Malice and Cruelty Towards Corellas in the WA Wheatbelt

A generalised hatred of corellas in the wheatbelt is remorseless and obvious. Not only do shires carry out ruthless culling, but if one hears corellas coming into a zone, it’s inevitable that gunfire will follow. I’ve been writing about this for decades, and all that happens is I have an index of poems lamenting the violence, the aggression, the excuses for cruelty.

And the excuses meted out by the killers? That the birds are an agricultural pest. Everyone who lives here knows about their loss of habitat — less than 3 percent of pre-colonial vegetation remains in the wheatbelt — and everyone knows that the birds are managing their environment in the best ways open to them.

 

Everyone knows that these are flocking birds with complex social interactions, and everyone knows that arguments around them being ‘invaders’ are ludicrous. Further, everyone knows that these birds are considered ‘fair game’ across various parts of Australia and are treated as animals without any rights. Western and little corellas live in the paradox of being ‘protected’ under the 2016 Biodiversity Act and also being labelled an agricultural pest.

 

I have intervened in culls (York 2003/4), written poems and stories against them, and recorded observations in an attempt to oppose them. I am not alone in this — many others have spoken, written, and campaigned against the slaughter, and continue to do so. There was a recent mass cull across a number of shires in the ‘Avon Valley’, and that has also brought an outcry, as it should.

 

But until the mistreatment of these birds and many other animals across the wheatbelt is highlighted, and until shooting while arguing on the grounds of the common good (‘anti-feralism’) is shown to be an hypocrisy (sport gained out of killing), and the other methods of killing exposed for their cruelty, this will continue. Grain growing areas are inevitably going to ‘collide’ with the wildlife that have been ousted, but rather than this kind of abuse of animal rights, it seems essential that more areas are set aside for these creatures, and that non-violent means of working towards a co-existence are investigated and put into practice.

 

Apropos of all this, indifference to targeted animals becomes a masking of cruelty. The other day we witnessed someone calmly driving their car over a stunned corella (but standing and surrounded by other birds)  — literally crushing it under their tyre. Did they perceive this as a ‘mercy killing’ (what a sick concept — ‘putting out of its misery’) or did they just see themselves as extending the cull? It happened next to the Northam Grain Terminal, where corella shooting is a regular occurrence (I wrote and published a story relating to this last year), and the roadside was a display of battered corpses.

 

What was one more corella? It was a sentient life. It was in need of help which could easily have been provided by a vet or animal care worker.

 

Before we could intervene, the deed was done and the driver left the scene, slowly returning to the speed limit. People who treat animals with cruelty are also capable of treating humans the same way. This poem is part of a collaborative work I am involved with which acts as witness, but really, the actions have to be on a personal level across the entire community. Some are speaking out; may many more.

 

Malice

 

In the age

of the short

attention

span

 

a white car

approaches

arrangements

of white

feathers —

 

a clutch

of corellas

on the road

alongside

the great

A-class

wheat bin

(longer

than

a ship);

 

one of the birds

has been injured

and rocks

back

& forth,

tended by

its companions

 

the white car

glides then slows

and almost stops

before the driver

guns the motor,

crushing

the injured,

shocking

those birds

tending;

 

it’s as specialised

an act of cruelty

as I’ve ever

witnessed,

 

deliberate

as a war

crime.

JK

 

NOTE: looking through my old emails, I find message after message to shires protesting corella culls. These spread over many years and are directed towards York, Northam and Toodyay shires. And I found this poem I sent to the Northam shire. It's never made a difference, though not for want of trying. I found an email where Tracy points out one woman who tried to stop an earlier cull.

Dawn Corella Asks to be Let Live: against the 2020 Northam ‘Corella Cull’

On returning after being away and hearing corellas at dawn

As if survival of dawn and call

is a matter of word sparkle —

a quid pro quo you expect from ‘art’,

a gift of zest and boost of the beautiful.

