Landscapes of Culture and Nature

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Landscapes of Culture and Nature

Also by Rod Giblett FORRESTDALE: People and Place HEALTH RECOVERY: The Taoist Tai Chi™ Way LIVING WITH THE EARTH: Mastery to Mutuality POSTMODERN WETLANDS: Culture, History, Ecology SUBLIME COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES THE BODY OF NATURE AND CULTURE

Landscapes of Culture and Nature Rod Giblett

© Rodney James Giblett 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-23584-7

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Dedicated to Jon Stratton

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Contents Tables and Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

x

1 Quaking Zone: Where Body, Land and Mind Meet

1

Part I Uncanny 2 Alligators, Crocodiles and the Monstrous Uncanny

17

3 The Nether World of the Uncanny City of Dreadful Night

36

Part II World War S(ub)lime 4 Earth and Water in the Slime of World War I Trench Warfare 5 Fire and Air in the Sublime Bombing of World War II Aerial Warfare Coda: The Elements and the Senses in World Warfare

59 69

Part III Photographic Sublime and Uncanny 6 Wilderness to Wasteland: The Sublime, the Picturesque and the Uncanny in the Photography of the American West 7 Shooting the Sunburnt Country, the Land of Sweeping Plains, the Rugged Mountain Ranges: The Role of Australian Landscape and Wilderness Photography in Promoting Environmental Sustainability and in Forming a New National Identity

89

106

Part IV Mindscapes 8 Land Health and Mental Health: A New Field for Research Nurturing Biodiversity and Well-Being on Farms

125

9 Terrifying Prospects and Resources of Hope: Minescapes, Timescapes and the Aesthetics of the Future

138

Part V Water Bodies 10 A Natural History of Natural, Unnatural and National Disasters vii

157

viii Contents

11 Black and White Water: Cross-Cultural Colour-Coding of the Life-Blood of the Earth-Body

174

Notes

190

References

192

Index

203

Tables and Illustrations Tables 5.1

Elements and senses

84

5.2

Elements and humours

85

11.1

The hierarchical taxonomy of water, land and landscape in Durack’s Kings in Grass Castles (Giblett, 1996c, p. 93 and 2004, p. 190)

176

Illustrations 11.1 Gregory Pryor Taking Fire (Dale) 2007

177

11.2 Gregory Pryor Moving with Locusts (de Sainson) 2007

178

11.3 Gregory Pryor Colony (Garling) 2007

180

11.4 Gregory Pryor Seagull (de Sainson) 2007

181

11.5 Gregory Pryor Taking Water (de Sainson) 2007

182

11.6 Shane Pickett Waagle and Yandock Story (2004)

183

11.7 Shane Pickett Waagle – Rainbow Serpent (1983)

184

11.8 David Mowaljarlai, Bandaiyan: The body of Australia, Corpus Australis in his Yorro Yorro: Everything standing up alive: Spirit of the Kimberley

185

11.9 François-Antoine Boniface Heirisson Rivière des Cygnes (Swan River) 1801

186

11.10 The digestive tract

188

11.11 Swan River as digestive tract

188

11.12 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noongar

189

ix

Acknowledgements The dedication of this book to Jon Stratton is a token expression of another embarrassingly long-standing (over a decade in fact) debt of gratitude to him for his continued support, first as a senior colleague at Curtin University of Technology from 1991 to 1996 and then as a referee for my time at Edith Cowan University from 1997. Earlier versions of chapters and various sections have appeared elsewhere: Alligator, Crocodiles and the Monstrous Uncanny, Continuum 20(3), 2006, 299–312. Shooting the Sunburnt Country, the Land of Sweeping Plains, the Rugged Mountain Ranges: Australian Landscape and Wilderness Photography, Continuum 21(3), 2007, 331–46. A Natural History of Natural Disasters, Photofile 76, 2006, 48–51 (copyright Rod Giblett and Photofile). Zone: City of Ghosts, FotoFreo 04, 2004, 24. Black and White Water. In E. Potter, A. Mackinnon, S. McKenzie and J. McKay (eds) Fresh Water: New Perspectives on Water in Australia (pp. 31–43). Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2007. Land is to Landscape as Naked is to Nude. In Gregory Pryor, Naked (pp. 20–6). Subiaco: Lister Gallery, 2007. Wilderness to Wasteland in the Photography of the American West. Continuum 23(1), 2009, 43–52. Terrifying Prospects and Resources of Hope: Minescapes, Timescapes and the Aesthetics of the Future, Continuum 23 (forthcoming), 2009. I am grateful to the editors of the catalogues, journals and magazines listed above for permission to re-publish this material and to the referees of the articles for their helpful comments on earlier versions of them. Articles published in Continuum are reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals). Grateful acknowledgement is made to Shane Pickett and Gregory Pryor for permission to reproduce their paintings in Chapter 11; to Greg for supplying an electronic reproduction of his paintings; and to Andre Lipscombe and Tanja Coleman for supplying an electronic reproduction of Pickett’s paintings. I am grateful to Deborah Bird Rose for inviting me to attend the Water Justice Workshop in September 2005 in Adelaide and for giving x

Acknowledgements

xi

me the opportunity to present an earlier version of Chapter 10, which was then published in a slightly edited (or censored) form in Fresh Water. The unexpurgated version is included in Landscapes of Culture and Nature. I am grateful to Magabala Books for permission to reproduce David Mowaljarlai’s drawing ‘Bandaiyan: The body of Australia, Corpus Australia’ from his Yorro Yorro: Everything Standing up Alive. I am especially grateful to Joel Meyerowitz for providing the cover photo. I am grateful to Sue Bahn for providing research assistance for Chapter 8; to CREATEC (Centre for Research in Entertainment, Arts, Technology, Education and Communications, Faculty of Education and Arts, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia); for funding this assistance; and to Angela Durey of the Combined Universities’ Centre for Rural Health in Geraldton for her many detailed and helpful comments on previous versions of this chapter. An earlier version of Chapter 9 was first presented at a seminar at Edith Cowan University. I am grateful to Jonathan Marshall for the epiphany I had during this seminar that the paper exemplifies the temporal orientation I am arguing for and to Julie Robson for pointing out the pertinence of Mary Zournazi’s Hope. I am also grateful to Libby Lester for sending me a copy of the special issue of MIA on ‘Ecomedia’ that she co-edited with Kitty van Vuuren, and an electronic version of Matt Newton’s photograph of the Weld Angel. A later version was presented at the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Conference in Kalgoorlie in December 2008, and then published in Continuum as indicated above. I am also grateful to an anonymous referee for Continuum for pointing out the pertinence of Ghassan Hage’s work on hope. I am grateful to Juha Tolonen for drawing my attention to the work of Rebecca Solnit, and to that of Robert Polidori, Glen Phillips for Beth Yahp’s The Crocodile Fury, and Warwick Mules to the work of W. G. Sebald. Naturally (and culturally) I am responsible for everything that follows. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for Palgrave Macmillan for pointing out the pertinence of several books and articles, thereby enriching and distinguishing Landscapes of Culture and Nature and also saving me from potential embarrassment from the book reviewers. Bourke’s Fear: A Cultural History focuses on the emotion or experience of fear whereas Landscapes of Culture and Nature is a sort of environmental history of fear focussing on the landscapes that produce fear; Haraway’s When Species Meet is about the moment of contact in what she calls ‘the

xii Acknowledgements

contact zone’ whereas Landscapes of Culture and Nature is about where species meet in the quaking zone; Helphand’s Defiant Gardens focuses on gardens in wartime and war zones and their therapeutic effects for their gardeners whereas Landscapes of Culture and Nature focuses on the war zone itself and its devastating impacts on people and places; Lloyd’s Battlefield Tourism is about the tourists who come to see and experience a dried-up battlefield whereas Landscapes of Culture and Nature is about battlefield terrorism and ‘terroirism’ of mud after the battle has finished, and their affects on the people (local residents, soldiers) living in them; and Whatmore’s Hybrid Geographies: Landscapes of Culture and Nature is about hybrid psychogeographies, or psycho(eco)logies. This referee insisted that I read Fussell’s Great War and Popular Memory, which I did and I do refer to it, though it is a difficult book for an Australian to read for its Anglo-centrism – albeit from an American. He makes no mention of the Australians who fought in this war, 60,000 of whom were killed and 119,000 wounded. Australians get subsumed under ‘the British’, not even ‘the allies’. Australia’s greatest general of this, and probably any war John Monash, who led the allies to victory in some decisive battles, does not even get a mention. The only use of the word ‘Australian’ I came across in Fussell’s book is in a quotation about a slouch hat. This is a major lapse of memory on Fussell’s part and reinforces the Australian mythology of British bastardry (albeit with American-inflected complicity). Landscapes of Culture and Nature remembers the Australians. The referee also drew my attention to articles by Paul Gough and Mandy Morris about the landscapes of war from a military point of view before the battles, landscapes of war after the battles commemorating the fallen, such as gardens and cemeteries, and traces of landscape of battle with its craters and trenches found recently in mounds and channels (Landscapes of Culture and Nature is about the landscape of warfare immediately after the battle from the point of view of the human inhabitants who endured the battle and the effects the landscape of the aftermath had on them). Landscapes of Culture and Nature is concerned with landscapes of the aftermath: World Wars I and II after the battles and bombardment, Chernobyl after the meltdown, ‘9/11’ (two books on this are entitled Aftermath) after the towers collapsed, New Orleans after Katrina, Nevada after nuclear-bombing, Australia and the US after white settlement and photography, the swamps of alligators and crocodiles after preying on travellers and tourists, the city after dark, and aft in its dark and dank places and so on.

1 Quaking Zone: Where Body, Land and Mind Meet

The modern age is the age of terror. Terror arises not only in time, in a period of history, but also in space, in places of terror. This book focuses on the places and experiences of terror. Drawing on the work of Henry David Thoreau, I develop his concept/metaphor of ‘the quaking zone’ by distinguishing between feral and native quaking zones. Feral quaking zones are landscapes where the earth quakes and terror is experienced as a result of the inscription of modern industrial technology on the surfaces and depths (and sometime heights) of the body, earth and mind. The features of feral quaking zones and the quality of the human sensory experience of being them is quite different, though, from quaking zones not made by modern human hands, or native quaking zones, such as swamps which are home to the fearful and horrific alligator and crocodile, and to death, decomposition and new life. Quaking zones are landscapes that are cultural or natural to greater or lesser degrees, or somewhere in between the two; they are in between nature and culture. Nature and culture are complex terms as Raymond Williams (1972, 1976) and others have argued (see Giblett, 2004, Chapters 1 and 2). For Williams, nature is the most complex word in the English language and culture one of the most complex. Part of the complexity of both words stems from their history as they have changed in meaning over time. They are multi-accentual terms as they are sites of struggle for competing interests. ‘Nature’ is a cultural category with a history and a politics. The Roman Cicero (first century BCE) drew the distinction between the first nature of the natural world and the second nature of the human world of herding, tilling, mining, forging and building. Second nature works over first nature. Yet second nature is cultural, a ‘culture of nature.’ And first nature in Cicero’s terms is partly the first ‘culture

2 Landscapes of Culture and Nature

of nature’ of first peoples. In Living with the Earth: Mastery to Mutuality (Giblett, 2004), I argued that there is also a third, fourth and fifth nature, and that these are cultures of natures (taking up and elaborating Wilson’s (1992) pioneering work in cultural studies of nature). Quaking zones are sites of cultures of natures. There is thus no single, homogenous culture or nature, but a number of cultures and natures. In Living with the Earth, I distinguished between the first nature of indigenous cultures and the second nature of ‘agri-urban’ cultures. This second culture of nature gave rise to the third culture of nature of modernity, and of mercantile, and later industrial, capitalism. This third culture of nature then produced the fourth culture of nature of hypermodernity and modern communication technologies. Recently the fifth culture of nature of postmodernity and sacrality harks back to the first culture of nature. In Living with the Earth, I also characterised these five cultures of nature in terms of human work (bodily and mental): the first culture of nature works (with) nature (defined as land, air, water and living beings); the second culture of nature works over nature in herding, tilling, mining, forging and building; the third culture of nature overworks nature in modern mercantile, and later industrial, capitalism; the fourth culture of nature hyper-works nature in communication technologies; and the fifth culture of nature involves bio- and psycho-symbiotic livelihoods in bioregions (see Giblett, 2008c). In this book, I trace, and compare and contrast, the quaking zones of the first culture of nature of pre-modern indigenous societies and the second culture of nature of agri-urban societies with that of the third culture of nature in modernity, principally in modern cities and industrial warfare, and with the fourth culture of nature of hyper-modernity, principally in landscape, wilderness and wasteland photography, in hyper-modern cities, and in national disasters. I conclude by considering the postmodern fifth culture of nature in terms of embodied being in the world and living mutually and sustainably with the earth. Thinking about some landscapes as quaking zones gets away from the culture/nature, human/environment, artificial/natural divides and develops new ways of thinking and being that involve both culture and nature (Giblett, 2004), people and place (Giblett, 2006a); body and earth (Giblett, 2008a), and body, mind, earth and water (Giblett, 1996a; 2004; 2008a). Drawing on the works of Freud, Abraham, Klein and Mahler, I have developed previously a ‘psychoanalytic ecology’ (Giblett, 1996a; 2004). There are some points of similarity between psychoanalytic ecology and what Whatmore (2002, p. 3) calls ‘hybrid

Quaking Zone 3

geographies’ which ‘allies the business of thinking space to that of thinking through the body’. Psychoanalytic ecology not only allies thinking space (and place) and thinking through the body, but also allies them with thinking, and with feeling, with the repressed and the unconscious. Psychoanalytic ecology involves what could be called ‘hybrid psychogeography’. Psychogeography is Guy Debord’s term devised in the 1950s for ‘a discipline that could set itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviours of individuals’ (cited by Solnit, 2000, p. 212). Hybrid psychogeography studies the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions, thoughts, behaviours of individuals’ minds and bodies at rest and in motion, even with the simplest and slowest act of human locomotion – walking. Debord was what Solnit (2000, p. 212) calls one of ‘the chief theorists of walking’, as was Henry David Thoreau whose most famous essay, and probably the most famous essay of American nature writing, is titled ‘Walking’. In this essay, his journal, and his most famous book, Walden (the greatest, most enduring, because still pertinent, book of American literature (and not a novel)), Thoreau developed the concept/metaphor of ‘the quaking zone’. This refers for him to both a particular landform, such as a wetland as a place where the earth trembles, and a psychogeosomatic state, or affect, where mind, body and earth meet and tremble in fear or flight, in horror or terror, in anticipation or fascination, in dread or hope, or in a mixture of both. The quaking zone in general is a place and space of both fear and hope. Although Thoreau did not draw a distinction between native and feral quaking zones, he did compare and contrast the visceral and emotional qualities of being in a swamp and being in a city. Native quaking zones are more naturally places of hope than are feral quaking zones. Native quaking zones are also less plainly places of fear than are feral quaking zones. Native quaking zones are, in addition, more markedly places of death and new life than are feral quaking zones. Feral quaking zones are by no means hopeless and lifeless, but they are not as hopeful and full of life as native quaking zones. Feral quaking zones, like slums, would become more livable for their inhabitants if they became more like the fully functioning ecosystems of native quaking zones like swamps. Developments in the environmental humanities, in particular in environmental aesthetics (see Mules, 2008), mean that there are new ways of living with, and being in, a variety of cultural/natural landscapes


and human/environment interactions and developing new ways of thinking about them and being embodied within them. The ‘quaking zone’ is a useful way of thinking about the relationship and interactions between humans, the human-made landscape and the earth considered as a ‘non-human’ entity that preceded humans and that continues despite our impacts on it. The ‘quaking zone’ is also a useful way for thinking about the difference between modern landscapes made with human hands using industrial technologies, and pre-modern landscapes made by ancestral beings using divine technologies, or by human hands using pre-industrial technologies. Neither the former nor the latter quaking zone is natural, and both are artificial in this sense of being non-natural. Modern, industrial, even post-industrial, quaking zones are flooded, fire-ravaged or polluted cities, towns or suburbs; watery wastelands; industrial ruins; toxic dumps; irradiated test sites; muddy trenches; rust belts and urban slums. They are feral quaking zones in which the natural elements of earth, air, fire and water have not only been displaced from their proper places and disrupted from their creative mixtures, but have also been mixed destructively, run amok, caused havoc and made wastelands. Pre-industrial, and pre- and postmodern, quaking zones are dismal swamps, melancholic marshes, miry bogs, despondent sloughs and other exquisite wetlands. They are native quaking zones in which the elements of earth, air, fire and water are mixed creatively and are at home in their own place. Spatially and figuratively, the feral quaking zone is the monumental brought low whereas the native quaking zone is the monstrous down below. ‘Native’ and ‘feral’ are often associated with flora and fauna, respectively. They are employed here in association with the places and spaces of quaking zones for a number of reasons. They are usually coupled and contrasted with ‘exotic’ and ‘wild’, both of which have some resonances and problems in relation to places. In the case of flora, exotic plants are weeds defined as plants out of their native place, or home (e.g. arum lilies in Australia), in contrast to native flora in its own home place. Exotic places are sites of fascination, not horror, and even tourist attractions and destinations, whereas native places can be places of fascination and horror. Exotic places are not native places for viewers of visual representations of them, nor for visitors to them. In the case of fauna, wild animals are native to their place and are neither domesticated nor tamed. Wild places, though, are or were often home to indigenous people native to that place. Wilderness has struggled with racism for a long time with indigenous people being either equated with wild animals or plants, or ignored altogether (see Giblett, 2004). Feral animals are like

Quaking Zone 5

weeds in that they are out of their native place or home. They are not native to that place. They have gone ‘wild’ often without having been native to that place in the first instance and having been introduced (e.g. foxes and rabbits in Australia). Similarly feral quaking zones are not native to their place. They are ‘manmade,’ human-made, or artificial reconstructions of places. A native quaking zone preserves the creative value of being native to a place, whereas a feral quaking zone highlights the destructive power of a place going feral. Although emotionally and physically the experience of fear and trembling associated with both types of quaking zones may be similar, qualitatively and sensually the experience of being in either is different in their engagement with all five senses, and with the human body and mind more generally. If anything is certain from the history of modernity, it is that fear has been exacerbated in its pervasiveness and modified in its agency in the modern urban environment, and that the bodily and emotional experience of fear therein has become more encompassing, more life-threatening, more prolonged, more frequent and has impacted more on all five human senses and the human body more generally. The modern industrial quaking zone is not just a spatial place, but also a temporal period, a period of history and an experience of chronological time, of the past, present and future. The pre-modern, pre-industrial quaking is also a period of pre- and post-history and an experience of cyclical time and of hopeful ‘now-time’ (which I discuss in Chapter 9). In 1946, and so before the middle of the last century, Camus (2006, p. 257) claimed that the twentieth century already was ‘the century of fear’. Sixty years later, and after the turn of the century, Bourke (2005, p. ix) confirms his diagnosis by arguing that fear is ‘the most pervasive emotion of modern society’. Given that ‘modern society’ is much older than the twentieth century, Camus’ ‘century of fear’ has much earlier beginnings. Camus (2006, p. 258) went on to suggest that there are those who ‘quake in fear’ and who hide their quaking from themselves. He concluded that ‘we live in terror’ (p. 258). The twentieth century is a long century of fear that does not seem to have begun in 1900 nor ended in 1999, nor does it seem like ending any time soon. It is a feral quaking zone of fear and terror considered in terms of time and space, period and place. This book focuses on places and experiences of terror, or what it calls ‘terroirism’, the experience of terror arising in and from a place. For Camus, ‘most people, broadly speaking, are deprived of any future’ (p. 257). Why? Partly because for Camus, writing in the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and at the beginning of the Cold


War, the practical applications of science ‘threaten the entire earth with destruction’ (p. 257). These applications also produced the nuclearbombed wastelands of the American West, a particularly destructive modern quaking zone, one of the topics of Chapter 6. Modernity has impacted more on the earth with its industrial cities, technologies and wars than did its pre-industrial counterparts. It has re-arranged the fundamental fabric of the categories of matter, particularly the elements of earth, air, fire and water. The quaking zone is a way of thinking this history and the difference between the pre-modern and the modern, the native and the feral. The quaking zone, modern or premodern, feral or native, is a mediating category and site between the solid and the liquid, and between fire and air. It represents a temporal and spatial transition between dry land and open water, and between dry air and hot fire. Principally the native quaking zone is the swamp, or other wetland, as I argued in Postmodern Wetlands following Henry David Thoreau (Giblett, 1996a). It is also the soft and pliable centre of the human body as he suggested. It applies to both the human body and the body of the earth, and even to the body of a book, such as when Solnit (1994/9, p. 111) refers to ‘the swampy midsection of [Thoreau’s] “Walking”’, a slim volume, like Thoreau himself by all accounts. The swampy midsection is a very apt description of the quaking zone of the body. The quaking zone is the swampy mid- (and lower-) section of the body and of the earth. In 1856, Thoreau (1962, IX, pp. 38 and 42) wrote in his journal about ‘the soft open sphagnous centre of the swamp’. He summed up this centre of the swamp as the ‘quaking bog’. In the following year, he wrote in his journal that central meadow and pool in Gowing’s Swamp is its very navel, omphalos, where the umbilical cord was cut that bound it to creation’s womb. Methinks every swamp tends to have or suggests such an interior tender spot. The sphagnous crust that surrounds the pool is pliant and quaking, like the skin or muscles of the abdomen; you seem to be slumping into the very bowels of the swamp. Thoreau (1962, IX, p. 394; see his hand-drawn maps of this swamp, VI, p. 467, and XIII, p. 125 with its heavily shaded, dark centre) The native quaking zone is a bodily and earthly zone, the womb of the great goddess earth, or in Bakhtin’s (1968; see also Giblett, 2008a, Chapter 4) terms, the grotesque lower bodily stratum, and the grotesque lower earthly stratum (see Giblett, 1996a, Chapter 6). Perhaps it is no

Quaking Zone 7

surprise that Gowing’s Swamp is within a mile (about a kilometre) of Thoreau’s birthplace (see map of Concord, MA, and Index, Thoreau, 1962, XIV). Of the hundreds of places and sites he wrote about, it is the one closest to his birthplace, just as the swamp itself is closest to his heart (see Giblett, 1996a, Chapter 12). The native quaking zone can be a place of horror, whereas the feral quaking zone is a place of terror. Horror and terror, the two ruling passions of modernity (see Giblett, 1996a, Chapter 2), preside over them. The swamp is a native quaking zone of horror as Thoreau (1962, VI, p. 467) also suggested earlier in his journal when he examined the middle of a swamp and found an open pool of water nearly full of sphagnum and other plants, but he could not see them ‘on account of the danger of standing on the quaking ground … [and] of quaking sphagnum in which I sink eighteen inches in water. … where I fear to break through’. The quaking zone is a dangerous place that elicits fear and trembling because it not only mixes land and water creating mud and slime, but also because it threatens to engulf the whole body fully in its slimy depths and mark the surface of the body with mud. Both these aspects Thoreau found later ‘picking our way over quaking meadows and swamps and occasionally slipping into the muddy batter midleg deep’ (Thoreau, 1962, VI, p. 479). The native quaking zone does not give a secure and stable place for standing upright, having a fixed point of view and observing the scene before one – preferably a pleasing prospect stretching before one. Outside this zone, however, the view from the edge is another matter. Thoreau (1962, XIV, pp. 301–2) writes in the final volume of his journal of ‘the open swamp … where the surface quakes for a rod around: … there is no wilder and richer sight than is afforded from such a point of view of the edge of a … swamp’. The native quaking zone affords visual pleasure from a distance, but provokes tactile horror up close and personal. The quaking zone is a way of thinking about human beings, our bodies and minds, and the earth as connected through the possession of a common, contiguous and continuous area. No more so than when it comes to considering alligators and crocodiles. The native quaking zone of the tropical swamp is home to the alligator and crocodile. The alligator for Thoreau (1854/1997, p. 283) ‘comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth’. As creatures of the quaking zone, they are often regarded as orally sadistic monsters, as objects of horror, whereas for Freud they are vehicles and vectors for the uncanny, or more specifically, the monstrous uncanny. Drawing on the works of Freud, William Bartram, John Muir, Val Plumwood and others, Chapter 2 considers the cultural construction


and historical figuration of the alligator and crocodile and argues for a counter-cultural reconfiguration of them as denizens of their home of the native quaking zone and as what Kristeva (1982) calls abjects, not of repulsion but of respect. Abject is her term for the mediating category between subject and object that makes both possible. Wetlands in Postmodern Wetlands are regarded as ‘living black waters’. The elements of earth, air, fire and water are mixed naturally (if not fearfully) in them. The present book focuses more on the dead black waters of modern, feral quaking zones in which the elements of earth and water are artificially mixed. These include ‘the abyss’ and ‘the nether world’ of ‘the city of dreadful night’ in the late nineteenth century, the city of the uncanny in the early twentieth century, and the cities of ruin and rust and the slums of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. Chapter 3 considers the cultural construction and historical representation of the dark underside of the modern city figured as jungle, abyss, stagnant pool, nether world or dreadful night by some latenineteenth-century writers such as Friedrich Engels, George Gissing, Jack London and James Thomson. The commonplace responses of dread and horror that were projected onto the native quaking zone were displaced onto the industrial quaking zone of the urban underside. This chapter argues that these writers are ‘placist’ in that they ascribe characteristics to a (man-made) place (the city) that were previously ascribed to a place not made with human hands (the jungle, abyss, nether land of swamps and so on). The negative connotations that attach initially to the native quaking zone are attached subsequently to the feral quaking zone. By contrast, for some early-twentieth-century writers, such as Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud, the underside of the city is both fascinating and horrifying, and figured in bodily terms. Recently, for some early-twenty-first-century writers the back blocks and slums of the hypermodern city – characterised as regions of rust and ruin, or of decay and decomposition steeped in feral swamps – are fascinating. These twenty-first-century writers express anxiety or dread about the city like their nineteenth-century counterparts. Rather than this fraught figuration, I propose seeing the city as a body, not only with parks as lungs as in the nineteenth-century cliche of the city cliche, but also with twentieth-century skyscrapers as the head and brain; the water supply and sewerage systems as the oesophagus and intestines; the rivers as arteries; the wetlands as kidneys, liver and placenta; the ‘mouth’ and the estuary of the river as the anus and bowels; slums as a sore to be treated and cared for, not bled or lanced in the gentrification of slum clearance; and so on. Rather than figuring slums as swamps in pejorative

Quaking Zone 9

terms as places of disease and horror, I propose seeing them as artificial wetlands whose liveability for their residents would be improved by improving their ecological functionality as kidneys, liver and placenta, as places of hope and new life. The trenches and no-man’s-land of World War I (WWI) of 1914–18 were also a modern, feral quaking zone. There is a world of difference, however, between being ‘eye-deep in the marsh’ like a muskrat as Aldo Leopold (1949, p. 19), the writer of a wetlands almanac (see Giblett, 1996a), occasionally found himself standing pleasantly, and being ‘eyedeep in hell’ (Ellis, 1976) as the soldier of the muddy, man-made and modern swamps of trench warfare often found himself unpleasantly sucked into. Chapter 4 considers the cultural construction and historical figuration of the landscape of trench warfare as man-made swamp, as artificial wetland, drawing on the work of a wide range of Australian, British, French and German writers of WWI. It argues that these writers not only constantly emphasise mud and slime as features of the battlefield but also turn to the non-man-made swamp as the means to explain the inexplicable, to figure the horror, yet without drawing the distinction or noticing the difference between the man-made swamp of industrial warfare and the native, pre-industrial swamp. There is not only a world of difference between being in, or on, a swamp like Okefenokee in Georgia in the US ‘where the earth trembles’ (Boyle, 1990, p. 265) and being in the trenches of WWI, but also being in a German city during the strategic bombing of WWII (1939– 45) where the walls of the bunker or cellar quake or collapse on top of one (Friedrich, 2006, pp. 258, 291, 304 and 374). This is not to suggest that the former is a particularly pleasant place, though it has been ‘Hollywood-ised’ as the archetypically unpleasant place vast and primeval, unfathomable, unconquerable, bastion of cottonmouth, rattlesnake and leech, mother of vegetation, father of mosquito, soul of silt, the Okefenokee is the swamp archetypal, the swamp of legend, of racial memory, of Hollywood. Boyle (1990, p. 265) Okefenokee is the swamp not only of Hollywood films but also of French filmmaker Jean Renoir who did not see it in quite the terms Boyle suggests (see Giblett, 1996a, pp. 147–9). Its ‘muck, mud, slime and ooze’ where ‘things fester, things cook down, decompose, deliquesce’ (Boyle, 1990, p. 265) is the matter, and mater, from which new life springs, unlike the destroyed German cities that had to be rebuilt

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and whose decomposing bodies had to be burned or buried. The swamp is ‘the womb and grave of everything’ (Boyle, 1990, p. 335) whereas the bombed cities were just the tomb and grave of anything. Okefenokee Swamp ‘became a refuge for every least thing that swam or flew or crept on its belly’ (Boyle, 1990, p. 267 (my emphasis)), for everything that, in a word, swarmed, whereas the German cities were a refuge from the bombers that swarmed across the sky and through the air and brought fire. The cities were also a deathtrap for those who had nowhere else to go. Swarming creatures come under a biblical interdiction as they are not confined to one element, but travel across elements, such as land and water, as alligators and crocodiles do (Giblett, 1996a, p. 184; 2004, p. 191). Swarming creations, like bombers, also come under this interdiction as they cross the water and send fire through the air on the earth below. One eyewitness saw ‘the airplanes in the sky, a whole swarm of silver birds glistening in the sun’ (cited by Friedrich, 2006, p. 226). ‘Swarms of planes’ (Friedrich, 2006, p. 231; see also pp. 329 and 358) flew in the air, reflected the light of the sun and brought its fire down to earth. With the development of planes during and after WWI, war reached new heights (literally) in WWII. This shift sublimated the space and place of warfare from the man-made swamps of WWI in which earth and water were mixed to the aerial firebombing of cities in WWII in which the elements of fire and air were mixed. WWI mixed the elements of earth and water to create a landscape of man-made swamps whereas WWII mixed the elements of air and fire to destroy human-made cities and create a landscape of rubble and ruins. WWI demonstrated man’s ability to create a new landscape of artificial swamps by mixing earth and water, whereas WWII showed his power to destroy the city that its citizens (men, women and children) had created by mixing fire and air to create a new landscape of rubble and ruins. Earth and water were mixed to produce bricks and concrete to build cities; fire and air were mixed to destroy them – the power to create superseded by the power to destroy. In WWI, human mastery of natural elements reached new lows with the emergence of a new kind of quaking zone: the horrors of manmade swamps in which earth and water were mixed and into which the countryside of the Western Front was sucked, as were some soldiers to their death. In WWII, human mastery of natural elements reached new heights with the emergence of a new kind of quaking zone: the terrors of the man-made firestorm in which oxygen was sucked out of the air to feed the fire and in which human bodies and cities were consumed in its maelstrom. In WWI, war reached into the depths below the earth

Quaking Zone 11

with artillery bombardment and trenches to create a surface landscape of no-man’s-land; in WWII, war reached into the heights above the earth and into the depths of bunkers below with aerial bombardment to create a three-dimensional space of no man’s, woman’s or child’s land. WWII entailed the increasing militarisation of civilian life in European cities as non-combatants were vulnerable to aerial attacks. The militarisation of all life has been going on for a long time before that though. War has affected areas beyond the cities as the first National Parks were ’set aside’ during the Civil War in the US and the first wilderness areas in the US were declared a century later during the Cold War. Photographs of national parks and wilderness areas, and of battlefields and warfare, have been crucial for the formation and maintenance of national identity. Frank Hurley’s photographs of the landscape of WWI trench warfare were crucial for the tempering of Australian national identity in the heat of battle. National parks and wilderness areas were the principal subject matter in the sublime photographs of Ansel Adams and the picturesque photographs of Carleton Watkins. In Australia, their closest analogues are Olegas Truchanas, Peter Dombrowskis and Max Dupain. Their photographs aestheticise (if not sublimate) the land into landscape as a site and object of visual consumption. By contrast, Timothy O’Sullivan’s uncanny photographs of grotesque formations take the viewer into the native quaking zone of the bowels of the earth. The New Topographic and Nuclear Landscape Photographers take the viewer into the manmade quaking zone of the wastelands of the suburban and nuclear bombtested American West. Chapter 6 considers Adams, Watkins, O’Sullivan and the New Topographic and Nuclear Landscape Photographers. Chapter 7 considers Hurley, Dupain, Truchanas and Dombrowskis. Both chapters conclude by arguing for a new mode or style of photography: photography for environmental sustainability. The slimy trenches of WWI and the ruined cities of WWII were landscapes and places of mental disturbance, of depression and despair. The farm can also be a landscape and place of mental disturbance, of depression and despair. Chapter 8 explores the link between land health and mental health. The link between land health and human physical health has long been established. The work of Sir Albert Howard, Aldo Leopold and others in what could be called ‘the soil conservation and organic farming classics of the 1940s’ acknowledged and promoted this link. The link between the two has culminated most recently in the new trans-discipline of ecosystem health. Healthy land gives rise to healthy bodies. The link between healthy bodies (disabled or able-bodied) and healthy minds is well-established with strong indications of the

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positive effects of one on the other though, of course, healthy minds and bodies do not necessarily go together. Establishing the link between land health and mental health in a number of senses is in its early phases. Poor mental health in rural and remote areas is well researched. Higher rates of male suicide in rural areas compared with urban ones are well-documented. Greater prevalence of female depression in rural areas compared with urban ones is also well researched. In rural areas, men are more likely to commit suicide, while women are more likely to experience depression, both of which are usually ascribed to social isolation and lack of provision of mental health services, not to the health of the land itself. Farm suicide and economic fluidity are negatively correlated. The incidence of drought and farm suicide is correlated and well established. Mental health and land health would presumably be correlated but is not well-established. This chapter explores the links between them. Chapter 9 begins in hope, and ends in hope. In the middle, it considers the way we look at the future as a time-scape that stretches before us, at how we regard the future in some ways like a landscape with various aesthetic possibilities as either, to cut a long story short and simplifying to the extreme, a pleasing prospect (with the double spatial and temporal meaning of ‘prospect’) or a terrifying prospect with also the same double meaning. Along the way, I draw from the past on the work of Walter Benjamin and Raymond Williams who both provide some resources for a journey of hope through the landscape of the future. Williams outlined six resources for a journey of hope? (1) Developing and deploying livelihood (2) A renewed commitment to pacifism (3) An attachment to place and a commitment to local activism to conserve places (4) A new kind of gender politics (5) A new kind of political ecology and (6) A new temporal orientation These resources have a different spatial and temporal orientation than pleasing or terrifying prospects, including Edward Burtynsky’s aerial photographs of ‘the Super Pit’ gold mine in Kalgoorlie in Western Australia; they are terrifying prospects as they do not provide much by way of resources of hope because they aestheticise mining and its impacts on and in the earth, though they do demonstrate the monumental threat that the depths of mining pose to human habitation of the earth, not

Quaking Zone 13

least in and for Kalgoorlie. The surface of landscape photography portrays and betrays the depths that mining goes to in its greedy lust for resources of ore just as landscape and portrait painting and photography reduce depth to surface, diachrony to synchrony, life to death. To Williams’ six resources for a journey of hope, I add two further resources: (7) A new embodied environmental aesthetics and (8) A new culture of the body. One particular place in which both an embodied environmental aesthetics of hope and a body culture of hope can be found is the swamp. For Thoreau (1862/1991, p. 98), ‘hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities [nor in mines and quarries I might add], but in the impervious and quaking swamps’. The swamp as the native quaking zone par excellence is a place of hope because it is a place of new life – unlike the mine, the feral quaking zone par excellence. Despite the doom and gloom of minescapes, hope lives on in these resources – that is the note I end this chapter on. The Asian tsunami of December 2004 was the result of a quite literal quaking zone off the coast of Sumatra. It took hundreds of thousands of people to their death in a world of mud and water. It was the deadliest earthquake in recorded history. Chapter 10 reflects on the photographic portrayal of this natural disaster and compares it to that of the aftermath of the bush fires on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia and other recent bush fires in Australia – some of which were cases of arson, a national disaster and disgrace. The natural components of fire, bush and air were mixed culturally in the feral quaking zone of burning bush, death and destruction. Photos of mud-covered, dead children in the aftermath of the tsunami were published whereas no photos of burnt Australian children were published. This amounts to what could be called an orientalist pornography of death. The death of ‘the other’ is an object of legitimised fascination whereas the death of ‘the same’ is taboo. Hurricane Katrina of 2005 produced a different kind of quaking zone in New Orleans with a four-pronged disaster with natural and man-made components: the storm whose force was compounded by man-made global warming; the storm surge whose severity was exacerbated by the dredging of absorbing, protective wetlands – a native quaking zone; the flood caused by the breaking of inadequate levees – a feral quaking zone; and the slow and poor relief efforts caused by bureaucratic bungling, lack of compassion and political blindness – a national disaster. With ‘the Great Deluge’, a profound historical irony

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and a return to the geographical repressed of the American cultural unconscious occurred to haunt its waking and dreaming states: wetlands that had protected the coast, but were regarded as wastelands and were dredged to create canals, brought the storm surge further inland to create a wasteland. The words of Hosea 8:7, ‘they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind’, were invoked in relation to WWII firestorms. In a rewriting of them for ‘Katrina’, ‘they have dredged the wetlands, and they shall drown in the wasteland’. With ‘9/11’ and ‘Ground Zero’, another feral quaking zone took place on American soil, or initially in its airspace, with exploding airplanes and with skyscrapers burning and collapsing onto its earth. Thousands of people plummeted to their deaths, or were burnt alive, or were overcome by smoke in the worst terrorist attacks on US targets or ‘assets’. Earth, fire and air were mixed in an exploding and burning, dirty and dusty quaking zone of elements brought about by the collision of technologies not in their normal place. Photographers and mobile phone users were on hand to record the most photographed event and its aftermath in history. Chapter 10 concludes with a discussion of the photography of ‘9/11’. The final chapter returns to wetlands as the quintessential native quaking zone and proposes that their and other waters be considered as blood red, concurrent with life and death rather than as black waters associated with death. It does so through a discussion of the Waugal/ Waggle/Wagarl (pronounced ‘woggle’), the indigenous water-being of southwestern Australia, which does not merely live in waters of the region but embodies the living water of the body of the earth. It also does so through a discussion of some recent paintings by Gregory Pryor that deconstruct and decolonise the colonial construction of black waters. This chapter presents some of Pryor’s paintings, Shane Pickett’s paintings of the Wagyl, maps of the Swan River region and diagrams of the gastro-intestinal tract. It demonstrates the contiguities and continuities between them and how the human body and the earth are intermingled in one living being – the body of the earth with its feral and native quaking zones.

Part I Uncanny

The concept/metaphor of the uncanny is arguably Freud’s greatest and most fruitful contribution to the study of culture, and of the cultures of natures (see Giblett, 1996a; 2004). While a whole swag of his concepts and ideas (such as the Oedipus complex, penis envy and so on) are critiqued and problematised, or poohed-poohed and dismissed, as the years go on, the uncanny endures as a useful tool in the toolbox of theory as Royle (2003), among others (see Giblett, 1996a; 2004), shows. Yet it is interestingly and symptomatically absent from both the dictionary of psychoanalytic terms (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1983), and the most recent account of the development and context of Freud’s thought (Makari, 2008). The uncanny for Freud is related to what is frightening and to what arouses dread and horror. It is thus particularly applicable to considering the quaking zone, both native and feral. For Freud, the uncanny is literally unheimlich, unhomely, but also homely, contradictory feelings which he found associated in the minds of adult males with the first home of the womb. The native quaking zone is more homely and less unhomely than the feral quaking zone, whereas the feral quaking zone is less homely and more unhomely than the native quaking zone. The home, or perhaps more precisely the ‘unhome’, of the slimy, and the uncanny, is the wetland (see Giblett, 1996a, Chapter 2). It is also the home, or unhome, for the alligator and the crocodile, the ‘king’ of the tropical wetland, the obverse of the temperate dry land, and the archetypal swamp monster par excellence. The alligator and the crocodile is the topic of Chapter 2. The uncanny for Freud was applicable not only to the native quaking zone of the swamp but also to the artificial quaking zone of the dark underside of the city which for him was an object, or more precisely abject, of horror and fascination whereas for some 15

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nineteenth-century writers on the city, this underside was exclusively an object of horror and for some twenty-first century writers, the slum is an object of fascination. The dark underside of the city is the topic of Chapter 3.

2 Alligators, Crocodiles and the Monstrous Uncanny

that hideous monster, the crocodile. J. A. Hunter, a white hunter, author of White Hunter (cited by Guggisberg, 1972, p. 171) In north Queensland during October 2004 a crocodile attacked a man in a tent and dragged him out of it, only to be saved from a worse fate by the valiant efforts of a grandmother who jumped on the back of the croc who released the man and then proceeded to attack her. The print media headlined the story and captioned the accompanying photo with ‘Gran who beat off croc attack’ (The West Australian, 2004). This headline gave a curiously Australian, and horrifyingly real, inflection to the immortal lines of a Tony Joe White song, ‘Polk Salad Annie, / gator’s got your Grannie, / chomp, chomp’ (White, 1997). The newspaper story described the crocodile as ‘a bloodthirsty predator’. This description of the crocodile was only jumping on the same bandwagon as its cousins in television news as they had already referred to the crocodile earlier in the week as ‘the four-metre monster’. The crocodile was constructed as a bloodthirsty predator and monster because of its size, its use of its jaws and teeth as a potentially lethal weapon and the fearful possibility of being eaten. These were placed on the menu for the delectation of the media consumer who could savour with relief over breakfast or dinner that they were safe from being eaten. This event and its media aftermath harks back to other incidents and representations involving crocodiles, such as Baby Bob and Steve Irwin, especially as there was a baby involved in the most recent incident. Fears for the safety of Baby Bob and the vilification of Steve Irwin from Indianapolis to Indooroopilly highlight human’s fascination with, and 17

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fear of, crocodiles and their cousins, alligators. They also highlight the visceral nature of human bodily being and experience, particularly when it comes to food and feeding. With Steve holding a chicken in one hand to feed the croc and Bob in the other not to feed it, but with the possibility that it could feed on him, the boundary between being food and not being food was evident for all to see, especially as baby and chicken were about the same size and colour. This raised fears of an oral kind, about who gets to eat and who gets to be eaten. It also raised again the horrifying possibility that a croc might take a baby, just as a dingo took one, too, as with Azaria Chamberlain in 1980. And just as she was taken from a tent, so in the most recent case, the baby was in the tent. As in the Lindy Chamberlain case, the Steve Irwin case also brought about the equally terrifying actuality of another moral panic and trial by media with Steve accused of careless parenting like Michael Jackson, or attempted son-icide with the croc as weapon, or accomplice, or both. The portrayal of the croc as some sort of orally sadistic monster made it wellsuited, if not typecast, to play this role which it has been playing for a long time – but only since humans have appeared on the earth long after it. In this chapter, I argue that the typecasting of the alligator and the crocodile as orally sadistic monsters is a projection of human desires and fears on to these non-human beings. These desires and fears of an oral nature are tied up with what Freud calls ‘the uncanny’. For him, the alligator and the crocodile portrayed as orally sadistic monsters are vehicles and vectors of the uncanny. This combination gives rise to what could be called ‘the monstrous uncanny’ in which the fascinating and horrific are projected onto, and embodied in, an orally sadistic monster. The uncanny, I have argued elsewhere, counters the aesthetics of the sublime, the picturesque (pleasing prospects) and the beautiful (see Giblett, 1996a; 2004). Whereas the latter three privilege the distancing sense of sight, the uncanny engages the sense of smell which is much more up close and personal, though not as immediate as touch and taste. Smell is often commented upon in encounters, real or imagined, with an alligator or crocodile. The monstrous uncanny, however, not only engages the olfactory but also the oral and the tactile. The uncanny associated with smell (as Freud did) is a sublimation to some extent of the uncanny associated with taste and touch. The uncanny is evoked by what is not seen, which could not only be what is smelt, but also what is tasted and touched, both of which are involved when being eaten. The fear of being killed and eaten, and the desire not to be, are understandable, and certainly characterise the human side of the relationship with alligators

Monstrous Uncanny 19

and crocodiles. It also presumably characterises the other side too. The relationship between eater and eaten is ultimately non-reciprocal: only one being gets to eat and the other to be eaten. When humans venture into the habitat of alligator or crocodile they can be prey and ‘being prey’ as Val Plumwood describes it is a terrifying experience, but also instructive as it was for her (as we shall see). Being prey highlights the non-reciprocal nature of the relationship. Besides consuming alligators and crocodiles as meat, humans also consume their habitat by destroying wetlands in a colonising and non-reciprocal relationship. The monstrous uncanny is also associated with the colonial unconscious, whether it be with William Bartram’s and John Muir’s encounter with an alligator in a Florida swamp, or Val Plumwood’s and Sigmund Freud’s recounts of stories about crocodiles in a New Guinea swamp. The return to the repressed is a return not only to the individual’s own repressed, but also to the culture’s repressed. Both these are figured in all these stories in association with the alligator or crocodile as an orally sadistic monster and the swamp as a grotesque place. Rather than reproducing this figuration of monstrosity, this chapter concludes by arguing for a relationship with alligators and crocodiles characterised by mutuality in which they and their habitat are respected and conserved. Animals, Whatmore (2002, p. 32) advises, are ‘best considered as strange persons, rather than familiar or exotic things’. In other words, they are best considered as what Haraway (2008) calls companion species, or as uncanny beings, rather than as monsters.

Freud and the smelly uncanny Alligators and crocodiles have been living on the earth for 200 million years, much longer than any other currently surviving, similar-sized genus of the animal kingdom. They are truly a ‘blast from the past’. As such, they are vehicles and vectors for the uncanny. Freud (1919/1985, p. 340) defined the uncanny as ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’. The uncanny is not only a return to the past but also in quasi-Freudian terms, ‘a return to the repressed’, including the colonial repressed (as I have argued elsewhere; see Giblett, 1996a). What was repressed for the nineteenth-century, petit bourgeois and Viennese Freud was invariably sexual in nature. More generally in patriarchal culture, the repressed is what is corporeal, visceral, maternal and monstrous. These can include the sexual, oral and anal, all of which can be, and were, associated with the colonial. In Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’, the crocodile emerges as a figure for

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the British colonial repressed to which he returns via the vehicle and vector of the artefacts of colonialism which bear the traces of other, alien or exotic places and peoples. The repressed does not have a fixed content or function but changes historically and varies culturally, though the crocodile and swamp as sites of the colonial unconscious have been with us for some time as we will see. Crocodiles were sacred for the ancient Egyptians, as they are for Australian indigenes. How the sacred becomes the monstrous, and even demonic, is a vexed topic. For David Quammen, in a reading of the biblical Leviathan in chapter 41 of the book of Job, the monster is both created by God and subdued by Him in order to instil humility in His people (Quammen, 2004, p. 13). The monstrous and the divine have been split off from each other and the divine constitutes itself and its hold over its believers by claiming to have created the monster, and, in turn, by subduing it. This splitting occurs in and as the moment of the institution of history. In pre-history, the monstrous and the divine are coterminous and mutually defining, and the uncanny is the name of this imbrication. Indeed, the monstrously sacred/demonic is perhaps an apt definition of the uncanny. Just as the sublime functions as a secular theology in which the sublime stands in for God in a culture for which God is dead (see Giblett, 1996a; 2004), so the uncanny operates as a kind of secular demonology with the alligator and the crocodile as devil and the swamp as hell (as we will see). According to the New Bible Dictionary (Douglas, 1962, p. 729), Leviathan is usually considered to be ‘some form of aquatic monster’. In Psalm 44:26, ‘it is clearly of the sea and is generally thought to be the whale’, though in the passage from Job ‘most scholars agree that the creature is a crocodile’. The previous chapter of Job (40:15–22) describes another monster translated as ‘Behemoth’ in the Authorised (or King James) Version. In the Revised Standard Version, ‘Behemoth’ is footnoted as ‘the hippopotamus’. The same version footnotes ‘Leviathan’ in the following chapter as ‘the crocodile’. The New Bible Dictionary (p. 138) concurs that ‘Behemoth’ in Job is ‘the hippopotamus’. Yet the New English Bible (cited by Kelly, 2006, pp. 67 and 246) has ‘crocodile’ for ‘Behemoth’ in Job 40:15 (this translation has ‘whale’ for ‘Leviathan’ in Job 41:1). In this translation, the crocodile is both ‘the chief of beasts’ and ‘the chief of God’s beasts’ (Kelly, 2006, p. 67). The crocodile is the king of the wet jungle, of the tropical wetland, the first, and best, work of God on the second day of creation (Giblett, 1996a). Biblical teratology is a movable feast of different monsters whose boundaries are blurred, an apt description of the monstrous. If the word of God can’t get its monsters sorted out, how can the rest of us?


