Essay By Holly Clark-Milligan for Contextualising Practice
Acknowledgement
I pay my respects to the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations, Traditional Custodians of the land in Naarm (Melbourne) and wish to also acknowledge the palawa-pakana people, Traditional Custodians of lutruwita (Tasmania), a place that holds my heart.
‘There are already so many holes in the universe that will never again be filled, and each of them forces us to question why we permitted such loss, such tearing away at the fabric of life, and how we will live with our planet in the future’ (Hogan 1995:115)
Climbing Galaxias, Mount Field National Park, lutruwita/Tasmania, sometime in the 2010s.
I used to count the whiskered fish on the walk to Russell Falls.
I remember the day I counted over twenty.
On a bad day, I would count less than ten.
I still try to count them, but I have not seen one in several years.
I hope it is because I have lost the knack, that their camouflage is too good for my adult eyes, that I walk on the moment before I spot one, or my heavier steps scare them away.
ON SEPARATION
In moving temporarily to Naarm/Melbourne from my home of lutruwita/Tasmania, I have found new kinship with the adage ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’. I am confronted more than ever with the constructed division between humanity and the environment. The Anthropocene, a proposed new geological epoch, suggests that the impact of humanity is now so great as to outcompete the previously dominant influence of natural processes (Crutzen et al. 2006). Herpetologist David B. Wake and ecologist Vance T. Vredenburg (2008) are two of many scientists arguing that humanity, or more accurately, capitalist practices, are causing the sixth known mass extinction event. At the time of publishing, Wake and Vredenburg claimed that a third of the 6,300 amphibian species were under threat of extinction, this number has since increased to almost half. With dire tidings such as these, I would normally find comfort in the presence of the lutruwitan/Tasmanian landscape. In the newfound absence of this possibility, I have been increasingly turning to my creative practice as solace.
When the neighbours cut half the tree down (it has been there at least thirty years),
to protect their second house (it has been there for six months),
I do not get to see the chainsaws bite into the branches
(I hope the white goshawk has another place to stay).
Solastalgia, a term first presented by environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht (2005), refers to the experience of anguish felt when you are connected to a place that is undergoing environmental deterioration. On the surface, my feelings upon beginning ‘Tidings’ may be more akin to early definitions of nostalgia; a melancholy experienced by those distant to their home. However, returning to lutruwita/Tasmania intermittently has caused changes that might have otherwise crept up gradually to instead become more violent in their impact. I do not simply miss it; I worry about it in my absence.
When my favourite grove of neighbourhood trees is also cut down (we used to pick the berries and throw them at each other)
I do not have the chance for one last visit (but the empty building has a better view now)
It is with these ruminations I begin to carve eight linocuts from photos I have taken around lutruwita/Tasmania over the last few years. I am seeking abstraction, familiarity, patterns and impressions that make up the natural landscape. I print the linocuts on tissue paper and recycled brown scraps from the art shop. I feel the need to bring the ecological fragility of the lutruwitan/Tasmanian environment into their texture. The referenced images all exist in pockets of national parks, separated by wide swathes of agricultural farmland. I sew the pages together, it is a deliberately time-consuming thing, there are faster ways, but I feel this work needs my time. The act of sewing attaches landscapes otherwise divided in life. I can turn the pages like a book, the linear traversal of a walk.
In my research efforts to identify the fish I counted in my memory, I encountered the Climbing Galaxias. Native to Australia and New Zealand, the Climbing Galaxias possesses an incredible ability to scale waterfalls (McGrouther 2021). It is skinny and found at Russell Falls, like the whiskered fish. Perhaps the whiskers were really fins. I wonder if maybe these are the fish I have counted, and why I cannot seem to find them now. Other results only tell me about the local introduced brown trout populations and how well-stocked the nearby lakes are for fishing. I suppose the fish are only counted if they are worth the catch.
So, I begin to add to the work, drawing Climbing Galaxias moving from right to left. I intend it to be a simple act of creative reflection, but as I make I think of the nearby fish farms (Russell Falls Aquaculture operates beside the entrance to the park) and logging in the Florentine Valley (I find myself looking on Google Earth to find the logged areas hidden from the main roads and therefore the vision of the commuter and tourist, the reputation of the wild state held together by thin tree lines like the painted backdrop of a play) and cannot help but worry it is a eulogy.
ON LOSS
The Tasmanian Tiger Snake, a campsite near Tarraleah, lutruwita/Tasmania, around 2005.
We went for a walk away from the campsite in the late afternoon. To wander this space was to exist in the divide between a subject and its dutiful mirror, a flooded wetland and a dull grey sky. Even in summer, I felt a bite in the air. Cracked glass running across my arms or jamming my fingertips in the fridge door.
We entered a clearing, stepping on the sporadic mounds that rose just above the surface of the marsh water. Shadows cast by the grass banks revealed an orange eucalypt-stained colour beneath the water’s surface.
