Eco-literature

Monday musings on Australian literature: Eco-literature, Redux

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Nearly five years ago, I wrote a Monday Musings on a branch of writing dubbed “eco-literature”. Since then I have reviewed a few works that I have tagged “eco-literature“, including, just yesterday, Jessica White’s collection of essays, Silence is my habitat: Ecobiographical essays. Coincidentally, a couple of weeks ago, critic/artistic director/literary judge Beejay Silcox sent me a link to her article in The Guardian on new Australian releases. In it, she grouped the releases under headings, one of which was “Eco-lit flourishes”. So, I thought, why not do a little update …

In that first Musings, I started with definitions, including one from Wikipedia, but it was limited to “ecofiction” (as were a few other sources I cited). Five years on, Wikipedia still doesn’t have an article on “eco-literature”. This is a bit surprising, as I do think it is a much broader church, as does The Wire’s Rajesh Subramanian, whom I quoted in that previous post. He asked in 2017 whether “Eco-Literature” could be “the Next Major Literary Wave”, and defined it as encompassing

the whole gamut of literary works, including fiction, poetry and criticism, which lay stress on ecological issues. Cli-fi (climate fiction), which deals with climate change and global warming, is logically a sub-set of eco-literature.

Five years on, I think we could say it is an established field in contemporary literature – and that it does compass all those forms Subramanian lists, and more (like essays, for example).

Indeed, I’d argue that it is so established that there are bona-fide sub-categories, if not sub-sub categories (such as cli-fi or climate fiction being a sub-category of eco-fiction which itself would be a sub-category of eco-literature).

Eco-literature in Australia

So, if I look at the Australian works I have categorised as eco-literature over the last five years, they include a work of literary fiction, Robbie Arnott’s Limberlost (my review), two works in the crime genre, Donna Cameron’s Rewilding (my review) and Shelley Burr’s Vanish (my review), and Jessica White’s book of essays. Other books which I haven’t tagged, but should have, include First Nations books, because the land, and our use and (mostly rapacious) treatment of it, is never far from the story being told, whether it be fiction, like Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie (my review) or nonfiction, like Debra Dank’s We come with this place (my review).

This is a tiny and narrow selection of what is being written, but it provides some sense of the variety out there, as does Beejay Silcox’s list of what is coming in 2026. She opens this section of her article with “It is a dark irony that our most alive fiction is anchored to extinction: the wilder our grief and awe, the wilder our storytelling”. I will dot point the books she lists, for simplicity’s sake, but will include any description she provided:

  • Romy Ash, Mantle: one of the three “apocalyptic eco-fables”, Silcox identifies, this one about “a virulent rash”, Ultimo, April
  • Johanna Bell’s The Department of the Vanishing: documentary poetry/archival image/verse, “the literary equivalent of a murder board”, Transit Lounge, March, on my TBR
  • Tim and Emma Flannery’s A brief history of climate folly: nonfiction, “stranger than fiction. It collects real-world tales of humanity’s attempts to control the weather – like Hitler’s plan to drain the Mediterranean”, Text, August
  • Keely Jobe’s The endling: the second of the three “apocalyptic eco-fables”, this one about “immaculate conception in a feminist utopia”, Scribe, March
  • John Morrissey, Bird deity: the third of the three “apocalyptic eco-fables”, this one about “the wakeful ruins of an alien civilisation”, Text, February, on my TBR
  • Adam Ouston‘s Mine: novel, which “follows a climate activist trapped at the bottom of an abandoned goldmine and is told in a single, wheeling 278-page sentence”, Transit Lounge, August

Silcox also named other authors bringing out “eco-inflected fiction” this year. I have added the titles, where I know them: Eva Hornung’s The minstrels, Katherine Johnson, Inga Simpson, Maria Takolander and Sarah Walker.

Book cover of Jane Harper's The Dry

The thing about eco-literature, perhaps more than most other forms or genres, is that its very nature implies a desire to effect change. Regarding this, I found an article written in 2023* which surveyed readers of eco-crime fiction. Their starting point was “whether narratives can persuade readers to reflect on and perhaps reconsider their own moral beliefs”, and their reader-response research focused on investigating “how Australian readers respond to works of Australian eco-crime fiction that portray non-humans and global ecological issues such as climate change in a local Australian context”. They concluded:

One potentially restrictive element of eco-crime fiction in terms of its potential to engage readers with pro-environmental understandings is the dark and confronting atmosphere of most of these texts. Crime fiction by nature is grim. Add to this an emphasis on catastrophic ecological crises and the connections between such crises and violent crime, and there is a strong possibility that such texts may not do much to convince people that positive change is possible. It is significant that this hopelessness may actually be a deterrent for some readers to engage with climate action in the real world.

Oh dear! And, presumably dystopian eco-fiction would generate a similar response? But maybe not all types of eco-literature?

So, over to you. Do you read “eco-literature”? And if so, what sort do you read and does it encourage you to take action?

* Rachel Fetherston, Emily Potter, Kelly Miller, Devin Bowles, “Seeking greener pages: An analysis of reader response to Australian eco-crime fiction” in Australian Humanities Review, Iss. 71, (May 2023): 1-21.

Jessica White, Silence is my habitat (#BookReview)

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Those of us who follow Jessica White have been waiting for the biography of nineteenth century botanist, Georgiana Molloy, that we know she has been researching, but then, almost out of the blue, appeared something a little different, a collection of ecobiographical essays titled, Silence is my habitat.

Published under the beautiful Upswell imprint, Silence is my habitat takes us on a journey with White as she navigates her grief over her mother’s death, tying into it, as she goes, the many strands that have comprised her life to date. Like her hybrid memoir, Hearing Maud (my review), Silence is my habitat defies easy categorisation. It’s not straight biography or memoir, and while it presents as a collection of essays, they are not, for all their careful end-noting, your typical formal essay. This is why I like White. She is out there in the vanguard thinking about what makes us who we are and about how to write about it, honestly and openly. On her website, she explains her book thus:

While a biography chronicles a person’s life, an ecobiography details how a person’s sense of self is shaped by their environment. My forthcoming essay collection, Silence is my Habitat: Ecobiographical Essays, details how deafness shapes my relationship with different environments, such as the bush, bodies of water, archives, and institutions.

In this book, then, the self is herself, not Georgiana Molloy, though Molloy makes frequent appearances all the same. The book comprises eleven essays, some of which have been published before, in their entirety or in different forms.

Many strands

I wrote above that in Silence is my habitat, White incorporates “the many strands” of her life to date. They include, of course, her biography – her family-farm childhood, becoming deaf at the age of four, finding her partner, the motherhood question, and the wrenching death of her mother. They also include her academic and research life which have taken her around Australia and the world, and various other events and issues, such as the pandemic or, even, architecture.

