Blood and Soil: nature, native and nation in the Australian imaginary

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Blood and soil: nature, native and nation in the Australian imaginary

Nicholas Smith*

University of Western Australia, Perth

Australia is a ‘young’ nation with a population that is one of the most polyethnicin the world. Australia’s ‘older’ Anglo-Celtic identity developed, it can be argued,out of a mythological relationship to the natural environment. This older form ofcultural nationalism continues to be played out and contested in the contra-dictory denunciation of colonial attitudes and actions, and in the naturalisation oftheir resulting legacy. A key theme of Australian environmental texts is the ideathat temporally and spatially, nature is simultaneously a place where settlerAustralians may find themselves and a place where they do not belong, preciselybecause they cannot yet imagine themselves as indigenous. The focus of thisarticle is the historical co-development of Australian environmentalism andnationalism (eco-nationalism). Drawing on an eclectic range of sources including:environmental history texts; texts concerning the origins of nationalism; literatureaddressing the ‘national character’; educational resources produced by conserva-tion agencies; natural science journals; newspaper reports; weekly news maga-zines, websites and other anthropological writing on environmentalism this papercharts the historical trajectory of nature, native and nation in the Australianimaginary with particular reference to the ecological debate concerning ideasabout what belongs (and what does not belong) in the past and present Australianlandscape.

Keywords: belonging; unsettlement; environmentalism; nationalism

Tender-handed, grasp the nettleAnd it stings you for your painsGrasp it like a man of mettleAnd it soft as silk remains

(Traditional)

In the 1990s while a postgraduate student of anthropology I also worked as alandscape gardener. One particular job was in a small parkland in Melbourne’s outerwest. The suburb had only recently been subdivided for cheap house/land packages;formerly it was grazing land. According to the designers’ plan we planted onlyendemic species including Acacia, Eucalyptus, Bursaria, Lomandra and Dianella,replicating the kind of landscape that would have allegedly been in the area pre-settlement. Community residents including two local migrant groups ! Kurds andHmong ! were consulted on aspects of the park’s design and construction. AKurdish artist had designed mouldings for the steps at the park’s steep southernentrance. A large ornate mandala on the step’s landing was the work of a localHmong ceramicist. Work in the park progressed with no major obstacles until the

*Email: [email protected]

Journal of Australian Studies,Vol. 35, No. 1, March 2011, 1!18

ISSN 1444-3058 print/ISSN 1835-6419 online

# 2011 International Australian Studies Association

DOI: 10.1080/14443058.2010.541475

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final stages. Most of the plants we had used were tube stock, but the plan called forseveral large native trees to embellish the main entrance. During meetings at thecommunity centre, a number of residents had complained that they did not recogniseany of the vegetation in the park. Both the Kurdish and the Hmong representativeswanted the remaining large trees to be ones with which they were familiar; theyproposed planting Plane trees (Platanus sp.). I had worked closely with the designersand they were disgruntled by the suggestion that the native parkland be tainted by‘foreign’ trees. At the time this incident challenged my own ‘green’ sentiments.

Debates concerning invasive and native species illustrate how colonial ideas aboutnature, native and nation have been re-imagined in postcolonial Australia. Ideas ofnature, native and nation do not only exist in thought; in order to be imaginable theymust be represented and given cultural form in narratives, images, symbols, ritualsand customs. My introductory example highlights the paradigmatic shift towardsprioritising understandings of indigenous ‘nature’ in the construction of a post-colonial Australian identity. On the one hand, indigenous fauna and flora areincreasingly seen as having certain rights to live unmolested in their own particulardomains, while on the other hand, many feral species are perceived as ‘matter out ofplace’. Debates about what belongs and what does not belong in the Australian landand seascape raise all sorts of questions about belonging and identification thatI believe have the potential to become a domain of both generative exchange andcontest between settler and migrant Australians (and Aboriginal Australians as weshall see). While I acknowledge that there is an ecological basis for concern regardingcertain feral species, as a social scientist I wish to call attention to and interrogate thesocial and cultural dimensions of environmental issues. This leads me to consider thesocial scientific contribution to environmental issues.

Anthropology and environmentalism

Environmentalism is a very broad concept that encompasses diverse and disparateelements. For example, environmentalism is sometimes seen as an alternativeideology that challenges modernity’s exploitative relationship with the natural world,evident in agricultural intensification, loss of biodiversity, and poor management ofnatural resources. According to Timothy O’Riordan ‘environmentalism is as much astate of being as a mode of conduct or a set of policies’ and ‘the desire to protectecosystems or conserve resources . . . are merely superficial manifestations of muchmore deeply-rooted values’.1 For J. Peter Brosius environmentalism must be viewedas much more than a social movement; it is a:

‘globalized political space’ in which new forms of political agency are being inventedand contested against both established and newly reconfigured structures of domination. . . a whole new discursive regime is emerging and giving shape to the relationshipsbetween and among natures, nations, movements, individuals, and institutions.2

Environmentalism then can be seen as a social movement or a political ideology; anew moral discourse; a state of being; a mode of conduct; and/or a rich site ofcultural production. I suggest that environmentalism amounts to all of the above.Environmentalism is also a global phenomenon with distinctly local manifestations.3

Drawing on Brosius and O’Riordon I want to examine Australian environmentalism

2 N. Smith


as a system of accepted and contested beliefs that invokes a particular way ofunderstanding the world and people’s place in it.

The focus of this article is the historical co-development of Australian envir-onmentalism and nationalism (eco-nationalism). I use the term eco-nationalism toencompass the coexistence of both nationalist and environmentalist values within awider discursive framework. Drawing on an eclectic range of sources including:environmental history texts; texts concerning the origins of nationalism, literatureaddressing the ‘national character’; educational resources produced by conservationagencies; natural science journals; newspaper reports; weekly news magazines andwebsites, this article charts the historical trajectory of nature, native and nation in theAustralian imaginary with particular reference to the ecological debate concerningideas about what belongs (and what does not belong) in the past and presentAustralian landscape. Settler Australians have imaginatively identified with theparticularities of the Australian biophysical environment to represent their collectiv-ity to themselves and to distinguish themselves from Others. As I have elaboratedelsewhere, debates in the domain of restoration ecology resonate with ongoingdebates in the political/social domain about immigration in which certain ethnicitiesare deemed more appropriate potential citizens than others.4 A key theme of recentenvironmental texts is the idea that settler Australians have identified with nativenature as a source of belonging and yet some argue that belonging is unattainableuntil such time as settler Australians can imagine themselves as indigenous.5

To extend my introductory example, I now turn to some further examples of thenascent vilification of feral biota to illustrate the discursive entanglement of humanand biotic communities in environmental debates, an entanglement characterised bydialectical notions of belonging and unsettlement.

