The second of the three great naturalists who influenced the development of American nature writing was Alexander Wilson. In 1794, aged twenty-eight, Wilson emigrated from Scotland, where he had been a none-too-successful weaver, reformer, painter and peddler and poet.

Wilson scored a teaching job and became friends with  William Bartram, who encouraged his drawing and study of natural history. Inspired by the beauty and diversity of American birds, Wilson devoted his life to their study, travelling all over America on foot in search of new species. By the time of his death, in 1813, he was America’s authority on birds and had almost completed the nine volumes of his American Ornithology, illustrating 268 species, 26 of which had not previously been described.

It was not just Wilson’s illustrations, but his writing that had an impact, bringing a poetic sensibility to natural history. His eloquent and detailed prose describing the appearance and habits of birds had a broad appeal. His attribution of human characteristics to his subjects, although open to criticism today for its anthropomorphism, had the effect of putting birds on a more equal footing with humans. Wilson’s style is a charming one. On the Mottled Owl, for example, he writes:

Hollow trees, either in the woods or orchard, or close evergreen in retired situations, are the usual resting places of this and most of our other species. These retreats, however, are frequently discovered by the Nuthatch, Titmouse, or Blue Jay, who instantly raise the alarm; a promiscuous group of feathered neighbours soon collect round the spot, like crowds in the street of a large city, when a thief or murderer is detected; and, by their insults and vociferation, oblige the recluse to seek for another lodging elsewhere.

An early conservationist, Wilson undertook pioneering studies of wildlife populations and predicted the impacts of human settlement on native habitats. In 1807, when merchants were killing thousands of robins to to grace the plates of genteel diners in Philadephia’s restaurants, Wilson published an article warning that consumption of robin flesh was  a health risk due to their diet of pokeberries. The claim was untrue, and he knew it, but the public trusted his authority – and the strategy was effective in reducing the number of robins killed.

I recently had the pleasure of examining an 1832 edition of American Ornithology, at the University of Queensland’s Fryer Library.

I handed over the catalogue details and set myself up at an empty table. Several minutes later, one of the numerous bobbed librarians came down bearing the three volumes. I had only requested the first, which she showed to the desk attendant, indicating it was damaged, its spine coming away. They entrusted it to me nonetheless. Tucked inside the front cover was a loose sheath of coloured plates. I had a close look at these first and set them to one side, thinking to leaf through and find where they belonged. There were no plates missing in the Wilson volume, and now I saw that the loose plates were quite different in style, and from a smaller book. The text, too, much less pleasing and poetic.

I padded over to the counter in bare feet. “This is not from the Wilson,” I said. “It must be from another book.”

“Oooh,” she said, examining the pages. A research mystery.

I had already checked the pages for a clue as to title or author. “These are English birds,” I said. “Wilson wrote about American birds.”

“Ah.” She tapped at the computer some more. She explained that most of their bird books were from the large collection of a particular donor. And that he hadn’t been adverse to tucking things inside books. “If we have it, we’ll find it.”

There were three ladies gathered around now, handling the pages and offering suggestions, and I told them the story about Wilson and the robins and his connection to my research, then left them to their detective work.

I was still reading and taking notes when they called me back over. “It’s from a volume by Bloom,” she said. “When you said he was English, that gave us a good clue.” The bobbed woman appeared again, with the very book, and we all watched as she slotted in the missing pages. There was a collective, satisfied sigh.

After I had returned American Ornithology and moved on to another text, a more senior librarian came down, had a quick look at the volumes, listened to a whispered explanation, and signed the form inside the front cover.

When I was packing up, the woman on the counter placed her hand on Wilson, still sitting on the counter. “We’re sending them out for repair, she said. “Five thousand dollars, they’re worth. The other one, not so much: five hundred.”

Wilson believed that he was not only contributing to science but the cultural development of a nation. And the work of preserving America’s natural treasures to be the work of God. I wonder though, whether he could have imagined the long-term value and impact of his devotion to birds. Sir William Jardine notes, in his introduction to the 1832 edition of American Ornithology, Wilson’s poetry was well regarded but it was his ornithological work that would make him famous: “Wilson was an observing naturalist, and, perhaps, nature never had a more ardent pursuer.”

