Aspectos conceptuales de los procesos de auditoría interna reportados en la literatura

“It is too hard to say something different, to tell a new story” (DRG 133)

The previous chapter explored emerging ecological dialogue, within mainly conventional Gothic representations of Tasmanian wilderness in film. In this chapter I examine cultural symbolism, specifically associated with rivers and forests, through Flanagan’s hybridised aesthetic representations of the Franklin River World Heritage Region. Flanagan combines Romantic and Australian Indigenous perceptions in River Guide to enhance “agential kinships,” a term used in the context of material ecocriticism (Iovino and Oppermann 79). The category of agency is extended beyond the realm of the human to “demonstrate the kinship between out- side and in-side, the mind and the world, embracing life, language, mind and sensorial perception in a non-dualistic perspective” (Iovino and Oppermann 79). I use the term “hybridised” to include cultural blends as well as to refer to the entanglement of human and nonhuman subjects. “Literal reference” can be complemented by “literary artifice” to reveal a dynamic and complex interrelationship of shared materiality between nature and culture (Garrard Ecocriticism 11). In accord with material ecocriticism the idea of “text” is extended beyond “human material-discursive constructions [to encompass] nonhuman things; water, soil, stones, metals, minerals, bacteria, toxins” for examples (Iovino and Oppermann 83). Ultimately, by analysing the entanglement of symbolism and materiality, I explore how tropes of the rivers and rainforests of the South West Tasmania relate to global ecological consciousness.

In River Guide Flanagan avoids some previously dominant patterns of Western

representation present in discourse and literature about Tasmania. Rather than perpetuating the privileged white male perspective which regarded forests and rivers primarily for their profitable extractive potential or recreational opportunities, Flanagan offers a cross section of

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points-of-view through characterisation and narration. The significant characters in River

Guide range in class, race, gender and age and offer alternative perceptions from previously

dominant voices. In addition, the narratives operate in different timeframes, and through the genres of realism and magic realism. As Laura A. White notes, “Flanagan recognises the experience of relationality between human and nonhuman nature” (274), and the result is that many previously ignored voices from the river communities, including the voice of the river itself, are heard.

River and rainforest, the two topographical features which dominate Flanagan’s representation, have each attracted a cluster of symbolic meanings. Literary tropes of rivers and rainforest that express agency, intrinsic significance, primordial kinship and exploitation of the Franklin River region frame my analysis. They also serve Flanagan beyond the needs of material and lyrical description of the land. His human characters are partially constructed through their particular relationships with the wilderness—sometimes as controllers of the land, as dependent upon it (both anthropocentric perspectives) or as interdependent (a position allied to ecocentrism and also Indigeneity).

In River Guide Flanagan reveals cases of disparity and complement between cultural

symbolism of the Franklin River area and its actual ecological conditions. Many of these examples, both historical, current and represented in River Guide, resonate beyond local or even national ecocritical interests because of the unique topographical features inherent in the Tasmanian wilderness. For example, “the rainforest dominants and many of the understorey species are members of the Antarctic (or relict) element of Australia’s flora” and thus provide another dimension for imaginative and ecological reference (S.J. Smith and Banks 81). While Tasmania’s eco-systems are unique, for European and Northern American sensibilities (particularly but not exclusively) the mountains, cool forests, lakes, moorland and alpine climate frequently elicit a “strangely familiar” illusion of early settlers’ and many

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contemporary migrants’ homelands. Romantic representations have historically enhanced this recognition but this is not to deny actual physical similarities in topography and weather. Flanagan’s evocative descriptions, originating from ecological insights and local deforestation and extinctions, capture the sensory and lyrical qualities of Tasmania’s cool temperate rainforest which, in turn, may stimulate similar sensory and affective experiences in international readers.

