Marco conceptual

“There is No Wilderness”—Tasmania’s Fractured Aesthetic

“What is wilderness today—a wasteland, commodity, a tourist attraction, a carbon sink, a Tasmanian devil habitat, an ancient, natural refuge from the rat-race?”

(Haygarth 20)

Ideas of wilderness, like ideas of nature, are culturally constructed, but they also refer to actual, ecologically vulnerable physical spaces and places. Reinstating the referent, by reading fictional representations of Tasmania’s wilderness against environmental history and contemporary ecological knowledge, is fundamental for ecocriticism. Consequently, this first chapter explores ecological conditions and literary aesthetics that are specific to Tasmanian wilderness, but which also resonate with many global issues. By examining wilderness ideals and debunking eco-regressive mythology, in the first part of this chapter, I establish a context within which actual contemporary environmental concerns, as represented in the primary texts, are highlighted. The chapter’s second part explores Ian McLean’s original, and my contemporary, concept of a “fractured aesthetic” as an effective mode of visual and literary representation for Tasmanian wilderness.

Perceptions of Wilderness

As the epigraph to this chapter illustrates, the meaning of wilderness, in the context of twenty- first-century Tasmania, is contingent upon shifting social, political and economic imperatives.16 Moreover, these meanings are not necessarily mutually exclusive, as “we take

16 It is important to note that “wildness and wilderness are not equivalent in definition,

meaning, or importance. … While wilderness in Western culture is most often a place, wildness is the force behind places” (Grumbine 6–7).

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different perspectives on nature and the environment on different occasions” [and] “we live with multiplicity” and complexity in our daily lives (Jamieson 5). Literature can capture multiple perspectives and changing paradigms to form an important dimension of cultural memory. In turn this generates “a cumulative quality to our cultural responses to nature: as our intellectual traditions evolve and as we gradually come to think of landscape differently” (Herendeen 18). In the anthropocene, an era of increasing environmental degradation, the style in which topographical features are conceptualised and represented has ethical consequences (Peppard 110).

Tasmania, which has a rich literary and natural heritage, is home to the formation of “the world’s first Green party, the United Tasmania Group” (UTG) in March 1972.17 _The

primary texts analysed in this thesis emerge from a cultural milieu of environmental debates and tensions across local, national and global communities. While the novels and films, discussed in the following chapters, are works of imagination, they represent actual regions. Environmental details are depicted with a high level of credibility. Attention is given to the wilderness-specific flora and fauna, in addition to the inclusion of explicit and implicit references to coexisting examples of anthropogenic environmental destruction. Both visual and literary wilderness representations in Tasmania have tended to follow a “classic wilderness”

17 _{The United Tasmania Group was formed by a group of Lake Pedder activists. Many}

lessons had been learned after their Lake Pedder campaign defeat and by “1974 the UTG issued an economic, social and cultural manifesto set out in a document entitled ‘The New Ethic’”. In addition, “A new breed of political activist came into being” —Bob Brown “stood on the UTG Senate ticket in 1975 behind Dick Jones and gained only 112 votes” (Lohrey 13– 15). By 1989 he was Parliamentary leader for the Tasmanian Greens and by 2005 he was the leader of the Australian Greens Party until his resignation in 2012.

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trope although, as my textual analysis reveals, there is a shift occurring in the twenty-first century. Specifically, in the past the ecological impact of extraction industries and human impact generally have been disguised or denied in art and literature about Tasmania. This “silence” or “omission” is reminiscent of the manner in which colonial history renders the Indigenous occupation of the land as “invisible.”

Most of my selected texts represent a “double vision,” of Tasmania’s landscape, by including depictions of anthropogenic degradation in their wilderness settings. I borrow from (and extend for ecocritical purposes) this term from the essay collection Double Vision, in particular Michael Rosenthal’s chapter “The Penitentiary as Paradise.” Rosenthal explains how colonial Sydney was sometimes depicted as a harsh penal settlement but also frequently represented as Arcadian or “Europeanized” (103–30). Neither of these conceits are accurate representations of the Australian landscape although it should be noted that the latter had some resonance with the actual Tasmanian wilderness, so different to that of mainland Australia. Tasmania’s unique topography adds to the complexities of representation. In the interests of clarification, however, it should be noted that instead of “Europeanization” as a primarily

imagined and constructed representation, as in much of Australian colonial art, including that

of Tasmania (discussed below), the climate and topography of the Central Highlands and rainforests, which constitute most of Tasmania’s wilderness, actually are more like parts of Europe than mainland Australia. As someone who lived her early childhood in the Central Highlands of Tasmania, and has also spent time in the Scottish Highlands and the moors and lakes of Connemara (Ireland) I can assure the reader that despite the differences in vegetation there are many material similarities between these landscapes. Consequently, double visions of Tasmanian wilderness are multiple, not all relevant for this research and most significantly, they are different, at least in degree, from those of Rosenthal. Europeanization is not the

