Introduction
The idea of this project is to build here a Landscape & Memory site containing some new poems on landscape, some responses to Simon Schama's book, Landscape & Memory and some related writing from Liam Davison, myself and others. I was surprised to tind that some of the ideas in Schama's book are similar to some I am working on now in my own poetry so I intend this page to be something of an ongoing project related to my current writing. I'm not exactly sure where this is going to lead but it might become a kind of online poem in progress with some the sources just a click away.
The Project
The aim of the project is to bring together some of the disparate ideas in some of the books I have been reading along with my own ideas into a ongoing poetry project on landscape, but that may change as it grows. I'm not sure yet whether the project will be a long poem, a series of poems, a mixture of prose and poetry or perhaps this web site itself. I don't know whether this is the plan for a new book or if this is the book. I'll know more as it comes about. The poems will be shuffled around until I find a shape that works.
The illustration on the left from
Schama's book is of a dance on a giant redwood tree in California. I've got a picture of
my daughters dancing on the sawn off stump of a giant pine we cut down in our back yard,
gleeful and triumphant at the death of the pine monster. It reminds me too of the
flowering gum in the back of my father's house [pictured below left]. It was a beautiful
tree, and he built the outside sun-deck around it. Later though he began sawing bits off
it, worried that it would fall on the house, or block the guttering with its leaves. The
picture below shows the misshapen hulk of the tree looking like a totem pole adorned with
the sacrificial heads of ferns. There's another tree too I think of in this context. When
the children were younger I took them to an Australian animated film called Fern Gully.
It was a bit like The Little Mermaid with an environmental theme. In this film was
an evil tree called the hexus tree and after the film in the darkening carpark a strange
tree there reminded them of this tree from the movie. For years afterwards the tree was
the hexus tree, a strange clotted looking sprouting thing. Recently we arrived at the
movies to see the tree had been cut down. It was sad in a way.
Schama's book is divided
into three basic sections, Wood, Water and Rock and, without diminishing the complexity of
his arguments one of his basic contentions is that, 'Even the landscapes that we suppose
to be most free of our culture may turn out, on closer inspection, to be its product' (p.
9) and 'Landscape and Memory has been built around such moments of recognition as
this, when a place suddenly exposes its connection to an ancient and peculiar vision of
the forest, the mountain or the river. A curious excavator of traditions stumbles over
something protruding above the surface of the commonplaces of contemporary life. He
scratches away, discovering bits and pieces of a cultural design that seem to elude
coherent reconstructions but which leads him deeper into the past. Each of the chapters
that follow might be thought of as an excavation, beginning with the familiar, digging
down through layers of memories and representations towards the primary bedrock, laid down
centuries or even millenia ago, and then working up again toward the light of contemporary
recognition.' (pp. 16-17)
It is troubling writing in a country that has only been settled by Europeans for just over two hundred years to hear Schama talk of 'millenia' and 'ancient' and the temptation is to write off the Australian landscape as not having had time to be mythologised. The obvious rebuttal to that view is the Aboriginal view of the landscape; the original Australians whose views of landcape are intrinsic to their views of themselves.
Some of this came to me again quite forcefully in an article about the Australian novelist Nicholas Jose (Australian - Good Weekend - July 12, 1997) which spoke about Jose's relationship with Schama and how Schama's ideas apply to Australia. Jose comments in the article that:
'What struck me about Landscape and Memory is that the first sentence refers to the role of fire in Australia, but I don't think Australia is mentioned again because the Australian landscape challenges Simon's basic thesis quite profoundly - the Australian landscape is not mapped by memory entirely or simply, and not our memory.
'His thesis is that any landscape is read and appreciated through the cutlural and historical memory the people bring to it. That's true in Australia, but what are those memories? What is that history here? It's the Aboriginal history and memories, and maybe the presence of Asian visitors to the country from way back, and then its layers of Europeans and others since, all in a complex and contested relationship.
'So that when someone goes out and looks at Uluru, it's seeing something of a complexity and scale that defies anything in Landscape and Memory - and that excites me. I was determined to get them [Schama and his wife, Americian scientist Ginny Papiaoannou] here, to go to Uluru, which they did on this trip [the couple visited Austrlia in March, 1997, staying with Jose] and they were blown away.'
Recently I visited Bairnsdale, in the south-east of Victoria, on
the Mitchell River. There, at the edge of an adventure playground for children, is an old
gum tree with an elongated scar cut a very long time ago. The Aborigines would cut such
pieces of wood away for constructing canoes, shields or carrying implements. Such a
tangible and living reminder of an earlier landscape.
- The other rebuttal to the arguement that Schama's arguments of ancient myths and archetypes not being valid in Australia is that we transport our culture and we transport our myths. We are largely a European society still and we still carry (cling to?) our cultural memories. We don't have to journey far here to see the naming of the places and their calling up of other places in other countries: Arthur's Seat is the tallest point on the Mornington Peninsula where I live, the Grampians, Brighton, Sandringham, St Kilda, many suburbs of Melbourne.
As stated above, this is an ongoing project with no fixed endpoint. I don't think it is an historical or geographical project, though I will provide links to such material if it seems useful; the original aim was to make it a creative site roughly following Schama's divisions; Wood, Water, Rock, and see where we end up. Now, however, I'm not sure that those divisions will work for me and the water poems keep bubbling to the surface of it all. I welcome your feedback.
Warrick Wynne
