New Nature

This quiet dying is all around us. In my childhood summer nights were punctuated by the yips and barks of geckoes, their soft bodies moving across walls, pale in the half-light. I have not seen a gecko in a decade, maybe more.

A track is memory. A track is relief. A track is company. A track is faith.

Is it possible to provide a spatial character of outscape? It will be enough to say now that I have found, at least, three principle geometries that pattern the poetry of outscape: panels, discs, beans.

The more I read, the more I came to adore the cockroach – the gleaming beauty of its ancient form, its zest for life despite its utter filth.

What did I expect? Epiphany, an interior? Eldorado. Another colonial myth. Growing up here you wouldn’t think thing were even as old as they are.

Gropers are generally placid creatures, ambling slowly around the rocks in search of sea urchins.

Cook appears, in Namatjira’s paintings, a reminder, remainder, corpse, trace, or ghost: a symbol of the repeated and the repeatable, the rule of law, and the law of the father. He signifies the continuity of settler sovereignty in the body of the current Queen, and the continuity of invasion in the form of a constant companion.

I visited the Sydney Markets at Flemington, and the Vegan Market in Marrickville on the same weekend late last year, and expected to write a study in contrasts.

Many Paleozoic cockroaches could fly. Because they could fly, they could navigate prehistoric swamps. Because their bodies were thin, they could squeeze into narrow cracks where they might avoid predators and survive environmental hazards. They are built to scale any surface, even sheer ones. Young cockroaches can regenerate lost antennae and limbs. They can eat almost anything, including their own moulted shells, and dead animals, living plants, excreta, fingernails, wallpaper, boxes, envelopes.

What makes an organism fit? How can we measure its fitness? What are the unfit bits?