How so when so many of you won’t stand 

for the art of corella, the collaborative

art, the voicings of faith and fascination,

the line through darkness that gives?

When the cullers come to cull 

ask how many are getting a bit of sport 

out of it — the kill that plays with ‘skill’,

the art of the dawn call’s bloody fall.

John Kinsella

 

No Nuclear Submarines No Matter Who Owns Them! For a Nuclear-free World! For a Weapons-free World!

And where have all the anti-nuclear peace protesters gone?

Apexing

 

As the propaganda

unfurls to make a complaisant

audience even more pliable,

we hear of the unsighted

sonar world of insight

into the call of whales,

the sea creature speech

that is a privilege to eavesdrop

on, to warm the soul

the deeper and colder

it gets. ‘Brothers and sisters’

in the new regime, precise

as torpedoes, concise

as thirty-second showers,

intimate as cramped

living conditions in which

‘sex’ is off the menu (‘steak

and lobster’ is on). The massaging

of reception as the Virginia-class

fast-attack submarine USS Minnesota

slips in to ease the transfer

of nuclear reactors

so friendly to oceans

and surface, to all that earth

is and will no longer be.

Rockingham hugs the ‘apex

predator’, Fremantle hugs

the apex predator, Perth

hugs the apex predator.

Don’t call these places

by their Indigenous names

in such a context as this —

those names are forever

and not temporary.

Where have the protesters

gone? Where have the flotillas

of peace boats sailed? As easy

as economics the safety

of world as we know it in

back yards, front yards, down

the street, across the water,

high up in the tainted atmosphere.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Statement Against Racism in Western Australia

 Racism in Western Australia

 

The murder of a Noongar teenager by an assailant said to have been uttering racial abuse as he attacked is horrifically and sadly part of a broader issue of racism in Western Australia that needs addressing on every level until it stops. This is an overt example of hate and its consequences, but for many Aboriginal people, and a significant number of non-white Western Australians, the spectre of racism is evident in many said and unsaid ways.

 

My entire life has been witness to racism perpetrated by smug, self-satisfied bigots who declare they are not racist when they are, and particularly when I was in my youth, by overt racists. For many years my associates and I spent our time removing racist posters and protesting against organisations such as the ANM white supremacists which had such a foothold in Perth and WA in general.

 

But it was really the school ground where I first saw racism towards Aboriginal kids first-hand. A lot of it was driven by ignorance and regurgitation of parental attitudes, for sure, but there was also a gross materialism underpinning much of it — a fear that these kids might actually have a connection to land beyond their own connection. There was an anxiety and doubt that led to abuse and put-downs.

 

Another tragic thing about such 'certainty' of colonial 'belonging' centred around migrant kids who had just arrived, who also copped bigotry because they ‘didn’t belong’. So there were those who weren’t allowed to belong, and those whose belonging stretched back tens of thousands of years were considered to belong too much.

 

The root causes of these issues are varied, but one in particular is the core narrative of colonialism itself. Colonialism isn’t migration. Colonialism is a system of violent occupation, theft and exclusion, and systematising of this occupation through generations and into any imagined future. Colonialism is what we live under in Australian still — the ‘state’ itself, but also private companies that replicate exploitative ‘trickle/flow up’ models of wealth.

 

How can Aboriginal people in Western Australia feel safe and secure in love of their land, in their deep connections, with mining companies and government agencies over-riding their belonging? It’s their country. Hate projected by ‘whites’ (or those who proudly identify as such — why anyone would, other than to own up to a sad truth, is beyond me) is very much tied up with control of property, goods and ‘ownership’. Even those ‘whites’ who are impoverished still function within a discourse that places their colonial ‘rights’ above all others. It’s a false idea of ‘first’ and ‘entitlement’ that often brings disturbing anger and resentment. The system makes racists. The colonial subtext is violence. This is not to exonerate individuals, but to say there is a broader responsibility in this.