Then, threading through and linking the essays (and these strands) are three main motifs – deafness, grief, and nature. Importantly, White opens with an Author’s Note in which she briefly discusses the “deaf” versus “Deaf” issue, advising that she will use the lowercase version for herself, but uppercase where it is the preference of people she references. Identity and nomenclature, as we know, is a fraught issue, so it is worth being upfront, as White is, clearly and respectfully.

So the essays … we start with scene-setting, in an essay appropriately titled “Grounding”. It gives us, effectively, her origin story, ending with the expected, but nonetheless death of her mother. Referencing the etymology of the word “essay”, she concludes:

To write an essay is to make an attempt, to test or try out one’s responses to a subject, emotionally, intellectually and psychologically … Perhaps this is why I turned to the form in the year following my mother’s death. (“Grounding”)

Essays, though, can take many forms, with White adopting here a discursive style, which, in this case, relies largely on vignettes and digressions to explore that essay’s main theme. This approach encourages us to see the world holistically – to look for connections (and perhaps find more for ourselves) – rather than follow one line of argument. In “Hostile architecture”, for example, White starts by referencing two specific uses of architectural features to deter, respectively, pigeons and homeless people. Then, through vignettes which shift between her own experiences and the research of others, she explores ways of “accommodating” workers with disabilities. She talks specifically about DeafSpace, a concept developed at/for Gallaudet College, and closes by bringing these personal and informational strands together to make the essay’s main point about Universal Design that just might suit us all.

These are elegantly written essays, which is easier to say than to explain because, to some degree, it’s indefinable. But, I’ll give it a try. I see it as a combination of several things. The language, for one. White interweaves straight information from academic research with small narratives from moments in her life, gorgeous descriptions of nature, and expression of deep, sometimes heart-breaking emotion.

Then there’s the way White develops her essays. For example, “Intertwining”, which follows the aforementioned “Hostile architecture”, starts very differently – on something personal, with White scrambling over rocks in Cumbria, and thinking about Georgiana Molloy who had left that region for Western Australia in 1829. The rest of the essay focuses mostly on Molloy’s life, but told through personal and ecobiographical perspectives which include White interweaving her own painful journey to non-motherhood with the story of Molloy, who buries two children and distracts herself from grief “by turning to the natural world”. Another recurrent perspective appears here, the colonial project, because the Molloys were, of course, part of “the colonisation [that] crept across the south-west like a parasitic vine”, and has resulted in ongoing stress on “weathered soils … never meant to sustain large numbers of humans”. The essay ends, neatly, with White standing on Cape Freycinet, near where the Molloys had lived, and coming to terms with her own life and choices.

And finally, there’s the sophistication of the ideas being explored through this ecobiographical framework. The concept – of understanding how a person’s sense of self is shaped through their interaction with their ecosystem – is easy enough to grasp, but conveying that in a nuanced way for any particular individual is the challenge.

For White, the self has, since she was four, been framed by her deafness. It made her, from that young age, “observant and quiet” which, given she was a farm girl, meant she developed the kinship with the natural world that imbues all the essays. Deafness also made her dependent on her family until she was in her mid-thirties. From this she develops ideas about interdependencies – between people, between people and culture, and between people and the environment. Through her essays, White teases out how these facts of her life – deafness and dependencies/interdependencies – make her who she is including informing her understanding of the world. They give her a particular way of seeing that she translates for us. For example, she writes of research into ecoacoustics, and how even soil has sound. Degraded soils, however, are quieter, which causes her to suggest:

If ecosystems are quiet, it seems that we should pay attention to them. (“On the wing”)

Silence is my habitat is the sort of writing I enjoy. It’s intelligent, heartfelt, confronting and confident – and, by the end, White has found not only the space to grieve but a way forward. That way forward includes recognising the interdependence of all things:

If silence is our habitat, it is one that engenders contemplation, compassion and creativity. It prompts us to seek connection, for we understand innately that to be alone is dangerous. Our lives are intimately bound up with, and depend upon, other creatures. In losing them, we lose ourselves. (“Balancing”)

Ecobiography, I can see, has much to offer.

Jessica White
Silence is my habitat: Ecobiographical essays
Perth: Upswell, 2025
170pp.
ISBN: 9781763733121

Shelley Burr, Vanish (#BookReview)

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With Vanish, the third novel in her Lane Holland series, Burr mixes it up yet again, which appeals to me because my main reason for not liking genre fiction is that it can be formulaic. I know this is why many like it, and I understand that need for comforting reading. It’s just not my need.

So, a brief recap. In Wake (my review), we are introduced to a private investigator, Lane Holland, who arrives in a remote, outback, fictional town to investigate an old missing persons case. He’s keen and caring, but he also has his own agenda – and the resolution is shocking. The next book, Ripper aka Murder town (my review), is set in a different country town. It initially looked like something different, as Lane is in prison from Wake‘s fallout, but it soon becomes a dual investigation story that coalesces when it turns into both a murder and a missing persons case.

And now, book 3. It seems you really can’t keep a good PI down, even if he is in prison! Vanish is set a few years later. Lane is still in prison but, because of prison governor Carver’s vested interest, he soon manages to get himself on a pre-parole release program in order to continue the unsolved investigation from Ripper. If you’ve read Ripper you’ll know what that is, and if you haven’t, it becomes clear very soon. My point, though, is that once again Burr has produced a highly readable crime novel that manages to be a bit different from the preceding book, while retaining enough familiarity for those invested in her characters and worldview. It’s a fine balance that Burr has trodden nicely.

Like its predecessors, Vanish belongs to the rural noir sub-genre, and is consequently, noir-ish – or Australian Gothic – in tone. It features characters we have met in the previous novels, including Lane Holland, his sister Lynnie, and his first client Mina McCreery. Further, its plot centres again on a missing person. In Vanish, however, there’s more than one missing person. A serial missing persons case!

Some stay. Some leave. Some disappear.

“Some stay. Some leave. Some disappear” appears above the title in the book’s first Australian edition (as you can see in the cover pic above). What it references is the main setting of the novel – a farm near Hume Weir, southeast of Albury, an area Burr knows well. At the novel’s opening, Lane has tracked down several missing people as having visited this farm, then disappearing from view – hence the tag line. What is this farm, and why have some people disappeared? Lane wants to find out and Carver, with his daughter still missing, is happy to help him do so.

Consequently, with ankle bracelet, a prison guard minder, and an agreement for him to work at the farm, Lane arrives – but not without a mysterious-sounding death having just happened on the road in. This, of course, captures Lane’s attention – and we’re off.

