The Wright Approach

I’m not sure what I expected to find, driving from Canberra’s tableland down the undulating road to the coast. But when we stopped for a break at Braidwood, an odd mix of memories and connections surfaced.

I had vaguely associated Braidwood with family stories of mild motoring adventures in days beyond memory. There was a bit of Toad of Toad Hall – poop poop and all – about my father, and his father. In cars that are now vintage they forded swollen rivers and braved dirt tracks in this district before Canberra even existed.

I also associated the place with the poet Judith Wright. Hers was a poetry that had been with me all my life, from the pages of primary school’s The School Magazine onwards. And I knew that she had lived near Braidwood for the last few decades of her life.

Australian Poet Judith Wright (image: The Age)

We had lunch in the town on the way to the coast, coffee on the way back. We explored a few other shops, and drove on. It was hardly an in-depth tour of Braidwood – and certainly not the way to gain any sense of the place that the great poet knew and wrote about. As I said, I’m not sure what I expected.

But the experience did raise some larger questions. What, for instance, would it take for anyone to truly experience a place that has been made famous – “real” even – by someone of note. Is it possible to find William Wordsworth’s Lake District? Or in the Green Mountains of Vermont, might I discover Robert Frost’s road not taken? Or would the Pilliga ever reveal again what it revealed to Eric Rolls?

What does it take for anyone, be they poet, writer, painter or photographer, to capture the sense of a place? Is it even possible? Or is the experience of place such an individual matter, and place itself so mutable, that we can only ever hope to triangulate it?

Judith Wright wrote wisely on this matter. Herself a transplant from Queensland to the Southern Tablelands, she told her friend Kathleen McArthur that:

Before one's country can become accepted background against which (one’s) imagination can move unhindered, it must first be observed, understood, described, and as it were absorbed.

Another Braidwood writer, Jackie French, observed first hand Judith Wright’s ability to sit for hours on her bushland property, just watching. A poem like 'Lichen, Moss, Fungus' illustrates the fruit of such watching.

Lichens, mosses and fungi—


these flourish on this rock ridge,


a delicate crushable tundra:


bracket, star, cup, parasol,


gilled, pored, spored, membraned,


white, chestnut, violet, red.

Winter Sun in the Tasmanian Mountains 

Back in Hobart, the winter has been relatively benign. Nonetheless, while returning to health after a dose of the ‘flu, this week’s snow showers and frost had me recalling another Judith Wright poem, ‘Moving South’.

Wind off the mountain snow,


small white-etched trees


leaning in leeward gestures.


I shall step carefully into the acid vapour


of morning frost.

After four days in a warm bed, I too should have been stepping carefully. But on the fifth day I was ready to welcome the cold embrace of the bush air, the banishment of cabin fever. It was time to again absorb this place.

John Gould's painting of spotted pardalotes, ca. 1860 

Soon the sun was shining its warm promise. And when I heard the season’s first spotted pardalotes calling pee-paw from the tree tops, it put a literal spring in my step. 

Nature Writer: An Interview with Fortyspot

[Some of my thoughts about nature writing]

Fortyspot  is a blog run by Lyn Reeves, a Tasmanian poet, editor and publisher. Lyn recently interviewed me about my passion for nature and my love of the genre "nature writing". Here's the interview, interspersed with some of my photographs. It is reproduced with Lyn's kind permission.


Fortyspot: When did you first become interested in nature writing, both as a reader and as a writer? What attracts you to this form of writing?

PG: I think it’s come out of a lifelong love of the natural world. A childhood chasing butterflies and cicadas; keeping silk worms; catching skinks and so on. And devouring “How and Why Wonder Books” on volcanoes, dinosaurs and the like.


But it was reading Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” in my 30s that really turned on my nature writing light bulb. It was like discovering a whole new planet that had barely been explored. Dillard is a writer who sees beneath the surface, and writes with a knowledgeable love of nature that leaps from the page.


That was the late 80s, and I spent the next few years trying to find more books like that. I’m strongly attracted to writing that shows me what’s hidden in plain view. I eventually decided to try and write my own local version of that.

Buttongrass and mountains, Southwest National Park 

Fortyspot: Who are the nature writers you most admire or who have influenced you the most and who you might recommend to someone wanting to learn more of the art of nature writing?


PG: I’d start with Annie Dillard and Richard Nelson. Dillard once told an interviewer “You almost have to hold a gun at my head to make me read ‘nature writing’, but I’ll crawl over broken glass for Richard K. Nelson.” Amen to that! I count Richard, who is based in Alaska but often visits here, as both friend and mentor. His “The Island Within” is breathtakingly good.


