Transdisciplinary Journeys in the Anthropocene

More-than-human encounters

Kate Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138911147
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317434900
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Transdisciplinary Journeys in the Anthropocene offers a new perspective on international environmental scholarship, focusing on the emotional and affective connections between human and nonhuman lives to reveal fresh connections between global issues of climate change, species extinction and colonisation. Combining the rhythm of road travel, interviews with local Aboriginal Elders, and autobiographical storytelling, the book develops a new form of nature writing informed by concepts from posthumanism and the environmental humanities. It also highlights connections between the studied area and the global environment, drawing conceptual links between the auto-ethnographic accounts and international issues.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and postgraduates in environmental philosophy, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, Australian studies, anthropology, literary and place studies, ecocriticism, history and animal studies. Transdisciplinary Journeys in the Anthropocene may also be beneficial to studies in nature writing, ecocriticism, environmental literature, postcolonial studies and Australian studies.

Part I

Stone country

Figure 1 Strata of New England, Armidale, 2016

Early on in this research project I decided that I wanted to revisit places that I remembered from childhood. Because the only feasible way to travel the stretched-out distances of New England is by car, getting to these places required a road trip. That I needed an automobile, the bitumen highways, traffic laws, petrol and everything else that accompanies the assemblage of car travel in Australia in order to visit New England places indicates that from the very outset my research was already deeply implicated in a colonial, perhaps colonising, experience of land and country.

Because I don’t have a licence, my parents drove the car, so I spent long interludes reclining in the backseat in air-conditioned comfort. As a passenger I watched through dusty windows as streamlined tableland landscapes rose and fell from my vision. Film theorist Michael Atkinson argues that automobility, with its ‘screen-like, Panavision-shaped lens of the windshield’, determines basic experiences of reality: ‘how we measure the width of continents … how we simultaneously close ourselves up within our self-made universes and gain access to every forgotten corner of the globe’.¹

The car as a microcosm of comfortable spectatorship seems to speak volumes about settler alienation from place. On a personal level the idea of a vehicular bubble symbolises the distinctly non-Aboriginal Australian life-world I have grown up in – a circle of familiar whiteness traversing a black land. My position as a passenger also resonates with my pervasive feeling that I have been carried along by processes of violent invasion and colonisation. While I have never really seen myself as being in the driver’s seat, I have certainly benefitted from my position as a white Anglo-Saxon settler in a colonised country – carried forward with the volition of the smooth and totalising movement of colonial ‘development’.²

Even within an attempted decolonisation of a home-place, where exiting the car at significant spots focuses my full attention on issues of settlement and Indigenous sovereignty, I am bound by the criss-cross of bitumen that territorialises this country. Stephen Muecke writes that ‘Australia is a country where deep Indigenous narrative lines have been confused by the imposition of another grid of lines’.³ Confined to highways and freeways, is it possible to talk and write meaningfully about decolonisation? Is it delusional to try to address problems of settlement when the experience of being on the road means that I necessarily embody a territorialising aesthetic?

The road has been essential to the process of observing, cultivating and possessing geographic territory. Paul Virilio has noted that ‘Possession of territory is not primarily about laws and contracts, but first and foremost a matter of movement and circulation’.⁴ The smooth flow of rubber tyres against tar and the soothing hum of an engine seem to ease away the social and environmental destruction that these highways symbolise: the erasure of Indigenous tracks, the war against nature, a mobilised violence against people and their places.

The grids of bitumen that stretch across the vast geography of our lands have been referred to as ‘Anthropocene rock’⁵ – the most obvious sedimentary layer of a species whose impact on the planet is so profound as to be considered a geological event. Terrestrial mobility is often cited as the beginnings of the transition from biological species to geological agent, with James Watt’s invention of the steam engine identified as the inauguration of the age of man – ‘the one artifact that unlocked the potentials of fossil energy and thereby catapulted the human species to full-spectrum dominance’.⁶ Our ability to accelerate the speed with which we traversed continents facilitated the ‘Great Acceleration’ in the human impact on the planet, leaving nuclear signatures in soils and sediments.

