As is well known the connection or nexus between the changing or dynamic landscape and national identity figures prominently in discussions of Australian experience since the 19th century. Today we are concerned to save the landscape and the best representation of the Australian landscape is contemporary indigenous painting by aboriginal desert dwellers, such as Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye is the latest example of visual artists--eg., from Romantics such as Eugene von Guerard--- to Fred Williams shaping our understanding of the Australian landscape. The landscape forms the nation which forms collective or national identity.

In the “Land and Landscape” chapter of her Photography and Australia Helen Ennis states:

And, finally, what of the vexed, interrelated matter of non-Aboriginal Australians’ sense of belonging? While the Australian historian Manning Clark speculated that European settlers were eternal outsiders who could never know ‘heart’s ease in a foreign land, because … there live foreign ancestral spirits’, it now seems plausible that non-Aboriginal Australians are developing their own form of attachment, not to land as such, but to place. Indeed, it has recently been argued that for contemporary non-Aboriginal Australians, belonging may have no connection with land at all. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why art photographs of the natural landscape have lost their currency and are now far outnumbered by photographs of urban and suburban environments - after all, it is ‘here’ that most Australians live and ‘there’ that the tourist industry beckons them to escape.

Australia was a land that constantly failed to equal this vision--- "the Default Country", The settler's language perceived Australia as a "dysfunctional continent", a land that was "incomplete" "unusual" or "defective", a land against which the settler had to struggle, forever trying to subdue the land.

I'm puzzled by the distinction between land and place. Place is where we live and belong and land is an integral part of place. Land, people and place form a nexus. Does this imply that we may belong to a particular place but are not rooted in land? Or does it imply that natural landscape is not of a particular place but cultivated land is?

In settler capitalism the bush or scrub was the enemy of pasture for grain or sheep production, which was held to be the primary form for generating wealth. So the bush--wilderness---had to be cleared. The landscape is exploited for profit rather than sacred as it is for indigenous Australians.

Is this relationship still the way that white Australians relate to the land? Is this still the basis for Australian identity--or Australianness? Didn't a shift begin to take place post 1945 in settler Australia towards the landscape in the sense of visiting the bush --the imagined centre---and conserving the wilderness (wild and other) in the form of national parks. Doesn't this entail a sense of acceptance of the land?

Some of these questions are explored in this session in the Melbourne 2011 Festival of Ideas on Australian Identity: Australian Bio-diversity:

Here the land primarily means natural landscapes and the emphasis is placed on biodiversity. The landscape is a site of ecological significance that needs to be preserved. We are a long way from the traditional role of bush mythology and the popular perception of the outback as the "real heart" of Australia.

Comments

Posted by: Pam | December 11, 2011 6:14 PM