by Don Watson
The Old Country: Australian Landscapes, Plants and People,
Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2006
Kenneth Slessor
1939
South Country
After the whey-faced anonymity
Of river-gums and scribbly-gums and bush,
After the rubbing and the hit of brush,
You come to the South Country
As if the argument of trees were done,
The doubts and quarrelling, the plots and pains,
All ended by these clear and gliding planes
Like an abrupt solution.
And over the flat earth of empty farms
The monstrous continent of air floats back
Coloured with rotting sunlight and the black,
Bruised flesh of thunderstorms.
Air arched, enormous, pounding the bony ridge,
Ditches and hutches, with a drench of light,
So huge, from such infinities of height,
You walk on the sky’s beach
While even the dwindled hills are small and bare,
As if, rebellious, buried, pitiful,
Something below pushed up a knob of skull,
Feeling its way to air.
The Penguin Book of Australian Verse,
J. Thompson, K. Slessor and R.G. Howarth (eds.), Penguin, London, 1958
South Australian Government
1992
Section 3(2) of the Act sets out two criteria for determining whether or not land should be regarded as wilderness:
(a) the land and its ecosystems must not have been affected, or must have been affected to only a minor extent, by modern technology;
(b) the land and its ecosystems must not have been seriously affected by exotic animals or plants or other exotic organisms.
The criteria are not a definition of wilderness, but rather describe the attributes land should have to qualify for protection under the Act.
The criteria are based on remoteness and naturalness; the indicators of wilderness quality established by the National Wilderness Inventory (1991). The Inventory has established the extent and quality of South Australian land with wilderness attributes by measuring variations in naturalness and remoteness across the landscape using four indicators:
remoteness from access – the degree of remoteness from established access routes;
remoteness from settlement – remoteness from points and areas of permanent human occupation;
apparent naturalness – the degree to which the landscape is free from the presence of permanent structures of modern technological society; and
biophysical naturalness – the degree to which the natural environment is free of biophysical disturbance resulting from the influence of modern technological society.
Remoteness and naturalness are relative terms; no land is absolutely remote or absolutely natural. The wilderness quality of land is assessed in terms of the degree to which it is remote and natural, that is the degree to which it is unaffected by the impacts (including pest plants and animals) of modern technological society.
This approach to the assessment of land recognises that there is little if any, pristine wilderness left, and that land selected is likely to contain some evidence of colonial or modern technological society (such as exotic plants or animals, minor structures from some past land use, or minor tracks).
The approach also recognises the increasing value the community places on land that retains a high degree of remoteness and naturalness. It is in this context that the concepts of wilderness protection areas and zones as land management categories have been developed.
Wilderness Assessment of Ngarkat Conservation Park,
South Australia, 1992
Robert H. Stainthorpe
1925
No. 2.
Women’s Fashions.
The dresses then worn by the women were very different to those of the present day. A woman then never wore a hat; it was always a bonnet, which covered the face and back of the neck. The dress consisted of a tight-fitting jacket and a print dress with a large crinoline, the sides of which had to be bent together to enable the wearer to get through the door. They also wore strong lace-up boots – no high-heeled shoes then.
THE MEN’S DRESS.
The men wore a cabbage tree or a tall Yankee hat with a very wide brim, a blue shirt with a side pocket and a large collar, and moleskin trousers with a saddle-strap for a belt, though some of the “flash” ones wore a red silk sash wrapped two or three times around their waists with the tassels hanging down on each side. No sox were worn, a rag wrapped around the feet sufficing. The boots were of the “blucher” type generally called “Prince Alberts”. A large black scarf around the neck completed the costume. The moleskin trousers were white and very strong, and would last over 12 months. No top coats were used then, and in wet weather they had for a coat what was called a poncho or a rug – one side imitation skins and the other black water-proof. It had a hole in the centre for the head to pass through, and was also used at night as a blanket.
Early Reminiscences of the Wimmera and Mallee, (1925), Robert H. Stainthorpe and
William Candy, Lowden Publishing Co., Donvale, Victoria, 2009
W. E. H. Stanner
1953
The Dreaming
If we put these four facts about the Aborigines together – 1) an immensely long span of time, 2) spent in more or less complete isolation, 3) in a fairly constant environment, 4) with an unprogressive material culture – we may perhaps see why sameness, absence of change, fixed routine, regularity, call it what you will, is a main dimension of their thought and life. Let us sum up this aspect as leading to a metaphysical emphasis on abidingness. They place a very special value on things remaining unchangingly themselves, on keeping life to a routine which is known and trusted. Absence of change, which means certainty of expectation, seems to them a good thing in itself. One may say, their Ideal and Real come very close together. The value given to continuity is so high that they are not simply a people ‘without a history’: they are a people who have been able, in some sense, to ‘defeat’ history, to become a-historical in mood, outlook, and life. This is why among them, the philosophy of assent, the glove, fits the hand of actual custom almost to perfection, and the forms of social life, the art, the ritual, and much else take on a wonderful symmetry.