A large rock rested at the centre. Atop it was a black snake.
The snake had been cut in half.
There were gauge marks in the rock from the chop,
Chop,
Chop.
The snake had been here for a few days. Its typically glistening eyes were hollowed out, easy pickings for trailing ants compared to its thick black scales.
I wish I had lifted the snake from the rock and placed it in the marsh, I had no notions of separation, then. Even as a child though, who had been taught through popular Christian symbolism that a snake was a harbinger of death and evil, I felt the wrongness of an animal killed in its own home.
The executioner could not have known how that scene would still haunt my mind almost twenty years later.
I sometimes imagine the snake was a warning, my canary in a coal mine of colonial hubris enacted upon the landscape, where even spaces intended for connection are beholden to the iron fist of ‘our comfort comes first’. Nobody would be expected to mourn the snake, except perhaps the marsh, whose preservative embrace was kept away by a steadfast rock.
Lost in my thoughts, breaking from my typically planned creative process, I continue adding to the work, drawing my canary in a coal mine. Alive, because in pondering this memory over the years, my mind has come to picture the snake as a kind of environmental oracle, I imagine its’ empty mouth opening and talking of futures it will never see. I dare not name the snake, I did not really know it.
I sew a red line across its’ body. My thread both mends and creates. It infers violence as I toe the line between the role of executioner and healer over this imitation snake.
I draw the snake on the spread of prints where I depict water-surface reflections in the Hartz Mountains, reminiscent of the grey stillness of the wetlands. It is a strange catharsis, a reflective mourning and a small release of the power the memory holds over me.
ON REMEMBERING
When they left the snake on display for wayward campers, the executioner inadvertently created a monument to the snake’s death: the temporal monument of the snake’s body, and the permanence of the scratched rock beneath. Hannah Stark (2023:173) writes that ‘memorial culture reflects our values back to us. How and what we memorialise is political and speaks to cultures of loss and memory’. Joshua Trey Barnett (2022:117) similarly echoes this, positing that memorials put vision to invisible losses and open encounters with absence itself. In lutruwita/Tasmania, many years of extensive campaigning and eventual physical intervention by activists were necessary to bring about the end of a statue memorialising former premier William Crowther (Holmes 2024). The statue previously held pride of place in Franklin Square, nipaluna/Hobart. The square is named after Sir John Franklin, who took and then abandoned Mathinna, a young Aboriginal girl (Maunder 2022). Crowther and Franklin were colonial figures known for causing significant harm to the Indigenous population. They were given permanence, place names, and centrality. Considering this culture, government-sanctioned memorialisation acknowledging the violence of colonisation upon the environment seems like a pipe dream. These memorials fail even from a humanitarian perspective, as they only reflect the values of the coloniser. They are political tools used to maintain the colonial status quo.
There is a lack of established tradition in modern western culture for environmental memorialisation. Joshua Trey Barnett (2022:12) writes ‘when animals or plants perish, when species become extinct, or when a land community is fractured, however, we have few traditions or rituals to guide us, few outlets for joining with others in our shared suffering’. He describes the subsequent difficulty in processing ecological grief without the same structures that are in place for western grieving rituals. Artist Chris Jordan is making an effort to expand these practices. In an interview (Craps and Olsen 2020:126) about his 2017 film Albatross, featuring photographs and footage detailing the fatal impacts of ocean plastic pollution on a colony of Laysan albatrosses, Jordan discusses his drive to memorialise their deaths:
There is also something about the helplessness of being there after they die, the desire to make some sort of gesture to honour what just happened. So we made mandalas around the birds, using sticks or flowers or rocks or just our footprints in the sand. Usually we just started doing it spontaneously, without any plan or even any words at all. Sometimes it was a circle shape, or other times in the shape of an egg around the bird, maybe like the egg it came from, a symbolic return to the mother. We made a few hundred or so of those, maybe some of them are still there.
The desire and capacity to utilise creative practices to mourn losses in the biotic community is also demonstrated through the works of local artists. Lutruwita/Tasmania-based artist Selena de Carvalho reflects (2019) on the last of the Prasophyllum taphanyx (Graveside Leek orchid), an endemic wild orchid species that is poetically making its’ last stand in a cemetery in Campbell town, lutruwita/Tasmania. The species is identified by Carvalho as an endling, the last known individual of a species. Carvalho’s 2018 work Beware of Imposters (the secret life of flowers) involves ritualistic expressions of care (watering, sitting with, singing to) and the gathering and delivery of audio messages from participants to the orchid. Carvalho speaks of her self-imposed role of witness, a term typically referring to somebody who is present for a significant accident or crime. To witness, Carvalho says, is to make oneself available for testimony on behalf of species who can’t speak for themselves.