Perhaps no animal has been more deified/demonised than the alligator and the crocodile, the ‘monarch of the marsh’ and the ‘king of beasts’ of the tropical swamp. The alligatorian and the crocodilian have been repressed for a long time, at least since Freud’s time and it still persists. For Vollmar (1972, p. ix), ‘crocodiles, alligators and caimans both horrify and fascinate’. In Freud’s (1919/1985, p. 339) terms, they are uncanny as he defined the uncanny as ‘what is frightening – what arouses dread and horror’ and I defined the uncanny as both horrifying and fascinating (Giblett, 1996a). Vollmar (1972, p. ix) suggests that ‘lurid travellers’ tales of evil reptiles lying loglike in tropical mud, ready to snatch and devour the unwary human, linger in the memory’. Freud (1919/1985, p. 367) developed the uncanny from reading one such tale, L. G. Moberly’s ‘Inexplicable’ published in The Strand Magazine in 1917. This story harks back to the ur-travellers’ tale of alligators: William Bartram’s account of his travels, and encounter with alligators, in a Florida swamp first published in 1791. I return to both these stories shortly. A century and a half later, in the mid-nineteenth century, John Muir walked a thousand miles from Kentucky to the Gulf of Mexico through a Florida swamp where he encountered an alligator. Fifty years later, and a year before Moberly’s story, Muir’s account of his encounter with an alligator, like Bartram in a Florida swamp, was published posthumously. His reflections on this encounter are seen by some as a crucial transition in his thinking of a biocentric ethic. More recently, Val Plumwood’s (1996, 1999, 2000a, 2000b) gripping (perhaps the wrong word) autobiographical story of being crocodile prey published in (among other places) a collection by Travelers’ Tales tries to avoid the lurid, but without success, as I will argue later. For Plumwood, as with Muir, her experience was the occasion to reflect on her place in nature. If one is an uninvited guest in, or intruder into, the home of the alligator or crocodile, one can only expect to be a prey as they are predators, or perhaps more precisely ‘opportunist hunters and gorge feeders’ (Kelly, 2006, p. 38). In other words, they are greedy feeders, not orally sadistic monsters. In his reading of Moberly’s story, Freud downplays the role of real alligators and ignores the swamp as the place par excellence of the uncanny (see Giblett, 1996a). If I were Freud, I would psychoanalyse some long lost and repressed memories to do with his father and the phallus as the crocodile must be some sort of phallic symbol in Freud’s lexicon of symbols, and to do with his mother and the swamp as a maternal place. Yet rather than psychoanalysing Freud’s psychopathology, I want to analyse the psychogeopathology that portrays the alligator and the crocodile as orally sadistic monsters, to engage in the talking cure of

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a psychoanalytic ecology that would regard them and the swamp in less demonic and more sacral terms, and to promote eco-mental health that would mean that these psychogeopathological symptoms did not arise in the first place (see Giblett, 1996a; 2004). Freud, perhaps in typical fashion, gives a three- or four-sentence summary of the story he ‘came across’ in a magazine. He does not give a reference other than saying that it appeared in ‘a number of the English Strand Magazine’ (Freud, 1919/2003, p. 151). Recently, I ‘came across’ two precise references to the story in Royle’s The Uncanny, one to the original publication in The Strand Magazine and the other to a reprint in an anthology of stories from The Strand Magazine (Royle, 2003, pp. 140,1, n.3; Moberly, 1917 and 1917/1991). Rather than concentrating on the slips and mistakes in Freud’s retelling as he himself would do, I want to consider the gaps and absences, the symptomatic lacunae, of Freud’s reading in order to reinstate alligators and crocodiles living in a swamp as a vehicle and vector of the uncanny and disinvest their construction as orally sadistic monsters. In ‘The Uncanny’, Freud (1919/2003, p. 151) relates how I read a story about a young couple who move into a furnished flat in which there is a curiously shaped table with crocodiles carved in the wood. Towards evening the flat is regularly pervaded by an unbearable and highly characteristic smell, and in the dark the tenants stumble over things and fancy they see something undefinable gliding over the stairs. In short, one is led to surmise that, owing to the presence of this table, the house is haunted by ghostly crocodiles, or that the wooden monsters come to life in the dark, or something of the sort. It was quite a naïve story, but its effect was extraordinarily uncanny. Freud makes at least two mistakes in summarising the story, the first of which is that the young couple move into a house, not a flat, furnished only with the table (‘the table goes with the house’ says the agent) and the table has carvings of alligators, not crocodiles, though Moberly’s story itself slips between them. These slips may be symptomatic of something more profound and if I were Freud, I would no doubt think so and would analyse them (and him) for it. I am more interested, though, in the presences and absences in Freud’s account, what he reproduces correctly and what he misses out altogether. Freud is not alone in referring to alligators as monsters as we have heard in a recent television report and as we shall see. There is a textual warrant for doing so in that the first-person narrator of the story refers to


alligators as ‘loathly monsters’. Yet this is not in relation to the carved, wooden alligators on the table, but in relation to a story within the story, a traveller’s tale, about real, living alligators in a swamp in New Guinea that Freud does not consider at all as if he only read half the story by Moberly (more of that shortly). First, the table. The first-person narrator (May, the wife in Freud’s ‘young couple’) describes the effect the carved alligators had on her as the light fell on the scaly bodies they had an extraordinary look of life, and the little sinister heads with the small evil eyes almost seemed to move. I shuddered and drew away from the table. Moberly (1917, p. 573 and 1991, p. 184) May feels quite faint for a moment and says to the agent ‘“there is such a queer smell in here,” … becoming all at once conscious of a strange and penetrating odour I had not before noticed’. She begins to suggest that it might be the drains but the agent is quick to interrupt and advise that they were ‘set in order before the last tenant vacated the house … I have the sanitary people’s certificate about them’ (Moberly, 1917, p. 573 and 1991, p. 185). This terrace house is, however, not a workingclass ‘swamp’ whose bad air was the supposed vector of malaria in the miasmatic theory of disease and the target of the Sanitary Movement (see Giblett, 1996a and its references). The carved figures on the table are creatures of the swamp and smell is a vector of the uncanny in the psychoanalytic theory of the psychopathology of everyday life in modernity (see Giblett, 1996a). May’s husband, Hugh’s, first encounter with the table is just as uncanny as hers. He runs his fingers over the carved surface of the table and rests them on the head of one of the alligators, ‘a head fashioned with such skill that its loathsome naturalness made one shudder. “Good heavens, May, the things look so lifelike I could almost have sworn one of them squirmed”’ (Moberly, 1917, p. 574 and 1991, p. 186). Inanimate things coming to life, or seeming to do so, or imitating life, is for Freud one of the features and vectors of the uncanny. The figuration of the alligator as ‘a thing’, ‘this thing’ and ‘the thing’ persists into recent fiction as this is precisely how T. Coraghessan Boyle figures one in his 1990 novel East is East (pp. 335–6). ‘The Thing’ has been defined by Kristeva (1989, p. 13) as the real that does not lend itself to signification, the centre of attraction and repulsion, the seat of sexuality from which the object

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of desire will become separated … the Thing is an imagined sun, bright and black at the same time. ‘The Thing’ occupies a zone prior to and outside signification, what Kristeva (1984) elsewhere calls ‘signifiance’, which is also prior to and outside the separation of subject and subject in what Kristeva (1982) also calls abject. It is a creature of the uncanny, the centre and site of fascination and horror, the vehicle and vector of the monstrous. Hugh and May are visited by a friend called Jack Wilding for whom the carved alligators trigger memories not related by Freud in his recounting of the story which highlights the importance of the fact that the table is located in a house, not a flat. After dinner ‘on a delicious May night’, the two men friends are chatting with the windows open. The spring smells of the garden waft into the room when all at once the drifting sweetness from without was tainted by that same strange odour which we had noticed once or twice before. … As it drifted across the room our guest suddenly sat bolt upright in his chair, and a curious greyness overspread his naturally bronzed complexion. ‘My God!’ he said, ‘what is that? And why does it smell the same – the same –’ His sentence trailed off into silence, and in the intense stillness following his strange words I heard a sound which, for some reason I could not pretend to explain, gave me a feeling of cold fear. I can only describe the sound as like a faraway bellowing – not precisely the bellowing of cattle, but a more sinister, more horrible sound, pregnant with evil. ‘You hear it too?’ Jack Wilding questioned, under his breath. … ‘And the stench is here too! Good God! If I thought I should ever have to cross that swamp again I would go mad.’ Moberly (1917, p. 576 and 1991, p. 190) The immediacy of the sense of smell takes Jack back to what was old and long familiar, and to what was long forgotten, if not repressed. Jack then recovers himself sufficiently to say ‘I must have had a nightmare – a waking nightmare,’ he said, looking around him. ‘I could have sworn that I smelt the alligator swamp in New Guinea, the place where –’ he broke off short. ‘I heard the loathsome brutes bellowing,’ he began again; ‘but, of course – or course, it was merely some association of ideas.’ Moberly (1917, p. 577 and 1991, p. 190)


Hugh indicates the table and suggests that it was the trigger for Jack’s association of ideas Jack turned and glanced at the table, and he recoiled when he saw the grinning heads lying amongst the crusted delicacy of leaves and flowers. ‘Loathsome beasts!’ he said, and again his voice shook. … ‘I crossed an alligator swamp once with a friend … It was dark, the place swarmed with those unspeakable devils, their stench was everywhere. It was dark – and poor old Danson’ – he paused, as if speech were almost impossible – ‘they dragged him off the path of the logs in the darkness’. … Somehow his words brought before me the hideous swamp, the darkness, the loathly monsters waiting for their prey, and the remembrance of just such an incident in a book I had once read flashed into my mind. Moberly (1917, p. 578 and 1991, p. 191) The original Strand Magazine publication of the story has illustrations by Dudley Tennant, one of which is of this story within the story, complete with a glimpse of both the table and the log path, and a depiction of Jack as both the teller of the tale and character in it (Moberly, 1917, p. 577). Jack goes on to relate how ‘“the place swarmed with those unspeakable devils.”’ Swarming creatures, in biblical terms, are ‘an abomination’. They are neither fish nor flesh nor fowl. They neither just swim nor walk nor fly, but do all three (see Giblett, 1996a; 2004). These alligators are no exception. When the wooden alligators come so life, they always seem to be sliding or slithering between Jack’s or Hugh’s feet (but not May’s, as presumably she keeps her legs together like a lady). The housekeeper later describes how they go ‘slithering’ and ‘running on their underneaths’ (Moberly, 1917, p. 574 and 1991, p. 193). They do not walk on all fours like domesticated animals. They do not separate their grotesque lower bodily stratum from the grotesque lower earthly stratum, but are part and parcel of it. The abominable is also almost beyond words. It is inexplicable as the story concludes and as its title signals.

Muir and the terror-stricken mouthful A year earlier than the publication of Moberly’s story, John Muir’s A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf was published posthumously relating a journey he had undertaken almost 50 years earlier. In 1867, Muir, ‘one

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of the seminal figures in the history of modern environmental thought’ according to Frederick Turner in his introduction to the Penguin Nature Library edition of this book, encountered an alligator ‘on the margin of a stagnant pool’ in a Florida swamp which prompted Muir to reflect that [t]hese independent inhabitants of the sluggish waters of this low coast cannot be called the friends of man. … Many good people believe that alligators were created by the Devil, thus accounting for their all-consuming appetite and ugliness. But doubtless these creatures are happy and fill the place assigned them by the great Creator of us all. Fierce and cruel they appear to us, but beautiful in the eyes of God. They, also, are his children, for he hears their cries, cares for them tenderly, and provides their daily bread. The antipathies existing in the Lord’s great animal family must be wisely planned, like balanced repulsion and attraction in the mineral kingdom. How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies! How blind to the rights of all the rest of creation! With what dismal irreverence we speak of our fellow mortals! Though alligators, snakes, etc. naturally repel us, they are not mysterious evils. They dwell happily in these flowery wilds, are part of God’s family, unfallen, undepraved, and cared for with the same species of tenderness and love as is bestowed on angels in heaven or saints on earth. I think that most of the antipathies which haunt and terrify us are morbid productions of ignorance and weakness. I have better thoughts of those alligators now that I have seen them at home. Honorable representatives of the great saurians of an older creation, may you long enjoy your lilies and rushes, and be blessed now and then with a mouthful of terrorstricken man by way of dainty! Muir (1916/1992, pp. 98–9) Here endeth the sermon on ‘how I learned to stopped hating alligators, and learnt to love them’. Only a true greenie would hug an alligator metaphorically as readily as they would a tree in actuality. Perhaps needless to say, Muir was not a mouthful of terror-stricken humanity for the alligators of a Florida swamp. He may have thought differently and not have been quite so jaunty if he had been as Val Pumwood was, and did, as will see.

Bartram and the greedy monster The story of the abominable crocodile and the monstrous alligator lurking in the uncanny swamp surfaces much earlier in modern western


culture than in Freud, Muir and Moberly in the early twentieth century. William Bartram, in the late eighteenth century, travelled to a Florida swamp where he encountered ‘the subtle, greedy alligator’ about to devour ‘the voracious trout’, the eater eaten, the preyer predated by a larger predator his enormous body swells. His plaited tail brandished high floats upon the lake. The waters like a cataract descend from his opening jaws. Clouds of smoke issue from his dilated nostrils. The earth trembles with his thunder. Bartram (1791/1998, p. 75) Two hundred years later, Glasgow takes this last sentence as the subtitle for his social history of the American alligator and suggests that Bartram ‘certainly wins, hands down, any contest for colourful alligator writing’ (1991, p. 31). There is certainly plenty of that in the intervening two centuries as Glasgow’s study shows. Bartram’s description is a lurid traveller’s tale complete with exaggeration that the vapour is smoke for which he has a biblical warrant (Job 41:20), though in a later encounter he describes how ‘the vapour ascends from his nostrils like smoke’ (p. 82). It would only take the addition of fire from the alligator’s mouth and wings on its back to complete the construction of the alligator as a dragon. Bartram’s alligators are, as Slaughter (1996, p. 200) points out, ‘monsters on a heroic scale. His drawing, The alegator of St Johns [now housed in the Natural History museum in London], resembles medieval representations of the dragons battled by St George.’ Bartram on a couple of occasions refers to ‘the monster’ (pp. 77, 80). If, as I have argued elsewhere (see Giblett, 1996a), the swamp is a secular underworld into which the hero of the modern adventure romance has to descend and in which he has to overcome monsters, then Bartram’s travels involve him not only descending into Florida swamps but also overcoming their resident monsters, alligators – as he does later to emerge ‘victorious, or at least [having] made a safe retreat’ (p. 80) as he concedes. Bartram leaves us in no doubt that we are in the underworld when he describes ‘the boiling surface of the lake’ (p. 75) created by two alligators engaged in ‘horrid combat’ (p. 76). The alligator swamp is a hellish, hot place and a place where the elements of water (lagoon) and fire (or heat) mix, as do the elements of air, earth and water created by the alligator itself. The ‘dreadful roar’ (p. 76) or the ‘terrifying roar’ of the alligator ‘resembles very heavy distant thunder, not only shaking the air and waters, but causing the earth to tremble’ (p. 82).

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The alligator mixes the elements of earth, air, water and fire (thunder and lightning are the fire in the sky) just as the wetland does more generally (see Giblett, 1996a). Instead of these elements staying put in their proper place, the alligator and the wetland mix them up and violate the order of things that assigns them to a fixed and stable category. Even the smoke/vapour exhaling from the alligator’s nostrils upsets the distinction between air, water and fire (where there is smoke, there’s fire). The fact that the alligator in the water ‘resembles, at a distance, a great chunk of wood floating about’ (p. 82) means that it pretends to be solid and earthy when in fact it is monstrous and slimy. And orally sadistic to boot. If there is one feature of the alligator that more than any other arouses dread and horror for Bartram, it is the fear of being ‘dragged out of the boat and instantly devoured’ (p. 76) by the greedy monster. Its jaws are prodigious with the upper jaw opening at right angles to the lower one according to Bartram (p. 82) but mistakenly for Glasgow (1991, p. 31). He also found that they are capable of ‘belching floods of water’ (p. 76). The jaws of the alligator emit terrifying roars and belch water, and so give out noise and liquid. They also take in liquid in the form of water and blood, and solid in the form of flesh: animal or human. Their jaws give and take. They are a transportational zone between the inside and outside of the body through which matter passes. Alligators in a Florida swamp function in both Bartram’s and Muir’s texts as figures for the British colonial and American cultural unconscious. Florida and the American south more generally with its swamps have been repressed in the collective psyche of the American north and have functioned as a figure of the primitive and backward (see Giblett, 1996a and references). Relatedly, American wetlands have been drained and their creatures commodified from early colonial times. In Bartram’s case, he is returned to this repressed only to try to continue to repress it; in Muir’s, he embraces it – albeit metaphorically.

Plumwood and great-toothed jaws Unlike both Muir and Bartram, and their encounters with an alligator in a Florida swamp, but like Danson in Moberly’s story, the Australian ecofeminist and eco-philosopher, Val Plumwood, was a mouthful of terrorstricken humanity for a crocodile in Kakadu National Park in northern Australia in 1985. She lived to tell the tale, though, unlike Danson, but it took some time for her to be able to tell it. I am not going to attempt to retell the story in all its details and if I attempted to sum it up by


saying it was a gripping and gut-wrenching story, I would be making bad puns. Plumwood’s story is worth reading for itself. By reading it critically, I am not belittling or demeaning her experience, which was traumatic to state the obvious, nor her individually as she was heroic to say the least. Rather, as with Freud, I am trying to critique the patriarchal and colonial elements that emerge in it despite her best efforts to keep them at bay. Her story has some explicit elements of the uncanny, such as her description of ‘the unfamiliar sensation of being watched’ and her ‘whispering sense of unease’ prompted, not by the sight of a crocodile, but of ‘a strange rock formation’ (Plumwood, 1996, pp. 33–4; 1999, p. 78; 2000a, p. 57; 2000b, p. 130) which is a portent of what is to come. Plumwood hears whispers of unease and observes the strange rock formation so she is in a heightened state of sensory alertness. When the crocodile attacks her flimsy fibreglass canoe ‘the unheard of was happening’ (Plumwood, 1996, p. 34; 1999, p. 78; 2000a, p. 131; 2000b, p. 57). The uncanny is evoked by hearing (or not) and smelling, by what can be heard or not, what can be smelt, but generally not by seeing (see Giblett, 1996a; 2004). Deathly silence evokes the uncanny. In this case, being seen also evokes it. ‘Being prey’, as she calls it, is the result of being seen. To be prey, one has to be seen already. Plumwood is not the subject of the gaze, but its object. She hears whispers of unease and hears (and sees) the unheard of, a crocodile attacking a canoe. The ten-year gap between ‘being prey’ and publishing her account and reflections on this event under this title attests perhaps to the difficulty for her of coming to terms with her experience and expressing it. Part of the difficulty was not only the trauma of the attack itself but also the way in which her story was subjected to what she called ‘the cultural drive to represent it [the attack] in terms of the masculinist monster myth: the master narrative’ (Plumwood, 1996, p. 40; 1999, p. 85; 2000a, p. 139; 2000b, p. 59). In this myth, the crocodile is constructed as a ravening, orally sadistic monster who (or which) rapes and eats his (and it is always a male in the myth) innocent female victim. Yet Plumwood reproduces the myth herself when, for example, she earlier describes in lurid terms how she had ‘a blurred, incredulous vision of great toothed jaws bursting from the water’ that then ‘seized [her] between the legs in a red-hot pincer grip’ (Plumwood, 1996, p. 35; 1999, p. 79; 2000a, p. 131; 2000b, p. 57). The crocodile is figured as a monstrous, orally sadistic and reptilian cousin of ‘Jaws’. Rather than only construing her experience in good ecological terms of being prey and so being a part of the food chain, Plumwood also

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turns in the longer version of her story to the mythology of New Guinea (and why not that of Australian aborigines, one wonders) as a way of accounting for her experience that does not merely deny or repress its mythological elements and significance. She suggests that ‘crocodiles are masters of water’ and goes on to argue that the crocodile is an exploiter of the great planetary dualism of land and water. As Papua New Guinea writer Vincent Eri suggests in his novel, The Crocodile, the creature is a sort of magician: its technique is to steal the Other, the creature of the land, away into its world of water where it has complete mastery over it. Water is the key to the crocodile’s power, and even large crocodiles rarely attack in its absence. The crocodile is then a boundary inhabitant. Plumwood (1996, p. 39; 1999, p. 84; 2000a, p. 137) In other words, the crocodile, like the alligator, is a wetland inhabitant, an inhabitant of the intermediary zone between dry land and deep water that crosses ‘the boundary’ between land and water and upsets the dualism between them (see Giblett, 1996a). Yet like Freud who ignores the story within the story of the alligator swamp in New Guinea (and like Royle who ignores the alligators and the swamp in the story within the story), and like both who ignore these aspects as the vector and vehicle for the uncanny, Plumwood overlooks the fact that the wetland with its distinctive features is the crocodile’s habitat. She describes the latter as ‘the swamp’ and contrasts that with ‘Kakadu’s wetlands’ with their ‘dreamlike beauty’ enticing her into ‘a joyous afternoon’s idyll’ at the beginning of the story. She describes how here she ‘glutted’ herself on ‘the magical beauty … of the lily lagoons untroubled by crocodiles’ (Plumwood, 1996, p. 33; 1999, p. 76; 2000a, p. 128; 2000b, p. 56). She moralises the pastoral world of the wetland as good and heavenly – good enough to eat with herself as metaphorical glutton – and the swamp as bad and hellish, the place of the orally sadistic and gluttonous crocodile. For her, the crocodile lives in a swamp whereas the tourist visits a wetland; in brief, swamp is bad, wetland is good. Naturally, she would rather eat than be eaten (and wouldn’t we all?). Just as she is being watched, but prefers to watch, so she prefers to ‘eat’ the beauty gluttonously than to be eaten greedily by the crocodile. Who can blame her? The point is, though, oral sadism rules, okay? She is a metaphorical glutton and the crocodile is figured as an orally sadistic monster. Tourist and crocodile are going about their


normal, everyday business subscribing in both cases to the master narrative – despite Plumwood’s best efforts to avoid it and do otherwise. The tourist watches (preferably without being watched) and consumes beauty gluttonously through his or her eyes without being consumed; the crocodile watches the tourist and sometimes consumes him or her through his or her mouth. Both are just doing their own things in this mythology of modernity with its non-reciprocal and non-symbiotic positions of mastery of watching and eating, rather than being watched and eaten. As the Kakadu wetland for Plumwood is good and heavenly, the crocodile swamp by implication is bad and hellish, though the wetland and the swamp are one and the same place – just figured differently. The Kakadu wetland is Eden before the Fall, or before the appearance of the serpent, here transformed into the crocodile. It is also the place of good magic, but crocodiles are excluded from this world of good magic as they bring trouble into paradise by enticing creatures of the land with bad magic into a watery grave, into a wet underworld, into its world – the swamp. The good magic is a sanitised white magic enticing Plumwood into the beautiful pastoral idyll of the wetland split off from, and valorised over, the black magic of the crocodile enticing her into the horrifying black water of the swamp. Magic is just magic, though, without the moralisation. Plumwood (curiously for an eco-feminist) reproduces not only the patriarchal, western moralisation of the wetlandscape, but also its dualisms, spatial metaphysics and poetics of land and water, good and bad, white and black, heaven and hell, above and below (see Giblett, 1996a). Yet humans are not simply or exclusively creatures of the land, just as crocodiles are not simply or exclusively creatures of the water. Alligators and crocodiles are creatures who live in the two elements of earth and water, just as their wetland home mixes these elements (Strawn, 1997, p. 14; Giblett, 1996a). Humans are also creatures of water as we are predominantly made up of water. Our beginnings as individuals are in the watery world of the womb and our beginnings as a species in evolutionary terms are in the womby world of water (see Giblett, 1996a). Humans also have vestigial reptilian parts of the brain. Humans are meat for crocodiles (and vice versa), but we are also very distant cousins. We are both wetland creatures living on a complementary, non-dualistic planet of land and water, in short, of waterland. Alligators and crocodiles in Haraway’s (2008) terms are ‘companion species’ (though not in the same way as pets are) who occupy what she also calls a ‘contact zone’ between human beings and non-human

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beings (though again not in the same way as the human home, or domestic space, is for pets). The quaking zone is a contact zone between humans and non-humans (such as alligators and crocodiles in native quaking zones, and lice and rats in feral quaking zones of the trenches and of the ruined cities of world warfare and of urban slums). This contact zone can be phatic involving communication via the acts and senses of touching, smelling, hearing and seeing, or it can be phagic involving consumption via the acts of biting, chewing and so on, and the sense of taste. The phatic contact zone as a rule occurs with pets; the phagic with non-pets. If the pet becomes phagic, it ceases to be a pet (and phatic) and may be ‘put down’. The uncanniness of alligators and crocodiles lies in the fact that they and modern urban humans live in the same earth-home (ecosphere), but not in the same house. Modern urban humans may live in the earthly wetland home of alligators and crocodiles, but the latter do not live in human houses and gardens as a rule. Alligators and crocodiles are (un)homely creatures, like human beings, of the terraqueous globe as Serres (1997, p. xiii) calls the earth. For Haraway (2008, p. 45), ‘the familiar is always where the uncanny lurks. Further, the uncanny is where value becomes flesh again.’ The familial – the family of ‘Man’, the family of reptilians (including humans) – is where the alligatorian and the crocodilian lurk just beneath the surface of the wetlands of the earth. Flesh is what carnivores – human, alligatorian and crocodilian – eat. The body becomes flesh in the uncanny; the value of the body is chomped into the flesh of a ‘mouthful of terror-stricken humanity’ as for Muir and Plumwood in the jaws of an alligator or crocodile, or of a mouthful of crocodile burger in my jaws as when I visited a crocodile farm outside Lusaka in Zambia in 2007. Eat or be eaten indeed. Plumwood draws on Eri’s novel to support her argument about crocodiles and water, but her reading has no real basis or textual warrant. Besides the perhaps customary references in the novel to ‘the monstrous crocodile’ and to ‘the horrifying creature’ (Eri, 1970/3, pp.108, 113), the crocodile of the title does not figure (in two senses of the word) much in the novel. It is certainly not used, as Plumwood later suggests (1996, p. 39; 1999, p. 85; 2000a, p. 138), as a metaphor for the relationship between colonised indigenous culture and colonising Western culture. If the crocodile–magician–coloniser can drag you completely into its medium, you have little chance; if you can somehow manage to retain a hold on your medium, you may survive.


If the crocodile is used in Eri’s novel as a metaphor for anything, it is as a device for explaining the inexplicable, unlike for Moberly for whom the crocodile is the inexplicable. When Mitoro, the wife of the central character Hoiri, disappears, the whole village maintains that a crocodile took her. Interestingly in one aboriginal story, the crocodile is a wife-stealer too (see Mudrooroo, 1994, p. 33). The men of the village hunt down a crocodile and Hoiri kills it in an act of revenge that he is privileged to perform as the victim. Yet at the end of the novel, Hoiri encounters Mitori. She does not acknowledge him and no explanation for her leaving him is given other than that she is under the power of the magicians who also control or transform themselves into crocodiles. The crocodile is a scapegoat onto which her sin of leaving her husband is heaped (as she cannot be found and punished) and the village is expiated. The crocodile is a creature of the wetland figured as the scapeland, not only in the sense of the anti- or counter-landscape but also in the sense of the sacrificial victim onto, or into, which the sins of the community are heaped and expiated (see Giblett, 1996a). Perhaps in modern western medical terms, Mitoro was suffering from post-natal depression following the birth of their son and left Hoiri as a result. This would highlight the connection between melancholia and wetlands, and the creatures of the wetland (see Giblett, 1996a). Alternatively, perhaps she simply ran away with another man. The crocodile–magician is a part of indigenous culture that is not necessarily good, or acts for good, but functions to explain the inexplicable unlike in Moberly’s story of this title. The coloniser, on the other hand, is largely represented by piggish Patrol Officers or draconian District Officers. One of them is ‘referred to as “the crocodile,” a title that was one of praise rather than abuse’ (p. 141), presumably because of his power, cruelty and ugliness. He is monstrous and horrifying like the crocodile. The coloniser certainly wants to drag the indigine into his medium represented by patrols, prisons, cities and warships. The crocodile does not represent this world. It represents an unsettling liminal zone of indigenous culture that is not necessarily good or bad, but is certainly not the coloniser’s culture, or a metaphor for it other than for the monstrous, horrifying and inexplicable in it, and all cultures, as in Moberly’s story. Plumwood associates the crocodile with the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised; Freud associates the uncanny with an artefact of colonialism with carved crocodiles that seem to, or do, come alive. Both are associated with a New Guinea swamp. The crocodile

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surfaces uncannily here in an Australian eco-feminist text quoting a novel, a colonial genre, written in a colonised culture. It also emerges in Freud’s Viennese cultural and psychoanalytic repressed via a British magazine as a vector for the uncanny. In both texts, the crocodile surfaces as a figure for the British colonial unconscious – repressed, but returning in their slips, gaps and lacunae via the vehicle and vector of the artefacts of colonialism which bear the traces of other, alien or exotic places and peoples. In Beth Yahp’s 1992 novel, The Crocodile Fury, set in Malaysia, the crocodile functions in a slightly different way as a projection (or ‘symbol’) of repressed desires and fears. For the first-person narrator’s Grandmother male sexual aggression is represented by ‘the land crocodile’, ‘a creature who can’t be controlled’. For her, this beast, this human-shaped terroriser of innocent girls … lives on the edges of the jungle so he gets the best of both worlds … when the urge takes him, out he creeps to jump at victims. … When he’s on a rampage his whole body swells, he lets out a sound that is low and throbbing, that fills young girls’ and old women’s heads with the hum of a thousand insects, the shudder of earthquakes, the toppling of great jungle trees, so they fall over faint and panting. When the crocodile is on a rampage he gives off a red glow. When a young girl is deflowered or a man seduces some else’s wife, or your daughter is stolen, your faithful assistant led astray, you can be sure it’s with the help of the land crocodile. A girl unlucky enough to be touched by the crocodile will forever be branded with wild ideas, with tempestuous fevers. She’ll never listen to her elders, she’ll never do what she’s told. Such a girl will become a lifetime victim of passions so itchy she’ll never be able to sit still. (p. 18) Redolent of Bartram’s alligator, the land crocodile is a creature of the quaking zone of earthquakes and of the liminal zone, not between land and water, but between city and jungle. He crosses the boundary between the two to get the best of both worlds. Like Eri’s crocodile, the land crocodile is a convenient explanatory device, a heuristic trope, for explaining inexplicable, abnormal, or unusual, or typical male sexual behaviour.

Monstrosity to mutuality My two encounters or interactions with alligators and crocodiles have been neither as spectacular nor as close as Plumwood’s, and pretty tame


by comparison but instructive nevertheless along the lines I have been pursuing in this chapter. I visited the Kimberley in 1992 and ventured into salt-water crocodile country down the lower Ord River in a small boat operated by a tour guide. This venture was part of research for a book on Western Australian wetlands with Hugh Webb. The photographer accompanying us, Simon Neville, took photographs of crocodiles which involved getting within a few metres of the shore. Greg, the guide, pointed out that he only went this close when there was enough water under the boat so that if the croc decided it wanted to go into the water it could go under the boat, rather than launching itself across the top of the boat and taking one of us with him or her. We all appreciated this consideration of not being prey! My one and only interaction with alligators was perhaps a bit tamer and much more mainstream touristic. Like Bartram and Muir, it was in a Florida swamp. Wakulla Springs is a popular picnic and swimming spot outside of Tallahassee. According to the inevitable brochure for the place, Wakulla is a Seminole Creek word that means ‘strange and mysterious waters’, in a word, uncanny, but not monstrous, like the alligators. Such films as Creature from the Black Lagoon and some of the old Tarzan films with Johnny Weissmuller were shot there. You get the general picture of swampy jungle. It is alligator habitat, too, so the alligators are supposed to stay on one side of the river and people on the other. A lifeguard is stationed on the people side and if an alligator ventures across to this side, the lifeguard evidently yells out, ‘Alligator on the people side!’ Everyone is supposed to get out of the water. The people side is roped off to stop people going across to the alligator side. A short boat tour takes tourists downstream and into alligator territory for a closer look with plenty of photo opportunities. One photo I took shows two alligators and two turtles on a log. Perhaps this is an instance of mutuality with two species living together and sharing the same living space, just as alligators and humans share the swimming hole with a degree of respect on the part of humans for the alligators in this place, but not in many others (see Strawn, 1997, especially p. 170; Giblett, 2004). Alligators, crocodiles and humans should be able to live together in a psycho-symbiotic relationship and pursue their livelihoods in the same bioregion on the same earth.

3 The Nether World of the Uncanny City of Dreadful Night

For some late-nineteenth-century writers, such as Engels, Gissing, London and Thomson, the modern city has a dark underside figured as stagnant pool, bottomless abyss, nether world or dreadful night. The commonplace responses of dread and horror that were projected onto the native quaking zone were displaced onto the industrial quaking zone of the urban underside. This chapter argues that these writers are ‘placist’ in that they ascribe characteristics to a (man-made) place (the city) that were previously ascribed to a place not made with human hands (the jungle, abyss, nether land of swamps and so on). The negative connotations that attach initially to the native quaking zone are attached subsequently to the feral quaking zone. By contrast, for some early-twentieth-century writers, such as Benjamin and Freud, the underside of the city is both fascinating and horrifying, and figured in bodily terms. Recently, for some earlytwenty-first-century writers, the back blocks and slums of the hypermodern city – characterised as regions of rust and ruin, or of decay and decomposition steeped in feral swamps – is fascinating. These twentyfirst-century writers express anxiety or dread about the city like their nineteenth-century counterparts. Rather than this fraught figuration, I propose seeing the city as a body, not only with parks as lungs as in the nineteenth-century cliché of the city, but also with twentiethcentury skyscrapers as the head and brain; the water supply and sewerage systems as the oesophagus and intestines; the rivers as arteries; the wetlands as kidneys, liver and placenta; the ‘mouth’ and the estuary of the river as the anus and bowels; slums as sores to be treated and cared for, not bled or lanced in the gentrification of slum clearance, and so on. Rather than figuring slums as swamps in pejorative terms as places of disease and horror, I propose seeing them as artificial wetlands whose 36

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liveability for their residents would be improved by improving their ecological functionality as kidneys, liver and placenta, as places of hope and new life. It is commonplace in detective fiction that the modern city has a dark underside. Conan Doyle refers to ‘the dark jungle of criminal London’ in one of his Sherlock Holmes stories. The role of the private detective is to slash through this tropical growth, penetrate the darkness and bring enlightenment to its benighted citizens. For other late-nineteenthcentury writers, the dark underside of the city looms large in slightly different, though similar, ways. For Jack London, it is the abyss; for Rudyard Kipling and James Thomson, it is ‘The City of Dreadful Night’; for George Gissing, it is the nether world and for Friedrich Engels, it is a stagnant pool. This figuration and association persists into some of the most recent writing about the city, such as Antoine Picon’s reading of the anxious landscape of the rusting city. How this dark underside is figured, adumbrates the politics, pleasures and fears of city places and urban spaces. These cognate views of the dark underside city as nether land contrast with two early-twentieth-century writers, Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud, especially when it comes to the lower-class inhabitants of the urban underside, such as servant girls and prostitutes. For Gissing, the nether world of servant girls and prostitutes was exclusively an object of horror, whereas for Benjamin it was a source of fascination. For Freud, it evoked both horror and fascination as it was a place where the uncanny was manifested. Yet despite their differences, for all these writers on the city its dark underside is experienced as a psychological region of dread, anxiety or the uncanny. The darkness of the modern city is constituted not only by its immoral underside, its dens of thieves, its parade of prostitutes, its labyrinthine slums, but also by the physical and moralised underside of the open drains or closed sewers that service it and the swamps on which it may, more than likely, have been built. The latter is often employed to figure the former with the demi-monde of the slums figured as swamp, or sewer, or muddy shore. Mayhew’s aim with what he calls ‘the neglected class’ is to try to ‘lift them out of the moral mire in which they are wallowing’ (1861–2/1985, p. 41). Mayhew’s source for his miry metaphor is his own description later of the ‘mud-larks’ who ‘plash their way through the mire’ (p. 210) and wade ‘through the mud left on the shore by the retiring tide’ and whose ‘bodies are grimed with the foul soil of the river’ (p. 209). Both sides of the figuration come together in the uncanny and the nether world (or nether lands).

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Uncanny city The uncanny for Freud is a feeling or state of fascination and horror evoked by the ‘dark continent’, whether it be of female sexuality, of the slums, the swamp or its monstrous creatures, such as alligators or crocodiles (as we saw in the previous chapter). Freud (1919/2003, p. 144) relates in ‘The Uncanny’ how he was strolling one hot summer afternoon through the empty and to me unfamiliar streets of a small Italian town. I found myself in a district about whose character I could not long remain in doubt. Only heavily made-up women were to be seen at the window of the little houses, and I hastily left the narrow street at the next turning. However, after wandering about for some time without asking the way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence began to attract attention. Once more I hurried away, only to return there again by a different route. I was now seized by a feeling that I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad to find my way back to the piazza that I had recently left and refrain from any further voyages of discovery Freud’s lost object is himself that he repeatedly finds in the wrong place, or more precisely, the place to which he unintentionally returns. This return enacts an unconscious desire. The uncanny is a return to the repressed. In Freud’s autobiographical anecdote, the repressed is not only his sexual repressed, but also the morally and spatially repressed of the small Italian town, its red-light district. The sexually and spatially repressed is the bodies of the prostitutes embodying what Solnit (2000, p. 209) calls ‘transformation of city into female body’. For the young Walter Benjamin (1979, pp. 330–1; 1999, p. 623), the city of Berlin is transformed into the body of servant girls. He relates how. The dream ship that came to fetch us on those evenings must have rocked at our bedside on the waves of conversation, or under the spray of clattering plates, and in the early morning it set us down on the ebb of the carpet beating that came in at the window with the moist air on rainy days and engraved itself more indelibly in the child’s memory than the voice of the beloved in that of the man – this carpet beating that was the language of the nether world of servant girls, the real grownups, a language that sometimes took

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its time, languid and muted under the grey sky, breaking at others into an inexplicable gallop, as if the servants were pursued by phantoms. The courtyard was one of the places where the city opened itself to the child. The languid and muted language of the servant girls is not only their spoken language but also the body language of their carpet-beating that was vaguely arousing and sexually enticing for the young Walter with its overtones of sadism on the part of the servant girls and masochism on Benjamin’s. The courtyard, rather than being an entry into private domestic space of the home, was a passage going out into the public space of the city, and into the female body culminating in his later depiction of, as Solnit (2000, p. 209) puts it, ‘Paris as labyrinth … whose centre is a brothel.’ The city for Benjamin is ultimately a labyrinthine female body. Nether world Benjamin’s fascinating nether world of servant girls is worlds away from the horrifying subterrain of George Gissing’s 1889 novel, The Nether World. Benjamin’s courtyard where the city opened itself to the child is a different place from Gissing’s courtyard where the city closed in upon itself to imprison and crush the individual. The moist air on rainy days of a lovingly evoked childhood in Benjamin’s case is an ocean apart from the description in Gissing’s novel of ‘a rank, evilly-fostered growth’ like a poisonous swamp plant in contemporaneous representations of swamps (see Giblett, 1996a). His narrator is not referring to a plant here though. He is comparing one of the working-class girl characters, ‘not to some piece of exuberant normal vegetation’, but to a kind of festering vegetative sore on the backside of the body-politic. Yet their labour is necessary for the functioning of the body-politic and could not survive without it. The narrator offers the opinion that ‘the putrid soil of that nether world yields other forms besides the obviously blighted and sapless’ (Gissing, 1889/1992, p. 8). Indeed, it yields the bad smelling and the morally bad. This is hardly surprising when ‘filth, rottenness, evil odours, possessed these superfluous dens of mankind and made them gruesome to the peering imagination’ (p. 74). Into ‘the jaws of this black horror’ the narrator, or at least his imagination, has peered. The nether world is figured as monster and the narrator as dentist who peers (albeit in imagination, not in reality) into its orally sadistic jaws. The nether world is a living creature to be shunned as an abomination.

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The narrator leaves us in no doubt about this when he describes ‘a disagreeable quarter, a street of squalid houses, swarming with yet more squalid children’ (p. 129). These swarms of children have developed from a ‘swarm of babies’ (p. 132). According to the Levitical interdiction, swarming creatures are an abomination and are to be abhorred (see Douglas, 1966; Giblett, 2004). The swarming nether world of the city with its vertiginous depths is worlds away from the pastoral upper world of the country with its flat horizons (though it too has its dark side). This contrast comes into stark relief when making a journey by railway from the city to the country Over the pest-stricken regions of East London, sweltering in sunshine which served only to reveal the intimacies of abomination; across miles of a city of the damned, such as thought never conceived before this age of ours; above streets swarming with a nameless populace, cruelly exposed by the unwonted light of heaven; stopping at stations which it crushes the heart to think should be the destination of any mortal; the train made its way at length beyond the outmost limits of dread, and entered upon a land of level meadows, of hedges and trees, of crops and cattle. Gissing (1889/1992, p. 164) The unhomely and unhealthy artificial wetland of the city for Gissing gives way to the homely and healthy natural dry land of the country It is merely one of those quiet corners of flat, homely England, where man and beast seem on good terms with each other, where all green things grow in abundance, where from of old tilth and pasture-land are humbly observant of seasons and alternations, where the brown roads are familiar only with the tread of the labourer, with the light wheel of the farmer’s gig, of the rumbling of the solid wain. (pp. 164–5) This is an idealised picture straight out of Constable of an organic community with its pre-industrial technologies living in pastoral harmony in accord with seasonal rhythms and where the growths are green and abundant, not rank and evilly festered, nor blighted and sapless. It nevertheless has its dark side as Gissing goes on to relate Here, as elsewhere, the evil of the times was pressing upon men and disheartening them from labour. Farms lying barren, ill-will between

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proprietor and tenant, between tenant and hind, departure of the tillers of the soil to rot in towns that have no need of them. (p. 165) The normal, fertile country has been blighted and the symptoms of rural depopulation are blamed on the age rather than its causes in industrial capitalism diagnosed. The country still has its consolations, though, as a salve for the deprivations of the city Danbury Hill, rising thick-wooded to the village church, which is visible for miles around, with stretches of heath about its lower slopes, with its far prospects over the sunny country, was the pleasant end of a pleasant drive. (p. 165) The church is a symbolic beacon on the hill in dark times, a symbol of the city of god on high, and a light at the end of the tunnel to which the traveller journeys and from which the viewer can command a pleasing prospect of the country. This pleasing prospect is unlike the displeasing prospects of the city where the traveller walks ‘through all the barren ways and phantom-haunted refuges of the nether world’ (p. 247). Both country and city have become barren but at least the country is not the city of the dammed and the dead. ‘Mad Jack’ declares, ‘“This place to which you are confined is Hell. … This is Hell – Hell – Hell!”’ (p. 345). Similarly in Morrison’s (1896/1995, p. 2), A Child of the Jago, the rejoinder to the stock epithet ‘go to hell’ uttered by one character is ‘“Hell? You’re in it! … there can be no hell after this”’ uttered by another. The pleasing prospect from Danbery Hill is worlds away from Shooter’s Gardens whose ‘walls stood in perpetual black sweat; a mouldy reek came from the open doorways; the beings that passed in and out seemed soaked with grimy moisture, puffed into distortions, hung about with rotting garments’ (Gissing, 1889/1992, p. 248). The verdant horizontal surface of ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ is contrasted with the vile, vertical walls of the Farrington Road buildings vast, sheer walls, unbroken by even an attempt at ornament; row above row of windows in the mud-coloured surface, upwards, upwards, lifeless eyes, murky openings that tell of bareness, disorder, comfortlessness within. … An inner courtyard, asphalted, swept clean – looking up at the sky as from a prison. Acres of these edifices, the tinge of

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grime declaring the relative dates of their erection; millions of tons of brute brick and mortar, crushing the spirit as you gaze. (p. 274) This is not Benjamin’s Berlin courtyard of his childhood ‘where the city opened itself to the child’ but the prison house of modernity closed in upon itself, though both are full of intimate, physical possibilities. These possibilities are exciting sexual ones for Benjamin, but distressing disease-laden ones for Gissing for ‘the air was poisoned with the odour of an unclean crowd’ (p. 274). Gissing subscribed to the miasmatic theory of disease commonplace at the time in which bad air (literally ‘malaria’) caused this and other diseases (see Giblett, 1996a). City conditions Engels subscribed to the miasmatic theory too. In his 1892 ‘Preface to the English Edition’ of his Condition of the Working Class in England (Engels, 1845/1987, p. 42), he quotes an article of his own in which he had said that the East End of London in 1845 was ‘an everspreading pool of stagnant misery and desolation’. In short, it was an industrial quaking zone of misery and desolation. He is pleased to report 40 years later that ‘that immense haunt of misery is no longer the stagnant pool it was six years ago’ (p. 45). Misery has not ceased but at least the East End is no longer the stagnant pool it was – due in his mind to unionism. Yet the ‘great towns’ of industrial capitalism are stagnant pools not merely metaphorically and morally, but also literally and materially as ‘the streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with stagnant pools instead’ (p. 71). These stagnant pools in cities are worlds away from Thoreau’s (1962, VII, p. 304) ‘stagnant ponds or pools in woods floored with leaves’. From Engels’ (1845/1987, p. 71) ‘filthy streets,’ as would be expected, ‘a horrible smell’ arises. The Aire River of Leeds, ‘thick, black, and foul, smelling of all possible refuse’, ‘engenders miasmatic vapours’ (p. 81) according to a journal reporting the sanitary conditions of working people in cities from which Engels quotes. Similarly in Manchester at the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse, which it deposits on the lower right bank. In dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting blackish-green slime pools are left standing on the bank,

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from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable. (p. 89) Hardly surprisingly, Engels concludes that Manchester is ‘this hell upon earth’ which ‘arouses horror’ (p. 92). Miasmatic gas is often described in short, and in a word, as effluiva that arise from ‘masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth [that] lie among standing pools in all directions’ with the result that ‘the atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these’ (p. 98). Although Engels does not belabour the miasmatic theory of disease, he does not demur from repeatedly quoting the journal reporting the sanitary conditions of working people in cities to the effect that in such streets, ‘a mass of dried filth and foul vapours are created, which not only offend the [senses of] sight and smell, but endanger the health of the inhabitants in the highest degree’ (p. 78). Later, he more explicitly argues that the filth and stagnant pools of the working people’s quarters in the great cities have, therefore, the worst effect upon the public health, because they produce precisely those gases which engender disease; so, too, the exhalations from contaminated streams. (pp. 128–9) Certainly, as Engels says, ‘life in large cities is, in itself, injurious to health’, but whether this can be attributed to what he calls ‘gases decidedly injurious to health’ (p. 128) is another question and more a matter of nineteenth-century misdiagnosis. Nevertheless the city is a place of death for many nineteenth-century writers. For Thomson (1880/1993, p. 29), ‘The City is of Night; perchance of death.’ Following in a similar vein, Kipling (accessed online) is in no doubt in his short story ‘The city of dreadful night’ published in 1891 that ‘the city was of Death as well as Night’. The stagnant pool in the city made with human hands is a deadly place. The city often had its beginnings in the stagnant pools of swamps not made with human hands. Many modern cities or areas in them like the East End of London, for Davis (2006, p. 82) ‘the Victorian world’s greatest slum’, were built on reclaimed marshes, or drained swamps (see Giblett, 1996a, Chapter 3). For Neuwirth (2006, p. 179), ‘all cities start in mud’. Cities end in man-made, dried-up crud. Mud for Thoreau (1962, V, p. 499), writing in his journal in 1853, is ‘Nature’s womb’. All cities start in nature’s womb of mud and end up in culture’s tomb of

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crud. Crud is culture’s tomb. The city’s end is in crud. The city is born from mud and dies in crud; it is born from nature’s womb and dies in culture’s tomb. The city made of mud bricks or concrete, a mixture of the three elements of water, earth and air, or of clay bricks baked in fire, a mixture of four elements, ends up in the elements falling apart and returning to dust. Yet cultural crud is often figured as natural mud. It is as if the filled or drained swamp on which the city was built returns in the fascination with the dark underside of the stagnant pools of the city, as if the spatial, geographic and historical repressed of the city returns in metaphors of the city. James Thomson (1880/1993, p. 29) describes in The City of Dreadful Night, his meditation on the modern city (obviously based on London), how A river girds the city west and south, The main north channel of a broad lagoon, Regurging with the salt tides from the mouth; Waste marshes shine and glisten in the moon For leagues, then moorland black, then stony ridges; Great piers and causeways, many noble bridges, Connect the town and islet suburbs strewn. The river is a monster that girdles the city and regurgitates the black waters of waste wetlands. London on London The city makes a mark on the earth – in space – and marks a place in history – in time. Its dwellers, its citizens, make a mark on its streets. When Jack London (1903/2001, p. 39) was in London in 1902, he remarked repeatedly on ‘the slimy, spittle-drenched sidewalk’. He contrasts ‘the solid walls of bricks’ with ‘the slimy pavements, and the screaming streets’ (p. 4), the solid and vertical contrasted with the becoming liquid and horizontal. In this spatial poetics, if not metaphysics, the solid and vertical is valorised over the slimy and horizontal. London had just witnessed a market [where] tottery old men and women were searching in the garbage thrown in the mud for rotten potatoes, beans, and vegetables, while little children clustered like flies around a festering mass of fruit, thrusting their shoulders into the liquid corruption, and drawing forth morsels but partially decayed which they devoured on the spot. (pp. 3–4)