The globalisation of world ecology

According to Tim Low, author of Feral Future, Australia is being overrun by bio-invaders. While many Australians are aware of long established ‘pests’ in Australiasuch as rabbits, feral cats, foxes and cane toads, Low cautions:

[T]hese are merely the tip of a vast unmeasured iceberg. Today’s mostly unseen invadersinclude exotic oysters, ostriches, orchids, fungi, fish, snakes, seaweed, shrimps, anduntold thousands of spiders, mites, beetles, wasps, flies, and bugs. In Victoria carp andgoldfish now outnumber native fish; in our largest river system ! the Murray-Darling !one species of destructive Asian carp made up 90 per cent of 4,000 fish caught in arecent survey of the river’s ruined ecology.6

In 1999 (the same year that Low’s Feral Future was published) I purchased a brand ofgarden fertiliser made from European carp that highlights the discursive potential ofnotions of ferality. At the time Charlie Carp ‘whole fish’ liquid fertiliser was sold in aone litre plastic bottle adornedwith the grotesque image of one of these aquatic ferals.The leaflet that accompanied my bottle reads: ‘There’s only one good European carpand that’s a dead European carp’. Carnivorous carp are described as the enemy ofAustralian fish ! ‘the mighty Murray cod’, yellow belly and catfish. They eat ‘all thatis good’. Carp are ‘UN-Australian’. The leaflet also notes that the continued use ofcarp fertiliser guarantees the ongoing eradication of alien carp. The redemptive tone

Journal of Australian Studies 3


of this strategy is marked on the pamphlet by an image of a carp suspended by a noosethrough its gills, headed by the phrase: ‘A good fish dead’ (see Figure 1).

Plants too are ‘misbehaving’. Escapees from domestic gardens are chokingand smothering our native flora. Large cities are now exotic weed battlegrounds.Melbourne, says Low, is the country’s weediest metropolis; fifty per cent of itsbushland is infested with garden truants. Low chastises nurseries and garden expertswho continue to promote these ‘fence-jumpers’; he also urges home gardeners to tearout ferals and plant only local natives.7

Australian species have also been unleashed upon the world. Acacias and hakeasinfest South Africa, brushtail possums and wallabies plague New Zealand, rogue

Figure 1. ‘A good fish dead’. Source: Leaflet provided with Charlie Carp ‘whole fish’ liquidfertiliser (Note this image has not been used since 1999).

4 N. Smith


budgerigars and paperbark trees are part of the ‘festering stew’ of aliens in Florida,and Australian carpet beetles are slowly chomping their way through Europeanfurnishings. World ecology is, says Low, ‘locked into the same trajectory’ as popularculture:

American pop music and blue jeans, burgers and Coke, have displaced indigenouscultures and foods in every land, so too are vigorous exotic invaders overwhelmingnative species and natural habitats. Some biologists warn of a ‘McDonaldisation’ ofworld ecology. The earth is heading toward one world culture and (maybe) one worldecosystem.8

Australian conservationism and environmentalism are very much local manifesta-tions of a global discourse. Australia is internationally famed for its distinct andunique ecology. While globalisation activates fears of uniformity in the cultural arena,Low seems similarly fearful of ecological homogenisation. Indeed, the BrundtlandCommission established by the United Nations in 1983 to investigate the social andeconomic consequences of environmental problems globally has stated that at thelocal, national and global level, ‘ecology and economy are becoming ever interwoven’into a ‘seamless net of causes and effects’.9 But nature and culture offer distinct localresistances to late capitalism’s hegemonic drive for conformity.10

This eco-nationalist vision of a feral-free Australia is shared by many includingAlan Newsome, formerly of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial ResearchOrganisation’s (CSIRO) Division of Wildlife and Ecology. In a fifteen-year nationalprogram, which he dubbed ‘restoration ecology’, Newsome lucidly spelt out hisversion of nationalist environmentalism:

If we wish to have a land that is truly Australian restore we must; for we have custody ofan extraordinary assemblage of plants and animals. The converse is that otherwise, as anation, we will be left to identify with a land that is one giant sheep-walk, cattle ranch,mining quarry, farm, or tree-felling operation. Such a land can be had anywhere in theworld.11

According to Newsome, western New South Wales is ‘a sea of rabbits, foxes andcats’.12 In order to regenerate native biota, he advocates the removal of all feralspecies. This dystopian vision of the eco-nation is duplicated in the art of KayeKessing, who, in her ‘Out of the Spinifex’ (n.d.), portrays a neglected Australia over-run with feral horses, donkeys, pigs, foxes, camels, cane toads and more (Figure 2).Kessing depicts an Australia almost devoid of native fauna; the same ecologicallydesolate landscape that will ensue if Newsome and Low go unheeded. From aperimeter of heavenly clouds, a menagerie of indigenous exiles, including insects,reptiles, birds and mammals, peer down at their feral-infested continent.13

The accounts of invasive ecology by Low, Kessing and Newsome are examples ofthe way environmentalist narratives utilise the opposition between feral and nativenature as a site of projective identification. In order to be imaginable, ideas of naturemust be represented and given cultural form in narrative (amongst others). Nativenature, (or what Australians colloquially refer to as ‘the bush’), is often depicted asinstrumental in shaping the national character. One prominent advocate of suchideas is Tim Flannery. Flannery’s popularity as a public intellectual is widespread,largely due to his controversial bestseller The Future Eaters, an environmental history



of human impacts in Australia and New Zealand.14 Central to Flannery’s hypothesisis that upon arrival on the continent Aboriginal people hastily exterminated themegafauna and indiscriminately burnt the flora, permanently altering the ecosystem.Flannery’s critics have branded his interpretation ‘a meat-centred view of prehis-tory’.15 Flannery suitably affirms the discursive range of my thematic triptych !native, nature and nation ! when he explains the critical assault on The FutureEaters, in terms of evolutionary biology:

In a poor environment, you have to pull together to survive and tall poppies arecounterproductive. They stand out among the group and use more resources. Thereare very sound evolutionary reasons why Australians feel that way . . . I really like theAustralian way of doing it, but there are times when someone has to stand up andhave some ideas, to run against the pack.16

Flannery goes on to contrast American and Australian ecosystems and renders bioticresponses analogous to respective national identities: ‘Americans are so fiercelyindependent, capitalistic and diverse . . . and Australians aren’t quite the same’.17

With reference to the co-operative breeding strategies of particular Australianavifauna (white wing choughs), Flannery goes one step further to synthesise nature,native and nation, arguing that ‘the unique level of co-operation among Aboriginalgroups . . . and the concept of mateship, which grew out of last century’s bushmencoming to grips with the same land and the same problems’ have created a distinctivesettler Australian identity. He emphasises settlers forging their identity in nature asmuch as nature asserting itself upon them. Maintaining that collectivism is essentialto survival in such a ‘difficult country’ Flannery renders the essential characteristicsof settlers and Aboriginal people as cognate.18 Social relations are presented asnatural ones, and natural relations are presented as social ones. Aboriginality is thusincorporated into the settler’s embrace of the primordial, activating potential ways ofbeing indigenously Australian.

