Habits of inclusion - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 8: People like Us
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Kay Ferres
TO RETURN TO TASMANIA (a rich source of material for Green Pens), the poet Margaret Scott has described her restoration of a derelict house and garden on the Tasman Peninsula. Scott was born in Bristol, emigrated to Tasmania in 1959, and bought the Federation house Tara in 1987. Its original owners were orchardists, who built the house on the profits from their first crop of apples, exported to the United Kingdom. The interior walls and ceilings were panelled with fashionable and practical Wunderlich pressed metal, each room featuring a different decorative floral design. This floral abundance was matched in the home garden. Scott's inquiries about the garden revealed a newspaper profile of Xenia Alene Jenkins, the "home industrialist", whose labour produced some 250 different items of food, including fruit and vegetables, preserves and cheese, fish, fowl and bacon. This accomplished woman was a local legend who still inspired respect long after her death. As Scott comments:
In all this she was seen not simply as winning personal glory but as typifying a way of life, so enabling her neighbours to take pride in themselves and what they did. She gave them hope by pointing the way through a desert of hard labour to a timeless paradise of milk and honey, tennis courts and preserved fruits, whether metal or crystallised. And she gave the lie to anyone in the big city who looked down on country people as rough, stupid or dull, by showing what could come out of a small remote community, by taking the ordinary stuff of the lives of Peninsula women and transmuting it to something magical. People still talk about the sensation Mrs Jenkins created when, like a sculptor or painter, she mounted a one-woman exhibition of her garden's bounty sealed in shining turrets of preserving jars.
Scott restored the house, though her efforts in the garden fell well short of those of her predecessors. But, like Jenkins, she was to exemplify her moral strength and her connection to the peninsula community through her work. In 1996, Martin Bryant murdered locals and visitors, including people known to him, at Port Arthur. This event had profound repercussions, nationally and locally. The debate about the regulation of gun ownership produced a town and country divide. At Port Arthur, picking up the pieces involved a tension between reparation and revenue that centred on appropriate commemoration. Scott published a book about the massacre, Port Arthur: A Story of Strength and Courage (Random House, 1997). This work, no less than Jenkins's home industry, represented the community to itself.
Scott did not like Tasmania when she first arrived and it took her years to feel at home there. Her essay on Jenkins's house Tara, "Prospects from a metal garden", published in 1999, documents both her acceptance of her community of fate and its acceptance of her. It details habits of inclusion centring on work and civility. Sadly, fire destroyed the house Jenkins built and Scott restored. Scott's attachments to the landscape and community of the Tasman Peninsula have been preserved in her poetry and in Changing Countries (ABC Books, 2000), a partly autobiographical work. Her intersecting membership of her adopted local community and the republic of letters connects private life and public commitment.
In Wildflowering (University of Queensland Press, 2004), Margaret Somerville has described the life of Kathleen McArthur, which was devoted to the identification and conservation of the plants that secured the dunes of Queensland's Sunshine Coast, from Caloundra to Cooloola. McArthur, a botanical illustrator, also championed the cultivation of Australian plants in suburban gardens. The emergence of the bush garden was a feature of Australian suburbs in the 1960s. Key figures in this development, Ellis Stones and Graham Ford, worked together after the war in the Diamond Valley, north-east of Melbourne, where a close-knit community centred on the artists' colony, Montsalvat.
In Queensland, McArthur published her drawings so that the beauty of these relatively unknown plants would be more widely appreciated. She also wrote short dramatic pieces, performed at the local community centre, to publicise conservation issues and other public concerns. Together with her friend Judith Wright, she worked to make conservation a popular movement. Kings Beach, where McArthur lived, is rapidly being overtaken by high-rise, but a few gardens like hers remain, along with a wildflower reserve at Tooway Lake. Somerville's biography is subtitled "The life and places of Kathleen McArthur". Her narrative shifts attention from the conventional biographical interest in family history and private life to the affiliations that shaped McArthur's civic involvement.
Gardening, as Peter Cundall and his devoted television audience agree, is a way of life as well as a means of survival. Histories of gardeners and gardening suggest that gardening may cultivate other things such as an ethical disposition and habits of inclusion that might go some way to eroding the boundaries of "them" and "us". ♦
References
Zygmunt Bauman, 2001, The Individualized Society, Polity Press, Cambridge.
Jane Brown, 1999, The Pursuit of Paradise: A Social history of Gardens and Gardening, HarperCollins, London.
Sam Fleischacker, 1998, "Insignificant communities" in Freedom of Association, ed Amy Gutmann, Princeton University Press.
Katie Holmes, Susan K. Martin and Kylie Mirmohamadi, 2004, Green Pens: A collection of garden writing, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne.
Margaret Scott, 1997, Port Arthur: A story of Strength and Courage, Random House Australia.
Margaret Scott, 1999, "Prospects from a metal garden" in The Nature of Gardens, ed Peter Timms, Allen & Unwin, Sydney.
Margaret Somerville, 2004, Wildflowering: The life and places of Kathleen McArthur, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia.