When you trace anything, it brings up everything
Miriam McGarry on writing Tasmania
Many narratives of connection to landscape (or protection of it) are predicated on ownership of land and home. It is a sense of authenticity that is linked to possession: belonging though belongings. What does it mean to write about place, without extracting from it, or owning it? What deceptions underpin the stories we tell, and how do we benefit from them?
Trawling YouTube, I clicked on a recorded interview between nature writers Robert Macfarlane and Barry Lopez from 2019. The pair were discussing their craft, and briefly explored ways to write landscape that wasn’t ‘a harvesting of the natural world for meaning, in a way that is eventually a form of extraction and conversion’.
It was a short exchange, but it stuck with me. How could you avoid mining the world for personal gain when writing about place? How to bypass the temptation to use the landscape to amass cultural capital, or cultivate a particular identity? How to skip past the temptation of creating narrative shortcuts, serving up digestible – but ultimately dishonest – metaphors?
Switching screens and scrolling through my own Instagram account, I noticed plenty of clunky metaphors on display. Blundstones nonchalantly tucked next to a posy of flowers, roadside blackberry picking, sprigs of spiral gum in a jar placed next to a pile of books. Carefully showing how authentic, engaged with the environment, and ‘Tasmanian’ I was.
Between the boots and the berries, my online presence was trying to create a short-cut – allowing a particular version of place to stand in for an identity. I had refused to wear Blundstones as a teenager, but by my late 20s, I found myself attempting to connect with an artist in Iceland over our matching Tasmanian footware. The boots now had the international ‘streetware’ tick of approval, and I wanted to highlight my authenticity. I wanted to perform the Tasmanian brand.
Trading on Tasmanian identity as a commodity is something organisations such as Airbnb and Brand Tasmania explicitly undertake. They establish a particular vocabulary of norms that are recognisable, replicable and accessible. These tropes convey a fixed sense of place: of organic roadside vegetables, ‘affordable’ properties and freshly churned butter.
Sometimes I jokingly called this ‘peak Tasmanian’ – but this imagery is whitewashed of the inequality of access to these celebrated Tasmanian experiences, and the conditions that created and perpetuate this inequity. By employing fixed markers of place, the relationship becomes commodified and prescriptive, and denies multiple ways for people to relate to the environment. Tourism imagery and narratives have helped to manufacture an exclusionary and invented nostalgia, for a history that never existed and cannot be recreated.
Extracting ownership
This essay isn’t about undermining or belittling the immense and often transcendent beauty of lutruwita/Tasmania. And for many of my friends, it is honest and accurate to reflect on a childhood of worn-through boots, chicken coops, and baskets of plums. But I am interested in questioning the integrity of the stories I tell about myself, the intent behind these vignettes, and how I use place to tell them.
Extractive industries, like mining, forestry and fracking, and extractive practices, such as exploiting workers and dispossessing people from their land, might seem a world away from my Instagram account. But I am suspicious that the narratives of place I embed in my bushwalking photos and posies of wattle (and that marketing agencies structure into tourism campaigns) are just different examples of the same extractive modes.
Extractive industries are built on what Raj Patel and Thomas Moore call ‘cheap natures’. This concept describes the way in which production in the modern economy is frequently based on a series of unpaid costs. The viability of industries is reliant on ‘putting nature to work’, enabled by an approach that distances ourselves from the environment, and a practice that creates externalities elsewhere (such as polluting a river without responsibility for the ecological impacts). Extractive writing can be seen as a form of putting nature to work and using metaphorical short-cuts – often in order to promote a particular identity, and then to translate that identity into a sense of ownership.
Through cheap natures, value is created (and taken) through non-reciprocal relationships to place. And this value can then be converted to power and ownership: both of the stories and the material environment.
Looping back to Instagram – in her recent memoir Real Estate, author Deborah Levy writes about the how the presentation of identity is often intertwined with ownership.
Look at our country cottages with their tangle of pink climbing roses. Look at the lake we made from natural springs… Look at our dining table and its constellation of chairs, look at the art on our walls, our pergola, our salad bowls and oriental poppies, our Victorian porcelain and wild-flower meadows. Look at this slice of buttered toast next to the modernist lamp. Look! Look at you looking on Instagram.
Reading this, I think of cans of Cascade Blue I’ve documented next to a slice of homemade pie on an enamel plate, atop a floral tablecloth. The way friends from Melbourne and Sydney used to jokingly ask if I was secretly paid by Tourism Tas to sell the dream island life.