Figure 2. Kaye Kessing’s dystopian vision of the nation entitled ‘Out of the Spinifex’.

6 N. Smith


It is important at this point to stress the plurality of visions that constitute theeco-nation. Low is an avid opponent of the ‘McDonaldisation’ of world ecology buthe is also somewhat resigned to Australia’s ‘feral future’. He describes a stream insuburban Brisbane as a ‘patchwork’ of native and exotic species, where ‘plenty ofnative fish still survive’ and a native blue gum remains ‘a breathing monument to thepast’, but he also says that by learning to like this hybridised place he is alsobecoming reconciled to the multitude of ‘weeds and foreign fish’ and the ‘feral futurethey imply’.19 In Low’s more recent writing he appears reconciled to the continent’s‘new nature’.20

Laurie Corbett, a research scientist with the CSIRO, suggests Australia’s feralfuture was preordained from the moment of European colonisation. His idea of whatconstitutes a native Australian is at odds with the pleas of Newsome and others topurge the nation of alien biota. Corbett is of the opinion that a native animal issimply one that is resident in Australia and has an ‘ecological and/or cultural impact,regardless of taxa, birth site, race, language, length of time in Australia etc’. By usingthis reasoning, Corbett ends up extending citizenship to some rather contentiouscandidates:

Defining a native Australian animal as one that arrived in Australia before Europeansettlement is . . . inappropriate because some, such as rabbits, that arrived in Australiaafter 1788 are now unique to Australia . . . Australia is unlikely to ever be free of rabbitsso the implication is that we have a native Australian rabbit. Similarly, feral cats andfoxes have caused extinctions and modified environments, and will probably be inAustralia forever; so, in that sense, they can also be considered Australian mammals.21

Similarly, ecologist Richard Hobbes and others have advocated that as ‘historicallyauthentic’ ecosystems are now sufficiently altered to qualify as ‘novel systems’ thenremoving undesirable species may no longer be sufficient, and further that such novelsystems require innovative approaches to ecosystem management.22

However, for many conservationists (and people who would not think ofthemselves as such), getting rid of feral biota (and reintroducing native ones) isa way of making the country and themselves more Australian. In contemporaryAustralia this equates with becoming more indigenous. The citations above fromLow, Corbett, Newsome and Flannery, demonstrate some of the myriad ways thathuman and biotic communities are conflated in environmentalist discourses. But wemight ask: What kind of Australian nature is being preserved?

From an international perspective, the themes of nationalism, nature and nativemay appear overly parochial or even anachronistic. My initial response is that thehistorical circumstances of settlement have determined the significance of this triadfor the cultural constitution of postcolonial Australia. In this respect Australia sharesan ‘anxiety’ about its national identity ! an anxiety of unsettlement ! with otherformer colonies of the British Empire.23

Imagining the nation and re-imagining nature

Historical and cultural readings of land (or ‘country’) elucidate continuity andchange in people’s environmental perceptions. At the core of Australian environ-mentalism is the triadic association between nature, native and nation; its historical



trajectory is both regressive and progressive. It is a generative and contested domainwhere fragmentary, hybrid and diasporic identities are expressed outside of thealleged homogenous national identity. Given the colonial origins of the antipodes itis not surprising that the triadic entanglement of nature, native and nation has beenreproduced in other European contexts. And it is to the roots of nationalism thatI now turn to elucidate native nature’s role in its formation. In eighteenth- andnineteenth-century Europe, nation-building was allied to the extension of civic rightsto common citizens, and correspondingly with rights being extended to non-humanspecies. Contrary to Benedict Anderson, Anthony Smith observes nations cannot(and historically have not) been wholly invented; they need a seed from which tosprout. Smith maintains that an ethnic heritage is an essential component of nationformation; without historical memories, myths, symbols, rituals, artefacts andtraditions the nation is un-imaginable.24

As Keith Thomas has argued the advent of capitalism is pivotal to the re-imagining of nature in Europe. Coincidental with European nation-building, thetransformation from agrarian to industrial societies resulted in certain rights beingextended to the natural world. Thomas explains changes in social attitudes to natureat the end of the eighteenth century as the product of objective observation andchanging socio-economic relationships. According to Thomas, rural society dis-tanced itself from nature because it had close economic ties to it; whereas an inverse‘closeness’ with the natural world was made possible by an expanding industrial andurbanised society. As a result of geographical and economic distance, people living incities could afford to sentimentalise their relationship with nature.25 The paradox ofthis extension of rights into the natural world is that in the colonial situation civicrights were predominantly withheld from indigenous subjects. Richard Tapperdescribes the manner in which urban-industrial societies tender a range of humanand non-human animal ‘others’; the hierarchical distinction between certain cate-gories of animals finds its pejorative or worthy equivalence in certain classes orethnicities. Nineteenth century support for particular ‘others’ in the shape of anti-slavery movements and animal protection societies exemplify this kind of totemicconflation of ‘culture’ and ‘nature’. Culture could be rendered ‘natural’ and naturecould be made ‘cultural’.26