Three early American natural history writers had a particular influence on the development of nature writing: William Bartram, Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon. As Romanticism shifted the emphasis from the physical qualities of the landscape to the feelings it engendered in the observer, and America looked to its natural landscape as a source of national identity, naturalists Bartram, Wilson and Audubon documented the flora and fauna of a new world. Their blending of natural history and the personal essay brought poetry and imagination to science.

William Bartram (1739 – 1823) was the son of renowned botanist, John Bartram, whom Linnaeus had pronounced the world’s greatest natural botanist. As a boy, William accompanied his father on many of his travels from their home in Philadelphia to the Catskill Mountains, the New Jersey Pine Barrens, New England, and Florida. From his mid-teens, William Bartram was noted for the quality of his botanic and ornithological drawings.

In 1773, he embarked upon a four-year journey of his own, through eight southern colonies. Bartram made many drawings and took notes on the native flora and fauna as well as his experiences with native American Indians. He discovered and described numerous new species on his adventures, returning home with an encyclopedic catalogue. His journals were first published in 1791 as Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, and were regarded at the time as a scientific and literary classic. His narrative style – a reflective and passionate account of an individual’s immersion in wilderness – helped establish the genre of the nature essay.

Travels influenced not just the great scientific minds of Europe but the writing of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelly, Carlyle and Blake. Coleridge write to Emerson suggesting that “all American libraries ought to provide themselves with a copy of that kind of book; and keep them as a future biblical article.”

Travels does carry a somewhat biblical tone. Michael Branch suggests that “it was Bartram’s devout faith in the divinity of nature that distinguished his work from most scientific tracts and consequently helped open the way for American literature to explore the spiritual resources of the wilderness.” Bartram’s particular spirituality, seeing nature as the work of God, perhaps also influenced the development of transcendentalism, which was to have its own role to play in the development of the nature essay.

The deep south of Bartram’s Travels is lush and tropical, reminding me of my own part of the world at times, with its sword like palms, and ferns, and green wet. I was amused to read of his first encounter with lantana: “the whole plant is of a most agreeable scent” (105). Here, of course, it is a prickly interloper creeping into Olvar Wood from all sides, and I’m afraid I cannot find anything agreeable about it at all.

One of my favourite sections from Travels describes the “resurrection from the deep” (87) of an insect from the genus Ephemera – the water residing mayfly family – whose graceful adult lives, after almost a year spent as an immature naiad, last only a few hours:

 Their whole existence in this world is but one complete year: and at least 365 days of that time they are in the form of an ugly grub, buried in mud, eighteen inches underwater, and in this condition scarcely locomotive as each larvae or grub has but its own narrow solitary cell from which it never moves, but in a perpendicular progression of a few inches, up and down… what a lesson doth it not afford us of the vanity of our own pursuits! (89)

 Bartram never complains of the discomforts of leeches, mosquitoes or even alligator attacks, ever retaining a sense of wonder in his Eden. Ecocritics have noted Bartram’s relative open mindedness towards native Americans and the respect afforded flora and fauna, both of which were somewhat revolutionary in an age of conquest. He understood the interconnectedness of plants and animals and was conscious of the impacts of his presence on the natural balance of  the local environment. These anti-anthropocentric traits were precursors to contemporary ecological thinking.

Bartram’s Travels marked an intersection of natural history and literature, of science and imagination, that would give rise to an American nature writing tradition.

 References

Bartram, William.1996. Travels through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country. New York: Penguin Books.

Branch, Michael. ‘Indexing American Possibilities: the Natural History Writing of Bartram, Wilson, and Audubon’ in Glotfelty, Cheryll & Fromm, Harold (eds), 1996, The Ecocriticism Reader. Athens: TheUniversity of Georgia Press: 52-68.

 When we first set up Olvar Wood, we kept hearing a deep mournful call carrying from far off in the early evenings, like a child speaking into a piece of poly pipe down near the large dams on the citrus grove below the retreat: Woo-hoo.