 

I can scarcely begin to comprehend the pain that the family and community affected by such an act of brutality can be experiencing. I can only extend my condolences and love and support and best wishes, and hope that speaking out by many can bring change. This is a racist place and the racism/hate needs to stop. It can be stopped by ALL implicated in colonial society standing up and being held accountable. I honour the memory of the deceased and extend my hand to all those who suffer racism in any form.

 

            John Kinsella

Another Poem In The Effort to Protect Julimar Forest From Mining

 

Silently Into the Sea of the Forest: Chalice’s Plans for Julimar Forest

 

‘And silently they crossed the threshold. And close by garden vines covered with green foliage were in full bloom, lifted high in air.’ 

            Argonautica (Book II)

 

 

Silently into the sea of the forest

 ‘soft’-tracked vehicles will creep,

no wheels to crush undergrowth

they hope in future to delete.

 

Silently into the sea of the forest,

gently gently off-track — no tyres

pressing their case, just metal expecting

what’s flattened to shoot back into place.

 

Silently into the sea of the forest

those drilling rigs are determined to go —

to reach down further than roots

and mirror the hollow of sky.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Memories of Bill Grono (1934-2022)

Tracy Ryan: Bill was a great encourager of other writers, while shy of admitting that he himself could turn a very fine poem when he chose to. I owe more than one of my first publications, and my first job as an editor back in my 20s, to Bill. Even before that, like others of my age, I learned in school English classes from anthologies he had edited. His influence on readers and writers has been immense. I loved how when the pandemic began he started a kind of email circle for sharing favourite poems, with his usual tongue-in-cheek tone. I think of Bill as always warm, wryly laughing, always ready to share a witty story or an irony, but also as a serious storehouse of information about Western Australian literature and its history. Our family will miss him very much.

John Kinsella: I first met Bill in a non-literary setting, though he wouldn’t have remembered that. But from the time I started publishing, I ran into Bill constantly. Not so much in recent years after he moved to Margaret River, though I did see him at a couple of events down there. Bill was a generous but blunt critic. If he thought something was good, he said so; if not, well he said so as well, but always with a laugh attached that made you feel as if everything was okay really. And it usually was — he would never abandon a poet. He and I had many conversations about Dorothy Hewett and Mick (Randolph) Stow, two brilliant stars in his firmament of friends. He cared deeply about them both, and about their work, and gave much of himself to affirm their work.

 

I dedicated the online anthology of Western Australian writing I did for UWA library to him, and Tracy and I owed him a great debt of thanks for his ground-breaking anthology work when we came to edit the Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry a few years ago. I remember a day seventeen years ago, Bill dropped off a sea-chest (no less) full of copies of old Swan River Colony newspaper poetry at York for me to use in any way that suited. He went out of his way to help if he could.

 

I have numerous personal stories of drinking with Bill back in my bad old days, but maybe I would retell them differently in my sober life. They weren’t just snappy stories full of literary-referenced self-irony; they were often empathetic and sometimes deeply personal. One very kind thing... one day, when I was at the bottom of my addiction barrel and living on my own in a flat near UWA in the early 90s, Bill turned up (having heard rumours I was in a bad way) and spent the day with me (drinking, but that was the way it was back then) just to see I got through... and an act made a difference to survival. I am sure I was one of many. Bill and Janet came around to celebrate after Tracy and I got married, bringing a couple of bottles of wine, only to discover I was trying to stay on the wagon, and with the skill of one in tune with the ups and downs of life, Bill said something like, Well, I’ll take care of them!

 

I spent decades trying to get Bill to write more poems, but he said he’d done with that. I believed Bill about everything else, but not that. Even if he wasn’t writing them down, I am sure he was thinking them. Poetry was part of him and he was part of Western Australian poetry’s essence.