In the twentieth century, semantics was one of the more extreme manifestationsof the German National Socialists. In 1942 biologist and head conservationist of theReich, Walther Schoenichen, outlined his belief that a respect for nature was in theblood of the northern peoples. Precisely because it echoed the humanised nature ofthe classics, Schoenichen was uncomfortable with the southern (i.e. Classical) etymo-logical derivation of the word ‘nature’. He proposed to ‘Germanise’ (verdeutschen) theword, amending it to ‘Urlandschaft’, meaning ‘earth’ or ‘original land’.27Urlandschaftwas wild, authentic, irrational and primordial, an essential part of the Nazi’s verybeing. There is a link between nationalism and romanticism, whereby the essence ofthe people (or ‘folk’) lies in nature itself, both as a universal principle and as a distinctcultural identity. Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, andMaster of the Forest andHunt, HermannGoring viewed forests as ‘God’s cathedrals’. Schoenichen argued thatthese cathedrals must be protected, thereby enabling ‘the pulse of the people’ tocontinue to ‘beat in joyous, vital warmth, so that Germany will remain German’. Naziobsessions with racial purity found their totemic correlation in legislation for theprotection of animals.28

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Under the Reichsnaturschutzgesetz (1935), a watershed in modern ecologylegislation, the National Socialists established reserves for bison, bears, elk andother ‘good’ ‘German’ animals.29 A similar romanticism, with its overt mystical andspiritual dimensions tending toward pantheism has endured in contemporaryenvironmentalism. Indigenous German creatures were to be preserved in an authenticprimordial ‘nature’ untainted by culture, much like the reserves envisaged by certainAustralian conservationists today. Consider, for example, the following preamble tothe Reichsnaturschutzgesetz:

Our native countryside (heimatliche Landschaft) has been profoundly modified withrespect to its original state, its flora has been altered in many ways by the agriculturaland foresting industries as well as by the unilateral reallocation of land and a mono-culture of conifers. While its natural habitat has been diminishing, a varied fauna thatbrought vitality to the forests and fields has been dwindling.30

My earlier example of garden fertiliser ‘Charlie Carp’ shares these overtones of blutund erde (blood and earth). Converted into liquid fertiliser, the carp’s role as exoticdestroyer of natives is inverted; its death not only gives life to Australia’s wild fish, italso reconstitutes domestic flora. The carp’s emulsified, contaminated body isrecycled, impregnating and enriching the pure native soil. Of course, this does notmean that contemporary environmentalists, ecologists and/or conservationists areguilty by association. But, while Nazi ecology may appear far removed from theantipodean context, it is not difficult to read in Low’s depiction of Australia a similarconflation of nature, native and nation.

Colonial occupation, the dispossession of the Aboriginal inhabitants and theconquest of unique Australian plants and animals configure distinctive postcolonialreworkings of nature and nation. Environmental sensibilities are never far removedfrom an imagined national identity, but ‘culture’, in its monolithic sense (as acommon stock of symbols), is also pivotal to all nationalisms. For settler Australians,ideas of nature and native constitute the imagined nation, and so, too, do peopleimagine themselves and their social relationships through nature. It may well be, asBruce Kapferer puts it, that ‘the nation for Australians is the exemplification ofnature as the cosmically unifying principle’. If so, this mythic unity belies an acutetension between settlement and unsettlement, which explains why so many studies ofAustralian attitudes towards the environment have history as their locus ! a historythat details settler Australians ‘spoiling’, ‘taming’, ‘wasting’ and ‘future-eating’.31

The origins of unsettlement

The abhorrence of invasive species (and the inverse passion for indigenous ones) isa relatively recent phenomenon in Australia. This is not to say that the idea ofconservation did not exist among colonists; it is more the case that conservation thenwas not what it is now. For example, colonial hunters were the instigators of some ofthe first conservation legislation, establishing game reserves to protect wildlife. Thesegame reserves were the forerunners of national parks.32

In one sense, settlers originally saw Australia as an alien land to which they hadlittle affinity. Australian nature was deemed deficient in both aesthetic and com-mercial merit: ‘a repellent gallery of vegetable and animal freaks’.33 Colonial natural



scientists stressed the contrariety of what they observed. Australian nature ‘indulgedin whim’; it was a world that needed to be righted: ‘an inversion in nature as ishitherto unknown’.34

The idea of improvement is allied to the commodification of Australian nature asa resource. Scientists found indigenous nature lacking and, by way of compensating,‘civilised’ Australia with their attendant floral and faunal colonisers. Throughoutthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries various acclimatisation societies activelypromoted the introduction of hundreds of alien plant and animal species into theAustralian landscape. Acclimatisation societies filled the landscape with everythingfrom foxes to blackberries in an effort to create a sense of belonging and to give theappearance of settlement in the world they had usurped. In 1863, the AcclimatisationSociety of New South Wales described its function as:

[S]tocking our waste waters, woods and plains with choice animals, making that whichwas dull and lifeless become animated by creatures in the full enjoyment of existence,and lands before useless become fertile with rare and valuable trees and plants.35

Alfred Crosby has described this Europeanisation of colonial territories as ‘eco-logical imperialism’, maintaining that colonial industry was ably assisted by a ‘world-altering avalanche’ of pathogens, weeds, pests and domesticated animals in theirconquest of indigenous peoples and indigenous biota.36

Colonialism’s transported world offered new scope for the settlers’ anthropo-centric projections. Amateur field naturalist, nature writer and Boer War correspon-dent, Donald Macdonald, though passionate about indigenous biota, was heartenedby the rampant spread of the blackberry and other suggestions of ‘the old country’.Macdonald saw the displacement of indigenous biota by introduced species as atypically Anglo-Saxon colonisation.37 Writing of Victoria’s Keilor Plains in 1887,Macdonald offered an evolutionary explanation in equating the loss of indigenousbiota with the loss of Aboriginal people:

The wild game have entirely disappeared, and the aboriginal [sic] is only occasionallyrepresented . . . by either an utterly degraded and hopelessly vagabond member of therace, or one semi-civilised. The she-oaks are also a dying race. They are decliningbefore civilisation . . . they are all dwindling to decay and dying without heirs . . .[having] made way for more aggressive usurpers.38

Nearly fifty years later, the same sense of inevitability regarding the natives’ declineprevailed. Doctor R. Pulleine of the South Australian branch of the Royal Geo-graphical Society of Australasia explained to its membership that colonisation‘meant more than the introduction of a new race and its attendant animals. It meantthe introduction of a vast new flora destined in the first century of its progress todisplace the original flora, just as the human beings and their domestic animalsdisplaced the aboriginals [sic] and the marsupials’.39

An underlying Protestant ethic reinforced the idea that by ‘improving’ the land,colonists improved themselves. Timber, minerals and other natural resources wereinexhaustible in the colonial view, originally because of the sheer enormity of thecontinent. Science was enlisted to serve first the exploitation and then the preservationof resources. When Australia’s national anthem is sung, the line ‘golden soils andwealth for toil’ still exalts this economic aesthetic.