 It carried over a long distance and at first I thought it children playing: calling to each other through a poly pipe, underwater perhaps. And then guests started hearing it, too. As one writer put it: “It sounds like someone impersonating an owl.” After a time, and hearing it through the evening and early morning, in slightly different locations, on all days of the week, we began to believe it really was an owl.

Consultation with our bird books and listening to recorded owl calls on line convinced me the call belongs to a pair of Powerful Owls calling to each other. They have moved closer to our cottage over time, and now, in summer particularly, you can hear them calling from late afternoon till early morning. Or perhaps sound just carries further and we are awake longer in summer, as the bird books suggest they call more often during the mating season/winter.

The powerful owl, or Ninox strenua, is Australia’s biggest owl: about 65cm. It looks a bit like a Boobook, with a similar barred pattern, only bigger, and with a proportionally smaller head. It is also called a Powerful Boobook. They have striking yellow eyes, and intimidating pale yellow feet. All this from pictures, because I have never been lucky enough to see one. I did find a round-ended barred feather once, in the orchard, which I think could be one of the shorter back feathers of a Powerful Owl.

The shy Powerful Owl prefers open forests and woodlands, or sheltered gullies in wet forests with dense understoreys, especially along watercourses. They need deep hollows in old growth trees to nest, and roost by day in tall forest trees with a commanding view of their surroundings. Each pair has several roosting trees and they roost on different trees on different days, not always together, but always within calling distance.

Powerful Owls hunt only within tree cover. And only at night. Snatching their pray from foliage and branches in banking swoops through the forest. Their victims are mainly small to medium tree-living mammals – gliders and possums – although they also eat mice and rabbits and … are strong enough to carry off koalas! This idea upsets me, given dwindling koala numbers, and I can’t help worrying about the well-being of some of the young koalas we haven’t seen for a while. Powerful Owls apparently also eat other, smaller owls, like the Tawny Frogmouth, which sounds a akin to cannibalism… They rip their prey apart, eating it piece by piece, usually starting with the head. Sometimes they carry the hindquarters back to their roost, place it on a branch and hold it all day in their talons: tenderising owl style?

The powerful owl mates for life (over thirty years in some cases, which is somewhat longer than most human marriages last) and together pairs defend a defined territory of up to 1450 hectares. During the breeding season, the male prepares the nest, and roosts in a “grove” of twenty or thirty trees close by the nest tree, providing the female and young with a constant supply of food during the early part of the nesting period. The female incubates the eggs  - usually only one or two each season – and broods the young, who emerge later in the nesting period to hunt for food as well. Young owls remain with the parents for several months after fledging and may stay within their parents’ territory for over a year.

Powerful Owls sound like very particular birds and are a threatened species now, due to clearing of woodland like this; it is an honour indeed to live in their territory.

 It is sometimes said that Australia doesn’t have much of a nature writing tradition. I would argue that we do, it has just developed differently than in the US and UK. There are many interesting reasons for this, which are the subject of my current research project. I’ll be very much immersed in nature writing for 2012 – though not necessarily my own!

For a start, it is worth remembering that Australia is still a relatively young country.  Gilbert White’s A Natural History of Selbourne, one of the earliest and best known examples of nature writing, was first published in 1788… the year Australia was “settled.”

The Natural History of Selbourne is an account of daily life in a Hampshire (UK) village and the plants and creatures of the neighbouring fields. It took eighteen years to complete and takes the form of a series of letters, from his correspondence to other naturalist philosophers, Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington. This is a bit of a construction, as White heavily edited his letters for the purposes of the book, including the dates, presumably for the sake of a stronger narrative.

It is White’s attention to detail and focus on one small location that set Selbourne apart. He was writing at a time when mainstream naturalism was focused on acquisition and expansion and preoccupied with the exotic. It was all expeditions, collections, classification and conjecture; post-Linnaeus but pre-Darwin … there were still some pretty wild theories in circulation about nature.

Selbourne is still more  natural history in its style, but as Mabey points out in his introduction, White brought “meticulousness, humility and scepticism” to the field. His writing combined clear observation with imagination, and he was able to write with “wit and intimacy.” In other words, he not only took an original approach – he was a fine writer.