I remember a viral Vanity Fair article, where the author interrogated the utopian life of Byron Bay lifestyle bloggers, as sold to followers by their Instagram pages. The article contrasts the freedom of these ‘nomadic’ Instagrammers in search of utopia with Australia’s draconian immigration policies and the dispossession of the Bundjalung people from their land. The bloggers didn’t create these conditions, but they benefit from them. And their Instagram stories continue to entrench the narratives of ‘white, ahistorical, neoliberal utopia of the imagination’ from which they profit.
An initial cheap response was to feel a bit smug reading about the linen-clad Byron Bay bloggers, until I understood that I was playing with the same Instagram algorithms at a smaller scale. The online reach might have been different, but the dance between promoting a particular identity through place and the subsequent conversion of that identity to ownership was the same.
Many narratives of connection to landscape (or protection of it) are predicated on ownership of land and home. It is a sense of authenticity that is linked to possession: belonging though belongings. What does it mean to write about place, without extracting from it, or owning it? What deceptions underpin the stories we tell, and how do we benefit from them?
Allowing matter to be itself, utterly itself
For Macfarlane and Lopez, a writing practice can avoid the temptation of narrow narratives by exploring both matter and metaphor. Macfarlane describes Lopez’ approach as one that combines metaphor and materials, by ‘allowing the otherness of the encounters to be absolutely respected’. The writing does not shy away from myth and meaning-making, but does so by drawing honestly, accurately and respectfully from the landscape. Writing like this helps reveal histories, challenge existing narratives, and construct different futures.
Closer to home, examples of non-extractive methods are evident in Trawlwoolway artist Julie Gough’s work. In her piece My country is out of my price range, Gough reminds the viewer of the dispossession of land in lutruwita/Tasmania, and how intergenerational transfer has rendered land inaccessible to the first custodians of country. Her research is forensic, unearthing and reclaiming. She describes the multiple narratives of place as told through materials and knowledge:
As a collector, I seek objects and knowledge that sits on the periphery, pieces that have been discarded by many snippets through time that suggest alternative stories that are anathema to mainstream perspectives.
By using the fragmentary and almost lost, I am hoping to suggest the magnitude, complexity and the sheer number of stories that do presently or may shortly lie beyond our earthly realm, informed and replicated by those surviving.
The raw materials Gough documents require no metaphor to create meaning. The bluntness of the fences and gates captured in The Gathering show the private estates of the island, and details of the Black War which facilitated this ownership. The video work Driving Black Home documents the artist traveling through country. The screen is captioned by the names of 3000 individuals who benefited, and whose families continue to benefit, from land grants from colonial authorities. As James Boyce writes, her work ‘never takes a short-cut.’
Through archival research and geographic examination, Gough exposes myths of the past that have resulted in misconceptions and deliberately deceptive stories of place. And in clearly documenting the historic and ongoing dispossession of Aboriginal Tasmanian people from land, she removes the opportunity for misleading metaphor. Her work pin-points the exact moments of extraction and conversion of land and culture into ownership.
Writing non-extractively about place requires accounts of what has happened in the landscape, what continues to happen in, through and with place – and who it serves. A friend of mine (who is wise enough not to use Instagram) reflected on her visit to Gough’s retrospective exhibition at TMAG. She explained to me, ‘When I think of the title of Tense Past, I also instinctively think about tense present and tense future. And then how an extractive model for place cannot actually ever hold the full scale and depth of lived and known experience. And that this is its inherent deficiency: but also a dangerous and destructive blind spot.’
Non-extractive writing contains both the history of place, allows space for multiple and unfixed experiences, and doesn’t try to erase conflict. Extractive writing is limited through its use of derivative tropes that sanitise complexities; and destructive stories that become abstracted and separate from place. Gough’s work reminds us that the stories of the island are not abstract or neutral, and of the violence embedded in the narratives we continue to promote. That, as Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang write, ‘decolonization is not a metaphor’, but the active process of ‘the repatriation of Indigenous land and life’. That stolen land is tense present.
Reciprocal landscapes
How then do we develop non-extractive metaphors to describe lutruwita/Tasmania, when we have contested material histories and narratives of place? Writing non-extractively offers a way to trace the history of a place through material movements, to create more accurate and honest accounts. Critical research into (traditionally understood) extractive industries patches together the often-abstracted relationship between landscapes of extraction, and their environmental, cultural and human impact. Writer Paul Cleary follows the trail from materials at mine sites to their conversion into CEO bonuses, as well as the legal conditions that facilitate these transitions. Cleary connects the threads to expose how mining profits created on land ‘protected’ by native title are distributed between corporations and traditional owners and how the creation of abalone licences prior to Aboriginal people being recognised as citizens in 1967 has excluded First Nations fishers from benefiting from this lucrative industry. Tracing and unearthing bring stories to the surface.
