41 Wilding
In the last podcast I referred to work done by Apalech man, Tyson Yunkaporta, author and academic from far North Queensland. Tyson keeps on giving and I continue to speculate on cultural differences, native perennials, land management systems and ideas around place - starting in my own back yard.
WHAT TO PISS ON
Well Tyson just keeps on giving. In an interview with Anthony James on his excellent podcast series The Regennarration, Tyson talks about living in the city and the frustration he feels at not being on country and free to do the small, essential things like piss outside.
Thanks Tyson, this has so given me permission to look at this.
Pissing outside, in the garden, or on the lawn or in the bush is just how it is meant to be. I always related to the old joke what is a stockman’s breakfast? Answer: A piss, a smoke, and a lookaround.
The earth welcomes our water return.
It is a vital pleasure for me to be able to walk barefoot outside in my pyjamas first thing in the morning. And in terms of regenerative farming practises I realise I have stumbled on one of the most simple tests you can do to assess the condition of your soil. Especially if you are of female persuasion. A lot of my soil is a long way from being a carbon sponge – the condition I have been advocating for long and hard in all these podcasts. Mainly because of a few decades of an uncommitted lawn mindset (a reluctant mindset on my part) and the parking of cars on the grass that have led to compacted soil.
NOT THE CARBON SPONGE
I am ashamed to say that there are many places on our small patches of tired lawn where I have to do a sort of crouchy shuffle to keep my feet out of my own urine – because it doesn’t sink in, it spreads as it would on the concrete driveway.
So a small garden can be educative. From the micro to the macro you get an idea of the living reality of healthy soil and how much rain would be lost to the roadway by soil compaction.
THE RAIN
And, here is another simple and profound pleasure that Tyson didn’t mention but I am confident would endorse, to be able to access rainwater from a tank. Sticking my whole head under the tap, first thing. Pouring a bucket over my body on hot days, washing the salt off after a swim in the warm, nutrient rich, seaweedy soup that is the Indian Ocean in summer. Although, I acknowledge, a freshwater spring would be better.
PERENNIAL VS ANNUAL
And here’s another lesson learnt about the macro in the micro. Last year, just before the colder months started to bleed into the hot months – and in the Midwest, this can be as early as October - I got a sudden rush to the head and decided to put in some seedlings and seeds for fast sprouting salad greens that might have a chance to get going before the moisture left the soil.
This required me to create space by thinning out the colder weather grasses, nettles, rocket and other easy-going annuals that come with the rain and create heavy green cover over most of the garden. I positioned myself in a likely growing bed and started heaving out the grasses by the handful, soil and plants flying as I enjoyed the contact with the (reasonably) friable soil – then nearly face-planted in the garden when one tug met with strong, unexpected opposition. Amongst the annuals was a forgotten perennial, a summer active grass known as native millet.
Native Millet Panicum decompositum
This, the fabled panicum decompositum, a common grass in pre-colonial Australia –has highly nutritious, shiny little brown seeds and was believed to have been a major food crop in across large inland swathes of the Rangelands. The first flour ever ground; the first bread ever created on planet earth is believed to have been made from these native millet seeds by an Australian Indigenous woman.
Being summer active, means that when the dry and hot conditions prevail, these plants have the capacity to stand their ground. They are designed to hunker into the soil with exceptionally developed root systems.
THE FIELD DAY
To hammer all this lived experience home, I recently went to a Native Grasses field day in Perenjori organised by Lizzie King from NACC (Northern Agricultural Catchment Council). Rod Butler, local farmer, showed us a few sites that demonstrated how intensive, managed grazing of sheep can wake up country. I was interested to see how the land at Pine Ridge – owned by Perth company Carbon Neutral - had progressed since I had recorded a podcast called ‘Relaxing with Sheep’ last winter in response to the project.
They had experienced good summer rain and the bare ground between the rows of trees planted for carbon capture was alive with plants including ag weeds, native annuals, and the odd perennial – a result that exceeded Rod’s expectations.
At a nearby roadside verge, Tim Wiley, Rangeland ecologist from Tierra Australia, shared his excitement about the mineral and water capturing capacity of perennials through the lens of ground temperature. Bare ground on a summer’s day will average 65 degrees Celsius – within the canopy of a native perennial like blue bush, mariana – a hard bitten common arid zone plant, the temperature will be about 30 degrees cooler. We could all observe that the friendlier atmosphere created a space where other plants could, and had, established themselves.
SCIENTIFIC BACK UP
Back at the pavilion, Tim shared the results of a trial run at Binnu – arid land north of Geraldton – that tested mineral and water carrying capacity of annuals versus perennials during the drought of 2006-2008. Available phosphorus in the soil came in at three times higher for the perennial plants than the annuals. Similar elevated levels of organic carbon, potassium, sulphur, and pH were recorded. This was staggering enough – but what really blew Tim’s mind was when they worked out where the perennial plants were getting their elevated moisture levels. The only explanation is that they have the ability to harvest water from the sea breezes that are a feature of life in this part of the world. This gives them super plant power.
THE CONS
Tim had a few provisos re: perennials. It takes a while to establish and retrain a broadacre annual system to a perennial system – he reckons 4 years before the biodiversity really kicks in.
Running stock help this process along enormously. Once perennials have a bit of a hold in a paddock it is possible to graze them down and then sow annuals in autumn. In a good year a farmer can harvest a grain crop, in a bad year they have created a good spread to keep their stock fat and happy.
