Opening Performance Art piece Coal Requiem for the Lorne Sculpture Biennale 2014

Occupying the secret VIP entrance of the G20 conference in Brisbane, November 2014. The subsequent deal brokered with police earned the Courier Mail’s ‘Most Aussie Moment’ of the G20 award.

Blockading AGL Energy’s Melbourne HQ demanding the company cease it’s covert, aggressive campaigns to undermine Australia’s Renewable Energy Target (RET), October 2014.

Staging a ‘visitation’ in support of the Surf Coast Air Action community’s calls for Alcoa to shut down its toxic Anglesea coal power plant, March 2015. The plant officially closed six months later.

With utmost respect and compassion for how Parisians were feeling following the brutal Friday 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, Climate Guardians defied the State of Emergency declaration that strictly limited civil society movements, including public protesting, during the UNFCCC COP21 climate negotiations that led to the Paris Agreement, December 2015. This image was taken on 29 November 2015, on the eve of the official opening of COP21, at the Place de la Republique which then served as the peoples’ shrine honouring those who had lost their lives or been injured in the horrific attacks a few weeks earlier. As mass climate marches were being held in cities all around the world, on behalf of all those unable to march in Paris, Avaaz placed more than 20,000 pairs of shoes (including a pair from Pope Francis) as a symbolic and peaceful call for UN delegates to be determined in reaching a global agreement to tackle the climate emergency. Photo credit: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images.

Greeting UN delegates at the conference centre in Le Bourget just after daybreak on Day 1 of COP21.

Blockading Engie’s global HQ during COP21 to call the transnational energy corporation to account for its reckless and self-serving approach to business that directly resulted in the disastrous Hazelwood Mine Fire in the Latrobe Valley. Hazelwood officially ceased operating on 29 March 2017.

Australian children’s heart-felt messages to UN delegates featured prominently in Climate Guardians‘ street performances for ArtCOP21. To increase their reach, a number of letters were left tied to posts and taped to ancient street walls, December 2015.

In protest of the deep injustice and lack of ambition inherent in the Paris Agreement, Climate Guardians broke through police barricades to lead a crowd of more than 10,000 through the Paris streets on the last day of COP21, December 2015. Activists from all around the world marched that Red Line around five kms from L’avenue de la Grande Armée to the Eifel Tower and occupied the bridge over the River Seine for more than an hour. The Red Line symbolises a crossing of the Earth’s critical physical and social limits; it marks a non-negotiable no go zone where wholesale systems collapse.

Joining the Pilliga Push’s blockade of Santos’ Narrabri Gas Project involving 850 coal seam gas wells in the Pilliga State Forest. In addition to threatening the largest inland forest left in Eastern Australia, Santos’ project sits above a critically important ‘recharge zone’ supporting the crucial pressure head enabling ground water from the Great Artesian Basin to flow to the surfaces of the massive expanse of land dependent on it (yep, for growing food), dawn 9 February 2016.

Staging a dusk performance action at the National Gallery of Victoria, involving petrochemical waste that had been collected from Melbourne’s Yarra River to highlight the contradiction of having people who help enable the pollution and destruction of the natural world in prestigious positions on the Boards of proud Australian arts and culture institutions.

Strategically timed to help support the global day of climate action on Saturday 17 November – with demonstrations and civil disobedience expected in a dozen or so countries – in Melbourne Climate Guardians heralded the Australian chapter of the international #ExtinctionRebellion movement calling for radical action to address the escalating global climate emergency, November 2018. Photo credit: Julian Meehan.

Performing at the official launch of Janet Laurence: After Nature at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA, Sydney) on the last day of Australia’s searing Summer of 2019, unprecedented for its extreme weather events. Written especially for the performance within Janet’s Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef installation (first shown at the Musee d’Historie Naturelle in Paris during COP21), What Lies Beneath by Irish Australian poet Anne Casey expresses deep grief over the loss of the Great Barrier Reef due to reckless, shameless greed and corruption.

Staging a ‘visitation’ to News Corp’s Melbourne HQ hold the global ‘propaganda machine’ to account for championing climate deniers, polluting industries and populists (no matter how racist and divisive), as well as ongoing breaches of journalistic codes of ethics that underpin rights to hold media licences, April 2019. Photo credit: Julian Meehan.

ClimActs’ founding act is the Climate Guardians who use angel iconography to highlight the vital role of guardianship of precious natural resources in addressing the global threat from the climate emergency. Graceful, haunting, and iconic, the Climate Guardians attract people to them with a beautiful simple clear message of hope through collaborative, effective climate action. Appealing to justice and fairness, they urge care for the precious natural world to protect children and future generations from the imminent twin threats of climate breakdown and mass extinction.

