Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize 2016

"Our task must be to widen our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." - Albert Einstein

If you love nature, and care enough to put words around that love, why not enter the Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize? The 2016 award offers the winner $A5 000, plus the opportunity of a 2 week writer's residency in a Tasmanian National Park, assistance with airfares, and publication in both Island and Wildtimes Magazines. The award helps to celebrate 100 years of national parks in Tasmania. 

All details and conditions of entry can be found on the Tasmanian Writers Centre website here http://www.taswriters.org/natureprize/ Entries close on May 29th 2016. Happy writing!

2013 Wildcare Nature Writing Prize Winners

The winners of the 2013 Wildcare Tasmania International Nature Writing Prize were announced on March 23 at The Lark as part of the Tasmanian Writers’ Festival.

The overall winner is:

Tanya Massy of Brunswick West, Victoria, for her piece entitled 'The Tree'.

The judges said of Tanya’s work:

This is an essay about how we know the world, and how we learn to care enough to make change. The author addresses the important subject of climate change, arguing that facts and scientific knowledge aren’t enough – that ‘heart’ knowing is equally, if not more, important. The writing is thought-provoking, tender and impassioned, displaying subtlety, humour, deep philosophical insights and deft changes of pace. The central metaphor of a child as a ‘blue-eyed laughing tree’ reminds us of other ways of thinking and being in the world that are vital if we are to survive.

Congratulations to Tanya, who receives $5 000, plus return airfares to Tasmania, a two week residency in a Tasmanian national park, and publication of her essay in both Island and Wildtimes. Tanya wasn’t able to attend the presentation, but is very much looking forward to coming to Tasmania for her wilderness writer’s residency later in 2013.

[Tasmania's Gordon River] 

There are two minor awards. Each of these writers receives $250, and publication in Wildtimes and possibly Island magazine. They are:

Bruce Pascoe of Gipsy Point, Victoria, for 'Birthmark', and

John Bennett of Valla Beach, NSW, for 'How to Begin'.

Of Bruce Pascoe’s piece, ‘Birthmark’, the judges said:

This elegant and at times breathtaking writing responds to ‘a country that has always dreamed itself as one canvas’. Images of desert landscape seen from the air, both physically and astrally, are juxtaposed with insights into Aboriginal dreaming, and responses to particular paintings by Aboriginal artists. The author positions as an observer, a collector of images, insight and meaning. The writing presents a strong message without being didactic. Instead it offers stepping stones of ideas – the essay as dot painting.

Of John Bennett’s piece, ‘How to Begin?’, the judges said:

The title of the essay provides springboard to a reflection on mindfulness: how to begin a new year and new appreciation of this world with a precarious future? The journal form is strung together with quotations from other authors who wrote on parallel dates. The stream of consciousness writing style allows latitude for an erudite, provocative wander through ideas and environments, both intimate and broad-scale. The outcome proves the author’s claim that journal writing ‘becomes an exercise in interesting oneself’.

There are also two commended entries. They are:

Danae Bosler of Richmond, Victoria, for ‘Shack’, and

Noelene J. Kelly of Flemington, Victoria, for 'Geomorphology'.

Of Danae Bosler’s piece the judges said:

This deeply moving rite of passage story is about how we know the world as children and how that shifts as we grow older. Intimate observations are expressed with simplicity and exquisite clarity. The author shares with the reader an intrinsic awareness of nature and natural processes on a remote bush farm. ’Shack’ offers tightly crafted writing about what we lose and what we hold on to – how life changes and transforms. 

Of Noelene Kelly’s work they said:

Survival and decay in the physical world becomes an analogy for human physicality and fragility in this accomplished essay. The strong and evocative writing invokes a vivid sense of place, both in Australia’s Alpine regions and in the domestic context. The author skilfully and effortlessly interweaves connections between human experience and geological time.  The result is authoritative, controlled, intellectual and objective, and at the same time tender, often lyrical.

Many thanks to our judges, Adrienne Eberhard and Dael Alison, whose thoughtful and insightful reading of the entries is hugely appreciated. Special thanks also to our major sponsor, Wildcare Tasmania, who have been with the prize since its inception, ten years ago. 

Thanks too to our other sponsors and helpers, including Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service, The Freycinet Experience Walk, The Tasmanian Writers’ Centre, In Graphic Detail, and Island Magazine.