10 N. Smith


For much of the nineteenth century, Australian nationalism stemmed largelyfrom pride in the development and improvement of the land. The hopes of colonialdevelopers and the successes of settlement were realised in wealth derived from wheat(the golden grain), wool (the Golden Fleece), and, of course, gold itself. This form ofeconomic nationalism was counterpoised by a romantic appreciation of Australiannature as evident in the literary nationalist movement of the 1890s, and thecorresponding self-conscious construction of a distinct cultural identity prior toFederation in 1901. Banjo Paterson, Bernard O’Dowd, Henry Lawson and WilliamOgilvie, for example, all promoted a vision of an unmistakably Australian nationaltype, born of ‘the bush’ and expressive of a ‘pragmatic lyricism’.40 The most notabledocumentation of these foundations is Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend.41

In the first decade of the new century, James Barrett, a member of the NationalParks Committee of the Town Planning Association of Victoria, inaugurated thecelebration of Bird Day, Wattle Day and Arbor Day into Victorian schools. In theoutdoor classroom, and through organisations like the Gould League of Bird Lovers,a new generation of Australians learned to cherish their natural heritage. Barrett’sedited volume, Save Australia, first published in 1925, contains essays that highlight arange of conservation principles and strategies, such as the need for protection ofendangered species and the concept of ‘responsible stewardship’. As popularisers ofscience, Barrett and Macdonald helped to romanticise ‘the bush’; like the eco-nationalists of the Third Reich, they regarded nature as a precious cultural asset.42

The tainted legacy of blut und erde lingers still. Robert Birrell, a prominent anti-immigration advocate, has argued that the conservation movement in Australia hasbeen least successful when it has deviated from nationalist sentiments:

Identification with and love of the land and its plants and creatures not only offers anenduring focus for national identity, which all Australians of whatever origin can share,but an emotive base for a movement with the best prospects of achieving a balancebetween man and nature.43

Such ideas have been widely mobilised in Australia, with a correlative mirroring inthe transition of American conceptions of wilderness from threatening ‘wasteland’to inspiring ‘wonderland’. In North America, Roderick Nash observed that scenicnationalism was a major factor in the establishment of national parks.44 Australiawas one of the first nations to recognise the value of its landscape. Royal NationalPark near Sydney was dedicated in 1879, making it one of the oldest national parksin the world. In hindsight, it is tempting to interpret this as evidence of the continuityof Australian conservationism. However, as Frawley warns, there is a risk in trans-planting current environmentalist and conservationist values onto Australian societyof the 1870s. Likewise, it is ill conceived to assume that the establishment of RoyalNational Park merely delineates the importation of the Yellowstone model thatsanctified the American ‘wilderness’ ethic.45 The first national parks in SouthAustralia, New South Wales and Western Australia were not ‘wilderness’ areas; theywere urban parks located near capital cities. They were conceived as people’splaygrounds, similar to the parklands of outer municipal London, rather than asremote, undisturbed sanctuaries. Nor was the establishment of colonial nationalparks indicative of proto-environmentalism; instead they ‘remained firmly within theexploitative pioneering ethic’.46 As abhorrent as it may seem to environmentalists



today, acclimatisation societies were keen to populate these newly formed parks with‘superior’ European species. According to current environmental values, colonialparks appear more like zoological and botanical gardens. Nonetheless, the establish-ment of these parks (like their American counterparts) was motivated by sentimentsnot unrecognisable today. Firstly, they enshrined a system of public ownershipwhereby land was set aside ostensibly for the nation’s enjoyment, recreation, andwellbeing; and secondly, they represented the earliest institutional recognition ofland as a focus and source of the national imaginary.

Postcolonial developments in Australia have mirrored the North American questfor primordiality. Uluru, for example, has been adopted as a ‘central’ site ! aconfluence ! of nation, native and nature. Since 1985 the customary Aboriginalowners have been managing this piece of the national estate. As recent developmentsin Cape York have demonstrated, national conservationist agendas are not always insympathy with local Indigenous aspirations.47

Environmental history as national history

The accommodation of Aboriginal environmental stewardship highlights the para-digmatic shift toward prioritising understandings of indigenous ‘nature’ in theconstruction of a postcolonial Australian identity. Environmental history is, I believe,instrumental in this reconstruction. By the 1960s a series of publications such as ‘Jock’Marshall’s The Great Extermination (1967) and Webb et al.’s The Last of Lands(1969), highlighted the non-economic ecological impact of European settlement thusheralding the ‘arrival’ of Australian environmentalism in its contemporary config-uration. Controversies over the Little Desert in Victoria and Lake Pedder in Tasmaniapoliticised the central issues of modern environmentalism worldwide: the preservationof natural heritage for its own sake; opposition to a perceived hegemonic developmentethos; and public recognition of deficiencies in government resource managementstrategies. The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) founded in 1965, markedthe beginnings of the widespread legitimacy conferred upon environmentalism bythe educated middle class of Australia.48 The international oil crisis of the early1970s undoubtedly legitimised local conservationist rhetoric by demonstrating thatresources could not be exploited indefinitely.

Harris argues that the dramatic growth of the Australian national park system inthe period 1960!70 resulted from the fortuitous combination of a decline in theprofitability of farming, global ecological concern, a restructuring of the NationalParks Service and an increase in state expenditure.49

However, while ecological factors certainly contributed to the growth of thenational conservation estate, it could also be argued that the renewed value placed inthe nation’s natural (native) heritage relied on the re-imagining of the bush as arecreational space. This re-invention is evident in Australian environmental historytexts beginning in 1969 with Eric Rolls’s They All Ran Wild.50 In these works, thesettler Australian’s relationship with nature is posited as critical to an understandingof their identity (and vice versa). The authors chart an historical transition fromcolonial exploitation to an enlightened, nascent appreciation of nature’s aesthetic,spiritual and pragmatic value.