As Climate Justice underpins their work, Climate Guardians are particularly concerned about how global warming is impacting on Indigenous communities and females from developing countries who bear the burden of providing for children and protecting them from the ravages of extreme weather. Females are more vulnerable when forced to flee homes rendered uninhabitable from conflict sparked by resource wars or climate catastrophes. Climate Guardians view calls for developing world economies to have so-called cheap, plentiful electricity from fossil fuels as cynical attempts by polluting energy corporations to gain access to new markets as well as further access to cheap labor in places that cannot afford the luxury of guarding against human rights abuses and protecting arguably their greatest common asset, their environment.

The exploitation and domination of females by the patriarchal globalised economy echoes that of nature and developing countries by imperialist capitalism. As they are most economically reliant on the services provided by nature, women in the developing world experience most acutely the detrimental effects of the destruction of the natural world by racist patriarchal capitalism. Through destructive business practices that put profits before people, the globalised capitalism rips apart the delicate balance of co-existence that humans and nature have developed over many generations. In addition to fuelling resource wars and the climate emergency, the globalised drive towards so-called ‘progress’ through western industrial, extractivist and exploitative development is reinforcing gross and increasing inequity within and between nations.

Meanwhile, major advances in ecological science and sustainable technologies are enabling us to create everything we need to meet basic food, water, power, shelter and education needs necessary for healthy and happy lives in fair and sustainable economies at the local level on a global scale. Effectively addressing critical and converging societal problems (deepening inequity within and between nations) and ecological crisis (the climate emergency and mass extinction to name a few) demands globally cooperative, democratically organised societies based on facts, fairness, and justice.

In addressing such highly complex, interconnected issues within a developed and largely secular western world that is cut off from nature, ClimActs channels the power of the creative arts, one of the only doorways still available into the spiritual realm*.

The English language has no morning equivalent of twilight, the abbreviation of ‘between light’. I use Eos to refer to being in the presence of a new day, as light starts to overwhelm the gaps between the stars, before sunrise. Every morning, the Greek god Eos rises from her golden throne and opens the gates of heaven for her brother Helios, the sun god.

I record my encounters with Eos and first light in Gumbaynggirr country, New South Wales.

To meet Eos, I find a quiet space facing East. If possible a natural space, a garden, park or beach and wait. With no need so early to think of what to do (hunt for food, dig for water, search for shelter, check the phone, make breakfast, feed the kids, go to work), I can become immersed in nature’s presence. Eos seduces presence, contingent and opaque to rationalisation, bureaucracy and the institutions of the global carnival of capital and material flows.

Apollonian and Dionysian are terms Nietzsche used for the two central principles in Greek culture. Apollo is the lyre-god, a handsome Johnny-come-lately sun god, representing light, clarity and rationality. Dionysus is the wine-god having more fun, losing the ego through drugs, dance and dreams. The tension between them is at the heart of tragedy, but Eos is too wild for Apollo and too early for Dionysius.

Natural Aesthetics can help put us back in contact now we no longer hunt or grow our own food. By natural aesthetics I am referring to both: Art with a capital A that references, or makes use of natural materials, processes and representations of nature; and the experiential aesthetic of being in a natural environment, of being aware of landform, habitat, fauna and flora, using all the senses to pay attention. The two cannot be clearly separated.

We are cultural beings; art influences our ideas and perceptions of nature and vice versa. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty noted that artists act on the world. He wrote that art-practice, ‘cannot be divided into a seeing of the world and a subsequent painting of a representation of what is seen. Through the act of painting something is done to the world.’[i] Art is performative, but so is everyday living which necessitates an ongoing flow of skilful activities in response to one’s environment.

I use technology; we are all immersed in it. I use digital photography and not a pin-hole technique, to interact with Eos, but always take time to put away my camera and notepad. I am aware that as Marshall McLuhan said: ‘Every technology at once rearranges patterns of human association and in effect really creates a new environment … most felt, though not most noticed, in changing sensory ratios and patterns.’[ii] Both being in the presence of Eos and making art with her, is part of taking a break from the everyday, increasingly deracinated from the natural and now fused into technologies. If we appreciate what we have, hopefully we will fight for what we are losing. I believe poetry and art can nourish what Fritjof Capra calls ‘ecoliteracy’, understanding our living networks which we are destroying.

