Be True to the Earth - Abstracts
Faye Adams, Manningham City Council Re-imagining the World: Icons & myths, pictures & stories sufficient to save a Civilisation - Ours!
Urban myths, gossip, scandal, street fashion, jokes, tunes, and riddles diffuse readily through our modern culture with ease. Yet we tell ourselves 'change is hard,' 'change takes time.' That getting the message out there, being heard and understood requires a clever communications strategy, good data and a convincing model/theory, a soundly thought out argument and an erudite scientific paper! . . . . . .and yet there are instances when a story, rumour or scandal can spread like wildfire! No communication problems here! As practitioners we gather data, develop arguments, only to be countered by opposing data and arguments and so the debate goes on, round and round. Common Sense! Is there a deep current within us that resonates to ethics, truth and beauty. Can this pulse be tapped by iconic imagery and mythic archetypal stories? In this presentation, we start by setting the scene, preparing the field if you like, with provocative ideas from the science of networks and living systems theory where we explore the ideas of synchrony and mind. Then we proceed to seed the field with images, stories, potent words, fairy tales, fable, myth, whatever! The aim of the presentation is to remember the powerful iconic images and stories that resonate with the pulse of common sense within us all.
Deb Anderson, University of Melbourne Rethinking 'drought' in a sunburnt country
Against a backdrop of European colonisation and rapid ecological transformation, the concept of drought has endured as a potent symbolic source of Australian identity - in spite of the ambivalence of 'the nation' as a narrative strategy. It could be said Australian drought generates a 'text' that comes before us as always-already-read, its organising fiction bound in the narrative of endurance. 'Drought' can be read as a cultural site where stories of survival, both symbolic and literal, and of being 'true to the earth' intersect. As a PhD candidate, I seek to explore drought in the context of 'lived experience' through oral histories and stories of a particular semi-arid region of Australia, the Mallee. There we might ask: How has 'drought' influenced ways of thinking this environment? More broadly, how can its analysis shed light on the construction of a place deemed the oldest, flattest and driest continent on Earth?
Fergus Armstrong, University of Sydney Francis Bacon and the earth: modernity's geo-technical sign
For Francis Bacon (1561-1626), circumnavigation of the earth marked the beginning of a new age of technoscientific progress: '...to circle the Earth, as the heauenly Bodies doe, was not done, nor enterprised [by men] till these later times.' At the same time, Bacon's speculative cosmology is geocentric (rather than heliocentric): the earth remains a cryptic substratum of matter at the centre of the universe. Bacon's writings - a rich hybrid of humanism and proto-science - herald the protracted event of modernity. They exemplify a specific moment of early-modernity, but they were actually influential beyond Bacon's own times and, even to us, they indicate what seems his extraordinary prescience. Bacon's written corpus - as it persists in the present and into the future - indexes, or represents by metonymy, the global archive (mnemotechnical system). One way to `be true to the earth' is to re-read the 'Baconian' prehistory of our geo-technological world-picture.
Philip Armstrong, University of Canterbury What Animals Mean, in Moby-Dick, For Example
Ecocriticism and animal studies remind us not only that important cultural values are encoded in our representations of the natural world, but also that our meaning systems often depend on nonhuman nature for their articulation. And there is yet another kind of "meaning" that sometimes troubles representations of the nonhuman, in literary texts and elsewhere, usually in regard to the animal: the anxiogenic possibility that the nonhuman could mean something -- could possess intention or agency -- that escapes or challenges human meaning.Moby-Dick, in depicting the whaling industry as the embodiment of 19th-century American capitalism at work in the Pacific, offers an exemplar of the above tendencies in a context highly relevant for critics and scholars in our region. My paper will begin with a brief survey of Melville's challenge to 19th-century modes of human-animal representation, before focussing more closely on the issue of animal agency.
Karen Barker, University of Melbourne'Keep close to the earth!' The Schism between the Worker and Nature in Australian Socialist Realist Literature
This paper examines how the ideal of being true to the earth is reflected in the industrial reform agendas of the socialist realist writers from the 1920s, with particular reference to the novels of Katharine Susannah Prichard, and to the tension between vitalist and Marxist notions of the worker's relations with nature. In Prichard's Black Opal (1921) the heroine, Sophie, recalls the advice to 'Keep close to the earth!' For her this means staying '[i]n tune with the fundamentals, all the great things of loving and working.' In later novels, Prichard, a foundation member of the Communist Party of Australia, had to adjust her vitalist view of the unity of the labour process and the natural processes to accommodate the Marxist emphasis on the productive capacity of the worker's body in its interaction with nature. The vitalist view conflicts with the schism between the worker and nature, as nature is subjugated to human will.
Rob Baum, Monash University"This Land Is White and Slow"
This form of environmental writing underlies ethnographic writing but is rarely published. Typically, ethnographic writing, or "write-up," takes place when research concludes-sometimes years after the study was conducted-developed from, or written as, fieldwork journals; it therefore sustains immediacy and integrity of intention. Such writing participates in symbolic anthropology but additionally acknowledges fieldworkers' sense of self and play. Instead of censoring data in order to extirpate subjectivity, singularity and/or sexuality, the ethnographer voices, thoughts, feelings, and images evoked in the field, as "creative writing." I draw primarily upon my years in the Alaskan Arctic among the Iupiat Eskimo, the People of the Whale. The striking and severe natural environment, a landscape of endless ice, is central to the poetry, which richly portrays a vision of the Arctic absent from tourist travel guides, National Geographic and anthropological volumes which vend the Far North's beautiful austerity.
Carol Birrell, University of Western Sydney Auto da Fe: An Act of Faith
To be 'true to the earth' seems to encapsulate such meanings as 'faithful','trusting', 'loyal'. And 'heartfelt', or 'felt in the heart'. Mary Graham, Aboriginal philosopher, states: "the land and how we treat it, is what determines our humanness. Because land is sacred and must be looked after, the relations between people and land becomes the template for society and social relations. All meaning comes from the land." (Graham 1999:106) A provocation emerges here: What if being true to the earth requires us to know it as sacred? What might that mean for our humanness and our human/earth relations? This essay exerts the possibility of such an act of faith, in exploring notions of the sacred through narratives of place. The focal point is Coogee, Sydney beachside suburb and setting for the unlikely- a visitation by Mary, Mother of God- henceforth to be known as Our Lady of Coogee. The emergence of this sacred site is juxtaposed with Aboriginal sites, the oldest imprint on this land, and musings on the likely residence of the sacred for we non Indigenous Australians. In the reflective spaces between seemingly disparate streams of narrative, connective tissue is formed.
Veronica Brady How to Reinvent the World? The Hope of Being True to the Earth
Being true to the earth has always been part of my sense that 'there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of' in our current culture. From childhood the natural world has always seemed to me to promise that, as Arandhati Roy says, 'Another world is possible: I hear her breathing'. But as one gets older this hope seems harder to sustain. Our culture increasingly seems to have lost what Judith Wright calls 'the sheen of life on flashing long migrations.' Taking Heidegger's point that 'it is poetically that we live on earth' I would like to explore ways in which we might provide a basis for belief in the sacredness of this other world.