Now Lane is, of course, your suspicious type. He takes nothing at face value, and he closely observes all that’s going on around him. There’s something about this farm that doesn’t feel right. Is it a community of like-minded people who want to escape their old lives and live more simply, growing their own food and reducing their energy impact on the world? Or is it a cult? How genuine is the owner Sam Karpathy, not to mention his recently deceased father? What do the people in the nearby township know, and why do they seem evasive when Lane tries to find out? And, why is a certain person from a previous novel there too?

Oh, and who is the trapped, sick, or injured person whose story is told in short italicised sections interspersed with the main narrative? (It added to the intrigue, and I didn’t guess it at all.)

As in her previous novel, Burr’s builds her crime story around wider issues. In Ripper for example it was “dark tourism”. Here, it is the idea of people wishing to live eco-minded, sustainable lives. So, as the investigation progresses, Burr also interrogates what this sort of life means in terms of whether or not you compromise and why, whether you stockpile for an end-of-world scenario, whether you eschew western medicine, and so on. These are questions Lane considers as he tries to understand the community he is living in. And it starts with the controlling Karpathy.

Lane, as he needs to be, is a trustworthy narrator for us. The novel is told third person, through his eyes, and he brings us along with him, sharing his thoughts and explaining his processes. His awareness of body language and his experience of human behaviour guide his actions. I loved those details. There’s risk and tension, some creeping around the farm at night, a locked room, magic mushrooms, and more. I didn’t find it edge-of-the-seat suspenseful, but I don’t like that anyhow, so the level of stress was just about right for me. The plot builds slowly, sending us off in various directions, and keeping us uncertain as we consider what Lane sees and questions. Is Karpathy, for example, coercive or simply wanting to keep control of a dream he is vested in. The denouement, when it comes, unfolds quickly, and at just the right time.

I enjoyed the read. I have been invested in Lane from the beginning, and he continued to interest me in this book. He’s conscientious, intelligent and decent, but, appealingly, is not always sure of himself, particularly when it comes to relationships. Also, Burr evokes place well. The farm, which is set in mountains just far enough from a little town to feel isolated, feels believable, as do the natural disasters – flood and bushfire – which threaten it.

My only question now is, will we see more of Lane? As a convicted felon he will not be able to renew his investigator licence. There is a hint at the end that there might be a way around it. Time will tell, but if you are a Lane Holland fan, I think you can have hope.

Shelley Burr
Vanish
Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2023
384pp.
ISBN: 9780733652158

(Review copy – an uncorrected book proof, hence no quotes – courtesy Hachette Australia)

Donna M. Cameron, The rewilding (#BookReview)

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Quite coincidentally, earlier this month, I read and posted on Willa Cather’s short story “The bookkeeper’s wife” which commences with a young man, Percy Bixby, sitting in his office deciding to do something in order to keep his flashy fiancée Stella. That was published in 1916. I have now just finished Donna M. Cameron’s novel, The rewilding, which was published in 2024. It commences with another young man, Jagger Eckerman, is sitting in his office deciding to do something that will lose him his flashy fiancée Lola. Both young men are caught up in fraud, Percy of his own making, Jagger unwittingly, though that doesn’t make him entirely blameless. From here the stories part company, so we will leave Percy, whose story I’ve already told, and look at 27-year-old Jagger.

Jagger has been living the high life. Caught up in his own privileged lifestyle, he’s been carelessly signing documents he shouldn’t, until finally the penny drops and he wakes “up to the fact that every aspect of his life is a farce”. So, he clicks Send on his whistle-blowing email and scarpers. The problem is that the only place he can think to scarper to is a cave in a national park south of Sydney, and when he gets there he finds someone else already holed up in the same spot, the 24-year-old “feral” eco-warrior, Nia Moretti. As the accompanying publicity sheet says, it is hatred at first sight, but they soon realise they need each other, whether they like it or not.

The rewilding starts with a bang and barely lets up for the length of its 300 pages. It’s a genre-bending work of eco-literature that combines thriller, road story and romance. The central thriller-driven plot is not my favourite type of story – I’m not much interested in watching or reading about chases, violence and suspense – but Cameron handles her material confidently, creating a book that I enjoyed reading despite myself. I just hurried through the bits that were less interesting to me. Why I was happy to read it is what I want to focus on here.

First, there’s the genre-bending aspect. Cameron balances the thriller components with more reflective and tender sections, with moments of interpersonal tension, with touches of humour, gorgeous natural descriptions, and serious themes. Second, the story is well-paced, and the writing fresh but accessible. It is primarily told third person through Jagger’s perspective, but this is occasionally interspersed with short chapters in Nia’s voice, in which she speaks to a mysterious “you”. These provide additional insights into Nia that Jagger can’t know, while also increasing the mystery. Who is this “you”? What has happened to Nia? Third, the two main characters are nicely developed. Jagger is on the run, scared and uncertain about what his future holds. Still grieving his mother’s death and the mistakes he’s made, he is fundamentally decent and an optimist. Nia, on the other hand, is an uncompromising idealist, and pessimistic, but reveals a softer side. Gradually, as is typical of the romance genre, the antagonism between them is relaxed, although not, of course, without setbacks.

“a capitalist suit” versus “the feral”

And finally, there are the themes. For me, a good story isn’t enough. I need some meat, some ideas that make the time I put into reading worthwhile, and this book has meat – personal and political. In the personal realm, Jagger is a young man who had lost his way but, when some truths become clear to him – when he realises his relationship had been built on a lie and his workplace was engaging in a waste removal scam – his better self, the one his recently dead mother had so carefully tried to engender in him, comes to the fore. In his suit and fancy shoes, he surprises Nia with his deep knowledge of and love for nature. Likewise, Nia is struggling with a personal loss. She is resentful of the “capitalist suit” who comes into her cave, and finds ways of using him – and his money – to her own ends but, despite her toughness, she has a heart. So, on the personal level, The rewilding is a novel about values, about the lines you draw, about the life you choose to live and what that means personally and …

politically, because this is also a novel about climate activism. Nia and her radical Earth Rebellion mates, the Lorax, are determined to save the planet. Their focus is a mining operation in northern Queensland which is about to proceed without permission. First, though, she has something to do in disaster-struck, flooded Brisbane, something that puts her and Jagger’s lives at risk. On the run, and being followed by hit men, he has no option but to go along with the only person who can help him. It is at this point, before the final dramatic confrontation at the mine, that Nia starts to unbend a little towards Jagger and his perspective.

“Why be scared of change?”

The rewilding is a wild, dramatic novel. It does push the boundaries of credibility at times, but probably no more than you expect in a thriller. Ultimately, through her characters and their fierce, lively conversations, and through her fast-paced plot which offers a few scenarios, Cameron explores the critical issues confronting us and asks the big questions we are asking, without resorting to overt didacticism.