I find Eos a complex subject. She is more primal than poetry or art; she goes to the heart of the matter. Eos is democratic, has no chosen people and makes no demands for servitude. Eos is almost ritual, a phenomenon in all known societies. She offers no explanations, no consolation, just a stream of new beginnings. Eos repays attention in a world where distraction is increasing. She offers a vast range of palettes, sensory experiences and opportunities to be present in natural environments.

Moya Costello

As a humanist, your job is to open language up, to play with it and show what it can do. This is a different, aesthetical way of making knowledge. But it has to take the sciences seriously as describing and conceptualizing real things, particularly now the Earth sciences. It is our job in the humanities to find ways of connecting that and other kinds of knowledge together in the common task of making a habitable and equitable world. (Wark and Jandaric 2016)

Let me start with an artefact:

leafstalk

(Davidsonia pruriens var. jersyana family Davidsoniaceae. Davidson Plum.)

Branchlet-featured: dull-green, hirsuited-brown leaf with underpinned-pink petiole. Toothed prominently. Spiked softly. The leafstalk is unstoppably, multiply leaf-stalked: Linnaeus’ stipule – outgrowth-born borne by the peeking becoming-peaked petiole. A tweed coat-in-development – rusted mustard and olive-underpinned. The furred and prickled young leaf – already prominent in tiny – ageing to a furry felted feather-shrunk of noticing-unnoticed being-accepted.

The furred side of animal skin: cub fur, fox. Baby chicken head. A baby bird’s fuzz, yet with beak-notice – the squawking beak ahead before it.

And then the impossible: a syringe long and slim like alien ribbon thread, a roll, a ring of twine, a thin wreath.

Or, some river course becoming a red rivulet, a stream.

Oh hairy curly furl! Oh finger-cushion! Oh door-draft-stopper pillow! Oh infant-school cling: a rush of cuddles piled and piling, cornucoped!

A becoming into the structured artifice of symmetry. Then undone.

Yet with small reminders of that cling to the balanced-grown: succinct in appropriate measures.

I am currently working with pressed specimens of some native plants of the New South Wales Northern Rivers, in the Southern Cross Plant Science Medicinal Plant Herbarium on the Lismore Campus of Southern Cross University. The specific methodology of this research is poetic inquiry, as noted by John Ryan (2010) in a similar context. I decided at the turn of the century that there was an imperative for me to write and teach ecocriticism, because the planet’s in crisis. Both Lawrence Buell and Wendy Wheeler have referred to that time frame, saying nature writing re-emerged “as a self-conscious movement” (Buell 2005, 1 ) and ecocriticism came as a “new critical formation” (Wheeler 2006, 101) in the last decade of the twentieth century. I had been writing plants, objects, and cultural and natural landscapes before then, but about that time I continued the practice consciously.

I think of writing as the substantive part of my political activity, and of all writing as political (Costello 2005). I agree with Emily Potter (2005) that literary poetics can “claim an engagement” with planetary crises, alongside “scientific research, technological know-how and legislative regulation” (Buell 2005, 5), because of the capacities of the imagination, because of literature’s ability to build empathy (Cosgrove 2008), and because human creativity gets us to the “distal conditions (the emergent structure of feeling) under which direct political action might be formulated and enacted” (Wheeler 2006, 137). I think science communication is critical now. And importantly, then, as one call for papers for poetic ecologies stated in 2008, ecocritical theory attempts “to initiate a much more sustained dialogue between literature” and biology (Université Libre de Bruxelles 2008). I think of what I am doing as supporting the Herbarium’s scientific work by differently recording, differently communicating that scientific work.

But what am I doing with the pressed specimens is problematic for me: I am anxious about representing / speaking for the other, and about working with dried specimens, and not with the liveliness or vitality, and sensuality, of the living plant. There is also a typical quantitative methodological question of how and how many samples to select for poetic inquiry in an overwhelming number: at the very least, I am attempting to select native plants that grow in the area where I live. I see this work as ekphrastic because ekphrasis differently articulates “nonverbal, aestheticised objects” (Haywood 2014, 107). Ekphrasis “can be thought of as … [carrying] on with newness”, giving “additional meaning” to the original (Haywood 2014, 110-13).

And I have chosen the prose poem as the form because joanne burns (1989) says that the prose poem is, in contrast to other poetic forms, “more humble … more subtle. It knows the potential … of not being too obvious” (28-29), and as a form, then, it potentially does not override more-than-human speaking. The prose poem – a hybrid, minor form – is not as commonly published as mainstream forms.

Here are two of Michael Marder’s (2013) 10 ethical offshoots of plant thinking. The eight offshoot is that “[t]he plant’s absolute silence puts it in the position of the subaltern” (127; emphasis in original). (I know there are questions around plants, silence and language, but I am not going to deal with those here.) His sixth is that “[t]o harness plants to a particular end is to drive them to ontological exhaustion” (126; emphasis in original).