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representation analysed in this thesis, but rather I focus on the double vision of pristine wilderness and/or anthropogenic degradation.

Most of the texts I examine do not engage with the issue of Indigenous “invisibility” or colonialism. Instead, they create a “double vision” by interspersing or juxtaposing relatively pristine images of vulnerable wild places (“paradise”) with entropic images of the legacy and ongoing anthropogenic violence to the land from mining, dam building, deforestation and general consumerism. Ethical and ecological dilemmas, emerging from marketing wilderness as a commodity for recreation and ecotourism, are also represented in varying degrees within the texts. To date, there has been little critical attention given to these particular textual representations of wilderness destruction, but they are central to my ecocritical analysis.

In art, ethical and aesthetic sensibilities mirror (and sometimes shape) cultural and social change. This is apparent in the dynamic concept of the environment and the resulting linguistic implications associated with the word “wilderness.” Perceptions of wilderness are changing, and related concepts, which position the human as apart from and superior to nature, are being questioned across academic disciplines, particularly literary studies, philosophy and sociology. Deep ecologists for example challenge “the anthropocentrism at the heart of modern society” by deconstructing “hierarchical attitudes to the natural world [in order] to identify [themselves] within a broader circle of living things” (Marland 850). Resonating with such perceptual shifts are concepts which underpin this thesis, most particularly, Romantic ideas of “kinship” that may be “transformed” into posthumanist ideas of “entanglement” and shared materiality between human and nonhuman entities. Changes in perception, conceptualisation and material reality create new opportunities for writers, filmmakers (and artists in general).

While ideas about wilderness continue to evolve with new knowledge and changing cultural sensibilities, consistently wilderness areas have been partially, and problematically, defined in terms of an absence of human habitation and disturbance. From a global perspective

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philosophers argue that purist definitions of “wilderness” lack relevance and usefulness for twenty-first century conditions. Mark Woods, for example, points out that J. Baird Callicott claims the term: “wilderness perpetuates a pre-Darwinian myth that we exist apart from nature” (354). Such purist ideology assumes people do not belong in wild areas and arguably that they are not part of the natural world. William Cronon notes the irony: “Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it [wilderness] is quite profoundly a human creation–indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history” (1). Cronon observes this paradox in the concept of wilderness and further argues that this Western cultural construction “privileges some parts of nature at the expense of others” (8). Many contemporary notions of “wilderness” ideology retain inherent contradictions regarding the place of the human.

Depending on timeframes, dominant cultural paradigms and individual points-of-view, “wilderness” may evoke pristine rainforest, arid desert or just neglected wasteland. In the eighteenth century connotations of wilderness tended to be negative: “To be a wilderness then was to be ‘deserted,’ ‘savage,’ ‘desolate,’ ‘barren’—in short, a ‘waste,’ the word’s nearest synonym” (Cronon 1). Roslynn Haynes notes the Hebraic association of wilderness with The Fall and the redemptive potential of Edenic cultivation and agriculture: “In a tradition that built on this dichotomy, land had meaning only in terms of human use and history. The progress of civilisation depends on the taming of the wilderness,” (Seeking the Centre 26). By the late nineteenth century environmental sensibilities had changed and wilderness areas were perceived as less threatening. Instead these areas became revered as opportunities for consolation and human spiritual restoration.