Climate change novels can be bleak, but many authors, even those writing the bleakest of stories, talk at writers festivals about wanting to leave their readers with some hope. That this was Cameron’s intention is foreshadowed in the epigraph from Tolkien’s The lord of the rings, “Where there’s life, there’s hope”. So, at the end, certain rapprochements are achieved, but the conclusion is real rather than simplistic. It recognises that life is messy and change is hard but that it’s worth keeping on trying. The rewilding is a worthy addition to Australia’s eco-literature field.

Donna M. Cameron
The rewilding
Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2024
309pp.
ISBN: 9781923023062

(Review copy courtesy Transit Lounge, via publicist Scott Eathorne of Quikmark Media)

Rebecca Campbell, Arboreality (#BookReview)

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Arboreality, by Canadian writer Rebecca Campbell, won the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. However, not being much of a speculative fiction reader, I didn’t discover this book through this award. Fortunately, some bloggers I follow, like Bill (The Australian Legend), do follow this genre, and his review convinced me that this climate change dystopian work fits into the sort of speculative fiction that does interest me.

Before I talk about the book, however, a little about the prize. It was established in 2022, in honor of Ursula K. Le Guin, and is currently worth $25,000. It has some specific criteria: it’s an English-language award for a single work of “imaginative fiction”, and intends to honour authors who “can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now”. This last bit is interesting – “real grounds for hope”. It reminds me of the Barbara Jefferis Award, which now seems to be in abeyance, but which was controversial because it stipulated that the winning work had to depict “women and girls in a positive way [my emph] or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society”. I don’t believe literature must offer hope or be positive, but I have no problem with awards sponsors making such stipulations.

So now, that out of the way, the book. It is set on Vancouver Island, a beautiful part of the world that I have visited. It’s novella in size, but, structurally, is best described as a collection of six inter-connected short stories:

  • “Special collections”
  • “Controlled burn”
  • “An important failure”
  • “Scion and root stocks”
  • “Pub food”
  • “Cathedral arboreal”

These stories are presented more or less chronologically, starting with the first two stories being set in the very near future (up to around 2050) with the last encompassing 2100. They are linked in various ways – by location; by characters (encompassing family and friends, ancestors and descendants, over time); and, as you’d expect, given the title, by trees, particularly but not exclusively, the arbutus and its mutant version, the golden arbutus. Each story focuses on a specific issue or idea and plays it out through personal stories, such as an academic saving books from a “crumbling” library (“Special collections”); a suburbanite trying to revive a devastated garden with local plants, as one-by-one his neighbours leave (“Controlled burn”); a luthier hunting for seasoned tonewood, via the black market if necessary, to make a Cremona-worthy violin (“An important failure”). These highly personalised stories are placed in context, through the addition of another voice – an omniscient narrator, in italicised sections – which conveys the wider ecological, economic and political picture. We see the land change through fire and rising sealevels; we hear of space colonisation; we learn of pandemics. It’s cleverly done, and although it requires concentration, I was more than willing to go with it because the vision Campbell presents is compelling in its awful believability. That, I think, is what telling a near-future story can achieve. It’s hard to pretend it won’t happen.

“What are we going to do?”

What makes this book so beautiful, however, is the way Campbell manages convey both absolute horror alongside a sense of hope born of human ingenuity, resilience, and sheer doggedness. Jude and Berenice, fighting a losing battle in their mission to save books, must constantly downgrade their expectations, which means becoming more and more selective about what is saved (and therefore also what is lost to human knowledge), but they don’t give up, and these books are seen in 2100. Similarly, Bernard, in his now empty suburb where gardens have died due to a watering ban, doggedly works to find plants that will live in his and neighbouring gardens, which we see, a few generations later in “Cathedral Arboreal”, has become a forest. And Mason’s “secret history” violin also appears in this last story in another generation. These people will not let go even though they are very aware of what has been lost, of what they have lost.

We’ve lived here for ten thousand years. Someone survived everything history threw at them, the fires and tsunamis, the earthquakes, the smallpox, the settlers. Empire. Capitalism. Someone’s going to survive this. (Benno, c. 2071, in “Scions and Root Stocks”)

The ecological story Campbell tells, alongside the human one, is fascinating, albeit probably more challenging to those of us who don’t know the plants of the region and their significance – the garry oak, the arbutus, the camas (lily), fireweed, Douglas fir, and so on. I know some of the plants she names, but I don’t know their particular role in the culture, their horticultural essence and value, or their symbolic meaning (if any any). Some I looked up, and some I didn’t, but certainly Campbell’s story is rich with interconnections here too, between past, present and future, and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous practices.

One of the meanings of “arboreality” is “of, relating to, or resembling a tree” which makes it a good literal title for a book in which trees stand for so much that is important to life – ecologically, culturally, and psychologically. But Campbell is also, perhaps, playing with the “sheltering” notion implied in “arbor” and “reality”.

The Ursula K. LeGuin Prize’s selection panel wrote:

Arboreality is a eulogy for the world as we know it. Rebecca Campbell’s extraordinary, deeply felt book explores the difficulties of the long hard project of survival. There are no heroes or villains here—only people making brave, difficult choices, out of hope and love for their community, for art, knowledge, and beauty. Arboreality imagines things that we haven’t yet considered about what can and will go wrong with our gardens, libraries, and archives if we don’t act now (maybe even if we do). In her masterful and profoundly ethical stories, Campbell asks us what might be saved, what must be saved, and what it will take to do so. 

‘What are we going to do?” asks Jude in the opening story, “Special collections”. Well might he ask. Arboreality is an astonishing book because of the way it imagines the dire, with all its attendant griefs, side-by-side with survival (and its attendant, hope). This makes it a bit discombobulating because we are constantly surprised by what happens next. The world is not beautiful, and life is tough, but people are surviving and working their way through what life has thrown at them. I don’t imagine Campbell intends us to think, “it’s alright then, let’s continue along our merry, destructive ways” but more that when (because we are, it seems, past “if”) we are confronted with the worst, humans can, and hopefully will, find ways through. The question is: is this the future we want?

Rebecca Campbell
Arboreality
Hamilton, Ca: Stelliform Press, 2022
128pp.
ISBN: 9781777682330 (eBook)

Robbie Arnott, Limberlost (#BookReview)

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Where should I start my discussion of Robbie Arnott’s third novel, Limberlost? Perhaps with the epigraph. It’s by Gene Stratton Porter, and says, “In the economy of Nature, nothing is ever lost”. I have posted on Porter – on her essay, “The last Passenger Pigeon”. She was, says Wikipedia, an author, nature photographer, naturalist and silent-film producer.