I have Stephen Muecke’s (2008, 292) question niggling at me: What if we wrote from the “necessary … convocation [we have] with non-human things”? He requests that we let “stuff talk to the writing” – or not a writing about, but a writing with. Freya Mathews (2007) asks can one somehow “manage to slip under the psychic skin of the world, and ‘enter’ its subjectivity”, to experience “the ‘outside’ as ‘inside'”, and indeed she sees poetry as one method of doing this, using “the poetic language of things as opposed to the conceptual language of words”, “where meaning is conveyed predominately through objects and circumstances rather than through abstract discourse”. Perhaps this is what John Ryan (2010, 12) means by representation becoming “less a process of wresting form from nature and more of a breathing into a form”. While I don’t disagree with Ryan’s imperative that we need to open the representation of flora to the body sensorium, there’s an oddity for this instance of my work with dried (dead) specimens.

flung

(Kennedia rubicunda. Dusky coral pea.)

The Dusky Coral Pea, found clung round a banksia tree on the headland of coastal bush, Cresent Head. To cling, it has (re)constructed a dance – a ballet circle. Its audience: furry-coated bean pods and their matching-coated offspring: furred baby pods, spear-tipped for full-length growth – standing around/mid dance. The re(de?)constructed ballet chorus is of leaf full-frill-skirted twirl, garnered by tendril, twirling skirt to skirt, gone en pointe mad with music. A combo of narratives: The Red Shoes and The Princess and the Pea.

The principal dancers: the prima-ballerina flowers: the thinnest of forms of silken elongation of soft prong-armed, svelte with torso elongated tall. Sirens on the side, away from the muddle huddle, inviting in to the quiet mayhem.

A co-joining in a trace of crest, trough and curlicue cling flung round.

Martin Harrison (2013, 10) says that a piece of writing which “fulfils” some order of “ecological requirement” would have to meet three conditions. One is that it should be in an “undetermined, evolving, ergodic or not fully resolved form”, the work being an “evolving act of attention and attentiveness”. “In the current moment it is clear that we must listen to what is other than human and how it is speaking to us” (11).

The second of Harrison’s conditions for an ecological writing is a reference to “a sense of intervention and participation in the natural world” (2013, 10). John Ryan (2010) also notes that there is an “inseparable interrelation between one’s personal history and the story of the land” (15).

Harrison’s third condition is to position “discourse outside of the discursive self” (10). “[W]riting cannot now be tied to the assumption that individuation” is the main aim of “acts of imagination”, because this emphasis “predisposes us to think that only humans speak”. It is about the space for the furthering of potential meaning in the natural world.

is not

(Rubus rosifolius family Rosaceae. Rose-leaved bramble.)

A rose is not a rose, when trying out thorn, and clinging via imitation – being a mini and a minor, a wannabe, with thorns small but sharp, singular but coupled close, ever-so-cleverly hooked to be a sharp, attacking claw.

The tiny rose flower is paper-thin, and its budding sheath rough-hewed, haired, striated, stippled, coned, multicapped to protect the forming flower.

A stretch of fractal-finger leaf, from the many-handed base, thorned and pinprick-tipped, with a strong, rod spine of bark-limb, holds lostness where a rose is not.

And it is my understanding that John Ryan (2014) asks for the development of the following skills: “a commitment to ecoregionalism, the study of Indigenous environmental knowledges”, a “competence with natural science”, an “interest in the human senses”, and an “appreciation of the dynamism of flora and fauna”.

pod boat and seed ball

(Castanospermum australe family Fabiaceae. Black bean)

Boats, we think of. A mini Viking boat (a robustly imaginative projection): with the curved bottom and pointy ends, the curve forming the basin (with fraying rims). The pod ‘skin’: a pitted Mars landscape, or the Australian red centre (maybe). A creamy basin-cover, mush-soft, a sticky marshmallow, a yum ecru.

Seeds: macaroons, with their cream-filled smile; or a boating-loving ball safely stowed; or red cricket-ball bulge, worn to brown, with stitched stripe – a place to half, the place where it does split into its two seeds. You could (easily) thin-slice through the ovule ballooning from its flat middle-mark. Indigenous peoples slice, smash, pound, soak, shape, roast. I throw shooter / yorker seed balls arhythmically in maiden overs into the bush to colonise. We could name our place, which is not our place, where I bowl these seed balls, Blackbean Place. Nomenclatures abound like Norse myths, Aboriginal Dreamtime: Bean Tree, Black Bean, Moreton Bay Bean, Moreton Bay Chestnut.

