Island Home Page 5

  In the morning the sheet is grafted to my hairy legs and my fingers are webbed. I get the sense the wolf herring has had the last laugh.

  I walk the flats at low tide. The first rays of sun sting my bare back. The outfalling sea has left a vast, ribbed field of sandy pools and rivulets like an abandoned kingdom. But up close the thin strips of water are busy with crabs and fingerlings, spider stars, bivalves. I stalk from one silvery fractal to the next between the wallows of skippers, the sandballs of ghost crabs and the mud-poots of worms. It’s a long, bare stretch of beach and it looks lifeless but the whole place pops and sighs and rattles. Everywhere there’s evidence of life, seen and unseen. I forget the indignity of the wolf herring. The morning feels like a gift.

  I really should hit the road – there’s another long day of driving ahead – but the sea at the horizon is milky blue and the puddles are warm. I meander on without a soul in sight.

  At a rocky pool I catch a flicker of movement and spy a blenny wriggling about feverishly, searching for a crack or a bit of loose sand for cover. I stand quite still but whatever I do the goofy little critter charges around in a panic.

  Then I see the bright shell at the far end of the pool. It’s like a half-buried cowrie, brilliant with splashes of purple and yellow-brown and blue, and in this tawny sandscape the colours are extravagant; it looks ravishing. As I stoop to reach for it all the colours swim before me; they seem to reconstitute themselves and the blue dots become livid, engorged. The effect causes me to hesitate, disoriented. My hand hovers above the water. And then my brain catches up. Those swirling blue rings, the sudden swelling mass. That’s not a shell – it’s a blue-ringed octopus. The tiny creature’s main weapon is a neurotoxin twelve hundred times stronger than cyanide. Pick that up and I’d be dead before I reached the vehicle.

  I straighten with a start. I don’t even pause to rescue the blenny. I abandon him to his fate.

  The corner of the eye

  I was always curious. As a kid I was a lurker and an eavesdropper. Sometimes I’d poke at things with sticks to see what they did – anemones, skinks, roadkill. But mostly I was content to watch.

  Like any kid I was told not to stare. But I stared all the time – and at the oddest things. I found if you gazed hard enough at a handful of sand the individual grains became enormous; you could see cavernous spaces between them. There was so much air between particles you were surprised dirt weighed anything at all, and when you tipped it free the hiss it made as it fell to earth was like the sound of all that air escaping. When you looked at things long enough your gaze seemed to alter what you were looking at. It felt like a quirk of optics, a sleepy trick.

  But young or old, stare as we might, much of what we learn about the objects of our attention in the natural world seems to come from out of the corner of the eye. When you’re not trying to dig a place up with your eyes, a feeling for what’s present will creep up on you, seep into vision and consciousness. Sometimes seeing is about duration and experience. This is the hard lesson newcomers have had to learn here on this continent. When Dutch mariners began making landfall in the early seventeenth century they were confounded by what they saw. Almost two centuries later the French and English similarly viewed the enigmatic southland through the lens of their own hemisphere. And they were appalled. Terra australis didn’t correspond to what they expected or understood; it wasn’t simply that they were baffled by the land and its indigenes – what they saw offended them. It seemed deranged and perverse. To the English buccaneer William Dampier, who visited the north-west coast in 1688 and 1699, the new land was a kingdom of sand and flies. True, he’d landed in a particularly tough bit of country around Shark Bay, but his disgust obscured and distorted what and who stood before him. And for Dampier the flies became an obsession. As he saw it the indigenes were ‘the most miserable wretches in the universe’, and the root cause of their apparently degraded state was the tyranny of flies, because ‘from their infancy being thus annoyed with these insects, they do never open their eyes as other people: and thus they cannot see far’. The irony of this misperception is bittersweet, but in the annals of exploration it’s hardly an exception. Europeans came to these shores fired by a spirit of adventure and acquisitive curiosity and they often left sorely disheartened. The intensity of their revulsion and dismay lingers in place names all over Australia, and there’s no shortage of examples here in the west – Useless Loop and Lake Disappointment, just for starters.

