Poetics of place
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 2: Dreams of Land
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Mark McKenna
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Mark McKenna's biography and other articles by this writer
No society can make a perpetual constitution or even a perpetual law.
The earth belongs always to the living generation.
– Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, September 6, 1789
Australians live under a constitution that speaks only to the dead. Since its inception in 1901, the federal constitution has not figured greatly in explaining our identity or character.
We are a nation forged through remembering the human sacrifice and horror of war, a people whose most profound political instincts lie outside the words of our constitution. While we live under a written constitution, the values and principles of our democracy remain largely unwritten – truths embedded in the practice of daily life – truths we have yet to distil. If Australians can be said have a constitution in any real sense, it is an imaginary constitution. One comprised of scraps of myth and wishful thinking that bears little relation to the text of the document itself.
We might comfort ourselves with the thought that our traditional scepticism makes us too suspicious of grand and noble language to write a new constitution. Alternatively, we could see the quest to make the constitution more reflective of our democracy and society as one suited more to the late 18th century than the early years of the 21st century, as if now, in an age of information overload, we no longer have faith in the promise words can hold.
Yet to think in this way would not only be too simplistic, it would also overlook some of the fundamental changes in Australia's political culture in the 1990s. Since 1998, there has been considerable public interest in a new constitutional preamble. And it is here, in the first words of our constitution, that Australians have shown a willingness to embrace a more poetic expression of identity, particularly in relation to the land.
IN JUNE THIS YEAR I WAS INVITED TO SPEAK on ABC Radio National's breakfast program, hosted by Peter Thompson. There was to be a half-hour discussion on the content of six new constitutional preambles sponsored and launched by the Australian Republican Movement (ARM). When I read the six draft preambles I was surprised. Each was written by a prominent Australian author – Peter Carey, Richard Flanagan, James Bradley, Delia Falconer, Dorothy Porter and Leah Purcell. But the authors were not the cause of my surprise. The association between Australian literary figures and writing a new preamble was not new. Together with other members of the Constitutional Commission's Advisory Committee on Individual and Democratic Rights, Thomas Keneally had tried as early as 1987 with these words: "Australia is a continent of immense extent, and unique in the world, demanding as our homeland our respect, devotion and wise management." Les Murray had also assisted another great wordsmith, the Prime Minister, John Howard, in penning a draft preamble in 1999. In each of the ARM preambles I could see evidence of something significant: explicit and poetic reference to the land. Each had tried to explain the depth of his or her attachment to Australia as country – as earth, sky, sea and light.
Peter Carey's speaks of our "fierce love of this land", hoping for an
Australia "indivisible beneath the Southern Cross". Leah Purcell asks that Australians "respect and acknowledge the land and its first peoples". Purcell's sentiments are echoed by Delia Falconer who writes of Australians "affirming our duty of care toward this ancient landscape and its creatures ... accepting our special status as an island continent, generous in expanse and heart, linked and looking outward to the ocean". Poet Dorothy Porter begins her preamble by reminding Australians of their good fortune:
We are fortunate to live and prosper in the expansive light of a unique and ancient continent. It is our duty and privilege as a people to nurture and protect this natural landscape as has been done for millennia by the indigenous Australians.
Two writers go to great lengths to evoke the spirit of place that they find so unique to Australia. Novelist James Bradley writes:
First and forever there is the land, the sea, the sky. It is from them that we are born, to them we shall return. It is to them that we pledge our allegiance first, and foremost, and in this allegiance assume the trust to care for them as they care for us.
In this same land, this same sea, this same sky that for countless generations were sacred to the Aboriginal peoples, who learned their rhythms, shaped them with fire and story, and drew from them their laws and customs ...
Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan attempts the same task, writing a creation story:
Yet leavened by the glory of this world cast as earth and sea, we came to see our own image as wind and light and dust, as tree and spinifex and coral, as animal and bird and fish ...
From the ancient painted gorges of the Fitzroy River to the ever-new rainbow of the Great Barrier Reef, from a Manly ferry at dusk to Uluru at dawn, from the many dreamings and many nightmares, from the rainbow serpent to the Burma Railway to Kuta Beach, we strove to make a nation of free and generous people united by a belief in liberty and truth.
When I read these words my first instinct was to see only their flaws. I laughed when my co-discussant on Radio National, Gerard Henderson, pointed out that it might be unwise to make reference to the Manly ferry in the constitution – what if it stopped running? Flanagan's Old Testament prose was also cinematic in its depiction of the land – language akin to a tourist brochure or a television advertisement to entice Europeans or Americans to Australia. While I admired Bradley's preamble as a piece of creative writing, my training in political science had me wondering how the High Court might find his attempt to emulate the Book of Genesis useful in interpreting the constitution.
As the first words of a constitution, the preamble explains the intention and rationale of the founders and lays down the fundamental principles on which the constitution is based. In almost every constitutional preamble these principles, grounded in the history of a particular nation state, are political or legal. Occasionally they stray into social and economic aspirations and rights. I wondered whether Bradley realised what he was doing. Writing that we are born from the land, sea and sky and that it is to them that we will return may well be a poetic exposition of our existential predicament – but what were these words doing in a preamble?
Equally, Dorothy Porter's reference to Australia's "expansive light" was affecting but what was the point of a constitutional preamble beginning by speaking of the light? At first blush, I found the six preambles moving, highly personal, even intimate, especially when read by the authors as they were that morning on Radio National. Yet while they were inspiring, I also found them fanciful. Then again, I thought, Australia could do with more fancy.
THE MORE I THOUGHT ABOUT THESE PREAMBLES over the next few weeks, I came to see their fanciful nature as positive. I also came to understand that they reflected something original about Australian thinking on the constitution that has been evident since the late 1990s. They were not the first draft preambles to include reference to Australia's land and environment. When I trawled through the preambles written since 1998 (and there are many) I saw that the land was a constant theme – land as place, land as history ("ancient" and "timeless"), land as the source of spirituality, land
as something sacred, land as home.
At the Constitutional Convention in 1998, republican Janet Holmes à Court, in a passionate address, insisted that Australians needed the "smell of eucalyptus" in the constitution, "the feel of red dust" and "swimming in the Australian sea". To which Geoff Gallop, now the Labor Premier of Western Australia, replied, "What about eating beef?" One week earlier, Democrat Senator Natasha Stott Despoja told fellow delegates at the convention that "we must put into our preamble the fact that we cherish, that we love, the great sky and land and sea of this great nation". Moira Rayner, a member of one of the subgroups that had worked on the text of a new preamble at the convention, said her group insisted on expanding the reference to "our unique and diverse land" "because we wanted to emphasise the environmental aspects of our care for the land – those responsibilities and trusts towards the land which the Aboriginal owners of the land had, for so many thousands of years, exercised until we came and changed things so much".
Delegates read preambles written by others that spoke of Australians being owned in spirit by the land. The more prosaic was represented by the convention's final recommendations, which suggested that "affirmation of respect for our unique land and the environment" be included. Yet throughout the convention debates and in so many other forums during the lead-up to the 1999 referendum on the republic – ATSIC, Women's Constitutional Conventions, the Constitutional Centenary Foundation's Preamble Quest in 1999 and the many newspaper features on the preamble that included preambles from prominent Australians and schoolchildren – reference to Australia's unique land and environment was the abiding theme.