In nipaluna/Hobart, artist Lucienne Rickard is interviewed (Burgess 2023) on the recent conclusion of her four-year-long project Extinction Studies, a performative work wherein she drew and then immediately erased highly detailed drawings of extinct and endangered species. The process of drawing and erasing is intended as a meditative reflection on evolution and extinction. The erased drawings become ghosts that effectively haunt the new drawings. As the erased animals accumulate, the paper begins to wear and deteriorate in the form of symbolic pas de deux with the ecological deterioration being represented. Located in the foyer of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, raising awareness through conversations with museum visitors is also part of the process, fostering a community of mourning.
ON HOPE
These artists choose to engage with extinction through grieving in anticipation. Thom van Dooren (2014:58) describes the process of extinction not as a single event, but instead as a ‘prolonged and ongoing process of change and loss that occurs across multiple registers and in multiple forms both long before and well after this “final” death’. For me, anticipatory grieving is a source of great inspiration in my creative practice. To mourn ecological losses is an acknowledgement that something lovely, something vital to us, has been lost, and serves as a call to action to protect what is left. This is where hope in memorialisation can be found.
On the final page, I sew the words ‘THE WORLD ENDED YESTERDAY’ on a scrap of pale pink fabric. The text sits opposite the page of the snake, they share space and reside at the conclusion. The text is a warning from the canary.
My fear, the fear that can become crippling, that it is
too late too late too late.
Soft and quiet, pale colouring. Always at the back of my mind when I watch the fairywrens flitter around the introduced blackberry bushes. The wrens are more accomplished dancers than most.
They block their ears and glance away,
These fears were needed yesterday.
By grieving environmental loss, we acknowledge ourselves as members of a community that extends beyond the human. In grieving we share space, in grieving there can also be hope. Aldo Leopold writes in A Sand County Almanac (1949) that understanding our position as a community demands a duty of care. Instead of treating grief as an illness in need of cure, it ought to be treated as an affirmation of our interconnectedness. We should not avoid grief by distancing ourselves from the more-than-human. Apathy is a death knell and goodbyes a reminder best not left ignored.
If extinction is an event of many moments, that scrap of fabric is my fear that we have ignored too many. I run my hands over the thick paper, idle fingers tracing the threaded words. I fold the book up. Despite these fears sewn into the final page, I will keep trying to count the fish, and perhaps I will find the snake’s resting place again.
Reference List
Albrecht G (2005) ‘‘Solastalgia’. A New Concept in Health and Identity’, PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, 3: 41–55.
Barnett JT (2022) Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence, Michigan State University Press, Michigan.
Burgess G (2023) Artist erases her drawings of endangered species over four years for Extinction Studies project, ABC News website, accessed May 29 2024. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-10/extinction-studies-art-project-plight-of-endangered-animals/103131870
Carvalho S (2018) Beware of Imposters (the secret life of flowers), Selena de Carvalho website, accessed May 29 2024. https://selenadecarvalho.com/beware-of-Imposters
Carvalho S (2019) ‘Beware of Imposters (the secret life of flowers) – by Selena de Carvalho’, Island, accessed May 29 2024. https://islandmag.com/read/beware-of-imposters-the-secret-life-of-flowers-by-selena-de-carvalho
Crutzen PJ (2006) ‘The “Anthropocene”’, in Ehlers E and Krafft T (eds) Earth System Science in the Anthropocene, Springer, Berlin.
Hogan L (1995) Dwellings: A spiritual History of the Living World, Touchstone, New York.
Holmes A (2024) Why is William Crowther, whose statue was toppled in Hobart, such a divisive figure?, ABC News website, accessed 1 June 2024. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-15/william-crowther-statue-toppled-who-was-he-explainer/103850774
Jordan C (director) (2017) Albatross [documentary], Midway Island.
Leopold A (1949) A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, Oxford University Press, London.
Lucienne Rickard (2019-2023) Extinction Studies, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, nipaluna/Hobart.
Maunder S (2022) The tragic story behind this doll has been revealed as it’s finally returned to Australia, SBS News website, accessed 1 June 2024. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/the-tragic-story-behind-this-doll-has-been-revealed-as-its-finally-returned-to-australia/2b298slf2
McGrouther M (2021) Climbing Galazias, Galaxias brevipinnis Gunther, 1866, Australian Museum website, accessed 21 May 2024. https://australian.museum/learn/animals/fishes/climbing-galaxias-galaxias-brevipinnis-gunther-1866/
Stark H (2023) ‘Lost Species, Lost Worlds’, in Stark H (ed) Extinction and Memorial Culture: Reckoning with Species Loss in the Anthropocene, Routledge, doi:10.4324/9781003315957.
Wake DB and Vredenburg VT (2008) ‘Are we in the midst of the sixth mass extinction? A view from the world of amphibians’, PNAS, 105(1):11466-11473.