  But the expeditioners’ reports weren’t always so downbeat. Later champions of empire saw what was expedient; they were eager to please their betters back home. And some, like James Stirling, found ways of seeing that neatly aligned imperial imperatives with their own ambitions. Before Stirling had even visited the Swan River region, which he did in 1827, he was sold on it. He had a picture in his mind already. The French maps he’d studied convinced him it was the perfect spot for a strategic colonial outpost and when he finally laid eyes on the place his enthusiasm was undimmed. To the nabobs at home he praised it in terms lavish enough to cause a modern local to blush. Perhaps he really did see the region this way. For somehow he saw things the French navigator Jules Dumont d’Urville hadn’t. In fact he saw virtues he needed to see, things that simply weren’t there. The excellent anchorages, plentiful water, fertile soils and teeming game of his reports were fabrications that cost many unsuspecting settlers their fortunes and their lives. And thus was born a grand West Australian tradition. Land scams, sharp practice and large-scale fraud have been distinguishing features of the state’s history ever since. The twin tendencies so integral to the settlement of the Swan River region, the ability to see what is plainly not there and a studious failure to notice what is, are deeply ingrained in local culture and politics.

  Nineteenth-century explorers locked the land into the grids of their imperial maps. Creatures of their time, they ignored features or beings superfluous to their vision. Many were geographers and naturalists, men of the Enlightenment, trained to observe and record, but there was a lot of the continent they simply could not see for looking and this problem persisted well into the next century. Travelling in Australia between the wars, and living for a time in the hills east of Perth, D. H. Lawrence struggled doggedly to see past the limits of his cultural understanding. He was an exceptionally sensitive observer, but when he tried to apprehend the mysterious bush it evaded and confounded him. ‘You feel you can’t see,’ he wrote in Kangaroo, ‘as if your eyes hadn’t the vision in them to correspond with the outside landscape.’4

  Eventually – and very slowly – experience gave newcomers and their native-born children fresh means of seeing and reading landforms. The extent to which Aborigines shared lore and traded information is often overlooked, as is the curiosity and openness they frequently displayed in early encounters. Many acts of kindness spared the lives of shipwrecked Europeans. In 1875 survivors of the Stefano, which foundered on the coral shoals of Ningaloo Reef, were aided and protected by a band of Aborigines. After four months of patient guidance and steady walking through some of the harshest country imaginable, the last of them, Michael Baccic and Ivan Juric, were calmly delivered to the cutter Jessy, anchored in the lee of the North West Cape.

  Much earlier than this the diplomacy, curiosity and fellow-feeling of clans and individuals along the south coast prevented the deaths of many English settlers and soldiers, even securing the survival of whole settlements, and there’s no better example of this than the Minang warrior of the Noongar people, Mokare, who distinguished himself at King George’s Sound, the military encampment that eventually became Albany. He was a man of rare wit, adaptability and generosity who did what he could to draw the clumsy invaders into a relationship of mutual respect, earning the affection of influential colonists who recognized his largeness of spirit and relied upon him. A teacher as much as a guide, he was a visionary in his way, pivotal in creating and maintaining the amity and co-operative spirit of the so-called ‘friendly front
ier’ at a time when successive commandants of the garrison afforded native custom and hunting grounds the sort of respect that was hardly typical in the colonial era. Mokare formed abiding relationships with newcomers, especially those like resident magistrate Alexander Collie whose curiosity and openness was almost a match for that of the Noongar statesman. Mokare died in 1831. Four years later the magistrate was buried beside his friend, as he’d requested.

  But Mokare’s dream of ongoing reciprocity between Aborigines and settlers died with him. In Albany the wisdom of indigenes was soon disregarded, and as the settlers consolidated their position their attitudes hardened. Useful and even vital advice offered them was either ignored, ridiculed or taken for granted. In a land where climatic and seasonal conditions were radically different to those of the Northern Hemisphere such information could be critically important to the newcomers’ survival. In those all too rare instances when the interlopers actually understood the value of Aboriginal counsel, which after all drew upon the research and development of countless generations, they gave nothing in return. Just as they’d come to seize land and game and access by main force, they grabbed information without a thought for notions of exchange, establishing a sorry pattern of ignorance and contempt that endured well into the next century, to the great and lasting cost of millions of Australians, black and white.

