Wheatbelt Stubble Burns and Fencing Are Just Other Methods of Clearing Native Vegetation

 
   by John

This poem is in response to the atrocity of stubble-burning going on at the moment in wheatbelt Western Australia. We have spent two months under smoke from pointless and damaging burns. In the extreme dry (no rain!) the stubble has easily lent itself to complete burnouts of surrounding bushland. And so many old-growth trees left in paddocks are now burnt to ash. A disgrace! And there's a binge of fencing going on, with fencers (and landowners) removing as much vegetation as they think they can get away with.

Graphology Endgame 74: burn testament burn-off

(i)

The burn-off racket. The windrows flame out.

The oops, it got away from us — fire having its way.

Blokes in hi-vis jackets light the stubble & evaporate.

Highlights to flame against, smoke dousing bees

where manna-wattles blossom now on edges,

so eruptive to nakedness, the raw combustion.

Don’t separate off napalm in the farming-out

of warfare — contrast victor and conquered. Don’t

lose track of parodic elements, those satellite furphies

to barely catch out the wanton, the collateral exposé.

Firebreaks ignored when razing the fence-line.

Lexical endgame in ‘out of control’; afraid there’s no

conservation cropping going on here, just burning

regimes to mock retention. Stubble binds. Stubble burns.

A week later, we’re back on the same road to witness

the entire bush-residue burnt out — the hop, skip and a jump

from paddock to enclave. Ash complements emptiness.

Summer’s fire-plan is autumn’s clearance sale in action.

Where we’d admired tall York gums in the centre of a paddock,

along the spine of the eroded Dyott Range, we see emptiness.

Fire climbed into branches and wiped out eras of nests.

Ash and charcoal ploughed into the loam — warped fertility.

We see power-poles in paddocks protected from the burning —

thus the selective nature of ‘accidents’. Growth as mechanism.

We have lived in a humidicrib of smoke for two months. Singed

and coated lungs. Landowners burning out the heart of here

as vengeance against the dry, against the ecosphere

for telling them what’s what. No rain means more flame.

In this age of destruction, we are expected to keep

our mouths shut and cop what’s ‘good’ for us?

(ii)

In this long dry, flames reach higher and it’s a gamble

grabbed with both hands: the fire-starters thirsty

for every extra bag of grain or hay-bale they can eke out.

Shot-term visionaries of the aggro-cultivated balance sheet.

And where flames don’t wipe out the remaining trees,

bring in the fencers! — excise every last tree along roadsides,

extended domains of felling. These tricks of demolition — scrolling,

rolling up. Work that into lines of rhyming iambic pentameter —

a colonial metre; or better still, make comment

and enjoy the indifference of movies or game-stations

in open forms. Poetry accommodates what is as long

as it sparkles in display — pseudo-ritualistic burning-off

being the way of it, the sun a red goitre in the encarboned sky.

And Stephen Hawking, O prophet of humanity, instructs us

that ‘resources’ will be used up (too fast, too fast) within a hundred years,

not a thousand, and we’d better hop to it and get out there

colonising space (I thought that’s what had been happening

all along). Hawking might like to visit the Western Australian

wheatbelt to see humans cutting off their noses to spite

all other faces, to see the eco-system of a tree

go up in smoke at the one time of year

we might hope to avoid bushfires — this

is the psychology and skills we’ll take out there

from here, the green eye on green planets to make bare.

The smoke of lit fires across the planet blankets

the future. It hasn’t rained and the farmers

can’t crop so they burn (working hard — leaving

the burning unattended) — to expand, to make ready,

to add the quintessence of their agriculture

to cracking the world’s pastoral-ismo enigma code.

The feeders, the fed, the feeding: eat what’s served up

on our plates. Not every farmer, of course — no one size

fits all, but people stand and suffocate bewildered,

not knowing what to do. Firies who fight summer fires

light late-autumn fires and have a barbecue afterwards.

Just one scenario, but it’s all in play at the moment.

And those few colonisers out there, who will wreak

development on other worlds, will think back to what

they’ve left, the billions dying, and say, all those plumes

of smoke, those destroyed trees, those genetically

modified crops replacing evolution. For our sakes.