As you would expect, there is plenty of sexy description:

The covert of this eminence is altogether beech, the most lovely of all forest trees, whether we consider its smooth rind or bark, its glossy foliage, or graceful pendulous boughs (21).

And charming annecdotes like the story of the female mouse (dam) who built a prefectly round ball of a house for her children in a wheat field, suspended on the head of a thistle, or the swallow that built its nest on the wings and body of an owl hanging dead and dry from the rafter of a barn.

Selbourne is, in some ways, also challenging for the modern nature lover. Despite the beautiful descriptions of birds and animals, and charming annecdotes, rather a lot of creatures, particularly birds, are shot, dissected or strung up on barn walls for the sake of natural science.

Gilbert White believed that those who study “only one district are much more likely to advance natural knowledge than those that grasp at more than they can possibly be acquainted with: every kingdom, every province, should have its own monographer.” The Natural History of Selbourne brought a new perspective on the natural world and was read by writers such as H.D. Thoreau, paving the way for Walden and the many fine nature writing books that were to follow.

Selbourne remains one of the most reprinted books in the world, popular even in Japan. The copy I have is a lovely large format, illustrated (woodcuts from previous editions as well as coloured plates) and annotated two hundred anniversary edition (1988), with an introduction from Richard Mabey, from the UQ library. Penguin’s Nature Classics edition (now there’s a series I’d like as a massive boxed set) is lovely, too, and very reasonably priced at around $12.

The ents may have lost their wives but I have found their children.

The Entlings are a little on the small side but I have no doubt they will grow into something much larger. Exactly what, I’m not quite sure; there is a dark and gnarly malevolence to them, with their tangled, mutant mangrove legs. Perhaps they are the children of huorn, and I am unwittingly raising monsters to unleash on the world. I have been half-expecting them to scuttle off, back into the wood, when I am not looking.

I found these fellows beneath a tallow wood tree by our back deck. It is afflicted with some sort of blight, which seems to kill off twigs and branches but not before they swell and blacken.

I have seen bits and pieces of it before, occasional fallen sticks about the place, but never in such intensity. And never so many creature-like pieces. They kept appearing by the back steps like lost children, one each day. As if afraid I would reject them if they all turned up at once.

I have learned not question gifts from above, from the wood, even when I do not understand. I gathered each one up, placing it with the others on the outdoor table, where I can watch them from the kitchen. I photographed them all, in case they do disappear.  And in the meantime, I set them at the empty places around the table.

It’s finally happening. An annual literary prize for Australian women’s fiction: The Stella Prize.

Do we really need another literary prize, you might well ask? The answer should be no, but it isn’t.

While there are plenty of fine books by women published and plenty of women reading, it is unfortunately still the case in this country that more reviewers of books are men, that more books by men are reviewed than books by women, and more books by men win literary prizes. The reasons for this are many and complex, and in some ways, just reflect broader disparities in our society (that old glass ceiling might be cracked, but it is yet to be shattered).

The Stella Prize is intended to help rectify this in the literary world, drawing attention to more wonderful books by Australian women writers. It has been set up rather like the UK’s Orange Prize, introduced in 1994 for the same reasons. And not enough has changed since then.

So, for now, we need the Stella.

For more on literary gender disparities see Nike’s number crunching and the lovely Susan Johnson’s response.

The word hinterland comes from the German hinderland, with the literal meaning of ‘the land behind’, usually the country behind the sea coast or a river, and traditionally, the port and city. In our case, we are behind the coast but in front of the Blackall Range, which is probably what most
people think of when they imagine the Sunshine Coast hinterland. “Oh, near Maleny” they say. And we nod, although Maleny is twenty
minutes by car and a world away by its altitude, community and climate.

Hinterland was also applied to the surrounding areas of European colonies, which, although not part of the colony itself, were influenced by the ruling colony. Although I have no wish to return to colonial times, it still fits. Local government sits on the coast and decisions tend to
be made for the greater population, which is concentrated along the shoreline and canals. The further away you are from the decision makers, and the less populated the area, the less likely revenue will be expended for your benefit or your views considered. Nonetheless, I quite like the idea that we are related to the coast but separate from its highways, malls and spreading estates. We have our own hinterland identity.

