As writers and editors, together and individually, Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths have published many valuable books on Australian environmental and historical issues that demand debate, understanding and resolution. Words for Country keeps up their good work as public intellectuals. Its 15 essays, by a range of authors, cover most parts of the country and a lot of its history and popular attitudes—delving, arguing, describing, as well as discussing language.
A wide variety of language has delineated, praised or affronted our landscape. One piece of doggerel from the mallee country of north-west Victoria has stuck in my mind since the 1930s Depression:
Bugger the road
Bugger the track
Bugger it all the way there and back.
Bugger the drought
Bugger the weather
Bugger the mallee altogether.
More sedately, Barron Field, the legal man who spent a few years here and returned to England in 1824, referred to Australia as ‘this prose-dull land’. James McAuley called it a ‘land of smiles’, and on another plane A.D. Hope saw it as ‘The Arabian desert of the human mind’.
Joseph Furphy, in The Buln-buln and the Brolga, has his alter ego, Tom Collins, in bitter and nationalist mood, pronounce that anyone ‘who disgraces an Australian river, or mountain, or town-site, or locality of any kind, with the name of his own insanitary European birthplace is guilty of a presumption which amounts to unpardonable impudence’. Tom Roberts thought our bushland had witchery rather than the melancholy so many saw in it—‘a witchery all of its own’.
Ten years ago in Towards Lake Eyre the poet J.R. Rowland found country strewn
With the wreck of human passage: sand-
logged bottles,
Blown paper, ruined plastic, blackened
fires,
Gifts to the land of tourists, like our-
selves.
Now no one lives here. Wheeltracks, not
footprints,
Mark the edges of this world with fading
scars.
However, ‘Politics is ... at the core of this book,’ the editors tell us on page 2: ‘Conflicts over land ownership, control and use—whether between cotton growers and pastoralists, pastoralists and Aborigines, Aborigines and archaeologists—loom large.’
And so they do. In a fascinating piece about South Australia’s Kangaroo Island, its history and attractiveness, Rebe Taylor raises what she believes is the exclusion of Aboriginal presence and achievement. Interestingly, the Aborigines referred to here are descendants of Tasmanian Aboriginal women kidnapped and taken to Kangaroo Island by sealers well before white settlement in Adelaide.
Four of the essays explore the subject of the Murray-Darling basin and the problems caused by