The other problem is sourcing local perennial seeds. Some of the farmers there had experimented with the South African varieties freely and cheaply available in WA, but were struggling to source native seed – it is costs about $300 per kilo and most of it is from small operations in the east. The seeds are also subject to strict quarantine processes. The theory is that when the land managers help the environment get back into shape, the perennials will return - but some would like to kickstart the process by experimenting on promising zones in their properties.
MICRO PROOF
When non-Aboriginal farmers arrived and quickly became the dominant land managers, they overlaid the perennial plant system with an agricultural approach that relied on the cropping of annuals…when the hot weather hit, annuals produce their seed, then wither and die, eventually either blowing or flowing away with the top-soil as wind and rain lashed the earth. Once you add clearing, burning, overgrazing and ultimately chemical farming practises to support this annual system - you have a recipe for an agricultural program that has done grave damage to ecological systems across Australia.
I had the intellectual capacity to understand this – but there is nothing like a near face plant to prove that a native perennial has an impressive root system, even when young and growing quietly amidst the green annuals.
THE STORIES OF WATER
Still working though Tyson’s ideas: here’s some thinking of water, fresh water, from an Aboriginal perspective that has been gifted to us all through the medium of story. Filtered through my wajella mind. South of Geraldton at the mouth of the Greenough River – a river that starts over a 100 kms east of Geraldton in the Rangelands, there are occasions when rain from a cyclonic event where it breaks through the sand bank into the ocean.
This is a turbulent meeting that is full of drama characterised by big waves, stormy waters and soil and nutrient laden water.. It also heralds a big increase of all kinds of nutrients that in turn attracts birds and hunters of all ilk and it is on, a moment of abundance and an opportunity to feast.
The river broke through to the sea in early March and I joined the throngs of people who enjoy the drama of the massive red, pungent plume of soil as it empties into the ocean . Before colonisation the water flow would have been different – now levee banks stop it flooding over the land and it is corralled into a roaring erosion-gouged river bed that occasionally takes out bridges on its way down to the coast.
Indigenous stories of Water carry general knowledge and teaching about the workings of the natural world. The local story of Greenough estuary is of the clash of the salt and freshwater serpent as they meet in battle at the estuary. The story goes that the salt-water serpent drives the fresh-water serpent inland where it lies licking its wounds in the inky blackness of a deep, permanent pool at the base of some sheer cliffs.
A few years ago I was lucky enough to go on a bus tour with Derek Councillor around important Aboriginal cultural sites. We went to Ellendale Pool, the resting place of the Bimmera, fresh water serpent, biding its time until it is ready to do battle again when the rain rushes over the inland plains towards the coast and the whole cycle of renewal starts again.
It’s a great story. An imaginative way to teach kids/adults about the natural world and the way nutrients return - allowing spirit and poetry into the life-giving cycles that affect us all.
PLACE BASED KNOWLEDGE
Tyson’s work centres on the importance of place. It is central to indigenous knowledge. It has taken me a long time to get a handle on this notion of place. It used to be an irritant to me to listen to Indigenous talk about connection to country. I would have been one of the whitefella in the room who wanted to assert that I love this land too, sometimes citing generations of occupancy to cement my sense of connection: while being very conscious that I can’t compete with 40,000/60,000 years of continuous relationship to country.
And I, they, do, all love the land. But I have dropped the defensiveness. Non-Aboriginal people need to do the psychological work to get with the program. The aggrieved way some still react to this question of love of place is a prime example of the fragility that seems to be occupying racial thinking at the moment. This should not be treated as a competition. It could be seen as another opportunity to acknowledge the destruction wrought to all our lives by colonialism and a desire to find a shared way forward.
I’m with Aileen Morton-Robinson, another wonderful Indigenous thinker and academic. I heard her interviewed on the philosopher zone on ABC’s Radio National.
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/aileen-moreton-robinson/11745924
She talks about Reconciliation as a process that needs to be explored by Non-Aboriginal people in terms of the violence of the past. When the Europeans arrived in Australia all those decades ago, they violently dispossessed the inhabitants of their land, their culture, their lives. As a great, great, great etc grand-daughter of the boat people I can’t take the blame, but I can attempt to take responsibility and acknowledge the enormous downstream effects of colonial violence on both Aboriginal people and other Australians. Some of us have gained, and we have all lost, so much.
After all, before my ancestors became ‘civilised’ (inverted commas), I lived in a tribe in the forest somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere, presumably in tune with nature, and oriented to the notion of custodial living with the natural world.
COLLECTIVE VS INDIVIDUAL
Traditional Indigenous communities worked, still work, on the idea of collective resources requiring collective and community management of eco-system function – which meant that the big things, soil, water, air quality and ecosystem health, were the responsibility of the collective.
This is so different to contemporary Ag communities that are organised in terms of individual land ownership and the commodification of resources like water and food. This is a big philosophical divide. I am not suggesting we launch into an experiment of communal living – but I am thinking that what connects Regen Ag with the Indigenous way of being is that of holistic thinking and management. Covid has given us an idea that a return to the concept of ‘commons’ and of the importance of what is local, might be necessary for us to construct an inclusive future where all can thrive.
PLACING SELF
So, place. I try to place myself in the land in a way a tribal person might. My friend, Indre, in tune with Indigenous ways sorted me out as I floundered around trying out words that might express my relationship to the ground I stand on:
She said: ‘You live on the land that juts into the sea.’ There you go. The West end of Geraldton. There is a new reality in there for the wilding of Amanda. Much more interesting than living at the corner of X street and Y terrace.
If I truly orient myself in this way – everything else I know shifts. It is thrilling to me to contemplate the idea of a natural wildness, not as a terrifying, outside force, but as something intimately known.
