, I have no idea what. No
second-guessing, despite the weight
of hexagrams, I-Ching. What else
I might read. Weebills are here!

Horseshoes and sheep skulls strewn across the block.
rare new growth, so late and odd. Fire wardens
watching afraid of vegetation? They have their own
version of prehistory, their own version of growth.

The making of place as a dynamic of couplings,
as if love and trust are omens, odds in your favour.
The sun burns but also fringes the leaves.

John Kinsella