- Landscapes of Our Hearts, by Matthew Colloff. Thames & Hudson. $34.99.
How do we relate to our suburb, its parks, trees and waterways? To our city and region? How do we see ourselves in a landscape?
And what will it take for Australians to develop a sophisticated means of cherishing and valuing natural environments?
These are some of the questions Matthew Colloff raises in a thoughtful and intimate examination of how people see themselves within a landscape.
Landscapes of Our Hearts demonstrates strikingly what slow learners we are. Colloff records the struggle of non-Indigenous Australians generally against, rather than with, the land, its systems and its first people.
Stark excerpts from the 1840s diary of settler Henry Lewes of Moira Station record clashes with Indigenous people, the loss of livestock, floods, failed crops, severe frosts and weather so hot it felled an ox.
There is also an excellent account of the settlers of the Limestone Plains - the area which would become Canberra and the ACT.
Migrants in this region employed popular 19th century notions, such as the idea that ring-barking trees would bring more rain.
The notion that "rain follows the plough" would be merely fanciful if it had not caused such damage.
It's interesting comparing these accounts to a discussion of 42,000-year-old Mungo Man and Mungo Woman, unearthed in the Willandra Lakes region of NSW.
The footprints of a hunting party, and of a one-legged hunter, were found in the same area. Colloff notes that this one-legged hunter was included in the hunt along with his able-bodied kinsmen and took part in the thrill of the chase.
This man, like Mungo Man whose gravesite bore the marks of complex funerary rites, was loved by his people.
Records such this, embedded in country, contrast so very sharply with the litany of disaster, grit and woe recorded by early settlers.
In the face of climate change, the book examines questions of hope and agency too. Visioning, the process of imagining where we might be in a warmer future, is suggested as one way of creatively engaging with climate change.
But discussions of how we might move forward from here seem slim when weighed against the failures of the past, and the powerful forces at work who continue to argue against action on climate change.
Colloff's personal musings about his Kentish childhood and anecdotes from fieldwork around Australia, are wonderfully observed.
But the book does meander in places. Some judicious editing would have assisted a more compelling overall narrative.
