Thesis Introduction (Kerry)

The Role of Art in Imagining Sustainable Futures: The Barmah Forest

Introduction

I am the daughter of a dairy farmer, a soldier settler who was in the pioneering group of returning soldiers from the second World War to be allocated newly-constructed irrigation properties in the Nathalia district of the Murray Valley, Victoria, thirty kilometres east of the river port of Echuca. My father’s father had a mixed farming property southwest of Echuca. At the end of the war, after he made the decision that he wanted to be his own boss and not be employed by the Victorian Department of Education as a schoolteacher, my father returned to this property to share the running of the farm with his father and another brother. He built a house for his growing family down the road from his childhood home. It was not until the early 1950’s that we moved to Nathalia and the new farm.

Twenty kilometres from our farm, whether you travelled north or west, was the Barmah Forest. It is still part of the largest river red gum forest in the world when taken as a whole with the Moira Forest on the opposite bank of the Murray River. It was formed thousands of years ago when the earth was uplifted along the Cadell Fault and the flow of the Murray River was re-directed from its westerly flow in a great curve to the south. As a result a huge flood plain was formed. This is where the forest is located. The river red gums depend on regular flooding at specific times to regenerate. The entire eco-system is dependent on the river’s ebb and flow over the seasons.

The system of irrigation channels, drains and bays had been constructed on the understanding that water would be available as required by the irrigators from the Murray River. This was part of a major economic development that was taking place across central northern Victoria. With the construction of the Hume Weir, the Yarrawonga Weir and numerous other smaller weirs along the Murray River and its tributaries, the regulation of the flow of water was maintained for the benefit of farmers. At the same time the construction of the Snowy Mountain Scheme for the generation of electricity was taking place. The combination of these two huge infrastructure schemes was to have an immense effect on Australia’s economy. The catch-cry of the time was ‘Water into gold’.

There were parallels to the mid-nineteenth century gold-rush days in Victoria when there was an influx of immigrants into the country coming to make their fortunes, lured by the magic of gold. Now, following the end of the war, there was an influx of immigrants, refugees from Europe on the whole, and returned soldiers looking for work and a new way of life. They were boom days for agriculture, the golden years. In the 1950s, wool prices were high. Australia was riding on the sheep’s back. Other agricultural commodities were in high demand as Australia’s population soared. The dry country in northern Victoria thrived on the ready supply of water and the bountiful application of fertilizer.

This was rich river country. Country towns sprang up and expanded. Schools, shops and churches were built to cater for the growing population. It seemed that there would be no end to the fortune.

With the new twentieth century regulation of the river the system was interrupted. Water was directed to areas that had previously only experienced annual rainfall and possible occasional flooding and, as a result, was directed away from areas such as the forest. The irrigation schemes were set up along the entire length of the Murray from Albury in Victoria through to South Australia.

The regulation of the river also disrupted the traffic on the river itself. Paddle steamers had been travelling along the Murray-Darling river system since the late nineteenth century but were now blocked by the weirs that had been installed to regulate the flow of the water. The paddle-steamers had been used to transport the produce from Australia’s inland grazing properties, particularly the wool, and to take it to the river port of Echuca from where it could be hauled by road or rail to Melbourne and hence by ship to the lucrative markets in Europe.

The early story of contact between European and Indigenous people in the Barmah Forest and surrounding areas is documented in the diaries of Daniel Matthews who came to Australia with his family in 1851 and selected land on the New South Wales side of the Murray, the Moira Run, in 1865. Nancy Cato has investigated the story of Daniel Matthews and his mission to provide for the Indigenous people in her book Mister Maloga: Daniel Matthews and his Mission, Murray River, 1864-1902. In undertaking this research she has depended heavily on diaries and letters kept by Matthews and his wife, Janet, as well as photos, maps and documents from the period. Matthews was the founder of the Maloga Mission and later was instrumental in forming the Cummeragunja settlement, which still exists today, for the local Indigenous people. His story is necessarily that of a Christian man intent on converting the Indigenous community to his faith. In the process he has been acknowledged for providing a school for the community, which ensured them a good education and subsequently the means to work independently in the European economy as farmers. His work is also acknowledged in the book edited by Rachel Perkins and Marcia Langton, First Australians: An Illustrated History. In the chapter written by Wayne Atkinson, he claims that the Scholar’s Hut at the Maloga Mission established by Daniel Matthews was the birthplace of political awareness of the Yorta Yorta people. In turn, this is where the seeds were sown for the Indigenous political movement throughout Australia leading up to the 1967 referendum.

Paul Sinclair has undertaken a major sociological study of the Murray River and its people, particularly since the time of European settlement. In The Murray: A River and Its People he documents the stories of people who have grown up along the Murray as a way of telling the story of the river itself. He uses the decline of the Murray cod as a metaphor for the degradation of the river and the land in its floodplain. He concludes that “settler Australians need to understand and mourn the immense losses they have inflicted on the river” in order to then be able to imagine a sustainable future for themselves and the river.