  All over the continent in the nineteenth century, as colonists began to attain a familiarity that wasn’t quite commensurate with their territorial gains, disdain for the first peoples and a suspicion of the ‘fickleness’ and ‘treachery’ of the new lands created a sort of siege mentality. Relations with indigenes became increasingly high-handed and martial, and even where clans were routed and ‘dispersed’ by massacres, the rather wild-eyed, aggro-defensive mindset endured. For the bulk of our history since 1788 Australians’ attitude to the land has been almost exclusively warlike. Every goldrush was a pillaging skirmish, a raid for booty, and for most miners the engagement was brief, brutal and fruitless. In the wake of each frenzied campaign the land lay gouged and despoiled for decades, even centuries, and few retreating combatants ever spared the places they’d ruined another thought. And while it’s fair to say generations of farming and grazing produced a closer feeling to country, even an intimacy of sorts, agriculturalists have engaged in a long action of subjugation from which they are yet to fully relent. The love they claim to have for the land is sometimes more a reflection of the work they and their families have invested in it, and when they declare that love, often what they really mean is they’re wedded to the lifestyle. And we don’t talk about it much, but there is another kind of fellow feeling – the tender spot we have for the vanquished opponent. There’s nothing like the sentimental soft focus we grant someone or something that’s no longer a threat. Still, I think attitudes really have changed, and the emotions many farmers express when talking about country are deeper, more intense and far less martial than those of their forebears.

  I guess we learn to love by experience. Despite it, too. True, some fondness is bought, especially on the frontier. Many fortunes were quickly made in the nineteenth century, in wool, wheat and gold. A century later people got rich from property speculation and iron ore – and what’s not to love about a place that makes you quickly and unthinkably rich? Most folk, though, have had to come to a more gradual accommodation with their environs. As migrants they only liked what they knew, but over time Australia was what they knew, and for their children it was all they knew. However else it was viewed in the Old World, they’d come to think of this country as theirs. And eventually, in the 1940s when a Japanese invasion seemed imminent, they were forced to defend it as their home. Until that point, only the continent’s first peoples had ever truly fought for their country.

  For all these disparate and largely incidental reasons, our attitude to the landscape and the species it supports has changed. The fragility of ecosystems and the consequences of the old frontier ethic have impressed themselves upon scientists and farmers alike, and land is slowly beginning to be used more sensitively. Land-clearing practices are much more strictly monitored and even the most rapacious of miners are required to address the non-monetized values of the country they want to dig, and submit to the regime of environmental assessment they complain of as ‘green tape’.

  The gradual transformation from a combative to a more cordial inclination has not just been a matter of attrition. A lot of it is the fruit of inspiration. All through Australia’s brief modern history, before the compounding experience of generations helped wear people into different shapes and rendered them open to country in ways that were alien to their ancestors, there were always outriders and eccentrics who saw beyond the bounds of their European inheritance. Some newcomers responded immediately and instinctively to Australia. They approached its unutterable strangeness with curiosity and delight. Every Australian community and era had its share of amateur botanists, its Sunday painters, moony middle sons and lonely wives for whom the ranges, gullies, saltpans and forests need be no more useful than music, no more in want of mastery than birdsong. From colonial times to the digital age there have been poets, songsters and nature mystics, bushwalkers, birdwatchers and enlightened farmers for whom the land is first and foremost a source of wonder. Many of them had the good fortune to meet and learn from Aborigines whose pride in the wisdom of their own cultures and whose reverence for country endured. With the aid of this counsel and their own experience, native-born Australians without indigenous heritage came to the realization that the natural world – even this peculiarly misunderstood tranche of it – has intrinsic value. But theirs has been the dissenting tradition; these were our conscientious objectors to the war on nature. In my own lifetime this cryptic cultural thread has emerged into the open to become a social movement. But when I was a kid such thinking was novel indeed.

