An Opening Read online

  To see a thriving Dragon Tree in the clear light of Adelaide and to recognise it as the same as the Tree of Life painted by Hieronymous Bosch is both marvellous and surprising. However lateral an experience, it seems to mean more than the simple recognition of a transplanted tree, an immigrant, as it involves a link to a depiction of a creation story that celebrates the diversity of life and the excitement of its mutability. Although Bosch’s painting was made in the Northern Hemisphere more than 500 years ago, it resonates today in the Southern Hemisphere with a strong implication of human interconnectedness across time and place. It suggests links between imagination and nature – and quite a lot of what Werner Herzog calls ecstatic truth – in inexplicably connecting to Australia.

  Around the three figures of God, Eve and Adam in Bosch’s painting there are animals of all sorts, many of which must have died in the Flood because they differ from all currently existing animals. Floating in the pond, a small creature with a bill like a duck is reading a tiny book. It seems to have a tail like a fish with which it balances itself but, apart from the tail, it looks just like a platypus, even though the work was painted about 300 years before platypuses were seen outside Australia. Then there is a dignified magpie standing casually near Adam in a magpie-on-alert kind of way, looking as if it is about to throw back its head to sing or slice across the sky and clip a dog in the ear. However, it doesn’t look like a European Magpie at all, but like its distant relative the White-backed Australian Magpie, of the butcherbird family, native to South Australia, Central Australia and Victoria, and whose sweet warble or flute-like carolling is such a familiar part of the morning in these places. An early recorded vernacular name for it was Piping Roller, written on a painting of it by the Port Jackson Painter in Sydney sometime between 1788 and 1792.

  This magpie is the third feature of Bosch’s painting, beside the Dragon Tree and the near-platypus – that miraculously connect it to the Australia I live in. Almost like a code, each of them emphasises that the profundity of relationships between animals and people, trees and people, places and people, exquisitely present in this artwork, spans the globe, centuries and cultures.

  In looking at the painting it is the idea of creation that is manifestly present, the idea of the world being formed from nothing, and the idea of purpose and intent. On top of the calm inevitability of creation there is the diversity, the plasticity of the world and the marvel of it all exuberantly expressed in such hybrid mutant wonders as unicorns and three-headed winged lizards. Above and beyond any religion or creator is the teeming energy of the world with its irrepressible and unpredictable metamorphoses.

  Does the making of an artwork have any relationship to the creation of the world? Are we as humans able to have special understanding because we are both created and creators, playing the role of both artefacts and gods?

  Indigenous cultures all over the world revolve around their creation stories. Their knowledge of creation and of the stories and acts, songs and dances connected with it embed them in circuits of certainty, and maintain their confidence about their relationships to the world around them. We might say that the purpose of knowing a creation story is to feel connected and confident, and that to feel confident and connected you need to know a creation story, evidence of which is in your vicinity. This certainty has been exchanged in many Western societies for scientific hypotheses in the care of experts. Clearly all people do come from and belong to the earth, but the stories of the many indigenous people all over the world suggest that they know which bit of the earth they come from and they can interpret it in terms of their own culture.

  What does it mean to believe a creation story: that a tree grew from the blood of a dragon; that God made the world in six days; that the Wagilag Sisters and Wititj, the olive python, were responsible for the first monsoon as well as the first dances, songs and laws about marriage and ceremonies? How does it affect your relationship to the world; does it give you an enhanced sense of the preciousness of what is here and of your close connection to it; does it mean you have a concept of belonging, of sacredness, of holiness, of mystery that pervades your life in the form of knowledge, objects and acts that relate to a non-visible world within, behind and inside the visible? Is such a concept only received through cultural indoctrination, or can it be derived from intuition? Does it mean that you see connections and analogies between various phenomena? That you have an openness to finding qualities like feelings in trees, insights in animals, intuitions in plants; that you don’t separate people from other living or non-living parts of the world but see them as of equal value, of equal standing, as truly somehow interchangeable? Can you invent your own creation story or feel it out or must it be handed down from generation to generation? What if the link is broken between generations? Is there a contemporary creation story that is credible or useful; what purpose would it serve?

  Every creation story, whether it is about evolution, divinity or ancestors, posits the wonder and rightness of what happened, each contains the arbitrary in balance with the inevitable. Things turned out the way they did but it could have been different. There is something truly marvellous about this necessity and its related sense of contingency.

  Evolution is a profound creation story that connects everything on and to the earth. Each time art is made it reflects or remakes part of the world. Art that draws our attention to the earth underlines the importance of the relationship between humans and nature. This is a literal relationship as all beings on the earth are related; our origins are the same. The shapes of plants, of animals, of landforms, of skyforms, have a resonance within us that is lodged in our eyes and brains at the most fundamental level. The correspondences between leaves and hands, trees and lungs, flowers and sex organs, affirm connection as well as transmutation.

