‘In order to save a few figs for the family,’ she wrote, ‘I hung some “Wedge-tailed Eagles” on long poles, and attached them to the tree. They were made of large fungi (Boletus portentosus, of which there are many in the garden every year) with moulted fowls’ feathers stuck into them. Not a bird went near the figs for some weeks.’
The models were later joined by a large clay eagle made by Dorothy, saving all the apricots and the Sturmer apples by the back door.
My image of early Walsham shifts and transforms. No cow then, or vegetables, but the fruit trees can stay. I’m pleased about the fig tree, for it still leans over the back fence behind the apartments, laden with fruit which perhaps the birds now have a chance to enjoy undisturbed.
The heroine is riding her glorious palomino horse through a field of golden yellow. The sun is setting ruby-pink in the background and waves of dreamy blonde hair drifts slo-mo behind them. It’s the great romantic highlight of the movie.
‘Canola,’ snorts a friend in disgust. ‘Why would they film a paddock full of weeds?’
One person’s picturesque romance is another person’s environmental disaster, allergy emergency or genetically modified apocalypse. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.
Australians tend to be hypersensitive to weeds. We have a particular postcolonial eye for ‘before’ and ‘after’. Our vegetation maps are classified as pre-1780 or post-1780. There is a biological line in the sand of our history – what should have been, pre-European settlement, and what is – the post-settlement ecological disaster of extinction, clearances and introduced species. It is a characteristic of many postcolonial New World cultures, particularly where European settlement has wrought savage changes to both the human and non-human populations that previously inhabited the lands. America, the Pacific and Indian Ocean islands, Australia and New Zealand.
The line in the sand is less obvious in the Old World regions – Africa, Europe and Asia – where modern humans evolved, originated and dispersed in repeated waves of migration, where agricultural and then industrial societies first developed 3000 years ago. The line in the sand is blurred across time, its impact no less severe but occurring in a slow, steady continuum across centuries. There is no ‘before’ and ‘after’.
We take some German visitors bushwalking, pointing out the invasive pine trees that have been ringbarked, ready to pull down and burn.
‘Why would you do that?’ asks our friend, genuinely puzzled that we don’t like such beautiful trees. We struggle to explain the way the pines thrust through the eucalypt canopy, their dark green angular shapes disrupting the smooth grey green of the native forest. We point to the carpet of pine needles blanketing the understorey, killing everything within a 20-metre radius except for a tussock of tough blady grass.
‘But it is lovely and soft,’ he protests, lying in the pine needles to demonstrate.
On the way back to the house, he stops to pick something out of the grass. It’s a millipede.
‘So cute,’ he enthuses. ‘Look at all those little legs.’
It’s autumn and the Portuguese millipedes that infest much of South Australia are beginning to hatch in the rich organic soil. They first came ashore in 1953 in Port Lincoln: contamination from some international cargo ship. I grew up with plagues of them sweeping the landscape. After the rain, thousands march across the paddock in search of food, over the verandah and up the walls, through the slightest crack or crevice, into the house where they curl up and die in corners, up walls to drop from ceilings at unexpected moments. They are entirely innocuous creatures, feeding on decomposing vegetable matter and aiding the nutrient cycle. But they smell awful and are almost universally detested.
I understand my German friend’s disconnection. I feel the same way when I visit Europe. To my antipodean eye, it is a landscape full of weeds and damage. Human impact is visible even on the most remote Scottish island, telltale lines of agricultural lazy beds exposing an ancient history of human industry. They defy my concept of nature. I instinctively search for ‘wilderness’, knowing that it is a myth, a construct, in an endlessly dynamic and changing biological world. But everything in my world is divided into ‘weed’ and ‘native’, ‘before’ and ‘after’, ‘belonging’ and ‘not belonging’ – a continuously discomforting intellectual distinction for a sixth-generation white Australian.
It is one of the reasons I am drawn to Edith’s nature writing. She is unapologetic in her Englishness and her love for the land of her childhood, entirely unaware that this should even be problematic. And yet she is entirely, unreservedly, unabashedly in love with Australian nature. Despite being an immigrant, she has ‘settled’ in the course of a single lifetime and claimed her place in a new land, not by virtue of labour, or transformation of the land, or territorial claims or property ownership per se, but rather by a profound depth of understanding and connection with the wildlife she encounters. Her writing is imbued with a deep respect for Australian wildlife that transcends who she is and where she comes from. There is a generosity to her writing that defies nationalism, while at the same time allowing for a proud appreciation of our unique fauna and flora. It’s a remarkable achievement and I envy the calm and confident way she has claimed her own niche in the local ecosystem.
She reminds me of ‘the Stray’ in Kylie Tennant’s The Battlers, who is struck by a flare of sunlight illuminating ‘a mass of purple flowers, a carpet of them, a brilliant torrent of flowers, pouring down the side of the road in colours of crimson and blue, violet and opal’. She refuses to condemn the weedy Echium plantagineum, even when she knows it is a weed.
‘“It’s a plant that’s struck it lucky,” the