Sinclair tells of an excursion made by artist John Davis to the Barmah Forest in 1979 when he responded to the place by constructing a work around some tree stumps in situ on the banks of the river. Davis had grown up along the river and this was a way for him to make sense of his connection to the river and the forest and as part of a “questioning of the cultural and development imperatives which had driven efforts to regulate the river since the 1880s.” Like Davis, I intend to respond to the forest as part of the creative research I will undertake for this study.

After more than fifty years of irrigating the country in the Murray-Darling Basin, the balance has moved. The climate has changed. There are concerns about the water table rising; there are issues with salt damage to irrigated country; there is not enough water to quench the demand from irrigators; the environment is suffering. With this change of perspective on the development of the irrigation schemes, I am interested in investigating my connection to the place and in untangling my family’s role as settler farmers and irrigators in the Murray-Darling River system. Also as a consequence of the widespread use of water for irrigation and the regulation of the rivers, the Barmah Forest is in decline. Perhaps the forest can be seen as a barometer for the health of the environment. I intend to use the forest as a case study for my research.

Rather than take a scientific approach to understanding the decline of the forest, my intention is to wonder about ways of imagining its sustainable future through the medium of art. The sustainability of the forest is intricately linked with the community of people who live and work in its vicinity, including the Yorta Yorta Indigenous people. It is also part of a delicate web of living organisms that sustain and nurture each other. By tapping into this rhizomic system and expressing something of its nature through art, I hope to be able to find a relationship between the art and the community’s ability to imagine a sustainable future for itself and for the forest. This may include involving some of the community itself in the art-making, perhaps in a collaborative work.

Before proceeding with any discussion about the role of art in imagining sustainable futures, it is necessary to provide a base understanding of the meaning of the term ‘sustainable’ in this context. It is a word that has entered the everyday language to the point of being a buzzword; a word echoed by corporations, politicians and grassroots eco-warriors alike.

In 1987 the World Commission on Environment and Development produced a report, Our Common Future, which included the most commonly upheld definition of sustainability. In the report there was a clear call to global cooperation and to consider the combined “social, economic and political concerns if we are to successfully move toward a more sustainable future.” Sustainability was understood as “development that meets the needs of today without compromising the needs of future generations.”
In 1991, The World Conservation Union, the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Wide Fund for Nature joined forces to produce a document called Caring for the Earth: A Strategy for Sustainable Living. The aim of the document was to help improve the condition of the world’s people, by defining two requirements as follows:

“One is to secure a widespread and deeply-held commitment to a new ethic, the ethic for sustainable living, and to translate its principles into practice. The other is to integrate conservation and development to enable people everywhere to enjoy long, healthy and fulfilling lives.”

In her book, Hijacking Sustainability, Adrian Parr voices a concern about a limited view of sustainability. She is concerned about a view that favours global economic prosperity and gives priority to action from multinational corporations and multinational organisations to the detriment of local specificity. She notes that there are thousands of grassroots local organizations seeking justice for “the underprivileged, including the right of the environment not to be destroyed.” Parr uses the term ‘sustainability culture’ to describe this localised enthusiasm for sustainable ways of life and social equality. She sees popular culture as the arena in which the “meaning and value of sustainability is contested, produced, and exercised.” It is a social practice that allows new and emerging values and practices to intersect with the traditional. Although Parr does not refer to the role of art in the conversation about sustainability, nevertheless it can be the artists within a community who influence popular culture.

An exhibition held in 2010 at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), In the Balance: Art in a Changing World, is a specific example of popular culture dealing with the issue of sustainability and responding to current environmental debates. Irene Watson begins a discussion in the exhibition catalogue by mourning the lost possibilities for Indigenous Australia following colonisation by European settlers in the name of progress. She is referring in particular to the Murray-Darling river system. She observes that the coloniser’s idea of progress has directly impacted the river system and in so doing has disconnected the Indigenous people from their country and their “sustainable relationships with the seas, waters and lands” of their ancestors. Watson acknowledges that the Indigenous people now live at the margins of Australian society, however she sees the evidence of Indigenous artists providing “a creative response to the environmental imperatives of our time.”

The intersection of the new and the traditional culture, as referred to by Parr, is made clear in the work of several Indigenous artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art, including Lorraine Connelly-Northey. Connelly-Northey is a Waradgerie woman who is “remaking the past.” According to Watson, she works with settler’s discarded commodities as an act of resistance and “transforms them into the baskets and possum-skin cloaks of her ancestors.” Watson describes Connelly-Northey’s work as a re-weaving of materials such as the barbed wire of settler’s fences, corrugated iron, and mesh, processing them as an act of decolonisation.

Watson is realistic about the effects of colonisation and climate change on the river system but claims that “what we call Art can also be a strategy for survival.” She suggests that the In the Balance exhibition could be a “strategy and a hope for the ending of acts of inhumanity and environmental destruction and [could] allow [the Indigenous people] to grow up and take that different path…, back towards being human on earth.” Watson recognises that this could be a dream but that the generations to come “need visions to imagine and grow a future humanity.” Watson is referring both to the sustainability of the Indigenous people’s way of life and also, inevitably, to the sustainability of the environment. Hers is a political view; she identifies the In the Balance exhibition, and the Indigenous works in it in particular, as “calls to action to change…going beyond political rhetoric, going to a place of ancient obligations in order to bring change, but also the balance and harmony to our lives as humans on earth.”