In a field generally seen as dominated by American writers, I should also mention classics like Aldo Leopold’s “A Sand County Almanac”, Barry Lopez’s “Arctic Dreams” and the works of writers like Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder and Terry Tempest Williams.


But there’s a British tradition too, often more bucolic than wild in nature. The father figure is probably Gilbert White (“The Natural History of Selborne”), but others include 19th century figures like John Clare and Richard Jeffries. In the 1950s T.H. White wrote a memorable book in “The Goshawk”, but also had some wonderfully observed nature writing in his history/fantasy “The Once and Future King”.


Of the more recent Brits, I was also lucky enough to meet and spend time in the Tasmanian wilds with the late Roger Deakin. His “Waterlog” is a classic; charming, poignant, acutely observed, and as disarmingly eccentric as the author himself. Robert Macfarlane’s “The Wild Places” and Kathleen Jamie’s “Findings” are two other recent book I’ve enjoyed and admired.


A couple of quality magazines that feature this kind of writing are “Orion” (from the US) and “Resurgence” (from the UK).


In Australia the list is thin. Eric Rolls’ “Celebration of the Senses” and “Doorways: A Year of the Cumberdeen Diaries”, and more recently Mark Tredinnick’s “The Blue Plateau”, are some notable exceptions.

King Billy pine at Lake Rhona 

Fortyspot: In 2002 you co-founded the WildCare Tasmania International Nature Writing Prize, the world’s first literary award for unpublished nature writing. What led you to do this, and how did you go about it?


PG: As I noted above, I believed there was a dearth of Australian nature writing. With this in mind I asked Eric Rolls where nature essays might be published here, and he indicated that the options were few. In 1992 I wrote an essay about this in Island (#53, 1992). It was a kind of “call to arms” for nature writers. It took nearly a decade, but I eventually took up my own call, and travelled to Britain, Ireland and the US to study the nature writing traditions there.  


I learned much, including that there was no writing prize anywhere – even in the US – for new nature writing. I came back and shared my findings with people like Pete Hay, and David Owen (then editor of Island), and we came up with the prize idea. When Andrew Smith of WildCare came on board as the major sponsor, we were off and running.


Fortyspot: The prize defines nature writing as ‘literary prose whose major inspiration and subject matter is the natural world, not necessarily excluding its significance for humans and/or their interactions with it.’ How did you arrive at that definition and what were some of the models or templates that you had in mind as examples of the genre?


PG: Pete Hay essentially came up with that definition. He’d been teaching literature and the environment at UTas for many years. We didn’t really have any models or templates, we just knew that we wanted people to engage in a heartfelt and literary fashion with the natural world.

Winter scene: Walls of Jerusalem National Park

Fortyspot: From reading the entries and prize-winners in this biennial competition, can you describe the general direction or particular attributes that distinguish the works submitted as ‘nature writing’. Have there been any ‘stand out’ entries that you’d like to mention?


PG: The best entries tend to be grounded in a particular place, and offer a reflective and knowledgeable consideration of experience in that place. In this context Robert Macfarlane talks about the need for “prolonged acquaintance with a place” so that “the slow capillary creep of knowledge” can occur. I tend to think of nature writing as the “slow food movement” of literature. It involves patient exposure to place; unhurried collection of observations; methodical gathering of relevant detail; and judicious combining of those ingredients with the individuality of the writer.


The fast food versions of nature writing are likely to give superficial descriptions of peoples’ experiences in nature, or worse, offer unsifted thoughts on current environmental crises, such as climate change or drought.


As for stand out pieces, I’d rather not single anyone out. Instead I’d urge people to read some of the winning entries in Island magazines. Past issues that have WildCare Prize winning essays include 92/93, 101, 102, 109 and 118. And the next issue, # 125, will hopefully have the 2011 winning entries.

Wallaby prints in snow, Walls of Jerusalem National Park

Fortyspot: Would you agree that the genre of place writing is less developed in Australia than in North America where there is a strong tradition comprising works such as Thoreau’s Walden, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek and the more contemporary works of writers like Barry Lopez, to name a few? Have you noticed a growing interest in the genre of nature writing in Australia in recent years and, if so, what would you put that down to?


PG: Yes, as discussed above, I think it is less developed here. But I also believe there’s now a burgeoning interest in nature and place writing in Australia. I think part of this is an expression of our desire to finally put down roots in this land, rather than simply camp on its surface. There may be a faddish element to it too, which could mean the spotlight will only hover here occasionally. But I think the more we live in this land, and reflect deeply on it, the more it will come out in our thinking, talking and writing.


Fortyspot: What suggestions or advice would you give to the novice nature writer?


PG: Spend time in the natural world; look deeply; be curious; ask a lot of questions; read widely; and then practice, practice, practice your writing. The good nature writers I know tend to be gentle and somewhat obsessive. It’s probably a helpful combination to cultivate.



