New Nature

It’s definitely possible never to notice the wondrous activity of plants beneath bark, beneath soil. Maybe the same could be said for turning a blind eye to images of plants, right under our noses.

What I remember is my grandmother teaching me how to draw the wind.

Fungi are integral to the functioning of ecosystems; we ignore them (and it seems that in our environmental legislation we do ignore them) at our peril. But this ignoring, sometimes bordering on outright hostility, is being slowly, partially corrected by a literature on fungi and a culture of fungal regard emerging (shiitake-style) from the woodwork (a woodwork they will perhaps go on to devour, if they’ve learnt anything from the wood-rotting fungi that Pouliot proudly claims have sunk more ships than all the naval battles since 1600).

Every time I see a bird or bee these days,’ a friend says when we are talking on the phone, ‘I find myself wondering if it’s the last.

Do the fish really still care about us as human or post-human? As the oceans fall to our pollution, as the rivers dry up contaminated, will they answer our plea for knowledge? A sun shower evokes a shared moment of renewal, it offers communion and connects us to water as bathed in light, on skin…. Indigenous culture and knowledge is a key to sensing our part in the interrelational cosmology, the multiverse, the inner and outer worlds of perception and action.

I’ve been lugging a childhood from dad’s shed to Sydney in the boot of my car and it’s getting restless. The little gumnuts are creeping from the pages to play patty-cake with the yuri men on my back seat, tucking themselves under discarded jackets and licking droplets from the blackorg-branded waterbottles collecting under my seat. They want me to write about them – or maybe they don’t, and they just want to be left where and when they are – but in any case, they’re enjoying the ride. With their little faces pressed to the window they watch tree turn to town, and hiss and shudder as we pass the earthmovers stacked at the post-Maccas merge. I don’t take new ways to go to places I’ve known already, and I’m not likely to ever turn early from the M4, but there’s something about those green signed end destinations that reminds me of everywhere else I’m supposed to be.

‘Writing ecocentric fiction is relational. Like ecology, like phenomenology. Like a medicine bundle. Like a carrier bag.’

My longing for a baby will seep through my life, but if having a disability has taught me anything, it is that there are limits to my ability to support my art and a child, just as there are limits to the resources of our world.

‘This was the first field trip the researchers had organised together. Everything was, to some extent, tentative and provisional.’

‘Perhaps a place is a mind one can learn to share. Perhaps a place is a body one can inhabit and care for as if it were one’s family, one’s lover. One’s self.’