 

Save Walwalinj ('Mt Bakewell') from Further Exploitation and the Destruction of Rare Habitat

 Dear Shire President (of York, Western Australia)

I wish to vigorously protest the plans to exploit the sacred and exceedingly rare and fragile environment of Walwalinj ('Mt Bakewell') as indicated by your declarations to the ABC. The mountain has already been placed under stress by clearing for 'recreational' as well as agricultural purposes, and the habitat will not cope with more stress. There are orchids so rare up there they exist nowhere else. The environment should be protected and not exploited, and its sacred essence respected. 

I have spent my entire life writing the region and known the environment of the 'Dyott Range' (another inappropriate renaming) and surroundings intimately. This is a 'greenwash' act that claims 'nature tourism', which would simply mean further degradation of a fragile and unique ecosystem. 

Cautious walking and care are one thing, but to 'open up' to mountain biking is to consign the bush to destruction. Recently talking on the email with an environmental officer regarding degradation of Perth Hills forests, they noted that the greatest damage came from mountain biking. This opens the door to so many abuses of the habitat. Walwalinj isn't a 'resource' to be 'capitalised' on. In a world suffering under the weight of such exploitation, surely an effort can be made to conserve rather than exploit?

I ask you to reconsider and take this informed protest on board. I will certainly use all my energy, contacts and writing ability to protest this constantly. It is a wrong thing you are aiming to do.

I will speak about this at every public opportunity I get in the wheatbelt, and that will be sooner than later — that is my responsibility, and I take it seriously.

Sincerely,

John Kinsella

Remembering Jo

By Tracy

 

Jo with some of her children in the late 1960s...

My mother passed away last night at age 84, so we are all feeling very sad just now, & John has written the poem below in memory of her, because she loved birds (something we all share!) and early this morning a huge flock of galahs and a flock of '28s' (ring-necked parrots) came into Jam Tree Gully -- in fact, the largest flocks we have seen here. The poem below draws on that.

Why Are Exploiters Worshipped?

 

Tracy Ryan's and John Kinsella's Launch Speeches for Westerly Issue 63:2

Last November (2018), Tracy and I launched issue 63:2 of Westerly magazine in the Shakespeare Garden at the University of Western Australia. Here are our speeches — Tracy's first, then mine (John's)...

                                                                       *

It’s a pleasure to be here this evening to launch Westerly 63:2, with its dynamic emphasis on community, both local and international. I want to acknowledge that this launch is being held on Aboriginal land – on Whadjuk Noongar land – and to express my respect for the strength and contributions of Noongar people, not only here on Whadjuk land, but also acknowledging Ballardong Noongar people, from among whom some powerful writers have contributed to this new issue of Westerly. As it happens, John, Tim & I live on Ballardong country.

It’s a privilege to learn from their poems in the Northam Noongar Poetry Project, and to be invited on the figurative walk the poems conduct. They emerge from the “Strong spirit,/ strong mind” referenced in Julie Wynne’s poem, “Rise Up and Be Strong”, which reminds us too of the centrality of voice and listening. It’s a credit to Westerly that its poetry pages make this connection with women from Ballardong country, beyond the journal’s base in Perth but not so very far away.

Just as bookshops, libraries and writers’ groups are important cultural loci or nodes within communities, literary journals at their best are not cut off from, but reflect (as well as influence) what is happening in those communities. With this issue, that sense of reflection is seen not only in the offering from the Northam Noongar Poetry Project, but in, for instance, the publication of David Malouf’s address from the recent Short Story Festival.

This sort of openness to events and developments in the immediate region is more than just a snapshot or a “what’s on”; it’s a live connection to the actual, and enables us to read disparate elements or features in a coherent context – so, for instance, we move back and forward between memorable short stories with the atmosphere of Malouf’s overview in the back of our mind.

When we read a story like Jane Downing’s “Caution Submerged Steps”, or Troy Dagg’s “The Pool”, we recall Malouf’s pinpointing of “engagement and empathy” as integral to the short story’s operations. The short stories in this issue all hover around questions of our relationship not only to place but to the people in it; our responsibilities whether faced or shirked or both.