My thanks to Lyn Reeves from Fortyspot for permission to reproduce this interview on my blog. Her blog focusses on writing about place. 

Feral Peril

[a stoat trap along NZ's Kepler Track. Click on the image and see if you can see the deceased stoat inside!]


[A cautionary tale from across the Tasman Sea]

It is not an altogether pleasant experience to be woken by mice scurrying over your face. The unpleasantness increases when the wider implications of a mouse plague in remote New Zealand are understood.

It’s spring 2006, and we are on our first serious tramp in the South Island of New Zealand. Our overnight stay in Aspiring Hut is very early in the season, just days after the hut has been fully opened.

2006 is a beech mast year – meaning that the various species of southern beech that dominate the forests of New Zealand are seeding prolifically. That’s good for the future of these beautiful forests, so reminiscent of Tasmania’s myrtle forests (to which they are related). But it’s also good for anything that will eat the seeds, and this year that’s conjured up a vast multitude of mice.

In, under and around Aspiring Hut hordes of mice have seen out the winter. With the thaw and the longer days they’re breeding and feeding at a frantic rate. Hence the early morning tip-toeing across my beard. Later, when we walk the Routeburn Track, the forest floor is alive with mice. In my peripheral vision the forest floor seems to undulate as mice scurry to hide from the passing bipedal “giants”. Afterwards they will return to the beech feast.

I used to count Australia the world champion in the field of introduced pest species. Eric Rolls’ 1969 classic book They All Ran Wild examines the lamentable record of our inadvertant rape and pillage of the environment via introduced furry, hard-hoofed, leafy and prickly living things.

“Inadvertant” may be too kind, given that Australia had acclimatisation societies in the 19^th century that aimed specifically and deliberately to introduce and establish plants and animals in this country. Their goal was partly economic, but they were also trying to make this “new world” look and feel more like the old. The founder of the Victorian Acclimatisation Society, Edward Wilson, went so far as to state “if it lives, we want it”.

But after my 2006 experience, and bearing in mind the spirit of trans-Tasman rivalry, I have to concede that New Zealand may be even more over-run by feral species than we are. And not just by mice. The food chain doesn’t end with the small rodents. Rats eat mice, and when mice are scarce then birds and bird eggs will do fine. In turn well-fed rats are fine food for mustelid predators such as stoats.

And when stoats can’t get rat? Well, while walking the Kepler Track in the mountains west of Te Anau, I found the sad answer. At the time I was struggling to find my walking rhythm. At such times I resort to tricks that help distract my mind and body. On the Kepler I used a series of pink triangles nailed at intervals along the track as both a distraction and a crude tally of my progress.

Of course the tags also piqued my curiosity. Hitler had sewn pink triangles onto the clothes of male homosexual prisoners. In this case the tags marked the location of stoat traps. And I learned that what stoats turn to when rats become scarce is birds. And what better than the fat and flightless takahe.

So the intensive trapping effort along the Kepler Track was aimed specifically at giving the dwindling population of takahe in the nearby Murchison Mountains a chance at increasing its perilous grip on what was once its stronghold.

The takahe (Porphyrio hochstetteri) is a large, strikingly-coloured bird believed to be descended from wind-blown Australian birds (similar to swamp-hens). Several million years in isolation has left them flightless and large - they weigh around 3kg. That’s fine in an environment virtually free of carnivorous predators, but disastrous when killing machines such as stoats are added to the mix.

By the end of the 19^th century, takahe were believed extinct. Then in 1948 a small number was found in the mountains across the lake from where we were walking. After huge breeding and trapping efforts, the total population is currently around 220 individual birds.

By the end of the 3 day walk I had counted over 120 trap markers. The traps themselves were mostly well hidden. However near the end of the walk I wandered off track near a marker to see what a trap looked like. Built to be accessible to mustelids rather than men, getting close to the wood and mesh box was difficult.

I lined my camera up near the cage and shot off a speculative photo – without actually being able to see through the view finder. To my surprise, weeks later, I discovered that I had photographed a dead stoat inside the trap? It was only after zooming in on the image that I made out the twisted and grisled stoat corpse (see image above).

On learning from Department of Conservation (DoC) rangers a little more of the story, my curiosity about stoats soon turned to anger. They were introduced to New Zealand in the 1880s in an attempt to keep rabbit numbers low. At the time there was strong scientific and political opposition, as even then the likely effects on non-target species was predicted. However the powerful farming lobby won the day, and New Zealand’s fauna – and its tax payers – have been paying a high price ever since.

