Habits of inclusion
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 8: People like Us
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Kay Ferres
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Kay Ferres' biography and other articles by this writer
Australia's unlikeliest television presenter, Peter Cundall, recently conducted viewers of the ABC TV's Gardening Australia on a tour of his garden in the Tamar Valley, Tasmania. After war service in Europe, Cundall enlisted in the Australian army in order to emigrate. The army sent him to Korea, but subsequently he settled in Tasm-ania. Now nearing 80, he has established an ornamental garden, orchard and vegetable paddock on a scale that recalls the enterprise of an earlier immigrant, John Glover, whose farm was the subject of his picturesque landscapes and sketches. In 1830, aged 64, Glover and his wife joined their sons in Van Diemen's Land. His decision to leave behind a career that had won him critical and commercial success puzzled his contemporaries, as it has art historians since. Glover, the son of a tenant farmer, spent the last 12 years of his life establishing his own farm at Patterdale.
In 2004, Glover's work and career were commemorated in an exhibition, John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque, at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. His Tasmanian works not only represent his conservation and transformation of the conventions of landscape painting, they also document practices of agriculture and animal husbandry. Light saturates the southern landscape and discloses the detail of its human occupation: Aborigines and convicts, the artist and his animals.
Like Glover's paintings, Cundall's program documents the labour of adaptation, as well as the products of that labour. The primary purpose of Cundall's garden is to provide food. It also allows experimentation in practices that regenerate the soil, conserve water and encourage biodiversity. He shares his practical knowledge with his audience and they respond with tips and advice. This exchange extends to a kind of moral wisdom: for Cundall, who grew up in Manchester in the Depression, gardening is what it is to be alive. On television, he exhorted his viewers to "forget jogging, start digging". Many Australians must agree, as gardening is a flourishing pastime across the country.
The "sea change/tree change" phenomenon has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. In the television program SeaChange, Sigrid Thornton's character looked for a solution to personal unhappiness and career anxiety in the idea of community. SeaChange's opening credits rolled against images of the city, tall buildings and a tangle of freeways. This is the iconography of an anxiety that centres less on means than on ends. In what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has called "the individualised society", the question of choice has changed its character. Where an earlier generation (like Cundall's) faced scarcity and inequality, aspirations for a different life had first to deal with the means to that end. Securing the means entailed a politics of solidarity. In the contemporary world of apparently expanding choices, insecurity centres not on the capacity to choose but on where the choice might lead and what it might mean. In the essays collected in The Individualised Society (Polity Press, 2001), Bauman repeatedly cites Pierre Bourdieu: La précarité est aujourd'hui partout. This precariousness, the sense that one does not have a grip on the present, much less the future, undermines confidence in oneself, in others and in institutions.
Yet, at the same time, people manage this insecurity by focusing on personal projects, particularly the search for identity. The appeal of "community" has never been stronger. The dangerous temptation of identity, its implicit non-identification with the other, produces "them" and "us". According to Bauman: "Identity owes the attention it attracts and the passions it begets to being a surrogate of community: of that allegedly ‘natural home' which is no longer available in the rapidly privatised and individualised, fast globalising world."
Community founded on identity divides and separates. It also preserves hierarchies and established networks of power. And it denies the complexity of associations that shapes individual lives. We all belong to dispersed groups. Some of these attachments are temporary; some involve formal membership; others depend on processes of mutual recognition. Bonds may be strong or weak, and some memberships intersect. Gardeners and artists can be regarded as communities of this kind. Cundall's gardening, for example, overlaps with his membership of organisations as diverse as the Organic Gardening and Farming Society, peace groups and his work as an envoy for the Save the Children Fund. Studies of national and ethnic communities have exposed problems of boundaries and exclusion. In the case of dispersed groups and "particle communities", to use Sam Fleischacker's term, habits of inclusion are critical to their continued existence.
A SPATE OF RECENT publications in Australia have taken up the issue of inclusiveness and the dissolution of boundaries between "them" and "us" from the standpoints of political theory and social history. Much of this work, nevertheless, locates the problem in the frame of race and ethnicity. Another strand explores connections between land and belonging. But what of ordinary encounters with strangers and newcomers? How does the daily work of learning to be at home in a new place proceed? Some recent books about gardening offer insights into habits of inclusion. As Jane Brown has observed in The Pursuit of Paradise (HarperCollins, 1999), a social history of gardens has shifted attention from aesthetics and design, from scientific expertise, to the ordinary people who get dirt on their hands. These people and their gardens leave few traces, yet their practices persist. Uncovering their histories also reveals a great deal about the way their work was implicated in social life and class relations.
In Green Pens: A collection of garden writing (The Miegunyah Press, 2004), Katie Holmes, Susan Martin and Kylie Mirmohamadi have drawn on archival and literary sources and oral history to allow gardeners to speak about their joys and disappointments, and about the way gardening features in their family, social and economic relationships. Many of these sources are fragmentary, so the book is organised around themes that place gardens in a wider context of public life and national identity. Gardening has been seen as a means of building character, incorporated into education programs designed to produce good citizens; and gardens have long been designed to cultivate civility and other virtues.
The writings in Green Pens reveal common concerns and shared hopes, and show that gardens, like other cultural formations in Australia, are a locus of ambivalence about boundaries. These are boundaries between the old and new worlds, the natural environment and land under cultivation, city and suburbs, the living and the dead, secular modernity and its various others. The cultures of cultivation that successive waves of immigrants brought with them saw the replication of plantings and garden design, and the adaptation of ancient forms to modern purposes. The walled garden, for example, is found in Australia in the design of religious houses, psychiatric hospitals, prisons and internment camps. Walled gardens derive from Islamic and Christian traditions of enclosure. In monastic houses and in the busy precincts of cathedrals like Notre Dame, they incorporated spaces for the varied dimensions of human existence.
In particular, design elements such as the bower, the reflective pool and the labyrinth were designed to allow withdrawal from worldly distractions, contemplation and communion with God. Green Pens characterises its Australian examples as places of confinement and exclusion, inhabited by the marginalised and oppressed. In these institutions, therapy, rehabilitation and productive work take priority over contemplative repose. Here, the topoi of the monastic walled garden have been relocated to the garden cemetery.
Cemeteries, as opposed to poignant lonely graves and public mausoleums like the Australian War Memorial, have an uneasy place in Australia's cultural landscape. Nineteenth-century garden cemeteries, designed as places for family remembrance, were quickly overtaken by all manner of urban developments. One writer to a local paper in 1895 described Boroondara cemetery in Kew: the stream of mourners in black sashes and feathers joined by gay young things, "drest in all the gaudy clothes which a cut-throat competition among drapers can give them – vieing for brilliancy with the very growing flowers upon the graves – and bubbling all over with high spirits and laughter and merriment", the young women with bright hair and white shoes. Population density and the hygiene movement's support for cremation saw the relocation of cemeteries to the suburban fringe. Low-maintenance lawn cemeteries displaced the cemeteries of the often-neglected family plot.