The wilder echoes of peaceful places[1]

We live in constant collaboration with nature. In the oikos, this is easy to prove: food, shelter, life depend upon human treatment of the environment. The more spiritual connection to animal-plant-mountain, however, challenges our civilised sense of humanity. We tend to tread more warily.

Under the long, slow oversight of Cooroora Mountain, our small community experiments with such place-based expressions. Artists from around the world meet the gentle senses and beauteous vistas of the Sunshine Coast hinterland. The human community holds contemporary classical concerts here, celebrating Australian composers and their place-based connections. Locana have (twice) played pieces by Michael Hugh-Dixon, Kent Farbach, John Gilfedder. World premieres in a big blue shed. Meantime, the graceful tree frogs hold other concerts, celebrating rain with carefully choreographed choruses that fill the damp night air.

Best of all perhaps, are the outdoor and improvised collaborations between the species. At one sunset performance last December, the bass notes of Dale Rickert’s cello attracted large green tree frogs. Maybe 20 clustered behind the make-shift stage. Their deep barking calls made new improvisation possible. Dale’s father, Peter, joined him on gamelan, the frogs deep throated the beat, and the cello soared out across the valley. The honour of the star-lit nights dissolved the skins between body and earth. It is through sound that our bodies of clay remember sheer delight. This is what landscape memoir is made of; this is where peace is born.

Other, older memories of sound drift across the valley. The ghosts of cows meander through our newly planted trees, lowing plaintively to those few remaining that agist on our neighbour’s property. They remember the neighbourhood united as dairy, the clanking of milk pails, the horse drawn cart collections, the worried call of farmers looking for lost cattle. Older still, a festive celebration of fine food and performing arts echoes amongst our extant bunya trees, tribes gathering from near and far to swap news, condemn invasions, commemorate great warriors, dance the new and remember the old. I hear such sounds continue on into our future: the joyous noises of creative humans, and the hum of bees. And in some primeval time, contiguous with our own, the bunyip booms its warning against environmental misuse.

This is Paul Carter’s ‘thick time of hearsay’ or John Hansen Mitchell’s ‘ceremonial time’, that builds the many layers of our landscape – their complexities hidden under swathes of green. Sometimes too comfortably hidden: Queensland conflicts are ‘agreeably shrouded’ in the words of Raymond Evans. JT Mitchell says we cannot use innocent idealism to cover the moral, ideological, and political ‘dark side of the landscape’.

In the interests of a deeper peace, then, I will dispense with any sentimental tendency to nostalgia and remember the darkness as well as the light. I want to embrace, rather than overpower, this site-specific fear. Love of a place is constituted through an awe for the imaginative as well as the scientific microcosm. The late Greg Denning says:

The history of places, especially in places of cross-cultural encounters, will take as much imagination as science to see. Blood and ashes are blown away with the dust. Shouts and songs die in the wind. Pain and happiness are as evanescent as memory. To catch the lost passions in places, history will have to be a little more artful than being a ‘non-fiction’.

Reconciling human/nature is a dark and artful journey. For peace to become possible, we first need to be made uncomfortable. There are more disturbing soundscapes buried beneath. We glimpse their chasm at our place amidst the Blackall Ranges:

• Screams of fear from those non-Gubbi Gubbi who wandered off the ‘Free-ways’ (the Murri common route) without someone who knew the site of the Yerra (proper gateways into country), so were chased down and attacked. The moans of young women after being initiated traditional-style, losing their last joint of the left little finger.

• The sobs of pain and frantic sounds of death of the Durundur people from arsenic poisoning by a Kilcoy colonialist, re-enacted at a nearby Bunya Festival (one boy later reported the results of the poison to a white inquiry: “plenty fellow jump about like it fish when you catch him.”).

• The silent screams and fierce crackling of ancient rainforests trees falling to 19^th century timber getters. The sound of a woman’s cheek bone breaking and wailing children when domestic violence enters the war-like consequences. Listening for Japanese enemy aircraft overhead and the blinding white flash seen out to sea from torpedoes hitting the hospital ship, Centaur. The shrill whine and helicopter search by police for hidden drugs and buried stolen goods. Sirens of ambulance rushing, too late, to weeping mothers of drowned children. A screeching car and a fierce yelp, followed by ominous silence.

• The electrified hum of the future sub-station, the increased whine of mosquitos from a wild river dammed stagnant, the dangerous whispers radiating back from a dark future dependent upon nuclear power. The vast and desperate silence that re-defines an Australia bereft of birds, cicadas, frogs, and crickets.

• And perhaps across this all, the roar of the bunyip, the Mellong, the Thugine, for all such human folly.

Place celebrations need to build in these darker forces of nature – human follies reflected in the fear of the Mellong (or in other places: the laziness of the trickster Coyote, the lust of Pan). Human/animal/spirit become intertwined. The place remains a complete, active, and influential force. The child, fearful of being eaten by the bunyip, does not remain a viewer of the scenery; rather she is a participant on the world’s scene. When we add the dark to our understandings of the world, we stop seeing nature as separate from culture: the wilderness is returned to (or re-imagined as) home for the oldest cultures; and the city becomes a place that can unearth and celebrate its wild beneath. We see the wild in ourselves and we creatively embed ourselves in the specifics of each regional place.

Such is the subaltern view of the wild within. By confronting the shadows of a place, we enhance peace of, and peace with, the whole place. Ursula Le Guin says at the end of her Jungian inspired tale, A Wizard of Earthsea:

And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his own true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.

So we continue to do heartwork on the images and sounds imprisoned in our place; we live our lives for life’s sake. This is our throne, a sapling that springs anew from the stumps of past destruction, speaking silently and eloquently of stillness.

This is the challenge for artists in sound and creativity: to improvise around place and our more-than-human nature. To produce within the thick time of soundscape, to speak of darkness and of light, to play with nature, to let nature’s animal spirit lead in this short dance we create upon this earth. Here is our chance to tell the history and the future of this land, to be more artful in our imaginations. Certainly, we play in partnership with the many layers (past, present, and future) of each place. We take the temper and the tempo of this earth, building it to a more ceremonial time. Sounds sink into place, enhancing our understanding of our human-animal-land spirit, and reflecting dark as well as light, animal as well as human. These wilder echoes create our peaceful space.

Come, let us listen... human-land-scapes always echo the wild.

References

Carter, Paul 2004 Material Thinking The Theory and Practice of Creative Research Melbourne University Press

Dening, Greg 2004 Beach Crossings Voyaging across times, cultures and self Miegunyah Press (Melbourne University Publishing)

Evans, Raymond 2002 ‘Against the Grain. Colonialism and the Demise of the Bunya Gatherings, 1839 – 1939’ in Queensland Review v9 n2 2002 pp47-64

Le Guin, Ursula 1968 Wizard of Earthsea Puffin Books

Mitchell, John Hanson 1984 Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile Anchor Doubleday, New York

Mitchell, WJT (ed) 1994 Landscape and Power University of Chicago Press

Nollman, Jim 1999 The Charged Border where whales and humans meet Henry Holt and Company, New York