Some of you will know her for her now classic novel, Girl of the Limberlost (1909). My mother adored it, and passed it on to me. I adored it too, and passed it on to my daughter, who adored it in her turn. It is a beautiful book about love of place (Indiana’s Limberlost Swamp) and a young woman, Elnora, living with a wounded, neglectful, widowed mother. It is about how Elnora obtains sustenance (physical and emotional) from nature. Yes, it’s a bit sentimental, in the style of the time, but Porter won me over with her description of the Limberlost Swamp and with her young protagonist Elnora’s strength. (Oh, and with Elnora’s beautiful lunchbox, which, apparently, also impressed author Joan Aiken! I wanted one.)

So, Robbie Arnott’s Limberlost … it draws more than a little – but also not a lot – from Porter and her novel. It is about a teenage boy Ned who, though not neglected like Elnora, is living with a loving but stressed and often remote father. It is set in a stunning and beautifully-rendered-by-Arnott environment, in this case northeast Tasmania, in the Tamar River valley. There are enough similarities to suggest that Arnott also loved Porter’s novel. However, Arnott has taken this kernel – troubled teenager left frequently alone in a beautiful environment – and woven a more subtle story about, well, let’s talk about that now …

Fundamentally, Limberlost is a coming-of-age novel but one that also happens to tell a whole life from childhood to 90s – in just over 200 pages. That’s impressive writing. If you like family sagas, this is not for you, but if you are interested in what makes a life a life then Arnott has written just the book. In this case, we are talking specifically the life of a man. I have reviewed a few books over the years that explore manhood – Christos Tsiolkas’ Barracuda (my review) and Sandy Gordon’s Leaving Owl Creek (my review), being two. Arnott’s book has its own take on this question.

He’d never felt so brotherless

The central narrative takes place over summer, near the end of World War 2, when Ned is 15. With his mother having died within months of his birth, and his two older brothers, Bill and Toby, being away at war, it is just Ned and his father on the family orchard, until big sister Maggie arrives to make it three. The core chronology follows Ned through summer, but the narrative shifts back and forth in time as events segue to other experiences in Ned’s life.

Ned is a sensitive, reflective young man. The novel starts with a scene from when he was 5. The community was awash with rumours and fears about a mad whale causing death and destruction at the mouth of the river, so Ned’s father had taken his three boys out in a boat to the eye of the storm, as it were. This little incident is key to the novel, because it is about facing fears, about checking the truth of stories, about memory – and about fathers and brothers. Throughout the novel, Ned struggles to remember what really happened in the various events of his life, starting with this one. Which brother had given him a coat that night when he’d shivered with cold? This bothers him, but what is more important is that “he remembered the warmth of the wool”.

It is perhaps the challenge of being the baby brother, but for Ned the struggle to feel competent – like his father, like his brothers – is ongoing. At 15, he dreams of having a boat, and he works hard to realise it, by trapping rabbits and selling the pelts. Achieving this dream would bring him two victories: “He’d have the boat, and he’d have people’s shock at the casual totality of his competence”. There is a guilty niggle, though, because his trapping for pelts looks “nobler” – providing pelts for slouch hats, while his brothers are at war – than he knows in his heart it is.

Limberlost, however, is not only about manhood and brotherhood. It is also a work of eco-literature (about which I’ve written before). The novel’s epigraph, along with the opening “mad whale” scene, clues us into this. Nature – the natural world – thrums through the novel – from the whale, the rabbits, and the quoll he mistakenly traps, to the beautiful giant manna gums (or “White Knights”) that Ned logs in a short stint on a logging crew. Many of the descriptions of the animals, plants and landscape are visceral in the way they act upon Ned’s emotions and consciousness. Ned’s relationship with this world is complex – at times it terrifies, at times it nurtures, at times he takes from it (such as logging and rabbit-trapping) and at times he gives back (such as returning the quoll), but it is always there. Arnott’s natural world is beautiful but fierce. It is also threatened – by man’s actions upon it – which Arnott shows graphically but not didactically.

There are many strong, dramatic descriptions of nature in the novel, but I’m gong to share a rare joyful one. It comes during Ned’s honeymoon, after he had experienced the true joys of lovemaking (in one of the best sex-scenes I’ve read for a while):

Afterwards he’d driven them across the plateau through white-fingered fog, through ghostly stands of cider gums, through thick-needled pencil pines, through plains of button grass and tarns, through old rock and fresh lichen, until the road twisted and dived into a golden valley. Here at winter’s end, thousands of wattles had unfurled their gaudy colours. As they descended from the heights their vision was swarmed by the yellow fuzz. Every slope, every scree, every patch of forest, every glimpse through every window was a scene of flowering gold.

The rolling, breathlessly joyful rhythm of this description is very different to that in the next paragraph where Ned’s old fears return, and the sentences become clipped, and staccato-like.

Arnott also refers to the presence of local First Nations peoples, to Ned’s awareness of their knowledge of the land. “At no point, Ned had heard, were they hungry” – not the way he and Callie were as they struggled to make their little orchard work. Some members of my reading group, with whom I read this book, felt this was anachronistic, but the Tasmanians amongst us argued that northern Tasmanians have long been aware of First Nations presence.

The final point I want to make concerns dreams and imagination. Ned, as I wrote above, feels guilty about his boat-dream when others think his rabbit-trapping is war-effort related, but it’s the dream that sustains him. When crisis comes and dreams are shattered – not in the way you are expecting so this is not a spoiler – Ned is devastated:

He wanted something to do, something to love. He had … nowhere to push his imagination, nothing to dream of … nowhere to turn his thoughts from reality … He felt cut loose from the anchors he’d been dropping all summer. He’d never felt so brotherless.

Limberlost is a great read. It is imbued with warmth for its world and characters, but it is not sentimental, nor simplistic, and no answers are given – except for one, the ties that bind, family. The novel starts and ends with father and brothers – but in between are real lives lived authentically in a vividly-rendered landscape that has its own life. Beautiful.

Several bloggers got to this before me, including Lisa, Kimbofo and Brona.

Robbie Arnott
Limberlost
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2022
226pp.
ISBN: 9781922458766

Delia Owens, Where the crawdads sing (#BookReview)

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Delia Owens’ bestselling debut novel, Where the crawdads sing, is a problematical novel, as my reading group discovered – and yet, I couldn’t help being emotionally engaged. It reminded me a little of a childhood favourite, Gene Stratton Porter’s A girl of the Limberlost. My heart went out to Owen’s protagonist, Kya, the maligned, ignored, Marsh Girl, and I loved the writing about the North Carolina marshland. But, intellectually, I had to work to defend my enjoyment, which I’ll aim to share here.