The idea that there is something essentially Australian located in the landscape isalso a feature of Australian cinema, most notably in the 1970s and 1980s. In films

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such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, Sunday Too Far Away, Crocodile Dundee and theMad Max trilogy, the landscape is represented as integral to the narrative, as if itwere a character with its own role. In these and other films, the landscape ‘speaks’both of and to the myth of Australian alienation.51

The discursive architecture of postcolonial understandings of nature, nationand native clearly has colonial foundations. Nature, nation and native have beenentangled in the past. But the entanglement continues because an idealised pre-colonial past, as represented by indigenous nature and Aboriginal people, offers themeans for the nation to go forward. Another way of saying the past features in ideasof nature, nation and native is to say the past is itself still ‘occupied’. Hence, poet andenvironmentalist Judith Wright presents colonial environmental destruction asintegral to contemporary re-appraisals of the nation’s nature:

It has taken 200 years of effort with axes and shovels and tractors and bulldozers tomake us begin to realise that Australia can never be made into the ‘new Britannia’ wehave tried to make it. We came with Europe in our heads, the green fields and farmsof other countries. We had no knowledge of Australia’s past, its climates and soils,and needs, its tough resistances. Now at last we are beginning to see it a little moreclearly than we did.52

Colonial history is in this sense being recast as environmental history. ‘Australiannational history’, Kapferer says, ‘often appears as a tale of despair deeply rooted inthe nation’s founding in convict abjection, in the harshness of the climate and soil[and] in the thirsty wanderings of explorers’.53 With hindsight colonists are regardedas misguided and lacking in local environmental knowledge, having once been‘visionaries’ they are now ‘villians’.54 At least since the 1960s environmental historyhas extended beyond the colonial era to include primordial indigenous nature asthe source of an autochthonous sense of belonging. This notion, that the progressof national identity hinges on the past ! and thus entails regression ! becomesproblematically anthropomorphised. Antipodean self-discovery is made to hinge onthe idea of Aboriginal people as custodians of this recoverable past. Nationalism isnothing without antiquity. This ideological composition of person and place couldbe recursively expressed as: settlement creates unsettlement creates settlement. Ideasabout colonial Australia’s origins remain in conflict with what the eco-nation mightbecome.

The nation’s future is in the past

History, notes Castoriadis, is one of several constraints upon the imaginary; societiesmust have a past, and must be in relation to a past. This type of re-creation is ‘alwaysdone according to the imaginary significations of the present’.55 Given that nationalistideology depends on antiquity, what is the interrelationship between this ‘older’, butpersistent, nationalist ideology and the contradictions and continuities sustained bycertain postcolonial discourses of environmentalism?

David Tacey’s The Edge of the Sacred is a key text in this respect. Tacey arguesthat the settler Australian psyche demands ‘re-enchantment’ with the nation’s soil;a psychological transformation he labels ‘earth sacrifice’.56 Flannery too has arguedthat a ‘lasting notion of Australian nationhood must come from an intimate



understanding of Australian ecosystems’.57 Flannery, though obviously less psycho-analytical than Tacey, articulates this national anxiety as the product of a settlermaladaptation which is cultural:

[T]he obsession Australians have with defining themselves . . . arises from a frustrationborne of the long-felt inability to live in harmony with the land. It comes from thedismay one feels when seeing the extraordinary beauty and complexity wither ! evenfrom an apparently gentle touch by a European hand ! and from the floods andbushfires that constantly remind Australians that the land does not hold themcomfortably. Finally . . . it arises from the great gulf of culture and understanding thatexists between Aborigines and other Australians.58

The search for a national identity is the search for an intimate history. One means ofavoiding exile in an alien land is to insist, as Flannery does, that the national lineagebe framed by a natural history. Paradoxically, although national myths about natureappear central to the comprehension of essential national characteristics, settlerAustralians seem discursively locked into a constant embryonic state of becoming.This same ‘emptiness’ pervades autochthonous nationalism. Ambiguously nativenature is simultaneously positioned (temporally and geographically) as the source ofour essence and alienation. While the colonial treatment of nature is retrospectivelyviewed as a form of primordial crime, environmentalist narratives continue to culti-vate a distinctively colonial identity forged in the thwarted conquest of Australiannature. Tom Griffiths argues that settler Australians have been ‘feeling their waytowards the realisation that becoming Australian would, in some senses, meanbecoming ‘‘Aboriginal’’’.59 And as Andrew Lattas observes ‘Aborigines becomea sacrifice that redeems humanity: their blood is the means of establishing aconsciousness of sin within settler Australians’.60 Lattas recognises the symboliccognateness of Aboriginality and the land in nationalist discourse, but, unlike Taceyand Flannery, he is highly critical of such appropriations.61

Whereas the bushman, forged in the conquest of nature, is transformed viasacrifice into a sacred figure that gives birth to the nation, contrarily, postcolonialdiscourses such as Tacey’s and Flannery’s view the conquest of nature as the sourceof settler Australian alienation; far from being integrated in history and in place,settlers are now dislocated. This national psychic crisis can allegedly be overcome ifwe embrace the Other glossed as indigenous, sacred, Mother earth. For Flannery,this maladaptation to our environment and separation from Aboriginal people isnaturalised and so, ironically, becomes cultural. Temporally and spatially, nature issimultaneously a place where settler Australians may find themselves and a placewhere they do not belong, precisely because they cannot yet imagine themselves asindigenous.

The distancing of Australians from their environment creates a conceptual spacefor the nation’s identity, it posits a space of subjectivity that we are invited to occupy.Lattas insightfully identifies constructions of Aboriginality and the land as dis-cursively constituted ‘lacks’ in the national imaginary. But, in doing so, he denies theauthenticity of the kind of quotidian expressions of a ‘love of nature’ located indiscourses of nation and native. While ‘not wishing to ‘‘excuse’’ white Australians forthe atrocities of the past’, Tacey regards colonisation as a preordained merger, thebenefits of which have yet to be realised.62

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We can now picture the imaginary eco-nation sought by the subject as a desiredthing. But is it simply an Arcadian fantasy? Surely the eco-nation also constitutes theself as ‘‘‘meaningful’’ subject’?63

Conclusion: the enigma of belonging

The idea of nature, says Raymond Williams, contains ‘an extraordinary amount ofhuman history’.64 The poetic epigram, describing the properties of stinging nettle(Urtica urens), thus seems an appropriate (feral) faunal metaphor for the ongoingsettler Australian task of cultivating a sense of belonging, which, by necessity, mustconfront the legacy of colonialism. The stinging nettle is an introduced Eurasianherb that is widely regarded as an urban garden pest. It contains carbonic and formicacids, which cause extreme irritation upon even the slightest contact with humanskin. A medicinal preparation of the herbal extract, however, is used as a salve foreczema. Tasting much like spinach when blanched, nettle foliage is also held to be anexcellent blood tonic. Nettles arrived in Australia very early in the colonial era.Robert Brown, a botanist travelling with Matthew Flinders, visited Sydney between1802 and 1804. He was intrigued by the variety of weeds emanating from Englandthat he saw, and drew up a list of them.65 It is possible to argue that at the onset ofsettlement, the germ of the dystopian version of the eco-national imaginary wassown along with the accidental and random scattering of nettle seeds. But if, asRaymond Williams contends, we need innovative ideas and fresh feelings in order torecognise nature as divergent and changeable (akin to Seastadt, Hobbs’s, andSuding’s ‘novel system’),66 we also need to admit that something valuable alsoflourished when a new future began to be cultivated in the nascent colony of NewSouth Wales.