We carry the genes of Stephen Hawking

in phials around our necks: ancestry,

the burning that brought false fertility

hard to pick out on this bloody

and smoky event horizon we cease under.

(iii)

We are not alone. A letter to the Toodyay paper

pointing out that such burning-off is illegal.

And another in the York paper. Rain doesn’t

come, so the burning continues. Into the ash,

the GM canola implants. Air-seeders,

dust plumes. Last year there were families

in the crops — bumper green — to leitmotif

the media. Happy families as the earth contracts.

(iv)

The colours of a polluted sunset are simply awe-inspiring.

I won’t fill in the wild and muted and angry colour chart —

that’s just a little indulgent, isn’t it? Giving you something

sensuous to get a grip on, dig your teeth into. That’d be

making art out of the horror — finding beauty in the

last gasp. But I’ve seen many land-owners standing

on the edge of their spreads (it’s the year of America)

admiring their handiwork, the kickbacks of nature.

(v)

The eagle flying mid-range between the burning

and the hills, waiting for the dash of rodents

and even reptiles who are this way and that

with the late heat, the dry, but shorter days.

The eagle flying mid-range between the burning

and the hills, watches its eyrie flamed-out of the tall tree

that has survived the bushfire seasons to be ashed

so the tractor can get a clear run on profit’s ingress.

(vi)

In Ireland it’s blasphemy to question God’s

ironies of fire and water — the conflagration

that has turned even bones to ash. It’s all

goodness on the statute books, and local

spirits know what’s good for them

as the earth is made bare; even

that place of the Saint Finbarr —

Gougane Barra — watching the mountains

in flames, the vegetation rising as cinders

to make false haloes over the lake.

Gorse fires without restraint.

Consequences. Subtexts. Blasphemies.

(vii)

Harvest of flame.

Time and a place.

Now a consequence

for nature that has

nowhere else to go.

Harvest of flame,

the world’s punishment

for suggesting ‘restraint’.

All that precedent

lost to the industrial

grotesque — the natural,

the ritualistic, all dragged

into the coffers; the products

we ‘need to have’, force-

fed, choking on abundance,

harvest of flame.

(viii)

Sick moon? What is

the magpie mimicking?

And the mistletoebird?

The trees knocked over by the digger

and burnt — we saw it happening.

No gathering to stop it.

Nothing. No case

to answer. Sick moon?

You rise large and diminish.

Consortiums and governments

are aiming to mine you soon. Soon.

Burnt off constantly by the sun.

Tawny frogmouths

suffocated by smoke.

On the moon, too — see them fly past,

and fall. Less gravity, but enough

to bring down, to hold the dead.

Evening star — fire-starter?

Tawny frogmouth — smoke ghost.

The gods are alive and walking

and flying and swimming and crawling

and existing on the earth — today,

and for the last couple of months,

Gods here have been burnt out

under the camouflage of burning-off,

of adding trace elements to a soon-to-be

heavily fertilised soil, to remove

the inconvenient chaff piles

and trees, of replacing

fences with new fences

and clearing vegetation

as process. These live gods

made dead. Multiplying

but finite blasphemies.

Evening star — fire-starter?

Nocturnal day-walkers.

Bruised clouds.

(ix)

You dare compare your acts

with the use of fire by Aboriginal people

as a means of being one with their country?

You dare compare your acts

with the use of fire by Aboriginal people

as you burn country you stole from them?

You dare compare your acts

with the use of fire by Aboriginal people

when you divide and conquer, leave nothing alive?

(x)

Smoulder. Rouse. Conflagrate.

It’s easy to balance the equation.

Emulsified testament suspension.

Conflagrate. Rouse. Smoulder.

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            John Kinsella

Sweeney Dreams He's Having a Nightmare of Clearing

In his dream Sweeney sees himself de-feathered and crashed in the grey sand,

unable to pull himself out of sleep, locked into a nightmare of a bulldozer

running across the land like an electric razor, the entire bush falling

to its gigantic all-encompassing blade. Nothing stops it, not even

the largest jarrah and marri trees, nothing just nothing will thwart

its progress, not even boulders setting their shoulders against

the onslaught. Sweeney in his dream tries to stop the nightmare

in its tracks, and calls on those who have become his friends to help him:

Forgive me for my mis-sayings for my well-meant efforts that have failed.