Tom
Burton
Dorset's Blackmore Vale in 1844: Reconstructing
William Barnes's Chronotope
To write about one's local environment in one's local dialect is an intimate way of constructing space as place by recording tacit knowledge of it inevitably lost in translation. In 1844 a Dorset schoolmaster, William Barnes, resisted the dialectical consequences of an education system that was privileging 'standard' English by publishing his Poems of Rural Life, in the Dorset Dialect . In public readings of them Barnes delighted Dorset natives trapped in a submerging culture. But in attempting to reproduce in print the way people spoke in the Blackmore Vale (where he grew up) he used spellings that looked bizarre even then and now render his poems disconcertingly opaque. What they sounded like originally can be reconstructed by ecolinguists trained in the philological knowledge that was sidelined by newer developments in the humanities. Consequently, in ecolinguistics the discursive problem Barnes confronted in 1844 (disappearing dialects) is replicated metadiscursively as disappearing philology.
Matthew Chrulew, Monash University Nominating the visual: the table and the menagerie
In Discipline and Punish , Michel Foucault places the animal at the inauguration of disciplinary power: 'The Panopticon is a royal menagerie; the animal is replaced by man, individual distribution by specific grouping and the king by the machinery of a furtive power.' (203) It is in the tabulation of Classical science, spatially instantiated in the menagerie of Versailles, that the disciplinary diagram of power may have found its inspiration. For Foucault, this is hardly a political matter: it is a case of relations of power (those among humans) drawing on the domain of knowledge (relations of humans with 'things'). I will argue that in fact the menagerie composes not just a structure of knowledge (the table) but a set of interspecies power relations: the original anatomo-politics of the body. Foregrounding this zoopolitics allows Foucault's tools to be unshackled from their anthropocentrism, and thereby more effectively applied to contemporary sites such as the zoological garden.
Peter Cock and Belinda Towns, Monash University Journeys into wilderness: social and sacred connections with nature
This paper shares stories of journeys into social and sacred ecology through the perspectives of a staff and a student participant in a graduate university unit. The meaning of 'sacred' in a natural environment is examined and we address the connections between challenges of community development and dynamics, and the exploration of senses and rituals that form the basis for living in a sustainable social ecology. We explore the processes used to deepen understandings of personal nature connections, such as 'solo time', and their role in personal review and development. As the journeys take place in an area of 'contested natures', the effects of the various human uses of the region such as indigenous connection, recreation, logging, and farming are also discussed.
Peter Coleman, Monash University Alice and the Wolf: Exploring Dennis Danvers' Wilderness
The werewolf has customarily been considered in Western culture to be a monstrous creature of supernatural power and hellish malevolence. From an ecocritical perspective, this werewolf archetype can be read as reflecting deeply entrenched Western values which posit 'humanity' as intrinsically separate from, and superior to, 'nature'. That the lycanthrope has traditionally been considered 'monstrous' can be viewed as implicitly related to the fact that it encompasses both the 'human' and 'non-human' orders, embodying a transgression that is considered in Western thought to be abhorrent and unacceptable. In Dennis Danvers' novel Wilderness this traditional conception of the werewolf is radically subverted: the werewolf is cast not as the villain but as the misunderstood heroine Alice White. This paper will explore Danvers' reinvention of the werewolf myth and the ecophilosophical issues raised by the story of Alice and the wolf.
Stuart Cooke, UTS Getting closer to country: Wandering into an Australian narrative
My paper will outline a basic structure for a genuinely post-colonial Australian literature, which will be more 'true' to the Australian earth. Such a literature will acknowledge the influence of the Indigenous, as well as the non-Indigenous, on Australian story telling, and will seek a greater intimacy with the Australian landscape. In the context outlined by the authors of Reading the Country (1984), nomadic writing, by virtue of its wandering, open-ended movement, concentrates on the details between points and thereby disrupts the bold, linear movement of European narrative. Because of the manner in which a nomadic narrative focuses on the experience of being in and feeling and responding to a place, it will create, by virtue of such sensitivity, a uniquely Australian writing. A nomadic narrative will also reveal how our locales have been shaped and opened to Europeans by the continent's indigenous perceptions of space.
Charles Dawson Of Dryads and Dams: silenced spirits and rivers in Aotearoa / New Zealand
This paper will consider two sometimes overlooked monographs on water, memory and the senses: Gaston Bachelard's Water and Dreams and Ivan Illich's H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness. What purchase do Bachelard and Illich's recognition of the mythic heft of water have, in an age of dams, drought and power crises? What remnants from a Western culture marked by utility yet touched by the Romantic recognition of the magic of place (a magic fed by Dryad, Nyad and Nymph) might offer ways into dialogue about the waters we all depend on? The paper appraises the books' quest for remembrance and reverence in light of contemporary river issues in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Chris Dew, La Trobe University Being True to Ourselves
In The Spell of the Sensuous David Abram notes that a new 'environmental ethic' will come from 'a rejuvenation of our carnal, sensorial empathy with the living land that sustains us' (p.69). In this paper I tell a story of that embodied, intimate empathy, to show how it operates on the deepest level of our being. I relate this story to the broader legislative and economic realms, using insights from phenomenology, in order to argue for the importance of recognising the interconnectedness between nature and culture on all levels of individual and social life. In being true to the earth we are being true to the deepest human truths about ourselves.
Christy Di Frances, University of Adelaide The Central Role of Nature in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings Myth
Tolkien's Lord of the Rings saga has made an indelible mark upon the culture and collective psyche of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In return, it serves as a fascinating "mirror" through which its author deciphers the happenings of modernity. This paper explores the spiritual and philosophical notions that form the centre of Tolkien's myth-a story in which forest and glen; river and sea; shadow and light manifest tremendous significance. Tolkien drew a direct parallel between nature and the idea of Good, going even so far as to present nature as a "great determiner"-the qualities of his characters are revealed by their interaction with other living things. Essentially, Tolkien's myth suggests an alternative to our modern world of industrialization, materialism, and dehumanization: a spiritual concept of reintegration with "real" natural things, a restoration for humankind and the ecological order.
Anne Elvey, Monash University and ACU Earth as intertext: " ... the stones would shout out ... " (Luke 19:40)
In a paper "Earth, World, Text: On the (Im)possibility of Ecopoiesis", Kate Rigby identifies a founding tension in the field of ecocriticism, namely the impossibility of bringing to presence in the act of writing about nature, Earth, or matter, that which one desires to 'save'. Can writing convey the 'thinginess' of the thing? Can any hermeneutic 'hear' or uncover the materiality which underlies a text and on which all texts depend? Rigby writes of two ecopoietic moments in writing and reading: the (im)possible ecopoiesis that endeavours to convey, hear, recover and respond to both the thinginess of matter and grief for its loss. A third ecopoietic moment in writing and reading also needs to be accounted for, namely the ecopoiesis of resistance. This paper listens for the intertextual materiality of stone in Luke 19:28-20:19, by attending to the three ecopoietic moments of matter, grief and resistance.