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This urban, industrial swamp of decomposing and stinking vegetable matter is for London ‘that wilderness’ (p. 4). Similarly for Morrison (1896/1995, p. 10) ‘the whole East End was a wilderness of slums’. Perhaps it was not unlike the swamp of the wilderness itself with its similar smells to the undiscerning nose to which all bad smells are bad in the same way. ‘Filth and noisomeness’ are coupled together for Mayhew (1861–2/1985, pp. 109 and 177) too; bad matter and bad smells go together. Dirt as matter out of place is also noisome as the bad smell of a place. Whether that place was a slum or a swamp did not make much difference. The slums of London (in two senses) are a site of horror as Jack goes on to state that for the first time in my life the fear of the crowd smote me. It was like the fear of the sea, and the miserable multitudes, street upon street, seemed so many waves of a vast and malodorous sea, lapping about me and threatening to well up and over me. London (1903/2001, p. 4) This fear of engulfment by the liquid and horizontal is evinced not only by the sight, sound and touch of the crowd and the city, but also by its smells. Yet London finds that When at last I made into the East End, I was gratified to find that the fear of the crowd no longer haunted me. I had become a part of it. The vast and malodorous sea had welled up and over me, or I had slipped into it, and there was nothing fearsome about it. (p. 7) The crowd takes on some of the qualities of the urban swamp as a few pages later London describes a woman of the finest grade of the English working-class, with numerous evidences of refinement, being slowly engulfed by that noisome and rotten tide of humanity which the powers that be are pouring eastward of London town. (pp. 13–14) The ‘strange, vagrant odours’ (p. 122) are like the vagrants who frequent the vagrant space of the slum. The human tide is flotsam and

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jetsam. The festering mass of fruit is ultimately indistinguishable from ‘the festering contents of slum, stews and ghetto’. This human sewage ‘resemble[s] some vile spawn from underground’ (p. 87). This human sewage is not spawned so much from underground but from what London calls ‘the under-world of London’ (p. vii), the city, and the under-world of London, the writer, whose tropes – ‘the dreams of speech’ as Nabokov calls them – give birth to the denizens of the slum and are ‘the royal road to the unconscious’ as Freud said of dreams. London ‘went down into the underworld’ of his eponymous city ‘with an attitude of mind which I may best liken to that of the explorer’ (p. xiii). He penetrates the urban underworld of the slum swamp just as the explorer in the colonies descended into the underworld of the swamp (see Giblett, 1996a). Just as the romance hero emerged with his manhood vindicated through trial and tribulation, so does London (the writer) emerge to write the book and preface it in Piedmont, California, literally at the foot of the mountain, a dry, elevated place thousand of miles away from, and thousands of feet above, the wet, low place of the urban underworld of the East End of London (the city). Like Dante, he descends into ‘the inferno’ (pp. 1, 6) and ‘infernal regions’ (pp. 52, 68) of ‘hell on earth’ (p. 68) and the inferno of London (p. 159) to ascend into the paradise of heaven on earth of God’s mountains in California as John Muir called them. Similarly Arthur Morrison’s (1896/1995, p. 1) A Child of the Jago begins with a description of the narrow street all the blacker for the lurid sky; for there was a fire in a farther part of Shoreditch, and the welkin was an infernal coppery glow. Below, the hot, heavy air lay a rank oppression on the contorted forms of those who made for sleep on the pavement; and in it, and through it all rose from the foul earth and the grimed walls a close, mingled stink – the odour of the Jago. For Morrison, the Jago, ‘for one hundred years the blackest pit in London, lay and festered’, like an open, infected wound inflicted on the body of the earth. In the centre of the blackest pit was Jago Court, ‘the blackest hole in all that pit’. This is the centre of the inferno where Satan resides in Dante’s Inferno with the denizens of the slum as Satan in this secular theology, a world where God is dead. The sublime is God in secular theology and the slime is Satan. Like Morrison, London, the urban and colonial explorer, the endo- and exo-colonist, the colony within at home and the colony without away

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from home, is apt to find both decay and decomposition wherever he looks and treads. Although London and Morrison did not find miasma and malaria (unlike their colonial counterparts or previous urban explorers), Morrison noted ‘the stifling air’ (p. 2) and London (1903/2001, p. 23) discovered ‘disease germs that fill the air of the East End’ and ‘the effluvia and vile exhalations of overcrowded and rotten life’ (p. 126). He also found that ‘rottenness is a slimy desecration of the sweetness and purity of nature’ (p. 87). The denizens of ‘city slime’ (p. 113) are slimy creatures of slimy pavements, ‘a fearful slime that quickened the pavement with life’ (p. 151). Human life has taken on a vegetable, animal and liquid life of its own. Humans are not autochthonous creatures that spring from the earth, or swamp, but creatures that spring from the urban swamp, the slum – they are auto-ex-metropolis, self-generating from the city. For London (p. 28), ‘a spawn of children cluttered the slimy pavement, for all the world like tadpoles just turned frogs on the bottom of a dry pond’, or more precisely on the bottom of a dried-up industrial urban wetland. The categories of solid and liquid, animal and vegetable, and the elements of earth, water and air are all mixed up. ‘The place swarmed with vermin’ (p. 83), with ‘swarming children’ (p. 91) and with workers who swarm (p. 113). In Morrison’s (1896/1995, p. 1) A Child of the Jago, in Jago Court ‘the human population swarmed in thousands’. Swarming creatures neither walk, nor swim, nor fly, but are hybrid creatures, or monsters, who do all three. As swarming creatures, they are neither fish, flesh nor fowl and so they fall under the Levitical interdiction of being an abomination. For London (1903/2001, p. 152), ‘they are a new species, a breed of city savages. … The slum is their jungle.’ This is not a tropical rainforest where nature is green in leaf and branch, but an urban jungle where culture is red in tooth and claw. For London it would be ‘far better to be a people of the wilderness and desert … than to be a people of the machine and the Abyss’ (p. 153). Better to be creatures of the swamp and jungle than of that urban swamp and jungle called the slum; better to be creatures of the living waters of wetlands than to be minced to death in ‘the Abyss [which] is literally a huge man-killing machine’ (p. 23) just as the slimy trenches of World War I (WWI) were later; better to be a living swamp creature than to be ‘the living deaths’ (p. 152) at ‘the bottom of the Abyss’ (p. 152); and better to be in the jungles of ‘Darkest Africa’ (p. 1) than in ‘the jungle of empire’ (p. 149). The landscape of urban slums is not only prescient of the landscape of trench warfare, but also the product of class warfare perpetrated by the military–industrial ruling class. For London, ‘here, in the heart of peace,

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is where the blood is being shed’ (p. 135). ‘In London the slaughter of the innocents goes on on a scale more stupendous than any before in the history of the world’ (p. 150), including Herod’s in the wake of the birth of Jesus (p. 135). This slaughter is perpetrated by ‘the men of England, masters of destruction, engineers of death … men of steel. … war lords and world harnessers’ who have ‘mastered matter and solved the secrets of the stars’ (p. 76). London also maintained that if the masses of the slums attempted revolt, they would perish ‘before the rapid-fire guns and the modern machinery of warfare’ (p. 123). Rather than revolting, they ended up as cannon fodder in the ‘meat-mincer’ of the fields of Flanders during WWI (as we will see in the next chapter). The denizens of the East End are monstrous like the city they inhabit (hardly live in). The city takes on a life of its own as it is what London calls ‘the monster city’ (p. 14) with its own aberrant and peculiar anatomy. Night in the city is not merely the time of sunlessness but ‘the black night of London [which] settles down in a greasy pall’ (p. 14). London for James Thomson is ‘the City of Dreadful Night’, but not for Jack London. The East End is ‘often called’, according to London, ‘the City of Dreadful Monotony’ (p. 113). Just as wilderness swamps were often called dreadful and monotonous, so the urban swamp is invoked in similar terms, though for London ‘the East End does merit a worse title. It should be called “The City of Degradation”’ (p. 114). It takes one lower into the depths and bowels, not of the good earth and wilderness swamp, but of the evil city and city swamp, ‘the perilous depths of the East End’ as Morrison (1896/1995, p. 10) puts it. In this body politics of the city, the park is not for London (1903/2001, p. 31) ‘a lung of London’, which it should be in accordance with the dictates of the desirable Victorian body politic, but ‘an abscess, a great putrescent sore’ on the bottom or backside of the body-politic that should be treated and the patient cared for, not lanced in the gentrification of slum clearance. The delta is the cloaca of the body terrestrial. St Petersburg is another famous modern city built on the reclaimed wetland of a delta. For W. G. Sebald (2002, p. 48) marooned on the Neva’s marsh delta St. Petersburg under the fortress, the new Russian capital, uncanny to a stranger, no more than a chaos erupting, buildings that began to subside

Uncanny City 49

as soon as erected, and nowhere a vista quite straight. The streets and squares laid out according to the Golden Section, jetty walls and bridges, alignments, façades and rows of windows– these only slowly come towards us out of the future’s resounding emptiness, so as to bring the plan of eternity into the city born of the terror of the vastness of space The city not only has a dark underside but it has also been built on repressing that other side in order to keep at bay not only the sublime terror of the vastness of space outside its walls, gates, suburbs and so on, but also the slimy horror of places inside and beneath and before it, under its streets, houses, buildings and so on. Sebald has read Thomson (p. 64) for the latter refers to ‘vast wastes of horror-haunted time’. The city of dreadful night is a bulwark, not only against the terror of space, but also against the horror of time. The city not only marks out a grid of allotments on the earth, but also marks a place in history. The quaking zone of the swamp, by contrast, mediates between time and space, place and history in the cyclical now-time of birth–death–birth. Like St Petersburg, Perth, Western Australia, was founded in a wetland and marked out across its wetlands. It is not only ‘A City of Wetlands’ but also a ‘grid-plan’ town, both in its early colonial and recent neocolonial phases (see Giblett, 1996a) Perth, uncanny city of the concrete tunnel that snakes its way through the underground watercourse of buried wetlands to disgorge its cargo of cars and trucks on the rubbish-strewn banks of the black swan river close by where the natural outflow of the wetlands used to be through Claise Brook now a yuppified lagoon shaped like it used to be

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according to old maps but contained now in limestone walls surrounded and overseen by a ‘livable neighbourhood’ of a soon-to-be yuppie slum of inner urban renewal and redevelopment of the old slum the walls of the eastern end of the tunnel are painted with the Waugyl to commemorate the water-being that once and still does (sort of) wend its way through the buried wetlands its life-giving/death-dealing waters replaced by traffic flows through the ‘polly pipe’ another token commemoration of indigenous contribution the tunnel displaced the underground flows, the wetlands drained above ground were drained underground too the land shrank, the houses cracked as every engineer should have known they would old maps showed the wetlands that were there history showed when you drain the wetlands, the land shrinks like a sponge with the water wrung out of it the buried history returned with a vengeance the tunnel is a dam that blocks the underground flows the residents of Northbridge wake after a deluge and wander into their kids’ rooms and find themselves ankle-deep in water the tunnel is damming the flows that still run deep

Uncanny City 51

the history is buried but not lost the tunnel floats on these flows the tunnel is cracking too The way that various writers describe and figure the city plays out theirs fears. James Thomson figured the dark underside of the late-nineteenthcentury city as dreadful night; Engels as a haunt of misery. Antoine Picon (2000) recently characterised this side of the late-twentieth/early-twentyfirst-century city as an ‘anxious landscape’. Picon contrasts Manhattan as ‘a magic city made of crystal’ and as ‘the celestial Jerusalem’ with ‘the hell, or purgatory’ of Newark with its ‘creeping swamps’ where everything is ‘rusted out’ and ‘irreparably polluted yet somehow endowed with a strange beauty’. In Yeatsian terms, a terrible beauty is born in the rusted city. The central business district with its sublime skyscrapers is heaven compared with the slimy hell of industrial swamps. Picon is working in the tradition of Jerrold’s and Doré’s (1872/2005, p. 11) depiction of nineteenth-century London, in particular of ‘the dead shore’ of the Thames River with ‘the muddy, melancholy bank’ with ‘rust upon everything’. As the marsh has traditionally been associated with melancholy, Jerrold’s and Doré’s pilgrimage could have referred to the muddy, melancholy bank as ‘a slough of despond’ to make an explicit connection with John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (see Giblett, 1996a). Picon does not use such archaic language, but the implication or impression is that the Newark industrial swamps are depressing, though strangely beautiful, places. Similarly when Jerrold and Doré (1872/2005, p. xxviii) went on their ‘travel[s] about London in search of the picturesque’ they ‘discovered that it abounded … in picturesque scenes’. The picturesque is not an object, nor a feature of the object, but a point of view, or a modality that sets up a relation between the subject and object, the viewer and the scene and seen. If one goes in search of the picturesque, one will invariably find it because one carries the picturesque point of view with one. For Jerrold (1872/2005, pp. 4–5) the lesson which Doré’s pictorial renderings of our mercantile centre will teach … is that London, artistically regarded, is not, as the shallow have said so often, an ugly place, given up body and soul to money-grubbing. Yet there are limits to the picturesque as Jerrold (1872/2005, p. 15) concedes that in the poverty of the poor, ‘there is nothing picturesque’.

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Poverty cannot be depicted in picturesque terms because the picturesque is an impersonal point of view from a distance whereas poverty is personal (see Doré’s illustration no. 119, ‘Wentworh St, Whitechapel’, (Jerrold and Doré, 1872/2005, p. 145)). The poverty of the poor is conveyed much better in Jerrold’s words used by Coolidge (1994, p. 53) as a caption to this illustration, than in Doré’s drawing: ‘beat-up alleys with pools of water. Here, tattered young women … look at you sullenly, fiercely, what suffering, what hunger can be read in their meager bodies, hungry since the day they were weaned.’ Jerrold does not reflect on the inability of the picturesque to convey the poverty of the poor and the ability of language to do so. The picturesque is also unable to convey the poverty of impoverished landscapes. Rusting industrial ruins and other wastelands have become an object of contemporary fascination, and fashion. See, for example, the photographic work of Edward Burtynsky, a kind of industrial chic, which I discuss in Chapter 9. The dark sides of both the late-nineteenth-century and late-twentieth/ early-twenty-first-century cities are invoked in terms of the swampy and uncanny and testify to a fascination with, and horror of, the urban nether world and the (in this case, artificial) quaking zone known otherwise and simply as ‘the slum’ or, as Neuwirth (2006, p. 241) prefers to avoid the pejorative connotations, ‘squatter communities’. The slum in the early-twenty-first century is the habitat for one billion people. For Davis (2006, p. 19), ‘instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first-century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement and decay’. Squats, in other words, in a man-made swamp, and not only squats physically on its haunches, but also illegally on land its residents do not own (Neuwirth, 2006, p. 12). Squatting today for Davis (2006, p. 39) ‘continues primarily in low-value urban land, usually in hazardous or extremely marginal locations such as floodplains, hillsides, swamps or contaminated brownfields’. The slum for Davis (2006, p. 22) was ‘first and above all envisioned as a place where an incorrigible and feral social “residuum” rots in immoral and often riotous splendour’. Vegetable decomposition figures moral decay and anarchic display. The slum is the arsehole or cloaca of the body politic, a festering wound inflicted on the body of the earth. Whether or not it can, or how it should, be treated is another matter. For Davis (2006, p. 95), ‘urban inequality in the Third World is visible even from space: satellite reconnaissance of Nairobi reveals that more than half of the population lives on just 18 percent of the city area’. This area includes Kibera, ‘Africa’s largest mud hut metropolis’

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(Neuwirth, 2006, p. 70), or slum. Satellite reconnaissance of Nairobi also reveals nearby Nairobi National Park, the world’s largest National Park within the municipal bounds of a city. Two iconic and interdependent features of modernity sit cheek-by-jowl with each other: nationalism and landscape preservation and display in the national park side by side with the underbelly of urbanity in the slum; the national park with vast open areas populated sparsely by rangers and tourists with the slum crowded and over-built with rusting iron shanties and muddy, sewery paths; and the national park created by the dispossession and removal of its native owners and inhabitants into the slum. The British for Davis (2006, p. 52) have the dubious distinction of being ‘the greatest slum builders of all time’. They designed and built railways (or at least their labourers did) and the railways, in turn, for Coolidge (1994, p. 32) were ‘the greatest creators of London slums’. British railways, at home and abroad, created the interstices between railway lines that were filled by slums. The communication and transportation technology of the railway excommunicated slum-dwellers between and besides its lines. Nairobi, for example, came into being in 1899 when the British wanted to span East Africa with a railway and used a small Masai settlement at the confluence of several small rivers as the staging point for the construction of the railway (Neuwirth, 2006, p. 91). Railways created the slum during the period from the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Road transport and satellite communication are the greatest creators of planetary slums today that excommunicate slum-dwellers between its highways and vectors. Yet the sanitary conditions are pretty much the same. Many slum-dwellers today live in what Davis (2006, 144) calls ‘the sanitary equivalent of the mud hell of WWI trench warfare’. The slum is the product of class war fought against the lower classes. Intra-urban class warfare produced a landscape very similar to that produced by international armed warfare. Thirty years before Davis, Fussell (1975/2000, p. 149) had noted the converse, ‘the similarity of the trench scene to modern, urban, industrial squalor’. It is hardly surprising that both places end up looking and being the same as both were the product of class warfare fought against the earth, against both the lower earthly and class strata. The ‘mud hell’ of WWI trench warfare is the topic of the next chapter. The city founded in war, or at least of the preparations for it as Virilio put it (cited in Giblett, 1996a, p. 56), becomes the landscape of warfare, whether it is the landscape of WWI trench warfare or the landscape of World War II (WWII) aerial warfare. ‘The urban institution of war’,

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as Mumford (1961, p. 42) puts it, makes the city into the landscape of warfare. This landscape is either the landscape of class and trench warfare as in WWI or the landscape of international and aerial warfare as in WWII. What Mumford (1961, p. 53) following Geddes calls ‘a living urban core, the polis, ends in a common graveyard of dust and bones, a Necropolis, or city of the dead: fire-scorched ruins, shattered buildings, … heaps of meaningless refuse’ – in a word crud, as in the aftermath of the fire-bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, Wurzburg, the topic of Chapter 5.

Part II World War S(ub)lime

The direct effect of the two world wars on people has been often remarked upon. Autobiographies, histories, memoirs and novels of World Wars I and II (WWI and WWII) document physical and mental trauma. They were, and still are, an important part of the publishing landscape with a steady stream of publications including continued publication or republication of classics in English (Blunden, 1928/2000; Graves, 1929; Manning, 1929/1999), new translations of French and German WWI classics (Barbusse, 1916/2004; Jünger, 1920/2003; Remarque, 1929/1996), newly discovered first-hand accounts (Lynch, 2006), a new anthology of WWI poetry (Walter, 2006) and secondary texts, such as monumental new histories of WWI (Carlyon, 2006) and surveys of primary texts (for WWI see Sherry, 2005). This stream shows no signs of abating and will no doubt increase to a flood for WWI as various imminent centenary commemorations come and go shortly in the years to come. Similarly with WWII, a spate of recent books (Friedrich, 2006; Grayling, 2006; Knell, 2003; Lowe, 2007; Taylor, 2004) has reflected on allied bombing of German cities on or around the sixtieth anniversary. Yet both wars not only reshaped the nature of war but also the lives of the men and women who fought these wars and who were affected by them. They also reshaped the land, the spaces and the places in which they were fought. WWI for Lloyd (1998, p. 95) ‘transformed the landscape of the places over which it fought’. The same could be said for WWII. Trenches for Helphand (2006, p. 23) ‘epitomized the landscape of World War I’ whereas bombed cities epitomised the landscape of WWII. The transformation of the land in both wars took place at the fundamental level of the arrangements between the four elements of earth, air, fire and water. It was also often remarked upon, and figured, in these terms 55

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by observers of, and commentators on, both wars. In the case of WWI, with its heavy artillery and trench warfare, earth and water were mixed to produce what commentators and caption writers called the ‘swamps’ (see Hurley’s photograph of ‘The swamps of Zonnebeke’, Bean, 1923, fig. 400). This photograph, and other photographs of WWI by Hurley, are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 7), or more precisely, artificial wetlands of mud and slime in the feral quaking zone of the battlefields of the Western Front. ‘Artificial wetlands’ are usually thought of as newly created arrangements of land, water and plants designed and constructed to rehabilitate a degraded wetland or to simulate elsewhere the form and functions of a native wetland. The ‘swamps’ of the Western Front were artificial wetlands in the sense that they were newly created arrangements of land, water and plants made by destroying wetlands, or by creating them, with the assistance of high rainfall, where they had not existed previously. The former emphasises the creative, the latter, the destructive, as did the landscape of WWII. The reshaping of the arrangements between the four elements of earth, air, fire and water took place too in the case of WWII with its long-range bombers. Air and fire were mixed to produce firestorms destroying cities and turning them into artificial ruins and many of their residents into charred remains in the feral quaking zone of the bombed cities of the home front. This reshaping of the land, in turn, had its effect on those who fought these wars and were affected by them. The effects of this reshaping of the land on people has not often been commented upon, except with the notable and remarkable exception of Walter Benjamin (1999, p. 732) who argued that in what he called ‘positional warfare’ of WWI a generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, amid a landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds and, at its centre, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body. Sadly, tragically, unfortunately (it is impossible to avoid clichés and to find adequate words to describe this loss, his loss), Benjamin took his own life in 1940 before he could remark about the next generation that had gone to school in electric streetcars and steam railways who now in the strategic warfare of WWII sat huddled in the closed air of the bomb shelters amid a landscape of ruins in which they could not even see the clouds, but still at its centre in a force field of greater destructive torrents of fire and exploding bombs, was the still tiny, fragile human

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body. Yet whereas the tiny, fragile human body that Benjamin remarked upon in WWI trench warfare of the country was the soldier body, the tiny, fragile human body in WWII strategic bombing of the city was the civilian body. These landscapes had an effect on spaces and places, and people’s perception of them. Apollinaire (cited in Sherry, 2005, p. 141) writing at the beginning of WWI prophesied that Before the war we had only the surface Of the earth and the seas After it we’ll have the depths Subterranean and aerial space. In fact, they had the subterranean depths and aerial heights during it. The landscapes of world warfare not only had an effect on space and people’s perception of it, but also on people’s perception on time. Both landscapes cut off people from their pasts by eradicating the visible signs of the persistence of the past in the present. They cast people adrift onto a sea of time disconnected from the past, uncertain of the future and fearful in the present. Both world wars thus not only had an effect on space but also on time, not only then but also now for the survivors and witnesses such as Knell (2003, p. 2) for whom ‘there is a psychological need to forget and a moral obligation to remember. There is the human desire to forgive and the ethical necessity to warn of a possible repeat of the disaster.’ These shifts in the conduct of industrialised world warfare are indicative of a change in the nature of war and its physical characteristics at the level of the four elements of earth, air, fire and water. The landscape of trench warfare was slimy, the mixing of earth and water (in mud); the landscape of strategic bombing was sublime, the mixing of fire and air (in exploding bombs and firestorms), and the mixing of earth and air (in destroyed cities). Fire in the sense of explosion and combustion was the agent that transformed the solid matter of cities into piles of rubble. The sublime city ruins of WWII transcended and sublimated (in two senses) the slimy hellholes of WWI. The horrors of the mud and slime of trench warfare were sublimated into the terrors of the firestorms of strategic bombing. WWI was, in the words of ‘the great military theorist’ (Bourke, 2005, p. 226; see Giblett, 2008c) J. F. C. Fuller, ‘bogged down in the slough’ of trench warfare and artillery bombardment (cited by Grayling, 2006, p. 195); WWII was seared on high in the firestorms of aerial bombardment. The ‘hallmark’ of WWI was ‘strategic stalemate

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on the western front’ between combatants whereas strategic bombing of the home front of WWII meant that ‘military violence against noncombatants had become the hallmark of total war’ (Chickering and Förster, 2005, pp. 6, 11; see also Overy, 2005). Subsequent wars, such as the Cold War from the 1950s to the 1980s and the Gulf War of 1991, sublimated warfare even more from the ‘massive urban destruction’ (Grayling, 2006, p. 176) of WWII and the morass-ive underground devastation of WWI into the nightmare of ‘mutually assured destruction’ by nuclear weaponry and into the heights of extraterrestrial space where the satellites orbit (see Giblett, 2008c, Chapter 9). It is as if the horrors of the WWI could not be repeated on the surface and in the depths of the earth but in order to avoid them, new terrors were invented in the heights above the earth. In the drive to make war more clinical, distanced and remote, war was taken to new heights and greater lengths, or distances. WWI was ‘killing at a distance’ (Carlyon, 2006, p. 33) with artillery bombardment, WWII was killing at greater distance with aerial bombardment and the Gulf War of 1991, at even greater distance, with satellite-guided and targeted bombardment (see Giblett, 2008c, Chapter 9). This drive has been going on for some time. The American Civil War was arguably the first modern industrial war as it involved the use of railways and telegraphy, two sublime communication technologies (see Giblett, 2008c). For General Sherman (1886/1990, pp. 343–4), the scene of the battle of Vicksburg was ‘truly sublime’ and ‘a picture of the terrible not often seen’. At the battle of Chattanooga, he could not help stopping to look across ‘that vast field of battle to admire its sublimity’ despite, or perhaps because of, the ‘carnage and noise’ (p. 390). Part of the sublimity of the battlefield resides in the destructive power of modern warfare. Sherman tersely stated in a letter to an editor of a newspaper that ‘generally war is destruction and nothing else’ (p. 301) and in another to the Mayor of Atlanta that ‘war is cruelty and you cannot refine it’ (p. 601). No doubt the ordinary infantryman experienced more of the destruction and cruelty of the heat of battle first hand and not much of the sublimity of the scene of battle viewed from afar by the generals. This was certainly the case in WWI: ‘War was return of earth to ugly earth,/War was foundering of sublimities’, as Robert Graves (Walter, 2006, p. 264) put it at the time. WWI was the foundering of sublimities in slime. It was, in a word, a portmanteau word, s(ub)lime in which, as Sofoulis (the deviser of the portmanteau) argues, slime is the secret of the sublime (see Giblett, 1996a, Chapter 2).

4 Earth and Water in the Slime of World War I Trench Warfare

From the American Civil War, the first war of the industrial age, to World War I (WWI), ‘the first big war fought between industrialised societies’ (Carlyon, 2006, pp. 761–2), a shift occurs in the type of warfare being conducted, not just in the scale of industrial technologies brought to bear in and on it. A mobile war fought through and over several states in the case of the American Civil War gives way to a war ‘bogged down’ in (not just on) the Western Front, including the ‘swampland’ of Passchendaele (Fussell, 1975/2000, p. 84; see the map, ‘Passchendaele: The mud’ (Gilbert, 1994, p. 103) which depicts appropriately ‘waterlogged areas of the battlefield, in which the mud was deepest’, as black blobs). Battles were fought in and over the same ground several times in the case of WWI. Artillery bombardment created craters and troops dug trenches to escape this and other firepower. Rain filled both craters and trenches producing mud, a persistent feature of the landscape of trench warfare. Those who were there and wrote of it, such as Edmund Blunden, Frederic Manning, Frank Hurley, Edward Lynch and Edward Thomas, refer to mud repeatedly and use the word persistently. A later commentator in Ellis (1976, pp. 43–7) devotes several pages to the discussion of mud in WWI, and even about drowning in it. Fussell (1975/2000, p. 16) states that at the battle of Passchendaele in 1917, ‘thousands literally drowned in the mud’. For Helphand (2006, pp. 27–8) too, ‘the land of Flanders became a foul, seething swamp’ in which ‘thousands drowned in the mud’. The land was turned into artificial wetland. In the aftermath of the war for Sassoon (cited by Lloyd, 1998, p. 129), ‘the Dead … struggled in the slime’. In death, as in life, there was no escaping from slime and mud. The Dead lived on in slime. In Lynch’s Somme Mud: The War Experiences of an Australian Infantryman in France, 1916–1919 59

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published for the first time in 2006 what he calls ‘our world of mud’ (p. 31) is a ‘manmade’ environment that has replaced the earth we live in a world of Somme mud. We sleep in it, work in it, wade in it and many of us die in it. We see it, feel it, eat it and curse it, but we can’t escape it, not even by dying. Lynch (2006, p. 108) Mud commands the processes of living and dying, the men who are living and dying, and the time of the present and future (dead or alive) invoking the apocalyptic: ‘the reeling, rocking earth seems to be toppling to its very doom’ (p. 58). Besides addressing the senses of seeing, feeling and tasting, it addresses the senses of hearing (‘a splashy oozy sound’ (p. 112)) and smell (‘foul-smelling’ (p. 108)). It attacks and attaches to the surface of the body (‘muddied skin’ (p. 85) and ‘mudstained … as the place itself’ (p. 108)). It crosses the border between outside and inside. Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That mentions mud occasionally, though generally he prefers the more colourful, onomatopoeic and tactile, ‘morass’. Outdoing the Australians Hurley and Lynch and the Englishmen Blunden and Graves for colour and drama, though, is the Frenchman Henri Barbusse. The very first chapter of his classic Under Fire sets the scene for ‘this war of mud’ in the sinister light of the storm beneath black dishevelled clouds, dragged and spread across the earth like wicked angels, they seem to see a great livid white plain extend before them. In their vision, figures rise up out of the plain, which is composed of mud and water, and clutch at the surface of the ground, blinded and crushed with mire, like survivors from some monstrous shipwreck. Barbusse (1916/2004, p. 6) In this apocalyptic vision of the war of the worlds ‘under attack from the elements’ (p. 153), earth and water are mixed up chaotically in mud and mire. From this conclusion to the first chapter entitled ‘The Vision’, Under Fire segues into the second chapter entitled ‘in the ground’ (my emphasis). This chapter begins by taking the bird’s-eye aerial view of The earth! The desert has started to appear, vast and full of water, beneath the long and desolate light of dawn. Ponds and craters,

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their waters pinched and shivering under the sharp blast of early morning; tracks left by last night’s troops and convoys in these fields of sterility, streaked with ruts which shine like steel rails in the weak light; and piles of mud with here and there broken stakes emerging from them, broken trestles in the shape of a cross, packages of rusted wire, twisted, like bushes. With its puddles and its banks of slime it looks like an oversized grey canvas sheet floating on the sea, submerged in places. It is not raining, but everything is wet, oozing, sodden, drenched. The pale light seems to be pouring across it. (p. 7) By mixing earth and water, slime is produced, an unsettling substance that is neither solid nor liquid, but the solid becoming liquid. In the lexicon of trench warfare, ‘slimy’ means ‘abandoned by water and by men’ (p. 138). The slimy also means abandoned by God. This is what Barbusse calls in Biblical terms, ‘the diluvian scene’ (p. 8), the world of the flood punished by God. Modern industrial war turns the earth into a wet desert in the sense that this is largely lifeless land – it is deserted. A deserted trench is ‘a frightful, horizontal desert’ (p. 185). It is not the horizontal desert of a living ecosystem home to native species but ‘the waste lands … of the sodden filth that is pressed/Into ooze, and the sombre dirt that spouts up’ as D. H. Lawrence put it (Walter, 2006, p. 28). It is a man-made, unhomely space, of ‘this dead place’, to return to Barbusse (1916/2004, p. 189), of the human species ‘buried in molehills’ (p. 17) in ‘this tomb’ (p. 233). It is a ‘wasteland, dirty and sick, … mired with black mud’ on which ‘the dead are lined up’ (p. 136). ‘Space has shrunk and the field of sadness of the sky has clamped down on the earth, that field of death’ (p. 25). The earth has been transformed from a cradle of life into a field of death, from womb to tomb. The landscape of trench warfare is the dead black water and earth of an artificial, ‘man-made’ wetland. It is ‘swampy waste ground’ (p. 139), not the living black waters of a wetland (see Giblett, 1996a). It is an artificial quaking zone, not the ‘trembling earth’ of a swamp, such as (literally) Okefenokee in Georgia, USA (Nelson, 2005). The wet nether land of trench warfare is an artificial grotesque lower earthly stratum (see Giblett, 1996a). To these artificial wetlands, the same horror is attached that is often associated with the wet nether lands of swamps, marshes and bogs. Modern industrial war also transforms the earth into the moon in the sense that the land has become a cratered landscape, or more precisely ‘marshy craters’ (Barbusse, 1916/2004, p. 298) for it has been

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flooded. The landscape of trench warfare is ‘like a lunar landscape’ for Erich Maria Remarque (1929/1996, p. 40) in his WWI classic All Quiet on the Western Front. For Frederic Manning (1929/1999, p. 160) too, it is ‘some sterile landscape in the moon’. For Wilfred Owen (cited by Helphand, 2006, p. 31), ‘No Man’s Land under snow is like the face of the moon chaotic, crater-ridden, uninhabitable.’ Similarly, for Winston Groom (cited by Helphand, 2006, p. 34) no-man’s-land is ‘the barren and ruined moonscape’. The earth has become the moon because it has been transformed into a barren place that is unable to give birth to new life, unlike fecund wetlands, one of the most productive ecosystems and habitats on earth (see Giblett, 1996a). The landscape of aerial bombardment is also a lunar landscape of craters. This was the case with WWII, though the craters were dry unlike the wet craters of WWI, and of the Vietnam War. This was a wetland war fought partly in and over the wetlands of the Plain of Reeds and the Mekong Delta, the most fertile zone of Vietnam (see Giblett, 1996a, Chapter 9). After seven years of bombardment, over 20 million craters spread over 300,000 acres in Vietnam made this war, as Helphand (2006, p. 17) puts it, ‘as much against the land as against armies’. The spraying of Agent Orange to reduce cover provided by foliage also demonstrates that this was a war fought against the land and its inhabitants. Yet not only the Vietnam War but all modern industrial wars were wars fought against the land as WWI and WWII attest. The Cold War was also fought against the land with its nuclear bomb-testing in the Australian and Nevada deserts and elsewhere on and under the earth and sea (see Chapter 6). Yet not only modern industrial wars are fought against the land, modern industrial warfare is unofficially declared against the land. Other undeclared wars are fought against it too. Modern industrial chemistry for Rachel Carson (1962, p. 7) in her classic Silent Spring is a war against nature (see Giblett, 2008a, Chapter 6). The same could be said for modern military physics. The moonscape is a dead landscape in which, rather than choirs of angels singing men to their deaths, ‘diabolical noise surrounds us’ (Barbusse, 1916/2004, p. 193) in ‘this landscape for witches’ sabbaths’ (p. 206). In this world of fallen angels, a black mass transubstantiates in an anti-communion the sacred elements of earth and water into the man-made mud and slime of the landscape of trench warfare. This is not the waterland of a fen, marsh or swamp, nor the pre-diluvian creation scene when God created the heavens and the earth, and had not yet divided water and land. Rather, it is the world of the flood in which God punishes sinners (but who is Noah et al saved in his Ark?).


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All that is solid melts into liquid. The hard becomes soft; the solid object becomes the slimy abject. Water brings about ‘the softening of the earth’ (p. 153). What was hard becomes soft. Mud not only attacks, and attaches to, the surfaces of the body and clothing but also becomes an all-encompassing, all-enveloping medium into which the body enters. At one point, the first-person narrator sees his comrades ‘slowly sliding, rolling in the mud in the depth of the night’. They ‘sank as far as we could into the mud’ and ‘pressed themselves further and further into the ground’ (p. 208). They end up ‘buried by night’. The first-person narrator is able later to ‘emerge from the earth in which we have been encased’ (p. 211). They have been ‘dirtied by their contact with the earth, dirtied by the grey smoke of space’ (p. 212). As dirt for Mary Douglas is ‘matter out of place’, body and earth have ceased to be separate but have been mixed together. Earth outside has come inside. Indeed, they are not only consumed by the mud, but ‘almost digested by the earth’ (p. 228). The earth becomes an orally sadistic monster as you sink into the depths a pestilential atmosphere, heavy as the earth itself surrounds you. Your hand feels the clay wall; cold, sticky, sepulchral. This earth weighs on you from all sides, wrapping you in dismal solitude, touching your face with its blind, mouldy breath. (p. 256) The landscape of trench warfare is not the great dismal swamp of a living wetland but the grimy damp swamp of a dying wasteland. In contrast to Barbusse, the earth for Erich Maria Remarque (1929/1996, p. 39) was both a nurturing mother and an object of oral sadism the power to defend ourselves flows back into us out of the earth and out of the air – and most of all it flows out of the earth. The earth is more important to the soldier than to anybody else. When he presses himself to the earth, long and violently, when he urges himself deep into it with his face and with his limbs, under fire and with the fear of death upon him, then the earth is his only friend, his brother, his mother, he groans out his terror and screams into its silence and safety, the earth absorbs it all and gives him another ten seconds of life, ten seconds to run, then takes hold of him again – sometimes for ever. Earth with your ridges and holes and hollows into which a man can throw himself, where a man can hide! Earth – in the agony of terror, the explosion of annihilation, in the death-roar of the shell-bursts

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you gave us that massive resurgence of reconquered life. The madness, the tempest of an existence that had practically been torn to shreds flowed back from you into our hands, and so we burrowed deep into you for safety, and in the speechless fear and relief of having survived the moment, our mouths bit deeply into you! Remarque’s soldier is the subject of oral sadism who bites the earth before the earth bites him back as it does for Barbusse’s soldier. Remarque phantasises a benevolent mother earth and hardly mentions ‘the black mud’ (p. 47) that blots the landscape and transforms the earth from something dry and solid into something wet and liquid. The horror of the slimy for Barbusse (1916/2004, p. 7; see also p. 9) has a particular bodily inflection (and infection) and a specific sensory address to the sense of smell you can see a maze of long ditches in which the last remnants of night linger. This is the trench. The bottom of it is carpeted with a viscous layer that clings noisily to the foot at every step and smells foul around each dugout because of the night’s urine. The holes themselves, if you lean over them as you pass, smell like a whiff of bad breath. Like the natural wetland, ‘the soft, sticky mud’ (p. 153) of the artificial wetland attacks (and attaches to) the surfaces of the body and clothing. Mud has agency as ‘we waded through marshy field, we got lost in silent regions where the mud grabbed us by the feet’ (p. 189). Slime even penetrates inside the body via the sense of smell when ‘a smell of dank cellar and marshland penetrates us’ (p. 283). However, unlike its natural counterpart in which the smells are produced by the non-human and by the processes of non-human decomposition and re-composition, the smells of the artificial wetland of the trench are produced by human waste out of which new life springs (eventually). One soldier says ‘the place smelt of shit’ (p. 49). This is hardly surprising when they were in ‘the bowels of the earth’ (pp. 122, 193, 233; see also Rosenberg’s poem ‘Break of day in the trenches’ in Fussell, 1975/2000, pp. 250–1 (for him ‘the greatest poem of the war’) and in Walter, 2006, p. 48). Yet this is not the cloaca of a wetland where defecation and procreation are mixed in the grotesque lower earthly stratum and from which new life springs. Rather it is the man-made sewer of the nether lands of the grotesque artificial lower earthly strata. The man-made atmosphere of trench warfare was not only smells emanating from the ground below but also gas wafting in the air above


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ground. It could spell death but also created a psychopathology of smell. ‘The fear of gas obsessed’ Graves (1929, p. 278) to such an extent that ‘any unusual smell, even a sudden strong scent of flowers in a garden, was enough to send me trembling’. The sense of smell becomes heightened in the feral quaking zone of trench warfare, as does the sense of touch. Through the soles of his feet and boots, it was possible for Barbusse (1916/2004, p. 286) to distinguish between mud and shit when ‘we are walking through filth and can feel its slithering softness against the earthy mud’. ‘The mire of excrement’ and ‘the foul and fetid muck’ (p. 287) is different from the rich and fertile mud of a living wetland. They are often confused, though, partly due to the indiscriminate sense of smell which tends to associate all smells of decomposition with shit as death-dealing waste and not as life-giving manure. Trench warfare for Barbusse is a human zoo in which ‘we are drenched in the odour of a lion’s den’ (p. 56). Despite the fecund smells, this is a sterile place, ‘the grey, muddy, downtrodden landscape in front of us [is] sterilized by the rain’ (p. 109). The water of the battlefield is not life-giving, nor even death-dealing, just sterile with no possibility of new life springing from it. The heat of thermodynamic industrial warfare has scarred the living body of the earth producing ‘the huge sterilized, cauterized plain’ (p. 139). A scorched earth policy of burning has been enacted on the battlefield itself, not merely on the pasture and crop fields of retreating armies for invading ones. This wounding has also penetrated beneath the surface. Not only has the surface of the body of the earth been cauterised and scarred but also the depths of the body of the earth have been exposed with ‘giant viscera and entrails opened upon the earth’ (p. 207) leaving ‘the plain with its entrails bleeding and rotting’ (p. 270). The murky depths have become the open surface, the body of the earth opened up. WWI not only had its physical effects on men and landscapes, it also produced psychological affects such as the ‘black depression’ of what the French called ‘le cafard, the cockroach, crawling up their backs’ (Winter, 2004, p. ix), or more simply in African-American terms, ‘the blues’ (Helphand, 2006, p. 45; see also p. 116). This black depression under the black sun of melancholy affects both the soldier and the earth as what Barbusse (1916/2004, p. 205) calls ‘a dreadful melancholy crushes the earth’. The earth is burdened not only with destruction, but also with depression just like its inhabitants. There is a parasympathetic response in humans and the earth. This is an unhealthy place for mental health. These are not the old fears of ‘the miasma of the slums’ (p. 17) and the swamps of sickness in which malaria arises (see Giblett, 1996a, Chapter 5). Rather it is the melancholic marshes of ‘a lake of stagnant

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darkness’ (p. 207) on whose ‘pestilential shore’ (p. 248) horror and terror, the two ruling passions of modernity, arise. This is ‘a zone of terror’ (p. 298) of ‘soft ruins’ and ‘dreadful space’. Terror of the world above the ground, horror of the world below; terror of guns, mortar, shells, planes and zeppelins; horror of slime, mud, drowning, death, decomposition. More precisely, the world below is where ‘the bodies [are] buried under the mud of the earthly lower depths’ (p. 314). Otto Dix graphically illustrated this sort of scene in which body and land merge together in destructive association. Skeletons and skulls stuck in the mud are revealed when trenches collapse (see Henshaw and Horsfield, 2007, plate 9 ‘Collapsed Trenches’, p. 3). Body and land are no longer the benign figure for each other (see Giblett, 2008a). Nor is landscape simply the backdrop for the scenery of war. The landscape for Henshaw and Horsfield (2007, p. 2) in Dix’s prints is ‘torn apart, desecrated and ravaged. Often the landscape appears alien, other-worldly, nightmarish. It appears sometimes as a simple backdrop to human tragedy, but often as a more integral part of the destruction’ as in ‘Collapsed Trenches’ that depicts what they call ‘disarticulated limbs’. Land and body merge together in destructive embrace. Bits of bodies are parts of the landscape. Paul Nash also illustrated these ‘trench-scapes’, or ‘antilandscapes’ as Hynes (cited by Helphand, 2006, p. 36) calls them without the graphic detail of Dix’s drawings yet depicting the transformation of the land from beneficent landscape to malign anti-landscape. The land for Wilfred Owen (cited by Helphand, 2006, p. 32) is not only ‘cratered like the moon’ but also ‘pitted with great pocks and scabs of plagues’. Commenting on this figuration of the land as body, Helphand (2006, p. 32) goes on to argue that in anthropomorphizing the landscape as a body, writers described the face of the land as deformed and disfigured and the body of the land as racked by disease and plague, ridden by the pestilence of war. Unlike the soldiers who died, the landscape survived, but it too was a casualty of war. Body and land have become the malignant figure for each other; both are diseased not only physically but also psychologically. The world of men above is mirrored for Barbusse (1916/2004, p. 318) in the world below you can see their shadows moving across the great melancholy mirror of the ground and reflected in the pale stagnant surface of the old


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trenches, which alone whitens and inhabits the infinite void of space in the midst of this polar desert with its misty horizons. Rather than the reflective surface of water being a mirror in which a soldier could reflect upon his place in the scheme of things, the surface of water reflects the sterile desert of the world above. The solid became liquid, in a word, slime, but the solid could also become gaseous, ethereal, in a word, sublime. For Blunden (1928/2000, p. 108), ‘the solid ground was ethereal’ when they felt that they were able to rise above it, exultant, sublime. While the world above ground, such as the sky, could evoke the sublime, even in war (see Fussell, 1975/2000, p. 52–3), the world below was the impure realm of the uncanny – in war, or not. The landscape of battle in WWI for Winter (2004, p. xv) was ‘full of the uncanny and the bizarre’. Charles Carrington (cited by Fussell, 1975/2000, p. 79) was obsessed for 50 years with ‘No Man’s Land’ and ‘the unknown world beyond it. … [O]ver there … is the uncanny.’ The landscape of trench warfare is not only a landscape of space (and place) but also of time in which the future is colonised. The soldiers of trench warfare are not only buried in mud but also, as Barbusse (1916/2004, p. 8) put it, ‘we are buried in the depths of an eternal battlefield’ in which the past stretches out behind them and the future rises before them. Time has become space; time has been spatialised. They have looked back into the past only to see the future with horror for ‘he has seen too deep into the past not to see the future with horrifying precision’ (p. 127). They are avatars of Benjamin’s and Klee’s Angelus Novus who faces, and looks back into, the past while moving backwards into the future, the future of WWII. Naturally, in the struggle to explain the inexplicable, Barbusse invokes hell. The ‘hell’ (p. 47), ‘this hell on earth’ (p. 209), and ‘this hell’ (p. 257) of trench warfare is not so much ‘a blazing inferno with huge and furious masses of red and black’ (p. 226) as ultimately, and in a word, water at one time I thought that worst hell of war was the flaming of shells; then, for a long time, I thought it was the suffocation of underground passages that constantly close in on you. But no: hell is water. (p. 299) Barbusse’s narrator does not go on to say why, and presumably there is no need to do so given all the reasons that have already been enunciated.

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The wastewaterland of WWI trench warfare for Barbusse (1916/2004, p. 306) mixes the elements of earth and water I shall never forget the sight of this endless landscape across the face of which the filthy water had corroded colours, features, relief, its forms attacked by this liquid decay crumbling and draining off on all sides through the broken skeleton of posts, barbed wire and shoring – and above it all, amid the dark Stygian immensities, the vision of this thrill of reason and simple logic which suddenly began to shake these men like a fever of madness. The ancient river Styx of the underworld is no longer an infernal, imaginary marshland as it was for Dante (Inferno, VII, 103–30) in which the souls of the sullen are stuck, but has become an artificial, all-too-real marshland, ‘this sullen mile of mud,’ as A. P. Herbert (cited by Lloyd, 1998, p. 25) put it, in which sullen soldiers are stuck. The underworld has also ceased to be down below and come to the surface to be revealed in all its horror, truly hell on earth. This is a particularly and peculiarly modern hell in which the land has been transformed by industrial technology. Ypres for one soldier was ‘a proper Dante’s inferno. Ground churned to pulp and mire’ (cited by Helphand, 2006, p. 32). The hell of the battlefield becomes the modern landscape of hell par excellence. Indeed, for Bloch (1998, p. 103) writing in 1931, ‘in modernity’s hell there exists an emptiness that is equivalent to the emptiness of the modern battlefield’. The hell of the modern battlefield is not merely a ‘symbol’ for the hell of modernity but is contiguous with it. Writing two years earlier, Bloch (1998, p. 308) was unfortunately prescient about this contiguity as he suggested that ‘the nothingness that stands behind the mechanized world, a world unmediated by humanity, is a mortuary in which people have been buried alive’. In fact, in WWII, the bombed cities of Europe were mortuaries in which people were buried alive in baleful fulfilment of Bloch’s prophecy. Views of the modern battlefield as a muddy hell are not the monopoly of eyewitness accounts but persist in a recent historical novel of WWI by Jeff Shaara (2004) in which ‘the ever-present mud, the soggy lowlands of Flanders’ is ‘a black, wet hell’ (p. 3) with ‘black water’ (pp. 4, 6, 8–9). This is a hell of smell emitted by ‘unseen decay’ from ‘what lay rotting in the deep mud’ (p. 5). As for Lynch and other writers, mud is the dominant substance and word for Shaara (p. 6). This hell on and in earth with the mixing of earth and water in WWI becomes the hell above earth in WWII in which fire and air are mixed in the firebombing of aerial warfare, a hell of flames on earth with the destruction of cities.