Forgive me for not spreading my wings wide enough to protect you all.

And with that he rises from the sand and squawks so loud the driver

halts his deadly machine, and leaps down and jabs his finger

into Sweeney’s charred breast, like an image out of a painting

yet to be painted, and says, Now listen, buster, this is how I make

my living, and who are you to take food from my table?! And Sweeney,

feeling the sway of his argument and feeling himself fall back

into the nightmare, sees his own beak moving, hears his own words

tumble past the nub of his tongue in more than mimicry of a human voice:

But when it’s all gone, you’ll have no more work anyway and the world

will be dying. And the bulldozer driver replies, You may be right,

but what would you have me do? — this is my job, and I know no other.

And with this Sweeney wakes, from both dream and nightmare and sweating

and feeling for his feathers to find them black and red and white and intact,

and says: I will fly high and watch over them all, I will fly from grey sand

over gravel and ochre loam and granite and brown clay. And in doing so

he flies past Walwalinj which the colonisers call Mount Bakewell,

and watches the fires the farmers have lit to eat their stubble and chaff

from the last harvest running over their firebreaks into the shreds of bush

remaining from past clearings and past burnings-off, and he watches a digger

knocking down four magnificent York gums —  ancient solar systems

of life — to make a paddock even more vacant, more productive

in the short term, but dead to the future, and he cries and cries

but his tears put out neither the fires nor the work zeal of the clearer

doing a job as night falls, and the kangaroo’s head is renamed

the Southern Cross and the ends of the earth play

on the stereos of machinery and cars and houses

and personal devices. Sweeney

in his dream of a nightmare.

            John Kinsella

High Ordnance Temporariness: Deathcultism and Deletions of Place

                               by John Kinsella

It is the air of atrocity.

An event as ordinary

As a President.

A plume of smoke, visible at a distance

In which people burn.

     George Oppen (from Of Being Numerous, 1968)

When I was a boy, actually through to the age of sixteen, I was obsessed with explosives and rocketry. Looking back from this point in my life, as a pacifist of thirty-plus years, I am bemused why the physics of explosions so fascinated me then. It was ‘technical’ and not ‘political’, though I was also in those days interested in things ‘military’, especially in terms of technology, equipment, ordnance and their relationship to strategy and tactics. The Australian military could have made good use of me if I had not had a pacifist epiphany (eventually).

And when I read of Al Weimorts, the civilian engineer working for the US Air Force Research Laboratory who designed the GBU-43/B Massive OrdnanceAir Blast bomb used yesterday on a Taliban cave network in Afghanistan, a horror of disconnection falls on me in so many ways. Obviously, the sheer brutality of this largest non-nuclear explosive device ever deployed as an act of war is horror enough in itself. This device, that has a one-kilometre-plus blast radius, and that will inevitably cause non-targeted casualties (though in the aftermath this has been denied), is the inheritor of the Vietnam forest-clearing 15000-pound bombs, ‘daisy cutters’, used by the US airforce, and then the bunker-busting bombs used by the US in the first Iraq War. The glibly nicknamed MOAB (I won’t even begin to untangle the Biblical subtexts), was designed for use in the last Iraq war but not ‘called upon’.

Al Weimorts, who died of a brain tumour in 2005, and was even celebrated in a New York Times obituary, was also the designer of cluster bombs used in Vietnam. On his hands is the blood of those killed by his death devices. He was a ‘righteous’ murderer, in the same way the designer Kalashnikov was (even with his near-the-end epiphany), or, for that matter, Leonardo da Vinci.

Many of us are personally implicated in this in subtle and obvious ways — and that is for each of us to consider and work out. Personally, as a child and early teenager, the fascination I had for ‘explosions’ (more than their ‘application’) was intense, and was only moved on from when I underwent an ethical and political shift at seventeen, developing an awareness that my politics of action were tied to the place/s I was in. That ‘explosions’ were a contradiction of place, that all I loved and respected was undone not only physically but also conceptually by my experiments.