Their tools and crafts, meagre – pitiably meagre – though they are, have nonetheless been good enough to let them win the battle for survival, and to win it comfortably at that. With no pottery, no knowledge of metals, no wheel, no domestication of animals, no agriculture, they have still been able, not only to live and people the entire continent, but even in a sense to prosper, to win a surplus of goods and develop leisure-time occupations. The evidences of the surplus of yield over animal need are to be seen in the spider-web of trade routes criss-crossing the continent, on which a large volume of non-utilitarian articles circulated, themselves largely the products of leisure. The true leisure-time activities – social entertaining, great ceremonial gatherings, even much of the ritual and artistic life – impressed observers even from the beginning. The notion of Aboriginal life as always preoccupied with the risk of starvation, as always a hair’s breadth from disaster, is as great a caricature as Hobbes’s notion of savage life as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. The best corrective of any such notion is to spend a few nights in an Aboriginal camp, and experience directly the unique joy in life which can be attained by a people of few wants, an other-worldly cast of mind and a simple scheme of life which so shapes a day that it ends with communal singing and dancing in the firelight.
The more one sees of Aboriginal life the stronger the impression that its mode, its ethos, and its principles are variations on a single theme – continuity, constancy, balance, symmetry, regularity, system, or some such quality as these words convey.
One of the most striking things is that there are no great conflicts
over power, no great contests for place and office. This single fact explains much else, because it rules out so much that would be destructive of stability. The idea of a formal chief or a leader with authority over the persons of others in a large number of fields of life – say, for example, as with a Polynesian or African chief – just does not seem to make sense to a blackfellow. Nor does even the modified Melanesian notion – that of a man becoming some sort of a leader because he accumulates a great deal of garden-wealth and so gains prestige. There are leaders in the sense of men of unusual skill, initiative, and force and they are given much respect; they may even attract something like a following; but one finds no trace of formal or institutionalised chieftainship. So there are no offices to stimulate ambition, intrigue, or the use of force; to be envied or fought over; or to be lost or won. Power – a real thing in every society – is diffused mainly through one sex, the men, but in such a way that it is not to be won, or lost, in concentrations, by craft, struggle, or coup. It is very much a male-dominated society. The older men dominate the younger; the men dominate the women. Not that the women are chattels – Dr Phyllis Kaberry in her interesting book Aboriginal Woman disposed of that Just-so story very effectively – but there is a great deal of discrimination against them. The mythology justifies this by tales telling how men had to take power from women by force in The Dreaming. The psychology (perhaps the truth) of it is as obvious as it is amusing. If women were not kept under, they would take over!
At all events, the struggle for power occurred once-for-all. Power, authority, influence, age, status, knowledge, all run together and, in some sense, are the same kind of thing. The men of power, authority and influence are old men – at least, mature men; the greater the secret knowledge and authority the higher the status; and the initiations are so arranged (by the old men) that the young men do not acquire full knowledge, and so attain status and authority until they too are well-advanced in years. One can thus see why the great term of respect is ‘old man’ – maluka, as in We of the Never-Never. The system is self-protective and self-renewing. The real point of it all is that the checks and balances seem nearly perfect, and no one really seems to want the kind of satisfaction that might come from a position of domination. At the same time, there is a serpent in Eden. The narrow self-interest of men exploits The Dreaming.
Power over things? Every canon of good citizenship and common sense is against it, though there are, of course, clear property arrangements. But what could be more useless than a store of food that will not keep, or a heavy pile of spears that have to be carried everywhere? Especially in a society in which the primary virtues are generosity and fair dealing. Nearly every social affair involving goods – food in the family, payments in marriage, inter-tribal exchange – is heavily influenced by equalitarian notions; a notion of reciprocity as a moral obligation; a notion of generously equivalent return; and a surprisingly clear notion of fair dealing, or making things ‘level’ as the blackfellow calls it in English.
There is a tilt of the system towards the interests of the men, but given this tilt, everything else seems as if carefully calculated to keep it in place. The blacks do not fight over land. There are no wars or invasions to seize territory. They do not enslave each other. There is no master–servant relation. There is no class division. There is no property or income inequality. The result is a homeostasis, far-reaching and stable.