Through Flanagan’s representation of the river and rainforest, which is embedded in a long history of both Western and Indigenous cultures, I examine the type of wilderness he portrays in River Guide and consider its effectiveness in terms of environmental advocacy. In accord with Clark I argue that “nature can always be read as a cultural/political construction” but ultimately “culture always depends on and is encompassed by actual nature which requires recognition” (94). Tasmania’s topographical hybridity or “double aspect,” facilitates a point of connective identity which extends beyond nationalist interests to global audiences. In River

Guide a “double vision,” in terms of representation, is captured on the one hand by Flanagan’s

depiction of voyeuristic tourists or consumerism and exploitation generally, and on the other hand by a Romanticised Indigenous shared materiality and spirituality. Occasional Gothic conventions evoking menace and horror are adopted but generally the narrative is underpinned by a Romantic expression of a primordial sense of material and spiritual kinship. Moments of magic realism re-animate the wilderness and transform it into an enchanted refuge but they also create a means to reveal its own agency and ecological vitality.

Historical Context for the Franklin River region

More than the body of water which flows down its gorge the Franklin River is a network of topographical and cultural features which form part of The Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage region. Rock-strewn gorges carved by erosion confine much of the river, but it is a

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protean force which defies absolute borders. Seasonal changes to sections of its banks and vegetation can erode or obscure familiar landmarks and thus evoke a sense of mutable boundaries for returning tour guides and visitors rafting the river. The Franklin River region includes the communities of Strahan and Queenstown. These towns form “subsidiaries” or “branches” of the Franklin River in the sense that the economic and cultural lives of their human populations have been dependent upon or supplemented by the river.

Flanagan’s representation of the Franklin River as an autonomous and dynamic entity establishes it as a nonhuman “character” in its own right. As context for interpreting Flanagan’s fictional portrayal of the Franklin River region I have created an historical snapshot, initially framed through four human “voices.” The four “voices” I construct are underpinned by historical research, and represent defining Indigenous and non-Indigenous environmental sensibilities towards wilderness in the region. At the outset both ancient and recent history are conveyed through the perspective of a female Aboriginal activist, Alice Hungerford, who was part of the core group of anti-dam protestors in 1982-83. Her account is followed by the perceptions of three white men who represent the dominant Eurocentric environmental discourses of the nineteenth-and twentieth-century communities in Tasmania. George Augustus Robinson represents the time of colonisation, James Backhouse Walker represents the “white recreational explorer” of the mid to late nineteenth century and Robin Gray represents late twentieth century (and some may argue, contemporary) conservative State politics. Each of these four “voices” captures a flavour of their respective times, class, gender and race and together they establish a contextual point-of-departure for the subsequent fictional analysis.

Prior to the Western occupation of the South West region there was an ancient Indigenous presence which had survived the last Ice Age; the South West and Big River nations were still living in the area at the time of colonisation in 1803 (Ryan 37). The rediscovery of

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Kutikina cave in 1977, a significant archaeological site for Aboriginal culture and global history, contributed to the region’s World Heritage listing. The Aboriginal community had a separate movement to protect not only the river but their cultural heritage. “All along the Franklin River, there was a pathway, and it was used for thirty plus thousand years. In fact, the caves that sit along the Franklin River operated as a refuge for Aboriginal groups for about 5000 years during the last ice age, between 20 000 and 15 000 years ago” (Hungerford 20). As Aboriginal activist Alice Hungerford notes, “There are a million acres of buttongrass plains in the South West that Aboriginal people burned on a regular basis. If you know this when you go into the South West, it’s like the Aboriginal people are still there. Certainly their spirit is still there, living in that landscape” (21). It is still not common knowledge amongst the Tasmanian community that buttongrass plains are the product of Indigenous firestick farming and this perpetuates misunderstanding related to regional ecology and Indigenous history and culture.

By 1830 the population of the clans of the South West nation had declined from between 200 and 300 to about sixty (Ryan 160). Most of the Aboriginal resistance movement had surrendered but a few escaped into the bush. George Augustus Robinson was responsible for finding and removing them from the island, by force if necessary. “Convinced that he was capturing the Aborigines for their own good,” (Ryan 214) Robinson’s views are reflected in his journal entry in May 1833:

Patriotism is a distinguishing trait in the aboriginal character, yet for all the love they bear their country the aboriginal settlement will soon become their adopted country and they will find that protection which they cannot find in their own land, not only against the attack of the whites but also against the tribes in hostilities with them. (Robinson qtd. in Ryan 207)

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By 1833 Robinson had “completed his mission of dispossession” and the last two hundred or so full-blood Tasmanian Aborigines were interned at Wybalenna Settlement on Flinders Island (Kleinert 35).

With the threat of the Indigenous population removed white settlement forged ahead in the colony. Communities strategically developed around essential and abundant natural resources attracted prospectors and pastoralists, while the South West wilderness itself began to appeal to artists and recreational hikers. In 1887 a solicitor and historian, James Backhouse Walker, and his hiking party, descended from Tasmania’s West Coast ranges and entered dense myrtle forest on the slopes surrounding the Franklin gorge. Walker’s diary entry described the Franklin River as “a fine stream flowing between thickly wooded banks over a bed of dark boulders” (27). One of his companions concluded that myrtle “scrubs” translate the traveller “in an instant to the cool, shady Romantic forests of Southern or Central Europe” (22). Plates framing the picturesque aspects of the landscape by local artist William Charles Piguenit, (who was part of Walker’s hiking party), accompany Walker’s diary text published posthumously as

Walk to the West. The area, however, was difficult to access and its ecological value and natural

beauty relatively unknown. Many of Walker’s diary entries record the unique vegetation of the area: “a group of the palmlike giant grass tree, Richea pandanifolia, the first we had seen” (27)

and later the endemic and relatively uncommon rainforest tree the huon pine or Lagarostrobus

franklinii which he claimed has “almost a mystical quality in Tasmania” (42). Walker’s diary

encapsulates one of many dominant voices representing the Franklin River from colonisation and into the twenty-first century. A professional white man (educated partly in the North of England) Walker’s “aesthetic” is primarily that of a naturalist providing an objective record of the area. Infused with the spirit of exploration he celebrates the sublime panoramic beauty of the wilderness while simultaneously recording the micro details of its material reality in Latin.

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Almost a century later another professional white man, also a “naturalist” of sorts,28 presented an entirely different perspective on the Franklin River region. Tasmania’s thirty- seventh state premier, The Honorable Robin Gray dismissed the Franklin River as “nothing but a brown ditch, leech-ridden and unattractive to the majority of people” (Crowley 40). Gray led his Liberal government in a campaign to dam the Franklin River for one of the many state hydroelectric power developments. This proposed dam was the catalyst for one of the biggest environmental campaigns in both local and international history.

Tasmanian history is replete with examples of unsustainable extraction industry practices. The century separating Walker and Gray is an interesting period in terms of environmental management, especially with regard to early piners’ and snarers’ relationship with the land and Flanagan includes rainforest pioneers in his narrative. There is also a complex history of socio-political divisions within the communities of Queenstown and Strahan whose populations have developed around mining and forestry industry employment. I outline regional historical practices and events where relevant in my textual analysis (and also in the Introduction and Chapter Six). River Guide includes retrospective and projected scenarios but its main timeframe is the early 1990s. Published in 1994, Flanagan, an environmental activist, would be aware of contemporary wilderness environmental issues including implications of deforestation for global warming.

The material absence yet supernatural or symbolic presence of Aborigines features often in Australian literature. This trope manifests in Flanagan’s text in particular—River

Guide includes part-Aboriginal characters in the narrative present and also spiritual presences

evoked through the changing consciousness of his protagonist Aljaz the river guide. In the

28 _{Robin Gray had a Bachelor of Agricultural Science and served as the Chairman of Botanical}

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context of her discussion of Aboriginal custodianship Hungerford claims that the forest “on the Gordon and Franklin rivers is there because Aboriginal people didn’t burn it” (21).

While centuries of Indigenous land management preserved much of the rainforest around the Franklin River, twentieth-century-community politics also played a significant part. The Tasmanian Wilderness Society (later known as The Wilderness Society), formed in 1976 and was comprised primarily of former United Tasmania Group members and the Southwest Tasmania Action Committee. While both Tasmanian State Labor and Liberal parties wanted a dam development they were divided on its location until eventually the Franklin River was chosen in 1982 (Lohrey 17). This coincided with the nomination of Southwest Tasmania, (which includes the Gordon and Franklin Rivers), for World Heritage Listing and the fight for the Franklin accelerated. Work on the dam had already commenced but on 14th December 1982 “no dams” protestors formed a blockade across the river with a flotilla of small boats which endured for some months. After a Federal election brought a change of party, the new Labor Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, announced he would intervene to prevent the flooding of the Franklin River. In 1983, the local Green Movement, led at the time by high-profile white activist Dr Bob Brown claimed victory. After a sustained international and nation-wide protest, the HEC bulldozers, already working in the forest, were stopped, and the dam proposal finally defeated in the High Court through Federal Government intervention.