Despite a number of similarly sad New Zealand stories, a Tasmanian like myself steers well clear of the high horse. The extinction of the thylacine here is tragedy enough; the “export” of Tasmanian possums to New Zealand terrible. But the deliberate 21^st century introduction of the European fox into the world’s only stronghold of carnivorous marsupials? Take me to the hair shirt and flagellation whip!

Nature Writing: A Personal Primer

[Photo: winter scene, Walls of Jerusalem National Park]

[Some reflections on why nature writing is important to me. Originally published in ISLAND in 2005. Short extracts have appeared here before.]

It was about 20 years ago that, as a would-be writer somewhat obsessed with the natural world, I attended some readings in Hobart by the great Australian writer Eric Rolls. I had read his wonderful “Celebration of the Senses”, and for me it ranked alongside Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” as a seminal contemporary book about nature. Moreover it was about Australian nature. So at the end of Eric’s reading I asked him where in Australia a nature writer might hope to be published. He laughed and said “nowhere”. If I recall correctly he may have added something about first disguising your nature writing as something else!

Unable to take “nowhere” for an answer, I began searching for recent examples of Australian nature writing in the hope that I might find some long-lost market for what I was hoping to write. Even minor provincial newspapers in the UK have regular nature columns, and in North America there is a thriving market for contemporary nature writing. Why wouldn’t there be a tradition, albeit somewhat hidden, within Australian literature?

My initial investigation pretty much confirmed what Eric had told me. That research was turned into an essay called “A Half Open Door”, submitted with a mixture of optimism and naivety to Cassandra Pybus, then editor of Island. I will always be grateful to Cassandra for taking a punt on that green piece of writing, helping to tidy it up and publish it – ironically alongside Eric Rolls – in Island #53, Summer 1992.

Part of my naivety in writing that essay was that I thought other people might read it; other people might take it on board, and that other people’s attitudes towards the literary depiction of Australian nature might somehow change. Instead I’ve realised that the essay has become something of a job description for me: in short if I wanted to see these changes take place, then I’d have to look for practical ways of lifting the profile of nature writing in Australia.

This realisation was slow in dawning. So it wasn’t until 2000 that I packed my environmental cringe in my bags and headed off to England, Ireland, Scotland and the USA to study the roots of nature writing in those places (assisted by a grant from Arts Tasmania). I discovered many interesting things on that trip. But what most intrigued me in the current context, was that there appeared to be no international nature writing prize for unpublished writing anywhere in the world. So the Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize, which has recently been awarded for the second time, is one of the concrete results of that trip.

Behind the prize is the desire not only to lift the profile of Australian nature writing, but also to position Tasmania as the natural hub for such environmental literature within Australia. We are one of the few places on earth that still has the chance to excel when it comes to intact environments. But that may not remain the case unless our concern for the environment is expressed in our literature as much as in other ways.

Run every second year since 2003, the prize has so far attracted around 350 participants. They’ve come from all states of Australia and several overseas countries. And they’ve been characterised by high levels of both skill and passion, as you will see from the examples that follow. [extracts not included here - see ISLAND magazine for examples.]

* * *

But before turning to those writers, I want to explore a little of what nature writing strives to do. One of its other names – place writing – gives us a clue here. It is a style of writing that wants to take special note of place; to celebrate the particular.

Kentucky writer Wendell Berry is one such celebrator of place. In Life is a Miracle he observes that the life of each place “is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never repeated.” As a result he sees “that life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving.” (Life is a Miracle, Counterpoint, 2000, p. 45) Robert Macfarlane, Cambridge academic and writer, concurs. “It is harder to dispose of anything, or to act selfishly towards it, once one has paid attention to its details.” (“Only Connect” in The Guardian, March 26, 2005). Conversely a place that is unnoticed, unloved, is an orphan: who will care for it, who will keep it from harm?

But lest we see place as merely supine and passive in the face of humans, the concept of belonging to place is also important here. Aboriginal and Celtic traditions, among others, have a strong sense of this. In Aboriginal lore the land owns its people, while the old Gaelic word duchthas encapsulates the concept of people belonging to the land. Similarly in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the land belongs not to the people, but to God.

The task for the place writer then is to find ways to both sense and express the particularity and unique importance of place. But how? Perhaps if travel broadens the mind, then staying at home deepens the soul. The soul that really watches and listens to a place can begin to discover the hiddenness of what is all around. This uncovering can start, perhaps must start, with simple questions in our own backyards. Embarrassingly elementary gaps in our knowledge may need dealing with. In recent years I have had to ask such basic questions as: Where do possums go in the day time? Which bird call was that? What time of the year will my banksia bloom? And I find myself repeating some of the same questions year after year, until it finally takes root within me that, for instance, the spring blush of new leaf tips is golden on bluegums, but ruddy on stringybarks. Or that juvenile muttonbirds take their first flight in early May, sometimes crash-landing in perilous places – like our doghouse – in the process.