Michael Farrell, Deakin University Creating a beach poetics for Melbourne
A Melbourne beach poetics applies for half the year. There can be beach days in September or May, but roughly we get six months of beach weather. Seasonal changes affect daily language, and this affects the poetry we write. I try not to use the word 'beach' in poems too often, though it's a great word. 'Bay' doesn't go far. Beach images enter my mind/poems. Different things happen there. Do colder months produce more interior work, related to reading and rooms? A bay beach is different to a surf beach. Does it effect a poetry less dynamic, more calm?
Kathryn Ferguson Representing the Great Barrier Reef: Being True to the Earth or Submerged Contempt?
Nietzsche's Zarathustra counselled: 'Verily, a polluted stream is man. One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure/ Lo, I teach you the Superman: he is that sea; in him can your great contempt be submerged'. Metaphorically, this analogy may have made good secular sense in the 1880s, however, in the twenty-first century when reefs are dying and seas are under increasingly deadly pressure how are we to understand this parallel? Being true to the earth has too often been interpreted as a specifically terrestrial concern. In this paper what I propose is a reading of an Australian icon; the Great Barrier Reef, or as it is becoming increasingly known, the So-So Barrier Reef. Examining representations of the Great Barrier Reef from an historical perspective this paper will argue that romanticized depictions of the Great Barrier Reef, no matter how well-intentioned or celebratory, are masking an environmental crisis.
David Fonteyn, UNSW Towards an Australian panspychist mythology: from Voss to Bliss - a transformation of The Australian Tradition
Both Voss and Bliss draw on long standing mythologies in the Australian colonial and postcolonial psyche: the Bush as heaven or hell, the city versus the country, colonising masculinity and domestic femininity.Bliss is a mythological tale of the beginnings of a transformation of colonial discourse and Australian mythology, into what Freya Mathews calls panspychist engagement and reciprocity. Whereas in Voss, the Romantic encounter is one of colonisation, with Capital extending into the unconquered, in Bliss, it is the Earth Mother that enters the realm of Capital and draws it to her. Although neither offer a synthesis of this dichotomy, the story of colonisation, that is, the story of Australia, is retold, where the 'hell' of the outback is not turned into 'heaven', but into a place of reciprocal relationship between people and place.
Barbara Ghattas, Monash University The country and the city in the plays of Maori dramatist Riwia Brown
I am writing a thesis on Pacific Island literature, and would like to present a paper on my analysis of Maori playwright Riwia Brown and two of her plays; Nga Wahine and Roimata, both of which deal with naive young women who leave their families behind in the country to go and discover the cities of New Zealand. There they meet challenges to do with assimilation, identity and direction. Both women end up accidentally pregnant, whereupon they decide to return to the country. These plays deal with city/country binaries, as well as issues of Maori/Paheka relations. In critiquing these plays, I am particularly interested in the way these women are presented, and what this says about the playwrights concerns about the place of women in postcolonial discourse.
Anna Gould, International Women's Writing Guild The Purposive Way
Unsustainable thoughts and beliefs prevent us from acting on our highest values. My message is that we now require a paradigm shift that will support us to act as a global human family and "Be True to the Earth". Sustainability starts within. The evolution of the self is connected to that of community, culture and the planet. My work aims to raise the consciousness of humanity, with visions that support us to choose a new way forward, taking into account our role as custodians of Earth. "The Purposive Way" is an essay that inspires the remembrance of a deeper sense of purpose and is a call to action on that which we regard as sacred. This talk helps us to address our urgent need to be accountable for who we each are at this crucial juncture in human history. To "Be True to the Earth" is being true to the Self, true to the each other, and reverential about our relationship with Life.
Martin Harrison, UTS The degradation of land and the position of poetry
This talk grows from what I am currently doing in my own poetry. My work is often viewed in the context of a major theme in Australian poetry: to do with land, landscape and self-reflective awareness of places. Critically, I have written about this Australian concern with land, and a reflexive sense of truth in relation to the earth, as one which must inevitably be conditional or subjunctive: this is because Australian "landspeak" cannot be idealised, it cannot be separated out from memories of settlement and invasion and Indigenous histories of country. In the talk, I plan to take this idea further: what would an ecological poetry, mindful of these issues and aware of the systemics at the heart of ecological processes, be like? The themes of land, landscape, and a reflexive sense of place, may not be as self-evidently "ecological" as they superficially appear to be, even when framed within a post-modern sense of object and identity. Has a truly ecological Australian poetry yet to appear?
Chris Headley, Monash University Pandora's Dilly Bag: A Neoclassical Tale of Two Post-Modern Heroes
The paper is concerned with human relationships with the natural world in Australia and New Zealand, particularly in Australia. It creatively looks at these issues with regard to the particular location of my own work as a visual artist in terms of place, time, culture and social contexts. It does this in a critical and reflective way through a counter-modern or postmodern perspective.
Midori Kagawa-Fox, University of Adelaide Are the principle of "Environmental ethics" applicable in Japan?
The principles behind environmental ethics originated in the West and were greatly influenced by American cultural doctrines. Japan has been actively involved in global environmental programs but their practices have been rather obscure to many environmentalists and conservationists in the West, when seen these practices are often controversial. Environmental ethics has given a significant awareness of the importance of environmental issues from the philosophical point of view. However, in practice there is no "one size fits all" as the cultural, religious and social aspects seem to be overlooked. In this paper, I would like to explore the Japanese interpretation of ethics practiced in that country as it is quite different from that in the Western (Christian) countries.
Justin Karol, Monash University Is the current environmental crisis really an environmental problem?
I contend that the environmental crisis is mostly a social, political, educational, cultural, economic, and perhaps most of all, a spiritual problem. So while efforts to restore the balance of nature take the formsof repair or replenishment, the individuals responsible for environmentaldamage have been 'unbalanced' themselves by the various systems mentioned above. I argue that if the worldviews or meanings encouraged by such anthropocentric structures remain, then conventional environmental actions will not be sufficient to stem the tide of degradation. So with the aid of philosophy, spiritual prophets and critical theorists, I hope to challenge and inspire people to consider their own meanings, lifestyles, practices and relationships in terms of sustainability. I will argue for the 'naturalness' of sustainability, and even forward the idea that living sustainably is one of the predicates of spiritual health and happiness.
Jayne Fenton Keane, Griffith University Interspecies Communication, Activism and Poetry
In developing a creative work for my PhD, I undertook a residency at Cornell University's Ornithology Lab, where as poet in residence, I auditioned over 150,000 recordings of marine animal sounds, which were recorded during scientific experiments on animals in captivity and animals in the ocean. In response to this experience I have been considering how to engage in an authentic creative partnership with the natural world and whether this is possible. This session includes multimedia presentation, performance, conversation and theory about interspecies communication, activism and poetic structures derived from the natural world.