When I exploded a ‘device’ to observe for effect, or set off a rocket to see what kind of altitude it could achieve, I was indifferent to the effect it had on the immediate ecology. The same kind of view of place as a performative stage for individual desire is what allowed me in those days to shoot things and fetishise weapons (all of which I long ago renounced and still renounce). Now I see that when those kinds of seeings are directed through work and patriotism into the Al-Weimorts-take on the world (that man with his children and grandchildren, well-dressed even at work, neatly groomed in the pics), the gap between being in a place and destroying that place is wider than death.

Weimorts witnessed the one previous explosion of a prototype of the weapon in 2003 at a site in the US (we see a forest in the background which we imagine was vaporised), so he physically felt and saw what it did to place. A place set aside for the testing of weapons, a place that had lost cultural and ecological variables to ‘necessity’, a replacement of ontology of existence with temporariness (the site before explosion) and a new presence of emptiness (post-explosion). The explosion caused by that prototype resulted in a mushroom cloud that could be seen 32 kilometres away.

Now, many years after Weimorts’s death, the Trump administration has used Afghanistan as a site of demonstration to impose its new global order. The American command in Afghanistan is denying that the use of this weapon is connected with Trump administration posturing, saying it was purely an internal ‘on-the-ground’ military decision made because the terrain and target were ‘tough’ — but only the deluded would accept this bit of propaganda as fact. This was an act to show the world that the US is ‘permanent’ (at least the pro-Trump parts of it!) while the rest of us are ‘temporary’.

 The US military used ‘daisy cutter’ bombs (at least one) early in the capitalist war in Afghanistan to vaporise entire deployments of Taliban, so a country was already made temporary before the new permanence of mass destruction. The non-nuclear is sold as a step down from total annihilation, but it’s also the calling-card of the total destruction that will come. The simulacrum of a nuclear weapon without the ‘fallout’. Just deletion and cascading effects on habitat (of humans, birds, animals, micro-organisms, those scarce plants in ‘desert’, and inhospitable — how can we even use this word? — place/s).

The desire to go nuclear, to merge the theory of general relativity, the escapism of wormholes, and the mediated ethics of Einstein (representative of human aspiration and ‘genius’), into a digestible paradox of being, of being under conditions of capitalist-state ‘liberties’. The ultimate home defence is to attack before they get to the door. In the same way the Geneva Convention underpins warfare by defining degrees of abuse, in the same way the RSPCA underwrites the slaughter industry as long as it operates within their definitions of non-cruelty, so the MOAB is the atomic bomb when you’re not having (allowed to have) an atom bomb. It is a lot less ‘powerful’ than an atomic weapon, but it makes a big impression and causes big damage.

Also, as a thermobaric weapon, the MOAB (it offends to use the acronym — they wish us to use it... this is the problem with all namings) sucks oxygen from the area around the detonation to feed the reaction, and in doing so evacuates space/place of even that marker of life. Through the caves and tunnels in the mountains it was targeted at, it deletes in manifest ways. There is more than a symbolic act in this.

The ultimate message: all living things, all places, are temporary before the might of US imperialism. Weimorts is the enabler of this imperialism, rewarded with the signs of the empire. Further, it’s not just a deletion of people (potentially on a massive scale), but also the deletion of the markers of culture and even the topography, geology and ecology of the place. This particular weapon is not a deep-penetration weapon, but is said to have ‘low to medium’ level below-ground impact with an absolute deletion of what’s on the surface in the blast range. Yet it does affect what’s below (thus its use against a broader cave system), so its implications are those of terraforming — rescaping the planet for eventual colonisation.

There is no gap between the cultural weapons of radical religious bomb-makers and the Al Weimorts of the United States. Both look to ‘defend’ by ‘attacking’ — conserving and extending their belief systems in the process — and also to remove the markers of the previous culturality and topography. It’s worth noting that the Russian military brags of having a ‘conventional’ bomb at least four times more ‘powerful’ than the MOAB, and the Americans themselves have a ‘bunker-buster’ that has a higher ‘conventional’ explosive yield. And with the ultimate deployment of ‘nukes’.

Nukes — that word that has almost become affectionate euphemism in a gaming age, as a kind of reflex action regarding power and inadequacy... Trump thinks of these endgames in the same way... because they are so real, they are made unreal... a taunt in the playground in which the taunters, the victims, and the playground, are all temporalities... slippages in time-space that have everything to do with going to sleep and nothing to do with waking. The temporary itself is forced through a wormhole of temporal fantasising — vast time-scales are drawn upon, the half-life of plutonium bandied about like military budgets. We live in this grotesque unreality where place is localised or internationalised by causational connection, and shared responsibility is somehow lost.