5 Fire and Air in the Sublime Bombing of World War II Aerial Warfare

The landscape of trench warfare was a battlefield for military combatants pitted against each other in the country, whereas the landscape of firebombed cites was the result of military operations against civilians in the city. WWI was fought in the country and over the country; it was also fought on, in and sometimes under, the ground. The theatre of operations was the countryside with its fields, hills, valleys, villages, woods and wetlands. The immediate strategic objectives were positions in the country: that ridge or salient or village. Paris was a long-term and remote German objective. London was bombed in 1915 and 1917, and 1300 people were killed as a result of 225 tons of bombs being dropped on it (Bourke, 2005, p. 224). This tonnage and these casualties pale into insignificance compared with World War II (WWII). WWII was fought over (in two senses) the city; it was fought on and over the ground and sometimes in the air. The theatre of operations was through the countryside to the cities and over the cities. Paris and Vienna were immediate German objectives, London and other British cities, targets; later Dresden and Hamburg, and many other German cities were immediate Allied objectives, and targets, as were Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All the major battles of WWI were land battles; some of the major, if not decisive, battles of WWII were air battles, such as the Battle of Britain fought in the air. Indeed, for Camus (2006, p. 45) writing in 1944 four years after the Battle of Britain, ‘Germany lost the war when it lost the Battle of Britain’. Trench warfare was a new kind of warfare whose horrors were largely unimagined before they took place. Aerial bombing was a new kind of warfare whose terrors ‘science fiction’ writers such as H. G. Wells and theorists of air war such as Giulio Douhet imagined before they were enacted. Wells’ The War in the Air, first published in 1908, is a prescient 69

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science fiction about the eponymous topic of its title. Bourke (2005, pp. 225–6) calls it a ‘prophetic novel’ with its ‘science-fiction horror’. Reflecting back some years later in prefaces he wrote for various editions, Wells (2005, p. 278) noted the precision of his insights that ‘with the flying machine war alters in its character: it ceases to be an affair of “fronts” and becomes an affair of “areas”’. Fronts are two-dimensional with length and breadth on the ground whereas areas are three-dimensional spaces with height as well in the air. Flying machines made war possible for Wells (2005, p. xxix) ‘in three instead of two dimensions’. War was no longer confined to ‘a restricted area called the Seat of War. Now the whole atmosphere was the Seat of War’ (p. 174) not only because planes flew in it but also because it provided one of the necessary components for fire (oxygen). Wherever there is air there is the possibility of fire; and wherever there is air is the possibility of flight and the possibility of planes carrying devices that can cause fire. Aerial warfare creates the terrifying possibility that the air we breathe to sustain life will become the medium of death and the means to destroy life. This terrifying possibility was realised in WWII. Aerial warfare also meant ‘the disappearance of the theoretical immunity of non-combatants’. Flying machines flew over fronts to strafe or bomb targets behind enemy lines. As modern industrial warfare is total warfare fought by a nation at arms whose labour power is mobilised for the war effort, non-combatants become targets. Besides these strategic insights, Wells’ novel also highlighted the fiery destruction and human dimension of aerial warfare with ‘the smashing impact of bombs’ and ‘the grotesque, swift onset of insatiable conflagrations’. From ‘it all’, the central character of the novel, Bert Smallways, ‘felt detached, disembodied’ (p. 140). The use of the third dimension in warfare enables the bomber and aerial witness to feel removed and uninvolved in the destruction occurring on the ground below them. It meant that ‘men … poured death and destruction upon the homes and crowds below’ (p. 149) but felt detached from it. Wells was aware of the paradox of ‘the enormous powers and grotesque limitations of aerial warfare’, in particular that ‘it was impossible to subdue the city except by destroying it’ (p. 149). This deadly paradox has haunted all aerial warfare, particularly the strategic bombing of cities in WWII. For Wells, ‘the application of science to warfare’ meant that ‘it was unavoidable that great cities should be destroyed’ (p. 149). How unfortunately right he was; how much death and destruction could be laid at the doorstep of the ‘unavoidable’. Trench warfare was a new kind of warfare whose strategies and tactics were developed on the ground and in practice, as the old ones, such as

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the cavalry charge, were outdated and ineffective. Aerial bombing was a new kind of warfare whose strategies and tactics were devised in the airy heights of military theory before they were enacted. The primary text of aerial warfare and its strategy is Douhet’s Command of the Air first published in 1921. This book was reprinted by the US Office of Air Force History in 1983, which testifies to its status as a classic of military theory and strategy for the practice of aerial warfare. Douhet (1921/1983, p. 3) was aware that ‘aeronautics opened up to men a new field of action, the field of the air’ and that this constituted ‘a new battlefield’. A dictionary definition of an aeronaut is of ‘a traveller through the air’, either a balloonist or pilot, and so not a passenger as such. Aeronautics is ‘the science, art, or practice of controlled flight through the air’. The air traveller controls the air vehicle unlike the air passenger. Part of the attraction of aerial warfare for Douhet (p. 52) is that ‘the air is a uniform element everywhere’ subject though, of course, to the vagaries of the weather and so to the speed of air flow and the presence or absence of that other element – water – in the air in the form of rain, hail, humidity, sleet or snow. The plane for Douhet (p. 82) makes ‘man master of space’ as ‘all space is an unlimited roadway for planes’ (p. 89). The trope of the road characterises civilian transportation whereas military mastery of space means that it is a largely unlimited theatre of operations for war. The new battlefield of the field of the air transcended ‘the surface of the earth’ (pp. 4 and 7; see also note, p. 27) and created a new medium for warfare. Artillery shells and incendiary projectiles had been propelled through the air for hundreds of years. With the advent of the manned aeroplane, the projectile could be launched in the air at targets on the ground and other targets in the air. The vertical dimension of the battlefield was increased aeronautically and made the way for their extension astronomically with satellites and ‘Star Wars’. Aeronautics enables ‘man’ to break the ties that tied him to the surface of the earth (p. 7) and to transcend it in an act of sublimation (see Giblett, 1996a; 2004). No technological development is without its effects and impacts on its users, and targets (see Giblett, 2008c), and the use of planes in war is no exception. This holds true not only for pilot and passenger, bomber and bombed, but also for war itself. Prior to the use of planes in warfare, there was for Douhet (p. 9), ‘a legal distinction made between combatants and non-combatants’. With the advent of the use of planes in war, ‘there will be no distinction any longer between soldiers and civilians’ (p. 10). Why? Because planes can ‘bomb our cities’ (p. 10), ostensibly in search of military targets, but given the embeddedness

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of military facilities and factories supplying the military within cities and the mobilisation of the civilian workforce for the total war effort (and given that targeting will never be 100 per cent accurate and reliable), civilians and civilian facilities will be bombed. ‘A nation at war’ (p. 9) means that all members of the nation are participants in the war, including possible targets. A nation at war in the air (as well as on the sea and the ground) means that the sky is the space in which a threat may be posed to soldier, sailor, pilot and civilian alike. All four are linked in the common element of the air. The soldier on the ground, the sailor on the high seas and the civilian in the city or country were previously separated, unless the soldier or sailor invaded the place where the civilian lived. With the advent of planes in war, this separation no longer applied as they, and the pilot, shared a common element. This commonality of the air as an element in, and a medium for, warfare meant that the airplane (and not its weaponry or bomb load) for Douhet (p. 15) in his day is ‘the offensive weapon par excellence’. In our day, it is the cruise missile or smart bomb. All are characterised by the use of air as the element through which the offensive weapon of war is conveyed. As the air poses such a potential threat from one’s enemy and as it is the element through which to pose a threat to one’s enemy, it becomes a major battlefield, and a stake in battle. The plane in war increases the pressure for the pre-emptive strike. The use of the element of air in warfare changes the use of the elements of earth, water and fire. The surface of the earth is, for Douhet (p. 19), the coastline of the air. The conditions pertaining to both elements, the air and the sea, are analogous; so that the surface of the earth, both solid and liquid, should be defended from aerial attack, not by scattering guns and planes over its whole extent, but by preventing the enemy from flying. In other words, by ‘conquering the command of the air’. This is Douhet’s mantra. For him, ‘to have command of the air means to be in a position to prevent the enemy from flying while retaining the ability to fly oneself’ (p. 24). The result of this command is simple, and can be summed up in one word: ‘to have command of the air is have victory’ (p. 25). Douhet’s mantra could be rephrased in the following terms: the best form of defence (of ones cities, factories, civilians) is attack (as he says later (p. 52)) and the best means of attack is the plane. Also for him,


the best means of defence of ‘the air arm’ is attack (p. 42). He finally concludes that ‘the basic principle which must govern the development of aerial warfare’ is that ‘aerial warfare admits of no defence, only offence’ (p. 55). The air becomes a liminal zone of attack alone unlike the coastline, which is both a zone of attack and of defence. Through the air zone, an attack may come and defence must be made preferably (in military terms) by attacking the enemy first. This is the doctrine of the pre-emptive strike that reaches its nadir in MAD, ‘mutually assured destruction’. The targets for such a pre-emptive attack could include what Douhet (p. 20) calls ‘the civilian population of congested cities’ with the attacker ‘making no distinction between military and non-military objectives’. The result for him is inevitably that ‘the decisive blows will be directed at civilians’ (p. 61). From the air, the problem for bombers is to distinguish military from non-military targets, and military from non-military personnel, especially when some civilians have been mobilised in total war and the nation is at war. The bombs for attacking such targets for Douhet are of three types: explosive, incendiary and poison. With the last type outlawed in the aftermath of WWI, the former two were used in WWII with destructive and deadly force. For Douhet (p. 20), ‘the explosives will demolish the target, the incendiaries will set fire to it’, and destroy it. ‘Demolish’ implies built structures, but as civilians are also targets, so human beings, and bodies, are ‘demolished’ by explosives, and set fire to and destroyed by incendiaries. With the use of incendiary bombs in air warfare, the element of fire is introduced into the equation with the element of air. Or perhaps more precisely, incendiary bombs reintroduce fire into warfare with devastating and destructive impact. Earth, air, fire and water, the four elements, are theatres of warfare (in the case of earth, air and water) and even weapons in warfare (in the case of fire). Command of the air follows, and is made possible by what Douhet (p. 29) calls ‘man’s conquest of space’. Command of fire is made possible by ‘man’s’ conquest of matter. The former took place through the science of aeronautics, the latter through the science of chemistry. This conquest took place not only in the fire of the internal combustion engine, but also in the fire of incendiaries. Fire was both contained in a small explosion within an engine and spread in a large immolation with an incendiary bomb. Fire was both harnessed and unleashed. ‘What determines victory in aerial warfare’ for Douhet (p. 44) is ‘fire power,’ the power of fire delivered in explosive and incendiary bombs as quickly and accurately as possible.

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War in the air not only reshapes the element of air and has impacts on the earth below and what is on it (such as cities) and on those who live on it (and in them). It also reshapes the relationship between ‘men’ and machine. The warplane (fighter or bomber) is like an airborne tank in that the operator is cocooned in a metal box. Both are indicative of the way in which modern industrial world warfare is fought not only by ‘masses of men and machines’ as Douhet (pp. 44 and 84) puts it twice, in tank or plane squadrons and formations (p. 45), but also men in their machines. Both the warplane and the tank have armour plating for protecting ‘the vital parts’ (p. 45) of the machine, and the men inside them. ‘Men’ and metallic machine form a mass, a unitary being with ‘vital parts’, flesh and metal. Warplane and war fighter come together for Douhet (p. 69) with the ‘forging of an arm’ of the monstrous military man-machine. They also come together with the introduction of two-way radios in WWII to form the cyborg, the man–machine–communication technology composite. The forging of the ‘air arm’ of the military, the development of an ‘airforce’ to deploy with the land forces of the artillery and infantry and the sea forces of the navy, is made possible by the forging of the individual warplane. This machine, for Douhet (p. 77), ‘man has forged out of his genius’. It is thus a Bachelor Machine from a Bachelor Birth. It is a product of cerebral parthogenesis which cannot create life – only destroy it as occurred in WWII. Writing recently on the firebombing of German cities by Allied bombers, Sebald (2003, p. 19) argues ‘the war in the air was war pure and undisguised’. In this pure air war, ‘the innermost principle of every war, which is to aim for a wholesale an annihilation of the enemy with his dwellings, his history, and his natural environment as can possible be achieved’, was pursued. This principle was exercised by war being taken to the new heights achievable by fighter and bomber planes which not only produced ‘a kind of mobile front line’ as Sebald (2003, p. 17) puts it to and fro across the horizontal dimension of space but also up and down within the vertical dimension. Planes and balloons had been used in WWI but it was predominantly an earth-bound war that took place on, and in, the earth, in its depths beneath the surface as we have seen. WWII was less earth-bound and took place on, and above, the surface of the earth. The results were different too with whole French towns and villages obliterated by artillery bombardment and their residents killed or displaced as refugees in WWI whereas in WWII, many German cities were ruined from firebombing and their residents burnt to death or displaced too. Both landscapes, however, were described as ‘lunar landscapes’ as we have seen with WWI and as Sebald remarks with


WWII. The lunar landscapes of both WWI and II were produced by bombardment, and both were wastelands (Sebald, 2003, p. 74) and products of modern industrial warfare (Sebald, 2003, p. 64), or more precisely, ‘the machinery of annihilation operating on an industrial scale’ (Sebald, 2003, p. 96). Yet they were different in that the lunar landscape of WWI was characterised by craters full of water on and below the surface of the earth whereas the lunar landscape of WWII was made up of ‘mounds of rubble’ (Sebald, 2003, pp. 36, 74) on and above the earth’s surface. The former was wet and cold and the latter dry and hot. The countryside of WWI trench warfare was a wastewetlandscape of artificial ‘swamps’ whereas the bombed cities of WWII aerial warfare were ‘a landscape of ruins’ (p. 46). Although Blunden (1928/2000), Hurley (1917) and Thomas (1917/1978) comment repeatedly on the ruins of WWI, these were of individual buildings and villages, not of large proportions of cities as in WWII. Recently Sebald called some areas of Germany during WWII ‘that vast wilderness, perhaps the most horrifying expanse of ruins in the whole of Europe’ (p. 30). From France as ‘swamp’ to Germany as ruin, marks a profound, elemental shift in the exercise of armament, in the deployment of firepower and in the experience of war. It also marks a shift in the type of landscape produced from feral swamp to ruined cities, from human-made countryside re-made into human-made swamp to human-made city re-made into human-made ruin. A ruin is defined by Solnit (2005a, p. 88) as ‘a human construction abandoned to nature’. A bombed city is an artificial ruin, a human construction destroyed by culture. A feral swamp is a native construction abandoned by humans. Both swamp and ruin stand as figures for the unconscious. Just as the swamp is a figure for the cultural unconscious (see Giblett, 1996a), so ruins for Solnit (2005a, p. 89) ‘become the unconscious of the city’. Out of both new life can spring as Solinit (2005a, p. 90) argues that ‘with ruin a city comes to death, but a generative death like the corpse that feeds flowers’ just as the corpses did in the battlefields of WWI. Cities and citizens, generally well away from troops fighting on the ground, became the front line in aerial warfare. In modern war, for Friedrich (2006, p. 357), ‘the difference between soldier and civilian no longer existed; everyone was a warrior’. In the air war, everyone was a combatant and a target. ‘Civilian warriors’, as Friedrich (2006, p. 358) calls them, ‘were defenceless; they had no weapons’. The front line was not merely mobile in time and space but also socially mobile across the distinction between soldier and civilian. Civilians for Pimlott

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(1988, p. 123) were ‘the new front line in total war’ with devastating consequences for them and their cities and homes in them. Germany, for Camus (2006, p. 40) writing during WWII, was ‘resigned to the appalling destruction that is raining down on their cities’. Camus later conjured up ‘an apocalyptic image’ of ‘its cities [that had been] transformed into shapeless rubble’ (p. 229). What had rained down from the sky had destroyed cities on the ground. Camus visited occupied Germany shortly after the Armistice and what he saw ‘reinforced the premonition’ as he found ‘the rubble and the barren fields ravaged by war and dotted with military cemeteries overshadowed by ungenerous skies’. He concluded that ‘this indeed is the land of the dead’. Resigned or not to the destruction, the fact remains that the sky above was no longer just the generous source of life-giving rain but also the greedy medium of death-dealing destruction on cities and citizens alike. The deployment of what Virilio (2005, p. 15) calls ‘our aero-naval modernity’ against cities entailed what he also called ‘the “aeropolitics” of a mass extermination of cities’ (Virilio, 2007, p. 8). This mass extermination of cities destroyed buildings and their inhabitants, a kind of genocide of cities, a citi-cide, or what Helphand (2006, p. 246) calls ‘urbacide’, ‘the wilful destruction of cities’. Just as WWI turned the country into a ‘desert’, WWII turned the city into a ‘desert’. For Virlio (2007, p. 7), ‘a human environment [was] turned into a desert through the annihilation brought about by air raids’. Like WWI, the ‘desert’ of WWII was not a living ‘natural’ ecosystem but a human-made wasteland. Whereas the ‘desert’ of WWI was wet, muddy and cold, the ‘desert’ of WWII was dry, rubbly and hot. This mass extermination of cities occurred at the tail end of WWII and on into the Cold War. For Virilio (2005, p15), ‘after Dresden, and especially after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this “aeropolitics” turned into a cosmopolitics of nuclear terror with the Anti-City strategy’. The nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki heralded for Bourke (2005, p. 363), the inception of ‘The Age of Terrorism’, which then thrived during the Cold War. This age with its anti-city strategy, however, was by no means pro-country but merely replaced and extended the anti-country strategy that had culminated in the landscape of trench warfare to the anti-city strategy that culminated in the landscape of ruined cites. Our aero-naval hypermodernity is both anti-city and anti-country. The anti-city strategy of WWII was carried out by the firestorming of strategic bombing whereas the anti-country strategy of WWI was carried out by the earth-moving of artillery bombardment and trench construction.


The ruination of European cities began in 1940 with the German Blitz of Coventry and London, increased with the Allied bombing of Hamburg in 1943 (Lowe, 2007) and culminated in the destruction of such cities as Dresden (Taylor, 2004) and Würzburg (Knell, 2003) in 1945. Goebbels evoked the bombing of London in 1940 in Dantesque terms as ‘an inferno of unimaginable extent. The city is coming to resemble a hell’ (cited by Taylor, 2004, p. 100). Yet this bombing was limited and the resulting fire was half a square mile in area. It was officially named a ‘conflagration’. For Taylor (2004, p. 108), it ‘was the nearest London came to what later would be called a firestorm’. For Grayling (2006, p. 18), ‘the first ever firestorm caused by bombing’ was in Hamburg in July 1943, not in London in 1941. Yet a recent, twopart BBC TV documentary on the Blitz claims that London more than came close to a firestorm as it is subtitled London’s Firestorm. Some of the interviewees describe the event as a firestorm. ‘Bomber’ Harris, one of the architects of the allied firestorm, witnessed the London Blitz of December 1940 and remarked of the Germans that ‘they are sowing the wind’ (cited by Taylor, 2004, p. 109; Grayling, 2006, p. 49). The rest of this Biblical verse (Hosea 8:7) goes on to prophesy that they would reap the whirlwind – as indeed the Germans did as one witness remarked of the firebombing of Dresden and the resulting firestorm (Taylor, 2004, p. 267). Yet as Friedrich (2006, unpaginated, ‘Afterword for American and British Readers’) points out, ‘a characteristic of air wars is that those who sow the wind do not reap the whirlwind and those who reap the whirlwind did not sow the wind’. Hamburg was ‘the first big city to be annihilated’ according to Nossack (2004, p. 32) who witnessed its destruction as a spectator from outside the city (pp. 1–2) and bore witness in his book called The End: Hamburg 1943. The title refers not only to the end of the city as he knew it, but also the end of the world in apocalyptic tones. What he calls ‘the ruin of Hamburg’ (p. 6) is also variously described in apocalyptic terms as ‘the abyss’ (p. 6), ‘the end’ (p. 8) and ‘the netherworld’ (p. 11). Not merely ‘anti-city’, its destruction also pitted nature against nature for ‘even nature had risen up in hatred against herself’ (p. 11). Aero-naval modernity is anti-nature where two forces of nature (fire, storm) are both harnessed by the militaristic men and unleashed against nature. The result for Nossack is ‘the raging of the world against itself’ and ‘the earth writhed in agony’ (p. 15). These are the death throes of ‘raging destruction’ (p. 13) inflicted by the world and the earth upon itself by a world- and earth-hating military whose end (in two senses) is ‘the ruined world’ (p. 13). ‘The horror’ of ‘the disaster’ (p. 16) was that it

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was both natural and cultural, the forces of nature directed against both nature and culture by natural and cultural human beings against other natural and cultural human beings. Part of the horror for Nossack was the fact that the refugees fleeing from the city ‘brought with them an uncanny silence. No one dared question these mute figures’ (p. 17). They had ceased to be human, to be natural and cultural beings, because they were deprived of speech and had become speechless automatons who mimicked and mocked human behaviour in an uncanny fashion. The fact that this disastrous destruction of Hamburg was ‘the end’ for its residents of 1943 meant ‘we no longer have a past’ (p. 23), only a present and future rent from any connection with the past. Perhaps they did not even have a present and future as ‘we no longer had any time at all, we were outside of time’. In other words, they transcended time into eternity (p. 40). Space and time ceased to exist as they had been known. Not only was the spatial landscape transformed, but also the temporal one as well: ‘the infinite behind man wafted unhindered in the endlessness before him and hallowed his countenance for the passage of what is beyond time’ (p. 29). Space and time are collapsed together into the landscape of eternity and infinity. The less, or more, than human figures, who people this landscape are not only mute automatons but also icons with eyes ‘grown larger and transparent’ (p. 29) through witnessing the horrors of fiery destruction of their city and the (its, their) past. Hamburg has a fiery and watery history as its centre has been destroyed by fire four times and, as Lowe (2007, pp. 3, 5) puts it, ‘it is situated on a fluvial plain, most of the ground is little better than a marsh, and it is prone to flooding’. Hamburg is like a number of other modern cities built on wetlands, such as London, St Petersburg, New Orleans, Jakarta, and Perth, Western Australia (see Giblett, 1996a and Chapter 10 below). Some of these cities drained and filled their wetlands whereas others, like Hamburg, built canals and waterways so, as Lowe (2007, p. 3) goes on to argue, ‘the element that most dominates the city is water’. The domination of water made the city more susceptible to firebombing as Lowe (2007, p. 32) points out the soggy, waterlogged soil upon which Hamburg was built meant that whole districts were devoid of cellars – the high-water table of the Elbe floodplain would simply have swamped them. The very element of water that quenches fire made the city, or at least its citizens, more vulnerable to fire, or at least to firebombing from


the air. Of the Hamburg firestorm, Lowe (2007, p. 182) says that it was ‘one of the biggest man-made fires the world has ever seen’. Later, he says that ‘no other large fire in recorded history has ever equalled it in intensity’ and that it was ‘the greatest firestorm the world has ever seen’ (Lowe, 2007, p. 185).

Coda: The Elements and the Senses in World Warfare

The transformation of the land in both wars had its effect on those who fought these wars and were affected by them. That reshaping took place at the fundamental level of the arrangements between the four elements of earth, air, fire and water as we have seen. The reconfiguration of the elements in world warfare had implications for, and effects on, human sensory perception in the feral quaking zones of trench and aerial warfare. Warfare is not only an assault on the human body in general but also on the senses in particular. The nature of this assault changed in the transition from the trench warfare of WWI to aerial warfare in WWII. Soldiers for Helphand (2006, p. 33) in WWI ‘saw, heard, smelled, touched, and even tasted daily, hourly, what in a sane world would only ever be [a] fleeting assault on the senses by the horrific’. Bombers in WWII saw, heard and may have smelled, but certainly did not touch and taste, daily, what in the insane world of modern industrial warfare was a fleeting and limited assault on the senses by the horrific. The sensory experience of the feral quaking zone of warfare differs also from that of the native quaking zone of wetlands. The swamp can look ugly, smell bad, feel slimy, taste muddy and sound oozy, and produce horror and the uncanny (see Giblett, 1996a), but its address to the senses can be pleasant and it is certainly not as horrific nor as terrifying as the assault on the senses that warfare entails. Considering all five senses in relation to the feral quaking zones of industrial world warfare leads to a discussion in Chapter 9 of a new embodied environmental aesthetics. For Giacomo Leopardi, the nineteenth-century Italian poet and essayist, and Italy’s second national poet after Dante, the element of air is linked to hearing. He remarked that air is ‘the element destined for sound’ (Leopardi, 1845/1982, p. 357). Air is the element in which sound addresses the sense of hearing and the organ of the ears. Similarly, for 80

Elements and Senses in World Warfare 81

Immanuel Kant (1798/2006, p. 47), the eighteenth-century German philosopher, the sense of hearing is one of the senses of merely mediate perception. Through and by means of the air that surrounds us a distant object to a large extent is cognised. … The shape of the object is not given through hearing. An explosion heard in the distance is largely understood, but the shape of the explosion, its size, extent and impact, is not ascertained through hearing, only through sight. Air war is a war of sounds. It percusses the sense of hearing and the organs of the ears with the sounds of deafening artillery, humming propellers, whistling and crashing bombs, howling and wailing sirens, punching blast waves, quaking buildings, screams of terror and raging firestorms. For Camus (2006, p. 61) writing during WWII, ‘the sound of explosions and destruction [is] the very voice of death’. The sounds of war give rise to terror. This association between the noise of war and the sensation of terror is a feature of any war utilising artillery. Goethe (1987, p. 652) in his account of the Prussian campaign in France in 1792 made the association between the two in the following terms it is … remarkable how whatever causes such terrible anxiety [under bombardment] is conveyed to us solely through our sense of hearing: for it is the thunder of the cannon, and the howling, whistling and blasting of cannon balls through the air that is actually the cause of these sensations. Air war takes the link between bombardment and terror to new heights, to greater extent and for longer periods. Extending Leopardi’s association of air with sound and hearing to the other elements and senses, earth is the element destined for seeing. Earth is the element directed to the sense of sight and the organs of the eyes. Earth war is a war of sights. It assaults the sense of sight and the organs of the eyes with the sights of the battlefield of trench warfare, of wounded or dead soldiers, of sudden flashes, blasted landscapes, ruined buildings, burnt and dismembered civilians, of living lands and cities transformed into piles of rubble and wastelands, of land no longer life-giving but death-dealing, changing from womb to tomb with people trapped or killed in bunkers and cellars. During WWII, in the bombed cities of

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Germany, ‘living space became a death zone’ (Friedrich, 2006, p. 84) after it had passed through a quaking zone of shaking and falling buildings. For Leopardi, ‘eyesight and hearing, according to the natural order concerning living creatures, are the principal senses’. They are the two senses of aesthetics for Hegel (2004, p. 43), with the eye, as Bloch (1998, p. 1) argues, ‘more commanding than the ear’. The eye sees and commands from afar. It has a longer range of perception than the ear. The sense of sight for Kant (p. 48) is ‘also a sense of mediate sensation’ like hearing and it is the noblest of the senses for him because it ‘not only has the widest sphere of perception in space but its organ feels least affected’. The eye commands unfeelingly from afar. Eyesight and hearing are also for Leopardi (1845/1982, p. 367) ‘the two senses most characteristic of the living’. Air and earth are also two elements for the living. Yet in war, especially in modern industrial warfare, air and earth are elements of the dead and dying. They are elements of anti-aesthetics of ugly sights and cacophonous sounds. Firestorms sucked oxygen out of the air until it ceased to be life-giving and became death-dealing. In the words of one eyewitness of the Hamburg firestorm, ‘the air was actually filled with fire’ (cited by Grayling, 2006, p. 83). The bombers produced the sound of ‘the doom-laden drone in the heavens’ (cited by Lowe, 2007, p. 161). The firestorm produced the sounds of ‘a shrill howling’ that ‘grew into a hurricane’ and ‘a sea of flames’ (cited by Grayling, 2006, p. 83). Lowe (2007, p. 195) notes that ‘Flammenmeer, “sea of flames,” comes up again and again in accounts of the firestorm’ and he cites many instances of this usage. For Friedrich (2006, pp. 84 and 167), through heat, radiation, and toxic gases, the very air was being transformed into something unliveable … the air that life needs to thrive had been exchanged for something else. The firestorm simulated the atmosphere of another planet, one incompatible with life. Earth had ceased to be earth, and air, air. Extending Leopardi further, fire is the element destined for touch, the sense that for Bloch (1998, p. 157) ‘gives the strongest impression of reality’. The sense of touch for Kant (1798/2006, pp. 46 and 48) is ‘the only one of immediate external perception’, but it is also for him ‘the most limited condition of perception’ because of its restricted spatial range compared to the sense of sight. Touch gives a strong and deep impression and an immediate perception, but it is limited and narrow in range and scope. Fire is destined for touch because it radiates heat to the sense of touch and the organ of the skin. Fire war is a war of radiation to the surface of the body


and combustion of surface of the body and the earth with burning flesh, buildings and trees. The skin in fire war, Friedrich (2006, p. 440) says, ‘felt the temperature and the blast of air, the build up of the blaze and the wind that carried it’. Fire war also produced toxic gases. The flames, Friedrich (2006, p. 330) says, ‘poisoned the air. Combustion generates heat and gases, the main agents that attack the body’. And not just the outside surfaces but also the inside surfaces. The nose, Friedrich (2006, p. 440) says, ‘registered the fire and odorous gases’. Toxic gases generated by burning were the main cause of death (for example, in Hamburg, 70–80 per cent (Friedrich, 2006, p. 167)). Water is the element destined for tasting. It drenches the sense of taste and the organ of the palate (mouth). Water war is a war of drenching of the body with torrential rain, of swallowing it and drowning in it, or in mud, water mixed with earth. In fire war, Friedrich (2006, p. 367) points out, ‘water had a hard time keeping up’. The four elements of earth, air, water and fire address the four senses of sight, hearing, taste and touch. The fifth sense, the sense of smell, is affronted by all four elements. The four elements impunge, to coin a new word, on the sense of smell and the organ of the nasal mucous membrane (nose). Smell, for Kant (1798/2006, p. 51), is taste at a distance … the pleasure coming from the sense of smell is always fleeting and transient. – But as a negative condition of wellbeing, this sense is not unimportant, in order not to breathe in bad air (… the stench of swamps and animal carcasses), or also not to need rotten things for nourishment. The sense of smell operates for Kant both positively as a sense of pleasure ‘of the most intimate taking into ourselves’ (p. 49) and negatively as a sense of avoidance of taking bad smells into ourselves. A case in point for Kant (p. 50) is filth which, for him, seems to arouse nausea not so much through what is repugnant to the eyes and tongue as through the stench that we presume it has. For taking something in through smell (in the lungs) is even more intimate than taking in through the absorptive vessels of the mouth or throat. Air can smell bad such as the smell of bad air or poisonous gas as in WWI gas warfare, the smell of chlorine or mustard gas, or ‘the stench of rotten flesh … over everything’ so ‘you could smell the front line miles before you could see it’ (Fussell, 1975/2000, p. 49) (and ‘you could smell the battlefield miles before you reached it’ (Helphand, 2006, p. 33)). Fire can

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smell bad such as the smell of burning organic matter. In a fire war, such as WWII firebombing, the smells of gases and of burning or burnt and decomposing flesh smelt bad (as in the case of eyewitnesses, or nose witnesses, cited by Lowe (2007, pp. 179, 268)). Earth can smell bad, such as the smell of rotting or decaying or decomposing solid organic matter. In an earth war, such as WWI trench warfare, the smell of dead bodies and shit smelt bad. Water can smell bad, such as the smell of stagnant water, as it can also in water war, such as World War I trench warfare, also with the smell of dead bodies steeped in water in flooded trenches, the smell of bodily solids, such as shit, and of bodily fluids, such as urine and blood. Sight and sound give rise to terror and the sublime; smell and touch give rise to horror and the uncanny. For Kant (1798/2006, p. 49), touch, sight and hearing are ‘the three highest senses’. They are ‘senses of perception (of the surface)’, or of ‘vital sensation’ (p. 45), and are ‘more objective than subjective’ (p. 46). For Kant, ‘these three outer senses lead the subject through reflection to cognition of the object as a thing outside ourselves’ (p. 48). For him, smell and touch are ‘senses of pleasure (of the most intimate taking into ourselves)’ (p. 49), or of ‘organic sensation’ (p. 45). They ‘penetrate the body’ (p. 46) and are ‘more subjective than objective’ (p. 46). These inner two senses lead the subject through penetration to the sensation of the object as a thing inside ourselves. Taking a thing inside ourselves can give rise to revulsion or propulsion to get rid of it as soon as possible. Nausea for Kant is ‘such a strong vital sensation’ as the ‘intimate taking in can be dangerous for the animal’ (p. 49). Smell and taste are senses of the depths of the body. The smells of the earth or water, in the air, or of burning and the taste of water or food penetrate into the depths of the body. Sight, touch and hearing are senses of the surfaces of the body. The sight of the earth, the sounds through the air, and the heat or warmth of fire address the surfaces of the body. All four elements are ‘destined’ for one of the five senses and for one of five organs of the human body (Table 5.1): Table 5.1 Elements and senses Element

Destined for

Sense

Body Part/Organ

Air

Sound

Hearing

Ears

Earth

Sight

Seeing

Eyes

Fire

Feel

Touching

Skin

Water

Taste

Tasting

Mouth

All four

Smell

Smelling

Nose


The four elements are produced by the mixing of qualities of hot, cold, wet and dry (see Giblett, 1996a, pp. 156–7; Table 5.2). The four elements give rise to four ‘humours’, or human characteristics, or psychological states, in the ancient and Elizabethan schema of things and beings (Giblett, 1996a, p. 160; Table 5.2). Table 5.2 Elements and humours

Dry

‘Wet’

Hot

Cold

Fire

Earth

Heat

Solid

Choler/ic

Melancholy/ic

Air

Water

Gaseous

Liquid/Fluid

Blood/Sanguinous

Phlegm/atic

WWII air-fire war mixed these two elements in the sublime firebombing of cities and produced a hot, dry and gaseous war. It was also characterised by heated exchanges and angry outbursts over the morality of strategic bombing and by bloody-minded and choleric leaders like Hitler and Churchill. WWI water–earth warfare mixed these two elements in the slimy trenches of man-made swamps and produced a cold war in the literal sense of being alternatively wet and dry depending on the weather, the battlefield alternatively solid or liquid and every stage in between. It was also characterised by phlegmatic and melancholic soldiers who invoked for Fussell (1975/2000, p. 139) ‘the Slough of Despond’ as ‘the only adequate designation for churned-up mud morasses pummelled by icy rain and heavy shells’. For him, it would be impossible to count the number of times this imaginary place of melancholy and depression associated with native wetlands was invoked by and to describe sullen soldiers stuck in sullen mud (see Giblett, 1996a, pp. 166–7). It would be nearly equally impossible to count the number of times ‘British phlegm’ is invoked in Fussell’s study of the literature of WWI as the only adequate designation for the unflappable and ironical turns of phrase employed in the literature of trench warfare. The elements and humours are relics of a bygone age yet they live on as heuristic devices, a conclusion recently echoed by Arikha (2008, p. 304) for whom ‘the old humours are gone, but they are still useful, suggestive, and malleable images’ used even by recent writers to explain the inexplicable, to figure the horror and terror of modern, industrial world warfare.


Part III Photographic Sublime and Uncanny

Photography is a sublime communication technology. Using light, the light of divine revelation, reason and rationalist technology, analogue photography transforms the base matter of solid objects via a slimy emulsion of chemicals into an evanescent visual image engraved or inscribed on the surface of the base matter of plate, film and paper. Digital photography transforms the base matter of solid objects via the writing of digital code into an evanescent visual image inscribed on the surface of the base matter of a disc. Photography sublimates solid matter into the thin air of sun-filled space only to transform and commodify it into the sublimate of dead matter (see Giblett, 2008c). Sublime communication technologies, especially as used in the mass media, not only ‘kill’ people and places by representing them in the dead matter of the visual and aural image, but also bring them uncannily back to life, or at least give them a strange, uncanny kind of spectral afterlife in the flickering shadows, and shades, of the same medium. The uncanny for Freud was a return to the repressed brought about through ghostly, virtual presence evoked by crafted artefacts coming alive as it were, and through the disturbing simulation of human movement and speech by automatons. Sublime communication technologies are also uncanny communication technologies (see Giblett, 2008c). The sublime has a long history in western culture (see Giblett, 1996a Chapter 2). The sublime implies an impossible object (such as dead rock) terrifying in its magnitude. The uncanny has a much shorter history of less than a hundred years arguably beginning with Freud (see also Giblett, 1996a, Chapter 2). The uncanny intimates an impassible abject (such as living water) horrifying in its monstrosity (as we saw in the first four chapters). The uncanny for Freud is associated with a vague form. In regard to form, the uncanny is thus not so much the obverse 87

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of the sublime as in-between, or the mediating category between, the sublime and the beautiful. It has neither the huge formlessness of the sublime nor the small form of the beautiful, nor the panoramic form of the picturesque, but a vague form. The uncanny is particularly applicable to considering the quaking zone, both native and feral, as depicted in and by landscape and wilderness photography. Landscape and wilderness photography in both America and Australia has worked across all four modes of the sublime, the picturesque, the beautiful and the uncanny, the topics of Chapters 6 and 7.

6 Wilderness to Wasteland: The Sublime, the Picturesque and the Uncanny in the Photography of the American West

American landscape and wilderness photography has lived under the aegis of the aesthetic, and in particular, under the sign of the sublime and the picturesque, for some time. Ansel Adams’ photographs of towering mountains and canyons are arguably major expressions, exemplars and evokers of the sublime in photography. The sublime involves the formlessness of uplifting spectacles and produces feelings of awe and terror. By contrast, Carleton Watkins’s photographs of mountains reflected in still lakes express the picturesque in photography. The picturesque presents wellformed depictions of serene scenery and produces feelings of pleasure. Adams and Watkins reproduced from landscape painting the aesthetic categories of the sublime and picturesque with its capitalist politics of land use. Characterising the work of these two photographers in these terms is not merely of formalist or taxonomic interest but has profound political import for the ways in which land and landscape are seen and commodified. While this tradition has been dominant, there have been some photographers who have deviated from it, such as Timothy O’Sullivan whose photography of chasms and fissures evoke the uncanny. This produces an anti- or counter-aesthetic of the uncanny in photography that threatens to engulf the capitalist enterprise in landscapes and lands that are not commodifiable. The uncanny has a vague form and is both fascinating and horrifying. The successors of all three photographers in the New Topographics and Nuclear Landscape Photographers photograph wastelands across all three modes of the sublime, the picturesque and the uncanny (for these three modes, see Giblett, 1996a, Chapters 1 and 2; 2004, Chapters 3 and 4). The principal place these photographers have depicted in photography has been the American West. In the West, Sandweiss (2002, p. 2) argues, ‘nineteenth-century [as did twentieth-century] American photography 89

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found its most distinctive subject’. The American West and photography were made for each other. The West, she goes on to suggest, ‘is a fabled place of fantastic topography, exotic people, the place where the nation’s future would unfold’ (Sandweiss, 2002, p. 3). In both spatial and temporal terms, it was the ideal place for photography to represent and for the evolving technology to develop. As a result, American photography, for Sandweiss (2002, p. 154), ‘would realize its most compelling and distinctive subject’ in the West, not only in the nineteenth century but also in the twentieth. The Western landscape was the American future stretched out before it in enticing prospects in both the spatial and temporal sense in the age of exploration only to become a terrifying prospect in the nuclear age.

Ansel Adams Just as John Muir is ‘a monumental figure in the American conservation movement’ (Giblett, 2004, p. 125), so for Weber (2002, p. 14) Adams is ‘a figure of towering stature in the history of photography.’ He was what she goes on to call ‘America’s greatest landscape photographer of the twentieth century.’ Besides sharing monumental status, Adams and Muir shared a common landscape aesthetic of the monumental and a conservation agenda, though there were some differences between them. Adams was a long time member of the Sierra Club that Muir helped to found. Not just a conservation organisation, the Sierra Club for Solnit (2007, p. 235) ‘put the aesthetic to political use in a way no other environmental group had.’ The Australian Wilderness Society followed suit with no regard for the politics of pictures, and of aesthetics (see Chapter 7 below). Turnage (1990, p. 10) describes Adams in his introduction to a collection of Adams’ (1990) photographs of the American wilderness as ‘a kind of visual Muir’. This applies to Muir of the mountainous wilderness and not to Muir of the marsh and swamp wilderness as with his encounter with an alligator in Florida (as we saw in Chapter 1). Weber (2002, p. 15) argues that Adams’ ‘underlying motivation’ for his Yosemite photographs ‘came to parallel the ideas of John Muir.’ Or more specifically, Adams’ motivation for his Yosemite photographs paralleled Muir’s ideas about Yosemite. For Garrard (2004, p. 69), ‘Muir wrote the book but Ansel Adams took the pictures.’ This applies specifically to Muir’s mountain books, and not his swampy one. Adams was (according to some) putting the sublime words of John Muir into pictures that expressed and evoked the sublime. Or more precisely, he put some of Muir’s words into pictures. Schama (1995, p. 9)

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argues that Adams ‘did his best to translate his [Muir’s] reverence for nature into spectacular nature icons.’ Muir’s reverence for nature was couched, however, in two distinct vocabularies: an earlier one produced by his experience in the marshes of Canada and swamps of Florida and a later one in the mountains of the Sierra (see Giblett, 1996a, pp. 240–1; 2004, pp. 125–43). Adams translated Muir’s reverence for mountains into spectacular nature icons whereas wetlands are neither iconic nor spectacular. Adams did not translate Muir’s reverence for marshes and swamps into pictures with one notable exception (my favourite entitled ‘The Black Sun’). Adams’ photographs arose out of him experiencing what Weber calls (2002, p. 16) ‘the high-altitude epiphanies of nature’s cosmic unity as described by Muir’. More specifically, Muir described these in his later life. In his earlier life, he described the experience of the low-altitude exigencies of nature’s grotesque fertility in the native quaking zone of marshes and swamps. Muir was not only a believer in the God of the mountains and the national parks, he was also a follower earlier in his life of the Great Goddess of the wetlands when he went into Canadian marshes and Floridian swamps. Adams did not photograph these as a general rule. As he did not follow Muir into these marshes and swamps, he was a selective follower of Muir and incomplete illustrator of his words. He did not photograph any wetlands with one possible exception, but concentrated in his landscape or ‘wilderness’ photographs on the monumental mountainous and the stunningly sublime, though he did also take some photographs of the small and beautiful. Adams for Jussim and Lindquist-Cock (1985, p. 22) ‘presents us with the towering mountains and sweeping vistas we would tend to associate with a God of sublimity’. They refer to his famous photo of a clearing winter storm in Yosemite as an example (Adams, 1990, plate 51). Muir eventually became known as the ‘father of the American national parks’, or at least of the idea for them (Giblett, 1996a, p. 240 and 2004, p. 125). Adams is the photographer par excellence of the American national parklandscape. Just as the national park is a nationalised and nationalist landscape (see Giblett, 2004, Chapter 8), so photographs of them promote nationalism. Weber (2002, p. 21) argues that ‘according to Adams, this magnificent scenery [in the West and southwest] was a symbol of what the United States was fighting for in World War II – a demonstration of America’s “scope, wealth, and power”’. Lands (ecosystems and habitats) were thereby aestheticised, conscripted and militarised, and so their value in their own right, and their right to be conserved as such, was diminished. National parks were an expression and institutionalisation of ‘nature’s nation’ and Adams was ‘nature’s

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nation’s photographer’, just as Muir was ‘nature’s nation’s philosopher’. By taking classic landscape photographs depicting nature ‘in its grand, primordial, and spiritually uplifting aspects’, as Weber (2002, p. 21) puts it in Muiresque (and sublime) terms, Adams was neglecting nature in its humdrum, mundane and physically demanding aspects, including the stuff of work and everyday life. Adams thereby ‘helped to define the emerging environmentalist movement’ as sanctuarist, as conserving special, sublime places of recreation and visual consumption, rather than as caring for all places of life and work with sacrality (for the sanctuarist/sacrality distinction see Giblett, 2004). Adams’ mountain photographs are also sublime in the sense that they sublimate the land into landscape, into aesthetic object, the depths of land and space into pictorial surface, and into a commodity as he was a professional photographer. Alinder (1985, p. 17) argues that the subjects of these [mountain] photographs are enhanced by visualization to portray a landscape that is beyond the limits of human experience. Yet because they are photographs, one accepts the print as true. They are not true to fact, but faithful to Ansel’s reverential ideal of nature and of a pure, unspoiled America (my emphasis). Although Adams and his photographs can be credited with helping to ‘save’ or conserve vast areas of ‘wilderness’, this is a compensatory and disavowing device for the exploitation and destruction that was taking place everywhere else. Turnage (1990, p. 13) argues that ‘Adams’ life spanned [1902–84] the most progressive and productive period of nature preservation in human history.’ Unfortunately, it also spanned the most regressive and destructive period of nature exploitation in human history. This contradiction lies at the heart of our hyper-modern condition, especially around the American nation and corporation as the armature of both sides of the contradiction. Nature, nation and corporation meet in the national park. Adams and his work are a useful entrée into this contradiction as he was lionised, not only as a nature conservationist and wilderness photographer, but also as a native son and true patriot. With Adams’ photographs, and its national parks, and wilderness, America could have its conservationist cake and eat its nature cake as well. In other words, it could conserve ‘vast tracts of wilderness’ while ruthlessly exploiting nature everywhere else. It preserved, painted and photographed nature in Yosemite National Park and bombed it just over the Sierra Nevada in the Nevada Test Site in about the same latitude (as the map in Solnit (1994/9, pp. viii–ix) shows).