James Kirwan, Kansai University On Being True to the Earth
This paper will address the question of to what extent it can be meaningful to speak of being 'true to the earth'. It will examine some of the ways in which such an aspiration manifests itself in current environmentally oriented literary studies and, more particularly, environmental aesthetics, emphasizing how it is often made to stand in contrast to what is called 'the anthropocentric viewpoint'. The paper will argue that the 'earth' thus evoked cannot, by definition, have any real existence, and that aspiration often represents a more profound arrogance than that attributed to anthropocentrism. The paper will conclude by examining some of the ways, traditional to the study of Romanticism, in which this notion of 'truth to' the external world is translated into propositions concerning the observer, and examine to what extent this manoeuvre can render the notion of being 'true to the earth' meaningful.
Jenny Kohn, Monash University Longing to Belong: Judith Wright's poetics of place
This paper explores a strong longing that is exhibited in the work of Judith Wright, the acclaimed Australian poet - the desire to belong to the earth. Wright feels a connection with the place in which she grew up, but is unable to be at one with the earth as she desires. Her poetry reveals feelings of uneasiness and guilt relating to the actions of her ancestors and the historical use to which the land has been put. This paper re-examines several of Wright's most popular poems, poems which deal with the landscape and which have commonly been read as nationalistic. I suggest a new way of reading these poems, which challenges the prevailing interpretation of them and has important implications for the understanding of Wright's feeling of place.
Rebecca Lucas, University of Melbourne An earth-based ethics
An ecophilosophical foundation is necessary for the theory and practice of human rights. Although the implications of an ecophilosophical foundation for human rights will be the emphasis of this paper, it shall be understood as a foundation that advocates for the rights of all life - not only human life. Indeed, the subject of nonhuman rights will be understood as integral to human rights, and a necessary consideration within any serious effort working to understand and help resolve situations characterized by extreme violations of human rights, including military conflict and terrorism.
Louis Magee, Melbourne University Thinking Nietzsche's injunction otherwise (provisional title)
'Be true to the earth' with Friedrich Nietzsche and what one might say in making otherwise of both in a reconstruction with ecology/literature as litter letter(s) and litre. Litter? Why do we use so much paper and print chemicals, let alone the offal of IT machines when Mallarm had the notion that writing might be defunct? We might say, certainly, that he has the correct disposition, but then how so and in relation to the injunction, so designated - 'be true to the earth' when perhaps it is not an injunction only but a recall to the demise of the Nietzschean 'home' and its environs?
Mark Manolopoulos, Monash University Being True to the Earth: From Nietzsche to Derrida to Creation
Without daring to tread into the murky waters of what "being true" could mean for Niezsche, my intention is to link his concern for the earth with another major preoccupation: the gift. Nietzsche's references to the gift recur throughout Zarathustra (including its beginning and end), so it might prove enlightening to consider truthfulness to the earth in terms of truthfulness to creation as a gift. What would it mean to be true to the earth-gift? First of all, we must determine what a gift is. This is where Derrida proves illuminating: he discloses the gift as a problem, a paradox, an aporia - defiantly doublesided or heterogeneous: it is given gratuitously but evokes gratitude; it is marked by both excess and exchange, linearity, and circularity. Hence, if the earth is a gift, our interaction with it would involve a variety of contradictory responses - which is not the case in an age of ecological untruthfulness.
Betsan Martin, University of Canterbury Responsibility, fluidity and the riverine poetry of Hone Tuwhare
With the reference point of Nietzsche's 'be true to the earth' my thoughts moved to consider whether there is sufficient regard for responsibility in Nietzsche's injunction in the current context of environmental degradation. With the need for an ethics of responsibility I turn to two very disparate texts: Luce Irigaray's Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche , and a poem from Aotearoa-New Zealand in the Hone Tuwhare collection Deep River Talk, 'The River is an Island.' In Marine Lover Irigaray takes up the complex position of engaging with Nietzsche in the intimate dialogue of lovers, while also taking a position of critique, because she detects, in Nietzsche's symbolism of the earth and high mountains in Zarathustra , the ressentiment which he so ardently refutes and seeks to transcend. The desire to 'overcome man', that is to overcome the paradigm of mastery which is necessary to become true to the earth, springs from the need to move from the framework of binary opposition to a mode of relationality. In Irigaray's view Nietzsche's respect for the earth is embedded in the solidity which she regards as signifying the solid structures of patriarchal mastery. It lacks the fluidity which she attributes to feminine qualities, the movement and flow of water and the tidal rhythms of the ocean which is governed by the moon. With reference to Irigaray's symbolism of water, this paper will explore the relational qualities that 'becoming true to the earth' invites. The exploration will be informed by thoughts on Responsibility and philosophy of ecology. It will include engagement with indigenous approaches to the earth. Hone Tuwhare's poem has the enchantment of an indigenous eye for symbolism and personification of the natural world.
Kylie Mirmohamadi, La Trobe University Talking About Native Plants
This paper proposes that one of the ways we can be 'true to the earth', is by taking great care in the way in which we talk about the earth, and our interactions with it. One of the most intimate sites of such interaction is the garden; and one of the most talked about areas of gardening in Australia is the native garden. The paper identifies the ways in which being 'Australian', especially in and through the garden, is formulated and represented in recent general release, popular books on native gardening. It suggests that these definitions can be simplistic and reductionist; often conflating 'good' Australianness with a set of convictions and land management practices which have their origins in the values of the Anglophone, environmentally- aware, white middle class. Aboriginal and non-Anglo voices have spoken about the limitations and instability of white Australian identities, and their contested nature; yet 'Australianness' is often discussed in the context of the native garden as if it is a given quantity, that can be easily known, expressed and experienced.
Monica Perera de Moore, Monash University Latin American Gyn/Eco/Logy: Anacristina Rossi's The Crazy Women from Gandoca
The Hispano-American literature that emerges from 1980 onwards accuses a new ecologic responsibility. The purpose of this article is to verify this new environmental narrative, as a reflection of the collective preoccupations that currently circulate in the core of popular Hispano-American societies. Emblematic of this eco- re-appraisal, Anacristina Rossi's The Crazy woman from Gandoca (1992) engages in a re-assessment of traditional linguistic and socio-eco-political norms. Circumnavigating the perennial Latin American polemic regarding the issue of identity, the author overcomes the peril of dichotomies yet simultaneously, she effectively situates her vision of the world within Latin America, to reveal several of the detrimental ecologic aspects contained in the notion of Costa Rican ecotourism.
Paul Morgan, University of Western Sydney Inside or out: Humanity's ambiguous relationship with nature
As an art form, gardening is a vehicle for personal creative expression with the potential to evoke profound psychological responses. For many people gardening is their most satisfying practice of engagement with nature. In Australia, ornamental gardening is also responsible for the introduction of many weeds, and other forms of environmental degradation. This paper uses gardening as a metaphor to explore our paradoxical relationship with nature. Humanity's deep connection with the natural world is manifest in our biological selves - our bodies. However, postmodernism informs us that reality, including the biological world, is culturally constructed, and our encultured selves are often profoundly at odds with nature. The tension between these two aspects can make it difficult to know how to be true to both the earth and ourselves. Perhaps a response which acknowledges the complexities of our relationship with nature might be helpful.