‘Hinterland’ can also be applied when talking about an individual’s depth and breadth of knowledge of other matters (or lack thereof), specifically of cultural, academic, artistic, literary and scientific pursuits. For instance, one could say, “Annie Dillard has a vast hinterland.” This usage is said to have first been applied, perhaps appropriately given its colonial reach, to British politicians. The spread of the expression is attributed to Denis Healey, former UK Defence Secretary, and his wife Edna, in the context of the supposed lack of hinterland of former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. What a dinner party conversation that must have been!

I’m not sure about the hinterland, in this sense, of our community; it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Thereare a handful with a vast cultural hinterland, and many lacking even the hinterland of Maggie Thatcher. It is a wonderful oddity of language that onecan live deep in the hinterland and yet also be lacking one. But then perhaps it went without saying, in colonial terms, that a hinterland population could not possibly possess a hinterland of the mind.

Trees, like us, live not only in the present but remember the past and anticipate the future.

The Larch, for example, remembers a caterpillar attack. The next year, it grows
shorter, stouter leaves, which don’t photosynthesise as efficiently as its usual longer, more narrow ones but are better at fending off pests. A tree shaken by wind, processes this information and responds by growing thicker and more sturdy.

A tree out on its own grows much stronger than in a forest. It has to fend for itself, put out root systems strong and deep enough to withstand winds and rain from all directions. And from a young age, too.

There are positives. A lone tree does not have to compete for light or space or nutrients; it can grow as tall and wide as it likes. And drop its limbs with freedom. It will never be in the shande of another.

I grew up admiring big old trees like that, who seemed to carry such wisdom and weight. Here, giant ficus up on the Range capture me, too, their green tangled growth, multitrunked, forming a world of their own.

It must be a lonely life though, without the comfort of others, and the richness of a whole ecosystem about you. There is only so much remembering or learning you can do on your own; surely the collective wisdom of a forest is far greater, and the company of others worth the loss of a little independence.

A ‘wolf tree’ is no longer lone. It once grew in open ground, spreading its branches wide and high, stretching and yawning with all the leisurely freedom of one who lives alone and bathed in light. If the field is left unmowed, unplowed and ungrazed, however, younger trees move in. The gather around the older tree, growing close together and reaching up for light. The original tree, its style cramped by a dense woodland of young and slender trees, is forced to send new branches upward, seeking light.

In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, there are dark forces in the forests. The Huorn are ents become more treeish, gone wild. They can still move and speak, but only with ents. They are vengeful, capable of creating darkness, moving quickly and quietly, and entrapping those who harm trees.

The Huorn are ancient, primeval, old growth; they remember a time when trees ruled Middlearth, before the awakening of elves and the rise of men. The Huorn are still angry at the impact of men and elves and dwarves and orcs on their world, harbouring resentments across the ages. Elves, it seems to me, should be welcome among trees; their only fault was a kinship to men. But I am not a tree.

In The Lord of the Rings, it is the Huorn that Treebeard rouses from Fanghorn Forest, to destroy Isengard. It is the Huorn who come to the aid of the Rohirim at the Battle of the Hornberg when all seems lost, and the Huorn who destroy the Uri-kai attempting to flee to Isengard. It is ultimately the trees that turn the tide, at every crucial point in the story, and save Midddlearth. Afterwards, their work done, they settle back into tree state.

Old Man Willow, the tree that threw Frodo into the water and trapped Merry and Pippin inside its trunk early in their journey, was a powerful Huorn. Only ancient Tom Bombadil, Master of the Old Forest, was able to sing it down:

Tom’s words laid bare the hearts of the trees and their thoughts, which were often dark and strange, and filled with things that go free upon the earth, gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning: destroyers and usurpers. It was not called the Old Forest without reason, for it was indeed ancient, a survivor of the vast forgotten woods; and in it there lived yet, aging no quicker than the hills, the fathers of the fathers of trees, remembering times when they were lords. The countless years had filled them with pride and rooted wisdom, and with malice. But none were more dangerous than the Great Willow: his heart was rotten, but his strength was green; and he was cunning, and a master of winds, and his song and thought ran through the woods on both sides of the river, His grey thirsty spirit drew power out of the earth and spread like fine root-threads in the ground, and invisible twig-fingers in the air, till it had under its dominion nearly all the trees of the Forest from the Hedge to the Downs (145).