“in the end, that is all you have, the connections”

I’ll start with the obvious, a summary of the plot. The main narrative runs from 1952 to 1970, and is told in two chronologies that eventually meet. The novel tells the story of Kya, who, in 1952, is six when her Mum and, soon after, her siblings leave home. Four years later, when she’s ten, her father also departs, leaving her alone, in their North Carolina marsh shack. She can’t read, has no money, and few skills. But, she’s an intelligent, resourceful little girl, and, with the help of a few kind people, she makes a life – albeit a lonely one – for herself. The novel commences, however, in 1969 with the discovery of the body of a young man, Chase Andrews, who is a local football hero. Was it an accident or was he murdered? The second chronology, then, is a crime story, following the investigation of this death through to the court case. You can probably guess where the two chronologies meet.

Owens manages this structure skilfully, drawing us into Kya’s life, and how and why she develops into the person she is in 1970, while, simultaneously, slowly building suspense by recounting the details of the investigation. The writing is lush and evocative, ensuring that we engage with Kya and her struggle to survive, her increasing loneliness and her desperation to connect with others. We see her turn to nature and wildlife to learn about life, as well as to provide herself with sustenance and give her a minimal income (by selling fish and mussels, for example).

This is nature writing at its best, with stunning descriptions of the marsh, and the birds, fish and insects that inhabit it, but it is also eco-fiction, with occasional allusions to development. Tate, a young man who befriends Kya (and provides her with a much-needed connection) tells her:

They think it’s wasteland that should be drained and developed. People don’t understand that most sea creatures—including the very ones they eat—need the marsh.”

The marsh is Kya’s family; it is what, in the absence of family, forms her:

She knew the years of isolation had altered her behavior until she was different from others, but it wasn’t her fault she’d been alone. Most of what she knew, she’d learned from the wild. Nature had nurtured, tutored, and protected her when no one else would. If consequences resulted from her behaving differently, then they too were functions of life’s fundamental core.

It is hard, as a reader, not to care about Kya. Will she find the connections she so badly wants – “Being completely alone was a feeling so vast it echoed” – and will they stick?

“it’s usually the trap that gets foxed”

However, it’s easy to pick holes in the book. Kya’s survival (given her youth) and her development into an educated young woman (given she only spent one day at school) can stretch credulity. Many of the characters feel stereotyped, from the good “colored” people, who put themselves out to help Kya, to the prejudiced townspeople, who reject and exclude her (as they do all marsh people). “Barkley Cove”, writes Owens, “served its religion hard-boiled and deep-fried”. And, if you don’t like your heartstrings being obviously pulled, you may not engage with Kya at all.

All this makes it problematical, because it’s one of those books that whether you love or hate depends largely on what sort of reader you are, what you like to read, and/or how you read this particular book. There are many ways to read Where the crawdads sing – a crime story, a romance, a coming-of-age story, historical fiction, a modern fairy-story or allegory, even, to name a few. Some of these ways demand more realism than others, and expose holes which are irrelevant to other ways. It is one of these other ways that appeals to me.

This way is to read it more like a fairy story or allegory, as a story about the triumph of the maligned, a comeuppance for the underdog. If you read it this way, the stereotyping of the minor characters, and the improbability of Kya’s survival and achievements, serve to emphasise the challenges faced by the underdog. It is hard to explain what I mean without giving away the ending, but I’ll try.

Throughout the novel, we are not only reminded of the prejudice and mistreatment of Kya (as representative of the marsh people) but are also aware of the ostracism of “colored people” as they were called then. Kya turns to nature to learn about life. Early in the novel, when the “colored” Jumpin’ warns her about Social Services looking for her, friend Tate tells her to “hide way out where the crawdads sing”:

Kya remembered Ma always encouraging her to explore the marsh: “Go as far as you can—way out yonder where the crawdads sing.”

“Just means far in the bush where critters are wild, still behaving like critters.”

One of Kya’s main challenges is to work out the differences between what she observes in nature and in human behaviour:

“In nature—out yonder where the crawdads sing—these ruthless-seeming behaviors actually increase the mother’s number of young over her lifetime, and thus her genes for abandoning offspring in times of stress are passed on to the next generation. And on and on. It happens in humans, too. Some behaviors that seem harsh to us now ensured the survival of early man in whatever swamp he was in at the time. Without them, we wouldn’t be here. We still store those instincts in our genes, and they express themselves when certain circumstances prevail. Some parts of us will always be what we were, what we had to be to survive—way back yonder.”

These two quotes – among others – hint at the novel’s underlying idea, which is that it’s not only “critters” who are “wild”, that human beings will be ruthless too. Exploring this ruthlessness in its natural and human manifestations, and how Kya navigates it, is a major theme of this book – and explains why Owens has written it the way she has. The resolution is deeply satisfying (albeit I didn’t love the device used to achieve it).

Where the crawdads sing is a thoughtful read for those who feel passionate about the maligned of this world. It is also a glorious lovesong to the marshland. I’m glad my reading group scheduled it.

Delia Owens
Where the crawdads sing
London: Corsair, 2018
379pp.
ISBN: 9781472154637 (Kindle ed.)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Eco-literature

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Book cover

Over the weekend, I reviewed local Canberra author Irma Gold’s debut novel, The breaking, and described it as belonging to the eco-literature “genre”. I thought it might be interesting to explore this field a little more.

Definitions

I’ll start with definitions, because, does it really exist? Wikipedia doesn’t have an article for eco-literature, but it does for ecofiction, which it describes as

the branch of literature that encompasses nature-oriented (non-human) or environment-oriented (human impacts on nature) works of fiction. While this super genre’s roots are seen in classic, pastoral, magical realism, animal metamorphoses, science fiction, and other genres, the term ecofiction did not become popular until the 1970s when various movements created the platform for an explosion of environmental and nature literature …

This definition is broad, and encompasses what I call “nature writing”. However, eco-literature, as I’m using it, accords more with definitions/discussions I found at a wide range of sites. They all say it differently, but the essence is that eco-literature, today, is largely used for works which the Carnegie Library describes as offering “a literary lens through which to explore the natural world and the many threats it faces in our modern world”. In other words, these books focus on “environmental issues” (my emph.), as The Conversation‘s Ti-han Chang says in “Five must read novels on the environment and climate crisis”.

The other point I’d like to make is that some, though not all, see this “genre” as encompassing all forms of literature. EcoLit Books keeps to fiction, calling it

a super-genre of writing that straddles all genres (mysteries, thrillers, literary, children’s). We often refer to it as “fiction with a conscience.” (their emph.)