And finally thanks to all of those writers who cared enough about their relationship to nature to enter the prize. As I said on the night:

One small remedy to the overwhelming issues that face our world is to bear witness to the places we share with other life forms. This is one of the reasons for nature writing. Lest we forget where we belong.

Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize 2013

$5000 and a residency near here? Start writing! 

It's the 10th anniversary of the Wildcare Tasmania International Nature Writing Prize. The prize wobbled to its feet in late 2002, with the shy hope that it might encourage a few more writers to think and write about their connection to the natural world. Five winners and hundreds of entries later, we're amazed to see that hope being fed by a strong and growing interest in place and nature writing all around the world. And we're pleased to see Tasmania recognised as a natural hub for such writing.

We've certainly made it worthwhile. The winner receives $A5000, plus airfares, a residency in Tasmania, and publication in ISLAND. That's a wonderful prize in any writing genre!  But what is nature writing? For the purposes of this Prize, we've defined it 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."

We hope we'll be flooded with entries between now and January 31st, the closing date. But most of all we hope people all over the world start to put their attachment to the natural world into words. Please click on the link below. All the best!

Further info here

Wildcare Prize Winners

Announcing the winners of:

The 2011 Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize

The prize's orange-bellied parrot logo was designed by Bradley Trevor Greive

The 2011 Prize attracted entries from writers all over Australia, and as far afield as Newfoundland, Canada. The Prize winners were announced in April during “10 Days on the Island ”. The free event was held at the Upstairs Function Room, Republic Bar (cnr Elizabeth and Burnett Sts, Hobart), and hosted by the Tasmanian Writers Centre.

The 2011 winner is:

Peter Shepherd (Upper Brogo, NSW) for his essay “In the Land of Nod”. Peter receives $5 000 plus return airfares to Hobart and a two week residency in a Tasmanian national park.

The minor awards were shared by:

Amanda Curtain (Bassendean, WA) for “On the Uses of the Dead to the Living”

AND

Elizabeth Bryer (Yarravile, Vic) for “Of Stars and a Lake”. They each receive $250.

Congratulations to all of the winners, and thanks to all authors who submitted works. 

Peter Shepherd was unable to attend the presentation, but forwarded this acceptance speech to me:

________________________________________

The Wildcare Nature Writing Prize has been, for some years, both my inspiration and my big stick. It has led me, each time I have entered (third time lucky, hey?), to a new level in my writing. What drives me is respect: for the existence of the prize, for the standard, and for its aim of drawing attention to what nature writing can offer.

I believe it can offer a lot. No, actually, I believe it can offer the world. Through the practice and teaching of nature writing I've discovered the importance of intimacy in this way of communicating with the world; of grace and courage and all those things that make good writing a yearning toward something fundamental and large; a search that drives every human heart.

Nature writing, I believe, is our best hope for a language of connection.

And that is because the connections it offers are those beyond the fences of industrial culture. Nature writing opens a space to listen to the larger spaces in which we are woven: skies, mountains, oceans, history and future, and the land itself. It suggests the possibility of listening in ways not just brain-based, but to the spiritual poetry of wonder.

Without losing the critical importance of the everyday poetry - children, laughter, this single rock, the colour and miracle of this particular fungus. The human commons. The earthly commons. Seeing neighbours despite how many legs they have or which end of their body they breathe out of.

And sharing the story of it.

Whatever you want to call it - nature writing, earthspeaking, or just plain writing or sharing - here is a call, as I see it, to reclaim our wild human heritage, to fling heartfelt poetic truths into the world around us in shapes and connections that the shallow plastic of industry-speak simply can't stand against. Without root and blood how could it? Without breath and a proffered paw, wing, hand and chirruping, sky-scaling song, what chance does it stand?

None, despite the sheer volume and effort of it. None, because it cannot stand eye to eye and heart to heart with one other and say, "I see you. I hear you. And I care."

Nature writing can. And, through rebellious spirits everywhere, will continue to deepen and expand, and reconnect with a song and language that has never been lost, but has merely been waiting for us to come home again.

I want to thank fellow conspirators: Island Magazine, Wildcare and Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife, the Tasmanian Writers Centre, all the poets and writers and dreamers and hopers and passion painters who have entered, and continue to enter, this award. And Peter Grant, whose persistence, work and vision makes it possible, beard and all. And my partner, now my fiancé, Jurnee, who holds a deep standard or writing and being that, it seems, the earth itself holds in respect. And our kids - Darcy, Teia and Niamh - who, by their simple existence, remind us of what is ultimately important. 

