Poetics of place - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 2: Dreams of Land
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Mark McKenna
NO OTHER NATION HAS A CONSTITUTION PREAMBLE THAT SEEKS to explain its people's love of the land. No other nation has sought to distil the spirituality of country in constitutional language. Only the Russian preamble comes close with its reference to "honouring the memory of our ancestors, who have passed on to us love of and respect for our homeland". Many employ phrases such as "our land" or "our country" but they often do so in the context of explaining a struggle for independence or, in the case of the South African constitution, to "respect those who have worked to build and develop our country".
In this light Australians, without knowing, have been engaged in something quite extraordinary and novel. We may well become the first nation to adopt a constitutional preamble that expresses the uniqueness of its land, the poetics of place, as a source and inspiration for national unity.
Such is the sensibility of the draft preambles written since 1998. They concern themselves with the land as an animate and spiritual force, drawing on indigenous notions of caring for country, expressing love of the "ancient" and "unique" land and the duty of trust and responsibility we bear for future generations. Repeatedly, the need to "respect" and "protect" the environment comes through. The imagined preamble becomes a "moral charter" grounded in a sense of place – the very same place that is the site of the greatest moral dilemma in Australian history – the land that was taken without negotiation, treaty or consent from Aboriginal people.
This new constitutional language is not the sole property of the left-leaning "elite". It is interesting, for example, to look at the transcript of John Howard's press conference at Parliament House on March 23,1999, the day he released his first draft preamble for public comment:
Journalist: "What were the influences on you as one of the prime authors of the preamble?"
Howard: "Well, my own feeling about this country, the history, the contribution of the original Australians, the contribution of immigration, the sense of space that I've always felt about Australia and the impact that that has had and continues to have."
Howard's preamble included recognition of the prior occupation of Australia by Aborigines as well as the statement: "Our vast island continent has helped to shape the destiny of our commonwealth and the spirit of its people." By August 1999, with the release of the preamble that went to a national referendum in 1999, these words had disappeared. They were replaced with the need for Australians to be "mindful of our responsibility to protect our unique natural environment".
Howard might have used different words to those of Richard Flanagan or James Bradley but he was undertaking the same task. The desire to find the words that might express Australians' relationship with their land is felt across the political spectrum. What then are the origins of this newfound desire, this constitutional dreaming?
TO LAY THE EXPLANATION AT THE FEET OF THE traditional role of bush mythology and the popular perception of the outback as the "real heart" of Australia would be too easy. Politics has played its role, particularly the politics of Aboriginal protest since the 1960s. The struggle for land rights, the High Court's Mabo decision in 1992, which exposed the lie of terra nullius, and the movement for reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians begun in 1991, have all contributed.
The reconciliation process was built in part on the need for greater understanding of Aboriginal cultures. Through decades of Aboriginal political resistance, Australians have listened to the stories of Aborigines caring for their country since "time immemorial". We have come to understand Aboriginal cultures as those in which flesh, earth, sky and language are one, where everything is connected. These cultures are "timeless" not because they lie outside time but because they speak of the oneness of time. Their land is "homeland" and "belonging place" – a synthesis of ancestral history, spirituality and dreaming, a source of sustenance and ritual, law and ceremony – a land that is both life itself and life-giving. This is land that can never be "sold" because to do so would be to deny the sense of custodianship and obligation that is such an integral part of Aboriginal culture.
By emphasising the centrality of the land to any new constitutional preamble, perhaps non-Aboriginal Australians are also wishing to end the sense of alienation and exile that is embedded within their colonial experience. Home is no longer elsewhere. The mother country is here. Through Aboriginal people we have come to see the spiritual nature of the land and accept more openly the traditions of environmental sensitivity and protection that have always existed in European culture. This is an understanding unique to Australia and one we should strive to articulate in a new preamble. The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation's "Declaration Towards Reconciliation", released in May 2000, attempted to do so in language that was also constitutional in tone:
Through understanding the spiritual relationship between the land and its first peoples, we share our future and live in harmony ... our hope is for a united Australia that respects this land of ours; values the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage; and provides justice and equity for all.
THE POLITICS OF RECONCILIATION, HOWEVER, IS NOT the only catalyst of a new constitutional language in Australia. At the heart of the movement for a republic, there is also an implicit but nonetheless deep psychological need to address the issue of land.
The gradual dispossession of Aboriginal Australia occurred under the imprimatur of the Crown. Aboriginal land became Crown land. Aboriginal sovereignty was usurped by the sovereignty of the Crown, at least in the eyes of the invaders. While the sovereignty of the Crown allegedly afforded Aborigines protection, the description of all lands not under freehold title as "Crown land" was the most powerful reminder that those lands had been seized unlawfully, without treaty or negotiation.