Lohrey identifies the Franklin River protest as the central campaign to broaden the TWS profile from “bearded backpackers and vegetarian cranks” into representatives of “a new political sensibility [that] had broken through into the mainstream” (27). They emerged not only as a single issue party, campaigning for wilderness, but also as a group presenting “a comprehensive critique of modern industrial policy and the funding of the Hydro Electric Commission” (26). Greenies “were becoming assimilated into the old utilitarian notion of the greatest good for the greatest number” (Lohrey 27). This change in culture coupled with the

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high profile Franklin River protest and the charismatic Bob Brown culminated in, “according to Brown, the highest Green vote recorded in any general election anywhere in the world” in 2002 (Lohrey 52).29

Current ecocriticism needs “a strategy for opening up the local to the global” in order to emphasise planetary-scale interconnections (Buell, Heise and Thornber 421). Buell, Heise and Thornber suggest “reconceptualising place as a node in a global network” and that this process can “become a point of departure for understanding and emotionally relating to global ecological processes” (421). Accordingly, I interpret River Guide’s imaginary representations of the Franklin River region as a microcosm, a “moral laboratory” for developing concern for vulnerable wild places globally. The linking of the particular with the universal was also part of the Green Movement’s response thirty years ago. This is evidenced by one of the many protest banners displayed by the Franklin River activists which read: “Think Globally, Act Locally” (Hungerford 174).

Fictional scenarios, like many in River Guide, generate a complex interplay between readers’ intellects, senses and emotions through a combination of naturalist description and literary symbolism. Heise asserts that fiction tends to “emphasise the misunderstandings that arise when individuals and communities with different cultural assumptions encounter crises”

(Teaching Ecocriticism 97) Yet, she also claims “that a global or cosmopolitan perspective can

only arise from the ability to look at environmental issues from several, sometimes conflicting cultural angles” (Teaching Ecocriticism 97). It is this latter comment that is of particular relevance for my research. River Guide contributes to a sense of planetary-scale-

29 _{In July 2002, the Green gained an “unprecedented 18 per cent of the vote—not only their}

highest vote ever but, according to Brown, the highest Green vote recorded in any general election anywhere in the world” (Lohrey 52).

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interconnection by presenting diverse and at times conflicting cultural perspectives. The protagonist Aljaz suggests a hybrid sense of kinship through his initial presentation as an ecologically aware white man but who ultimately discovers his Aboriginal ancestry. Flanagan constructs Aljaz’s responses to the river and rainforest from a blend of Western Romantic ideals and complex interrelations typical of the local Indigenous people’s sense of kinship. Topographical features and body parts of creation-beings merge and “the distinction between the living and the non-living, so basic to Western ontologies, is less real” in the Indigenous cultures (Kleinert 33).

In contrast the Europeans “failed to establish a partnership with natural resources, which were exploited and then disregarded” (Kleinert 34). However, the river and rainforest in

River Guide are not constructed as passive natural elements but instead are invested with a sense of agency which increases the human/nonhuman entanglement. In literature generally, matter [river and rainforest ecosystems, for example] can be seen: “as manifesting an inherent creative power, a vitality” which disrupts the conventional nature/culture binary to reinforce “the idea of horizontality rather than hierarchy” (Marland 857). Yet Marland’s “fairly harmonious picture of interrelationship and shared qualities—a broadly deep ecological notion of ‘agential kinships’”—when I apply it to Flanagan’s text, is occasionally disrupted through a “more disorientating hybridity” a shared materiality derived from both immediate and diffused effects of pollution (Marland 857). Such exchange of components renders both human and nonhuman agents as unpredictable and thus creates further opportunities to extend moral imagination. Competing ethical positions may be further complicated by a sometimes fractured aesthetic which evokes some correspondence with MacGregor’s “Smelterscape,” for example. The nonhuman agent, the Franklin River is both unpredictable and complex through its