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. 

Nature Writing Prize

It's time to get that writing out of your bottom drawer, especially if it's related to nature. Here's why: 


$5 000 in cash, plus airfares to Tasmania, and a two week writer's residency in one of Tassie's wilderness national parks!


That's the prize for the winner of the Wildcare Tasmania International Nature Writing Prize. Please spread the word to any writers or would-be writers you know. Details are in this flyer:

Mere Words: Can Nature Writing Make a Difference?

[Photo: Buttongrass showing off its "mad metronome" stalks]

[The award speech for the 2009 Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize - adapted from a presentation given at the Wildcare Conference.]

I want you to come with me over the back of our mountain. With strong wings we can be in the far south-west in maybe 30 minutes. Once there we find a tweedy buttongrass moorland sprouting from the sodden ground all around us.

It is blustery, and the top-heavy buttongrass stalks wobble like mad metronomes to the wind’s wild music. As we walk we see that this tawny buttongrass carpets every valley out here. It laps up against the odd crag, smothers all more rounded eminences, and relents a little only in the creases and crevices. There it shares some space with scrubbier, woodier species, conceding a few contrasting greener swatches.

Extracting our boots out of yet another coffee-coloured bog, we are startled by a sudden rush of wings. A brownish/greenish blur arcs across the track, at a low trajectory, and settles deep into the buttongrass some 20 metres ahead. We walk towards it, but each time we approach, it repeats its ground-hugging aerobatics, doing so for well over a kilometre. In all that time, despite having a good bead on the whereabouts of the bird, we never actually spot it on the ground before it takes flight.

What we are following is, of course, a ground parrot (Pezoporus wallicus). It’s one of only three ground-dwelling parrots in the world, and is the species we have come here to see, and to help protect. Our team is an alliance of can-do, hands-on types, including rangers, scientists, land managers and people from potential funding and support bodies.

While the ground parrot is not an endangered species, it is rare, being found only in a few isolated places around the Australian coast. The heedless tread of human feet is one of its major threats. So, ironically, we’re walking here to see what can be done to protect a bird from people walking here.

Earlier advice has recommended that a boardwalk of parallel planking will help keep walkers on track and away from the ground-nesting birds. Our group agrees that this looks like a good project proposal, and funding is likely to result.

But let’s pause the scenario at this point. I want you to notice two things. One is that a worthy and practical conservation proposal is about to be funded – in an ideal world at least. Once the money is given, the professionals will get busy, and the volunteers will add their considerable weight to the cause, via bird observation, field assistance, administrative help and so forth.

But the other thing to notice is that a story is being shared about a place and a species that someone cares about. And the story involves putting into words, perhaps for the first time, something of how some of us really feel about a creature and its place. That is what nature writing is about: carefully and lovingly putting into words some of our connections with nature, whether in the wilds or in the cities and towns in which most of us live. It sounds straightforward, but in this country it is as rare as Pezoporus wallicus.

And that is part of the story behind this prize. The Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize is seeking to make words about nature a more central – dare I say more natural – part of our writing. It is about prompting us to find words – considered and caring words – about a natural world that gently insists we ignore or mistreat it at our peril. And it’s also about seeing Tasmania, this little island where wilderness is literally just over the mountain, as an eminently suitable place for a word-led resurgence of such thinking.

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.

Words That Paint Pictures

[Essay introducing the Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize 2009. Published in Island #118]


What if life really did imitate art? What if each of us was to throw a painter’s canvas over the place we lived? What expression of our place, our life in that place, would fill that canvas? Would it be only the universals of modern urban life: the concrete and cars; plasma screens and iPods; mobile phones and plush furnishings that are found anywhere human prosperity has reached? Would our canvas not also contain the colours of the earth beneath our feet; the dark fleeting dash of the wild creatures we share our place with; and the variegated textures of the plants that respond to the particular seasons and soils of our particular place? Wouldn’t we want to record the sudden colour splash and sound of the birds that flit and flutter through our bushes; or the whisper, whoosh and wash of the particular weather that is present only here?

The Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize was conceived in 2002 to provide an outlet for the very particular and concrete thoughts and feelings writers have about the natural world. Not just any natural world, but the particular part of the world they have thought on, interacted with and cared enough about to express in words.