Perhaps this need to take the time to observe makes nature writing the “slow food” of literature. Its gratification is not instant, and the mastery of it isn’t the work of a few hours. As Robert Macfarlane has put it “landscape cannot, on the whole, be mocked up; cannot be dreamed into descriptive being.” (“Only Connect” in The Guardian, March 26, 2005)

A childhood obsession with silk worms helped me to realise that all our senses are vital to this enterprise. As much as I might have been sated and stained by its glorious fruit, it was the shape, colour and texture of mulberry leaves that is forever imprinted on my memory. Our neighbour Mrs Thompson would turn a blind eye to leaf thieves as we surreptitiously sought the best leaves as food for our silk worms. I swear I could detect the gratefulness of the grubs when fresh fodder was placed in their box. And today I could still pick out the vivid, pleated and rumpled green leaves in any police line-up of leaf look-alikes.

Such visual, seasonal particularity may be the legacy of our hunter-gatherer past. But it can also be a good way for us to re-learn how to treasure the places we call home. Being able to recognise things that belong together – a visual sense of what fits – is one way of safeguarding the integrity of place.

But if our soul can be deepened by the particular sights of our home place, it can also be stretched by particular sounds. I didn’t realise how large a part aural memory played in my sense of place until jolted by unfamiliar sounds in strange places.

I am on the north coast of NSW a few springs ago. I am sleeping in a strange room. The hour is early. Not being a morning person, it is not my custom to bound from bed for a dawn abseil or a bracing surf. So to me it is half past bloody five when the cacophony of birds starts.

A rainbird winds its meteorological interrogative ever higher; turtledoves answer several dozen more times than seems absolutely necessary. “Is that so?”, overlapping one another (“Is that so?”) in their enthusiasm (“Is that so?”) to make their point (“Is that so?”) A baby magpie asks a different question over and over . . . and over, with the same nagging upward inflection. I wonder how such a raucous aural ugly duckling could ever become that sweetest of carollers.

And a bird that I don’t recognise has me thinking of my own hungry little boy. Actually he’s not little any more. He’s 21 and taller than me, and often wiser. But still sometimes we call Stuart “Choo”. And I hear this bird – above “Is that so?” – gently calling “Choo” singly, repeatedly, transporting my soul back over Bass Strait to home.

* * *

In my dreams I might have hitched a ride home with the muttonbirds which fly past this coast every spring. For them Bass Strait is merely the home strait in a marathon annual flight from the Arctic. Over the Strait, down the white sanded east coast, and around the imposing doleritic chunk of Tasman Island. Then, as easy as you like, into Storm Bay and up the Derwent estuary. The dominating mass of Mt Wellington, bolt upright above the forested valleys bordering the river, would have told me I was near to home. And here the muttonbirds, little interested in mountains, would have bade me farewell.

Ah the rock of home. Silent but speaking volumes; an igneous ode in dolerite, reminding me that the sense of touch is also vital to the sense of place. Fluted Cape and the Organ Pipes might be named for dolerite features, but this earth material depends less on the music of language than on its rugged good looks.

But what is it really like? What kind of neighbour does it make? To the walker and climber it is friendly and reliable. Feet and hands find it answers their needs with a sureness that can be comforting, at least on casual acquaintance. Our dog might have told a different story after a long day on the Western Tiers. His regular habit of covering the ground three times – out, back to check, out again – combined poorly with the shark-skin roughness of the rock. Towards the end of the day the pads of his paws were abraided so badly that they bled, and he limped wretchedly. Even so he would neither slow his pace nor alter his rule. We finally had to pick him up and carry him the last kilometre back to the car.

So I should have learned. Yet many years later I found myself learning afresh the lessons of dolerite on a high level traverse of Mt Massif and Falling Mountain. The navigational difficulties presented by its enormous boulders forced us to clamber up, over, around and down countless dolerite faces. As I slid face, feet and fingers down my umpteenth rock wall, pressed hard against it by my heavy pack, I gained the kind of intimate acquaintance with this rock that had me feeling like a failed rock-whisperer. If only I could have commanded the rocks to throw themselves into the sea, I might not have ended the walk with raw and bleeding fingertips. Or perhaps I could have worn gloves!

Still such close and painful acquaintance can have its compensations. Who, for instance, could fail to be impressed by the ubiquity of lichen on dolerite? The rock’s often finely pitted surface, its native acidity, the clean air of its favoured haunts all help it to contrive myriad niches for lichen.

And who could remain unmoved by the lichen’s amazing variety of colours and textures? What from a few metres away appears a flat grey turns, on closer inspection, into a symphony of subtle tones. There are unnamed shades of grey, green, black, red, orange, yellow, brown and white.