Martin Mulligan, University of Western Sydney Stoking the "the fires": Honouring the Legacy of Judith Wright
A reflection on the recent "Two Fires" festival honouring the legacy of Judith Wright both as a poet and as an activist who was passionately committed to securing Aboriginal rights and to conserving the natural environment.(Provisional abstract.)
Simon Musgrave, Monash University Placename narratives and identity in the north east of Ambon Island
Ambon Island in the Central Maluku region of Eastern Indonesia has a long history of contact with non-indigenous cultures. During the seventeenth century, the Dutch colonizers caused many inland villages on Ambon to relocate to the coast, including a group of villages in the north-eastern corner of the Island: Tulehu, Tengah-tengah and Tial. In these villages, traditional narratives which tell of the origins of the villages are still current. A central feature in these narratives is an account of how the villages came to have their names. None of these narratives mention the European presence or its role in the relocation of the communities. Instead, the narratives seek to construct identities for the communities based on relations to natural phenomena such as bird cries and the sea. This paper examines linguistic aspects of several such narratives to show how ideas of place and identity are imagined in these communities.
Harry Nankin, International College of Professional Photography, Melbourne Towards a Biocentric Photography
This paper arises from a 13 year long project using photography as medium and method in an attempt to uncover an ecological aesthetics. In pursuit of this, I have discarded the camera while using traditional photographic materials on a vast scale in order to reduce the mediation between ecosystem, artist and imaging material. In the past, this has included plein air shadowgrams (camera-less photographs) of forest ("Cathexis," 1993-4) and sea ("The Wave," 1996-7). In the recent work, "Contact" (2002-5), on which I will focus in this presentation, I use translucent film to record a semi-arid woodland deep in the Victorian Mallee. This work is distinguished by its scale, the use of text, the production of a secondary body of palimpsests, and the fact that it could only be imagined in the mind's eye, bringing it closer to traditional painting than conventional photography. Most importantly, "Contact" undertakes a radical reappraisal of the notion of genius loci.
Nataliya Oryshchuk, University of Canterbury"Tolkien cult" as a Post-Soviet Escapist Sub-Culture
The publication of the full translation of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings in Russian (1991-1992) provoked a strong reaction amongst the post-Soviet public, especially young people. The collapse of totalitarianism in the USSR, and the subsequent re-assessment of values, created a so-called "spiritual vacuum". In the post-Communist social and cultural conditions, Tolkien's interpretation Escape and Escapism ("Escape of a Prisoner") looked very appealing. For many young people who grew up during and after the time of "Perestroika" (1986-1991), Tolkien's philosophy and aesthetics helped to regain a sense of natural harmony in the world. Tolkien's enthusiasts created a special form of post-Soviet escapist sub-culture.
Nataliya Oryshchuk, University of Canterbury Fear of Machine: Fight or Flight? Representation of Technology in the Works by neo-Romantic Writer Alexander Grin
In his works Russian neo-Romantic writer Alexander Grin (1880-1932) expressed concern about the repressing influence of technology. He represented all industrial innovations of his time (airplane, car, cinema, gramophone) as a global anti-human power. Notably, Grin described the art of futurism as anti-human art of and for Machines. According to Grin's philosophical concept, the power of rationalism is the power of emptiness/death. However, in his novel Shining World Grin demonstrated his faith into the power of creative human spirit. His protagonist Drud can fly naturally as a bird, in contrast to the idea of mechanized/calculated flight of the airplane. Grin's outlook can be viewed in line with the ideas of Western eco-movements and Modernist literature trends (in particular "fantasy" literature). Also, the character of flying man can be deciphered as Grin's own psychological shield against political and social terror in Russia in the 1920s. In this context Drud represents a flight of human fantasy and spiritual freedom in general, repressed by the dead-like machine of the political power.
Dr Elizabeth Parsons, Deakin University Pets, Lies and Videotape: anthropomorphism and children in The Lion King, Finding Nemo, Brother Bear and Ice Age
Encouraging child audiences to love the animals in these popular films involves an anthropomorphising that entirely desensitises children to any real ecological, or ecocritical reasoning that might otherwise come from such a narrative immersion. Given that these animals are, for the most part, constructed people, why are they disguised as animals? Beyond the possibilities for merchandising with stuffed toys, the political relationship between animals and children speaks to this cross-species translation. This paper employs ecofeminism's reading of the power disparities built into the cultural subordination of both children and animals in order to answer this question in terms of agency. In effect, the lack of agency shared by children and animals (when confronted with adult humanity) is attractively presented in these films so as to promote such modes of oppression. Attending to these messages exposes the dysfunctional effects of this ideology in terms of environmentalism, in particular the synchronicity of the myth of progress with the childhood rite of passage. Within this framework, child audiences positioned to love these animals must simultaneously efface nature and themselves, thereby being co-opted early into belief systems that allow, even demand, the destruction of the planet's ecosystems.
Glen Phillips, Edith Cowan University Palimpsest to Palliative Care: A ficto-critical proposition for the earth lover
My paper will take as its touchstone the wonderful poem, 'The Earth Lover' by Katharine Susannah Prichard, one of our first seriously eco-conscious Australian novelists (Working Bullocks, Coonardoo). From there it will visit the fable of the town mouse and the country mouse as a simulacrum of the long reign of Arcadia as the solace or pastoral retreat from human vanity and oppressive materialism. Inherent in this fable was a belief in the restorative powers of the good earth and the beneficence of Nature. For most of the last century, the vicissitudes of world wars and nuclear armaments shattered romantic delusions of the pastoral. And works like T S Eliot's The Waste Land created strong tendencies toward anti-pastoralism. In my paper I propose to evaluate the impact of one of the most forceful anti pastoralist statements by a contemporary poet, John Kinsella's The Silo. Also I want to compare the parallel rise of the 'ecocritical' movement of Cheryll Glotfelty, et al in the USA with the attempts to create a 'post pastoral critical school in Britain through the work of Terry Gifford and others. Ultimately, and by comparison to the above critics, I want to examine the writerly response to environmental concerns on the part of poets like Kinsella. Adrienne Rich and Sheamus Heaney. For my own part, my work as a 'landscape' poet emerges from the above influences but also from Gaston Blanchard's The Poetics of Space, Giblett's Living with the Earth, Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space and David Summers' Real Spaces. Using some recent published works of my own, I want to propose an alternative to Gifford's 'Post Pastoralism' and 'ecocriticism which I am provisionally calling 'from palimpsest to palliative care: a life after death for the earth lover.'