However, The Wire’s Rajesh Subramanian, who wrote “Could Eco-Literature Be the Next Major Literary Wave?” in 2017, sees it as encompassing

the whole gamut of literary works, including fiction, poetry and criticism, which lay stress on ecological issues. Cli-fi (climate fiction), which deals with climate change and global warming, is logically a sub-set of eco-literature. 

I like this, but now, having made this point, I’m focusing on fiction.

Eco-literature in Australia

While The Conversation is an Australian site, Ti-han Chang is based in England, and her five books are non-Australian. However, in 2016 Overland published an article by Rachel Fetherston on Australian eco-fiction. She starts from the point of view that the Australian population is indifferent to nature. Is this true? Anyhow, she asks:

can fiction play a role in enhancing our connection to local species and habitats? The expansion and appreciation of less anthropocentric and more ecocentric literary works may well be a silver bullet.

She argues that while Australia has a good tradition of ecocentric writing and ecophilosophical thought, it “pales” compared to that of the US where there’s been a dramatic rise in the humanities’ engagement in the issues. Australia, she says,

needs to provoke a more public and accessible discussion of the modern environmental crisis, and eco-fiction presents a powerful means of doing so. It is not too late for Australians to embrace ecophilosophy, especially in regard to our own specific environmental concerns. But how can such concerns be translated into fiction?

Charlotte Wood, The natural way of things

Fetherston just names a few books, including two dystopian novels, James Bradley’s Clade and Charlotte Wood’s The natural way of things (my review). Clade, she says, is “a world-shaking, cross-generational work of climate fiction that” presents “a truly Australian approach to climate change”, while Wood’s novel “is based strongly in ecophilosophical thought. Her characters become increasingly less human, more animalistic, and more connected to the landscape”.

Fetherston goes on to say that “depiction of the human as animal is … a theme that appears to be emerging more and more within our nation’s literary circles”. Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals, she says, explores similar themes, though it’s “not focused specifically on Australian landscapes and animals”. Different, but related, I’d say, is Laura Jean Mackay’s The animals in that country, which won this year’s Victorian Prize for Literature and which looks at animals and their language from, say the critics, a new and non-anthropomorphic way.

Fetherston is clearly interested in this field because a year ago, she wrote an article for The Guardian. She quotes “renowned nature writer Robert Macfarlane” who “lamented” the deficient “creative response” to the climate crisis and who argued for the arts to be involved in debating, sensing and communicating the crisis. She names more books in this article, including two which look at the bushfire issue, Mireille Juchau’s The world without us and Alice Bishop’s collection of short stories, A constant hum (Kim’s review). Further, she writes, Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (Lisa’s review) “addresses the strong ties between colonisation and climate catastrophe”.

Cassie Flanagan Willanski, Here where we live

I named a few books in my introduction to my review of The breaking, but I’d like to add a couple more here. Cassie Flanagan Willanski’s collection of short stories Here where we live (my review) draws strongly on the environment, with stories looking at it from various angles, including climate change, the impact of tourism on the environment, and caring for the environment. Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and light (my review), comprises three sections, of which the middle one, “Water”, is a long dystopian short-story which posits a future world populated with mutant plantpeople alongside humans.

Eco-literature might be more politically-focused than some environment literature, but it is still a rather broad church, and is, I believe, increasingly preoccupying our writers, for good and obvious reasons.

Fetherston ends the first article I quote, with

It is time for our writing and art to focus on the non-human: the increasingly vulnerable, apparently insignificant lives and habitats that make Australia’s natural heritage so special and sublime. 

And, not just that, but critical to our physical and mental survival and well-being. I’m glad to see more and more writers embracing it, from multiple perspectives.

Now, over to you. Do you read “eco-literature”? And it so, tell us your favourites?

Irma Gold, The breaking (#BookReview)

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Book cover

I have broken a golden rule! That is, I am reviewing Irma Gold’s debut novel, The breaking, out of the order in which I received it for review, which is something I (almost) never do! But, I am attending an author event on this book this weekend, and I really wanted to have read it before that conversation.

The breaking is an example of a growing “genre” of literature, eco-literature. This literature encompasses cli-fi, and focuses on human activities that endanger the environment in some way. It’s a broad church, covering climate, water and the land, deforestation, animal rights, and more. Books in this genre are often inspired by their writer’s passions. They tend to have a strong plot because the author wants to engage the reader in an issue: how better to do this than with an engaging plot. However, the plot is, largely, subservient to the issue, because at heart these are political novels, often in the “personal-is-the-political” sense.

So, some examples? Heather Rose’s Bruny (my review), which is deeply concerned about the future of Tasmania, Angela Savage’s crime novel The dying beach (my review), which explores the impact of shrimp-farming on the environment, and Karen Viggers’ novels, like The orchardist’s daughter (my review) which addresses deforestation, are three. These could be called “passion project” books. Critics often find this sort of writing difficult to asses. If it sells well, if it’s popular, is it good?

I’m going to sidestep the implication of that concern, and simply say that of course something popular can be good. If it’s well-plotted, well-written, has engaging characters – and deals intelligently with something relevant or important – then it’s good.

All of this is a very long introduction to Irma Gold’s book, but relevant, I hope. So, The breaking? The title doesn’t give away its passion, though if you look carefully at the gorgeous cover you might see it. It’s the plight or exploitation of elephants in Thailand. Gold, as she explains in the Afterword – I love an Afterword – has been to Thailand, and worked with elephant rescue projects, so she knows whereof she speaks. (I hope to have more to share after the weekend!)

It’s a grim situation, as I’m sure you know, and, like many grim situations in developing nations, it’s complicated by the fight for survival. For many Thais, elephants are their bread-and-butter, both as beasts of burden and, more, for their tourist potential. Gold addresses this dilemma in her novel without being overtly didactic, by having her characters see the situation with their own eyes, discussing it with each other, and weighing up the options.

“Be brave” (Deven)

The breaking is about two young Australian women, Hannah Bird, who has just arrived in Thailand as a tourist, unsettled and insecure because she’s lost her job, and Deven, who has been living there for some time and is involved in elephant rescue projects. They meet in a hostel lobby, as tourists do, and the experienced Deven invites Hannah to go to the night markets with her. From there, a friendship – and eventually something more – develops as the somewhat naive Hannah is drawn into the more experienced and confident Deven’s passions and views of the world. It’s not long before we discover the layers in the title as Hannah is introduced to the cruel practice of phajaan.

We follow their trajectory – told in Hannah’s first person voice – as they tread an activist’s path. It starts with involvement in organised, legal rescue projects that aren’t going to change the world quickly. However, as often happens to those who stay the course, they find themselves confronted with the ultimate activist’s dilemma of “how far will you go” for the cause you believe in? Always, it is Hannah following Deven, deeper and deeper into both political and personal engagement. Deven is driven to save those elephants, while Hannah, who believes in the cause, is more cautious, but, she’s falling for Deven, so, where Deven goes … the ending is powerful, confronting us head on with what can happen if you let passion rule your brain.

