Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Letter from Far South
John Cameron
Recently retired from academia, Cameron is an Honorary Associate of the Place Research Network in the School of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania. In sending this essay, he explains: “I‘m setting out to write an occasional letter from our place on Bruny Island, just off the southeastern coast of Tasmania, the island state to the south of mainland Australia. I hope to reflect upon some of our experiences of place making and the relationships we have developed, the complexities of seeking to live more lightly on the land, responsive to the richness of the ‘more-than-human world’ in which we find ourselves immersed. Much of my thinking in this letter has been enriched by the writings of David Abram, Henry Bortoft, Edward Casey, Jeff Malpas, Edward Relph, David Seamon, as well as many others.” jcameronvking@optusnet.com.au. © 2008 John Cameron. Originally published in vol. 19, no. 1 (winter 2008), pp. 13-15.
A pair of herons reside very close to our house. They are nesting now, and I am often stopped in my tracks in the early morning by the sound of their strangely guttural mating cries or the sight of their slow lolloping wing beat in unison as they fly by, one of them often carrying a dry branch in his or her beak. The White-faced Herons (Egretta novaehollandiae) stand over two feet tall, pale misty grey in color with yellow legs and rounded white face that seems to emphasize their delicacy and alertness.
My partner Vicki has painted several watercolors of the heron, bringing patient observation and decades of painting experience to her deceptively simple and evocative depictions. She has also been working in a completely new medium for her—assembling pieces of driftwood to convey the essence of each of the shorebirds we encounter.
When we climb down to the rocky beach immediately below us, we pick our way through the morning’s offering from the sea—strands of seaweed, fragments of whelk, cowrie and oyster shell, plastic drink bottles, and driftwood pieces suggestive of bird necks, beaks, or bodies. We always have avian company—kelp gulls wailing and mewing; a tern dipping its wing slightly before plummeting into the water to dive for a fish; a pied cormorant, part fish, part bird, part snake, slipping below the water, then surfacing and slapping the water vigorously with its wings to gain purchase for takeoff when fully laden with fish.
When we have gathered a good supply of the morning’s treasures, we carry them up to Vicki’s shed where a profusion of shapes are in all stages of being transformed from wood to bird. She has placed a delicate elongated driftwood heron in our kitchen window facing the water, opposite the wall on which hangs one of her watercolor herons.
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One recent morning, gazing out that window, I saw the heron with its rounded white face motionless at the edge of the water amid the grey ellipses of rock in the mist. Its presence in living, sculpted, painted form brought forth several memories. One day we were watching the heron alight onto a large horizontal dead branch overlooking the shore. It perched, looking out over the water as intently as we were looking at it. My focus shifted from the heron to the branch, and I was startled to see how closely the end of the branch mirrored the shape of the bird. The angles between thrust forward head, sinuous neck, and spindly legs were the same. The tree ceased being a eucalypt of undistinguished shape and became the “heron tree.” Here was the very correspondence between wood and live bird that Vicki was creating with her sculptures.
The second memory was of the role that the heron played in our finding this place initially. We were relaxing with our friends Pete Hay and his wife Anna at their weekend place on Bruny Island after the successful conclusion of a “Sense of Place/” colloquium in southern Tasmania. On our last morning, when we were due to fly back home to Sydney, Pete, a colloquium co-organizer and a passionate poet and place writer, suggested a pre-breakfast boating excursion, to which I readily agreed.
For no particular reason, we turned southward rather than northward as on our previous outings. Pete was in front in the rowboat with his two dogs alert in the prow, and we paddled behind in the canoe, enjoying the still waters of the estuary for the last time. He’d spied a white-faced heron by the shore and rowed closer in the hopes of photographing it. The bird did not oblige and each time flew a little further on just as Pete prepared to photograph it.
By the time we rounded yet another rocky promontory in our canoe, Vicki and I had grown concerned at how far we’d come and how long this expedition was taking, given how much time was needed to catch the Bruny ferry to the Tasmanian mainland and be at the airport by early afternoon.
Just past the headland, the wide veranda of a simple house appeared in view, splendidly located on its own, overlooking the wooded coastal shore. Vicki exclaimed that she wanted it, or to be precise, “Wanna wanna wanna,” something I’d never heard her say before. I commented that the current owner would probably have an opinion on that statement. A few more strokes of the paddle brought us in sight of a “For Sale” sign on the shore. We were stunned.
After failing to rouse anyone by calling out, we diverted Pete from his pursuit of the heron and persuaded him to hurry back to the shack so we could make inquiries. With a half hour to spare, we met with the owner on site, had a quick tour of the small and largely unfinished house, and essentially shook hands on the sale of the place.
As for Vicki’s uncharacteristic utterance, we were humbled to later discover that the name the original Nuenonne Aboriginal inhabitants gave to Bruny Island was “Lunawanna-alonnah.” She had voiced something of an echo of the Aboriginal name for the island, and we subsequently learned that our new home had been the site of significant early contact between the Nuenonne and representatives of the first Governor with ultimately tragic consequences when they were moved off the island.
Vicki had just finished her doctoral thesis exploring the experience of being-in-place, displacement, trauma, and the ethics of perception based in part on time she spent at the Aboriginal outstation of Utopia in the Northern Territory with Anmatyerr and Alyawarr Aboriginal women artists. Our relationship with Aboriginal people, their trauma and displacement, had just taken a new turn in an uncanny way.