And that is just the clothes the dolerite wears. Let your walking boot dislodge a small boulder and you may literally scratch the surface of this impressive rock. Beneath its surface – providing you and your companions survive to inspect it – you will see a hidden masterpiece in grey and blue, with accents supplied by the sparkling faces of crystals coming to the light for the first time in perhaps 150 million years. If you also detect the flinty whiff of freshly concussed rock, you may be thankful that bleeding fingertips is the worst you have.

So wherever I may journey, I will always return to these places. I will grip again this rock of home; see again the spring blush on the stringybarks; hear again the whipping flute-call of Jo Wittee. Because these are the things that grip me, that enfold me, that join with the people I love and who love me, in making a home place for my life on earth. And in expressing wonder in the face of these things, perhaps I am agreeing with Wendell Berry that this life is absolutely worth having, and these places are absolutely worth saving.

A Half Open Door: Nature Writing and Environmental Cringe

[published in Island #53, Summer 1992 - the piece that started me on the nature writing path]

There is a startling passage in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that could have been written in any particular place, but I find it hard to imagine it being written by an Australian.

The mating rites of mantises are well known: a chemical produced in the head of the male insect says, in effect, “No, don’t go near her, you fool, she’ll eat you alive.” At the same time a chemical in the abdomen says, “Yes, by all means, now and forever yes.”

While the male is making up what passes for his mind, the female tips the balance in her favor by eating his head. He mounts her. Fabre describes the mating, which sometimes lasts six hours, as follows: “The male, absorbed in the performance of his vital function, holds the female in a tight embrace. But the wretch has no head; he has no neck; he has hardly a body. The other with her muzzle turned over her shoulder continues very placidly to gnaw what remains of the gentle swain. And, all the time, that masculine stump, holding on firmly, goes on with the business!”

A less confronting, more plainly American piece is Edward Hoagland’s The Tugman’s Passage.

A tree swallow darts high with a feather, drops it deliberately, then swoops to catch it again. A woodchuck is raising a family in her summer depot the same den that she hibernated in; that’s back in the woods, headquarters for a skunk family now. Once when the woodchuck sat up close to his tent, as brindled-brown and husky-torsoed as a grizzly bear, he thought he might be camping in Alaska – except that, at the same time, a catbird overhead was mimicking the song of the Southern bird that the catbird, too, may have heard in Georgia last winter.

What Hoagland shows in his unexceptional way is he is perfectly at ease in describing the creatures that live around his Vermont home. He writes expecting the smile of recognition or shared experience which is the bond between reader and writer (which may be a grimace in Annie Dillard’s case). This is not something we might expect in Australian writing. Such intimate observations are absent from most of our writing.

We have a strong tradition of bush literature, even though it is execrated from time to time. But this focuses on the Big Country – Australia wide, brown and large. We lack a tradition of intimate “nature writing” akin to the rich tradition among the English, beginning perhaps with Gilbert White’s A Natural History of Selborne, and continuing through the likes of Richard Jefferies up to the present. Even provincial newspapers in Britain have a nature diarist of one sort or another. This tradition unashamedly loves the countryside and its inhabitants. What’s more, it writes for a public that knows – or at least wants to know – something about it.

In the United States the tradition is younger, if no less passionate. Thoreau is the patron saint. The Sierra Club and Audobon Society are among the evangelists. A latter day disciple, Stephen Graham, wrote in The Gentle Art of Tramping:

As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged on the shingly beach of a mountains stream, the great door, that does not look like a door opens.

In Australia, “the great door” is only half-open. We’ve barely begun to integrate the Australian environment into our writing. Geoffrey Dutton, in Snow on the Saltbush calls this our “environmental cringe”, pointing to the hostility many writers have to non-urban Australia. ……. Their message has been one of intense guilt over the despoiled Australian environment (and) hostility against the bush tradition……Australians raped the country and massacred the ancient, indigenous population. The hostility has seemed to extend even to nature itself, as something undeniably large but irrelevant, except in the political confrontations of conservation campaigns.

The same sense of hostility to nature comes through in our mythology. In Intruders in the Bush: The Australian Quest for Identity, sociologist John Carroll argues that our great myth is the uncaring vastness of nature in Australia.

Drought, bushfire, blasting heat, hurricane, and the sheer monumental vastness of nature, of oceans, cliffs, deserts, mountains, and the sky itself-much larger and brighter than in Europe-will always make man feel a nobody on this continent. This is our greatest asset in an age in which man has the vanity of believing that he can do anything, that nothing in nature can check him, that his technology and his medicine will protect him from any threat. Australians are lucky that in spite of their fearlessness of God, they
must submit to a nature with many of the implacable and punitive powers of their lost divinity.

This antagonistic and Eurocentric view of Australian nature (which not surprisingly sits uneasily with Aboriginal mythology) is reflected in much white European-Australian literature, where it is hard to find a protagonistic view of nature. Instead much of our literature describes an almost gothic hostility between ourselves and nature, such as Marcus Clark’s demonising of Van Diemen’s Land in For the Term of His Natural Life. A similar brooding sense of hostility can also be found in recent works like Tim Winton’s In the Winter Dark.

Whether the horror of the bush is intrinsic or extrinsic is never quite resolved, but it is hard to escape the feeling that we are not at home in our own homeland. The central character in Rodney Hall’s The Second Bridegroom is unusual precisely because he alone of the whites in the story does not feel an alien in Australia. Instead, he begins to share the bond which his Aboriginal guardians have with the land. Similarly Mary O’Halloran in Tom Collins’ classic Such is Life is exceptional in being a “child of the wilderness, a dryad among her kindred trees”, and therefore knowing the names of all the trees and “the dwelling-place of every loved companion”.

So why is it that so few Australian novels celebrate the Australian environment in an unselfconscious way? Consider D H Lawrence and Mollie Skinner’s response to Western Australia in The Boy in the Bush.

It was spring in Western Australia, and a wonder of delicate blueness, of frail, unearthly beauty. The earth was full of weird flowers, star-shaped, needle-pointed, fringed, scarlet, white, blue – a whole world of strange flowers. Like being in a new Paradise from which man had not been cast out.

Had Mollie Skinner written this alone, would it have been accepted as widely as it was? Perhaps environmental and cultural cringe share the same bed.

In Britain there is also a rich vein of nature fantasy that is absent in Australia. The most recent examples have tried to go beyond the animals-dressed-as-people variety popular in tales like The Wind in the Willows. Richard Adams’ Watership Down, an early and influential modern example, was based in part on the scientific study of rabbits and rabbit behaviour. It did not altogether escape anthropomorphic tendencies, but at least Fiver, Hazel and Co were not dressed up in waistcoats and smoking pipes. What Adams did for rabbits, others in Britain have since tried to do for moles, badgers, eagles, weasels, frogs and hedgehogs. The bookshelves of wildlife naturalists have been plundered as never before.

Regardless of the literary merit of this outpouring of ethologically correct fables, they show an interest in getting the precise details of the natural world right. Their commercial success indicates that they have tapped the broad conservation concerns of many readers, including their love of “nature” and their disquiet over the disappearance of habitats and species. You would think that Australia, which has seen the extinction of more than twenty native animals species since white settlement, and has over half of its total mammal population of 256 species on the vulnerable list, might have a similar market to tap. However there is very little Australian fiction which takes seriously the observed behaviour of our own wildlife. We have no kangaroo quest to Watership Down; no echidna equivalent of Duncton Wood. While a few children’s stories such as Leslie Rees’s Shy the Platypus take care to get some details right, the general run of Australian nature fiction is happier mythologising the bush and its creatures, as in Blinky Bill or Snugglepot and Cuddlepie.

Magazines such as Australian Geographic and Geo, or more specialists nature journals like Wildlife Australia or Australian Natural History, may appear to be safe-houses for the kind of nature writing I’m discussing. But while they contain some fine writing about Australia, most of it doesn’t amount to what I would define as “nature writing”. Australian Geographic sometimes comes close, though its format favours the spectacular and the graphic, after the style of the National Geographic. Picture prevails over word. What I am looking for is writing that has no need of pictures; writing that doesn’t stand or fall by academic whim.

Another potential haven is the conservation movement. At times though, this movement gives every appearance of being dominated by professional lobbyists who, perhaps unwittingly, push celebratory nature writing to the periphery. Some of the best – and worst – finds itself lost at the beginning of wilderness calendars and coffee-table books; word again subject to image: the door half-closed. To “sprawl wet-legged on the shingly beach” doesn’t have the publicity impact of chaining yourself to trees or tractors.

There is an irony in this. By concentrating on the Big Issues the conservation movement risks neglecting the very thing it is fighting for – like a crusading social reformer whose own children run barefoot. Does it celebrate the Australian environment in all its daily humility, as well as its spectacular grandeur?

For surely nature writing is celebration. Even when, as with an Annie Dillard, it is aghast at what it observes, it is still able to maintain a sense of wonder, as this recollection of Bishop Burgmann’s bush childhood in An Australian Education shows.