I do not wish to create an impression of a social life without egotism, without vitality, without cross-purposes, or without conflict. Indeed, there is plenty of all, as there is of malice, enmity, bad faith, and violence, running along the lines of sex-inequality and age-inequality. But this essential humanity exists, and runs its course, within a system whose first principle is the preservation of balance. And, arching over it all, is the logos of The Dreaming. How we shall state this when we fully understand it I do not know, but I should think we are more likely to ennoble it than not. Equilibrium ennobled is ‘abidingness’. Piccarda’s answer in the third canto of the Paradiso gives the implicit theme and logic of The Dreaming: e la sua volontate è nostra pace, ‘His will is our peace’. But the gleam that lighted Judah did not reach the Australian wilderness, and the blacks follow The Dreaming only because their fathers did.
The Dreaming and Other Essays, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2009
Douglas Stewart
1952
Sheep Country
Woe . . . Woe . . . Woe!
Cries the lone black crow
In the hot blue sky.
– And with that beak
Still reeking foul
From the old cast ewe
Would you dare to pluck
The day’s gold eye
From the cloud’s white wool?
– Aye. If I can. Aye.
Collected Poems: 1936–1967, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1967
Randolph Stow
c. 1954
Country Children
Country children know more than they know.
They see the red young bull, his loins on fire,
wounding with love the spring of his desire,
sowing the savage seed of his cruel youth,
eyes staring at the climax. And they know,
watching the hot red hide, they know the truth,
and laugh among themselves to hear at night
the vixen’s scream of agonised delight;
for country children know more than they know,
yet have no worldwise Punch and Judy show.
Country children know more than they know.
They see the pony, lusty and unwise,
follow his dam with hot incestuous eyes;
and slitting up a rabbit’s belly, seeing
the wet fur never to be born, they know
the underlying cruelty of being.
They see the shearer hurt the half-caste cook
and leave her crying, and they laugh and look;
for country children know more than they know,
yet have no worldwise Punch and Judy show.
The Land’s Meaning: New Selected Poems by Randolph Stow,
John Kinsella (ed.), Fremantle Press, 2012
T. G. H. Strehlow
1950
1
The best Australians are, of course, our own aboriginals. These have lived for thousands of years off the resources of a continent which lacked animals that could be domesticated and cereals that could be cultivated. They enjoyed a life of plenty in the good seasons; but they also had to survive the worst droughts without any food relief from abroad. They came to a continent in many parts poorly endowed by Nature as regards food and water; and they adapted their whole mode of life to it in order to fit themselves to the country of their birth. Though they lived off the land, they did not ruthlessly devastate it as some of the white pioneers were to do in later times; and though their meat consisted entirely of the game won in hunting, the dictates of totemism and the absolute ban on killing animals at any of the numerous sacred sites in their tribal territories gave these animals a chance to maintain their numbers and to remain safe from all danger of extinction.
There is one thing about the aboriginals that I want to emphasize particularly in this address – their intense devotion to their country:
According to native beliefs, the earth was the eternal mother from whose fertile womb the totemic ancestors and the first animals and plants had sprung. Each ancestor was associated with one animal or one plant, whose life essence was the same as his own. The later human beings, who were believed to have become reincarnated from these immortal ancestors, were therefore linked intimately with the animals and the natural features of their birthplaces or, more correctly, of their conception sites. To a man of the kangaroos totem, the kangaroos were his own ‘elder brothers’; and the rocks and trees of the kangaroo totemic site were sacred objects that shared with him some of the mysterious life essence that had once emanated from the original kangaroo totemic ancestor. A comm
on bond of life united a man with the animals of his totem, with the supernatural personage that he honoured in his ritual, and with the land in which he had been born. An Australian native consequently had an affection for, and a feeling of oneness with, Nature that few of the present-day generation of white Australians can even comprehend, let alone feel in their own hearts. It is this personal legendary link with the animals, trees, and rocks of his environment that had the power once to turn even an arid and sun-scorched tract of desert into a spiritual home for our natives; and the emotions stirred up by the sight of the animals, trees, and rocks of their home gave to the aboriginals in past times spiritual strength during cruel droughts and disastrous epidemics. As long as the mountains stood, the springs flowed, the animals survived, and the ancestral rocks escaped damage, the tribe had no fear for the future. Nature and men shared the same life; and Nature could not die.
2
There has been no kindlier folk anywhere than the Australian natives, and that fact makes all the more disgusting our exploitation and our destruction of them. Their splendid myths and songs, which we have ignored and spurned, could have helped us in our own difficulty of adjusting ourselves to a land so unlike Europe in appearance. We could have learned from them how to feel truly at home in our new environment. For the natives have always felt at ease and at home in Australia. Where many of us, who pride ourselves upon our education and our artistic insight, see only “a dead deserted land”, “a land where all the primal fires are dead”, and “a loveless land” that must be conquered so that it cannot harm us, our natives have found spiritual peace. It has been their home, peopled in their minds with their own powerful totemic ancestors . . .