Carleton Watkins Although Carleton Watkins, Adams’ nineteenth-century precursor, did not photograph swamps and other wetlands, his views of the mountainous are not as monumentalist, nationalist and sublimatory as Adams’ were. Although Adams is seen as the direct descendant of Watkins, there are some fundamental differences between their photography. Watkins is regarded as ‘America’s greatest landscape photographer of the nineteenth century’ (Weber, 2002, p. 67) and as ‘the founder of the major photographic tradition of landscape on this continent’ (Solnit, 2004, p. 45). His most famous photographs of the sequoias and Yosemite were taken during the Civil War and were instrumental in having Yosemite ‘set aside’ during the war as what Simon Schama (1995, p. 191) calls ‘the world’s first wilderness park’, though ‘wilderness park’ seems oxymoronic. More commonly, it is usually described as ‘the world’s first national park’ (Solnit, 1994/9, p. 221; see also Giblett, 2004). Yet Yosemite was not only set aside during one war but was the result of a previous one. To become a national park it had been a battlefield in the war against the local Amerindigenous owners and inhabitants in 1851 from which the losing side was progressively removed and the history of this war erased. Yosemite, as Rebecca Solnit (1994/9, p. 222) argues, ‘was a battleground before it was a vacation destination’. In between being a battleground and a vacation destination, it had become a work of art. In fact, to become a vacation destination it first had to become a work of art. Yosemite, as Solnit (2007, pp. 28–9) puts it, ‘would become the great national shrine of nature as a work of art’, particularly for landscape photography. No place on earth for Solnit (1994/9, p. 222) ‘is more central to landscape photography and landscape preservation’. The national park is a landscape preserve, rather than a conservation reserve. It is usually set aside for aesthetic reasons (see Giblett, 2004). Yosemite, Solnit (1994/9, p. 263) argues, ‘has been preserved as though it were a painting’. It has not been preserved as if it were a battlefield, though a battlefield should be regarded as a landscape (as the two previous chapters suggest). Landscape, for Solnit (2003, p. 80), ‘should have been revised a long time ago to include battlefields’. This book undertakes that revision with the inclusion of the battlefields of the Indian Wars, the American Civil War, WWI and WWII, the Cold War and ‘9/11’. From the military point of view, landscapes of the battlefield have been an important part of war for a long time (for military landscape drawing see Gough, 1993); from the art history point of view, the battlefield has not been an important aspect of

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landscape for long, yet from the landscape photography point of view, photography of battlefields has long been included; from the critical cultural history point of view, battlefields, bomb sites, national parks, wastelands, cities and swamps are all landscapes. Adams is Adam in the Garden of Eden of landscape photography who acknowledges his predecessor in Watkins who was for Solnit (1994/9, p. 237), ‘the most widely acclaimed landscape photographer of his day’. Adams (1985, p. 149) in his autobiography acknowledges that ‘Watkins’ photographs of Yosemite had great positive effects on the efforts that made Yosemite Valley a state park in 1864.’ He included some of Watkins’ photographs in the exhibition he mounted in 1940 for the Golden Gate Exposition ‘to represent all of creative photography since its beginnings’ (Adams, 1985, p. 204). Watkins created picturesque photographs by choosing angle, location and composition (especially framing devices and the mid-point in the frame for the meeting of the reflection and its object in his photographs of lakes and peaks). Watkins also showed an interest in trees, which may not have elicited any fellow feeling in the mountain-loving Adams. Trees also lend themselves more to the picturesque, whereas mountains do so with the sublime. Schama (1995, pp. 190–1) argues that more than any other images, Watkins’s heroic prints shaped American sensibilities towards Yosemite and the Big Trees [the ‘Grizzly Giants’]. … Yosemite became a symbol of a landscape that was beyond the reach of sectional conflict, a primordial place of such transcendent beauty that it proclaimed the gift of the Creator to his new Chosen People. … Yosemite and the Big Trees constituted an over powering revelation of the uniqueness of the American Republic. The horrors and the deprivations of the Civil War and its aftermath in post-war reconstruction prompted a displacement of the drive to mastery, the will to power, from the intractable enemy with which one was locked in mortal combat to the conquerable primitive landscape and to a sublime place as well as symbolising the ideal of national re-unification and ‘the rebirth of the American nation’ as Sandweiss (2002, p. 43) puts it. One of the means of taming the great western wilderness and conveying the sublimity of the place was through landscape photography. One way to resolve and salve the conflict between North and South of the Civil War was by looking to, and at, the West as a place, Sandweiss (2002, pp. 57 and 156; see also pp. 73 and 180)


argues, that ‘stood above the sectional strife of North and South’, and so could be seen ‘as the site of national healing and reunion’. To do so, the traditional Amerindigenes had to be removed from landscape photography and portrayed in portrait photography. They had ceased to be owners and inhabitants of the land and become ethnographic curios. Immigrant settlers of the American West were photographed in situ on the ranch or farm with the land as backdrop. Up in the mountains was largely an unpeopled landscape. Yet Watkins’ landscape photographs are not of an unpeopled wilderness unlike Adams’ later photos of ‘the American Wilderness’. Yet Adams did photograph people as the Weber book demonstrates, though they tend to be abstracted from place, unlike Watkins who photographed people situated in a landscape. Just as the Civil War was the nationalist impetus for the declaration of Yosemite as a state park and for the national park movement, and national parks were the place Adams depicted in WWII as patriotic landscapes, so was the Cold War the driving nationalist forces behind the wilderness movement (Hammond, 2002, p. 128). The American wilderness was the American domain where the American scene could be seen and contemplated in all its glory and where the American idea could be maintained. These were bulwarks against, and consolations for, the threat of thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union. They were also the place where the might of America (the land, the nation) was displayed and the land wasted in the testing of nuclear bombs. Rather than being conservation sites, both national parks and wilderness are landscapes of warfare because they are places where the nation sought solace, and its national identity, against the threat of war and where it could display its national vigour and power. Adams’ taste for what Bright (1993, p. 129) calls the picturesque sublime [was inherited] from nineteenth-century European and American painting. This aesthetic was premised on an identification between a mythical Eden and the American landscape and was well suited to the conservative social climate of post-World War II United States basking in its reborn Manifest Destiny as a world superpower. It was also well suited to deal with the threat of nuclear war in the terror of the Cold War. The West was the place where the US displayed, and could enjoy, its nationalist might. Just as the US colonised the West under the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, it could now colonise the world under the same doctrine and use the West as the marker of its power, power to

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both conserve and destroy, as well as to aestheticise. Recently former Vice President Al Gore (2008, p. xix) has suggested in a conservation call to arms to his fellow Americans that it is ‘our ultimate manifest destiny to save the earth’. This is like asking the fox to save the chickens. Adams was a twentieth-century photographer of this nationalist sublime whereas Watkins was a nineteenth-century photographer of what Marien (1993) calls the corporate sublime. Hambourg (1999, p. 12) notes that ‘the vision of industry comfortably enveloped in nature was an important aspect of Watkins’ relation to the world’. Nature and industry were shown in these photographs to be organically harmonious. They were acting out what Leo Marx calls the vision of ‘the machine in the garden’, or the ‘pastoro-technical idyll’ of machine and nature in harmony (see Giblett, 2004, pp. 66–7; 2008c, p. 22). There is a strong link here with what Mary Warner Marien (1993, p. 34) sees as the ‘commercial or corporate sublime’ in Watkins’ work by which she seems to be referring to his aestheticised, panoramic photos of industrial landscapes. For Nickel (1999, p. 20), ‘Watkins’ subject as a whole was never really “nature” so much as it was “natural resources and their development”’, including scenic resources for tourist development I would add. The commercial and corporate sublime of the industrial park landscape of the West is not that far removed culturally from what Marien (1993, p. 30) calls ‘Watkins’s soaring sublime’ of the national park landscape of the West, especially of Yosemite. There are certainly sublime elements in Watkins’ photography of Yosemite, but (if it is possible to quantify the sublime) they are not as sublime as Adams. I would suggest that Watkins’ photos of Yosemite fall into two distinct categories: those taken of mountains or rocks from their base (Nickel, 1999, plates 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 33, 35 and 37); and those ‘views’ taken from an elevated position across valleys (plates 29, 30–2, 38, 39 and 41). In the former, the foreground leads the eye to the rock or mountain that rises in the background as a backdrop. In the latter, the foreground is limited and the valley stretches out before one in panoramic prospect as it does in his industrial landscape panoramas. In all of Watkins’ photographs, the sky is limited and there are no clouds, unlike Adams who seems to have been fascinated by them as a kind of extension or transcendence of the sublime below in the mountains (and so on earth – however high) into the sublime above in the heavens. Both categories of Watkins’ Yosemite photographs are picturesque rather than sublime. Let me illustrate. One of his most famous photographs is of Washington Column in Yosemite (Nickel, 1999, plate 35). Oliver Wendell Holmes commented


on this photograph in 1863 that the hilltops are taken ‘not as they soar into the atmosphere, but as they are reflected in the calm waters below’. In other words, this is not a sublime landscape in which the earth or the solid is sublimated into air or gas, but reflected and de-sublimated in the waters below. The exact horizontal centre-line of this photograph is where earth and water meet. The centre of attention is the point of reflection, not the mountain towering terrifying above one (the viewer). Joel Snyder (1994, p. 183) suggests that ‘Watkins’s fascination with the mirrored surface of Lake Tenaya is emblematic of his rhetorical posture as a photographer. He views his job as the fixing or recording of an evanescent reflection of physical reality and not as the construction of an idealised landscape’ unlike Adams, I would add. Unlike the sublime, which smacks of eternity (infinity in time), the picturesque quality of Watkins’ photograph conveys temporality (a moment in time). Landscape (painting, photography and a piece of land viewed as landscape) is as much a matter of time as of space as the double spatial and temporal meaning of ‘pleasing prospects’ suggests (see Giblett, 2004, p. 72); it is a timescape of the colonisation and commodification of the past, present and future (see Chapter 9 below). Using water as a means of reflection on a landscape and on oneself and one’s position and situation in it has been a trope in art and literature of the western cultural tradition for a very long time going back at least to Narcissus who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. Water, Novak (1980, p. 40) notes, has ‘a special significance in American landscape painting’, and photography I would add, ‘unifying both surface and depth in its reflection of the world above’. Watkins’ photograph is no exception as it reflects the heights above and represses the depths below, rather than unifying them (as Luce Irigaray argues for (see Giblett, 1996a, p. 7)). Watkins’ photograph is not sublimatory; it is repressive. The calm, enamelled surface of the water reflects what is above and does not convey what is below. It is impenetrable, not permeable. It inverts the sublime rather than deconstruct it.

Timothy O’Sullivan Timothy O’Sullivan’s photographs do not fit easily into the aesthetic categories of the picturesque or the sublime.1 For this reason, and because he was also attached to exploratory and surveying expeditions as a documentary photographer, his work is often categorised as scientific photography. Partly, this categorisation boils down to the fact that his photographs are often anti-aesthetic, and in a two-term

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system of science versus aesthetics, the anti-aesthetic quality of some of his photographs place them ineluctably in the realms of the scientific. If this binarism is abandoned in approaching his photographs and other categories and terms are invoked, his photographs can be read in much more nuanced and productive ways. Joel Snyder (1994, p. 191), for example, while subscribing to the scientific view of O’Sullivan’s photographs, suggests some alternatives. He describes how O’Sullivan’s photographs of the Great Basin of southwestern US ‘portray a bleak, inhospitable land, a godforsaken, anaesthetizing landscape’ that ‘verge upon being anaesthetic – they stun and they numb’ (1981, p. 49). They even portray an anti-aesthetic landscape that could be summed up in one word, wilderness (see Giblett, 2004). In his earlier book on O’Sullivan, Snyder (1981, p. 7) places O’Sullivan’s photography firmly in the wilderness as O’Sullivan for him is a photographer of the area beyond the frontier. This placement is conveyed not only by the title of the book (American Frontiers: The Photographs of Timothy O’Sullivan 1867–1874), but also by the opening sentences of the book in which Snyder describes how ‘O’Sullivan crossed the frontier in 1867’ and ‘left it for the last time in 1874’. In the intervening seven years, he produced over one thousand photographs of what Snyder calls ‘an immense, unknown region of the American wilderness’. Unknown for whom is an interesting question because this region from the Missouri River to the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada and from the Mexican to the Canadian borders was not unknown to, for and by the Amerindigenes of the mega-region. This region is constituted not only as unknown, but also as a landscape that Snyder calls ‘unmarked, unmeasured and wild’. In other words, it is unmapped, unsurveyed and untamed. It is constituted as ‘un-’, by what it is not, not by what it is, the home of the plains, prairie and desert Amerindigenes. This is part of the point of the wilderness – to make the unknown known, to map the unmapped, to survey the unsurveyed, to tame the wild, to make meaning out of the meaningless (see Giblett, 2004, Chapter 5). In both his book and his article on O’Sullivan, Snyder (1981, pp. 45, 46 and 1994, p. 195) comments on the grotesque elements in O’Sullivan’s photographs. In particular, he describes how one photograph shows a man lying at ‘the mouth of a grotesque vent in the ground’. Snyder argues that ‘the mode of juxtaposition is weird in the non-pejorative sense’ and that the way his head ‘emerges over the lip is both strange and mystifying’. The steam rising from the fissure vent leaves only ‘the ghostlike adumbration of a human being. The photograph suggests the impossibility of maintaining all but the most fundamental


conditions of personhood in this place which … actively obliterates human presence.’ Without naming it by name, Snyder is invoking what Freud called the uncanny with which I have associated the grotesque (see Giblett, 1996a, Chapters 2 and 6). The anthropomorphism of the vent as either or both an earthly and bodily term with its mouth and lip figures the earth as body. In a typical masculinist inversion, the lower and nether are displaced and inverted into the upper regions of the body (see Giblett, 2004, Chapter 10; 2008a, pp. 186, 8). The arsehole of the earth becomes the mouth whereas the vent is associated with the grotesque lower earthly stratum associated often with wetlands (see Giblett, 1996a, Chapter 6), but here associated with steam vents, both of which lead into the interior of the body of the earth, the grotesque lower bodily and earthly strata, the native quaking zone. In his later article, Snyder (1994, p. 95) goes on to describe how in another photograph ‘the grotesque, disembodied [seemingly decapitated?] human head that sits atop a tufa cone is … chilling, discomforting, weird. Part of the figure has disappeared into the earth; it seems to have been swallowed whole by nature and is incapable of resisting.’ Although such fears of ingestion and incorporation in and by the earth are usually associated with the swamp and are here displaced elsewhere, they are still uncanny. The uncanny is not limited or restricted to the swamp, the uncanny place par excellence, but is experienced wherever the grotesque and the monstrous raise their ugly heads and wherever fears of an orally sadistic nature that the monstrous can ingest and digest are played out (see Giblett, 2004; 2008a). Snyder (1994, p. 197) describes how O’Sullivan’s photographs depict ‘geologic monstrosities and grotesqueries’ and are ‘both fascinating and mysterious’ and ‘antipicturesque’ which places them to some extent in the upper realms of the sublime and Snyder concedes that they can be analysed in those formal terms. Snyder (1994, p. 199) prefers, though, to analyse them more in other terms and to contrast O’Sullivan with Watkins: ‘the difference between the photographs of Watkins and … those of O’Sullivan is the difference between the familiar, known and understood and the alien, unknown, and unintelligible’. In other words, the difference between the picturesque and the uncanny, both of which are different from the sublime photographs of Ansel Adams, and of ‘nature’s nation’.

Nuclear Landscape photographers The tying together of American nature and nation in Adams’ work becomes unravelled in the work of the ‘explicitly activist’ Nuclear

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Landscape Photographers who mounted what Davis (2002, p. 39) calls ‘a frontal attack on the hegemony of Ansel Adams, the dead pope of the “Sierra Club school” of Nature-as-God photography’ with ‘his apotheosized wilderness vistas’. They were also murderous sons who killed their father as Adams for Solnit (2003, p. 91) is ‘the Great Oedipal Father of American Landscape Photography’. They also re-established an alternative lineage (on their mother’s side?) with Timothy O’Sullivan whose photographs of what Solnit (2003, p. 66) calls ‘an array of weird formations and geological wonders’ hang like a ghost over this work and its predecessors in the ‘New Topographics’, not merely for the clarity and precision of his depiction of the deserts of the American West but also for his invocation of the uncanny underside of the earth. Yet whereas O’Sullivan was able to see, as Davis puts it, ‘the West pristine and unspoiled’,2 the Nuclear Landscape Photographers saw ‘the poisoned, terminal landscapes of Marlboro Country’, the result of the testing of nuclear bombs in the American West (Davis, 2002, pp. 40 and 35), especially at the ‘Nevada Test Site’. Located 60 miles north of Las Vegas, the ‘Nevada Test Site’ is described by Rebecca Solnit (1994/9, p. 208; 2007, pp. 1, 128) as the ‘most bombed place on earth’ with 1000 nuclear bombs detonated there between 1951 and 1991. Between 1951 and 1963, 100 of these detonations were carried out above ground creating what Bourke (2005, p. 262) coyly calls ‘severe problems with radioactive fallout’ with all Americans becoming ‘downwinders’ and some Utahns in particular suffering severe and fatal consequences to their health, lives and livelihood (Davis, 2002, p. 46; Giblett, 2008a, Chapter 3). Solnit (1994/9, pp. 5, 15) describes the Nevada rehearsal (rather than test) site as ‘the place where the end of the world had been rehearsed since 1951’. As this was the year in which I was born, the beginning of my life in the rainforests of Borneo has the dubious distinction of being contemporaneous with the rehearsals for the end of the world in the deserts of Nevada. My entire life has thus been lived in the shadow of the bomb and its threat of death, and under the reign of nuclear terror. Rather than making ‘nuclear war a terrible possibility’, these rehearsals made the rehearsal site into ‘an ongoing regional catastrophe’ as Solnit (2007, p. 128) goes on to point out. They also made the rehearsal period an omnipresent global threat. As these rehearsals ‘shook the earth’ and created ‘limited earthquakes’ as Solnit (2000, p. 7; 1994/9, p. 16) points out elsewhere, the rehearsal site was a quaking zone made with human hands, as was the period of the rehearsals from 1951 on. O’Sullivan evoked the quaking zone of fissures and vents not made with human hands whereas the New Topographics and the Nuclear Landscape Photographers portray the quaking zone made with human


hands: the New Topographics in what Davis (2002, p. 39) calls ‘the suburban wastelands of the New West’; and the Nuclear Landscape Photographers in what he calls ‘the rural West as the national dumping ground’. More to the point, as Gallagher (1993, p. xxiv), one of the Nuclear Landscape Photographers indicates, the non-urban West is the federal government’s dumping ground as it ‘retains 68 per cent of the land and air rights in the West’. For this reason, it seemed appropriate to Gallagher to include in the final pages of her book ‘images of the land’ in the hope that the beauty of the land as seen through my lens could provide the reader some healing and restoration from the preceding tragic segments [focussing exclusively on people], although it should be kept in mind that the hidden secret of each and every one of these landscapes is the presence of radioactive toxins that are certain to be there. Wastelandscape aestheticised as beautiful in Gallagher’s photography is a consolation for the terror of the Cold War just as wilderness aestheticised as sublime was in Adams’. Both photographers aestheticise the land as a site of solace, both separate people and the land and both render war invisible. Just as the Cold War is invisible in Adams’ photographer, so is it invisible in Gallagher’s for the atomic ruination of the land is invisible to the lenses of her eye and camera. Not so in Richard Misrach’s photography. For Solnit (1994/9, p. 39), Misrach is ‘the pre-eminent landscape photographer in the country’, partly because for her ‘the unnatural disaster is his most persistent theme’ (Solnit, 2003, p. 96). In his photographs of what Kozloff (1994, p. 205) calls ‘a cratered landscape, barren of all but the most stubborn plant life’ the atomic ruination of the land is plain for all to see. Misrach’s photos of bomb craters, some of which are filled with pink or orange water, depicts a lunar landscape reminiscent of modern battlefields from the Crimean War to WWI (Misrach, 1990, pp. 56, 67, 71–3, 75). Yet as Kozloff (1994, p. 205) goes on to suggest, this ‘moralized landscape’ is ‘not a battlefield but a practice zone’ in which ‘a macho culture has literally vomited all over the very same environment that in yesteryear it had held up as the territory of its heroic aggressions’. Orally sadistic industrial capitalism has greedily consumed the land faster than it can digest it in what I have called a psychogeopathology (see Giblett, 2004, pp. 39, 164). Unable to process the good things of the earth properly, it has regurgitated bad things back onto the earth from whence they came.

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The place that had once been the theatre for heroic wars of conquest against indigenous peoples becomes a wasteland. Heroic aggressions against Amerindigenes and the frontier were also perpetrated against the land itself and this aggression is not confined to yesteryear. It continued in the heroic aggressions of yesterday against the land in the rehearsing of nuclear bombs and will continue in the future with the half-life of nuclear waste. The West was a practice zone and not a battlefield, but it was also a modern, man-made quaking zone in which the militarisation of civilian life (including non-human life) took place both in space and time. The transition from the pleasing prospect of the traditional European pastoral landscape to the terrifying prospect of the contemporary American western wasteland represents a development not only in terms of space but also in terms of time. The land and the future have been colonised and militarised. Misrach has also photographed dead livestock lying about where it fell, or heaped up in piles, or half buried in the nuclear wastelands and feral quaking zone of the American West. For Timothy Druckrey (1991, p. 7), what he calls Misrach’s ‘eerie landscapes’ remind him of a photograph by Timothy O’Sullivan at Gettysburg, [called] The Harvest of Death. A corpse, amongst many, lies bloated in the soggy field, while burial crews, overtaxed by the 10,000 dead, work to inter the bodies. The carnage of Gettysburg is but a fraction of the carnage of nuclear contamination. The Pit, Misrach’s series of images of fallen animals, records a more easily hidden consequence of nuclear testing. Pits ‘all over the state of Nevada’ have been opened as ‘trash dumps’. … He writes [that] ‘something strange has been seeping into my work’. Is not the uncanny this something strange that seeps? Is not the uncanny something associated with death and life? Of death in life? Something with a strange kind of half-life? A bloated corpse of a soldier in a soggy field lies in the wetwasteland of a Civil War battlefield just as in Misrach’s photograph ‘Dead Animals #327’ a desiccated corpse of an animal lies half buried in the dry wasteland of a Cold War nuclear wasteland (Misrach, 1992, frontispiece). The Pit reminds Druckrey of O’Sullivan’s Harvest of Death, fallen heroes before the scythe of the grim reaper; The Pit reminds me of O’Sullivan’s photos of the fissures and chasms of the American West, the earth opening up and leading into its bowels (Misrach, 1992, pp. 39–59). Both are uncanny quaking zones. Yet both Harvest of Death and The Pit are photos of modern,


man-made quaking zones, whereas O’Sullivan’s photos of the fissures and chasms of the American West are of a quaking zone not made by human hands. The man-made uncanny quaking zone is the product of the sublime nuclear bomb. Solnit (1994/9, p. 44) finds the power of the bomb ‘fascinatingly terrible’ and associates it with the sublime. The bomb itself demonstrates, as Solnit (p. 43) puts it, that ‘humans have managed to make stars’, but ‘an exploding nuclear bomb is a kind of star come to earth’ with catastrophic and uncanny consequences as Misrach’s photographs show. The destructive force of the bomb is fascinatingly horrible, a shorthand definition of the uncanny. The bomb encapsulates the two ruling passions of modernity – terror and horror – the terror of explosion and the horror of mutilated bodies and lands. The bomb could not remain a star in the heavens but came to earth in the hyper-modern s(ub)lime of the nuclear bomb rehearsals. Solnit (1994/9, p. 207) describes aerial views of them in which the earth shuddered … as though it were made of thick liquid. … Aerial photographs of the Ground Zero region show an arid surface pockmarked with depressions and crisscrossed by roads like long slashes, a surface that looks more like the devastated skin of an ancient plague survivor than the familiar surface of the earth. The earth becomes a quaking zone made with human hands and the surface of the earth is inscribed with the marks of a modern plague against the earth and its inhabitants. The Civil War, the Crimean War, the first World War and the Cold War: the shadow of war hangs like a pall over the land and the mind, over the lands of the American West and over the American mind. The Second World War does too in Peter Goin’s photographs of nuclear landscapes. These landscapes are not located in the continental western US but further west on the Bikini and Enewetak Atolls in the Marshall Islands. The resonance with WWII is especially strong in his photographs of ruined bunkers on these atolls as they are reminiscent of the German bunkers of WWII along the northern coast of France (Goin, 1991, pp. 107, 109, 111, 115, 129, 131, 137). In the 1950s, Paul Virilio (1994) undertook what he called an archaeology of the German bunkers. He photographed them and wrote about his experience of visiting them and about their function in architectural, cultural and military history. Stylistically, architecturally and structurally (with the use of concrete), the German and US bunkers came from the same modernist

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mindset, specifically from the same brutalist politics and aesthetics, irrespective of the differences between Nazi Germany and democratic America. Virilio, as a teacher of architecture, is quick to point out the obvious similarities between the bunkers and Le Corbusier’s work (Virilio, 1994, p. 12). Besides the obvious similarities, they point not only to ‘this architecture’s modernness’ as Virilio (1994, p. 12) put it, but also to a common militarisation of civilian life and of earthly and extraterrestrial space. Like the German bunkers built on ‘the European littoral’ (Virilio, 1994, p. 12), the US bunkers were built on the American littoral of the atolls of the Marshall Islands. Writing about the German bunkers, Virilio (1994, p. 12) argues that these concrete blockhouses were in fact the final throw-off of the history of frontiers. … the bunkers, as ultimate military surface architecture, had shipwrecked at lands’ limits. … they marked off the horizontal littoral, the continental limit. The same could be said of the US bunkers for they were a throw-off of the US’ fascination with frontiers. The US frontier, which began historically and geographically with the crossing through the Cumberland Gap and closed supposedly with the 1890 Census, has never really been closed as the frontiers of science and space still remain open for the US militaristic mindset (see Giblett, 2008c). The Bikini bunkers, out on the western territorial limit of the US, were the first line of defence facing the defeated enemy of Japan and the Cold War enemy of the USSR. As the site of nuclear bomb testing, they were both visible signs of defence against a possible second Pearl Harbour attack coming from the eastern USSR and stark reminders of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The German bunkers on the European littoral for Virilio (1994, p. 29) were ‘from the start the funerary monuments of the German dream’. Are not the Bikini bunkers on the American littoral the funerary monuments of the American dream? Here the American dream of the ‘conquest of nature’, the crossing of the frontier terrestrial and scientific, and the building of a heavenly paradise on earth gives birth to the hell and nightmare of thermonuclear annihilation. Goin’s photographs of the bunkers, just like Virilio’s, are documentary memorials of these monuments, stark reminders of the destructive power of grandiose nationalistic and natureconquering dreams. The bunker for Virilio (1994, p. 46) is ‘the last theatrical gesture in the end game of Occidental military history’. How much more so are they than in the end game of a possible nuclear war?


The Cold War and WWII were not only the context for Ansel Adams’ work but also its repressed which returns in the work of the Nuclear Landscape Photographers and which returns the viewer to it, or at least its aftermath. Behind, or besides, Adams’ American wilderness, just out of shot, lurks the New Topographics’ and Nuclear Landscape Photographers’ American wastelands. Adams’ work evokes the sublimity of God’s and Nature’s nation whereas the New Topographics and Nuclear Landscape Photographers return to the stark ‘beauty’ of ‘Man’s’ bunkered, blasted and blighted lands. Posing wasteland against wilderness as the New Topographics and Nuclear Landscape Photographers do, and wilderness against wasteland as Adams did, locks photography into the binary opposition of a sterile antinomy in which each is constructed as a presence on the basis of the other’s absence. Each relies on the other to constitute itself. Deconstructing the binary involves decolonising and historicising the construction of the terms ‘wilderness’ and ‘wasteland’. Ironically, wilderness was once considered wasteland (see Hall, 1992; Giblett, 2004). Out of this deconstruction and decolonisation, a new photography could emerge, photography for environmental sustainability showing land as the stuff of everyday livelihoods in bioregions with people working (not overworking) the land in bio- and psycho-symbiosis (see Giblett, 2004, Chapter 12). This would involve producing photographs focusing on landscapes and land-uses that exemplify principles and practices of environmental sustainability. Such a body of photographs would begin exploring, documenting and developing environmental sustainability by representing communities working the land in ways that conserve biodiversity. These could include indigenous people living traditional lifestyles, permaculture practitioners, organic farmers and gardeners, natural energy technologists and so on. It could create a new genre of photography, photography for environmental sustainability.

7 Shooting the Sunburnt Country, the Land of Sweeping Plains, the Rugged Mountain Ranges: The Role of Australian Landscape and Wilderness Photography in Promoting Environmental Sustainability and in Forming a New National Identity Australian landscape and wilderness photography has played an important role in the formation of Australian national identity and in wilderness conservation. These two uses of photography are diametrically opposed as the former celebrates the conversion of the Australian bush into farmland whereas the latter promotes the conservation of the Australian bush as it was at some arbitrary point in the past. Yet despite these opposing political ends, Australian landscape and wilderness photography employs a similar aesthetic drawn from the traditions of American landscape and wilderness photography and of European landscape painting. The aesthetic modes of the sublime and the picturesque are used across all three with no regard for their nationalistic politics. This chapter critiques these politics of pictures focussing on three prominent examples in the photography of Frank Hurley, Peter Dombrovskis and Steve Parish among some others. It also considers the uncanny in the photography of Simon Neville, among other photographers, of wetlands. It concludes by arguing for photography for environmental sustainability. Landscape photography of Australia, and by Australians of other places, has played an important role in the formation and maintenance of Australian national and cultural identity. Whether it is Steve Parish’s multitudinous and ubiquitous touristic landscape pornography (discussed later), or Frank Hurley’s photographs of the feral quaking zone of trench warfare (such as ‘The swamps of Zonnebeke’ also discussed later), Australian landscape photography has been, and still is, central 106

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to how Australia and many Australians see and define it, and themselves. Yet the place and role of landscape photography in Australian life has not been well researched or documented. Of course, there was a flurry of interest in, and books about, Australian photography during the bicentenary of white settlement in 1988 which discussed landscape photography, but only intermittently and spasmodically (see Batchen, 2001 for a review of both Newton, 1988 and Willis, 1988). Discussion of Australian landscape and wilderness photography is limited to ‘landscape photography in Australia’ in Helen Ennis’ Photography and Australia (Ennis, 2007, p. 51; my emphasis). Yet strangely she does not consider Max Dupain’s (1986, 1988) two volumes of pictorialist photographs of Australian people and landscapes. As a result of this limited definition of Australian landscape and wilderness photography, she does not consider Frank Hurley’s famous photographs of World War I (WWI) trench warfare, nor his photographs of the Antarctic taken during the illfated Shackleton expedition. She mentions tourist photography but does not consider any examples of it, such as Steve Parish’s ubiquitous work. This situation of patchy and spasmodic attention being paid to Australian landscape and wilderness photography compares unfavourably with the American one where there is a wealth of research about its landscape photography (as we saw in the previous chapter; see also, for example, Jussim and Lundquist-Cock, 1985; Weber, 2002). Some of its leading landscape photographers, such as Ansel Adams, are national heroes (Adams, 1985, 1990; Alinder, 1985). The closest Australian equivalent to Adams would be Olegas Truchanas or Peter Dombrovskis. There is a lineage between Adams and Dombrovskis as Greens Senator Bob Brown (1998, p. 6) says that Ansel Adams was ‘a photographer Dombrovskis particularly admired’. Dombrovskis’ photographs similarly for Ennis (2007, p. 67) ‘stylistically owe more to North American than Australian traditions’ citing Adams, and the Sierra Club publications that featured his photographs as ‘particularly influential’. Like Adams, both Dombrovskis and Truchanas were avid conservationists (Bonyhady (1997, p. 237) calls them ‘environmental photographers’). Yet, unlike Adams, they photographed in one state of Australia (Tasmania) whereas Adams photographed in many states (predominantly western, though) of America. In mitigation, Dombrovskis and Truchanas died untimely early deaths whereas Adams lived into his 80s. Truchanas has had a book devoted to his work (Angus, 1980), which sold over 40,000 copies (Bonyhady, 1997, p. 247) and so has Dombrovskis (1998). Both have also been the topic of a recent documentary screened on ABC television (McMahon, 2003). Stylistically, however, Adams is much closer to Max

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Dupain (1986, especially p. 139; 1988, especially p. 28) as both photographed predominantly in black and white. They were also born within a decade of each other – Adams in 1902, Dupain in 1911 – and share a common historical aesthetic of the panoramic. Australian landscape photography for the purposes of this chapter is defined as photography of the land largely free of built structures. This definition implies landscape photography of the country and not the city. More specifically, in the Australian context, and terms, it means photography of ‘the bush’, the outback and the desert (and not until recently swamps and other wetlands (for example, Simon Neville in Giblett and Webb (1996) discussed later in this chapter). It also implies more recently, drawing on a term from the American context, wilderness photography (see Giblett, 2004). Australian landscape photography has been concerned primarily with Australian lands, but in some instances lands not Australian photographed by Australian photographers will be included in this definition as they were crucial in the formation of Australian nationhood. Frank Hurley, for example, travelled, and photographed, widely, including with Douglas Mawson and Ernest Shackleton to Antarctica and to the Europe of WWI. Australian photographers include those born here or who spent the majority of their working lives here. This definition of Australian landscape photography as photography of the land by Australian photographers is broad enough to include the rural landscape of farm and farmhouses and other buildings, such as shearing sheds, which played such an important part in the cultivation of the Australian bush and mateship mythologies. This definition, however, is narrow enough to exclude city and suburban scapes and crowd scenes (built landscape and its inhabitants). People are not excluded, but the static tableau of small family groups and groups of workers in some sort of social solidarity in a rural or small town regional setting are preferred over the random collection of individuals in an urban setting of the largely built environment (for example, Cazneaux’s cityscapes). Landscape photography in both America and Australia has recently morphed into, or spawned, wilderness photography. This is largely of a ‘pristine’, unpeopled landscape very remote from cities and usually often inaccessible to all but sophisticated transportation (helicopter, air boat, four-wheel drive vehicle) or to the diehard by more traditional means (canoe, walking in rugged or inhospitable terrain).1 Part of an exploration into Australian landscape photography would test the limits of applying models of interpretation drawn from American landscape photography (and from the European landscape


aesthetic more generally) to Australian landscape photography. In the previous chapter, I argued that the work of three prominent American landscape photographers – Ansel Adams (1985, 1990), Carleton Watkins (Nickel, 1999; Palmquist, 1983) and Timothy O’Sullivan (Snyder, 1981, 1994) – fall largely within, and subscribe to, the modes of the sublime, picturesque and uncanny. This chapter will argue that these modes are applicable also to Australian landscape photography. It will also argue for a shift away from the aesthetics of landscape photography of the sublime and picturesque towards what could be called a conservation counter-aesthetic of photography for environmental sustainability (see Giblett, 2004). Finally, it will argue for a shift from a nationalist mythology of landscape photography of ‘the bush’ to a new national mythology of photography for environmental sustainability of the land for livelihood. The picturesque as an aesthetic mode has its parallels in Australian pictorialist landscape photography from the 1860s to 1930 with two distinct phases: an earlier soft-focus, impressionist style of depiction and a later style emphasising bright light and spaciousness (Ennis, 1999, p. 136). Max Dupain’s landscape photography from the 1930s demonstrates clearly this shift (Dupain, 1988). His early landscape photographs are soft, dreamy, impressionistic and self-avowedly pictorial (pp. 20–3); his later ones are often panoramic and brightly lit, even at night. Both phases of what Ebury (2002, p. 35) calls ‘the natural Pictorial school descended from the nineteenth-century picturesque tradition’. Ebury’s view needs to be nuanced given the differences in style between the early and late phases. Perhaps, though, his view simply attests to the durability of the picturesque mode across these shifts in style, which is still very much with us in contemporary landscape photography. In the earlier phase, Willis (1988, p. 60) argues that ‘many landscape photographers working in Australia in the 1860s and 1870s organised their landscape images according to the conventions of the picturesque, seeking out elements such as framing trees, foreground logs, winding paths and rivers. These were the means by which nature, conceived of as original wilderness, could be tamed and rendered visibly manageable.’ Indeed, Willis (p. 71) argues later that ‘scenic views performed a … normalising function, assuring [the erstwhile settler?] that the antipodean landscape was not rugged and inhospitable but picturesque and pleasing to behold’. And so ripe for settlement. Invoked crucially here is ‘the pleasing prospect’, if not the ‘commanding prospect’, in which the land was not only aesthetically pleasing for pastoral leisure but also economically viable for pastoralist industry

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(see Giblett, 2004). Charles Kerry and company’s photograph entitled View Wolgan Valley (Willis, 1988, p. 80, fig. 44) represents what Willis calls ‘a transition between the vision of the landscape as scenic view and that of the land as site of settlement and development. Devices of the picturesque are deployed to make pastoral properties aesthetically pleasing.’ Landscape is an aesthetic object, the surface of the land, whereas the land, its depths, is an object of economic exploitation. The aesthetic and economic go hand in hand and support each other no more so than in the bush and mateship mythologies in which ‘the small-scale landholder’ (Willis, 1988, 84) battles big squatters, big banks, big government and the big land to carve out a small, economically viable and aesthetically pleasing farm in a beautiful setting or location (see Giblett, 2004). View Wolgan Valley, as the title implies, is of a particular place but increasingly, Willis (1988, p. 78) argues, ‘views were no longer simply of a specific place, but increasingly came to signify “Australianness.” At this point [from the late 1880s to 1910] landscape photography began to intersect with ideas of an emerging nationalism.’ It also began to intersect with early tourism. The bush, mateship, nationalism and tourism were strongly associated in the landscape photography of Nicholas Caire, John Watt Beattie (see Tassell, et al., 1981; Thwaites, 1979) and John William Lindt (Willis, 1988, pp. 85–90). Caire, according to Willis (1988, pp. 86–7; see also Pitkethly, A. & D., 1988), was ‘a keen explorer who wrote pamphlets and gave talks about the beauties of the bush, as well as produced picturesque photographs of rivers, waterfalls and ferntree gullies. Many of his photographs were used to promote tourism’ as most locations were ‘little more than 80 kilometres from Melbourne and easily accessible by rail. His photography was used to promote these locations as places that city day trippers could visit to enjoy the beauties of nature.’ His photographs were later used by Victorian Government Railways to promote travel. The ‘pictorialist’ tradition of Australian landscape photography that dominated from the 1860s to the 1930s thus falls firmly within the domain of the picturesque (see Josef Lebovic Gallery online). Indeed, pictorialism is to photography as the picturesque is to painting. Willis (1988, p. 142) enunciates some of the key conventions of what she describes as ‘the pictorialist aesthetic’. These include that ‘there had to be a single dominant highlight, which should not be too close to the edges or the centre. Horizons could not cut the picture in half: either landscape or sky had to dominate.’ By and large, Australian landscape photography in picturesque mode conforms to these conventions. Even


in those apparent exceptions, such as the Anson brothers’ photograph of Lake St Clair c.1880 (Willis, 1988, p. 61, fig. 33) in which the horizon divides the photography roughly in half, the two sections are not exactly the same size and the framing devices of a log in the foreground and over-hanging branches to the left and right with a point as the centre of interest, means that the bottom half of land dominates over the top half of the sky. It conforms to the conventions of picturesque painting and establishes the norm for pictorialist photography and its cultural and political functions. Australia initially forged a sense of cultural and national identity in the 1890s through the bush mythology of the Bulletin school of writers and the Heidelberg school of painters (see Giblett, 2004). WWI (1914–18), Lloyd (1998, pp. 10, 182 and 213) argues, was ‘perceived as a rite of passage to nationhood’ so that ‘Australia had become a nation during the war’. This may be overstating the case, albeit from an international point of view, as the Boer War (1899–1902) and Federation (1901) had already tempered a sense of Australian national (if not nationalist) identity into full-blown nationhood. Perhaps with WWI, it became full-grown internationally. Photography played a crucial role in documenting and presenting a nationalistic view of this war in a pictorialist style. After WWI, Willis (1988, p. 145) argues in a section devoted to ‘Pictorialist Australia’ that the view that Australia had forged its nationhood through the sacrifice of its manhood on the battlefields of Europe was widely promoted and the need to define that nationhood became crucial. … The Australian landscape, which was widespread in both popular imagery and high art, came to be imbued with national sentiment. The Australian landscape, though, was not just Australian lands but the lands on which Australians had fought and died. The tempering of Australian nationhood on, and in, the battlefields of the war was documented by Frank Hurley and many other Australian photographers (see Bean, 1923). The Australian national landscape was not just the rural landscape of Australia ‘at home’ but also the landscape of European trench warfare abroad photographed in an Australian nationalistic style. What Willis (1988, p. 146) calls ‘a more aggressively nationalist style of “Australianness” [was] equivalent to bright sunlight’. This could be depicted at home, or away as in Hurley’s concocted sunburst through the clouds over the battlefield in his composite photograph, Morning after the Battle of Passchendalee (Willis, 1988, p. 185, fig. 114; for the two images that make up this composite see Jolly, 1999, figs 3 and 4).

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The battlefield scene, and not the composite, made it into the official history of the war as Bean (1923, p. vii and fig. 403) distinguished between ‘photographs for the historical record, and the taking of them for propaganda or for the press, [which] were to some extent conflicting activities. Captain Hurley devoted himself to the latter work’. Hurley cast himself in the grander role of the purveyor of nationalistic sentiment. His devotion to this work was not without conflict with Bean and ‘Authorities’ as Hurley (1917, pp. 52 and 58–9; see also Jolly, 1999) records in his diary that he had a great argument with Bean about combination pictures. [I] am thoroughly convinced that it is impossible to secure effects, without resorting to composite pictures. … Our Authorities will not permit me to pose any pictures or indulge in any original means to secure them. They will not allow composite printing of any description, even though such be accurately titled, nor will they permit clouds to be inserted in a picture. Perhaps with good reason as Hurley’s composite, with what Willis (1988, p. 184) calls ‘its sublime backlit clouds rising over a scene of death and devastation’, aestheticises the landscape of trench warfare, or more precisely, the artificial wetland and feral quaking zone of the Western Front (as discussed in Chapter 4). For Hurley, as Ennis (2004, p. 143) argues, ‘the battlefield was sublime’, perhaps the last thing ‘Authorities’ wanted. Yet rather than a field of battle, this scene is a depiction after the event of what Willis (1988, p. 187) calls ‘fields of mud’, ‘a flattened, rubble-strewn, burnt-out, and ravaged landscape’. This landscape of destruction is the mud and slime of the artificial quaking zone of the wetwasteland of trench warfare commented upon so often by WWI writers such as Henri Barbusse in Under Fire, Ernst Jünger in Storm of Steel (as discussed in Chapter 4), and photographed by Australian photographers too (and described by Hurley in his diary) (see, for example, ‘The swamps of Zonnebeke on the day of the first battle of Passchendaele’, Bean, 1923, fig. 400; and other ‘swamps’, figs 372, 394, 396). By contrast, in Hurley’s composite photograph of Passchendaele, the sublime and the slime counterpose each other in one composition and show their complementarity encapsulated in the portmanteau word s(ub)lime in which, as Sofoulis (as the deviser of the portmanteau) argues, slime is the secret of the sublime (see Giblett, 1996a, Chapter 2). In Hurley’s composite, the slimy land dominates the photo as it takes up two-


thirds of its area (and so conforms to the pictorialist rule of thirds (Willis, 1988, p. 142)) but this is surmounted and transcended by the sublime sky in the top third. The overall effect for Willis (1988, p. 184) of this and other photos by Hurley is ‘to glorify war’. The slime and mud of the depths of the earth and the wastewetland of the hell and gore of trench warfare below is sublimated into the heavens and glory of heroism above. Slime is indeed the ‘dirty secret’ of the sublime. The wasteland of trench warfare is anti-aesthetic and an industrial waste product (the product of industrial technology) similar to the wasteland of mining. Both are artificial quaking zones where the uncanny rears its ugly, monstrous head, though Hurley also sublimates it into the heights of clouds and sunshine. For Willis (1988, p 52), ‘the spectacle of mining presented a kind of landscape not widely represented by painters so photographers had few compositional devices on which to draw’. The landscape of mining did not conform to the conventions of the picturesque and sublime. How then to depict it in photographs? Richard Daintree’s Swiss Tunnel at Jim-Crow Diggings (1858–9) shows what Willis (1988, p. 53, fig. 27; see also Carew, 1999, p. 157) describes as ‘a land gouged into, turned over and re-formed into a strange vista of bare earth, tree stumps and mullock heaps’. This is not a pleasing prospect but the displeasing prospect of a sadistic wasteland (see Giblett, 2004, Chapter 9 for mining and sadism). Mining works the depths of the earth, not the surface of the land (see Giblett, 1996a, 2004). The sublime prospect can be found also in Peter Dombrovskis’s most famous photograph, ‘Rock Island Bend’ (hereafter RIB) (http://nla. gov.au/nla.pic-an24365561). Photography theorist and critic Geoffrey Batchen (1992, p. 48; see also Bonyhady, 1997, pp. 249–53) in an article entitled ‘Terrible Prospects’ has described it as ‘the Save the Franklin advertisement’. In fact, it was the vote for the Franklin and against the Liberal-National Party government ad in the 1983 Federal Election (see Batchen, 1992, p. 47). For Batchen, this photograph ‘works in terms of the sublime’. It is not a pleasing prospect but a terrible prospect in both the temporal sense of the future stretching out before one (the damming of the Franklin River would be terrible, too terrible to contemplate) and the spatial sense of the landscape lying before one (see Giblett, 2004). For Batchen (1992, p. 48; 2001, p. 54) it is not only ‘an expertly constructed piece of conservation kitsch’ and ‘chocolate box photography’, but also a photo whose ‘awful sublimity’ makes it ‘one of the rare photographs that has made an almost demonstrable political impact on its viewers’. In the later reference, Batchen deletes ‘almost’ so confident had he become in the intervening decade that

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RIB had had a demonstrable political impact. Indeed, Bob Brown (2004, p. 28; see also Bonyhady, 1997, p. 253) says that ‘old hands in Canberra tell me that this is still the most effective election advertisement they have ever seen’. This ability of photography to engage with the political at the level of voters’ election preferences means that it is not confined to the merely artistic and crosses the border between aesthetics and politics. For Tim Bonyhady (1993, p. 172), RIB became ‘the visual embodiment of a turning point in Australia’s environmental and political history’. It also embodied a turning point in the production and consumption of photographic images of Australian landscapes. It was the culmination of a flood of conservation and touristic landscape images in books, calendars and diaries (Bonyhady, 1997, p. 248). From Dombrovskis to Parish (n.d.) ubiquitous touristic landscape pornography there is a clear line of descent. Dombrovskis for Mulligan and Hill (2001, p. 69) ‘raised the art of wilderness photography in Australia to a new level’ – just as his work has been raised to sacred, iconic status. The Wilderness Gallery on Tasmania’s Cradle Mountain has a special, dimly lit room devoted to Dombrovskis’ work whereas all the other rooms are well lit. Dombrovskis’ images for Batchen (2001, p. 53) ‘probably contributed more than any other to the eventual transformation of the word wilderness from a pejorative to a positive term in the Australian lexicon’, RIB being the prime example. This is a very large claim indeed that can only be backed up by further research. Recent work on wilderness in the Australian context does not discuss Dombrovskis at all (see Giblett, 2004). McLean (2002) gives an alternative reading of this photograph. He picks up, like Batchen, the sublime elements in the photograph, but also relates them to what he sees as its abject elements using the terminology of Julia Kristeva (which I have discussed elsewhere in relation to the sublime; see Giblett, 1996a). The sublime and the abject are two sides of the same coin with the sublime lifting one above what is below and the abject pushing one down into what is below. The sublime takes one away from what is old, familiar, familial and long forgotten; the abject returns one to it. For McLean, RIB ‘memorialises a cosmogenesis in which the waters of the Franklin River, swirling beneath the cliffs of “Mother Earth’s” supine body suggest the originary chora [or receptacle – in other words, the womb] from which life is born’. Yet cliffs can hardly be supine so this earth is not the benign mother earth of agriculture. Rather she is the Great Mother, or Goddess, who is both creative and destructive and who precedes and refuses Mother Earth (see Giblett, 2004).


Rather than the earth as Great Mother, in Steve Parish’s landscape photography, the earth is a young porn star depicted in picturesque mode. His landscape pornography depicts, often in double-page spreads in porn magazine-fashion, a number of landforms or landscapes including concave bays (for example, Wineglass Bay with classic feminine shape (Parish, n.d., cover, pp. 4–5)), a receptacle, a chora or young virgin; curvaceous rocks and smooth rock formations (pp. 1, 22–3, 26–9); dark caverns with jagged teeth around their mouths (for example, pp. 8 and 33); languid surfaces of still water, including Kakadu wetlands (pp. 40–1, 44–5); mirrored pools or floodplains of narcissistic contemplation and cosmetic infatuation (pp. 37, 44–5, 46–7); milky inlets of water between long legs of land (pp. 18–9); hairy bushes with vegetation in whorls (pp. 10–1, 53); deep and seductive gorges (pp. 32–3); rounded, voluptuous hills (p. 37); bridal-veil waterfalls set either demurely among the rugged bones of the land or in lush, fern-fringed glades (pp. 38, 40, 42–3, 57, 60– 1); sequestered pools of water (pp. 46–7); snowy peaks and hills (p. 54), and so on, all shot in stunning colour. Not surprisingly, his ‘primary goal is to turn the world on to nature’ (Parish, n.d., p. 64). Whether this turnon is supposed to result in copulation or masturbation is not clear. In drawing a comparison between nature photography and pornography in an essay appropriately entitled ‘Uplift and separate’, Rebecca Solnit (2003, p. 200) notes the similarities between the two as ‘both are souped up, sleek, passive … in which the chaos of thought and action have been replaced with a stale vision of delight’. She goes on to enumerate seven features of the ‘nature photography genre’ (pp. 201–2) beginning with the absence of humans and their traces in history. Although Parish (n.d., pp. 3, 10, 20, 50) does show humans, there are still no traces of the history of human use of the land depicted in his photographs, and no depiction of human action besides sitting, standing or walking, in other words, all engaged in passive recreation and not working. There is no natural history too as there is ‘nothing dead, sick, rutting, dying, or in a state of decay’, Solnit’s second feature, unless it is the crumbling rocks of the hills of outback Australia (Parish, nd, pp. 24–5). There are no dead, sick, rutting or dying animals, and no dying or decaying plants. Parish also conforms to the third feature of the use of water in the genre of nature photography which is to mirror the land behind or to fall from the land above (as we have seen), though he does also depict ‘the beautiful and wild sweep’ of beaches (pp. 20–1) and the wetlands of Kakadu (pp. 44–5). He also conforms to Solnit’s (2003, p. 4) fourth feature in which ‘repetition and pattern are good’ such as in his photographs of Purnunulu National Parks whose beehive-shaped and

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striated rock formations lend themselves to reproducing this feature (Parish, n.d., pp. 36–7). Bright colour is Solnit’s fifth feature and one that Parish is only too ready to oblige with in pagefuls, and in fact is one of his hallmarks. Sixthly, ‘all animals are loveable and attractive’ as are Parish’s (pp. 7, 9, 16, 17, 48, 58–9). There are no insects or reptiles in this book. Finally, for Solnit (2003, p. 202) ‘the photograph should be so clean so as to never call attention to its own creation’. Parish largely conforms to this generic feature, though he concludes this book with a photograph of himself bare-chested immersed nipple-deep in a wetland or river holding and looking through his phallic camera with an erection of a telephoto lens (Parish, nd, p. 64). He is obviously turned-on to nature! Photographs of the native quaking zone of swamps and other wetlands have, until recently, been fairly thin on the ground. Parish’s wetlands are aestheticised, as are to some extent those of Simon Neville and others, though they also show dark and muddy swamps, and watery tree-graveyards (in Giblett and Webb, 1996). It was a deliberate ploy in designing the photography for this book, the first and still only book about Western Australian wetlands, to aestheticise wetlands (as they largely have not been), to simultaneously anti-aestheticise them (as they have largely been), and so to try to deconstruct and decolonise conventional landscape aesthetics by doing both. Neville’s and others’ photographs of wetlands are beautiful sometimes, sometimes not, or are both, or have both qualities. To sum up this ambivalence in a word – Solnit’s (2003, pp. 207–15) word – they are exquisite. She proposes the Exquisite as ‘a new aesthetic category’ for ‘the aesthetic of unimproved conscious female bodies’ (p. 207). I propose extending her aesthetic category of the exquisite to the aesthetic of unimproved sentient water bodies, such as in Neville’s wetland photographs, whether it be the embowered woodland wetland of Parry Lagoons (in Giblett and Webb, 1996, pp. 18–19) or of Lake Toolibin (p. 98), or the tree-lined and serpentine ‘Everglades’ of Lake Kununurra (pp. 27 and 30). The Exquisite for Solnit (2003, p. 211) ‘revels … in the transgressible boundaries of the female, the liminalities or permeabilities that are denied in the masculinized ideal body’, especially, I would add, in the fascist body (see Giblett, 2008a), the cold, hard, impermeable body. The exquisite revels also in the transgressible boundaries of the female commons of the wetland, in the liminalities between land and water, or in the permeabilities between solid and liquid that are denied in the masculinised sublime city and found in the feminised slimy swamp, such as in Neville’s photographs of wetlands, whether it be the estuarine delta of


Venus of the ‘False mouths’ of the Ord River (in Giblett and Webb, 1996, p. 23; see also map, p. 45), or the gleaming, blue-grey of the cloacal, intertidal and fertile mud of Crab Creek and Roebuck Bay (pp. 38–9). In addition, the Exquisite for Solnit (2003, p. 212) ‘affirms the biological body against prior artistic norms’ and ‘restores … the squishy, mobile, mutable stuff of bodies in process’. The exquisite for me also affirms the body of the earth against the prior artistic norms of depicting (or not) wetlands, and restores the same messy stuff of the body of the earth in the processes of birth, life, death and regeneration in slimy swamps, such as in Neville’s photographs of wetlands, whether it be the muddy Mandora Swamp in the pastoral region of Western Australia in which carcasses of cattle are decomposing in the bog just out of frame (in Giblett and Webb, 1996, p. 46), or in Jiri Lochman’s ‘tree graveyard’ of saline-affected Lake Taarblin in the wheat belt region of Western Australia (p. 99). Moreover, the Exquisite for Solnit (2003, p. 212) operates in this zone where the repulsive and the beautiful intersect, or rather in the zone where what is conventionally considered most beautiful – the female body [or water body] – and what is conventionally considered most repulsive – also the female body [or swamp or marsh] – intersect. The Exquisite also operates in the native quaking zone of wetlands, such as in Neville’s photographs of Lake Preston depicting open water between clumped reeds in the foreground like a maze of winding paths inviting and leading the viewer out through them to the larger body of water beyond (in Giblett and Webb, 1996, p. 94), or of the vast Ord River floodplain with the river wending its way across the foreground and reappearing in the background, the only double-page spread of the book (albeit found on the cover) with the floodplain so dry and dotted by so much vegetation that it is not really a turn-on. Thus the Exquisite for Solnit (2003, pp. 214–15) is ‘an aesthetic in which the beautiful meets the repulsive, insofar as the damp messes and tangles of biology are repulsive’. The Exquisite also operates in the quaking zone between the beautiful and the repulsive damp messes and tangles of marshes and swamps and their biological processes, such as in Lochman’s contrasting photographs of Forrestdale Lake on facing pages, one with a blazing crimson sunset (a native quaking zone), the other with dried-out exotic Typha reeds (a feral quaking zone) (in Giblett and Webb, 1996, pp. 82–3).