  My first exposure to a more considered view of nature was probably through Vincent Serventy (1916–2007). The youngest of eight children to Croatian immigrants and brother to the eminent ornithologist Dominic Serventy, he wrote or co-wrote more than seventy books. Growing up in the hills overlooking Perth and ‘running wild through the bush like a brumby’, as he put it, he became a teacher and filmmaker and was far and away the most prominent naturalist and conservation campaigner of his time. His environmental outlook was prophetic and his passion for communicating it to a lay audience was indefatigable. Many years before the appearance of Harry Butler, who was a former student, and the ‘crocodile hunter’ Steve Irwin, who was an unconscious but very successful imitator, Serventy was there, giving public lectures, making documentaries, using the new medium of television to expose natural history to ordinary punters. Few Australians ever did more to excite and educate their countrymen about their environment. His 1966 Nature Walkabout was our first homegrown TV nature show and I wasn’t the only Australian to be mesmerized by the excursions he led into the remote interior. He often took artists along to immerse them in wild landscapes and the fruits of his evangelizing impulse are plain to see in the sketches and paintings of Frank Hodgkinson, Tim Storrier and especially John Olsen, who continued to paint Lake Eyre obsessively and reverentially for decades after Serventy took him to see it in flood in the 1970s.

  Lake Eyre, or Kati Thanda, is fifteen metres below sea level, the continent’s lowest point. When I was a kid it was only notable as a racetrack, the proving ground of Donald Campbell’s pursuit of the land speed record in his gas-powered Bluebird. To the untrained observer it’s little more than a vast saltpan, but on the rare occasions it fills, when the rivers of three states literally run ‘backwards’, it reveals its hidden life in an efflorescence so remarkable as to be regularly described as miraculous. For a few months it becomes one of the largest lakes in the world. Millions of bony herring and golden perch seem to erupt from the desert sands and billions of birds descend upon it from all over the world. Having seen the desert transformed in 1974 Olsen came to think of landscape ‘as a nervo
us system’, as if he’d gotten past surfaces and gone deeper. He never quite shook this place and these events off. Previously steeped in European ways of seeing, Olsen was one of the first non-indigenous painters to sense in this country an organic whole, a web of interdependent relationships, and Vin Serventy deserves some credit for that.

  Years before the Lake Eyre expedition, Serventy took Perth’s most famous son, Rolf Harris, on a ‘safari’ from Darwin into the red centre to make a TV series called Rolf’s Walkabout. It was an early example of a filmmaker using a celebrity to reach a popular audience. With its canny mix of outback adventure and nature documentary, the show followed the meandering progress of the Harris and Serventy families as they juddered down red dirt tracks, camped in creekbeds and came upon all manner of creatures and landscapes, and though very much a product of its time, with the popular entertainer always front and centre, it was shaped by Serventy’s pedagogical imperative, and it introduced many suburban Australians like myself to the wonders and fragility of the ecology of our homeland. I was entranced by every episode. The families featured were famous, but the Harris and Serventy kids were about my age; I could instantly see myself in their place, parting reeds to spy on freshwater crocs in billabongs, turning over desert rocks to find thorny devils, chasing goannas through the spinifex. In 1971, when Carol Serventy and Alwen Harris published a spin-off in the wake of the show, Mum gave it to me for Christmas and I treasured that book above all others. In retrospect it’s a gauche production, particularly in its desultory and picturesque portrayal of Aboriginal lives and cultures, but what most affected me at the age of eleven was that the ecology, usually relegated to mere backdrop in Australian stories and TV shows, was suddenly the focus – vast flocks of wild budgerigars, eerie fields of termite mounds, wetlands and savannahs teeming with life. Instead of stuff to look past to the story at hand, these things were the story at hand. Thanks to Rolf’s Walkabout I learnt about quolls, plumed pigeons, jabirus and pandanus palms. It was my first exposure to Aboriginal cave painting. More than a tantalizing entrée into the remote interior, it quickened my interest in the plants and creatures closer to home and in a real sense it taught me to pay attention, to see beyond the initial glance. The book and TV series were influential in other ways, too, because when I was a kid the accepted wisdom was that nothing of significance came out of Perth or Western Australia. Of course in those days the old cultural cringe held sway for many Australians, but in the west we had our own thing going, a continental cringe that was especially crippling and self-defeating, so as a boy it was unutterably exciting to see people from my hometown on television and in the printed pages of a book. There they were, people from Bassendean, Bickley, Subiaco embarking on intrepid adventures, witnessing marvels of nature that were the envy of the world.