  The affirmation of connectedness that lies within the recognition of these correspondences emphasises our corporeal being, or in simple terms ‘it grounds us’. It is said that from one piece of your DNA it would be possible to recreate your entire body, so all of you is present in it, something like a convex mirror that holds a room in a circle of glass. It is also said we share eighty per cent of our DNA with trees. Our attachment to creation stories, whether literal, metaphoric or scientific, is also an attachment to our own creative and explanatory powers. DNA is characterised by beauty, elegance and randomness. Purpose and lack of purpose, meaningfulness and meaninglessness intermingle and exchange positions. Beauty is present in the balance and grace of the double helix, which most of us will only ever know as a drawing or a diagram. Some notion of harmony as well as of unpredictability is present in this creation story, this scientific tale of the generation of the heart of the world. In that respect this creation story shares elements with all other ones.

  Creation stories are often specific to where they are told, so people can see every day the connecting patterns and designs that are in local creatures, vegetation, the sea and the sky. In some places indigenous Australians are divided up between saltwater and freshwater people. Perhaps we are all divided up in ways like this and linked to natural phenomena and forces. These may be the elements that we prefer in our daily lives, meat or fish, heat or cold, sun or shade, the sea or a river. Is it possible at this time of great global movements of people to find belonging and attachment in a vision of the whole world, in a fragment of tradition, in an intuition, in a series of correspondences, in a feeling that is not handed down but found? In order for people to not be divided into those who belong to certain places and those who do not, can we believe in the value of sharing food, respect for birds, animals, plants and trees, in responsibility for the planet? If the most significant identity comes from land, what of those who have no land? Do they find it in embracing where they are, wherever that is? And what is the role of the first peoples? What can we learn from them?

  Australian indigenous art draws on traditions and stories stretching back to what is often rather irritatingly called ‘time immemorial’. It seem
s to stretch back to ‘the beginning’, to the moments when what is considered human came into being, was invented, discovered, found, imagined, created. This is the absolute first place of origin, the moment of the beginning of humanness, which coincides with the beginning of humans creating. This moment or series of moments is of intense interest to scientists who are always intensively looking for beginnings and explanations. The presence of what are the basic elements of art – charcoal, ochre, pigments, drawing and rituals – are the primary signs used by archaeologists to denote the quality of becoming human. Australia has been described as one of the first places where art and thus humanness began, in the sense of a discernible cognitive leap towards symbolic behaviour as evident in rock art drawings. Archaeologist Rhys Jones said: ‘There was no long period of groping towards art. It was sudden. There was an extraordinary explosion of creativity.’

  There is something miraculous in the survival of indigenous traditions and indigenous people all over the world. While they are still not always visible in the mainstream and it may have been possible even a few years ago to grow up without knowing of their survival, this is unlikely now. According to many indigenous accounts it is they who have in the past, and continue to in the present, ensured the survival of the earth or at least the parts of it in their care. The indigenous peoples who have survived into the twenty-first century contribute to cultural ecology, the diversity of possible cultural expressions that spells psychic health for humans as they keep alive different approaches to life and to the world. Just as the fertility of Bosch’s Garden of Eden suggests an explosion of possible pathways to life, so diverse human cultures keep open the possibilities of what it is to be human.

  The presence of indigenous people, indigenous culture and indigenous art means that we are surrounded by living extant knowledge of creation spirits and beings. We may need to seek it out, but once experienced it is rarely forgotten. It is like a blast of electricity to the soul. What does it mean, how does it matter? Rather than belonging to a distant or redundant past such beliefs and knowledge are present in contemporary life.

  Indigenous people exist all over the world. The conviction expressed by them is radical. ‘The trees are alive, the river is alive, the stones are alive,’ are the words an indigenous man from Costa Rica said to me when I interviewed him in 1981 at the World Council of Indigenous Peoples conference in Canberra. I have never forgotten this, and the shiver that went through me when he said it. For I too believed it to be so, but had never said it aloud. Animism, totemism, identification with life forms beyond your own increase your empathy and respect for the world and embed you in a big family of relatives and relationships. The words we use to think about and describe such ideas are often found in anthropology, which took them from indigenous languages. Totem is a word from Ojibwa, an Algonquian language of the Great Lakes in North America. It translates as ‘he is my relative’.

  The impact of this kind of knowledge and conviction on Western attitudes of scepticism and empiricism is confronting in several ways. In asking for recognition of what is unable to be empirically seen or measured it asks for faith and trust. It also throws up the contingency of non-indigenous ways of seeing. Thinking about a sentient earth has the effect of closing the gap between humans and the earth and her other inhabitants. Some version of animism is part of Western thought traditions (think of St Francis and many others) but has been set to one side for a long time.

  When we enter the world, when we are born, we are aware of its animation. Spending time with a young child proves this fact. We arrive ready to find family and find it not only in humans. As we are acculturated we learn a particular way of seeing and thinking about the world, but where we come from, our origins, remain in this early identification with the world around us. This awareness belongs to all of us who live on the earth, and makes us indigenous. When dormant it may be re-awoken when we read about or hear indigenous peoples’ descriptions of their beliefs. When an indigenous artist tells a story of how this piece of land was made it is his or her certainty and conviction as well as their artwork that impresses us with respect. We may or may not be able to fully believe what they tell us, but we believe that they believe.