Eco-nationalism is both an ideological doctrine and a symbolic network.(Post)colonial unsettlement instigates a re-negotiation of the cross-cultural encounterbetween Aboriginal, settler and migrant Australians and their respective attachmentsto the biophysical environment. In the encounter, the relative position of ‘self ’ and‘other’ is deconstructed and reconstructed. This complex intermingling of nature,nation and native provides the basis for a subjectivity that fuses knowledge ofecology, history and culture into an alternative model of (post) coloniality. As I hopeI have demonstrated, this ‘space of subjectivity’ can be projected in novel ways. It hasthe potential to become a domain of both generative exchange and contest betweenAboriginal, settler Australians and migrants. Following Ghassan Hage it is inevitablethat Australia’s ‘future culture’ too ‘will be plural’.67 As such I propose we continueto grasp the nettle in all its manifestations.

Notes

1. Timothy O’Riordan, Environmentalism, London: Pion, 1981, p. ix.2. J. Peter Brosius, ‘Analyses and interventions: anthropological engagements with envir-

onmentalism’, Current Anthropology, vol. 40, no. 3, 1999, p. 277.3. Robin Grove-White, ‘Environmentalism: a new moral discourse for technological society?’

in Kay Milton (ed.), Environmentalism: The View from Anthropology, London: Routledge,1993, pp. 17!30.

4. See Nicholas Smith, ‘Thank your mother for the rabbits: bilbies, bunnies and redemptiveecology’, Australian Zoologist, vol. 33, no. 3, 2006, pp. 369!78.



5. In Australia there is also a growing body of literature from anthropologists, sociologistsand human geographers that addresses the social and cultural dimensions of thebiophysical conceptions of ‘native’ and ‘feral’. (The term feral is applied to animals andplants which were formerly domestic but which have since reverted to an undomesticatedor uncultivated ‘wild’ state.) For example, see Adrian Franklin, Animal Nation: TheTrue Story of Animals in Australia, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006;Lesley Head and Pat Muir, ‘Nativeness, invasiveness and nation in Australian plants’,Geographical Review, vol. 94, no. 2, 2004, pp. 199!217; Jane Mulcock and David Trigger,‘Ecology and identity: a comparative perspective on the negotiation of ‘‘nativeness’’,’ inDan Wylie (ed.), Toxic Belonging? Identity and Ecology in Southern Africa, Newcastleupon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008; N. Smith, ‘The howl and the pussy; feralcats and wild dogs in the Australian imagination’, Australian Journal of Anthropology,vol. 10, no. 3, 1999; N. Smith, ‘Nature, Native and Nation in the Australian Imaginary’,PhD Thesis, La Trobe University, 2000; David Trigger, ‘Indigeniety, ferality, and what‘‘belongs’’ in the Australian bush: Aboriginal responses to ‘‘introduced’’ animals andplants in a settler-descendant society’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute,vol. 14, 2008, pp. 628!46.

6. Frank Robson, ‘The pest controller’, Good Weekend, 25 September 1999, p. 35.7. Tim Low, Feral Future: The Untold Story of Australia’s Exotic Invaders, Ringwood:

Viking, 1999, p. xviii.8. Low, Feral Future, pp. 164!71, xiii!iv.9. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 5.10. See Jonathon Friedman, Cultural Identity and Global Process, London: Sage, 1994.11. Alan Newsome, ‘Vertebrate pests versus wildlife conservation in semi-arid New South

Wales: a profound imbalance’, in D. Lunney, S. Hand, P. Reed and D. Butcher (eds),Future of the Fauna of Western New South Wales, Mosman: Transactions of the RoyalZoological Society of NSW, 1994, p. 49.

12. Newsome, ‘Vertebrate pests versus wildlife conservation’, p. 50.13. Kaye Kessing, http://kayekessing.com/outofthespinifex.htm (accessed 26 October 2010),

see also http://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/invasive/publications/feral-map.html(accessed 8 July 2010).

14. Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands andPeople, Port Melbourne: Reed, 1994.

15. Mark Whittaker, ‘Stirring the mega possum’, The Australian Magazine, 8!9 August 1998,p. 15.

16. Flannery cited in Whittaker, ‘Stirring’, p. 15.17. Flannery cited in Whittaker, ‘Stirring’, p. 17.18. Flannery cited in Whittaker, ‘Stirring’, p. 17.19. Low, Feral Future, pp. 314!15.20. Tim Low, The New Nature, Camberwell: Penguin, 2003.21. Laurie Corbett, ‘Expatriate wolves or native dogs?’, Nature Australia, Summer 1995!96,

p. 52.22. Timothy Seastadt, Richard Hobbs and Katherine Suding, ‘Management of novel

ecosystems: Are novel approaches required?’, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment,vol. 6, 2008, pp. 547!53.

23. For example, see Klaus Neumann, Nicholas Thomas and Hillary Ericksen (eds),Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, Sydney:University of New South Wales Press, 1999, p. xvi; Claudia Bell’s Inventing New Zealand:Everyday Myths of Pakeha Identity, Auckland: Penguin, 1996 and Richard White’sInventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688!1980, Sydney: George Allen and Unwin,1981.

24. Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism, London: Verso, 1983; Anthony D. Smith, ‘The nation: invented, imagined,reconstructed?’, inM. Ringrose and A. Lerner (eds),Reimagining the Nation, Buckingham:Open University Press, 1993, p. 23; A.D. Smith, ‘The politics of culture: ethnicity and

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http://kayekessing.com/outofthespinifex.htm

http://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/invasive/publications/feral-map.html

nationalism’, in Tim Ingold (ed.), Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology: Humanity,Culture and Social Life, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 719.

25. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500!1800,London: Allen Lane, 1983.

26. Richard Tapper, ‘Animality, humanity, morality, society’, in Tim Ingold (ed.), What is anAnimal?, London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.