In some of the poetry, these same concerns and linkages are encapsulated, for instance in Amy Lin’s “The Architecture of Grief”, where place and (absent) person merge; likewise, though differently, in Roland Leach’s poem, “Wreckage”. These points of crossover are of course not accidental; they represent skilled organisation on the part of all the editors concerned, and send ripples through the issue that have an effect bigger than the sum of its parts.

Similarly, despite respect for specific differences within Aboriginal people’s experiences, the issue allows us to read Cindy Solonec’s non-fiction about her forebears and family from the Kimberley in the light of what Ambelin Kwaymullina and Julie Dowling have to say about stories, and to reflect on the commonalities of family separation and its legacies also mentioned in the Northam Noongar Poetry Project, as in Janet Kickett’s “Story of My Life”. Westerly’s editors begin the issue with an emphasis on locatedness on Noongar country and “the complexities” that involves; it is heartening to read material that does not shy away from such complexities but embraces and investigates them. Congratulations to all who have contributed to and worked on this issue for its openness in this regard.

     Tracy Ryan

                                                                   *

And mine (John's), which followed Tracy's on the night:

The polyphony of voices brought together in this issue of Westerly do not have their own localities, their own emphasis, threatened or dis-respected through the constructed community that is literary journal publication. In the polyambient nature of location, a consciousness that we speak out of our own experiences of place is set against the consciousness that we read other experiences and intensities of place through that same set of personal experiences. In these intersectionalities of ethical-place-concerns and shared and differentiated experience, we are surely reaching towards a more just co-ordinating of respect and belonging. Editors Catherine Noske and Josephine Taylor note in their introduction:

... our engagement with Indigenous authors in this issue has pointed more pressingly to our locatedness on Whadjuk Noongar boodja, Westerly’s presence on Country, and the complexities of past and future that involves. This cannot be underestimated in the unending process of understanding self. It is only appropriate, then, that this issue questions and considers the coming into self that writing has always offered. (p. 9)

In this acknowledgement is writ the unresolved fact of dispossession and privileging of a colonial authorising that’s intensifying rather than diluting. In Elfie Shiosaki’s interview with Julie Dowling, ‘Sovereignty, Self‐ Determination and Speaking Our Freedoms’, we hear Julie Dowling say of her mob, ‘What they’re doing is mapping dispossession in terms of things and how we get treated by local mob.’ That’s unmapping colonialism with its own tools and an undoing of its destructive technologies, its technologies that will yield only desolation.

In Ambelin Kwaymullina’s brilliant article ‘Literature, Resistance, and First Nations Futures: storytelling from an Australian Indigenous women’s standpoint in the twenty‐first century and beyond’, she says of being a futurist storyteller: ‘But Indigenous Futurist storytellers do not only address the profound injustices of settler-colonialism. We also look to futures shaped by Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing.’ And goes on to cite Lou Cornum:

Indigenous futurism seeks to challenge notions of what constitutes advanced technology and consequently advanced civilizations [...] Extractive and exploitative endeavors are just one mark of the settler death drive, which indigenous futurism seeks to overcome by imagining different ways of relating to notions of progress and civilization. Advanced technologies are not finely tuned mechanisms of endless destruction. Advanced technologies should foster and improve human relationships with the non-human world. (np)

Further, thinking over the lines from the introduction to the issue quoted above, and the work of Nicholas Jose, whose novel, The Red Thread: A Love Story, is considered and carefully contextualised by scholar Wang Guanglin in the issue, I am reminded of Jose’s article on Randolph Stow’s Visitants in an issue of Transnational Literature from 2011, in which he also spoke of ‘locatedness’. He wrote: ‘For Cawdor [...] His desire is to step outside his own locatedness, and he prides himself on his capacity to do so. It proves damaging all round.’ (Nicholas Jose. Visitants: Randolph Stow’s End Time Novel Transnational Literature Vol. 3 no. 2, May 2011.  http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/home.html)

The relevant bit is, ‘It proves damaging all round’. When we subsume another’s locatedness, even if we are attempting to make connection that is protective and generative, we necessarily occlude, damage, and create false stories of presence. Stories of the self if disconnected from their cause and effect are damaging stories.