Like the link between industry and Instagram, the connection between a Tasmanian Christmas seafood platter and extractive narratives might seem like a leap. But the marketing imagery of abundant plates of Tasmanian oysters, lobster and abalone is absent of the environmental impact of their farming; who benefits from the industry; and who is able to enjoy the feast. Who is cropped out of the tourism image, and what impacts on waterways are zoomed over? By tracing the factory-farmed chicken heads fed to farmed salmon and the lineages of who could access an abalone licence, an unearthing and restorative writing practice can challenge established fictions of place.
Letting the land tell a story is another way to challenge established narratives. This approach is evident in the scholarship of historian James Boyce, who places the physical conditions of the environment in the centre of his book, Van Diemen’s Land. He employs the material qualities of the land to argue against a whitewashed history of European exceptionalism in conquering the ‘harsh and forbidding’ landscape. Through documenting the ‘matter’ of place, he unsettles established nation-building stories. Boyce writes,
The fact that protein-rich shellfish were there for the taking, that wallaby and kangaroo could be killed with nothing more than a hunting dog, and that abundant fresh water and a mild climate made travel by foot relatively easy, does change a story.
Boyce describes the book as a work of environmental history, ‘not because it explores how convict settlers changed the environment but because its primary interest is how the environment changed them’. Writing place is about reflecting on how the landscape makes its mark on us – and is not separate from us.
Historically, nature and humans have been framed as distinct from each other. This has helped enable the production of ‘cheap natures’, but also – on a more tangible level – the well-marketed tale of ‘untouched wilderness’. The kind of ‘wilderness’ that Blundstones are photographed walking through, water is bottled from, and airports display in evocative photos. While the concept of wilderness has often been employed as a means to protect the environment from extractive industries, it has also historically been used to describe land that has the potential to be converted into profit.
The concept of ‘pristine wilderness’ insinuates a history of emptiness, which simultaneously erases people and their relationship with the environment. Dr Emma Lee, marine scientist and Trawlwulwuy woman, identifies how the language of wilderness erases historic land management by Aboriginal people, and denies ongoing relationships with country. The material history is ignored in order to tell a particular national story. Lee explains to Jess Cockerill:
I despise that term wilderness … [it’s] an old Judeo-Christian term which means that the evil hasn’t been removed from a place yet … Wilderness prevents people from having that relationship, that kinship with country … actually it’s a colonising technique. I believe in restoration, yes, of course … but don’t pretend we’re trying to create this pristine wilderness environment, because it never existed.
The idea of this mythical return to a non-existent ‘pristine wilderness’ gets right to the heart of extractive writing and placemaking. An endless search for an invented place, through a series of short-cuts that only serve to separate us from the environment we are seeking. The idea of Tasmania as perpetuated through marketing and branding material is an environmental imaginary.
Writing futures
There are many examples of Tasmanian artists and writers challenging these extractive environmental imaginaries. The Lost Rocks series published by Margaret Woodward and Justy Phillips sees artists and writers respond to endemic Tasmanian rocks and minerals, through exploring their material and metaphorical qualities. In Rhyolite, Tasmanian artist Lucy Bleach examines the basalt aggregate that makes up the highways of the state, and how these roads frame the nation boundaries formed and maintained by Indigenous Tasmanians. In Copper, Raymond Arnold presents copper plate images of the Queenstown landscape, created in the shadow in the collapsed Mt Lyell copper mine. He captures the complexity of living within Tasmania’s contested landscape – his introduction to Queenstown was spending time in the local police station after being arrested in the Franklin Dam protest campaign.
Trying to find my own material connection to write this piece, I googled the history of Knocklofty for inspiration. I knew where to look for the tawny frogmouth nests on the third bend down the zig-zag section, and how far up Forest Road I needed to drive to get free all-day parking: but I didn’t know the material history of the place. I learnt that Knocklofty was originally called Woodman’s Hill by European settlers, as it became known as an easy source of timber. Forest Road was created to ferry out a parade of culled forest – and later, extracted sandstone.
In addition to this history, the first page of Google search results were filled with an Airbnb – ‘Knocklofty Retreat Garden’ – and the branding for a local micro-gin distillery. I scrolled through their Instagram pages, and had to admit that these things are part of the material reality now. Writing place means writing them in, sullying the metaphor, to create a more honest representation.
When you trace anything, it brings up everything. Boots and all.
‘When you trace anything, it brings up everything’ is an extract from Breathing Space, edited by Jane Rawson and Ben Walters and published by the Tasmanian Land Conservancy XXXX. The title of this essay is borrowed from Jane Hutton’s, Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements (2019).