Since the first biennial prize in 2003, around three hundred individuals have entered the Wildcare prize; nearly half of that number in the 2009 event. The prize has tapped into a feeling that seems to be abroad in our land: the feeling that here, in the early years of the 21st century, we Australians are finally ready to write our places into a new kind of existence. We seem eager to record in words the feelings and thoughts about being in this land that have only slowly come to the surface. It now appears important for us to read our landscape; to know our place; and to celebrate the particularity of where we live.

It’s not that disgruntlement with our leaders or perceptions of threat – the traditional motivators of environmentally-slanted writing – have gone away. Clearly the mainstream 'success' of environment as an issue, and the plethora of spin about 'clean and green', haven’t assuaged the concerns of writers. But something else is happening that is both beneath and beyond the world of headlines and politics. At last place is about more than postcodes, real estate values and the cache of locality names.

My own place is near the base of a collapsed layer cake, geologically speaking at least. It’s a cake that was baked over some 280 million years out of whatever ingredients fell to hand. Right where I sit the available element was mud; just above here it was sand, and top-most it was magma – three hundred metres of it – injected up through layers of previously ‘cooked’ sediment. Not a conventional way to ice a cake, nor a standard thickness. But whoever designed Tasmania had an inordinate fondness for dolerite.

The collapse of the cake has been barely noticeable on a human time scale. Nonetheless it has crumbled, and will continue to do so. A large scoop of cake was taken out of the mountain’s side just above here by ice as recently as ten thousand years ago. The tell-tale swale is an unmistakeable signature of ice. Vertical scars through the forest show the tracks of more recent major rock falls. Occasionally crumbs still fall from the mountain’s table, with dolerite boulders turning up even here in suburban Hobart.

To keep reading my place, I must augment the geological timescale with the much shorter-spanned biological ones. I learn that when the Permian mudstone was just ooze being washed into the Tasmania Basin, there were no flowering plants. Conifers, cycads, algae, lichens and mosses impeded the erosive running water, with bits of plants joining the shells in becoming fossils. It wasn’t until that basin had been filled, buried, hardened, and lifted back to an altogether unrecognisable surface that the rock saw its first flowering plants.

Over aeons wave upon wave of varied vegetation adjusted to the different climates, latitudes and altitudes that this mudstone has seen. Until today the shallow, impoverished regolith and soil that it produces, brings forth not the spectacular rainforests than can grow on richer soils in this climate, but instead a gnarled and humble woodland of silver peppermint, Eucalyptus tenuiramis. A spacious, easily traversed forest with crackling, straggly undergrowth, so quintessentially Australian that I half expect to find a Roberts or McCubbin character propped against a trunk, billy boiling, handing me a cuppa.

Above us Tasmania’s green rosellas might be feeding on seeds, chuckling and sweetly tinkling, reminding me why I always think of them as bell parrots. If disturbed their relaxed calling would be replaced by their more excited flight/fright call 'cussick cussick'. Are they perturbed by clinking currawongs flying low through the trees? In this stealth mode, currawongs are more intent on finding prey than drawing attention to their presence. By contrast when our apple crop is near to ripe there is no such silence. Their loud ringing calls spread the news to the whole flock.

Such are a few tiny daytime fragments I might read in my local bush. But if I’m tempted to think I’ve gained a degree of familiarity, night-time confounds me. After dark this bushland takes on a wholly foreign character. Were I adept at reading with my nose, as my dog certainly is, I could more readily comprehend the pages of this crepuscular life. Instead I’m left to look at the tracks and traces it leaves behind. Potoroo and pademelon runways; bandicoot diggings; scats, frass, fur and feathers: clues to a twilit life. They remind me how close to bio-illiterate I am, despite nearly a quarter of a century of living in and looking at the one piece of bush.

All of this may explain why nature writing is a hard-won form. Yes, any good writer should be able to write about the natural world. But to do it successfully, to do it in a way that rings true, requires the same kind of observational commitment that writers put into character, plot or sentence structure.

This year’s prize-winning pieces illustrate well the benefits of such toil. Whether describing human efforts to restore what once was, nature’s gentle irruptions into tangled urban lives, or the perils faced by all life forms, the felicity of the writing cloaks the observational labour involved. How encouraging that so many are so effectively taking on this labour of love.