To this day, the very words "Crown land" help to conceal the fact that the lands and waters of Australia belonged to Aborigines. Like an illusion created by a conjuror, Crown land denies the Aboriginality of this country, yet another reason that the declaration of an Australian republic must acknowledge that which the Crown has served to obscure. Speaking at the 1998 Constitutional Convention, the then chair of ATSIC, Gatjil Djerrkura, reminded Australians that it was for this reason that the republic and reconciliation were linked. A new republican preamble, he said, could become a powerful "symbol of reconciliation".
WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF THE PAST FIVE YEARS in mind, how might we best express our "love of this unique and ancient land" in a new preamble? Over the past decade there has been a flowering of environmental history in Australia and much of this new work carries profound insights into the way we have come to view the land and our place in it. I want to draw briefly on the work of three authors in particular as a means of understanding some
of the pitfalls we might avoid when making reference to the land in a new preamble.
The work of Tom Griffiths has shown how "the writing of Australian history has always been suffused with a sense of the land and its difference". But it also reminds us that we should be wary of describing the land as if nature lies "outside culture". In other words, we should not make the mistake of imagining the land in such a way that it becomes a "landscape without humans".
To borrow a phrase from Aboriginal English, I have often thought of Australians as "saltwater people", people who cling to the sea for their livelihood. Yet despite the fact that almost 90 per cent of Australians live on the coastal fringe, "the descriptive metaphors" used to imagine the land, as Tom Griffiths writes, are "about hearts and backs, but never heads and fronts". The land of the heart is so often imagined as non-urban, as if belonging to land could only mean belonging to "natural" landscape rather than to a street corner in our suburb or city. On an everyday level, Australians' deepest sense of the land is expressed through the national obsession with home ownership. How does this "dream" sit with our desire to care for the land?
If we are to include our desire to care for the land in a new preamble then we must find the words to make it clear that the land to which we refer is all our land – urban, suburban, rural and wilderness. Caring for land cannot be gazetted. There is little point in caring for the red centre if we fail to care for our backyards, our streets and our cities. Our environmental aesthetic must be holistic.
One of the groundbreaking works of Australian history in recent years is Tim Bonyhady's The Colonial Earth (Miegunyah Press, 2000). Bonyhady's work demonstrates that European culture in Australia has always carried traditions of environmental sensitivity and understanding. Since the second half of the 19th century, certain settlers increasingly referred to their new environment as a "heritage if not national estate". The "environmental aesthetic", says Bonyhady, is "deeply embedded in [our] culture". The popular stereotype of an avaricious European culture bent on nothing more than rape and pillage of the environment is not one that we would want to entrench, even if only by implication, in the preamble. Making reference to indigenous custodianship and caring for land should be linked with the responsibility and duty that all Australians now share.
SINCE EUROPEANS FIRST ARRIVED IN AUSTRALIA they have found it difficult to find the words to describe their new environment. As exiles, they often remembered an idealised vision of their homeland, something akin to William Blake's vision of England in Jerusalem – a "green and pleasant land". Australia was a land that constantly failed to equal this vision, "the Default Country", in the words of lexicologist JM Arthur, who reveals the way in which so much of the settler's language perceived Australia as a "dysfunctional continent", a land that was "incomplete" "unusual" or "defective", a land against which the settler had to struggle. "What if the Default Country were finally banished from the language?" she asks. "Would this make a difference to the way Australians live in Australia?"
Perhaps a new preamble could answer Arthur's question by employing language that entailed a sense of acceptance of the land. Rather than forever trying to subdue the land, we might finally be able to show that we have learned to listen to the land.
Over the coming years, Australians have the opportunity to create a uniquely Australian constitutional language, one that is culturally specific to our own place and time. The failure of Howard's proposed preamble at the 1999 referendum should be seen as a failure of political negotiation and consultation rather than an indication that the electorate will not support a new preamble in the future.
Finding the right words to express the uniqueness of this land and the depth of our relationship with it could serve to promote a sense of popular ownership of the constitution. If the constitution touches ordinary Australians, if it speaks to the living and not to the dead, then the people are more likely to vote for it.
The desire of so many Australians to include reference to the land in a new preamble has been a means of taking the constitution beyond the material, the practical and the everyday. Perhaps this new constitutional language will supply the sense of mystery that monarchy once possessed. Perhaps it will also express something about our nature that can't be bought or traded.
The words we use will be both poetic and pragmatic, without hubris or sentimentality. That they will remain mere words and that we will always fall short of the promise they hold is true, but that is no reason to resile from the task of writing them. ♦