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Finally, the Exquisite for Solnit (2003, p. 215 operates in the psychological realm of the Abject. The Abject also operates in the anti- or counter-aesthetic realms of the uncanny, grotesque and monstrous, so the Exquisite as an aesthetic category is also linked to anti- or counteraesthetic ones via the Abject. The uncanny, grotesque and monstrous operate in Clay Bryce’s photograph of the ‘stromatilites’ (actually thrombolites) of Lake Clifton best described as living fossils or rocks, and in Simon Neville’s photograph of graffiti on a rock, a petroglyph in short, alongside Duncan Highway just outside of Kununurra that states defiantly ‘Wagyl lives’ (in Giblett and Webb, 1996, p. 31). The Wagyl is the water-spirit being of the Noongar people of southwestern Australia (O’Connor cited by Giblett and Webb, 1996, p. 4). The Wagyl lives despite all the Western Australian wetlands drained, filled or otherwise destroyed (see also Mudrrooroo’s, ‘A snake story of the Nyoongah people: A Children’s tale’ in Giblett and Webb, 1996, pp. 33, 36–7; I return to the Wagyl/Waugyal/Wagarl in the final chapter below). Australian landscape and wilderness photography is both art and politics (including cultural and gender politics). That is part of the reason why it has received so little critical interest and has been so poorly researched (again compared to the American situation) as it does not fall neatly into the categories of art or politics. Australian conservationists and green politicians (for example, Brown as we have seen) and historians of Australian conservation (for example, Mulligan and Hill), Australian art historians (for example, Bonyhady) and historians of Australian photography (for example, Willis) acknowledge and make passing reference to the power of wilderness photography, but the conjunction of these elements of politics, conservation and art in Australian wilderness photography has not been explored, especially in relation to environmental sustainability. These concerns have tended to be addressed in and by their siloed discourses and disciplines and not explored or entered into dialogue across a common area of interest. The approach proposed here will remedy that situation by being interdiscursive and trans-disciplinary in a cultural studies approach. This approach does not mean taking the moral or academic high ground from which to survey the field aloofly from above. It means more taking the low ground where discourses and disciplines mix and flow into each other, and engaging with the messy processes where art, politics and conservation mix. Green politicians and conservationists are happy to reap the benefits of such photographs without questioning the politics of the pictures and the cultural traditions of the modes of depiction they employ,


and deploy. Progressive art historians are probably equally happy to bemoan the fact that wilderness photography is, as Bonyhady (1993, p. 171) puts it, ‘one of the notable omissions from the collections of most Australian art museums,’ largely because it is not regarded as art. If wilderness photography is included, as ‘RIB’ is, it is because of its social significance as a political poster rather than any perceived artistic value (as Batchen’s discussion above suggests; see also Bonyhady, 1993, p. 171). ‘RIB’ and the Franklin ad are housed in the National Library of Australia, not in the National Gallery of Australia. Proponents of environmental sustainability have not considered the role of landscape and wilderness photography in either inhibiting its development through inappropriate pastoral or unpeopled landscapes, or in promoting its development by producing images of people working with the land in sustainable ways that conserve biodiversity. Neither conservationists nor curators have really explored the relationship between art and wilderness photography. Is wilderness photography notably absent from Australian ‘art museums’ because its politics are green? What is the relationship between wilderness photography, green politics and art acquisition policies at Australian ‘art museums’? The whole question of whether photography is art is, of course, an old and tired one that is of merely taxonomic interest at the ontological level, but of great political and cultural importance at the epistemological level. In other words, whether photography is art is largely a matter of definition (on both sides); how it is classified and how that classification functions culturally and politically is of much greater importance. This chapter focuses more on the latter rather than the former. The sublime, the picturesque and the uncanny thus do seem to have their analogues in Australian landscape and wilderness photography. Landscape photography in tourism, conservation and culture has played an important role in forming and maintaining national identity. It has played, and still plays, an important, but undervalued and misunderstood, role that is not aware of the cultural politics of pictures that underpins them. What role it will play in developing environmental sustainability in Australia is another question. Representing the natural environment as an aesthetic object does not promote environmental sustainability. Landscape photography (including environmental and wilderness photography) plays an important role in how we see and live in relation to the land. In this regard, it is related to developing an environmentally sustainable Australia at a number of different levels both through looking back into the past and forward into the future. In relation to

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rural landscapes, photography has been important in developing and maintaining the bush and mateship mythologies. These stereotypical images of a pastoral, and pastoralist, country helped to create a theory and practice of land use, a way of seeing and doing, which is increasingly being seen as unsustainable. On the other hand, touristic and wilderness images of remote or accessible sites fuel the tourism industry and the conservation backlash of the ‘setting aside’ of sanctuaries of ‘pristine’ places may both be unsustainable too (see Giblett, 2004). Both touristic and wilderness images exploit the land they photograph and create unrealistic expectations of aesthetically pleasing or aestheticised landscapes that bear little relation to the lives of people, indigenous and not, who live on or near them and who rely upon them for their livelihoods. Elsewhere I have argued for a shift from mastery over ‘nature’ to mutuality with it. In conservation and ecology this entails a shift from the setting aside of special places in sanctuaries, such as national parks, to the sacrality of all places, rural and urban, pristine and spoiled (see Giblett, 2004). These shifts from mastery to mutuality, from sanctuarism to sacrality, could be developed in relation to landscape photography. Environmental sustainability comes down to everyday land practices in local places involving what I call symbiotic livelihoods in bioregions (see Giblett, 2004). Photography for environmental sustainability could document and display Australians engaged in biological and psychological symbiosis in gaining and sustaining their livelihoods in their bioregions. This would mark a similar shift in photographic practice as I have argued for in environmental theory and practice, which would lead to changes in land practices to ones that are environmentally sustainable. The postmodern, political and psychoanalytic ecology I develop in this book (Giblett, 2004) and earlier (Giblett, 1996a) could be developed in a new photography that would address the historical, social and psychological dimensions of environmental sustainability and promote their interdependency. There is little Australian landscape photography that depicts environmentally sustainable land use in everyday life that would promote it to the wider community. Quite the contrary has in fact been the case. For example, Max Dupain’s (1986, 1988) two volumes of photographs of Australians and Australian landscapes do not include any photographs of Australians engaged in working the land other than in the agricultural and pastoralist industries. They do not show indigenous Australians hunting or gathering, nor non-indigenous Australians gardening, one of the most popular leisure activities of urban Australians.


This is surprising as much of his work was shot in the 1940s and 1950s when the vegie garden was a standard feature of the Australian suburban backyard. In the broad sweep of his panoramic and pictorialist photographs, biodiversity is lost in the monoculture of archetypal rural and bush settings which celebrate these nationalist mythologies. To find a photograph of a vegie garden by a recognised landscape photographer in a major collection, such as the National Library of Australia, we have to go back to c.1887 and Nicholas Caire’s photograph of his allotment in Gippsland (Conrad, 2003, pp. 12–13). Yet this scene with its rectolinear grid of plots hardly constitutes environmental sustainability, but nevertheless it is an attempt at a degree of self-sufficiency. Many photographers before Dupain, such as Caire, had a nationalist fixation with trees (see Bonyhady, 2000, pp. 248–52; Conrad, 2003, pp. 99–113). Many photographers since Dupain document and celebrate the biodiversity of Australia. They focus on, and document, individual species in isolation from their habitat or surrounds. Few, if any, promote sustainability in relation to it. Proponents of environmental sustainability have not considered the role of landscape and wilderness photography in either inhibiting its development by producing inappropriate pastoral or unpeopled landscapes, or in promoting its development by producing images of people working with the land in a sustainable way that conserves biodiversity. Just as landscape photography helped to form and maintain the Anglo-Celtic Australian national identity steeped in the bush and mateship mythologies, so landscape photography could help to form and maintain a new international identity around environmental sustainability. This would involve producing photographs focusing on landscapes and land uses that exemplify principles and practices of environmental sustainability. Such a body of photographs would begin exploring, documenting and developing environmental sustainability by representing communities working the land in ways that conserve biodiversity. These could include indigenous people living traditional lifestyles, permaculture practitioners, organic farmers and gardeners, natural energy technologists and so on. It could create a new genre of photography, photography for environmental sustainability.


Part IV Mindscapes

The body is like a landscape, or more precisely the body is, or has been seen as, the land (see Giblett, 2008a). For Rebecca Solnit (2005a, p. 53), ‘the mind too can be imagined as a landscape’. For Helphand (2006, p. 146), too, people have ‘mental landscapes’. The mind has mountains, cliffs of fell, as Gerard Manley Hopkins said, and as blind King Lear experienced when he was led to believe that he was jumping off a cliff but found that he wasn’t. He had been fooled (in two senses), fooled by the fool. If the mind is a landscape, conversely the landscape is a mind, or a minefield, or a mind-field, or a mined-field. Landscapes have mental overtones as in the ‘Slough of Despond’ or the ‘Great Dismal Swamp’. Mental landscapes and land minds come together in what could be called ‘mindscapes’ in which land and mind affect each other. Just as a range of what Foucault called ‘psy-’ technologies are used to try to heal the mind, so what could be called ‘psy-’ ecologies could heal the mindscape. In two previous books, (Giblett, 1996a, 2004), and in this one in Chapters 2 and 3, drawing on the work of Freud, Klein and others, I developed a psychoanalytic ecology, particularly in relation to mining and pastoralism in terms of greed and gluttony, or gratitude for generosity, and in relation to the city and the swamp in terms of the uncanny. In the two chapters of this section, I look at the farm and the mine (rather than mining) as landscapes of the mind. Rather than looking at both as the source of resources for what Williams called ‘extractable wealth’, I consider them as sites for resources for a journey of hope towards environmental sustainability.

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8 Land Health and Mental Health: A New Field for Research Nurturing Biodiversity and Well-Being on Farms

The interrelationship between, and interdependency of human beings, their settlements, bodily health, and ‘the environment’ has been well established. The link between land health and human physical health goes at least back to the work of Sir Albert Howard, Aldo Leopold and others in what could be called ‘the soil conservation and organic farming classics of the 1940s’ (see Giblett, 2008a, Chapter 11). The link between the two has culminated most recently in the new trans-discipline of ecosystem health. Healthy land gives rise to healthy bodies. The link between healthy bodies (disabled or able-bodied) and healthy minds is well established with strong indications of the positive effects of one on the other though, of course, healthy minds and bodies do not necessarily go together. Establishing the link between land health and mental health in a number of senses is in its early phases. Poor mental health in rural and remote areas is well researched. Mental health and land health would presumably be correlated, but is not well established. This chapter argues that healthy minds, healthy bodies and healthy lands are intimately linked, that each positively affects the others and that it is desirable for nurturing land health, physical health and mental health to foster positive relationships between them. Higher rates of male suicide in rural areas compared with urban ones are well documented (Caldwell et al., 2004; Taylor et al., 2005; Stark et al., 2006). Greater prevalence of female depression in rural areas compared with urban ones is also well researched (Amoran et al., 2007; Hoyt et al., 1997). In rural areas, men are more likely to commit suicide, while women are more likely to experience depression (Emily and Shyamal, 2007), or not (Kilkkinen et al. 2007), both of which are usually ascribed to social isolation and lack of provision of mental health services, not to the health of the land itself. Farm suicide and economic fluidity are 125

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negatively correlated (Page and Frager, 2002). The incidence of drought and farm suicide is correlated and well established. Land health is well defined. In the 1930s and 1940s, Aldo Leopold (1999, pp. 219; see also 1949, p. 221) defined land health as ‘the capacity for self-renewal in the biota’. Conservation for Leopold (1949, p. 221) is ‘our effort to understand and preserve this capacity’. Land sickness, by implication, is the destruction wreaked upon the biota so that it is incapable of self-renewal. Leopold’s land health concept for Newton (2006, p. 321) ‘became his culminating vision of enduring prosperity and ecological harmony among humans and the entire community of life’. Despite the troubling use of the problematic Romantic and musical concept/metaphor of harmony not used by Leopold, land health links human health and non-human life in the soil on which both live. Soil health is also well defined as the capacity of soil to function as a vital living system, within ecosystem and land-use boundaries, to sustain plant and animal productivity, maintain or enhance water and air quality, and promote plant and animal health. Doran and Zeiss (2000, p. 3) Soil health is a human product and is dependent on sound human mental health that values, nurtures and protects soil health. Without it, the soil gets sick, the land unhealthy. The link between land health and human activity is well documented. For Doran and Zeiss (2000, p. 3), ‘anthropogenic reductions in soil health, and of individual components of soil quality, are a pressing ecological concern’. The link between soil degradation and rural and urban mental depression needs to be better established and understood, particularly by studying the feedback loop between land health and mental health. Healthier lands means healthier people (mentally and physically) and mentally healthier people means healthier lands. Promoting good mental health in rural, remote and urban areas through sustainable land use practices is underdone. Mental health is much harder to define than soil health and is often expressed in negative terms as an absence of mental disease or malady rather than as the presence of positive attributes. For the World Health Organization (WHO) (2001, online) concepts of mental health include subjective well-being, perceived self-efficacy, autonomy, competence, intergenerational dependence,

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and self-actualization of one’s intellectual and emotional potential, among others. These facets are located within the individual and their social context, not within the natural environment too. For the WHO, mental and behavioural disorders are the result of a complex interaction between biological, psychological and social factors. In this account, ‘mental and behavioural disorders’ located at the overlapping centre of a Venn diagram of these three factors are not the result of environmental factors, according to WHO, though they may exacerbate them or diminish access to mental health service. Later it acknowledges that rural life is fraught with problems for many people. Isolation, lack of transport and communications, and limited educational and economic opportunities are common difficulties. Moreover, mental health services tend to concentrate clinical resources and expertise in larger metropolitan areas, leaving limited options for rural inhabitants in need of mental health care. Under the dominant public health regime, the restoration of rural mental health becomes a matter of the provision of palliative services, rather than the promotion of rural mental health and the prevention of rural mental illness in the first place. WHO does not recognise that rural life itself is associated with the particular symptomatology of higher rates of depression and suicide than city dwellers. It is primarily concerned with ameliorating symptomatology through improving the provision of services to rural residents comparable with their city counterparts as a matter of equity and social justice and not with addressing the root causes of the problems, not only to do with isolation and location but also to do with environmental factors. WHO acknowledges that other environmental and social factors such as ‘conflicts, wars and civil strife, are associated with higher rates of mental health problems’. Rural areas are the sites of conflict, not least over the land and with the land, as the literature on the history of western agriculture indicates and as will be reviewed shortly. These conflicts, too, are associated with higher rates of mental health problems. Similarly, rural and remote areas are subject to civil strife, social unrest, economic hardship, all of which contribute to higher rates of mental health problems. The WHO Venn diagram, and so mind, body

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and society, takes place within the larger, all-embracing circle of the earth. Psychological, biological and social factors are dependent upon the earth in relationships of parasitism, or bio- and psycho-symbiosis, or sustainability (see Giblett, 2004). The central core of ‘mental and behavioural disorders’ is embedded within this larger context and both draws and impacts upon it. Conversely, mental health and well-being are situated at the core of the intersecting domains of the psychological, biological and social within the wider context of, and connections made with, the earth, including farming. Farming for Stoll (2002, p. 8) is ‘the central biological and ecological relationship in any settled society and the most profound way that humans have changed the world over the last ten thousand years’. Yet the relationship of farming to the earth is not only a matter of biology and ecology, but also of ideology, psychology and sociology. Farming plants or animals is the product both of soils, climate and water, and of ideas, attitudes and values. The resulting ‘middle landscape’ for Stoll (2002, p. 8) of farming poised ‘somewhere between wilderness and city’, and so neither one nor the other, is the product of what is inside the farmer’s head and what is outside it, what he sees, how he sees the land before him and how he works (with) it, how he relates to ‘the wilderness’ and ‘the city’.1 Whether farming is a sustainable and productive land use, or an unsustainable and destructive land abuse, or somewhere in between, is a product of cultural, social and geographical factors. How healthy the farmer is physically and mentally are also tied together in the same knotty core. The history of western agriculture is characterised by boom and bust cycles often underpinned by conflict with the land with little care or respect given to the land that makes agriculture possible. In boom times, the land is a partner that gives generously or reluctantly; in bust times, the land is an enemy that withholds good things and defeats the farmer. For Rob Linn (1999), 200 years of rural Australia can be summed up simply as ‘battling the land’. Describing, if not figuring, this history in these terms implies not only that the land is a battlefield or the enemy, but also that the farmer is a soldier, if not also a ‘battler’, that beloved icon of conservative Australian politicians and talkback radio hosts, who fights on, or against, the land. If the land is a battlefield, then it becomes the mere background against which the heroic farmer fights the enemies of bushfires, drought, government, debt and high interest loan repayments to the banks. If the land is the enemy, then it becomes the foe against which the heroic farmer fights with rainfall, government, superphosphate, industrial technology and low-interest


loans from the bank. Either way, the farmer is pitted against the land and does not work with it. He is in solidarity with other farmers against it, rather than in solidarity with the land. The outcome of the battle is either victory or defeat for farmer, or for the land. The land, as Linn (1999, p. 153) points out, ‘could still defeat those who struggled with it’ in ‘a losing battle against nature’ (Linn, 1999, p. 163). Principal weapons in the superior armoury of nature are what Linn (1999, p. 163) calls ‘natural disasters – floods, fires, droughts –’ though most bush fires in Australia are caused by humans, the severity of floods is increased by human activity, such as draining wetlands and building on floodplains, and the frequency and length of droughts exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change. Yet the land is not just the passive recipient of enmity but an active agent engaged in some sort of exchange or reciprocity with the farmer. Whether that reciprocity is mutually sustaining and beneficial is another matter. One aspect of this relationship between the farmer and the land is the way the land becomes a site for expression or screen for projection of the farmer’s mental state, of his attitudes towards, and his valuation of, the land (see Giblett, 2004, especially Chapter 6 on ‘the bush’). In the early years of rural development in Australia in the 1820s, Linn (1999, p. 31) remarks that contemporaries described the sight of farms lacking gardens and ‘neatness’ and surrounded by muck, carcasses, sheepskins, woodpiles, pigs and primitive implements. A spirit of depression hung over such places. The aesthetics of sight is here associated with the psychological and economic state of depression. The way the land is seen, and what is seen, is tied up with the mental and monetary. On the next page, Linn (1999, p. 32) sums up that ‘throughout Australia in the late 1820s farming was in a tenuous state and rural areas [were] often in depressed or primitive conditions’. Linn (1999, p. 49) later makes the link with the economic sense of the word ‘depression’ explicit when he states that ‘rural Australia emerged from the depression of the early 1840s’ only to be followed variously by ‘the depressed situation of the 1880s’ (Linn, 1999, p. 111), ‘the depression’ (Linn, 1999, p. 122) of the 1890s, ‘the Great Depression’ (Linn, 1999, p. 138) of the 1930s and ‘the depressing reality of rural Australia in the late 1980s and 1990s’ (Linn, 1999, p. 170) which shows no sign of abating in the 2000s. Depression is an economic, psychological and aesthetic, if not spiritual, category for Linn.

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The economic and psychological Depression of the 1930s occurred in the US in the same period as the Dust Bowl, an instance of environmental oppression. The simultaneous occurrence of poor economic, mental and land health was arguably not a matter of mere historical coincidence. Rather, for Worster (1979, p. 5) ‘there was in fact a close link between the Dust Bowl and the Depression’. Both events for him revealed ‘fundamental weaknesses in the traditional culture of America, the one in ecological terms, the other in economic’. Underlying both events, he saw capitalism as ‘the decisive factor’ in the ‘nation’s use of nature’. Capitalism, Worster (1979, p. 206) concludes though celebrated by Adam Smith as a ‘natural’ order, had turned out to be, especially in its most recent phase, when it was armed with powerful technology and corporate organization, a malignant growth – a disease born in but now eating away at the body of the earth. Nature’s nation (the US) glorified its cosy and intimate relationship with nature in its National Parks (see Giblett, 2004). It also expressed its exploitative and destructive relationship with nature in its Dust Bowl. Nature in and for the US is like a show or trophy wife who is adored and displayed on public occasions and in public places, such as mountains and forests, but hidden and exploited in private times and places, such as plains and prairies. This abuse resulted in the Dust Storms that swept across the southern plains in the 1930s. These Dust Storms for Worster (1979, p. 24) were ‘the most severe environmental catastrophe in the entire history of white man on this continent’. This catastrophe was an environmental disaster. It was not a natural disaster as ‘the dirty thirties’ were for Worster (1979, p. 13) ‘primarily the work of man, not nature’. In other words, for Worster (1979, p. 94), ‘it was culture in the main that created the Dust Bowl’. Nature had to play its part by supplying dust and wind, but man and culture played their part by creating dust through sod-busting, overgrazing native grasses and farming seasonal wheat. Yet man is a part of nature and not apart from nature. The part man plays with nature is an expression of ‘his’ ‘culture of nature’ (Wilson, 1992). Agriculture is an aspect of a second culture of nature; industrial agriculture and the Dust Bowl are both aspects of the third culture of nature. Just as the wastelands of WWI trench warfare were a man-made landscape, so was the Dust Bowl of the 1930s with some remarkable similarities. The wearing of masks during the Dust Storms of the


1930s made the plains for Worster (1979, p. 21) ‘look like a World War I battlefield, with dust instead of mustard gas coming out of the trenches’. Both were battlefields. Perhaps this is hardly surprising as both were subjected to the same industrial capitalist technology of carbon-powered vehicles. In the 1936 film, The Plow That Broke the Plains, Worster (1979, p. 96) describes how ‘great phalanxes of tractors were filmed, advancing on the land just as World War I tanks had moved across the smoke-shrouded battlefields’. Perhaps the similarities in the resulting wasteland are hardly surprising either. Both were landscapes of warfare against the land. Both were also landscapes of psychogeopathology associated with mental depression. Writing about ‘the extremely unstable communities found in the wheat belt’ in the 1930s, Worster (1979, p. 142) argues that ‘the combination of drought, dust storms, Depression, and, above all, on-the-make ambitiousness … created an almost pathological state’. Were not these communities not only socially unstable and suffering from ‘social instability’ (p. 142), but also mentally unstable and suffering from mental instability, especially in their quest for the quick buck, for make or break, in their disregard for the carrying capacity of the land? Did not this combination of factors not only create a physically pathological state but also a psychopathological one too? Conversely, was not ‘on on-the-make ambitiousness’ a psychopathology that created dust storms and the Depression in the first place? Is not the Dust Bowl and the Depression a psychogeopathology? A failure of mental health in relation to ecology and economy? Industrial capitalism manifests psychopathological symptoms in association with what Aldo Leopold (1935/1991, pp. 212–17) called ‘land pathology’ in ‘the collective organism of land and society’. Psychogeopathology is the psychological counterpart of land- or geopathology. Both always operate together; hence, ‘psychogeopathology’. Psychoanalytic ecology diagnoses the symptoms of psychogeopathology and engages in a talking cure of them. It makes the link between mental health and land health in general, and promotes ‘eco-mental’ health in particular. Psychoanalytic ecology is a term I first used in 1996 in a book on wetlands to describe ‘a cultural talking cure of the psychogeopathology of the will to fill, or aestheticise, or create artificial, wetlands’ (Giblett, 1996a). In that book, I drew on Freud’s work on the uncanny, sublimation, symptom, mourning and melancholia to diagnose the symptoms, and engage in a talking cure, of the psychogeopathology of the will to fill wetlands. In Living With the Earth (Giblett, 2004), I continued the development of psychoanalytic ecology by using

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Melanie Klein’s and Karl Abraham’s work on oral and anal sadism and applied it to mining and pastoralism. I also drew on Margaret Mahler’s and Jessica Benjamin’s work on psychological symbiosis to promote eco-mental health. Industrial capitalism is a psychogeopathology that has had a direct and devastating impact on the land in resource extraction industries such as mining (the basis for manufacturing) and pastoralism (cattle and sheep ranging). The proponents of both industries often figure them as orally and anally sadistic in consuming good things and excreting bad ones. In psychoanalytic terms, oral and anal sadism are psychopathologies in which oral and anal desires and fears of an alimental and excremental nature are played out: the desire to consume good things, the desire for fairness and symmetry in an exchange of good things, the desire to get rid of bad things, the fear of being consumed, and the fear of fairness and symmetry being exercised back against one in an exchange of bad things. These desires and fears are enacted in both the mining and pastoral industries as they consume greedily and gluttonously the good things of the generous earth, excrete ungratefully their bad wastes into it, and then expect the earth to hide them – hardly an equitable exchange! Mining and urban sprawl employ monstrous machines to devour the earth and defecate on it, as does pastoralism literally with domesticated animals. As mining and pastoralism exercise oral and anal sadism against the earth, they are what could be called psychogeopathologies. Psychoanalysis arose in the heyday of industrial capitalism and bears the marks of its patriarchal parentage (see Makari, 2008). It diagnosed and attempted to cure psychopathological symptoms manifested in individuals. It was both a product of patriarchal capitalist culture and a palliative for it at the individual and cultural levels, in the private and public spheres. It neglected, or even repressed, the biosphere and other ‘-ospheres’ and the underlying cultural, historical and ecological causes of psychopathology diagnosed in Living With the Earth and in Postmodern Wetlands. It also had little to say about technology and its relation to psychopathology and psychogeopathology. Freudian psychoanalysis addressed the role of technology in psychopathology, most famously in the Fort/Da game with its attempt to master absence and lack, but nothing to say about the role of technology in the psychogeopathology of orally and anally sadistic monstrous machines and their mastery of nature in industries such as agriculture. While psychoanalysis arose in the heyday of industrial capitalism and is the son of its patriarchal father, it can be used to analyse and


engage in a talking cure of its psychogeopathologies, just as it did with its psychopathologies. The limited success of the latter can partially be ascribed to its locating the causes of symptoms within the claustrophobic confines of the domestic private sphere of the patriarchal conjugal family rather than in the larger private sphere of civil society, the public sphere of the nation state and their interactions with the bio- and other ‘-ospheres’ (see Giblett, 2004, Chapter 2). Psychoanalytic ecology addresses these larger interactions and their psychogeopathologies. The drive here is not only to diagnose the symptoms of psychogeopathology and to engage in a talking cure of their causes but also to prevent their manifestation in the first place by promoting eco-mental health through mutuality and sacrality, as Wendell Berry has done. For many years, in many books and essays, and on his farm in Kentucky, Berry (1972) has nurtured ‘a continuous harmony with the land’. His focus has primarily been on organic farming and sustainable land-use practices. Although he links ‘agricultural health and sanity’, Berry (1996, p. viii) has little to say explicitly about the link thereafter. Agricultural sanity nevertheless arises out of taking seriously what Berry (1996, p. ix) calls ‘the meanings, the responsibilities, and the pleasures of farming’. This is the bedrock on which not only is agricultural sanity founded but also on which the health of the land is built. The building of healthy land implies a healthy builder. For Berry, this builder of healthy land is ‘the ideal farmer’ who, for Berry (1996, p. 7) is a ‘nurturer’ and whose ‘goal is health’, not only for the land, but also for him or herself, his or her mind and body, his or her family, and his or her community and society. The fact that many farmers are not builders or nurturers of healthy land is for Berry a ‘crisis of culture’. For him, ‘the crisis of agriculture is a crisis of culture’ where culture is defined as ‘a practical necessity’ (p. 43) and where a culture can be ‘healthy’ (exemplified in the ideal farmer) or not (exemplified in the figure of the exploiter, such as the strip miner) (p. 7; see also Berry, 1972, pp. 170–6) both of whose mental health will differ. Organic farming is a possible exemplar for nurturing healthy land. Yet it is necessary to ask which organic farming is being touted here as it is not a unitary or homogeneous concept and practice. It is a site of struggle about what it means. In a case study of six Danish organic farmers, Kaltoft (1999) examined ‘the explicit as well as the implicit views of nature, ethical stands, learning processes, knowledge sources and identity of the farmers expressed’. He found unsurprisingly that ‘the empirical study provides evidence for the thesis that views of nature influence practice, and that organic farming comprises a variety of practices and

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views of nature’. Non-organic farming using, for example, chemical fertilisers, also comprises a variety of (different) practices and views of nature. Kaltoft (1999, p. 46) identified four views of nature espoused by his six organic farmers and characterised them as follows: mind in nature, mind–matter dualism, mind–matter undivided (Taoism) and controlling nature. For some inexplicable and undeclared reason, ‘many other interesting aspects of nature, such as aesthetics, are left out’ (Kaltoft, 1999, p. 46). Aesthetics is one of the main armatures around which views of nature are constructed, not least with the vexed concept of landscape used unproblematically by some writers on agricultural landscape with no awareness of its capitalist and colonialist history (Busck, 2002; see Giblett, 1996a, 2004 for an extensive discussion of aesthetics of nature and landscape aesthetics). Furthermore, Kaltoft identified and analysed ‘four paradigms of knowledge related to organic farming … with regard to concepts of nature and philosophy of science’. These are nutrients, soil fertility, biodynamics and communication (Kaltoft, 1999, p. 50). These paradigms are correlated for Kaltoft consecutively with the views of nature: mind in nature is correlated with the paradigm of nutrients; mind–matter dualism with the paradigm of soil fertility; mind–matter undivided with the biodynamic paradigm; and controlling nature with the paradigm of communication. Although Kaltoft does not develop this line of thought, each of these views and paradigms can be associated with psychodynamics along a continuum with mind–matter dualism linked to mastery and mind–matter undivided linked to mutuality (see Giblett, 2004, for the mastery to mutuality continuum). Despite the deplorable absence of attention to the aesthetic, and the need for further development of the dimension of psychodynamics and mental health, these views and paradigms provide a potentially productive pathway for further research, not least for overcoming what Kaltoft (1999, p. 52) sees as ‘the split between nature and culture as institutionalised in universities [which] is producing a lot of problems’ (see Giblett, 2004, for overcoming the culture–nature split). Kaltoft warns that the paradigms are shared by farmers, agronomists in extension and advisory services and agro-scientific researchers. The findings are related to the broader discussion about the ongoing institutionalization of the organic farming. Institutionalization prioritizes certain practices and views of nature. Organic farming as a source for the development of different kinds of sustainable agriculture is thereby reduced.


Non-institutionalised views and paradigms of organic farming and ‘nature’ are therefore required (for competing ‘views’ or discourses and paradigms of nature, see Giblett (2004)). Contact with ‘nature’ is perhaps one such non-institutionalised view. Within recreation and leisure studies, it is well established as having a wide range of therapeutic benefits, including physiological and psychological ones. Much of this work is applied and confined to parks and gardens in an urban setting for city dwellers. This work is nevertheless also applicable and transferable to rural areas, especially when ‘nature’ is defined, as Maller et al. (2006, p. 46) do, in (among other) terms of ‘the spectrum of habitats from wilderness areas to farms and gardens’. They argue that urban-dwelling individuals who seek out parks and gardens appear to intuitively understand the personal health and well-being benefits arising from contact with ‘nature’ … nature plays a vital role in human health and well-being, and parks and nature reserves play a significant role by providing access to nature for individuals. Implications suggest contact with nature may provide an effective population-wide strategy in prevention of mental ill health, with potential application for sub-populations, communities and individuals at higher risk of ill health. (p. 45) Rural-dwelling individuals who seek out parks and gardens too would presumably experience the same benefits, as would farm-dwelling individuals who seek out pockets of remnant bushland on their properties, or who conserve, and/or rehabilitate native bushland. Such experience, rather than merely preventing mental ill health, would promote sound mental health and sustainable land practices on the farm and in the wider community. Rather than contact with ‘nature’ where nature is seen in passive terms as an object with which to be in contact, nature would be seen in inter-subjective terms as a being with which to be in dialogue (see Giblett, 2004). Rather than ‘nature’ being seen as ahistorical, homogeneous and independent of cultural construction, it would be seen as shaped in part as the product of views, perceptions and valuations of it. These would, in turn, affect actions and behaviours in relation to it and nurture environmental sustainability and mental health. An exemplary instance of appreciating, conserving and/or rehabilitating remnant bushland and biodiversity as well as improving the financial bottom line on farming properties was reported on the rural

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affairs ABC television rural affairs programme Landline in September 2007 (see Courtney, 2007). These farmers in the New England region of Australia have been re-vegetating their farms with native trees. One also had a remnant bit of native vegetation that he and his wife called ‘The Jewel’. This farmer and one of the re-vegetators spoke of the pleasure and satisfaction they got from smelling native flora and from seeing and hearing native fauna. Native fauna and flora were not only good for the profitability of their farms but also for their mental health. Profitability, aesthetics, preservation of soil, fauna and flora, and physical and mental health all come together in the current political and economic climate in a mutually beneficial way. Although the beneficial effects of ‘contact with nature’ were noted, these were not related explicitly to the mental health of the farmers involved. Obviously, they weren’t depressed and they weren’t contemplating suicide. ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’ is a common catchcry of land-care and natural resource managers. You can measure the amount of remnant native vegetation on a farm, and the amount of re-vegetated native vegetation on a farm. This story on Landline gives a concrete example of the latter. In one case of the New England farmers, they were aiming to re-vegetate 30 per cent of the total farm area. The correlation between drought, economic climate and suicide has been made. The counter or inverse correlation between the amount of native vegetation (either remnant or re-vegetated) on a farm, economic fluidity and suicide has not been. From this quantitative basis, research could go on to look at the qualitative aspects of mental well-being, at aesthetic and cultural values and attitudes towards the land. The problem with locating ‘contact with nature’ at the individual level is that farming is a communal activity that involves more people than just individual farmers. It involves their family, community, clients, suppliers, agents, and so on, and their mental state, values, attitudes and behaviours. Stress in farmers for Thurston et al. (2003) is more ‘an ecological rather than an individual problem’. The problem and solution are ecological requiring a more holistic view of ‘nature’ on and off the farm that factors in the mental, cultural and social aspects of values, attitudes and behaviour. These would include factors that produce and exacerbate stress among farmers and diminish it in what Thurston et al. (2003, p. 253) see as a possible ‘paradox of rural living and farming. It may be that farmers enjoy the benefits of rural living, while suffering the stress related to farming as an occupation.’ In response, Thurston et al. (2003, p. 247) call for ‘an ecological model of mental health promotion’ that ‘acknowledges that social, economic,


physical and environmental factors interact to influence health’. These factors, including mental health, in turn, influence social, economic, physical and environmental factors. It is this feedback loop between land health and mental health that needs addressing. Mental stress, economic stress and environmental stress are linked, as are land health, economic health and mental health more generally. This is not news to anyone who has some understanding of, and appreciation for, indigenous approaches to health and the land where the health of the land and human health (mental, spiritual and physical) are intimately intertwined (see Giblett, 2004, especially Chapter 11). This is not to downplay or diminish the very real health problems across the gamut of land, mental, spiritual and physical health that indigenous peoples face today. Indeed, morbidity and mortality rates are higher in rural areas and among indigenous populations, though this is obviously connected to a wide range of social determinants (Phillips, 2005; Strong et al., 1998). Rather, it is to suggest that part of the resolution to these problems lies within their own culture in its holistic approach to health and well-being that is also applicable and pertinent to non-indigenous people. ‘Aboriginal health and well-being’ for Burgess et al. (2005, p. 118) is defined as achieved qualities, developed through relationships of mutual care of kin, non-human affiliations and observance of ethical conduct described by the law of dreaming that is encoded within the landscape. These relationships may be stronger in ‘homelands’ where ‘residents enjoy considerably better physical and mental health’ according to Burgess et al. (2005, p. 120) rather than among indigenous people in township and cities. Indigenous urban dwellers often have a strong connection to ‘country’, visit it regularly and maintain strong ties with it (see Giblett, 2004; 2006a). This connection between body, mind, rurality and local place located within the broader socio-economic framework that informs practices is crucial for nurturing land and mental health.

9 Terrifying Prospects and Resources of Hope: Minescapes, Timescapes and the Aesthetics of the Future

I begin in hope, and end in hope. In the middle, I consider the way we look at the future as a time-scape that stretches before us, at how we regard the future in some ways like a landscape with various aesthetic possibilities as either, to cut a long story short and simplifying to the extreme, a pleasing prospect (with the double spatial and temporal meaning of ‘prospect’) or a terrifying prospect with also the same double meaning. Along the way, I draw from the past on the work of Walter Benjamin and Raymond Williams who both provide some resources for a journey of hope through the landscape of the future. These resources have a different spatial and temporal orientation than pleasing or terrifying prospects. The photographic minescapes of Edward Burtynsky, including his aerial photograph of ‘the Super Pit’, are terrifying prospects since they do not provide much by way of resources of hope as they aestheticise mining and its impacts on and in the earth, though they do demonstrate the monumental threat that the depths of mining pose to human habitation on the surface of the earth, not least in and for Kalgoorlie. The surface of landscape photography portrays and betrays the depths that mining goes to in its greedy lust for resources of ore just as landscape and portrait painting and photography reduce depth to surface, diachrony to synchrony, life to death. By contrast, resources of hope have a different bodily orientation in what Benjamin called a ‘work of bodily presence of mind’. Despite the doom and gloom of Burtysnky’s minescapes, hope lives on – the note I end on. Like Benjamin and Scholem (1992, p. 135), Benjamin (1994, p. 453), ‘I take as my starting point the small, nonsensical hope’. Hope is nonsensical. It is nonsensical to hope. Yet the nonsensical, like nonsense poetry, is much more entertaining, humorous and resourceful than despair and than the other sort of poetry. Benjamin’s statement implies the question of the 138

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small, nonsensical hope for what? Benjamin does not go on to hope for something in particular, or in general for that matter. I know it is not polite to reply to a question with a question but I will by asking: does hope have an object? Do we hope for something? Hope is a noun and a verb, and an intransitive verb at that as it takes a preposition. Although we usually hope for something, or have hope in something, or to do something, the quintessential feature of hope is hoping (engaging in the activity), rather than the object of hope (the end of the activity). Hope is a state or a station; it is a journey, but not one towards a final and fixed destination. It is a journey without a destination. Hope is not an end point; it is a starting point, but a starting point for what? That is the point and purpose of hope. One does not have to hope for something definite as an object. One hopes (period). One begins to hope and one can go on hoping – hope is a beginning, not an ending. One might hope for things to change for the better, but one does not have to, or is obliged to, and things are not obliged to either. One can imagine how things might get better, but if one fixes hope on too definite an object, one is bound to be disappointed. If one were in a perpetual state of hope, one could never be disappointed because hope would not be fixated on an object. One is perpetually hopeful. This is not blind optimism but resourceful hopefulness. I turn first towards the past, not in glowing nostalgia for the good old days of Cultural Studies, but to provide some resources for a journey of hope into the future in these bad new days of the present. Twenty-five years ago, Raymond Williams (1983/5), the ‘father’ of Cultural Studies, first published his book, Towards 2000, the last chapter of which is called ‘Resources for a journey of hope’. Williams provides some resources for such a journey in this and other writings. When the editors of a posthumous collection of Williams’s writings were searching for a suitable title for it, they drew on and abbreviated the title of this chapter to Resources of Hope (Williams, 1989, p. viii). In this chapter, I will outline the resources for a journey of hope that Williams provided for us. I will add two further ones drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, ‘the patron saint of cultural studies’ as Solnit (2000, p. 198) calls him. These are a new embodied environmental aesthetics and a new culture of the body. All these resources of hope are used, as Williams (1989, p. 209) put it, to make ‘hope practical, rather than despair convincing’ and give us what he called ‘practical hope for a shared future’ (1989, p. 225). This practical hope for a shared future is produced within and by a social context. Practical hope is social hope; a shared future is a social future. More recent thinking about hope complements Williams. Societies

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for Ghassan Hage (2003, p. 9; see also p. 3) are ‘mechanisms for the generation and distribution of hope’. Hope is both productive and a product; it is both a social process, and a social outcome. Hope is an orientation to the future in the present that draws on the past. Hope is produced socially, both individually and collectively. In order to have hope, and to be hopeful, it is necessary to produce it. Hope is something made, not given. The social mechanism generating and distributing hope does so by working the resources of hope. Hope is produced out of the resources of hope. Without resources of hope, there would be no hope. Williams’s thinking on the resources of hope complements Hage’s on social hope by providing the material with which to generate hope. Without resources of hope, there would be nothing to generate and distribute. In the chapter ‘Resources for a journey of hope’ and elsewhere, Williams outlined resources of hope which I have listed under six headings. (1) Developing and deploying livelihood: twenty-five years ago in a paper called ‘Problems of the coming period’ reprinted in Resources of Hope, Williams (1989, p. 167) argued that the real ecological crisis … is much deeper than what’s usually considered environmentalism or conservationism. Issues like endangered wild species or the preservation of unspoilt countryside are just causes … [but] they often mask the true ecological crisis, which is at this stage of the industrial order, [that] elements of depredation and stress have been recognised whether in success or in failure. In the same year, Williams (1983, pp. 214–15) published Towards 2000 in which he argued that what is now known as the ecological argument should not be reduced to its important minor forms; the dangerously rising scale of industrial and chemical pollution; the destruction of some natural habitats and species. The case of the argument is very much harder. … What is really at issue is a version of the earth and its life forms as extractable and consumable wealth. What is seen is not the sources and resources of many forms of life but everything, including people, as available raw material, to be appropriated and transformed. Against this, the ecological argument has shown, in case after case, and then as a different way of seeing the whole, that a complex physical and its intricated and interacting biological process cannot for long be treated in such ways, without grave and unforeseen kinds of damage.


Extractable and consumable wealth is a simple definition for the resource commodities of ore and whore. Workers in the mining industry mine workers in the sex industry treating whores as ore just as much as they mine ore as whore (for the sexual politics and psychodynamics of mining, see Giblett, 2004, Chapter 9). As Williams (1989, p. 220) said regarding Welsh miners (and which I will relate to Australia), ‘it is no use simply saying to [Australian miners] that all around them is an ecological disaster. They already know. They live in it. They have lived in it for generations. They carry it in their lungs.’ No doubt they carry it elsewhere in their bodies too. For Williams, the only way to mount a revolution against the capitalist conquest and mastery of nature is to produce ‘a new social and natural order’ via the concept and practice of ‘livelihood’. Livelihood entails sensing and living the connection and interaction between the human body and the earth (including mining) in gratitude for its generosity (as I and others have explored elsewhere; see Giblett, 1996a, 2004 (especially Chapter 9 on mining). Livelihood for Williams entails moving from viewing and using the earth as a source of extractable and consumable wealth to living with the earth in what others have called symbiosis (see Giblett, 2004, Chapter 12). In a groundbreaking paper called ‘Between country and city’ first published in 1984 and reprinted in Resources of Hope, Williams (1989, p. 237) warned that the deepest problems we have now to understand and resolve are in [the] real relations of nature and livelihood. … [T]he central change we have to make is in the received and dominant concept of the earth and its life forms as raw material for generalised production. … [In order to do so] it is important to avoid a crude contrast between ‘nature’ and ‘production’, and to seek the practical terms of the idea which would supersede both: the idea of ‘livelihood’ within, and yet active within, a better understood physical world and all truly necessary physical processes. Both industrial and agrarian capitalism have overridden this idea of livelihood, putting generalised production and profit above it. (2) A renewed commitment to pacifism: nearly 30 years ago, Williams (1989, p. 200) argued that pacifism ‘remains, in the multiplying dangers of international violence, one of the most profound and accessible responses to evil in our world and culture’. In a groundbreaking paper called ‘Socialism and ecology’, first published in 1982 and reprinted in

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Resources of Hope, Williams (1989, p. 224) argued that ‘a crucial component of any rational definition of a standard of life is the maintenance of peace’. The urgency and necessity of this call for peace has only increased in the intervening years. (3) An attachment to place and a commitment to local activism to conserve places engaging in what Williams (1989, p. 240) ‘territorially based popular mobilization’. All places are places where history, as Williams (1989, p. 5) puts it, is ‘written visibly into the earth’ and where what he calls ‘material inequalities … are literally inscribed in the earth’. In particular, they are inscribed in cities and towns, farms and mines, in national parks and wilderness areas. For Williams (1989, p. 242) ‘a new theory of socialism must now centrally involve place’ as ‘place has been shown to be a crucial element in the bonding process’ of people with people into a viable and vital society through economic and political ties. I have attempted to do this in the place where I live (see Giblett, 2006a). (4) A new kind of gender politics embracing the women’s, men’s, environmental and pacifist movements. Although Williams frequently mentioned the women’s movements and acknowledged its centrality among ‘the new social movements’ alongside the anti-nuclear and ecological movements, he had very little to say about it in more specific terms during his life. In probably his last interview he pointed to the work of the Brontë sisters as ‘representing interests and values marginalized by the male hegemony’ (Williams, 1989, p. 319). In a reading of the scene on the heath in Jane Eyre, I show how Charlotte Brontë does just this, but she then returns her eponymous heroine to the clutches of male hegemony (Giblett, 2004, pp. 20–3). In this interview, Williams (1989, p. 319) says that he embarrassed his students, among whom were his interviewer Terry Eagleton, by suggesting to them that it would be interesting to locate the historical moment when men stopped crying in public. The suppression of tenderness and emotional response, the willingness to admit what isn’t weakness – one’s feelings in and through another; all this is a repression not only of women’s experience but of something much more general. In the almost 20 years since Williams made these comments, it has become almost de rigueur for sport stars who have season-ending injuries, or have been caught as drug cheats, or for chair-sniffing politicians, to cry in public as a sign of their ‘new age sensitivity’, or as a marker of the sincerity of their confessions. These seem to me to be epiphenomena


spun off from a much more profound and thoroughgoing deconstruction, decolonisation and reconstruction of the gendered construction of reality and the gendered poetics of matter which I and others have been attempting more recently (see Giblett, 1996a, 2004, 2008a, 2008c). (5) A new kind of political ecology: in the paper ‘Between country and city’ Williams (1989, p. 233) argues that what is … necessary is a new kind of political ecology, based in but surpassing … earlier cases [of ecology ‘in its usual forms’ and environmentalism which ‘resists pollution and the destruction of habitat’. This new kind of political ecology] can trace the processes to the economic and social structures which develop and are strengthened by them, and which can reasonably propose alternative kinds of economic and social organization. In the same year, Felix Guattari published his essay ‘Three ecologies’ which came to remarkably similar conclusions. Williams’s political ecology can be associated with the third type of ‘generalised ecology’ that Guattari (2000, p. 52) envisages: ‘ecology must stop being associated with the image of a small nature-loving minority or with qualified specialists. Ecology in my sense questions the whole of subjectivity and capitalistic power formations’, including the whole of corporeality I would add for capitalism is corporeal. The body of capital is an orally and anally sadistic monster that consumes good things from the earth and produces goods and bads (see Giblett, 2004). The body of the earth is inscribed with and by the body of capital as in Burtynsky’s photograph of Lake Lefroy where roads and the mine-hole mark the surface of the earth with scarified wounds and the depth of the earth with suppurating wounds. Part of the questioning that Guattari proposes entails a thorough interrogation of the subject’s interpellation as bodily being in relation to spaces and places and in relation to the history of the colonial expropriation and resource exploitation of indigenes’ lands. In terms remarkably similar to Williams, generalised ecology for Guattari (1995, p. 20) is not just a matter of the environment but also of human psyche and society as we cannot conceive of solutions to the poisoning of the atmosphere and to global warming due to the greenhouse effect, or to the problem of population control without a mutation of mentality, without promoting a new art of living in society

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where society is not conceptualised as something separate from nature or ‘the environment’, but as integral to it and interdependent with it. To provide the materials and skills for creating a new art of living in society, Williams (1989, p. 237) points to ‘green socialism’ and argues that it is the most hopeful political movement of our time within which ecology and economics can become, as they should be, a single science and source of values, leading on to a new politics of livelihood [and] to a new social and natural order. (6) A new temporal orientation looking at the past and journeying hopefully into the future, or what Williams (1989, p. 281) called ‘walking backwards into the future’ with its obvious reference to Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’ and to his 1940 reading of Paul Klee’s ink-wash drawing Angelus novus which, Benjamin says, shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned towards the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it as his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm. Benjamin (2003, p. 392) The Angel of History looks back into the past as s/he moves backwards into the future. S/he does not consider the future to be a prospect – pleasing or terrifying. S/he does not consider the future at all because the future is inconsiderable. The future is behind him/her. The past is before him/her. The Angel looks back at and into the past as a ‘passpect’. The Angel even looks beyond the past, past the past, as Weber (2008, p. 226) has suggested recently the glance of Klee’s Angelus Novus may be directed in the general direction of the viewer, but … his eyes are riveted elsewhere: off to one side. … The New Angel glances at us and yet past us. … In thus


looking past the past, such a glance leaves room for a different kind of future, one that would not lead ‘back’ to the place from where we have come. The Angel does not look at us as that would fix us in its gaze at a particular moment in time whereas we are always players in time suspended between a past we cannot change, a present we cannot escape from and a future we cannot know. It is impossible to know the future for the future is unknowable. Like Benjamin, for Williams (1989, pp. 76 and 282) ‘“imagining the future” … is a waste of time. … All we can know for certain is the succession of actual crises and developments that have already occurred’. We cannot know the future; we can only know the past. We can know something of the present on the cusp between the known past and the unknown and unknowable future. Whether the past and the future were or will be better than the present is a contentious topic. As ‘ideas of a better past and of a better future have chased each other through all modern political thought’ for Williams (1989, pp. 281 and 118), we need to ‘move from a merely retrospective nationalist politics to a truly prospective politics’, in other words, from a politics oriented towards the past (for example, John Howard) to a politics oriented towards the future (for example, Benjamin, Guattari and Williams). The only way to ‘face the future’ in Williams’s (1989, p. 287) words is by facing the past and the present. Williams (1989, p. 322) concludes Resources of Hope by stating categorically: ‘I say we must speak for hope.’ I speak for hope too, not because it can’t speak for itself, but because it needs others to speak with it in a chorus of hope, and for hope. In this chapter, I speak for hope too by trying to follow the temporal orientation outlined by Benjamin and Williams by learning from the past (but not dwelling nostalgically in it), by facing and living in the present, and by having hope for the future (not despairing about it). Underlying, and associated with, all the above resources for a journey of hope is a desire to produce visual, verbal and other expressive and creative work that will enable that journey to take place, that will provide the sustenance to sustain the journey. Although Williams does not explicitly mention this creative and cultural aspect, it is implied in all the previous resources and it involves developing resources for hopeful prospects in six of his resources: (1) developing and deploying livelihood, (2) a renewed commitment to pacifism,

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(3) an attachment to place and a commitment to local activism to conserve places, (4) a new kind of gender politics, (5) a new kind of political ecology and (6) a new temporal orientation. All of these find expression in artistic and creative work that means shifting away • • • • •

from resources of ore and whore to resources of hope, from resources of space to resources of time, from resources of the past to resources for the future, from resources of past places to resources for future places and from resources of the pleasing prospects of the picturesque and the terrifying prospects of the sublime to resources for hopeful prospects.