Perdita Phillips, Edith Cowan University Ordinary Wilderness
At first glance, "Ordinary Wilderness" is an oxymoron. Doing fieldwork in the Kimberley, as part of a PhD project whose rationale is to link scientific fieldwork and artistic walking, the question of how to reinvent non-urban places that are local, emplaced, embodied and contemporary, was central. Also, the field experiences, whilst joyful, were neither epiphanic nor sublime. This led me to reconsider "wildness" as a strategy of acting in a world where nature is contested, and to consider phenomenological approaches to art practice. Using Spencer's (2004) concept of "conversational aesthetics" as a way of transforming the position of a walker from voyeur to conversationalist in the "ebb and flow" of walking art, I ask the question: how might you have a conversational aesthetic with non-verbal/human nature? I propose to discuss "Ordinary Wilderness" by showing a ten-minute extract of my video project followed by a theoretical discussion of the wild.
Emily Potter, University of South Australia Ecological Crisis and Australian Literary Poetics
Scholars in the eco-humanities contend that the greatest impediments to environmental change at a time of ecological crisis are cultural, and yet the fictional stories that circulate in our society are often considered ecologically disengaged. This paper responds to suggestions that contemporary Australian fiction, in particular, is failing to take up these concerns. It suggests that the kind of representations that are familiar in environmental discourse - of a world condemned to environmental decline and looming catastrophe - restrict the role of fiction in an environmental ethics. If we look outside this paradigm, however, the possibilities for Australian literature as a site of ecological engagement open up. This paper will explore these alternate poetics that replace an apocalyptic imaginary with one of non-linear relations and connectivity, and consider this in terms of the ethical imperative to 'be true to the earth'.
Gary Presland, University of Melbourne The land as actant: Being true to the earth in the settlement of the Port Phillip region (provisional title)
Consideration oflandscape and human/nature relationships can be a useful tool in attempting to understand the early history of European settlement in the Port Phillip region. The landscapes of this area had specific, culturally-derived meanings - of vastly different kind - for both resident Koorie clans and European settlers. How each of these groups related to local landscapes was a major factor in their way of life. We may well ask what it would have meant, then, for either of these groups to 'be true to the Earth'. This paper introduces another actor, the land itself, of which we might ask the same question. The environments encountered by Europeans from 1803 onward were shaped mostly by forces of enormous duration. It is suggested that these landscapes and the local natural history played a major role in the way that European settlement in general, and the development of Melbourne in particular, took place.
Greg Pritchard, Deakin University Salt-lakes and swamps: Michael Meehan's Australian environments
The representation of landscape has been an important part of Australian literature, and the imagined Australian character has partly been constructed relative to interactions with the natural world. Often, the land has been framed against some idealised European landscape, and depicted in anthropomorphised terms as harsh and unforgiving. Michael Meehan's first two novels, The Salt of Broken Tears and Stormy Weather, have rural Victoria as a setting and character. Though both are set in the Mallee, one depicts a world of heat and dust and salt, whereas the other is an account of one day in the small town of Towaninnie on which the rain is unceasing. A major symbol of the first is the salt-lake, and of the second, the fecund greenness of the Rabbiter's swamp. This paper will examine the way these two disparate environments reflect on the novels' characters and influence the narrative, and what the novels suggest about Australians' relationship with the environment.
Iris Ralph, University of Texas Patrick Wright's Riders in the Chariot: a green flaw in the crystal glass
My paper is an ecocritical investigation Patrick White's novel, Riders in the Chariot. I argue that White gives to us in the character of Mary Hare, one of the four principal characters and so-called luminaries, a vision of a world in which the human does not subordinate the non-human world but rather treats the non-human as its own self. I argue further that through this character, White implicitly or self-consciously critiques the anthropocentrism of the Coleridgean, Romantic imagination. The Romantic imagination, as White represents it in his novel, in the anthropocentric conceit of Xanadu, the estate that Mary Hare inherits from her father Norbert Hare, untowardly elevates non-physical or metaphysical realms at the expense of reverence for so-called non-transcendent, objective or material reality, or "foul existence"(as Hegel calls such reality). Mary Hare does little to halt the slow crumbling of the massive estate, and eventually abandons it altogether.
Douglas Reid, University of Canterbury 21st Century Mystics: Ecology and Identity in a Postcolonial Land
Contemporary Pakeha 'ecologically committed' literature is loaded with moments in which an everyday engagement with landscape spirals into a transcendent, near spiritual encounter. These moments of numinous connection between the human, animal and plant worlds, embodied in the culture of popular environmentalist discourse and practice, are held to dissolve, at least momentarily, the traditional Western divide between ecologies and people, nature and culture. In the postcolonial Pakeha context, such encounters reveal the possibility of naturalisation or indigenisation for Pakeha through an ontologically and culturally meaningful immersion in the land. Pakeha are frequently vilified as 'wreckers of a mythical, ancient world that has no need of them' and portrayed as being 'spiritually fragile', torn away from their roots and ancestry in the wake of colonial transplantation. Conversely, I will argue that by preserving, giving voice to and mapping such experiences these texts attempt to craft a tangible sense of the naturalised presence of Pakeha in Aotearoa / New Zealand. Given that the relationship between Pakeha and land is a central theme in Pakeha literature and the wider culture, a theme at once troubling and highly productive, moments of transcendent encounter, in which writers 'immerse themselves in [the land] like mystics', generate an alternative mode of insight into a critical aspect of postcolonial Pakeha identity. Through an analysis of the writing of both contemporary and colonial-era Pakeha nature writers, including Geoff Park, Christine Dann, Monte Holcroft and Michael King, I will discuss how, for many Pakeha, the land is the locus of an emergent postcolonial spirituality.
Roslyn Joy Ricci, University of Adelaide The Power of Poetry: Transversing Time and Space
The poetry of Han-shan, Tang dynasty (618-909) alternative lifestyle advocate, speaks to contemporary Western societies. Whether re-created in English by Gary Snyder, bioregional ecologist and poet, or Burton Watson, renowned translator of East Asian Buddhist texts, Han-shan's poems challenge present-day readers to follow the edict of Nietzsche's Zarathustra to 'remain true to the earth with the power of your virtue.' Snyder and Watson permeate temporal and spatial boundaries to allow contemporary entre to Han-shan's insights through the transcultural genre of re-created classical Chinese poetry. Interpreting the Chan (Zen) thought underlying Han-shan's poetry with sinological eyes, Watson tests Western eco-philosophy. Snyder, an outspoken advocate of bioregional environmentalism derived from indigenous ecological practice and mountaineering, interprets Han-shan's texts with the eyes of a poet. Ultimately, interpretation lies in reader reception of the poems; how the reader interprets them in the light of their individual spiritual and environmental sensitivities.
Kate Rigby, Monash University Consuming Canberra
This paper takes as its point of departure (and perpetual return), Marion Halligan's literary representation of the cultural ecology of food in her Canberra novel, The Point. Designed by Walter Burley Griffin and constructed at a time when Australia's national identity was closely tied to a particular concept of landscape (the 'bush' or 'outback'), Canberra is a city that was intended to accommodate the 'country' to the 'town', and vice versa. However, only recently has there been an attempt to formally acknowledge, not only the ways in which, prior to pastoral settlement, this landscape had been shaped by millennia of Aboriginal inhabitation, but also the connections that some Aboriginal people still maintain with their ancestral country in this area. Simultaneously, awareness has grown of the grave ecological consequences of inappropriate land-use practices and of the need for non-indigenous Australians to develop new ways of relating to the natural environments of this continent. The question that I will address here, with respect to Canberra in particular, concerns the tension between reconciliation, both Aboriginal and ecological, and cosmopolitanism, in the context of an increasingly multicultural and globalized society.
