Nothing is inevitable

I haven't read much, and written even less, in the last couple of weeks. Or rather, I haven't written much prose and no gemposts. This is to a large extent because much of my free time has been spent writing a bunch of code for a new feature for the social reading app Bookwyrm. This has turned out to be significantly bigger than I expected, and has been slow-going because I had to learn the Bookwyrm codebase, and how Django works, and some Pytest techniques, and what makes ESLint grumpy and... well, you get the picture.

Just before becoming epicly distracted by Bookwyrm, I finished reading Bill Gammage's "The biggest estate on earth". This completes my initial batch of "I suddenly want to read every book I can find about pre-invasion Australia" books, and ironically it was published before pretty much everything else in that group. It's a little more plodding than the others. A little repetitive, slightly defensive. Gammage admits this in the last chapter, but explains why. At the time of publication, his ideas of Aboriginal land management through the mastery of complex fire regimes were widely dismissed amongst both historians and, in particular, ecologists. He felt the need to produce an avalanche of evidence—much from the colonial archive itself—with which to bury the prevailing wisdom of a "natural" 1788 landscape. I've had to remind myself of this in the last few weeks, when the temptation to berate myself for not knowing all this stuff earlier sets in. "Why has it taken me so long to read about all this?" I rhetorically asked my mother a few weeks ago. "Hugh", she replied, "these books weren't written yet". This is ridiculous, yet nevertheless true. It's been hiding in plain sight.

Connecting, albeit in a faltering and small way, with the knowledge, culture and practices of Australia's first peoples has helped to push me through the self-absorbed hopelessness of climate despair. Humans have survived multiple major climatic swings on the Australian content, including huge variations in sea level and average temperatures. They learned to work, even in times of relative stability, with huge variability from year to year and decade to decade. They knew, unlike the newcomers of the last couple of centuries, that there is no such thing as a "normal" year in Australia. They managed every part of the land, but working with the grain of natural systems, rather than against them. This is what we need to do in the face of the latest, self-inflicted, change to the global and local climate.

This change is coming, and if you're looking it's easy to see everwhere. Admitedly it's not exactly a typical sample of the Australian population, but yesterday my Mastodon feed was full of discussion about Melbourne Water's new plan to rip up 500 metres of concrete in Moonee Ponds. The ABC has pitched this as an heroic fight against bureaucracy by local campaigners, and it certainly is that. But there's actually much more to this story. Because the Moonee Ponds Creek project is merely one of several projects Melbourne Water are undertaking, to "naturalise" several urban and suburban waterways as part of their "Re-imagining Your Creek" program. Turns out people like waterways full of native plants and animals a lot more than they like concrete drains: surprise!

The Moonee Ponds Creek is an interesting example, because Gammage points out in his book that British "explorers" had difficulty describing and naming Australian waterways with any kind of consistency. A swift winter creek becomes a chain of summer ponds. A springtime rivulet disappears to become an underground soak in summer.

The conversation Gammage tried to kick off about fire management is finally breaking into more sophisticated discussions too. Politicians are as usual behind the curve, denying the impact of a drying climate, or alternatively blaming every large bushfire on climate change. Simplistic arguments in favour or against fuel reduction burns are slowly becoming more nuanced. And researchers in Tasmania have found evidence matching similar research in Victoria pointing to both clearfell logging and "managed forestry" with it's younger and more uniformly-aged trees as major vectors for large and devastating fires. I've written earlier about some of the discussion around Indigenous fire management in the north of the continent, and the recognition my Indigenous rangers themselves that their burning regimes are too large and infrequent compared to previous regimes. I think this is a lesson for all of us and relevant to most life endeavours. Lobbing incendiaries from a helicopter is certainly more efficient, but to get the job done in a proper, sustainable and sophisticated manner, you have to be down on the ground, walking with the fire, feeling the breeze and watching the animals.

As I wrote in my last gempost, there is also increasing interest in and funding for research into native cereal crops like so called Kangaroo Grass: fire-tolerant, green in summer and dry in winter, perennial, needing little or no fertiliser. Why on earth has this been replaced with "improved pasture" across the continent?! Bruce Pascoe is the figurehead for this movement but it has spread well beyond his efforts.

Gamage's last chapter is called "Becoming Australian". At the very end, he writes:

This book interrupts Law and country at the moment when terra nullius came, and an ancient philosophy was destroyed by the completely unexpected, an invasion of new people and ideas. A majestic achievement ended. Only fragments remain. For the people of 1788 the loss was stupefying. For the newcomers it did not seem great. Until recently few noticed that they had lost anything at all. Knowledge of how to sustain Australia, of how to be Australian, vanished with barely a whisper of regret.

We have a continent to learn. If we are to survive, let alone feel at home, we must begin to understand our country. If we succeed, one day we might become Australian.

I've never had any particular interest in "being Australian". Nationalism disgusts me, and patriotism seems merely a more respectable face of nationalism: a matter of degree rather than substantive difference. But I can get on board with Bill Gammage's idea of becoming Australian. It's hopeful. It acknowledges the loss we have all suffered, but doesn't dwell on what has happened in the past. It recognises our ignorance of the country we live on, yet asserts that it is possible to learn once again how to thrive here for thousands more years. It implies above all the thing we need to remember to get through the next stage of human existence on this planet: nothing is inevitable.

=> Bookwyrm | The biggest estate on earth: how Aborigines made Australia | Community's decades-long fight pays off with plan to restore 'concrete creek' at Moonee Ponds | Melbourne Water: Reimagining Your Creek program