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There are several ways to view what happened that day. From one viewpoint, the heron was simply doing what herons do, keeping its distance and moving on as Pete got too close in his rowboat. At the same time, we have said on more than one occasion that “heron” helped bring us here because we would never have ventured so far otherwise, and that the place called to us that morning.
These are not glib lines. They are full of meaning that deepens with experience. Both views make sense to me despite their seemingly contradictory nature. Holding attitudes and experiences that are at odds with each other appears to be part of living here. It provides a creative tension—an impetus to think through questions of how the heron might somehow be an agent in the mysterious process of our unexpectedly moving here, or how meaningful it is to talk of intentionality in the more-than-human world.
It is a matter of the heart as well as thought to pay attention to the feeling of affinity that sometimes rises in me when heron appears. Even the attitude that heron was only instinctively avoiding human contact comes from a feeling of respect, of valuing its otherness, and not wanting to reduce it to merely a figure in a human drama of my creation.
I don’t want to make more of the event than is warranted, especially when there are so many practical environmental problems to deal with in our locality that need my attention. I hope to mull over such issues in future letters, but for the moment saying that heron guided us here seems to be a way of expressing a feeling that something larger than my own conceptual mind or mere accident is at play.
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Without consciously intending to, we have provided ourselves with the opportunity to put more fully into practice what we had been teaching in “Sense of Place” classes at the University of Western Sydney. Ecological sustainability, an essential aspect of inhabiting place, is more of an everyday matter here because we are not connected to power, water, or sewage. We generate our greatly reduced electricity needs with solar panels and a wind turbine and rely on rainwater tanks and a dry composting toilet.
Since we moved here full-time two years ago, we have embarked on a land regeneration project on our 55 acres of overgrazed paddocks—we’ve removed the sheep and have planted 1200 native trees grown from local seed and 1000 native grasses for land regeneration, wildlife habitat, and erosion control.
Experientially, because we are on the island for about ten days at a time between trips to mainland Tasmania for provisions (there are no shops on north Bruny Island) and don’t watch television, we have a far more intense and ongoing experience of this one place. With no neighbors in view and facing an expanse of estuarine shores and waters, we focus much attention on the more-than-human world that we are inhabiting and our response to it.
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Living here is also precipitating changes in the “practices of place” that I have developed and written about previously: Goethean science, meditation, bush regeneration, and investigation of local natural and human history. I had expected in my “retirement” I would be able to implement this work more thoroughly and systematically, but life has proved otherwise. Much of my day is now spent outside spraying thistles in the paddocks, planting trees and grasses, maintaining the tree guards, digging in the vegetable bed and so on, whereas nearly all my working days at the university were spent inside at the computer screen, in classrooms, or at meetings.
The rare occasions when I have ventured down to the shore to undertake some Goethean science, for example, have been rewarding enough but no longer seem sufficient in themselves, perhaps because the context within which I am carrying them out has changed so radically. Rather, they are pointing toward a more flexible and integrated way of being outdoors here, enabling me to move in and out of task-oriented action, sensuous appreciation, and intuitive or meditative states, without allocating certain periods of time for each.
I say “pointing the way toward,” because for much of the time, the directed activities tend to overwhelm other sensibilities that emerge only as an occasional glimpse. Even though progress is slow, it has increasingly felt contrary to the spirit of these practices, as well as being impractical, to schedule them into a part of the day.
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I felt surrounded that morning by the many manifestations of heron in front of me. Heron wasn’t simply “out there” in all its forms, manifesting what I could best describe as poised attentiveness. The feeling was also a personal matter. My everyday personality is not characterized by either poise or attentiveness, yet these are qualities that attract me and to which I aspire.
The possibility of bringing them more to life within has opened up, but it is a razor-edged possibility. On the one side, there are days when it seems that all I can see in the mirror of nature here are my own shortcomings—mental turbulence in the face of the reflective waters, resistance to change in the midst of the continuous flux of wind and waves.
On the other side is the danger of constructing a narrative that obscures as much as it reveals, of telling a simple storyline that belies the complex, contradictory, and erratic nature of what I’ m experiencing or makes too much of what is happening. The middle way between self-doubting and self-deluding stories seems to involve holding such stories lightly, having an attitude of quiet, open-hearted acceptance of what is—including my own human foolishness— and care for ourselves as integral parts of this place.
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As I write this, I am also very aware of the precariousness of the situation we all face. There are many threats, such as tree dieback, erosion, and introduced weeds, to this narrow fringe of coastal woodland, and our capacity to keep living here can be so easily broken by illness or misadventure.
Yet, heron nests are being built, the recently planted trees are putting down roots, as are we, so there is hope for the new season. I sense that we are participating—heron, Vicki and I—in an unfolding relationship that has many dimensions.
We are becoming familiar with each other’s habits. Our feeling for heron grows as the story of our being here develops. We are working physically to create more habitat for birds. We move quietly to respect everyone’s space as much as we can, and some of our avian friends are approaching us more closely these days. Vicki’s creative response to the presence of heron and the other birds is flourishing.
My wonderment and appreciation of the whole process grows as I write my way into it. Writing, too, is one of the ways in which I am participating in this three-way connection. It is helping to illuminate the depth of the relationships, how to hold lightly the complexity of living here and to accept it with an attentive heart.