Several phases in literary and environmental history culminated in transformed notions of wilderness from “Satan’s home” into “God’s Own Temple”—the rise of the environmental movement in the USA, the influential work of writers like Henry David Thoreau, John Muir

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and Aldo Leopold and the establishment of official national parks—were particularly significant (Cronon 2). The religious significance of wilderness was eventually sublimated into Romantic depictions manifested through Gothic and sublime aesthetics. Such cultural shifts are evident in postcolonial Tasmania as the fear and difficulties experienced by pioneers and settlers (often expressed through Gothic metaphors) were, to some degree, displaced by the Romantic sensibilities of affluent excursionists who, from the late nineteenth century, began to seek out the contradictory emotional response inherent in the “sublime experience.” From the safety of recreational choice, the overwhelming beauty and vastness of mountains and skies inspired “both humbling fear and ennobling validation for the perceiving subject” (Hitt 606). Seeking an experience of the sublime in wilderness includes recognition of its hazards. In Australia the challenging aspects of the land were often emphasised bringing into sharp relief the skills and endurance of the white “explorers.” As Haynes notes, “Myths of national heroism demand an enemy and the land was readily sacrificed to that end” (Seeking the Centre 33). In Tasmania excursionists (usually educated white men from affluent backgrounds) seeking the ultimate sublime moment of individual domination over the nonhuman world were also able to showcase their survival skills against the often harsh natural elements.

Fear of being “taken” by a wild and harsh land frequently led to a common theme in early national mythology of European children being lost in the bush (Pierce, Country of Lost

Children xii). In traditional European tales like the Grimm collections:

the forests in which children were lost were perilous places, not because of any natural threats that they posed, but for the malevolent people who lived within them. Australian tellers of fairy stories, in the 1890s, necessarily writing with the Grimms in mind, naturalised the Germanic material earnestly, but often incongruously. They neither found, nor fabricated, plausible human threats to lost children. (Pierce, Country of Lost Children xv)

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Such myths resonate in Tasmania’s contemporary art and culture when depicted as a lost bushwalker, frequently a tourist who has ventured out alone and often ill-equipped. Cate Kennedy’s narrative in The World Beneath, for example, is centred on a bushwalk and a lost white child under the care of an over-confident and ill-prepared parent.

The Western concept of wilderness, initially European and American ideas of wilderness, were imported into Australia. Derived from Eurocentric sensibilities, preconceived notions of landscape were embedded in white Australian representations. More recently, as a direct result of historical revisions and new ecological knowledge, traditional ideas have been challenged. In The Biggest Estate on Earth Bill Gammage alludes to the concept of “wilderness” as a socially constructed ideal. He suggests that before 1788 (the year of the arrival of the first fleet and establishment of the British colony at Sydney Cove), when the Indigenous people managed the land, “There was no wilderness. The Law—an ecological philosophy enforced by religious sanction—compelled people to care for all their country. People lived and died to ensure this” (2). Gammage argues convincingly that the Indigenous impact on the environment was far more systematic and widespread than is popularly realised. Gammage’s findings regarding the extent of Aboriginal land management practices in Australia, should fuel Australian wilderness discourse. His research is significant for rereading historical representations of the Australian wilderness which generally depicted it as pristine (“untrammelled” by humans), and for informing contemporary and future ethical and aesthetic representations.

Indigenous land practices altered even the South West and Central Plateau regions of Tasmania where populations were relatively small. Evidence indicates many Indigenous fires were carefully planned and controlled through generations of skilled observation of weather patterns: “To decide what day, even what hour, to burn, managers took account of wind, humidity, aspect, target plants and animals, and fuel loads” (Gammage 169). Many burns were

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started just before heavy rain or snow thus suggesting a natural restraint was anticipated by the Indigenous people (169). “Some doubt that Tasmanians lived in the southwest, but fire- promoted buttongrass covers more than 45 per cent of it, reflecting persistent burning on a scale which lightning strikes cannot explain” (Gammage 69). The Tasmanian Aborigines were hunters and gatherers and frequently travelled long distances in their search for food and ochre (Ryan 12). They also exercised proprietary rights over particular territories (the boundaries of which “coincided with well-marked geographical features like rivers, lagoons and mountain ranges”) and had regular camping spots which they returned to seasonally (Ryan 12–13). These patterns would seem to lead logically to Gammage’s assertion about the Australian landscape: “There is no wilderness” (2).