We could do with some Huorn in our world at the moment, and an Old Forest.

I have never felt anything as quick as anger from a tree, although they would have good cause. I on the other hand, am full of rage. If I were to encounter a Huorn, a big old tree gone rogue, we would be terrible. We would rouse each other to fury, to vengefulness, ripping out powerlines and phone towers, pulling up railway lines and highways, squashing flat highrises, minister’s offices and government departments. I would ride high in the Huorn’s branches roaring, my hair aflame, the forests of the world falling in behind us. We would turn back time, descending into chaos and darkness, and the trees would reinherit the earth.

Thankfully, trees only gentle me, give me solace. They try to teach, by example, patience and acceptance. I have wandered the gullies, the seasonal creeks, and leaned against the trunks of the greatest trees in Olvar Wood and felt no malice. They impart only stillness, quiet. As the world burns, dries and dies, and we go on killing it, I hunker down, turn inwards, retreat to the wood.

The trees sometimes leave gifts for us at Olvar Wood: driftwood from the sky. Branches and fragments bleached pale grey and rubbed smooth not by the tumble of the ocean but by wind and sun and rain. They fall to earth, dry, hardened, sanded into otherworldly shapes: the bones of forest creatures.

They fall from the dead, tree-ghosts still standing guard on ridgelines, and big old trees carrying dead limbs and sections, the result of some accident or disease. Driftwood is wood half-dissolved, carved by the elements. In the sea, the process is aided by crustaceans and molluscs, in the forest canopy by ants, bugs and birds.

We had picked up an occasional piece over the years, when gardening or exploring: a pleasing shape or useful walking stick. It was only during winter this year, having vowed to source all our firewood from the property, that we really learned to see it. When the chainsaw failed, or was in the shop, we would roam Olvar Wood looking for timber to burn that didn’t require cutting: large sticks, old stumps and logs and branches that can be broken up under a steel-capped boot. The driftwood makes for the best burning; dry and dense, it does not seem to absorb moisture they way other, inexorably rotting timber does. It burns hot and is wonderful for getting the fire going.

We developed an eye for driftwood. After wind or storms we found there was often a scattered offering beneath the dead and dying trees. Each evening we would search these spots, as if for mushrooms after rain, and gather nature’s offerings up into our arms; a driftwood harvest.

We would have liked to keep many of the pieces, admiring them as we collected them, or before throwing them into the flames. But we had to keep warm. And we knew more would fall. At the nearby Maroochydore Botanical Gardens, someone has made sculptures from their eucalypts’ driftwood. Long-limbed forest people walk the gardens, beneath the trees from which they fell. One day, we will make some wooden creatures for Olvar Wood. I have put away a long leg and an arm, with a few broader pieces that might be a face, or a shell.

Like driftwood washed up on a beach, there is something magical about ‘finding’ objects in nature. When we bend to collect a piece of wood that has journeyed across the seas, nibbled and tumbled and baked into the shape of a hand or a bird, it is a treasure; the random result of so many events and processes. Making furniture and works of art from these found objects adds another layer: human creative process. The flotsam and jetsam we gather from Olvar Wood tell its story, of seasons, of life, and of death. The creatures we make from these treasures will be born of the forest.

Olvar Wood’s driftwood maps the rain – 95 inches a year – the directions it came from and with how much force, and in what combinations with sun and wind: the atmosphere of the treetops.

Sculpture, as has often been said, is as much about what is taken away as what is left behind. Cutting away those soft and inessential parts to reveal the true shape beneath, the sinews and knots; the heart of the work.

Collecting these fallen pieces brings me back to my own process: the slow craft of writing, the passing of days among trees, time shared – my heart’s wood.