Hurtling through New England back country in my parents’ sedan, I’m reminded that my movement through place is enabled by a fossil economy. The exhaust pipe coughs polluting streams of carbon into the atmosphere as I approach remote New England places with ‘speed, noise, all those things that add up to Western productivity, to make some use of a place, to violate its “quiet fossil murmur” ’.⁷

Thinking of the deposits of millennia of creaturely existence – the birth and death of countless individuals and species – that have been extracted from the deepest veins of the earth to be converted into crude oil that perpetuates a territorialising, motoring hum, I am plagued by Stephen Muecke’s question:

What kind of story do you tell on the road if you don’t want to write like an imperial highway, on the road to further colonial expansion, where you engage in trade, slow down, get boring, lay out the plan for a town, create rectangles and climb into a coffin?⁸

The following two chapters offer a counter-colonial story of being on the road in a colonial country in the era of the Anthropocene. Journeying from the ‘time-space compression’ of a vehicle confined by a surface grid of highways,⁹ into subterranean layers of granite etched with the ‘deep Indigenous narrative lines’¹⁰ of the continent, I write with New England’s ancient gorge country that has carved itself into my life and mind. This is stone that is etched into my memory, and stone into which a memory of the human species is now forever consigned.

Notes

1M. Atkinson, Ghosts in the Machine: The Dark Heart of Pop Cinema (New York: Proscenium Publishers, 1999), 43–44.

2This is similar to the is/is-not-me settler condition described in the introduction, and supported by Albert Memmi’s description of the colonial condition.

3S. Muecke, No Road, 192.

4P. Virilio and J. Armitage, ‘The Kosovo War Took Place in Orbital Space: Paul Virilio in Conversation’, trans. Patrice Riemans, CTheory (18 October 2000), www­.ct­heo­ry.­net­/ar­tic­les.as­px?id­=132.

5J. Zalasiewicz et al., ‘The New World of the Anthropocene’, Environmental Science & Technology 44.7 (2010): 2228–2231.

6A. Malm and A. Hornborg, ‘The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative’, The Anthropocene Review (2014), 63.

7S. Muecke, No Road, 134.

8Ibid., 192.

9Geographer David Harvey coined the term ‘time-space compression’ in his work The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990). In relation to transport technologies, time-space compression describes the alteration of the relationships between time and space as high-speed mobility enables one to travel large distances in minimal time. I am contrasting this experience to the kinds of layering of time made tangible in sedentary rock formations.

10S. Muecke, No Road, 192.

1 Standing stones and stratigraphic time in the Anthropocene

‘Shallow roots’, Ellen heard him saying. ‘They haven’t really taken in this place. And the soil, there’s thinness in the soil. I’d say we haven’t been here long enough, we don’t go in deep.’

—Mr Cave, in Eucalyptus by Murray Bail (1998)

Our car pulls into the green picnic area by the New England highway at Glen Innes. I’m sleepy from the long drive, but wakefully intrigued by the monument we are about to view. The Australian Standing Stones were erected in 1992, when I was six years old, and while I have passed through Glen Innes many times I have never visited them.

Figure 2 The Australian Standing Stones, Glen Innes, 2010

Glen Innes has never seemed to be much more than a place for a pit stop. I remember primary school buses lined up along the main drag so all of us kids could run out to get McDonald’s for lunch before continuing our long journey to the coast. It’s a place that has always been on the way to somewhere else. A pastoral town with a population of less than six thousand people, Glen’s main tourists are passers through. And the Standing Stones are next to the New England highway. Rushed past, they live less in geography than in the ephemeral visions of commuters. Viewed from the vantage point of accelerated automobility, the stones are morphing and indeterminate, distorted by an aesthetic of speed until they blend into the streamlined moving body of the landscape.

But this time we are parking the car just to see them. There are a few other tourist-looking types around, stretching their legs in the green surrounds. I crawl out of the air-conditioned bubble of automobility and clumsily reacquaint myself with solid ground. With the monument in full view, I am struck by its magnitude. It is almost too big to be powerful. It feels, from the side of the road, excessive and fake. As I amble down the slight incline toward the Stones I watch my eager mother stream out ahead of me and become dwarfed by the granite giants. A brief sentiment of humility in the face of these towering rocks is quickly undercut by the overpowering sensation of superficiality, unreality.

It is an experience of oscillation to wander through this tract of country. My body swings into the sublimity of the evocative granite – running fingers across them I feel the vibrations of their symbolic resonance, and stare up, open-mouthed, at towering figures of history. But then I jolt quickly back in moments of disorientation. The Stones feel false to me because they are too deliberate; they are kitsch, themed and obvious – so mimetic that they could almost be moulds of plastic.

The Australian Standing Stones were opened in 1992. They were erected with the support of the Celtic Council of Australia as part of the 1988 Bicentenary Year ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction. Unsettling ’blood’s country’
• Part I Stone country
• Part II Trees
• Part III Animals
• Part IV Water
• Part V Sky country
• Works cited
• Index