It was with disturbed interest that I read of an ‘end-state’ in military-political thinking today (I wrote this article on ‘Good Friday’ but am revising on the Saturday) — its glibness is horrifying (and I think likely also to the academic who deployed it) and in writing my Graphology Endgame poems it sadly has to come into play as a static in the background, or a different form of fallout. This from the ABC news website regarding the use of the MOAB, quoting Professor John Blaxland (of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University): “‘This is telegraphing to the opponents of the Government in Kabul that the United States … is now upping the ante, and is prepared to kill many people to achieve its political end-state,’ he said. That end-state, said Professor Blaxland, is for the Taliban to cave and for the US to be able to reduce its presence in Afghanistan.” So we have pursuits of end-state while playing humanity to an end-game. Grotesque.

As a young person obsessed with ordnance, an obsession I no longer have, I went through a variety of decision-making processes every time I made an explosion. My interest was specifically in the rapid uptake of oxygen in a reaction (the MOAB exploits this to the fullest) and literally the colours an ignition produced.

I was less interested in the stress placed on the container in which the ignition took place, though I almost died (along with two others) when a 3mm steel pipe went off ahead of time and sent shrapnel three feet underground, the explosion being heard 5kms away. That was my epiphany — because of coming close to losing life and causing the loss of life, but also because (a) the ‘controlled’ event did not behave as I’d expected (b) the ecology around the event changed so decisively that I finally understood that such events have long-lasting effects on topography and on culturality. They permanently change what we (especially as kids) might consider as temporary and continually available to change (our little ‘improvements’! or a change can happen because it was ‘nothing much to worry about’ to begin with) — that is, the change can have repercussions.

And such events do change surroundings — they damage flora and fauna, of course, but also a place’s psychology. They make it ‘feel’ vulnerable. They place it (and I choose the word carefully) on tenterhooks. What I was doing (in the name of ‘science’!) was wrong, and I turned against it, which given I was also deeply interested in things military back then, was surely a healthy thing. And as my politics and ethics evolved, my repugnance at such terraforming, such cultural impressings, has led me to metaphors as redemptive acts of place ecology.

Having said that, I think creative thinkers can hide behind the figurative while still being fully implicated in the damage being done. Metaphors can be violent as well as healing; but more than that, they can create a reality in which the performance of a screen-place, in which the creator’s morality is played off against the (bad) morality of the non-creative materialist. We surely have to be wary of this.

I am looking at a photo in the public domain, presumably supplied by the US airforce to the world at large, with the caption: ‘Al Weimorts (right), the creator of the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, and Joseph Fellenz, lead model maker, look over the prototype before it was painted and tested.’ Rather than paste the photo in, I’ll tell you what I see. (‘Brown bear brown bear, what do you see?’, that classic of American literature my son grew up with, that prepares ways of seeing that loop our selves into a material reality, a linguistic and visual presence in place.)

I see two men and the ‘homemade’ bomb before it becomes the industrial weapon (apparently, to this point, only fourteen have been manufactured);  they look serious and yet ‘mature’. The ‘model-maker’ — such a ‘play’ title — and the designer, both exhibiting confidence and gravitas, there’s a most serious production. And yet almost casual, too — we can whip this up in the back shed because that’s US know-how and culturisation. This place of making can replace all places. And more than that is not worth noting. It is what it is — from someone who played weapons inspector in Iraq, a seeker for weapons of mass destruction, a weapon of mass destruction ‘half in love with easeful death’. The weapon looks solid, well constructed, permanent. Its moment of destruction is an eternal marker of human endeavour — the post-it note on place, dropped from high altitude (‘air supremacy’) from the back of a cargo plane (an MC-130) and ‘guided in’ with GPS, from here to there. The ironies implode in direct proportion to the explosion. Oh, and the men touching the unpainted weapon: lovingly, cautiously, and confidently. All of this, in the theatre of the photograph. And never forget the early days of the war: Halliburton, Bush, gas. Lest we forget.

These horrific doings in the unravelling of the narrative of human presence on the planet — its unravelling by the few who have the power, also of all our narratives in our inability to prevent them, and in some cases, complicity — are a denial of the essence of place in the human condition. By disarranging place, we deny place. Such massive violence against life and presence, against the markers of belonging, is showing our temporariness while claiming an imperial permanence in which power and enslavement to death are projected through time and space. All our stories of implication are relevant to attempts to reassert Eros over Thanatos, to reconfigure the spatial and temporal variables of our shared existence. We need to analyse the play, the actions, the events, and the narratives of our own lives from earliest memory and see how they have participated in or diverged from the deathstory of global and local militarism.

On occasions, I have turned to Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster (trans. Ann Smock; University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1995) for ‘pithy’ summations of horror. But it too often fails me. Regarding Eros and Thanatos he says, and I can see this, ‘There is not the death drive; the throes of death are thefts from unity, lost multitudes.’ (p.46) But as part of his essay, Blanchot also cites Mallarmé: ‘There is no explosion except a book.’ (p. 7). This is under a separate ‘bullet’ and sits alone: it is a critique, of course, of its own absurdity, but it is also given reflective space. It is true, and yet absurd. Under the MOAB blast, in the caves of the violent and sadistic and deathcultish enemy, there are gestures of the human. Snuffed collectively. And insects and birds move above. And creatures we ignore. Snuffed. The English teacher, Mallarmé, has to shake our foundations linguistically to make such a declaration simultaneously float, and attach. All our personal stories validating our presence, the presence of our families, our people. As entwined (or not) in place, the land/s.

And yet, the MOAB is still made and many people are proud of its making. It’s what you’d expect. The schools that made the engineer. The jobs. The belief systems. Family (liking it or not). Community. Circumstance. Notions of enemies. The fallout is devastating. We register the explosion on a seismograph. And yet, there is no spike in measurements of radioactive fallout. That almost ‘largest’ non-nuclear device.

But then Blanchot follows with his next — or his publisher’s next — bullet point: ‘The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience — it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes. What does not mean that the disaster, as the force of writing, is excluded from it, is beyond the pale of writing or extratextual’ (p. 7). Yes, because all writing has been vaporised. Even those who in their caves see literature as corruption, even their hands for writing and typing have been vaporised. The page is gone. No new pages replace. Does the translator of Blanchot, does Blanchot himself know what ‘beyond the pale’ does in this context? Probably. And if so, what of beyond writing beyond fragments beyond disaster? The disaster has been deleted. This post-disaster acceptance. These acts we perform after hearing the news, as we all do. These copyings and rewritings of our own narratives.

Just a few ‘paragraphs’ before he mentions the Bishop Faustus, Saint Augustine in his Confessions writes (roughly, in the Penguin books R.S. Pine-Coffin English translation, 1961): ‘Clearly the wicked do not know that you are everywhere. But you are not bound within the limits of any place. You alone are always present, even to those who set themselves apart from you.’ (p. 92). I treat this in a secular light on Good Friday, the most sacred Christian time. I copy this onto this ‘page’ in the long hemispheric of a secular patriotism that allows such barbarity as the MOAB to even exist. Make no mistake that such massive deployments of violence require spiritual sanction: even the most brutal states will make use of any ‘permission’ and validation they can acquire. The wicked do know ‘God’ is everywhere, and that God is unbound by the limits of place. And the same for the temporal.

But this idea that place is a human limitation over-ridden or over-come or incorporated by God is a very earthly desire: the desire to be larger, and controlling of place. And what better way to do that than delete place. To replace ‘place’ with the constructs of military-capitalism, fill in the holes with the machinery of ‘liberty’. The metaphors of othered history that we pick over for evidence of material and non-material existence are the permissions we collect for our actions, collectively and individually. We could all stand up and refuse! If that happened, the war machine would stop, and the God so many want to believe in would be respected in all place(s), not in acts of hubristic and horrific deletion.

Graphology Endgame 63

We wish to extract

from what we can’t see?

Oxygen from surroundings

to facilitate an explosion

spirit from emptiness

to fill those voids

A love — no, no, a need —

for gravity wheedling us out.

Or a question of limits,

statutes, gasping

for aspirations.

Workshops

of erasure.

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