The Bush capital ‘B’ is no fairy dell. There is something aenemic about the European glade that cannot meet the glorious raw ossiary to be found at it’s antipodes.
It is a harsh love perculiar to the southern heart. The person comes to it. It isn’t a sublime bow to the grandure of sweeping wilderness that sets it apart. It is not in the nature of those most touched by it’s particular charm to wax lyrical about it. It ill-fits a western parkland habit so natural to Eurocentric conceptions. But it has a call to an alien rite that is in it’s air. As if nothingness is animate.
It is a landscape that does not pleasingly fawn and spoil you. Trees collect dust, drop limbs and burn. Grasses are not pastures but cordons. Mountains often disappoint and rivers fleet.
We are born here and are not foriegn to it. Still we are not bequeathed it. It demands listening. A wandering within. The bush connotes humility.
Fools clear it and salinate it with heroic schemes. Dwellers recognize it’s true initiation, which is to walk with it quietly. Adapt and change gradually. It has been riddled with thousands of bland quarter acre blocks, leaching nutrients and squandering water by the season.
Perverse imperiums have tried to import crawling, climbing, plaguish things to ‘acclimatise’ it, at once nearing exotica’s true ruin and dilvulging their iladjusted genius. But this barren will to prettiness is weak and petty. Such blandishments allow for no alternate conception of beauty in the world.There is little nature and a great deal of the spoiler in a single spectrum aesthetic.
Short term conquerers expect that if a weed can grow it must be natures way. But the way of this indifference is to change the forests that make our water and soil. To an extent plans to alter the nature here can yeild. But a new Europe or Americas fed by mountains or equatorial rains isn’t a consequence of cloud seeding or the planting of deciduous trees. Schemes are limited. Their infections though can be ruinous. Caution is the best aesthetic. Native reflection is the most cautious scheme. And the Eco system with its native species, from soil microbes to birds, blossoms, bees and fish rely on the remnant of native aesthetic left.
The onus of change is on the exoticist planter to provide precaution. The bush and desert ecology may not be pretty in western terms but in southern terms they a working system that is known to function in this hemishere.
A true test of how adaptable cultural thinking is, is to concieve itself anew in light of new contexts. This is the long project of an Antipodean mind.