William Rollins and Lisa Bilsky, University of Canterbury Between a Rock and a Green Place: Anti-Semitic Nature and the Dilemma of a German Jews in the Nineteenth Century
In our presentation we want to draw attention to the dilemma that faced German Jews in the nineteenth century if they sought to express their interest in the environment. Jews faced a special burden in this regard because they were consistently portrayed not just as city-dwellers, but also as overly "materialistic" people who were incapable of any deeper connection to nature - and as such, the antagonists of all "true Germans," defined in the intellectually predominant national-Romantic tradition as idealistic and nature-loving. This particular constellation of discourses left German Jews in a Catch-22 situation: if they demonstratively embraced German nature they could be accused by the Right of exaggeration or even fakery, while if they refrained from doing so they risked antagonizing friends by appearing to give German culture the cold shoulder. This fraught terrain is explored by focusing on works by two different German writers, Wilhelm Raabe and Heinrich Heine In the time allotted to the paper the ultimate significance and wider causes of the "green anti-Semitism" that we have identified can only be sketched out, but deserve to be mentioned nonetheless. We believe, for instance, that the unfriendly scrutiny to which Jews were subjected can be understood as a scapegoating response to the stresses of modernization; in the long run it contributed greatly to a growing social and cultural divide between majority Germans and German Jews, and thus helped prepare the way for the dissimilation processes of the Holocaust. This bitter history must also give pause to anyone who would revive the heritage of Romanticism for today's environmental struggles.
Deborah Rose, ANU Bobby's face, my love
This work-in-process is divided into three parts:
- Their failure/our anguish. Scholars from a range of perspectives have discussed 20th century intellectuals' failure adequately to encounter the Holocaust. Here I work with a failure that for me highlights much of the violence and many of the broken promises of the 20th century.
- His disgrace/other faces. I suggest that Coetzee's endlessly disturbing novel Disgrace can be read as a parable of the failure of philosophy (1). Into this parable I bring Old Tim Yilngayarri of Yarralin, and his dog-centric story of the human face as well as dog's making of the more private attractions.
- God's allies/our rejection. Following in the footsteps of Levinas, I offer an alternative reading of Exodus 11:7 and 22:30. This analysis takes me into repetitive injury, as well as love and blessing, and I offer a speculative reflection on the beauty of a dog's caress.
Doug Russell, Curtin University of Technology"In Proper Perspective": Nature, Society, and the Significance of Popular Science
Sociologist of science Bruno Latour, in his polemical-theoretical works We Have Never Been Modern (1993) and Politics of Nature (2004), has advanced a pragmatist critique of the separation of the categories "social"(or "political") and "natural." From T. H. Huxley onward, a politically reflexive brand of popular science has foregrounded evolutionary and ecological perspectives and critiqued the social implications of the sciences. In response to Latour's injunction to look again with different eyes in order to see the networks that have always tied the social and the natural, I argue that this is work already performed by this important popular science discourse. I examine the interrelation of the social and natural in ecologist Francis Ratcliffe's influential Australian popular text Flying Fox and Drifting Sand (1938), its representation of scientific and lay knowledge, and its relation to the popularization of ecological concepts by, among others, Ratcliffe's former lecturer Julian Huxley.
Robert Savage, Monash University Are Rats Comrades? Some Readings of a Question in Orwell
'Are rats comrades?' asks Old Major in Animal Farm. The matter is put to a vote and affirmed with an overwhelming majority. But the evidence of Orwell's other writings is by no means so conclusive. What does it mean to declare one's solidarity with a rat, or to refuse it? And why should the question concern environmentalists, for many of whom all animals may well be equal, but some are more equal than others? My paper will seek to address these issues by pursuing the rat as it scurries its way from the trenches of Catalonia to Room 101.
Lorraine Shannon, UTS Can Gardening be true to the Earth?
Francis Bacon opened his famous essay 'On Gardening' with the words 'God Almighty first planted a garden and indeed it is the purest of human pleasures'. This paper explores the relationship between pleasure and reality principles, how they operate within the context of gardening and how this may relate to an ethical human embeddedness in nature.
Sylvie Shaw, Monash University Sustaining the Sea, Sustaining Ourselves
The sea surrounds us yet sea as natural environment plays little role in research about the human connection to the natural world. Yes, some authors like Richard Nelson embrace the Arctic surf but in Australia, the ocean laps the shore, our hearts and our imagination but is limited in research studies. This paper addresses my current research (work in progress) on people's relationship to the sea. Though interviews with marine biologists, ecologists, educators, surfers and activists, the research explores the interviewees' passion for conserving the ocean as well as outlining their perceptions about the major problems facing Australia's marine and coastal environment and what they are doing to protect it.
Paul Starr, Department of the Environment and Heritage"There's something different about global warming": Culture and climate change
In a recent contribution to the debate in the USA over the "death of environmentalism", Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope argued that environmentalists have found it difficult to mobilize public support around global warming issues -- even in times and places when public outrage over issues like mercury poisoning or clear-cutting has been boiling over. There is something different about global warming. This paper examines the characteristics of this claimed difference from a cultural studies perspective. The paper argues that the development of alternative responses to climate change needs to proceed from a standpoint of historical, scientific and cultural awareness. Cultural responses to climate change, from Michael Crichton's thriller State of Fear to the film The Day After Tomorrow, offer crucial material for initiating deeper debates and behaviour changes. The paper argues that contesting cultural contributions and responses to climate change is a key task for environmentalism. Indeed, it is arguable that the heart of what makes climate change different from many other environmental problems is the extent of the demands for change it places on culture and behaviour. The paper concludes with a discussion of the challenges involved in adding cultural issues to debates characterised by political, scientific and economic discourses.
Rupert Summerson, University of Melbourne"Howling emptiness" - revealing wilderness and aesthetic values in Antarctic literature
Polar literature, especially that devoted to Antarctica, is a well-defined sub-genre of travel writing and collectors of polar books pay fabulous prices for first editions of such classics as "South" by Ernest Shackleton. Amid the heroics and privations, the character of Antarctica was revealed through these books as being at once hostile but incredibly beautiful. "It was glorious, a flood of golden light in the midnight sun", wrote Edward Wilson at Cape Adare in 1902. Modern Antarctic literature, often more concerned with science than exploration, still reveals a fascination for "its howling emptiness ... for which wilderness is far too tame a word". In 1998, perhaps recognising these special qualities, the Antarctic Treaty nations ratified the Madrid Protocol, which includes protection of the wilderness and aesthetic values of Antarctica among its measures. This paper describes an investigation of polar literature and its potential contribution to implementation of the Madrid Protocol.