Aboriginal stories of location are part of stories that belong to their lines of heritage, and are theirs to tell. Julie Dowling includes this note after her interview: ‘The stories contained within this interview may not be reproduced without the story-owner’s permission.’ It is worth thinking about the issue of ownership here outside and inside the capitalist rubric colonisation imposes on it.

Ownership here is a resistance to theft, to having value added by colonial mechanisms in order to strip away connection to self and presence of its originators — this is what is being resisted in the Aboriginal work in this issue. When the Northam Yorgas offer their remarkable poetry, whose coming into being was facilitated through the participation of wonderfully engaged workshop people, it is offered not as something to take from, but something shared. It is shared (or not) by choice, and the conditions of its sharing are to be respected (as they have been by the workshops’ facilitators).

In showing editorial sensitivity to offering a zone of respect for creative and scholarly work of location, the editors are ‘curating’ but also resisting the curatorial urge to collate and to compartmentalise — their gatherings are to offer to liberate, not isolate, to respect, not constrain.

In his scintillating article, ‘Writer as Translator: on translation and postmodern appropriation in Nicholas Jose’s The Red Thread: A Love Story’, Wang Guanglin writes: ‘In a logocentric Western philosophy, which prioritises word over image, alphabet over ideogram, all human efforts are very much conditioned by either-or choices, which do not allow translation to experience other kinds of transformations.’ The colonialisms of translation are literally deconstructed (Derrida is an active shade in this text), and we might agree with Old Weng, as paraphrased by Wang Guanglin, ‘incompleteness is a way to continue people’s lives.’ (p. 64) Which is not to say we are not looking for resolution and completeness regarding injustice, regarding land and cultural theft, but that inside resolution, which we hope is achievable, the self’s journey is never finite or limited.

It is perhaps pertinent to consider: Beibei Chen’s article on Ouyang Yu’s novel The English Class, where he notes of the character Jing:

‘Jing is aware of his incompleteness, which causes a crisis of subjectivity at a key point in the text:

I hate myself so much for being unwhole, for being a traitor to everything I once held dear, for being unable to resist the temptation to fall into delightful peaces [sic], for the delirium that I have courted. (372) 

[Beibei Chen (p.183)]

What all readers have to be vigilant for is the process of how we access and utilise the stories shared with us, especially Indigenous stories and the theft they are told against. Ambelin Kwaymullina notes:  ‘The need for non-Indigenous writers to step away from (rather than into) the story spaces of Indigenous peoples is an issue that has been raised many times over’, and ‘But the privileging of the voices of cultural outsiders over cultural insiders remains a live issue across the Australian literary landscape.’ (Ambelin Kwaymullina, Westerly, p.148)

This issue is an enactment of principles — the curatorial becomes the collation and exchange within the skilful organising, the juxtaposition of pieces so we read in questioning ways. The self is given its own space to grow within its own community/ies and left intact — in fact, the entire issue challenges invasiveness. The remarkable prose poem project ‘curated’ by poetry editor Cassandra Atherton confirms how a medium, a ‘genre’, is never the same in different hands, and that a mode is always an undoing. ‘Divination: Linen and Dolphins: From Soft Oracle Machine, a collaboration with Chris McCabe’, by Vahni Capildeo, is a wonderful breaking out of the containment field of formality to bring new departures and proliferating conversations. And finally, I have to speak for the Fay Zwicky of 1995 and her eternal presence as part of Perth poetry, and the university — her spirit is with us, laugh at this comment as she would.

     John Kinsella