  There is an image that has remained with me for a long time. Actually it is not just in my mind but in a black and white photocopy on my shelf, and I like to look at it often as a touchstone of some kind. It is of a Native American garment called Powhatan’s Mantle, once part of the seventeenth-century Tradescant Collection of Rarities (the first museum open to the public in England) now housed at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It is supposed to have belonged to Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas, and is one of the earliest North American artefacts to have survived in a European museum. On this garment made from a buffalo, a tanned hide that retains the shape of an animal’s body, a human figure is flanked by two animal forms and by many circles with concentric circles inside them like fingerprints. The design is stitched onto the hide in small white shell beads. To me the Mantle is a manifestation of a vision about the important and significant relationship between animal and human, and about common origins and common location on the earth, mutuality and sharing.

  Even in silhouette we can recognise the forms of animals. It seems we have internalised their patterning and shapes. How do we visually distinguish animals from humans? Often by their ears, their ‘creative’ shapes, their imaginative forms – spots, stripes, horns, tails, manes, fur, ruffs. There is a rich variety in animal bodies that is not matched even by the many shades of colours or shapes that humans have. Powhatan’s Mantle demonstrates in an object what I interpret as equivalence, symbiosis between animal and human. Totem: he is my relative. It is not necessarily possible to imitate the example set by indigenous people’s totemic relationships with the world, but there is a level at which knowing about them and witnessing them leads us to thoughts of practical, prosaic and sometimes overwhelming obligation. If you think of a bird or an animal as your totem, your relative, how does it makes you feel?

  Images that show when the world was made partake of a particular excitement; creation times are moments of great versatility when the way things are now was open to change. In the background of Bosch’s painting there is a unicorn, a white (i.e. uncoloured) elephant and a white giraffe. It suggests that unicorns were there in the beginning, that elephants could have been orange and brown with spots and that giraffes could have been grey. Thus the arbitrariness and wonder of everything is emphasised as well as the aptness of the way things turned out. It is a puzzle that we know the answer to; it is an implicit benediction on all things.

  At this time in the history of the world, we tend to see ourselves as contributing to the destruction of the world rather than its creation. The scientific view of the creation of the world employs a mechanistic model in which either a big bang or a small whimper started it all, lightness/darkness, lightning and water, bacteria, photosynthesis, and in the water a stirring, a rim of green on a rock at the edge of the sea. Everything in the world is connected back to that moment and each time we see leaves or flowers breaking out from dead-seeming sticks, a tadpole stroking through the water, a bird dragging a piece of something to make a nest, we are there.

  ——

  When it’s hot the dog and I try to get our morning walk in early but don’t always manage it. This means that on the way back from one of our half hour or hour long routes he will call a halt by stopping in the shade somewhere and flopping onto the ground and then rolling on his back in an effort to cool his skin. Dogs don’t sweat through their skins, only through their mouths. I am hot too, of course, though wearing a hat, and would have gritted my teeth and pushed on rather than stopping but have learnt to respond to the moment, sit on the grass next to him and just enjoy being with a friend on a bit of dirt under a tree.

  APRIL

  finding water

  … when a glimmering of the mystery of time is given

  in the darkness under a passing river.<
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  Toss Woolaston

  Propped up somewhere in my studio is a book folded open to a page showing Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Monk by the Sea. It has a coffee cup ring on its edge but the stain is no distraction from its solemnity. The painting’s colours are a smoky grey blue, a greenish brown, white, and numerous greys from almost black to almost white. It shows mostly sky with cloud rolling over it, a narrow band of dark grey sea with some white-capped waves, a lighter band of chalky white sand and not much monk but it is the thoughts of the monk that I imagine when I look at it. He stands on the beach as if he is standing on the edge of the world. Dressed in a robe the colour of the sea, with his hand on his chin in a pose associated with thoughtfulness, perhaps because it suggests turning words that may have been spoken back into the mouth, he looks at the point where the sea meets the shore.

  To some extent he reminds me of the cowled figure of Death in Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal. A film that my parents took me to see when I was very young and which absolutely terrified me, Death’s pale looming face and the fear in the eyes of the young witch burnt to death at the stake haunted my dreams for many nights and days. The visceral experience of pain and mystery pressed upon me by seeing both The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring at the same time (can they really have been on a double bill? I know it was at the Curzon in Goodwood Road where ‘foreign’ films were shown in the sixties in Adelaide) put scars on my psyche that have never faded. I remember being too shattered to sleep or go to school the next day, and instead walking on the beach in the morning discussing the films with my mother. What did the men do to the girl? Why would anyone burn another person while they are alive? What would the pain be like? Would death have to be so frightening? I don’t remember her answers and barely remember the questions but I retain a sliver, less a snapshot than a split second, of memory that we walked on the beach and that the world seemed newly strange to me. It seems odd that I can’t remember what she said, but I remember the sea on my left, the shore on my right and an edge of concrete wall next to a row of Norfolk pine trees.