Mark Tredinnick and John Cameron, University of Western Sydney Teaching the Stones to Talk
Responding to the conference's theme, and stealing Annie Dillard's suggestive phrase as our title, we-a lyric essayist-ecocritic-poet and a geologist-scholar-sculptor-propose a paper that we'd like to present in dialogue, for that is the way the subject came up between us. What we want to explore are the insights and shortcomings of two modes of apprehending and expressing the earth, the rocks, in particular: the artistic witness of the poet, nature writer and sculptor, on the one hand; and the scientific observance of the field geologist, on the other. How does each (the artist and the geologist) let the world be the world; how does each tell the truth about the earth-its manifest, implicit, lost and immanent pieces? What are the disciplines necessary for nature poetry and for geology; for lyric apprehension of the world and geological interrogation? What can the poet teach the geologist, and the geologist the poet? Are nature-oriented lyric art and geology, deep down, the same art? Are we, in other words, looking for the same thing-the wild and necessary music of terrain, its past lives, its dreams and ambitions, its deep-seated, implicit and often fractured structures, the poem that makes it all cohere-in different ways? Or do geology's purpose (which is, among other things, to make a map and tell a history of a terrain so that miners may know where to sink their mines) and the techniques it employs to that end make it something altogether alien from the artist's metrical and kinaesthetic engagement with the way things are just here? If the world is to be a world in which we can all belong; if it is to endure; and if the stones are to talk, what we must accomplish-scientific and poetic witness alike-is listening of a deep order. What the stones need is for us to tell the truth about them. And there are many forms, of course, in which we might attempt that listening and telling-the poem, the lyric essay, the geological map, the sculpture. If we listen well enough, what we may also discern and elaborate is our own song of being on the earth. Each of us will speak out of his own field work, sometimes in similar landscapes (Wyoming, for example; and the sandstones of the Blue Mountains); and we will reflect on how this question, which arose out of an assertion of Mark's in a draft of his dissertation, which John was supervising, has led us deeper into our artistic and scholarly practices of witness of the earth. It will be our argument that the geologist has much to teach the poet and vice versa: what's called for is a bit of cross-disciplinary listening.
Juliana Venning, Council member RSNZ, Canterbury He papa atawhai nga toime te whenua - Conserve arts and the land
As one who both writes and creates art in varied forms I have long been interested in their interrelation. Our environment is a milieu made up of visual, auditory, sensory and literary perceptions. Preserving the environment and making people more aware of the diversity and worth is possible through using varied media to involve. I will use specific tribal patterns in geographically different locations. Just so birds adapt different plumage and habitats according to environment. Painting a bird from a photograph can give the viewer of the painting a more intense, critical view of that species than looking at the real bird or photograph. Elements are selected out/in. Just so a conference paper. One selects message and medium. Ideas take flight often because of art, thus, Beckett wrote, inspired in part, by German expressionist art, Waiting For Godot. Interpreting science through art is a way of reaching a more visually literate audience, of conveying a message without language.
Maya Ward, CERES The Long Yarra Walk - a modern day pilgrimage
The Long Yarra Walk was a modern day pilgrimage that I undertook with three companions along the Yarra River from mouth to source. Taking three weeks, and following the route of a Wurundjeri Songline, it was inspired by the worldwide tradition of sacred journeys. It was a powerful and poetic way to experience my home; it combined the personal soul journey with a media event, community activism, education about catchments for local schoolkids - successfully sharing love of place in the process. Lao Tzu said that to return to the source of things is to find your own true happiness - this can be understood literally, as I explore how our body's engagement with rivers, mountains, paths and birds unlocks reciprocity between our self and the earth. I suggest that by following a literal path, one that has been walked for thousands of years, we can begin to create links into understanding the unwritten history of country.
Lesley Williams, University of Adelaide Heart of Darkness - or - you can't play Pooh-Sticks, here, any more
What happens when light is lost? When sound disappears? What happens in the silence? What are the maps of the ear? Rhythm and movement abound but can we hear? The creeks that run through this valley have been pushed into concrete pipes, covered by roads and buildings, draining through darkness. It still has the sound of water, echoing in the dark perhaps, not as its former self, but as the self it has now become. All it would know, if knowing could occur, is that it is still the creek, still arising from the earth, still from the same pattern of seasons, rhythms of earth, but silenced by a darkness it cannot escape, just at this point, just in this place. Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, considers the universe as cosmic house, aspects of its walls and boundaries imagined/ delineated/ discovered 'when [he speaks] the image sincerely' (50). Nietzsche says, 'be true to the earth'. Perhaps speaking the image sincerely is one aspect of 'being true'. Machinery roars through darkness filled with artificial light, the shouts of men, using night as day. Trees disappear, one by one; chain-sawing, log-chipping, leaf-mulching, stump-munching. Trees that showed their tops above the town yesterday are gone almost without trace this morning, and owls note their passing in long hoots exchanged across the dawning hillsides. There is one seed of hope, of virtue (Nietzsche); one aspect of the earth that insists upon its presence, although its image has been pushed beneath the surface; thought deed idea of the deed (Nietzsche); an inescapable confrontation with the contours of earth. Now, wetlands are constructed to take the underflow of storm water, creeks and effluent. It is a place for birds, and frogs; wildlife and humans alike seek its life, its seasons, its sounds, its underlying silence.
Tom Wilson, University of Western Australia Species-Centric Ecocriticism for Change: What should we make of the popularity of pastoral in the urban twenty-first century?
More and more people become city-dwellers. The United Nations predicts that by 2050 there will be more people living in cities than now live on the whole earth. With less and less people living in close contact with the land the ground has become ripe - excuse the pun - for the writing of pastoral, that genre which classically represents human accommodation on the earth. As Peter Marinelli writes, pastoral is a genre which arises only when an original beauty has been lost. Relying on recent work from evolutionary psychology, I will argue that in important senses Peter Jackson's recent Lord of the Rings film trilogy, filmed in the wilds of New Zealand, is a narrative structure which is deeply appealing to modern Westerners with their increasingly urban patterns of habitation.
Lisa Wong, University of Canterbury Theme/Film Tour: The Disappearing of Illusion into Integral Reality Presented with a postscript by Adam Lam, University of Canterbury
This paper tracks the proactive steps taken by the New Zealand Government, to encourage foreign companies (especially those from Hollywood) to film in New Zealand locations and to promote New Zealand as a fantasised tourist destination (the Middle-earth, Mt Fuji doubled, etc.). It argues, in light of Baudrillard's elaboration on how Disneyland Parks function in the postmodern hyperreal signification, that New Zealand (and, arguably, all other contemporary tourist destinations) has not only become a giant theme park but also achieved a new identity. Following this argument, be that identity called Middle-earth or Post-New-Zealand, it is a "purified and simplified" cultural construct out of, and at the same time disappearing into, the integral 'real' New Zealand. Extensively examining various government, industrial and organisational media releases and correspondences, critically taking the advantage of Internet resources and communications, and innovatively exploring a number of images of film locations and New Zealand tourist publicities, the paper also unconventionally features a postscript at the beginning and a preview at the end.