Aboriginal land contains valuable resource commodities. Furthermore, their land management practices conserved other rich natural resources that have been exploited by Western industries and enterprises. Marcia Langton points out that this level of anthropogenic management and occupation invalidates contemporary Western concepts of wilderness:

Aboriginal land is targeted both by mining companies and conservation campaigners precisely because it is Aboriginal land. These vast areas owned by Aboriginal people are the repository of Australia’s megadiversity of fauna, flora and ecosystems because of the ancient Aboriginal system of management .... They are not wilderness areas. They are Aboriginal homelands, shaped over millennia by Aboriginal people. (2) Langton’s national perspective is distilled into a Tasmania-specific context by Greg Lehman. Referring to the violence of dispossession and attempted genocide Lehman points out that “In Tasmania, an empty wilderness was created, and not found” (“Tasmanian Gothic” 205). He evocatively suggests that in current times the landscape “should be streaked with the smoke of a dozen campfires” (“Tasmanian Gothic” 205). Quoting Aboriginal Heritage officer Daryl

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West, (about Tasmania) Lehman says, “This whole island is an Aboriginal site” (“Ancient Footsteps” 14).

Conventional ideas of wilderness, according to Mitchell Rolls, are of little relevance or usefulness in the light of twenty-first century knowledge, and he challenges the potentially eco- regressive mythology which represents Aborigines as traditional “conservationists”:

Whilst [it is] now generally accepted ... that almost all landscapes are a consequence of anthropogenic modification, the idea of a boutique natural realm free of meddlesome humankind persists. Where humans—such as Aborigines—are included, they appear in the guise of eco-environmentalists whose intimate bioregional knowledge enables them to tread lightly on the earth. (53)

Rolls’ identification of misplaced assumptions about Indigenous people, as eco- environmentalists, resonates with comments from biologist Tim Low. Low recognises the eco- regressive potential of wilderness ideology which privileges popular areas over areas rich in biodiversity but lacking in sublime or picturesque qualities. He points out: “wilderness is not an ecological term … it stresse[s] freedom and challenge, not biodiversity. [It] was invented for people to enjoy. It was grounded in a selfish idea” (39). Influenced by American ideals and practices “modern ideas about wilderness in Australia date back to the walking clubs of Sydney” from the 1920s (Low 39). Low further explains that the idealised landscapes at the basis of much wilderness rhetoric, areas that are “big, remote and pristine,” often miss more valuable areas for conservation. Areas of Tasmania exemplify this: “The glaciers that helped sculpt the Franklin’s inspiring scenery also scraped away much of its biodiversity [while] hot spots for rare herbs include the rubbish tip at Tunbridge and the cemetery at Jericho” (Low 42).18

18 _{Tunbridge and Jericho are historic villages in the midlands and Southern midlands}

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Despite archaeological and historical evidence of substantial Indigenous impact on the Tasmanian landscape most of my selected texts do not acknowledge or merely gesture towards Indigenous presence, perpetuating long-standing “silences.” In literary and cinematic representations such “sins of omission” or “strategic silences” occur for a variety of reasons, not all of them conscious or explicable. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin attribute a reluctance to acknowledge the Indigenous dispossession by European colonisers to “white settler anxiety” (82). They explain this term as “the crisis of belonging that accompanies split cultural allegiance, the historical awareness of expropriated territory, and the suppressed knowledge that the legal fiction of entitlement does not necessarily bring with it the emotional attachment that turns ‘house and land’ into home” (82). More recently, heightened community awareness of colonial and settler prejudices and preoccupations has led to political over-corrections and cultural misrepresentations about the relationship between the Indigenous inhabitants and the wilderness areas in Tasmania (see Rolls above). In this context, it could be argued that misrepresentation is no improvement on absence of representation.

Regardless of these postcolonial and ecological arguments which cast doubt on the relevance and usefulness of the concept of “wilderness,” the word and concept is embedded in Tasmanian history and existing society. The Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service, Tourism Tasmania and the vast majority of environmental literature, public policy and community “conversations” generally continue to refer to the South-West and Central Plateau regions as “wilderness” (evidenced by the government Parks and Wildlife map included at the beginning of this thesis). A recent Wilderness Photography exhibition spent several months in both Launceston and Hobart public art galleries and there are several “wilderness shops” throughout the island offering a sophisticated range of outdoor equipment and excursions. Tasmania also has its own long-standing branch of the Australian Wilderness Society which promotes the protection of wilderness. Furthermore, the work of Gammage, Ryan, Langton, Rolls, and

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Lehman, while well respected within higher education institutions, appears not to have filtered into Tasmania’s general community.

Alternatively, perhaps political and pragmatic factional definitions have evolved to