“We have to change the culture” (Deven)

Throughout all this Gold takes us on a journey through Thailand, showing it through the eyes of wide-eyed oblivious tourists, like Hannah, and those of the more experienced, aware Deven, who rejects the tourist path, the ladyboy shows, the elephant rides, and so on. Gold shares the food and culture of Thailand, using local words with little attempt to translate. She addresses this in her Afterword, explaining that although it is traditional to italicise foreign words, she “made a deliberate decision not to” do so here. Italics, she says, makes it easy for readers to “skim over foreign words” but she “wanted to encourage readers to engage with Thai language in the way that the Australian characters attempt to”. Gold’s solution is deft, because we readers puzzle and feel our way along with narrator Hannah, who is guided but not spoon-fed by Deven. Deven can be tender and caring, but she doesn’t mollycoddle!

However, if I have given you the impression that Hannah is all follower and Deven all leader, then you’ll have the wrong impression. Deven, alienated from her parents, has her own demons, and Hannah is not a push-over. As the novel progresses she takes in what Deven says but processes it in her own way. She sees “it’s not that simple; it’s not that black and white”, while for Deven it is simple. The denouement suggests where Gold lies, but the question remains for each reader, where do you lie? And, beyond that, whose rights should prevail?

Irma Gold’s The breaking reminded me somewhat of Madeleine Dickie’s Troppo (my review), which also explores the experience of young Australians caught up in unfamiliar lives and cultures, and who must forge their own way, morally and ethically, in places where the usual signposts are missing. Like Troppo, The breaking is an engaging debut novel that encourages us to consider some of the critical questions of our time.

Challenge logo

Irma Gold
The breaking
Rundle Mall, MidnightSun, 2021
271pp.
ISBN: 9781925227819

(Review copy courtesy MidnightSun Publishing via Brendan Fredericks)

Gene Stratton-Porter, The last Passsenger Pigeon (#Review)

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I have passed up reading and/or posting on so many Library of America (LOA) Story of the Week offerings over the last months – sadly, because there have been some excellent selections chosen for their political relevance. However, when I saw a sentimental favourite, Gene Stratton-Porter (1863-1924), pop up, I knew I had to break the drought.

Gene Stratton-Porter (Uploaded to Wikipedia, by gspmemorial; used under CC-BY-SA-4.0)

Some of you may not be familiar with this American Midwest author who wrote, says LOA, “sugary (and extremely popular) fiction to underwrite her work in natural history”. It was one of these works, The girl of the Limberlost, that I loved, and later introduced to Daughter Gums who also loved it. Yes, it was sentimental, though it has its tough side, but it did also leave an everlasting impression on me of its setting, Indiana’s Limberlost Swamp. According to LOA again, it was the immense success of this book, and Freckles which I also read, that resulted in her publisher agreeing to also publish her less saleable nature books. She was, writes LOA, “a fighter for the world she saw disappearing around her, as Standard Oil of Indiana drilled new wells and farmers drained more land”.

Interestingly, LOA’s as usual excellent introductory notes focus not on Stratton-Porter but on her subject, the Passenger Pigeon. LOA discusses others who have written about this bird – novelist James Fenimore Cooper, a chief of the Potawatomi Indians Simon Pokogon, and naturalists John James Audubon and John Muir – before eventually getting to Stratton-Porter herself. LOA’s point is to document the extinction of these birds from the early 1800s, when they were still seen in immense flocks, to a century later in 1914 when the last one died in captivity. Stratton-Porter wrote her piece just 10 years after that.

So Stratton-Porter’s piece. She commences by describing the beauty of her childhood farm, including its woods and forests where birds, such as the Passenger Pigeon, loved “to home”. She writes, introducing her environmental theme, that:

It is a fact that in the days of my childhood Nature was still so rampant that men waged destruction in every direction without thought. Nature seemed endlessly lavish …

When people started to clear land they “chopped down every tree on it” without, she says, having any “vision to see that the forests would eventually come to an end”. She writes – and remember, this was 1924:

… as the forests fell, the creeks and springs dried up, devastating winds swept from western prairies, and os the work of changing the climatic conditions of the world was well under way.

She talks of animals and game birds “being driven farther and farther from the haunts of civilisation”, but she also talks of people who did not believe in living so rapaciously, preferring instead to live in log cabins in small clearings. She describes her family’s own hunting practices, including of quail. As their numbers decreased, her minister father forbade the family’s trapping and egg-gathering. He’d noticed that when bird numbers were low, grain-damaging insect pests were high.

He had never allowed, however, the hunting of Passenger Pigeons, despite their being significantly more numerous in those days than quail. Stratton-Porter thinks this stemmed from his having “a sort of religious reverence” for pigeons and doves. Others, though, had no such qualms, and she describes some brutal hunting practices involving wild pigeons, which apparently made good eating. Gradually, it became noticeable, writes Stratton-Porter, that their numbers were decreasing. Not only did her family miss the sound and beauty of these birds, but

The work that they had done in gathering up untold quantities of weed seeds and chinquapins was missed and the seeds were left to germinate and become a pest, instead of pigeon food.

Once again, she notes the wider ecological or environmental implications of species reduction or loss. She then writes of the death of the final two birds in captivity before sharing her own searching for any remaining wild birds. It was while she was watching and photographing, over a period of time, a brooding goldfinch, that she heard the unmistakable “wing music of a bird that should reasonably have been a dove, but was not”. She describes this beautiful bird, but says “it had not the surety of a bird at home; it seemed restless and alarmed”. This was, she argues, “one of the very last of our wild pigeons”, a male bird “flying alone, searching for a mate and its species”.

Stratton-Porter closes her essay with a cry from the pigeon, whose song she says sounds like “See? See?”:

Where are your great stretches of forest? Where are the fish-thronged rivers your fathers en- joyed? Where are the bubbling springs and the sparkling brooks? Why is this land parching with thirst even in the springtime? Why have you not saved the woods and the water and the wildflowers and the rustle of bird wings and the notes of their song? See what you have done to me! Where a few years ago I homed over your land in uncounted thousands, to-day I am alone. See me searching for a mate! See me hunting for a flock of my kind! See what you have done to me! See! See! See!”

And that was written in 1924! Nearly 100 years ago, and yet we still destroy habitat including, here in Australia, that of one of our most popular native animals and national symbols, the koala. Will we never learn?

Gene Stratton-Porter
“The last Passenger Pigeon”
First published: Good Housekeeping, 1924 (Collected in Tales you won’t believe, 1925)
Available: Online at the Library of America