One sat quietly at the foot of a tree, resting against the butt. To move at all was to move as though a baby were near which must not be awakened. At such times the bush is fastening its spell upon you. You breathe slowly. Time stops. Then a cricket is sure to break the silence. He can never keep quiet for long. One becomes conscious of bees in the blossoms above. A bird flits past, but one remains still. It is a pity that the moment must pass, but the babe is awakening. It may be Pan; it is the spirit of the bush; and it lives in the insects, the birds, the animals, as well as in the trees. A black magpie flies overhead with his raucous cry. He is an unruly bird, and doesn’t care whom he awakens. A snake may glide past, but he does it quietly.

Presently the babe is full awake and all the dwellers in the bush loose their tongues. Bellbirds, whipbirds, and all sorts of birds enjoy their songs, and as they make high festival the lyrebird can mimic them all. Nature must be taken as a whole. It speaks through its birds, it lives in its animals; man may only join in on Nature’s own terms. He can site He can sit and listen and let his fancy run free. He will grow more reverent as his sensitiveness to the presence grows. He will feel privileged to have been admitted into the audience of Nature’s moods. Birds and animals may even come to feel that he to some extent also belongs to their exclusive world.

It is foolish for man to think of Nature as below him. If he lives in the bush long enough he will find that reverence is the only worthy attitude. But the bush will take its won time to do the work. It will not speak to a man in a hurry. Its message is worth waiting for. Only the soul that is stilled in its presence can hear the music of its song.

To Burgmann, opening the door is a spiritual labour, and in the fifty years since he wrote few have followed his lead. In that half-century the microscope and magnifying glass have been superseded by the cathode-ray tube and the silicon chip; and awe and wonder have been replaced by mere amusement. By sticking to the myth of the vastness and implacability of nature in Australia, we hasten the retreat into the artificial urban world. Thereafter nature is either malignly ignored, or its downfall is actively plotted. Gilbert White offered a far more sanguine approach to the vastness of nature when he wrote at the time of the First Fleet that “every kingdom, every province, should have its own monographer”.

One Australian write who stands out is Eric Rolls. His superb Celebration of the Senses was unusual in the Australian literary context that the blurb writers and publicists fumbled for ways to describe it. Rolls comfortably included observations of wildlife alongside ribald recollections of army service.

We wake to bird calls. In army training camps the first notes of reveille jerked us out of sleep at 6a.m. Tent flaps lifted, cranky soldiers cursed the bugler. “Bow your guts out your bastard!”. “Jam the fuckin’ thing down his throat!” “Stick it up your arse and play retreat!”. During the war in Papua New Guinea, when I woke a signaller to take the next night watch, I stood off and nudged him with a long stick. The Japanese were very close……..all of us were on edge. Bend over a man and wake him suddenly and he would come up ready to kill.

……In the country……I waken gladly to bird calls. All through the night in brief wakings one hears birds. When nesting the male Willy Wagtail maintains his territory day and night. “Sweet pretty little creature” he calls…..Sometimes one wakes to strange cackling laughter. A Spotted Nightjar that did not catch enough insects at dusk is on the wing again, hawking….. Each season has its own
alarm. In winter the cling clang of Pied Currawongs wakes us us fittingly after the sun is well up and the frost has begun to melt…..In autumn when the sunflowers are ripe, two thousand galahs awaken us. They come in rolling pink and grey clouds as noisy as thunder….. In spring so many birds wake us we have to concentrate to recognise them all. The White-winged Triller makes long rolls of two notes. The Rufous Whistler makes a few musical calls, then cracks like a whip, a good alarm. The little Striated Pardalote beats out its two notes
astonishingly loudly.

More recently Rolls was commissioned by the Sydney Sun-Herald to write regular pieces under the title The Cumberdeen Diaries This too is very good nature writing, but one writer doesn’t make a tradition. The 1990 anthology Gone Bush edited by Roger McDonald does take seriously the diversity and complexity of both nature and literary style in Australia, with writers as different as Elizabeth Jolley and Frank Moorhouse, Les Murray and Helen Garner, Barney Roberts and Bruce Pascoe all contributing stylish pieces. There are also widely different Aboriginal perspectives from Jack Davis and Mudrooroo Nargin; but it is Geoffrey Dutton who wryly shrugs off his environmental cringe in a wonderful evocation of Kangaroo Island.

Here in the bush around the house by the sea the blue wren hops across the emerald moss of an early winter like a chip of summer sky, and the scarlet robin lies flatly, wings extended, in the bird bath, fluffing out his chest, so much more fiery than that of his cousins in the Northern Hemisphere.

We need more writing of this kind. Frankly, most Australians remain woefully ignorant about the web of life around them and better educated about the badger than the bilby. I have a vivid picture of the utter astonishment of a South Australian visitor to Tasmania’s Southwest as an eastern quoll nonchalantly snuffles by in search of food. The woman’s face is a mixture of wonderment and mystification. What is this beautiful creature? She not only has no name for it, she has never imagined that such creatures existed.