Edward Burtynsky’s aerial photographs of Australian minescapes are terrifying prospects of mining. Two main types of strip-mining are depicted. In the first, the earth is a horizontal surface for the inscription of roads, ponds and other mining activities; in the second, the earth is a vertiginous depth for digging holes to extract ore. Mining is aestheticised in aerial photographs as an object of sight alone. The viewer is placed above and beyond to look down upon the scene below and master it. The other senses are denied. The history of the place is also frozen in the synchronic moment in which the photograph is taken. In a recent article on what Soenke Zehle (2008, p. 110) calls Burtynsky’s ‘grand tour of industrial landscapes’ in a special of MIA devoted to ‘Ecomedia’, Zehle remarks on ‘the de-emphasis of the geographical specificity of the sites Burtynsky’s documents’. This effect can partly be attributed to the aerial point of view he adopts in many of his photographs. Zehle goes on to note that ‘from nineteenth century photographers like Carleton Watkins he retains the elevated hovering viewpoint’ (p. 112). This point of view can be related to the sublime, yet whereas Watkins produced what Marien (1993) called ‘the corporate sublime’, Burtynsky produces what has been called the ‘industrial’ or ‘toxic sublime’, or what Zehle calls the ‘documentary sublime’. What all these proliferations of the sublime miss in their emphasis on subject matter and style is the spatial and temporal orientation of Burtynsky’s photography. The sublime is often evoked by looking up at vertical forms and terrifying heights, such as mountains or mountainous seas, looming above one (see Giblett, 1996a, 2004), whereas Burtynsky’s photographs


evoke the sublime by looking down into the terrifying abyss and vertiginous depths opening up below one. His photograph of the Lake Lefroy mine freezes a moment in time, not only of its taking but also of the possibility of plunging to one’s death in an empty hole in the ground and of overcoming this possibility so one’s point of view is like a bungee jumper suspended in mid-air with no visible means of support. The sublime is evoked not only by transcending space but also by compressing time. Time and sublime rhyme as I have argued elsewhere (Giblett, 2008b, pp. 28–30). At the risk of adding another sublime to the list, Burtynsky’s photographs are of time sublime – an empty now and a terrifying prospect. In Burtynsky’s photograph of ‘the Super Pit’, the black hole of Kalgoorlie threatens to swallow the whole town in its orally sadistic maw. This is precisely how the Super Pit was reported in an article in the The Weekend Australian Magazine entitled ‘The Super Pit gold mine in Kalgoorlie is threatening to swallow the town’ (Andrusiak and Taylor, 2008) it is Australia’s biggest goldmine, swallowing what is known as the world’s richest square mile of dirt. But the Super Pit, in historic Kalgoorlie-Boulder in Western Australia, is also eating the booming city it is helping sustain and literally shaking its residents to their foundations. Kalgoorlie-Boulder is a feral quaking zone created by the orally sadistic Super Pit. There is a long history regarding mining in oral sadistic terms as I have analysed elsewhere (Giblett, 2004, Chapter 9). Rather than these niceties of metaphorisation and the sublime, the local residents are much more concerned with the threat that ‘noise, dust and pollution’ pose to their health, lives and livelihood. The story goes on to discuss these assaults on the ear, nose and skin in some detail. This is the other, invisible side of the story to Burtynsky’s photograph and the specificities of the place. In writing about some of his other photos what Solnit (2007, p. 138) calls ‘a truly ecological photography’ tracing ‘the life of a commodity from extraction to disposal’ might portray this other, invisible side. Yet tracing the life of a community in its place and in its use of living beings before they become, or when they are not, or have ceased to be, a commodity might portray livelihood in Williams’s terms in what I have called ‘a photography for environmental sustainability’ in Chapters 6 and 7. Similarly Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s (2005) monumental travelling exhibition of photographs, The Earth from the Air, documents landscapes

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and human impact on the earth from the aerial point of view. This is a position of military reconnaissance that masters the land and people from above. Aerial photography has military beginnings and applications (see Giblett, 2008c, pp. 69–70). Like a map, it reduces the heights and depths of the earth to surface, to line, pattern, form and colour. It does not get down and dirty with people. It does not engage with people living in their bioregions, though it shows these places in graphic detail from a distance. Unlike Burtynsky, Arthus-Bertrand does not show mining – a curious omission given that mining is one of the most visible industrial activities from the air – nor, like Burtynsky, does he show people living in an environmentally sustainable way. All human activity is seen as marking the earth in pleasing patterns, and in largely destructive ways. Like Burtysnky, Arthus-Bertrand aestheticises the formal patterns, shapes and colours of objects on the surface of the earth. Like Ansel Adams’s monumental photography of the American West that provides a consolation to the threat of nuclear war, Arthus-Bertrand’s monumental photography of the earth gives solace in the age of climate change, and earthly destruction. Just as the viewer of Adams’s photographs can have his or her conservation cake and eat it too, so can the viewer of Arthus-Bertrand’s by appreciating his aerial aesthetics and taking on board his environmental message without addressing the disconnect between the two and the politics of pictures. To Williams’s six resources of hope, I would thus add a seventh, (7) a new embodied environmental aesthetics. Although Williams (1973/85, pp. 120–6) had much to say about the aesthetics of the landscape, especially the pleasing prospects of the gentleman’s park estate, he had little to say in his work not only about feminism and the women’s movement but also about aesthetics per se and human embodiedness, two topics about which Benjamin and others have had a bit to say (see Giblett, 1996a, 2004, 2006a, 2008a). Aesthetics for Benjamin (2008, p. 41 and n.35) is a theory of perception. In a note to his use of this term, he traces the etymology of how ‘the term “aesthetics” is a derivative of Greek aisthetikos, “of sense perception,” from aisthenesthai, “to perceive.”’ The Kantian definition of aesthetics is ‘the science of sensuous perception’ (The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (p. 34)). George Karpathakis (personal communication) tells me that the Greek word is in current usage and would be translated into English as ‘how do you feel?’ Aesthetics in Benjamin’s (and Kant’s) sense cannot be confined to the senses of sight and hearing as they were for Hegel (2004, p. 43) for whom they are the only senses fit for aesthetic inquiry so there can be no aesthetics of smell, taste and feeling. This is a narrow, sublimated


definition of aesthetics restricted to works of art whereas aesthetics in a broad, embodied definition as sensory perception involves the senses of smell, taste and touch too, so there can be, contra Hegel, and is, an aesthetics of odour, texture and flavour. A new embodied environmental aesthetics would also involve a sense of place for this sense is for Solnit (1994/9, p. 203) the sixth sense. This sixth sense of place could be called topaesthesia. This relates to Williams’s resource of hope of an attachment to local place and activism in conserving that place. With Solnit, it receives a bodily, sensory inflection. In addition to the usual five senses, Michel Serres (in Zournazi, 2003, p. 199) argues for two more senses in support of what he calls ‘the art of living’: first, an internal sense of one’s own body, or coenaesthesia and secondly, the sense of movement of one’s own body, or kinaesthesia. A new embodied environmental aesthetics would involve an aesthesis of one’s sense of place in relation to the landforms and other life around one, an aesthesis of the place of one’s own body within that place and an aesthesis of the movement of one’s body in that place. How one feels about a place, about one’s own body and the movement of one’s body in a place would all be a part of a new embodied environmental aesthetics. An embodied sensory perception of the ‘Super Pit’ would involve not only the sight of its cavernous depths and gaping maw swallowing the town of Kalgoorlie, but also the smell of the earth, the rock, and the cordite from the blasting; the percussion and sound of the blasting and the noise of the machines; the touch of the earth and the rock; and the metallic taste of the mine in the worker’s sandwiches and water bottles. It would also involve a sense of the place of Kalgoorlie, its bioregional characteristics and its natural and human history. Moreover, it would involve a sense of one’s own tiny, fragile body in the pit’s cavernous space and its movement within it. This embodied aesthetics of all eight senses provides a resource for a journey of hope for a new way of being with the earth and a new art of living in society which would engage with embodied being, everyday life and livelihoods. The Angel of History sees, hears, smells, tastes and touches the terrors and horrors of the past, the present and the future of a place, the body and movement with spine-chilling fear and warm-hearted hope. Turning to the recent past for the resource of hope of a new embodied environmental aesthetics, Warwick Mules (2008) argues for ‘environmental aesthetics’ in order to ‘think otherwise our relation to the earth from the ground up’. This involves engaging our embodied nature as beings making sense of the world in which we live. Environmental

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aesthetics is distinguished from traditional aesthetics with its relationship of a subject to an object. Mules critiques this relationship in the transformation of land into landscape, in ‘landscape engineering’ and in Williams’ ‘working country’. Turning to Australian aboriginal cultures (see Webb, 1996; Giblett, 2004, Chapter 11) and the paintings of fellow Queenslander, William Robinson (see Klepac, 2001), Mules argues for what he calls ‘open country’, a union of people and places. For Mules, along lines similar to Benjamin, our being in the world is an embodied one involving an environmental aesthesis as a joyous affirmation of interconnectivity. Instead of ‘the environment’ being a source of resources to exploit, for instance, in mining and an object to contemplate and enjoy, for instance, in landscape photography, ‘the environment becomes a place of being-with the earth’. In this new embodied environmental aesthetics, ‘the environment’ (built with or without human hands) becomes a place for a journey of hope. One particular place in which an embodied environmental aesthetics can find hope is the swamp. The swamp is a place of hope because it is a place of new life, unlike the mine. The swamp is also a blast from the past into the future; it is a place of pre-modernity, filled and drained in modernity, and conserved in and for postmodernity. It is the postmodern place par excellence (as I have argued elsewhere; see Giblett, 1996a). It is also dark, and not just a dark place. For Virginia Woolf (cited by Solnit, 2005b, p. 1), ‘the future is dark’ ‘with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave’, Solnit (2005b, p. 6) adds. The swamp is a perfect place for generating what Solnit (2005b) calls ‘hope in the dark’ because its darkness is as much of the womb as the tomb (as I have also argued elsewhere; see Giblett, 1996a). The quaking zone of a swamp also relates to the human body. The quaking zone of the body is the soft and pliable centre of the human body as Thoreau suggested. The quaking zone applies to both the human body and the body of the earth. Thoreau (1962, IX, p. 394) wrote that ‘methinks every swamp tends to have or suggests such an interior tender spot. The sphagnous crust that surrounds the pool is pliant and quaking, like the skin or muscles of the abdomen; you seem to be slumping into the very bowels of the swamp.’ The quaking zone is a bodily zone, the grotesque lower bodily stratum as Bakhtin (1968; see also Giblett, 2008a, Chapter 4) called it; it is also the grotesque lower earthly zone (see Giblett, 1996a, Chapter 6). A new embodied environmental aesthetics involving all eight senses of the human body would develop and use the eighth and final resource of hope:


(8) a new culture of the body (see Giblett, 2008a), or what Benjamin called a ‘work of bodily presence of mind’. He suggested that to turn the threatening future into a fulfilled ‘now’, the only desirable telepathic miracle, is a work of bodily presence of mind (my emphasis). Primitive epochs, when such demeanour was part of man’s daily husbandry, provided him with the most reliable instrument of divination: the naked body. … What would have become a portent of disaster he binds bodily to the moment, making himself the factotum of his body. Benjamin (1979, p. 99; 1996, p. 483) ‘Primitive man’ does all kind of work for his body whereas modern man tends to do only limited kinds of work with or on his or her body. This resource of hope works the body as a means of generating hope for the future. Instead of the human body being seen as a passive object upon which disease and old age is inflicted, it becomes an active agent producing hope and a better body. Instead of ‘society’ being seen as a mechanism for the generation and distribution of hope, the social body becomes just that – a body. Instead of the earth being seen as a source of raw materials to extract and process, the earth becomes a body (see Giblett, 2008a). Cultivating a bodily presence of mind is possible and paramount in practices such as Tai Chi or taijiquan in which there is no mind–body dualism (see Giblett, 2008a). The player of taijiquan does all kinds of work for his body rather than working with or on his or her body as the exerciser does, the epitome of ‘modern man’. In his essay on the tenth anniversary of Kafka’s death, Benjamin (1973, pp. 126 and 132; 1999, pp, 806 and 810) relates that, ‘just as K lives in the village on Castle Hill [in Kafka’s novel The Castle], modern man lives in his body; the body slips away from him, is hostile towards him. … Exile – his exile – has gained control over him. … the most forgotten alien land is one’s own body’. Or, as in the later translation, ‘the most forgotten source of strangeness is our own body’. By contrast, ‘primitive man’ for Benjamin, the most fondly remembered, friendly land and source of strangeness is one’s own body. Indeed, the Taoist body is one’s own land (see Giblett, 2008a, Chapter 10). The Taoist body is topaesthetic, coenaesthetic and kinaesthetic as it involves a feeling for one’s place, one’s own body in that place and for the movement of one’s body within it. In particular, the Taoist body of taijiquan develops delegated general powers of balance, fitness, strength and flexibility, rather than

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specialised powers in one particular sport, or technique. It provides a reliable instrument of divination as it does not predict the future but shapes the future and the body in accordance with cosmic rhythms, with eternity. The aim of taijiquan is to return the body to the perfect body of the past, the intra-uterine body. Taijiquan looks back into the past while walking backwards into the future. Instead of the body being a portent of impending disaster with the breakdown of old age or the onset of disease, it binds the player of taijiquan to the moment of a fulfilled now. Rather than the empty now of the time sublime of Burtynsky’s photographs, the moment of a fulfilled now is what Benjamin (2003, p. 395; see also Eagleton, 1981, pp. 10–1, 73, 146 and 156) called Jetztzeit, ‘time filled full by now-time’, or ‘nunc stans’, ‘eternity regarded as a state outside time in which there is no past or future’ (The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (p. 1956)). Is this not what the Angel of History looks at past the viewer? Does not the Angel of History look past the past to eternity? For Benjamin, this now-time is revolutionary and the means to ‘blast open the continuum of history’ (2003, p. 396), not least the continuum of the history of the human body (as Benjamin and others have attempted; see Giblett, 2008a). Rather than blasting open the continuum of the earth for resources of ore, Benjamin blasts open the continuum of history for resources of hope. The figure of the Angel and its deployment in photography has recently come to prominence in Matt Newton’s photograph of Allana Beltrans’s ‘Weld Angel’ which won a Tasmanian Media Award for excellence in news photography and was a finalist at the Walkleys, Australia’s most respected journalism awards (Van Vuuren and Lester, 2008, p. 73). Like Klee’s Angelus Novus, the Weld Angel looks past the viewer into the past and future. For van Vuuren and Lester (2008, p. 72), ‘her composure, her stillness are important. Beltran’s statue-like pose can symbolise the past two decades of active protest and the decades of protest to come.’ Suspended between a past that cannot be changed, but must be remembered, and a future that cannot be known, but can be shaped, the Weld Angel embodies the fulfilled now of a bodily presence of mind suspended on a tripod in mid-air with visible means of support. She also symbolises much more. For van Vuuren and Lester (2008, p. 73), ‘the halo of light filtered through the trees surrounding Beltran is powerful also.’ In Benjamin’s terms, this halo is auratic as it conveys the unique appearance of the Weld Angel in this moment in time and this place in space (see Giblett, 2008c). The aura of the angel connotes for van Vuuren and Lester (2008, p. 73) ‘the angel as guardian of the wilderness and the


angel as messenger’ similar to Benjamin’s reading of Klee’s Angelus Novus conveying a message of the winds of progress caught in her wings. The guardian of the wilderness is also the guardian of paradise who was placed by God at the gates of Eden after the Fall to prevent Adam and Eve from returning (Genesis 3:24). We can never return to the past, to the Edenic paradise, because the Angel prevents us from doing so. The Weld Angel also tries to ensure that we never repeat the mistakes of the past of destroying paradise, or wilderness, in the future. The Weld Angel, by preventing access to the Tahune Airwalk, protected the wilderness, or guarded the gates of paradise, for a time at least and so constituted the wilderness as paradise (see Giblett, 2004). She thereby embodied a resource of hope and blasted open the continuum of history. Newton’s photograph preserves this moment and is now part of the archive of high-impact conservation photography. Benjamin did not turn to the grand works of high art to provide resources of hope for himself personally. He turned to the small stuff of everyday life: dolls, and other toys, notebooks, photographs and postcards, and so on. These were not only the materials for his work in the present, but also his means of communication with the future and were thus not merely an archive of his past work. They are an archive for his future work. By accumulating an archive of his own work, Benjamin was able to send a message to the future and so defy the fascists and their policy and practice of genocide. Unlike the fascists who used the body as a means of communicating with the future (as I and others have argued; see Giblett, 2008a (especially Chapter 6)), Benjamin used his archive as a means of communicating with us. An exhibition of his archive was mounted in Berlin in 2006 and an exhibition catalogue was published to accompany it. A translation into English was published in 2007 (Benjamin, 2007). It shows that Benjamin was not only an archivist of his own writings and an aesthetician of writing and the small, but also a collector of cottage craft and visual images. All these objects bear the traces of his bodily presence of mind, of his embodied aesthetics, and were his resources of hope. A remarkably similar appreciation for the aesthetics of the small stuff of everyday life can be found with Thoreau. The patron saint of cultural studies and the patron saint of swamps were both archivists of the everyday. Like Benjamin, Thoreau was a collector, in Thoreau’s case of botanical specimens, arrowheads and other rocks, and so on. Coincidentally in 2006, the year in which an exhibition from the Benjamin archive was mounted in Berlin, an exhibition catalogue to accompany the Thoreau collection in the Concord Museum, Massachusetts was published by

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the museum (Wood, 2006). The curator of the Thoreau collection argues that Thoreau was ‘distinctively aware of the ability of objects to communicate’ (Wood, 2006, p. 9). Benjamin was aware of this ability too, though also for Benjamin, and I surmise for Thoreau too, objects did not merely communicate in the present but communicated across time, from the present to the future. They are a blast from the past to the future. For the Executive Director of the Concord Museum, Thoreau was ‘in many ways a pioneer in the field of material culture history’, especially of everyday life (Caldwell, 2006, p. 6; see also Wood, 2006, pp. 17–18). Similarly, Benjamin was a pioneer not only of cultural studies but also of material cultural studies. Both books are a source of joy for devoted readers of their work because the reader can retrace visually the lives of the two writers through the photographs of the objects they handled, used and, in some cases, made, in a much more engaging way than simply reading biographies about them, or even their own autobiographical works. Both books are a resource of hope because even though both writers died in their forties, their work lives on, not only in the books they wrote but also in their bodily presence of mind traced in these objects that communicate to us in the present and provide an exemplum for us to communicate in the present and to the future. They give hope, though not necessarily for any specific object. For Benjamin (and Scholem, 1992, p. 225; Benjamin, 1994, p. 565), ‘as Kafka puts it, there is an infinite amount of hope, but not for us’. There may be no hope for us but that does not mean that we cannot hope. There is always hope. As Bill Hayden said when Bob Hawke toppled him for leadership of the Labour Party before Hawke went on to become Prime Minister, ‘hope springs eternal from the human breast’. To cite another cliché, where there is life, there is hope. By implication, where there is no life, there is no hope, or, as Zournazi, (2003, p. 16) puts it, where there is no hope, there is death. Hope is living (in two senses). Despair is dead. Long live hope.

Part V Water Bodies

Natural disasters and what Solnit (1994/9, p. 46) calls ‘unnatural disasters’, such as nuclear bomb rehearsing in Nevada as we saw in Chapter 6, impact on people and the land. In Chapter 10, I consider the disasters of the Asian Tsunami of 2004, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, ‘Chernobyl’ in 1986 and ‘9/11’ in 2001. I tease apart some of the cultural and natural aspects and contradictions in written accounts and photographic representations of them. The first two disasters involved water, too much water, and water not in its proper place; water over the land that had previously been dry. It also involved bodies in water, often drowning bodies. The latter two involved fire in explosions and collapsing structures. It also involved bodies being burnt, radiated, falling, jumping, and the like. Disasters are scenes of death. Swamps, feral or native, can be considered not only as quaking zones where land and water meet but also as water bodies where body and water meet. They are also places of the mind, especially of the uncanny, of horror and fascination. For Rebecca Solnit (2005a), ‘there is something fearful and mysterious about every body of water, murky water that promises unseen things in unseen depths, clear water that shows you the bottom far below as if you could fall into it’. Both types of water, or both types of bodies of water, can be found in ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ whether it is the murky waters of native or feral swamps in which a monster (real or imagined) might lurk in their depths, or the clear water of an ocean rock pool or a chlorinated swimming pool. Just as humans are predominantly made of water, so is the earth itself which can be regarded as a water body. Water is both life-giving and death-dealing. Hurricanes and tsunamis highlight the destructive power of water; rivers and wetlands highlight its creative power. Rivers are the veins and arteries of the body of the earth, and wetlands its kidneys, 155

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liver and placenta. The final chapter considers the land as body and compares the cross-cultural colour-coding of water as black, red or white. It proposes that the waters of wetlands be considered as blood red concurrent with life and death rather than as black associated with death. It demonstrates the contiguities and continuities between the human body and the earth, and how they are intermingled into one living being – the body of the earth with its feral and native quaking zones.

10 A Natural History of Natural, Unnatural and National Disasters

In the old cliché, a picture is worth a thousand words, but pictures without words can be relatively worthless as they do not provide the means to understand or articulate what they depict. They leave a sense of loss or deficit that makes speech difficult or impossible. The drive to make sense can sometimes thankfully be stilled or stopped by the immediacy and viscerality of a picture. Then, almost by a reflex action, the mind kicks into language mode and wants to make sense. Rather than privileging pictures over words (as in ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’) or its mirror opposite (a picture is worthless without words), words and pictures can enter into a dialogue. The difficulty then lies in finding a common language with which to engage in that dialogue. The language of aesthetics, especially painting, provides one obvious point of commonality with its terminology of the sublime, the picturesque and the beautiful. The sublime may be applicable to some photographic depictions of natural and other disasters as they may evoke the awesome power of nature. The picturesque and the beautiful are largely inappropriate or inapplicable in terms of subject matter, but not in composition.

Asian Tsunami With what terms then could one begin to articulate Dean Sewell’s confronting photograph of mud-covered, gaping-mouthed and dead children from the tsunami disaster (see Giblett, 2006b, p. 49)? At the level of subject matter, this is an anti-aesthetic photograph as it is not sublime, not picturesque and not beautiful. At the level of composition, of form, expression and colour, however, it brings together these elements in a pleasing whole. Although not beautiful in a conventional 157

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sense, its point of view of looking down at small objects is a feature of the beautiful. At the level of the subject matter and the viewer, the photograph could be considered as pornography of death, not only because of the barely covered genitalia of one of the children which may evoke a prurient, paedophilic fascination, but also because of the fact that this image is a revelation of the hidden. It reveals what the mainstream media hid in its depiction of the tsunami disaster. This aspect involves fascination and horror, not only fascination with the bodies, but also horror at death and the tsunami disaster. This combination of fascination and horror is, in a word, the uncanny. A simple definition of the uncanny is a return to the repressed. This photo returns the viewer to the repressed of death (death is repressed) and to the repressed of the media representations of the disaster. It also returns the viewer in visual terms to the human scale of the event. The mainstream media pictorially hid this aspect. It reran tourist video footage of the event from which the victims were largely absent. It did not show victims in the aftermath; it showed survivors. In a sense, it did not show the natural disaster per se, as a natural disaster is primarily a human disaster and takes place at the point of impact on humans. A volcano erupting on an island uninhabited by humans and causing torrents of lava to flow down its sides destroying everything in its wake is not really a natural disaster. It is a natural event. Disaster is a human category. Humans surmise it is a disaster for the plants and animals it destroys. An undersea earthquake is a natural event; a tsunami that hits human habitats is a cultural disaster. A natural disaster is thus a bridge between the natural and the cultural worlds linking both in a very immediate and bodily way. Photos of natural disasters can do the same and Sewell’s do this. What might constitute a natural disaster is a vexed question. Arguably a bush fire started by arsonists is not a natural disaster, but an unnatural or cultural disaster. It is a disaster of people’s, or at least of some people’s, relation to place, and to other people, of their culture of nature. Yet the reportage of recent bush fires, such as those of ‘Black Saturday’ of 7 February 2009 in Victoria, Australia, refers repeatedly to them as ‘Australia’s worst natural disaster’ when many of them were lit deliberately by arsonists. Doing so seems to absolve arsonists of responsibility for the consequences and aftermath of their actions. Fire is natural, and once lit takes a natural course to consume flammable material. Yet all big bush fires start as little fires, many of which are the work of arsonists, not ‘nature’, though, of course, humans are part of nature, though, on the other hand, it is hardly ‘natural’ to light fires that destroy public and private property, and human

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and non-human lives. Using the rhetoric of the natural disaster also highlights the problematic nature of the concepts of nature and culture and the need to rethink and develop new terms, such as feral quaking zone. Black Saturday was Australia’s worst feral quaking zone. The depiction of the human scale and impact of the event, such as a bush fire and its aftermath in a photograph, provides a point of identification between the viewer and the subject. Photos of a bush fire that show humans threatened, fascinated, confronted or sheltering from it (as in Nick Moir’s series) are qualitatively different from photos of ruined houses or of fire itself (as in Michael Langford’s) from which humans are absent (see Giblett, 2006b, pp. 50–1). Moir’s series shows people in context with the disaster, engaging with it in their everyday lives. Langford’s series shows the ruinous and human-less aftermath and is a kind of wilderness experience of fire from which people have been removed. Arguably, this produces a sense of a land from which people are absent and with which they don’t engage. Moir’s and Sewell’s show a natural disaster, an event of natural forces (fire and tsunami) at, or shortly after, their point of human impact. Sewell’s pornography of death is also an orientalism of death as it depicts dead ‘Asian’ children; to show blackened bodies of burnt Australian children following a bush fire would be unacceptable.1 Disasters are cultural and natural. The media record and disseminate them and their technology produces them.

Chernobyl Langford’s, Moir’s and Sewell’s series of photographs provide the material for a dialogue between words and pictures which enable us to articulate the human experience of what could be called the age of disasters which has been going on for a century or so. They also provide the visual archive for undertaking a tentative taxonomy in the natural history of natural and unnatural disasters, as does Juha Tolonen’s journey photography of city sites in the Chernobyl exclusion zone which represents the aftermath of an accident (see Virilio, 2003; for other photographs of the exclusion zone see Polidori, 2003). The residents of the zone have been evacuated; the victims of the accident are dead or dying elsewhere; the residents could be the next victims. Chernobyl is a kind of Auschwitz for our time. Adorno said that poetry was dead or could not be written after the horrors of the Holocaust; with Chernobyl, the fabric of biological life was rent and the routines of everyday life overturned by the terrors of the meltdown. It is a limit case of the unthinkable. After Chernobyl, the unthinkable is alive, or at least has a half-life of 200 years. The half-life unthinkable has

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a story though, and Tolonen’s photos tell part of the story. Chernobyl may be unthinkable but it is not untellable as these photos and the stories of Chernobyl collected by Svetlana Alexievich (1999) show. The words and pictures can be read together. The words give a commentary on the pictures, but the pictures are worth a thousand words. For Tolonen, the city sites of Pripyat he has photographed are industrial ruins in the sense that these sites were the products of industrial society and are now its ruins and are in ruins. His photograph of the cityscape showing the context looks normal enough, and just like any other modernist city, but it is a ghost city, and a city of ghosts. Even though the photos are of an abandoned city, the sites have, and are, industrial products: the mouldering bumper-cars, the sinking hulks, the trashed buildings, the dirty glass and rusting steel. These materials and products have been domesticated and were used for consumption, but now they have been discarded, or more precisely their consumers have been forcibly and ‘temporarily’ removed. The overall mood and lighting is of decay and mould, of decrepitude and rust. This is a world that has gone awry, even the earthworms have gone, burrowing deeper into the earth or been irradiated, nuked out of existence (see Alexievich, 1999). In one of Tolonen’s photos, dying sunflowers dot a sculpture park of Triffids in a nucleated exclusion zone, surely one of the most bizarre images ever spawned by science fiction. Perhaps metallic Triffids are the only things that can survive in this place of science-fact-become-grotesque-farce. The exclusion zone is a war zone and Tolonen’s photos are war photography. He has arrived in the battle zone after the battle has been fought – and lost (there were no winners) – in the aftermath. Even the meaning of war has changed. Chernobyl was a war fought against citizens, and against the earth, by an industrial accident – if that makes sense, and if it doesn’t, it is because after Chernobyl it is hard to make sense of, certainly about Chernobyl. After Chernobyl and with Chernobyl, sense cannot be made. Recently, wildlife has returned to the exclusion zone and has flourished. Now that the area no longer has many human inhabitants, animals and plants are free to thrive (see Mycio, 2005). The exclusion zone is a kind of feral quaking zone returning to a native quaking zone.

Katrina It is also difficult to make sense of ‘Katrina’. Around the name ‘Katrina’, a whole series of events and images congregate, including those of


photographer Robert Polidori (2006) in his book of photographs After the Flood, another aftermath, with its overtones of divine punishment as with the biblical flood for human sin (Genesis, Chapters 6–7). Hurricane Katrina of 2005, and the exacerbating factors of global warming and drained wetlands, and their impacts, especially on the city of New Orleans (both its infrastructure and residents), point to the cultural construction and production of the disaster. This suite of occurrences is a salutary instance of the difficulties of trying to separate out the natural from the cultural. A hurricane is in some sense a natural event, but in the age of global warming, it is also a cultural occurrence; a flood produced by a river breaking its banks is a natural event, but a flood caused by breached levees and drained wetlands is a cultural occurrence; people dying is a natural event, but people dying by drowning in a large and iconic American city created by drainage of wetlands is a cultural disaster of logistics. ‘Katrina’ is a salutary instance of the need to think the cultural and the natural together. In particular, it points to the need to think industrial capitalism and its technologies, weather, climate, cities, floods, rivers and wetlands as intertwining and interrelated entities and agents. Yet the rhetoric of ‘natural disaster’ looms large in accounts of ‘Katrina’ (Muecke, 2007, pp. 259, 263). In an escalating scale of hyperbole, ‘Katrina’ for Brinkley (2006, pp. 5, 60, 77) was a ‘natural disaster’, ‘the worst natural disaster in modern U.S. history’ (p. 62), ‘the biggest natural disaster in recent American history’ (p. 273) and ‘the worst natural disaster in modern American history’ (p. 331). Yet a hurricane in and by itself is not a disaster. It is a natural event. Perhaps all that could simply be said is that ‘Katrina was one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in U.S. history’ (Brinkley, 2006, p. 73). Yet to be recorded in US history, ‘Katrina’ had to be more than just a storm. It had also to be more than merely an ‘oceanic disaster’ (Muecke, 2007, p. 259) out to sea. It had to have made landfall and it had to have had human impact. It was not merely an event in the history of weather patterns in the US. For Brinkley (2006, p. 249), ‘the hurricane disaster was followed by the flood disaster, which was followed by human disasters’. These three disasters for Brinkley (2006, p. 426) add up to ‘the overall disaster, the sinking of New Orleans, [which] was a man-made disaster, resulting from poorly designed and managed levees and floodwalls’. The result was that ‘the man-made misery was worse than the storm’ (Brinkley, 2006, p. 597). The flood and the misery amounts to what Brinkley calls ‘the Great Deluge [which] was a disaster that the country brought on itself’ (Brinkley, 2006, p. 619). The storm could also be seen as a disaster that the country brought on itself through the use of fossil fuels.

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The overall disaster comprising the hurricane, the flood disaster, and the man-made disaster of the sinking city and its drowning or displaced inhabitants was preceded by the disasters of dredging wetlands and of global warming. Brinkley (2006, p. 74) cites the work of Kerry Emanuel and concludes that ‘global warming makes bad hurricanes worse’. Draining wetlands also makes bad hurricanes worse as ‘miles of coastal wetlands could reduce hurricane storm surges by over three or four feet’ (Brinkley, 2006, p. 10). Miles of coastal wetlands, however, had been destroyed. Brinkley (2006, p. 9) relates that ‘nearly one million acres of buffering wetlands in southern Louisiana disappeared between 1990 and 2005’. They ‘disappeared’ as the result, not of some sort of megaconjuring trick, nor of erosion from sea-intrusion (though that contributed), but as a result of deliberate human practice. Brinkley (2006, p. 9) relates how ‘too many Americans saw these swamps and coastal wetlands as wastelands’. Wastelands needed to be redeemed into enclave estates of condos and strip developments. In a historical irony that is not lost on students of wetlands and their history, destroying wetlands can create the wasteland of flooded cities, such as New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In searching for a trope to explain these events, Brinkley turns to the tried and true figure of the monster. For him, ‘Hurricane Katrina had been a palpable monster, an alien beast’ (Brinkley, 2006, p. xiv), ‘a monstrous hurricane’ (p. 72), ‘a monster hurricane’ (p. 115), and ‘the monster storm’ (Brinkley, 2006, p. 453). A monster, according to the dictionary, is (a) ‘an imaginary creature, usually large and frightening, composed of incongruous elements; or (b) a large or ugly or misshapen animal or thing’. Katrina was not imaginary, though it or she was and has been imagined in a number of ways, including as a monster. ‘She’ was certainly large and frightening. ‘She’ was composed of the elements of air and water. These may be incongruous elements in the normal course of events but not for a hurricane. ‘She’ certainly caused ugliness and misshapenness to those caught in her wake of havoc, but aerial photographs show her to be a perfectly shaped hurricane, albeit with a deep and destructive throat imaginable as an orally sadistic monster. Katrina for Brinkley was not just any monster in general but an orally sadistic monster in particular. For him, ‘Katrina was gargantuan in sheer size, 460 miles in diameter’ (Brinkley, 2006, p. 132). Drawing on Chapters 7 and 44 of Rabelais’ Gargantua, Mikhail Bakhtin (1968, pp. 459–60) traced how the word ‘gargantua’ ‘in Spanish … means the throat. The Provencal tongue has the word “gargantuan” meaning a glutton.’ He goes on to argue that ‘gargantua’ ‘symbolize[s] the gullet,


not as a neutral anatomical term but as an abusive-laudatory image: gluttony, swallowing, devouring, banqueting. This is the gaping mouth, the grave-womb, swallowing and generating.’ Katrina for Brinkley is thus an orally sadistic monster who destroys, who takes life, rather than the monstrous-maternal that both gives and takes life like a wetland. For others, Katrina was more like Thor. For Dara Adano, ‘Katrina obliterated the landscape. Roads were torn up like they were sheets of paper and buildings looked like a huge hammer had pounded them into rubble. It was a wasteland’ (cited by Brinkley, 2006, p. 163). Buffering wetlands that were regarded as wastelands were dredged only to have a hurricane turn the landscape into a wetwasteland by an acute irony of history and reversal of fortunes. Not only the landscape but also the cityscape was turned into an artificial swamp. The Superdome for Marty Bahamode ‘cascaded into a cesspool of human waste and filth’ (cited by Brinkley, 2006, p. 239). ‘The most hellish image in New Orleans’ for Solnit (2005c, online ‘Postscript’) was ‘the forgotten thousands crammed into the fetid depths of the Superdome.’ The human-made swamp, the feral quaking zone inside the Superdome had worse conditions of air, water and sanitation than any swamp outside not made with human hands, any native quaking zone. Whereas Adano turned to Norse mythology and Brinkley to Rabelais, Christian fundamentalist bloggers turned to the Bible and quoted Hosea 8:7: ‘For they have sown the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind’ (cited by Brinkley, 2006, p. 204). In more recent terms, they have dredged the wetland, and they shall drown in the wetwasteland. Or in even more recent terms, they have seeded the clouds with greenhouse gases, and they shall reap the whirlwind and storm surge of Katrina. The seeds of the disaster for New Orleans were sown in its own history. Wilson (2006, p. 86) describes how ‘the city itself was constructed on an uneven patch of relatively high ground in the midst of a vast swamp’. New Orleans is one of a number of infamous swamp cities, cities built in, near or on reclaimed swamps: St Petersburg, Perth, Hamburg, Berlin, Jakarta, London. New Orleans for Kelman (2003/6, p. 22) ‘is surrounded by a wet world composed of terrain that is not quite land’ with the Mississippi River delta on one side and Lake Pontchartrain and the ‘backswamps’ on the other, though the latter were later drained. What Colten (2005/6, p. 46) calls ‘the swampy mire behind New Orleans’ was drained in the first 40 years of the twentieth century. Colten (2005/6, pp. 140–1) concludes that ‘by the 1930s, drainage and landfilling efforts had successfully reclaimed wetland between the city and the lake, and in the postwar years similar campaigns dewatered marshlands for tract

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housing eastward and westward from the city’. For Wilson (2006, p. 86), ‘much of New Orleans’s history can be seen as a continuing battle with the swamp’. New Orleans was a frontline in the modern war against wetlands. Many campaigns were fought against wetlands. New Orleans tried to dominate wetlands with the ironic result that ‘efforts to drain the city dominate early New Orleans history into the present day’ as Wilson (2006, p. 86) puts it. New Orleans seemed to be winning the battle until Katrina, or at least participating in an uneasy truce between its unviable location and the forces of the weather to the point that the former was forgotten until the latter intruded as a stark reminder. Colten (2005/6, p. 163) ‘traces the public’s abandonment of the belief that the city is no place for a swamp’. If the city is a place for a swamp, it is a place for a contained and controlled swamp, which is not really a swamp at all. It is not a place for a swamp such as the aftermath of Katrina. As the history of New Orleans attests, a swamp is no place for a city in the first place, and the city is no place for a swamp in the second place. Swamp and city are antithetical and inimical to each other. They are mutually exclusive. New Orleans for Wilson (2006, p. 90, my emphasis) is ‘a city on a swamp’. In the 1927 flood (Wilson, 2006, p. 111) and in the 2005 hurricane, it was transformed into a city of a swamp. The swamp outside the city, or before the city, came into the city, became now. The natural, historical barriers between city and swamp were removed. ‘Cypress wetlands used to act as reservoir for floodwater, but no longer’ (Kelman, 2003/6, p. xvi) as they had been drained. Katrina for Kelman (2003/6, p. xviii) was not a natural disaster. Katrina produced ‘water … out of place’ (Kelman, 2003/6, p. x). In other words, and in Mary Douglas’s terms, this water was dirt. It was not merely that the water was dirty in colour or composition but that the water was in the wrong place, in the buildings and streets, and not behind levees, as Polidori (2006) graphically illustrates in his photographs. Bodies were also out of place with ‘corpses floating in dirty water’ (Kelman, 2003/6, p. x) (Polidori does not photograph these). Dead bodies became dirt: visible, smelly, water-logged. Human actions, Colten (2005/6, p. xix) argues, ‘make an extreme event into a disaster . . . The extreme event that became a disaster was not just the result of Katrina but the product of three centuries of urbanization in a precarious site’. Katrina was not only the product of three centuries of urbanisation of New Orlean’s precarious watershed, but also the product of three centuries of American urbanisation of the precarious air shed through pollution with greenhouse gases.


The watery location of New Orleans, its history of drainage and leveebuilding, the fossil-fuel dependence of modern industrial capitalist economies, poor relief efforts and the storm combined to produce the disaster of Katrina. Land, water and air were mixed in an artificial quaking zone of elements not in their normal places, a feral quaking zone of the elements of air, earth and water that had been in native quaking zones now ran amok in a watery wasteland. Water was on the land and in the air. Humans were thrown into this maelstrom where they quaked in fear and survived or died.

9/11 With ‘9/11’, humans were thrown into a different sort of maelstrom of crashing and exploding planes, and falling and burning buildings. Earth, fire and air were mixed in an artificial quaking zone of elements brought about by the collision of technologies not in their normal place. The aeroplane, as what Bourke (2005, p. 358) calls ‘the previous century’s symbol of technological prowess’, was flown into the previous century’s symbol of architectural and structural-engineering prowess, the skyscraper, in particular into the World Trade Center, which she later calls ‘the architectural symbol of America’s corporate greatness’ (p. 369). The results were cataclysmic. One eyewitness said ‘“the ground was shaking”’ (Brondolo cited by Friend, 2007, p. 7). One photographer of the aftermath, Joel Meyerowitz (2006, p. 24) said, ‘the stench from the combination of burning elements overcame me’. The attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 made it ‘the most deadly murder scene in American history’ (Friend, 2007, p. 52). It did not have the dubious honour of being the site of the biggest mass killing in American history as that honour belongs probably to the Battle of Antietam during the American Civil War with four to five thousand fatalities (Friend, 2007, pp. 346–7). The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon do have the dubious honour, though, of being ‘the worst terrorist attacks, ever, on US soil’. Yet the soil of the WTC towers was a long way below the site of the attacks umpteen stories above. The fact that the towers were erected on US soil meant that an attack on them was an attack on sovereign US soil, a national symbol of blood and toil. The attacks were the worst airborne attacks, ever, in sovereign US airspace, worse than Pearl Harbour with 2400 American victims. The result was ‘a national disaster’ (Meyerowitz, 2006, p. 16) just like Katrina, though the speed and scale of the humanitarian relief effort in both cases were entirely different.