27. Walther Schoenichen cited in Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order, trans. Carol Volk,Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 98; Anna Bramwell’s Bloodand Soil, Walther Darre and Hitler’s ‘Green Party’, Bourne End, Bucks, 1985 on WalterDarre (Hitler’s Minister of Agriculture from 1933!1942) is the source of the title of thispaper. In turn Bramwell acknowledges Darre made the phrase ! Blut und Erde ! his own.

28. Ferry, The New Ecological Order, pp. 98!9. Cited in Arnold Arluke and Boria Sax,‘Understanding Nazi animal protection and the holocaust’, Anthrozoos, vol. 5, 1992, p. 8.

29. Arluke and Sax, ‘Understanding Nazi animal protection’, pp. 6!31.30. Cited in Ferry The New Ecological Order, p. 102.31. Bruce Kapferer, Legends of People Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance and Political

Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia, Washington and London: Smithsonian InstitutionPress, 1988, p. 17. Geoffrey Bolton, Spoils and Spoilers: AustraliansMake their Environment1788!1980, Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1981; William J. Lines, Taming the GreatSouth Land: A History of the Conquest of Nature in Australia, Sydney: Allen and Unwin,1992; AlanMarshall (ed.), The Great Extermination: A Guide to Anglo-Australian Cupidity,Wickedness and Waste, London: Heineman, 1966; Flannery, The Future Eaters.

32. Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth, Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2000.33. Robert Hughes, The Art of Australia, Ringwood: Penguin, 1984, p. 42.34. O’Hara cited in Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd edn,

Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 226.35. Cited in Bolton, Spoils and Spoilers, p. 97.36. Alfred W Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900!1900,

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.37. Cited in Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia,

Melbourne and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 133.38. Donald Macdonald, Gum Boughs and Wattle Bloom, Gathered on Australian Hills and

Plains, London: Cassell and Co., 1887, p. 205.39. R. Pulleine, ‘Botanical colonisation of Adelaide Plains’, Proceedings of the Royal

Geographical Society of Australasia, South Australian Branch 35, 1933, p. 36.40. Robert Hughes, The Art of Australia, p. 45.41. Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1958.42. Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, p. 142.43. Birrell, ‘The social origin of Australia’s conservation movement’, p. 38; Bob Birrell ‘has

acted as an advisor on immigration issues to both Labor and Coalition governments’http://arts.monash.edu.au/cpur/staff/bbirrell.php-publications (accessed 7 July 2010).Examples of Birrell’s most recent views can be found in ‘The Risks of High Migration’,Policy, vol. 26, no. 1, 2010 and ‘Reality check on growth’, The Age, 14 January 2010, athttp://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/reality-check-on-growth-20100113-m6ue.html(accessed 7 July 2010).

44. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, New Haven and London: YaleUniversity Press, 1982, p. 91; Stephen Budiansky Nature’s Keepers: The New Science ofNature Management, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995, p. 52.

45. Kevin Frawley, ‘‘‘Cultural landscapes’’ and national parks: philosophical and planningissues’, Australian Parks and Recreation, vol. 30, no. 2, 1994, p. 17.

46. Ronald Heathcote, Australia, 2nd edn, Essex: Longman Scientific and Technical, 1994,p. 238; Frawley, ‘Cultural landscapes’, p. 17.

47. This can lead some whitefellas to place the rights of certain species above Aboriginalrights, and/or to prioritise conservation over and above Indigenous economic develop-ment. (The Aboriginal English word, ‘whitefella’ refers to European Australian peoplegenerally.) See Julie Marcus, ‘The journey out to the centre: the cultural appropriation ofAyers Rock’, in A Rutherford (ed.), Aboriginal Culture Today special volume X Kunapipi,



http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/reality-check-on-growth-20100113-m6ue.html

1988, pp. 254!74; Annette Hamilton, ‘Spoon-feeding the lizards: culture and conflict inCentral Australia’, Meanjin, vol. 43, 1984, p. 373. For Cape York dispute see ‘NoelPearson slams Anna Bligh on river ‘‘deal’’’, The Australian, 4 April 2009.

48. See Drew Hutton and Libby Connors, A History of the Australian EnvironmentalMovement, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999 and Drew Hutton, GreenPolitics in Australia, Angus and Robertson: Sydney, 1987.

49. Harris cited in Derek Whitelock Conquest to Conservation: History of Human Impact onthe South Australian Environment, Netley: Wakefield Press, 1985, p. 139.

50. Eric Rolls, They All Ran Wild: The Story of Pests on the Land in Australia, Sydney: Angusand Robertson, 1969. Other similar texts include: Bolton, Spoils and Spoilers; Hutton,Green Politics in Australia; Lines, Taming the Great South Land and Flannery, The FutureEaters.

51. See Ross Gibson, South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction ofAustralia, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992.

52. Judith Wright, Born of the Conquerors, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1991, p. 97.53. Kapferer, Legends of People Myths of State, p. 23; Ward, The Australian Legend,

chapter VII.54. Kevin Frawley, ‘Visionaries to Villains: the rise and fall of the foresters’, in Greg

Borschmann (ed.), The People’s Forest: A Living History of the Australian Bush,Blackheath: Peoples Forest Press, 1999, pp. 37!47.

55. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Castoriadis Reader, trans and edited by D. Curtis, Oxford:Blackwell, 1997, p. 334.

56. David Tacey, The Edge of the Sacred: Transformation in Australia, Nth Blackburn: HarperCollins, 1995, pp. 68!76.

57. Flannery, The Future Eaters, p. 390.58. Flannery, The Future Eaters, p. 390.59. Tom Griffiths, ‘Ecology and empire: towards an Australian history of the world’, in

Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (eds), Ecology and Empire: Environmental History ofSettler Societies, Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 1997, pp. 5!6.

60. Andrew Lattas, ‘Aborigines and contemporary Australian nationalism: primordiality andthe cultural politics of otherness’, in J. Marcus (ed.), Writing Australian Culture: Text,Society and National Identity, special issue, Social Analysis: Journal of Cultural and SocialPractice, vol. 27, 1990, p. 59.

61. Lattas, ‘Aborigines and Contemporary Australian Nationalism’, p. 51.62. Tacey, Edge of the Sacred, p. 141.63. Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society,

Sydney: Pluto Press, 1999, p. 70.64. Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture, London: Verso, 1980, p. 67.65. Low, Feral Future, p. 25.66. Seastadt et al., ‘‘Management of novel ecosystems’.67. Ghassan Hage, ‘Roots will be with you always’, The Australian, 23 April 2008.

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Blood and Soil: nature, native and nation in the Australian imaginary

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