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Like Antietam, whose aftermath was well documented photographically, ‘9/11’ marked a shift in the photographic recording of war as both the attacks and the aftermath were well documented photographically. ‘September 11’, or simply ‘9/11’ as it became known, was for Friend (2007, p. 36) ‘the most widely observed and photographed breaking news event in human history. And it occurred, aptly enough, at a time when image reigned supreme in world culture.’ The image reigned supreme due to the ubiquity of digital cameras, especially in mobile or cell phones. ‘9/11’ ‘was a photogenic event. … It coincided with the revolution of digital photography’ (Shulman cited by Friend, 2007, p. 20). It was photogenic in the sense that it generated photographs, and that photography and the event were made for each other; it was not photogenic in the sense of producing photographs of beautiful scenes, or even producing beautiful photographs. The scenes did not defy aestheticisation though, as a number of photographs show, such as that of the ‘Falling Man’ with its symmetrical composition. The accessibility and ubiquity of the digital camera meant that ‘the age of the universal lensman had arrived’ (Friend, 2007, p. 30). This was so not only on the ground, and in the air from helicopters but also from extraterrestrial orbital space as Frank Culbertson in the International Space Station was ‘the twenty-first century’s first space-based war photographer’ (Friend, 2007, p. 53). ‘9/11’ also marked a shift in the mediation of war as the attacks were ‘the first such acts witnessed in “real time”’ (Friend, 2007, p. xviii) as it has been calculated that ‘more than two billion people on September 11 watched the attacks in real time or watched that day’s news reports about the attacks, according to David Hazinski’ (Friend, 2007, p. 32). The attacks were targeted against city buildings and their occupants, and in particular against the twin towers of the World Trade Center as a symbol and site of capitalist hyper-modernity. The twin towers for Friend (2007, pp. 86–7) were ’totems of the West’s economic supremacy’ and ‘the seat of American financial prowess’. They ‘seemed the urban-age equivalent of the pyramids’. They were ‘like citadels … positioned like sentries’ at the gates of the city. Yet unlike the longevity and durability of the pyramids, the twin towers were relatively short-lived and easily destructible. Unlike twin sentinels guarding the entrance to a pyramid, the twin towers came crashing down. One eyewitness of the attacks on the World Trade Center Towers observed that ‘“a concrete building seemed to be melting with this deep-throated, rumbling roar … the crash … came like a hot sirocco of deep, reddish dust and ash”’ (Flynn cited by Friend, 2007, p. 31). Solid matter melts


into clouds of dust. The city made out of mud was turning into, or returning to, dust before and in one’s eyes, and up one’s nostrils. The sublime city that transformed solid matter into the air of skyscrapers was de-sublimated into billowing clouds of hot smoke rising from the burning towers above the city skyline and a rain of burning ash and dry dust falling onto the survivors below, two of the major subject matters of the Magnum Photographers (2001, pp. 6–9, 23–5, 46–53, 68–73, 75–83) who documented ‘9/11’. These clouds of smoke and this rain of dust were death-dealing, not life-giving. Clouds and rain had ceased to be natural and become cultural. The skyscraper is both a cultural triumph over nature and a dangerous target for all who work or live in it. There is an upside, literally, to skyscrapers standing and a downside, equally literally, to skyscrapers falling, especially when 110 stories are compressed into 14 as occurred with the twin towers on 9/11 (Meyerowitz, 2006, p. 24). The collapse of the towers was exacerbated by their ‘hull-and-core’ design, which was, as Meyerowitz (2006, p. 26) puts it, ‘in part, why the towers could be so tall – and why they fell so fast’. In his 1929 essay, ‘The anxiety of the engineer’, Bloch (1998, pp. 304, 307–8) argues that [i]n the Americanized big city … technology has achieved an apparent victory over the limits of nature. For the coefficient of known and, more significantly, unknown danger has increased proportionately. … The existence of the technologically advanced city is extremely dangerous and completely lacking in beneficent harmonies. There, natural correlations have been torn apart – as in New York or similar places where the world has become a scene of commercial activity and intercourse. The city of ever-increasing artificiality, in its detachment and distance from the natural landscape, is simultaneously so complex and so vulnerable that it is increasingly threatened by accidents to the same extent that it has rooted itself in midair – that is, the city is built upon roots that have grown more and more synthetic. This grandly suspended, inorganic metropolis must defend itself daily, hourly, against the elements as though against an enemy invasion. But most important, these elements are not of the old kind, made up of conventional modes of chance and accident. Instead, they dwell amid the complexities of mechanized existence itself; with respect to ‘nature’, they inhabit nothingness: a nature consisting of nothing but calculations, a nature that arrived with the machine and that increasingly has taken up residence under less perceptible conditions, in ever more ‘mathematized’ dimensions …

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the nothingness that stands behind the mechanized world, a world unmediated by humanity, is a mortuary in which people have been buried alive. The bombed cities of World War II and the bombed twin towers of New York city on ‘9/11’ in World War III were the terrible and ultimate instantiation of this mortuary as people were buried alive, and died. In and with the hyper-modern city, nature has become fourth nature, nature overworked by culture in the technologies of hyper-modern communication and transportation (Giblett, 2004). Echoes of war were heard or seen in one of the most famous photographs of ‘9/11’. Thomas Franklin’s ‘Flag Photo’, with its allusion to Joe Rosenthal’s famous Iwo Jima flag-raising photo, ‘would become the most widely reproduced news picture of the new century’ (Friend, 2007, p. 312, image 31). Franklin’s photograph for Friend (2007, p. 325) was ‘no less than the digital-age descendant of Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima 1945’. Both photos were taken above ‘a killing field’ (Friend, 2007, p. 325) and both used ‘their nation’s most beloved symbol to turn a decimated landscape from a battleground into sacred ground’ (Friend, 2007, p. 326). In Rosenthal’s case, his photograph was of what Sontag (2004, p. 50) calls ‘a “reconstruction” … done later in the day with a larger flag’. In Franklin’s case, the original flag in his photo went missing and was replaced by a larger flag ‘shuttled around the world with a Navy escort’ as ‘the flag in the photo’ (Friend, 2007, p. 312). It was as if to make Franklin’s photo with a smaller flag seem like Rosenthal’s with a larger flag, a larger flag had to take the place of the smaller flag. Reality had to emulate the photo. Reality was not sufficient itself. It had to replicate the photo—such was the dominance of the image. Unlike Iwo Jima, however, the victims of ‘9/11’ were civilians and paramilitary police and firefighters. Richard Drew’s ‘The Falling Man’ (Friend, 2007, image 22) shows him ‘“standing in the world but the world is upside down”’ (Wieseltier cited by Friend, 2007, p. 136). Drew choose this shot out of dozens ‘“because of its verticality and symmetry”’ (cited by Friend, 2007, p. 136). This symmetry applies not only horizontally across the photo with the falling man ‘positioned precisely at the juncture where the edge of one tower’s façade eclipses the other’s’ (Friend, 2007, p. 136), but also vertically up and down the photo as the façades of both towers look the same if the photo is turned upside down as Wieseltier suggests doing. If the carnivalesque is the world turned upside down and inside out for a day to place the lower classes in the position of the higher (see Bakhtin, 1968), then Drew’s ‘Falling Man’


photo shows a world turned upside down and inside out for a day with a lowly man falling to his death caused by the lowly suicide terrorist pilots of al-Qaeda attacking high class American capitalists represented by the towers themselves. For Drori-Avraham (2006, p. 295), ‘dying so spectacularly, so calmly, the falling man awkwardly echoed his killers’. Up and down, terrorist and terrorised, killer and killed were all mixed up in a topsy-turvy world in which the killers were killed, some of whom (not just the hijackers) killed themselves. These were ‘the jumpers’ (Friend, 2007, p. 133), or were they ‘the fallers’? This is not just a question of volition or intention, but also that of status and value. ‘A person who falls’, Drori-Avraham (2006, p. 295) argues, is ‘a victim. A person who jumps may or may not be a victim.’ From the photograph of a human being plummeting through space, it is impossible to tell whether they jumped, or fell, or were pushed by others, or were forced out by heat or smoke. All the people who plummeted to their deaths were victims of the terrorist attacks as they were placed in the situation where they either were pushed or fell, or in the position of having to make a choice between jumping to their death, or being burnt to death, or dying of smoke inhalation. Observers and commentators turned to previous war terminology to make sense of 9/11, especially to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though there is no comparison in terms of the extent of the destruction (16 acres (Meyerowitz, 2006, p. 58) versus 1920 acres) and the number of victims (approximately 400,000 victims in total, comprising Hiroshima with 253,008 and Nagasaki with 143,124) compared with 2749 victims (Friend, 2007, p. xvi) for ‘9/11’, 1796 of whom remained unaccounted for after nine months of searching (Meyerowitz, 2006, p. 26). The less than 1000 victims accounted for yielded more than 19,000 body parts (Meyerowitz, 2006, p. 215) – a gruesome statistic. The ruins, as Friend (2007, pp. 22, 48) relates, ‘would become called Ground Zero’, ‘the land called Zero, the debris field’ as well as ‘this new netherworld’, or simply ‘the zone’ (Meyerowitz, 2006, p. 16). This new netherworld contrasts with the old netherworld of Gissing’s London with its man-made swampy slums. The new netherworld of ‘the inferno’ (Friend, 2007, p. 12) of the exploding planes and burning buildings became in the aftermath ‘lunar’ with its ‘moonscapes …, a cold, dead world’ (Friend, 2007, p. 49). It was a lunar landscape, like the landscape of trench warfare, but, unlike the artificial swamps of WWI, the Ground Zero of ‘9/11’ in New York (and 1951–91 in Nevada) was dry and dusty. Viewers of pictures of ‘the event’ (Friend, 2007, p. 27) of ‘9/11’ and its ruinous aftermath turned to previous photographs of similar events to

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make sense of it. David Fitzpatrick’s images taken from the NYPD helicopter looked like ‘pictures of London during the Blitz’ for Friend (2007, p. 51). ‘The billows [of smoke] are thunderous, apocalyptic. Buildings … might as well be gravestones swathed in fog’. Friend shifts register from the Blitz to the gothic. Both are sites of death. Graveyards are traditionally places of horror. New York on 11 September 2001 was ‘the horror of horrors’ for Friend (2007, p. xxii). Kurtz’s ‘the horror, the horror’ of the heart of darkness in Conrad’s novel of the same name and of the Vietnam War in Scorcese’s Apocalypse Now became the horrors of ‘9/11’. War and its horrors had come home. Television pictures beamed into American homes of the horrors of war were of terrorism on the same side of the world unlike those of the Vietnam War on the other side of the world. Both the Blitz and the gothic are associated with ruins: the Blitz created ruins; the gothic loves being in them and representing them. One of Joel Meyerowitz’s photographs of ‘9/11’ that is not in his book but is reproduced on the cover of Landscapes of Culture and Nature is thoroughly gothic in colour, composition and subject matter with its slimy green, ruinous foreground and flying ramparts like a medieval gothic cathedral. Romantic gothic landscapes for Botting (1996, pp. 2 and 32) are often castles, ‘the major locus of Gothic plots’, or graveyards or ruins depicted at night. They are places of death and ghosts and are ‘desolate, alienating and full of menace’ – all of which can be said of Meyerowitz’s photo. The castle ‘up above’ K in Kafka’s (1926/1997, p. 8) gothic novel, The Castle, like the Woolworth skyscraper in the background of the photo, ‘rose freely and airily skyward’. It sublimates base matter down below into the airy heights above. The gothic and sublime go hand in hand. Gothic for Botting (1996, p. 3) ‘signified a trend towards an aesthetic based on feeling and emotion associated primarily with the sublime’. K later compares the castle and its tower to the church tower of his home town which rose ‘neatly, unhesitatingly tapering straight upward …, an earthly building – what other kind can we build – yet with a loftier goal than the squat jumble of houses and making a clearer statement than the drab working day’. Similarly, the Woolworth skyscraper has a loftier goal than the squat jumble of the ruins of the twin towers in the foreground of this photo where many a drab working day was spent by its inmates before ‘9/11’ and the clean-up crews in the aftermath. The castle tower for K had ‘a crazy quality’ about it ‘with battlements that jutted uncertainly, unevenly, brittlely’ – just like the ruined towers. The gothic and the sublime, the ruins and the skyscraper, couched together in Meyerowitz’s photo as foreground and background, represent both the triumph and the defeat of modernity.


In Meyerowitz’s (2006) main body of work, he turns explicitly to the aesthetics of the sublime. Friend (2007, p. 262) relates how Meyerowitz says ‘he was after nothing less than replicating Ground Zero’s potential to evoke “the sublime”, using the term as it was applied in the eighteenth century: an almost unbearable awe that we experience confronting the boundless power of nature’s grandeur’. Instead of the mountains, waterfalls and big trees that evoked the sublime in the nineteenth century, the ruined World Trade Center towers in the twenty-first century confront the power of humankind’s inhumanity to humankind. Just as the skyscraper overcomes the limits of horizontality by going vertical and demonstrates mankind’s power, so ‘the awesome monumentalness of their upheaval makes mankind powerless’ (Friend, 2007, p. 263). Using the sublime communication technology of photography (Giblett, 2008c), Meyerowitz photographs the upheaval and demonstrates the awesome power of mankind to master it in images, 8000 plus in all (Meyerowitz, 2006, p. 336). Thirty-five identical copies of his exhibition of 28 photographs entitled ‘After September 11: Images from Ground Zero’ toured ‘some 300 cities in 90 countries’ ‘under the auspices of the U.S. State Department’ (Friend, 2007, p. 260) on ‘a four year journey around the world’ (Meyerowitz, 2006, p. 349). For Friend (2007, p. 261), ‘even if Meyerowitz’s work had become a calling card of the Bush Administration’, eventually ‘collected in a book of hundreds of photographs’ (Meyerowitz, 2006), and was ‘the ultimate State Department PR coup [of] Ground Zero and its nameless heroes recast as an export – none of this mattered’ because his ‘purpose remained pure: he had gone where most others were forbidden and documented the humanity that, curiously enough, overshadowed the destruction’. Yet despite this expression of purity, his purpose was compromised and tainted by the cultural baggage of the sublime, and of the history and sublime communication technology of photography, that he carried with him. Meyerowitz is the Ansel Adams of 9/11. Just as Adams is the modern photographer laureate of nature’s nation and the mountainous sublime, so Meyerowitz is the hyper-modern photographer laureate of culture’s nation and the disastrous sublime. Just as the American nation sought solace in Adams’ photographs of the sublime wilderness in the American West in the face of the threat of thermonuclear war represented by missile silos and test sites also in the American West, so it sought solace in Meyerowitz’s photographs of the sublime American wasteland of ‘Ground Zero’ in the aftermath of terrorist attacks in the same place. No longer did the American nation look to the American West to heal the wounds of war; it looked into its own backyard, into

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the battleground itself. No longer did it displace its desire for healing elsewhere. The destruction and the images were in the same place. Unlike Adams who looked to the pristine unpeopled landscape to give solace for the threat of nuclear war, Meyerowitz looked to the peopled and ruined cityscape to give comfort for the terrorist strikes. His photographs of buildings are sublime but his photographs of people working on ‘the pile’ ‘as the heaped wreckage of the Twin Towers was called by the workers’ (Meyerowitz, 2006, p. 16) are pastoral. For Meyerowitz (2006, p. 107), ‘my signature memories of Ground Zero are gardening images’ of some of the 1000 workers who went to work on searching through the pile for human remains, often with their bare hands using the sense of touch, and with their noses using the sense of smell as ‘the only way to determine whether or not they had come across human remains was by touch and smell’ (Meyerowitz, 2006, p. 30). Otherwise, they used picks, shovels, rakes, and so on, to deal with a mountain of remains, rubble and ruin of two million tons of debris (Meyerowitz, 2006, p. 278). Most of this debris was transported to ‘Fresh Kills Land Fill’ on Staten Island which has ‘exceeded the Great Wall of China as the largest manmade object on earth’ (Solnit, 2003, pp. 53 and 148). ‘The act of raking’ for Meyerowitz (2006, p. 281) ‘had become emblematic of the work on the site.’ Meyerowitz alludes visually not only to the sublime landscapes of the Hudson River School, but also verbally to their pastoral landscapes as well, such as the Church’s scene of hayricking, West Rock, New Haven. Yet the gardening of Ground Zero is not performed on living beings (plants) to promote growth and of the living earth but in the search for dead beings in ruins. As one of the rakers who Meyerowitz (2006, p. 280) photographed said, ‘we’re gardeners in the garden of the dead’ (cited by Meyerowitz, 2006, p. 281). Meyerowitz uses ‘gardeners in the garden of the dead’ as the caption for one of his photographs showing a group of 14 nameless rakers at work (Meyerowitz, 2006, pp. 316–7). Instead of labouring in the living fields of the Lord of God’s Nature’s Nation, the rakers are labouring in ‘the raking fields’ (Meyerowitz, 2006, pp. 278, 281) of the dead in Hades’ culture’s nation. Both Meyerowitz’s Aftermath and Adam’s The American Wilderness are monumental books, and Meyerowitz’s book is even described as such on its flyleaf. Meyerowitz’s book is in portrait layout compared to the landscape layout of Adam’s. Both depict the vertical, whether it is mountains or office buildings. Yet whereas Adams depicts rugged mountains in the context of a valley with long shots in landscape layout, Meyerowtiz often depicts ruined office buildings as single structures,


and individual rescue workers and volunteers in portrait layout. This poses people against the landscape and abstracts them and their labour in cleaning up the pile (for example, Meyerowitz, 2006, pp. 289, 290, 297). Generally, he does not show rakers raking with the one exception noted above. He shows rakers posing with their rakes with a raking field in the background after it has been raked. He does not show rakers in the act of raking. This obfuscates the relation between the raker, his or her rake and the raking field, and makes invisible the labour that made the raked field, just as the ‘gentleman’s park estate’ obscures the labour of its labourer who made its pleasing prospects. His book occasionally has double-page fold-out panoramic spreads to embrace the horizontal enormity of the site. Meyerowitz’s book is the panorama and portrait of ‘9/11’, Adams’s the landscape of American wilderness. Meyerowitz’s photographs are also similar to the photography of the Civil War (Brady, O’Sullivan) as both are of the aftermath of war. Meyerowitz’s book is entitled Aftermath as is Botte’s (2006). Both sets of photographs are of the battleground after the battle when the living combatants have left and only the dead ones remain to be removed by the clean-up crews. The heroes of Meyerowitz’s sublime wastelandscape are the pastoral firefighters and clean-up crews. Unlike the sacred groves of Yosemite that Lincoln ‘set aside’ during the Civil War and which were photographed by Carleton Watkins as a consolation for the depredations of Civil War and as a western American site unsullied by the conflict between the North and the South, and so a symbol for national re-unification, the sacred ground of Ground Zero of the bombed World Trade Center was an eastern American site produced by the conflict between a different North and South than in the Civil War of the globalised world depredated by the World Trade Organization and photographed as a consolation for the terrorist attacks.

11 Black and White Water: CrossCultural Colour-Coding of the Life-Blood of the Earth-Body

Wetlands – swamps, marshes, mires, morasses, bogs, lagoons, sloughs, shallow lakes and estuaries, and so on – have been seen in patriarchal western culture as places of darkness, disease and death, horror and the uncanny, melancholy and the monstrous, in short, as dead black waters (see Giblett, 1996a). This chapter rejects this perception and proposes seeing them in indigenous cultural terms as living waters. Instead of seeing wetlands and other such water bodies as black waters linked to death, this chapter proposes seeing them as blood red concurrent with both life and death. The profusion of hyphens in the subtitle to the chapter I see as emblematic of a dialogue between cultures (indigenous and settler) and of a bridge for crossing boundaries between categories. The title, on the other hand, naturally (or culturally) comes from cultural constructions of ethnicity, but also of water. Just as whites have coded, and valued, white as good and pure, so they (we) have coded black as bad and impure. These codifications and valuations apply as much to water and waters as to people. In Joyce Carol Oates’s 1994 novel, Black Water, based on the infamous episode in the life of Senator Edward Kennedy involving the death of Mary Jo Kopechne (see http://mary-jo-kopechne.area51.ipupdater. com/), the fictional Kelly Kelleher sinks beneath the waters of the marshland trapped in The Senator’s car. She finds that ‘this water was not water of the sort with which she was familiar, transparent, faintly blue, clear and delicious not that sort of water but an evil muck-water, thick, viscous, tasting of sewage, gasoline, oil’ (p. 97). The cultural variability of water is here played out around its colour, clarity and transparency (or lack of them) through the senses of sight as well as taste and touch, those more immediate senses (though not smell). The clear blue water in the swimming pool, or the transparent delicious water out of the tap, is not the living black waters of a wetland, nor is it 174

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the dead black waters of the modern wetwasteland polluted by modern cities and industrial capitalist technology. In Postmodern Wetlands, I explored this distinction between the living black waters of a wetland and the dead black waters of a wetwasteland. I did so in order to separate them out and to enable a revaluation of different sorts of black waters so that whites would not regard all black waters as bad and impure – only the ones they, or we, have created. Relatedly, this revaluation involved exploring the indigenous colour-coding of water in general and wetlands which I as a whitie will re-explore later in this chapter, in particular via a consideration of the Wagyl or Waagle, the Noongar water-being of southwestern Australia. This figure is not necessarily, or only, a beneficent or life-giving being, but also destructive and death-dealing – as water and waters can be. Water for Thoreau (1962, XIII, p. 163), as ‘the most living part of nature’, is ‘the blood of the earth’. Yet just as blood in the human body can be poisoned, infected, diseased and can cause death, so can be the life-blood of the body of the earth. The earth as body is a trope I have explored elsewhere (Giblett, 2008a). It should also inform a discussion of water, especially when attempting to understand water from an indigenous point of view, which I have attempted to do in both Postmodern Wetlands and Living with the Earth. In this chapter, I want to concentrate mainly on water as both lifegiving and death-dealing, especially in the Australian context and especially in that context, and initially in this chapter, with the pastoral industry. This was an iconic industry of nation-building, and still is of nation-forming, whose views of land and water, plants and animals, have shaped urban whites’ perceptions and valuations of water and waters. In Living with the Earth, I devote a chapter to the deconstruction and decolonisation of Mary Durack’s classic 1959 family saga of the pastoral industry in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, Kings in Grass Castles. In that chapter, I argue that she constructs, or reproduces, a hierarchical taxonomy of water in which a white cultural coding of land and water is starkly apparent. This taxonomy is based on the premise of whether water is dirty and slimy, or clean and shiny, similar categories to those Oates invokes. Dirty and slimy water for Durack is found in bogs and sloughs and is bad black water whereas clean and shiny water is located in billabongs and is good white water (see Table 11.1). It is hardly surprising then that the billabong has become the iconic Australian wetland of nationalist mythology (as in the opening lines, ‘Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong/under the shade of a Coolibah tree’, of Banjo Paterson’s unofficial Australian national anthem, Waltzing Matilda) compared to bogs and sloughs. Durack

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Table 11.1 The hierarchical taxonomy of water, land and landscape in Durack’s Kings in Grass Castles (Giblett, 1996c, p. 93 and 2004, p. 190). HIERARCHICAL TAXONOMY

DISCOURSE

THE SUBLIME (WHEELING WATERBIRDS)

WATER

DIRTY, SLIMY (BOGS, SLOUGHS)

MODE (AGENT OR OBJECT)

CLEAN, SHINY (BILLABONGS)

STILL, STAGNANT (SWAMPS)

ROMANTIC, AESTHETIC, NATURALIST

CLEAR, FLOWING (RIVERS)

TEMPORARY (QUEENSLAND RIVERS)

PERMANENT (KIMBERLEY RIVERS)

THE BEAUTIFUL (BRIGHTLY SHINING BILLABONG) THE UNCANNY (WET-WEATHER LANDSCAPE) THE PICTURESQUE (PARKLANDSCAPE) (THE) PASTORALIST (CATTLEMAN’S PARADISE)

STEEP-GORGED, ACCESSIBLE TO STOCK, ORALLY-SADISTIC ORALLY-SATISFYING (NON-ORD) RIVERS (ORD) RIVER

rejects bogs and sloughs, and accepts billabongs, and then proceeds to divide clean and shiny water into still, stagnant water found in swamps and clear, flowing water found in rivers. Again the former is dismissed and the later accepted. Yet clear, flowing rivers can dry up so she proceeds to divide rivers into temporary rivers and permanent rivers, and again dismisses the former and accepts the latter. The latter, however, can be inaccessible to stock so she distinguishes between those that are accessible and those that are not. These two sorts of rivers are also distinguished on the basis that the accessible rivers are orally satisfying and give pleasure as cattle and drovers can reach them and drink from them whereas inaccessible rivers are orally sadistic as they cannot be reached and drunk from, and so they inflict pain. In the chapter, I undertake an extensive analysis, or more precisely, psychoanalysis of the oral and anal sadism in Kings, which I won’t go into here again. The point I want to make and explore is that Durack’s cultural valuation of water is largely driven in terms of the pastoral industry. The aesthetic valuation of water in terms of dirty and slimy or clean and shiny, or still and


stagnant or clear and flowing, is constructed in terms of an industrial valuation and an industrial set of categories and imperatives. Durack invokes and weaves the aesthetic into her book where the sublime is evoked by wheeling waterbirds, the beautiful by the brightly shining billabong, the picturesque by the parklandscape of grass and trees, and the counter-aesthetic by the uncanny of a drenched wetweather landscape. In the chapter I go on to explore these associations in much more depth as I also do in two other chapters on the aesthetics of landscape. The aesthetic and the industrial are mutually reinforcing. Far from the aesthetic of the sublime, picturesque and beautiful being outside industrial capitalism, its true colours are revealed as part, parcel and product of it. Can the counter-aesthetic be counter-industrial? Rather than pose or pit two sides of a mutual antagonism against each other in a sterile antinomy, I want to deconstruct and decolonise the hierarchical system that constructs land and water in these terms in the first place. The Australian painter, Gregory Pryor, also decolonises the land and water by paring back landscape to the land beneath. In his recent body of work, the land is largely denuded of trees and other plants to reveal the land as form and colour in his paintings. He reworks some classic landscape images of the colonial era to show the choices that took place to construct the land as landscape. These are choices of point of view, of colour, and of form and texture. One outcome of the choices made with each of these aspects resulted in the European landscape aesthetic. Pryor deliberately sets out to disrupt those choices. His paintings present land as land, not as landscape. The European landscape aesthetic colonised the land, just as much as agriculture and settlements did. In more abstruse, but more politically engaged terms, he is decolonising the land. The foreground of his decolonisation of Dale’s famous panorama of the bays and sounds of Albany depicts rocks in curving shapes and in pink and purple, even bruised, tones (Figure 11.1). This is land as naked body, not as nude with its milky white (or dusky black) skin tones. It is land as body stripped of power and pretence, but not of pleasure and pain for this is a story of possession and then dispossession of indigenous owners and the land’s subjugation to European aesthetics and agriculture, settlements and cities.

Figure 11.1 Gregory Pryor Taking fire (Dale) 2007. Oil on linen 36.2 5485 cm. Private collection, Perth, Australia. Copyright and courtesy of the artist. Photography: Tony Nathan.

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As naked is to nude in relation to the human body and its depiction, so Pryor’s paintings are naked to the pleasing prospects’ nude; they are land as naked to the landscape’s nude. The nude is artifice, just as pleasing prospects are artifice. Swelling forms and curvaceous lines, soft and subtle tones, and a superior point of view entailing mastery over the body or land before one are common to both. Both are screens against which an implied masculinist viewer projects phantasies of power and pleasure. Both are manicured surfaces that deny or repress the depths of the body or land, the work that went into producing this aesthetic object, and the history of both. Pryor’s paintings reveal the land as object of work, the work of wind, water and fire, and of indigenous people. They show the land as depth and the history of the land; they imply a viewer entering into mutuality with it. The black water in this and other paintings in the series creates a nocturnal negative to the diurnal positive of European landscape painting. It creates or reveals the dark other side to the history of Enlightenment expeditions to southwestern Australia. It is not a screen, but the backside of the earth, the grotesque lower earthly stratum. Black water also has a long symbolic association with mourning and melancholia. Traditionally associated with swamps (usually seen as horrific), Pryor associates it with bays and sounds (usually seen as havens Figure 11.2).

Figure 11.2 Gregory Pryor Moving with Locusts (de Sainson) 2007. Oil on linen 90 120 cm. Collection of Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia. Copyright and courtesy of the artist. Photography: Tony Nathan.


King George Sound and Princess Royal Harbour have been seen as magnificent and near-perfect harbours by European explorers from George Vancouver on. They are imperialist spaces by name, and nature, or at least the product of the imperialist project to colonise nature. Black waters, such as swamps, have been seen as dangerous, disease-ridden and deathdealing places. They have been seen as uncanny, as ambiguously homely and unhomely, fascinating and horrifying. By painting the waters of a harbour black, Pryor’s work is defamiliarising our modern western cultural colour-coding of waters in two directions. On the one hand, the harbour is made dangerous (for this is the point of invasion and violence, disease and death), and on the other, the black waters of swamps are made into a safe harbour (for these are a place of solace and nurture, health and life). This sense of the danger of black water is also conveyed in Pryor’s nocturne of twinkling stars signifying benignity in a black sky mirrored in the dangerous black water below. This painting looks out to sea, probably to the south where there is no land between the south coast of Australia and Antarctica. The black water receding to the horizon like a winding river signifies both promise and threat, the intrigue of what lies beyond, but also the danger of what could come from there; the invitation to travel and explore, but also the possibility of invasion and violence. A harbour is a two-way street of ingress and egress, a base for attack, a site for defence, but also a trap, a site of death. The artist told me that this painting was partly inspired by a news story about a cloud of locusts that came south from the wheat belt and kept flying out to sea, presumably to die, lemming-like, in the vast wastes of the Southern Ocean. The sun is blotted out and the sky is blackened, which is reflected in the black waters beneath. This painting can thus be read ambiguously as a cloud of locusts that blacken the sky in a pestilential plague straight out of the book of Exodus delivered as divine punishment on a godless and sinful people. Instead of the black cloud presaging rain and new life, this black cloud is redolent of death and destruction. Yet the plague of locusts also marks the beginnings of the exodus of God’s people out of exile and slavery to the Promised Land. The dots of light are also bits of sunlight poking through the black cloud of locusts. They are glimmers of hope. The threat of death and the hope of new life are tightly knitted or knotted together in this painting. Only by looking at the land, its depth and history, and not at landscape, its surfaces and synchronicity, could we begin to live hopefully and sustainably with the earth. A similar concern emerges in Pryor’s reworking of a painting of Heirisson Island from Fraser’s Point that transforms the undecidable trees looking like monolithic rocks into a kind of miniature city as if the skyscrapers of

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Figure 11.3 Gregory Pryor Colony (Garling) 2007. Oil on linen 120 183 cm. Private collection, Perth, Australia. Copyright and courtesy of the artist. Photography: Tony Nathan.

Perth had been shrunk and transported back in time and across a short distance in space to this island in the black stream (Figure 11.3). The rectilinear shapes of these trees/rocks/buildings rise vertically above the horizontality of the river and the shores. They mark space in its vertical dimension, just as the layout of the grid-plan town marked out space horizontally. Space has been colonised and Pryor’s work decolonises it by showing the arbitrariness and ambiguity of formal representation of trees as rocks in the original from which he has worked. It is commonplace that early colonial artists depicted gum trees as oaks. This early watercolour by Frederick Garling depicted gum trees as rocks. I pity my poor great-great-grandfather, John Giblett, who leased Heirisson Island in 1842 for £10 a year and ran a dairy farm on it, if he had to clear monoliths like these to run his farm on it! Perhaps it is no wonder that he went to Manjimup to cut down karri trees instead! Water and a harsh environment are also present in Pryor’s painting of a couple of tarns (mountain wetlands) that depicts a kind of moonscape of craters, albeit water-filled (Figure 11.4). This painting makes an allusion to ‘the mountains of the moon’, the source of the Nile River. Sublime clouds hover in the background in the original by Louis Auguste de Sainson from which Pryor is working. Are they a pillar of smoke leading the ‘chosen people’ through the desert or wilderness to the Promised Land? Is the skyscape a sign of God’s blessing? The explorers or colonists shown in the foreground of the original might have thought so. One of


Figure 11.4 Gregory Pryor Seagull (de Sainson) 2007. Oil on linen 120 183 cm. Collection of Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia. Copyright and courtesy of the artist. Photography: Tony Nathan.

them has a gun and is aiming at a bird, possibly a seagull, an inedible bird. The gun against the wilderness demonstrates mastery of the land and its creatures via this ocular and ballistic technology. The gun-wielding hunter kills living things in order to constitute himself as living (being). Others die so that ‘he’ might live, not by eating what is killed in this instance, but by creating the distinction between the living and the dead. Pryor is also working against the original by removing the sublime clouds. His painting de-sublimates the grand heroic original to show the violence at the core of the colonial project not blessed by God at all and not taking place on a journey to a Promised Land. The land supplies food and water that living beings require to live. Pryor’s painting of a boat being supplied with fresh water for conveying to a ship is an allegory of technological taking (water) from the land without giving anything back in return (Figure 11.5). The original by de Sainson that Pryor is working from shows a large funnel-like contraption suspended on cross-sticks. These originals and others by de Sainson from which Pryor works were recently on display in the Voyages of Grand Discovery exhibition in the Western Australian Maritime Museum. The artist has mentioned that he associates this simple technology of siphoning fresh water on to a boat with the desalination plant that ‘siphons’ water from the ocean into homes. Pouring water into pipes and transporting it is a part of a long history of supplying the necessities of life. Water is the life-blood of the earth-body. Yet water can also be dangerous,

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Figure 11.5 Gregory Pryor Taking Water (de Sainson) 2007. Oil on linen 120 183 cm. Collection of Wesfarmers, Perth, Australia. Copyright and courtesy of the artist. Photography: Tony Nathan.

black and death-dealing as we have seen. Water is both life-giving and death-dealing. The life-giving and death-dealing properties of water relate to Freud’s concept/metaphor of the uncanny as it is both homely and unhomely. The uncanny is also both fascinating and horrifying, features again of the European and settler attitude to water. It is a way of thinking the counteraesthetic and the counter-industrial. The uncanny also enables a deconstruction and decolonisation of the privileging of sight (and colour) as it is often produced by the sense of smell. This leads to a revaluation of the sense of smell and a decolonisation of the body. The life-blood of the body of the earth flows with the blood of the body in a continual stream which cannot be seen but can be sensed, both smelt and felt. The flows of both these bloods can be seen in two of Shane Pickett’s paintings of the Waugal/Waagle/Wagarl. I let the variation in spelling from the various sources I use stand as testament to a living, nonalphabetic culture. Of course, I do not speak with any indigenous cultural authority about these paintings and for this reason I quote first an indigenous account of the Waugal. In a report on the aboriginal significance of the wetlands and rivers of southwestern Australia, O’Connor, Quartermaine and Bodney (1989, p. 47) state that Waugal beliefs are widespread … and refer to a water-creative force with a serpentine physical manifestation. … The Waugal is not just


a mythic serpent, an Australian version of the Loch Ness Monster. The Waugal is not just a totemic ancestor. The Waugal is not just a spiritual being, a semi-deity. The Waugal is indeed all of these but is, more fundamentally, a personification, or perhaps more correctly animalisation, of the vital force of running water. As such, the question ‘does this permanent river (or creek, or spring, or other water source) have (or belong to, or be associated with) a Waugal (or the Waugal)’ becomes, from an Aboriginal viewpoint, meaningless and condescending. The presence of ‘living water’ bespeaks Waugal immanence. One of the iconic tourist lakes around Perth is called Loch Ness so the association with that monster is not arbitrary or tenuous. It is also one that Shane Pickett seems to deliberately evoke in one of his paintings of the Waagle painted recently and now held by the City of Fremantle (see Pickett, 2004; Figure 11.6).

Figure 11.6 Shane Pickett Waagle and Yandock Story (2004). Acrylic paint on canvas 120 90 cms. Copyright Shane Pickett, courtesy City of Fremantle Art Collection.

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In this painting, the more than Loch Ness monster of the Waagle rises out of the water against a backdrop of a stratified landscape which could also be the stratigraphic layers of the land so this water could equally be an aquifer, or underground river, as it is an overground river thus indicating that for aboriginal people, there is no distinction between waters under the earth and those above the earth. They are all waters. In a brilliant discussion of Western Australian aboriginal attitudes to their rivers and wetlands, Hugh Webb (1996, pp. 67, 70) cites the Seaman inquiry into aboriginal lands which refers to ‘people who have country in the sea’. This led to the assertion by a number of groups that aboriginal people should be able to own the beds of rivers if they run across or through the surface of their land. Presumably, this would also extend to aquifers, or underground rivers, that run through (rather than merely under) the depths of their land too. Pickett’s painting does not draw a distinction between land and water under ground and that above ground. Land and water are one – contiguous on the surface and in the depths. Janice Lyndon brilliantly illustrates this contiguity and continuity in a recent kids’ book about the Wagarl (Little, 2004, p. 6). By attempting to exclude water rights from Native Title, former Prime Minister John Howard was not only dealing a cruel and savage blow to reconciliation. He was also demonstrating his ignorance that water and land cannot really be separated out in this way for both Anglo and indigenous Australian cultures. Water is the life-blood of land, and land is people – both Anglo and indigenous. Pickett’s painting of the Waagle painted 25 years ago and now housed in the Art Gallery of Western Australia shows the Waagle rising out of a river of blood bearing people on its (or his or her) back (see Pickett, 2003; Figure 11.7).

Figure 11.7 Shane Pickett Waagle – Rainbow Serpent (1983). Oil on canvas 92 183 cm. State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia.


A river of blood for Anglo-Australians is typically horrific. It has been associated with menstrual flow,1 massacre, war, sacrifice, abattoirs and so on. In pondering the Judeo-Christian significance of blood, I referred to my 35-year-old bible dictionary (as one does) and found that the first comment under the heading of ‘blood’ is that ‘the point chiefly to be determined is whether “blood” in biblical usage points basically to life or to death’. Like wetlands, blood points to both life and death. In contrast, biblical binarism and moralism separates life and death, and so constructs blood as associated with either life or death. Regarding water as both life-giving and death-dealing means that the Wagyl is not a monstrous swamp serpent that only kills and consumes, but is both the taker of life, and the giver of new life as well. Just as water is the life-blood of the earth, so blood is the livingwater of the body. For many aboriginal groups, land is body, and body is land. David Mowaljarlai (1993, p. 205; Figure 11.8) sees Australia as ‘Bandaiyan – Corpus Australis’ with Cape York and Arnhem Land

Figure 11.8 David Mowaljarlai, Bandaiyan: The body of Australia, Corpus Australis in his Yorro Yorro: Everything standing up alive: Spirit of the Kimberley (Mowaljarlai, 1993), p. 205.

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the lungs, Uluru the navel and the Great Australian Bight the ‘pubic section’. The map of Australia is re-mapped as a map of the human body. The land is a map of the body; the land is a map, not only of the cosmos, but also of the corpus. European cartography is deconstructed and decolonised by being corporealised, by being made body. Presumably the rivers and wetlands of Australia are arteries and veins, blood and lymph, flowing through organs and muscles making the body of the earth live. Yorro Yorro in Mowaljarlai’s (1993, p. 133) terms is ‘continual creation and renewal of nature in all its forms’, including presumably in both human and water forms. Wetlands are the kidneys, liver and placenta of the body of the earth. They are kidneys as they ‘maintain the composition of the blood, removing waste nitrogenous and other matter and excreting it as urine’ (New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, p. 1486; see also Giblett, 1996a, p. 136). Wetlands are ‘waste treatment plants’ that maintain the composition of water, the life-blood of the earth by purifying it. Rather than excreting urine, wastewater, they produce potable water. Wetlands are also the liver as they, like the liver, ‘secrete bile, detoxifies the blood,

Figure 11.9 François-Antoine Boniface Heirisson Rivière des Cygnes (Swan River) 1801. State Library of Western Australia.


and is important in the metabolism and storage of major nutrients’ (New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, p. 1609). Wetlands detoxify water, the life-blood of the earth by storing nitrogenous nutrients. They are also the placenta that mediates and regulates the exchange of matter, the metabolism between the human body and the body of the earth, the Great Mother and nurtures new life in its womb (see Giblett, 1996a, p. 137). These functions are missing from early maps of the Swan River and the Perth area. Heirisson’s map of 1801 (Figure 11.9) shows the Swan River as a kind of alimentary canal or digestive tract draining, consuming, digesting and excreting the interior, the hinterland beyond. It does not show the organs of the earth, the wetlands, that make the Swan Valley and the Swan Coastal Plain into a living bioregion and that make Perth into what the Western Australian Water Corporation calls ‘A city of wetlands’ (see Giblett, 1996a and 1996b). It reduces the digestive system and its organs to a canal, a means of transportation. The life of the land and the flows of its energy are reduced to a single digestive function through a canal. The swamps and marshes alongside the river that flow into the river, such as Claise Brook, are excluded by the hard line edge of the riverbanks and canalised into the river. The flows of water that communicate between these wetlands and the river are channelled into a single line of communication from exterior to interior, from the ‘mouth’ of the river (which is more like the rectum of the river) to its nether shallows where a boat could go no further. The rectum here is depicted as a discrete, and discreet, hole and not as a cloaca, a fertile region of excretion and reproduction (see Giblett, 1996a, p. 82). Although the Swan River is now estuarine and so cloacal, it has no delta that mediates between the exterior and the interior like the Mekong Delta, the most fertile region of Vietnam (see Giblett, 1996a, p. 218). Unlike the carnivalesque body in which the body is inverted and subverted so that the mouth is the arsehole, the conventional nomenclature of the ‘mouth of the river’ re-inverts the arsehole and the mouth in order to occlude the excretory functions of the river and to hide the fact that the exploratory journey up the river is a journey up the rear and inner passage entering through the arsehole rather than a journey down the upper and inner passage entering through the mouth (see Giblett, 2004, Chapter 10). Heirisson’s map of the Swan River and its immediate environs does not show the whole ecosystem of which the river is a part. It is like an anatomical illustration of the alimentary canal or the digestive tract (Figure 11.10) that for illustrative purposes excludes the enabling organs for the function of digestion and reduces the digestive system to transportation and processing of food into nutrition and waste. Heirisson’s

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Figure 11.10 The digestive tract.

Figure 11.11 Swan River as digestive tract.

map does not include the auxiliary functions of the kidneys and liver as an anatomical illustration of the whole digestive system would. Producing a composite of the Swan River as a digestive tract produces a very depleted view of the body of the earth (Figure 11.11). No self-respecting medical illustrator of human anatomy would depict the alimentary canal as the digestive system also without depicting the organs of the kidneys and the liver. Illustrators of earthly anatomy had no such qualms. Of course, it would have entailed a massive surveying operation to map the region, but that is partly my point, that this map was not designed to give an accurate picture of the country, but to portray it as penetrable to a certain extent by transportation up the river just as later maps that excluded the wetlands and described the region as ‘grassy country thinly wooded’ portrayed the country as settlable (see Giblett, 1996a, Chapter 3). It did not acknowledge the swamps of the region. They were erased, not by a stroke of the pen, but by the tabula rasa of the map. The living black waters of wetlands drew a blank in the dead white space of the map. Such erasure persists in the Wikipedia illustration of the Waugal and its mapping of the Swan River (Figure 11.12). The wetlands of the whole Perth metropolitan area are Waugal country, not just the iconic Swan River.


Figure 11.12 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noongar.

Rather than seeing water in white terms as black or white, in black and white terms, I propose that we see it as blood red pointing to both life and death. Instead of seeing the waters of the earth as a system of canals for irrigation and transportation, let’s see them as the life-blood of the body of the earth. Let’s see rivers as a digestive tract and wetlands as organs, such as the kidneys, liver and placenta with rivers and wetlands living together as part of one whole body. Let’s deconstruct and decolonise the white cultural coding of water as black or white and take on board an indigenous colour-coding of water as red, as water, like blood, that is both life-giving and death-dealing, the life-blood, of the great, wide brown body of land of Australia. The human body and the earth are intermingled in one living being – the body of the earth with its feral and native quaking zones.

Notes 6 Wilderness to Wasteland: The Sublime, the Picturesque and the Uncanny in the Photography of the American West 1. Yet Sandweiss (1983, p. xvii) contrasts the two photographers in terms of the sublime in the following terms: ‘while O’Sullivan’s landscapes recall early nineteenth century notions of a sublime full of fear, gloom, terror, and awe, Watkins’s bridge the later nineteenth-century ideal of a quiet and contemplative sublime and the more modern sense of landscape as a compendium of abstract shapes.’ A footnote at this point refers to Snyder’s book on O’Sullivan. Although it is important to acknowledge the abstraction in Watkins’s later work, the quiet and contemplative qualities of his earlier work are more pastoral and picturesque than sublime. There is nothing quiet and contemplative about the sublime. It is more noisy and disruptive than quiet and contemplative. The qualities of O’Sullivan’s landscape photography outlined here are sublime for Snyder in his book (1981, p. 45), but scientific, and not sublime, in his later article. 2. Ironically and recently, Michael Lundgren (2008) has been able to see the West, including the Barry M. Goldwater Bombing Range, as pristine and unspoiled, or at least he has transfigured (Transfigurations is the title of his book) it back into the landscape of Timothy O’Sullivan’s wilderness photographs with cones, fissures and vents. Lundgren’s photographs also mark an ascension and resurrection from the wounded and crucified earthly body of the desert of the Nuclear Landscape Photographers into a sublime, eternal and perfected heavenly body.

7 Shooting the Sunburnt Country, the Land of Sweeping Plains, the Rugged Mountain Ranges: The Role of Australian Landscape and Wilderness Photography in Promoting Environmental Sustainability and in Forming a New National Identity 1. Previous work on Australian landscape representation has been concerned primarily with painting and writing (for Bonyhady, 1985, 2000; Giblett, 2004 and its reference list; Hills, 1991). The relationship generally between photography and colonialism has been considered (Ryan, 1997), but not in relation to Australia, though the role of photography in exploration has been discussed in a couple of articles, but again not extensively nor systematically (Carter, 1988; Rossiter, 1994). Some work on Australian landscape painting has discussed photography in passing (Bonyhady, 1985, 2000). Some recent work on Australian photography has also discussed landscape photography in 190

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passing (Conrad, 2003; Davies, 2004; Ennis, 2004, 2007). There has been no systematic exploration of Australian landscape and wilderness photography in a monograph that analyses critically its social and cultural role and creatively produces photographic alternatives. Of the limited research to date related to this topic, one Ph.D. thesis completed at the University of Exeter in the UK (Quartermaine, 1987) includes a couple of chapters on it. Two extensive bibliographies of work on Australian photography indicate no monographs or Ph.D. theses devoted to the topic to date (Willis, 1988, pp. 288–95 and Downer, 1999, pp. 192–7). Recently, a Ph.D. on the photographic sublime in Tasmania from 1982 to 2000 has been completed (Stephenson, 2001) but this is relatively limited in stylistic, geographical and historical scope as this description indicates.

8 Land Health and Mental Health: A New Field for Research Nurturing Biodiversity and Well-Being on Farms 1. By using the masculine pronoun ‘he’, I am not implying or suggesting that all farmers are male. Typically, the farmer is a man. I use ‘he’ to reflect this and as a convenient form of shorthand.

10 A Natural History of Natural, Unnatural and National Disasters 1. This comment was deleted or censored from the original publication in ‘A natural history of natural disasters’, Photofile 76, 2006, 48–51.

11 Black and White Water: Cross-Cultural Colour-Coding of the Life-Blood of the Earth-Body 1. This term was deleted or censored from the original publication of this chapter as ‘Black and white water’ in E. Potter, A. Mackinnon, S. McKenzie and J. McKay (eds), Fresh water: New perspectives on water in Australia, (pp. 31–43). Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2007.

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Index abject, the 8, 24 Adams, A. 11, 89–92, 94, 107–108, 171–173 Angel of history (Angelus novus) 144–145, 152 Angel, Weld 152–153 Apollinaire 57 Arikha, N. 85 Arthus-Bertrand, Y. 147–148 Asian tsunami 13, 157–159

Doré, G. 51–52 Douglas, M. 63, 164 Douhet, G. 69, 71–74 Druckrey, T. 102 Dupain, M. 11, 107, 108, 109, 120–121 Durack, M. 175–177 Dust Bowl, the 130–131 elements, the four 8, 27–28, 31, 55–56, 57, 62, 84–85, 165 Engels, F. 42–44 Ennis, H. 107, 109 environmental aesthetics 3–4, 148–150 Eri, V. 30, 32–33 Exquisite, the 116–118

Bakhtin, M. 150, 162–163 Bandaiyan – Corpus Australis 185 Barbusse, H. 60–68 Bartram, W. 26–28 Batchen, G. 113–114 Bean, C. 112 Benjamin, W. 8, 38–39, 42, 56, 67, 138, 143, 144, 148, 151, 152, 153, 154 Berry, W. 133 Bloch, E. 68, 82, 167–168 Blunden, E. 67 Bonyhady, T. 107, 114, 119 Bourke, J. x, 5, 57, 69, 70, 76, 100, 165 Boyle, T. 9–10, 23 Bright, D. 95 Brinkley, D. 161–163, Brown, B. 107, 114 Burtynsky, E. 12, 52, 138, 146–148

Freud, S. 8, 15, 18, 19, 21–23, 38, 46 Friedrich, J. 10, 11, 75, 77, 82–83 Friend, D. 165–166, 168–171 Fuller, J. 57 Fussell, P. xi, 53, 59, 64, 83, 85 Gallagher, C. 101 Gissing, G. 39–42 Goethe, J. 81 Goin, P. 103 Gore, A. 96 Graves, R. 58, 60, 65 Grayling, A. 58, 77 Guattari, F. 143

Caire, N. 110, 121 Camus, A. 5–6, 69, 76, 81 Carlyon, L. 58, 59 Chernobyl 159–160 Colten, C. 163–164

Hage, G. 140 Haraway, D. x–xi, 19, 31–32 Hegel, G. 82, 148 Helphand, K. xi, 55, 59, 62, 66, 76, 80, 83, 123 Howard, A. 11, 125 Hurley, F. 56, 106–108, 111–113

Davis, M. 43, 52–53, 100, 101 Debord, G. 3 Depression, the (Great) 130–131 Dix, O. 66 Dombrowskis, P. 11, 107, 113–114

Jerrold, B. 51–52 203

204

Index

Kafka, F. 151, 154, 170 Kant, I. 81–84 ‘Katrina’, hurricane 13–14, 160–165 Kelman, A. 163–164 Kipling, R. 43 Knell, H. 57, 77 Kristeva, J. 8, 23–24, 114 Lawrence, D. 61 Leopardi, G. 80–82 Leopold, A. 9, 11, 125–126, 131 Linn, R. 128–129 livelihood 141, 147 Lloyd, D. xi, 55, 111 London, J. 44–48 Lowe, K. 77, 78–79, 82 Lynch, E. 59–60 Magnum Photographers 167 Manning, F. 62 Mayhew, H. 37, 45 McLean, I. 114 Meyerowitz, J. 165, 167, 169, 170–173 Misrach, R. 101–103 Moberly, L. 21–25 monstrous uncanny 18–19 Morrison, A. 41, 45, 46, 47, 48 Mowaljarlai, D. 185–186 Muecke, S. 161 Muir, J. 21, 25–26, 90–91 Mules, W. 3, 149–150 Mumford, L. 53–54 Neuwirth, R. 43, 52, 53 Neville, S. 108, 116–118 ‘9/11’ (11 September 2001) 14, 165–173 Nossack, H. 77–78 Oates, J. 174 O’Sullivan, T. 11, 89, 97–99, 102, 190 n. 1 Owen, W. 62, 66 Parish, S. 106–107, 115–116 photography for environmental sustainability 105, 109, 120–121, 147

Pickett, S. 183–184 Picon, A. 51 pictorialism 107, 109–111 picturesque 18, 52, 89, 109–111, 190 n. 1 placism 8, 36 Plumwood, V. 21, 28–34 Polidori, R. 159, 161, 164 political ecology 143–144 Pryor, G. 177–182 psychoanalytic ecology 2–3, 123, 131–133 psychogeography 3 psychogeopathology 101, 131–132 quaking zone, feral/native 1, 3–8, 32, 36, 88, 102, 103, 117, 147, 150, 155, 163, 189 Quammen, D. 20 Remarque, E. 62, 63–64 Sandweiss, M. 89–90, 94–95, 191 n.1 Sassoon, S. 59 Schama, S. 90–91, 93, 94 Sebald, W. 48–49, 74–75 senses 80–84, 148–149, 182 Serres, M. 32, 149 Shaara, J. 68 Sherman, W. 58 Snyder, J. 97–99, 190 n. 1 Sofoulis, Z. 58 Solnit, R. 39, 75, 92, 93, 94, 100, 101, 103, 115–118, 123, 147, 149, 150, 155, 163, 172 Sontag, S. 168 sublime, the 89, 92, 95, 96, 146–147, 171, 190 n. 1 Tai Chi/taijiquan 151–152 Taoist body 151–152 Taylor, F. 77 terroirism 5 Thomson, J. 43, 44, 48, 49, 51 Thoreau, H. 3, 6–7, 13, 42, 43, 150, 153–154, 175

Index Tolonen, J. 159–160 Truchanas, O. 11, 107 uncanny (see also monstrous uncanny) 7, 15, 18, 19, 21, 29, 38, 67, 78, 87–88, 99, 182 Virilio, P. 53, 76, 103–104 Watkins, C. 11, 89, 93–97, 99, 146, 190 n. 1 Waugal/Waggle/Wagarl/Wagyl 14, 50, 182–184, 188 Webb, H. 184

Weber, E. 90, 91, 93 Weber, S. 144–145 Wells, H. 69–70 Whatmore, S. xi, 2–3, 19 Williams, R. 12, 123, 139–146, 150 Willis, A.-M. 109–112 Wilson, A. 163–164 Worster, D. 130–131 Yahp, B. 34 Zehle, S. 146 Zournazi, M. 154

205

Landscapes of Culture and Nature

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Reflecting Nature: Garden Designs for Wild Landscapes

Cultural Landscapes: Balancing Nature and Heritage in Preservation Practice

Designing Greenways: Sustainable Landscapes for Nature and People

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Scarred Landscapes: War and Nature in Vichy France

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Designing Greenways: Sustainable Landscapes for Nature and People

Nature and Culture: Rebuilding Lost Connections

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