And the leaves: angled elegantly with separate oaring. The elongated ovular, narrowly ovate tapering, individually matching, in a flattened way, the outline, the shape of the pod boat, sinking, splitting, opening for sp[r]outing of the seed ball.

 

References

Buell, Lawrence 2005, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination, Blackwell, Malden

burns, joanne 1989, “joanne burns: space dust”, in David Brooks and Brenda Walker (eds.), Poetry and Gender: Statements and Essays in Australian Women’s Poetry and Poetics, St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, pp. 28-29

Cosgrove, Shady, 2008, “Reading for Peace? Literature as Activism – An Investigation into New Literary Ethics and the Novel”, in Garbutt R (ed), Activating Human Rights and Peace: Universal Responsibility Conference 2008, Conference Proceedings, Southern Cross University, Lismore

Costello, Moya 2005, “Irrigorous Uncertainties: Writing, Politics and Pedagogy“, Text, vol. 9, no. 1

Harrison, Martin 2013, “The Act of Writing and the Act of Attention” in Martin Harrison, Deborah Bird Rose, Lorraine Shannon and Kim Satchell (eds), TEXT Special Issue 20: Writing Creates Ecology and Ecology Creates Writing, October, viewed 24 December 2016

Haywood, Ashley 2014, “Harlequin Blue and The Picasso Experiment”, PhD thesis, Southern Cross University, Lismore

Marder, Michael 2013, Plant-thinking a Philosophy of Vegetal Life, Columbia University Press, New York

Mathews, Freya 2007 “An Invitation to Ontopoetics: The Poetic Structure of Being”, Australian Humanities Review, issue 43 December, viewed 24 December 2016

Muecke, Stpehen 2008, “Momentum”, in N Anderson and K Schlunke (eds), Cultural theory in everyday practice, South Melbourne: Oxford UP, pp. 287-95

Potter, Emily 2005 “Ecological Consciousness in Australian Literature: Outside the Limits of Environmental Crisis“, Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies Working Papers 29, viewed January 2012

Ryan, John 2010, “Palm-like Fingers Gripping a Coarse Line of Air: Poetry as a Method of Enquiry into Southwest Australian Flora”, Proceedings of Humanitites Graduate Research Conference, Bentley, WA, Curtin University, viewed 24 December 2016, pp. 1-24

Ryan, John 2014, “Australian Ecopoetics Past, Present, Future: What Do the Plants Say?“, Cordite Poetry Review, 1 December, viewed 24 December 2016

Université Libre de Bruxelles 2008, CFP “Poetic Ecologies: Nature as Text and Text as Nature in English-Language Verse“, 14-17 May, viewed 24 December 2016

Wark, McKenzie and Jandaric, Petar 2016 “New Knowledge for a New Planet: Critical Pedagogy for the Anthropocene“, Open Review of Educational Research, vol. 3, no. 1, viewed December 2016

Wheeler, Wendy 2006, The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture, Lawrence & Wishart, London.

Moya Costello teaches Writing in the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Southern Cross University. She has two collections of short prose and two novellas (Kites in Jakarta and Small Ecstasies; The Office as a Boat and Harriet Chandler) published, and work in scholarly and literary journals and anthologies.

Birds are talking, in gardens, parks, streets and empty buildings. Often heard before they are seen, wild birds, have a natural suspicion of humans and tend to blend into the background when one comes into their territory. There’s nothing like a chirp, coo or cluck-a-luck to turn a bird watcher’s head. Those familiar, soothing sounds put the world right for a minute or two.  Imagine a town without birds.

These feathered community members work, play, love and squabble (just like us) raising their families, hardly noticed by the majority of people. Yet here they are, living amongst us, without the conveniences that humans require. Their needs are simple: water, food, and materials for nest building.

Birds take a beating from predators such as dogs and cats, and humans encroaching on their habitats. Despite the speed limits in built up areas, a high number of birds are killed by vehicles going way too fast.

Even a seemingly plain looking bird has exquisite tones and patterns layered in its feathers. And every beak has its own unique shape, held proud and true to the species. What ancient avian thoughts behind those rounded, piercing eyes? To capture such depths with a camera takes patience – or potluck. Recently I spotted a hawk circling over the garden and by the time I raced back out with the camera, it had gone; a missed opportunity, but at least, “my” birds were spared.

This photo essay was inspired by the birds I’ve met, some in the wild, others from council parks and gardens. To hold a bird in my lens, feathers all a-sheen in a tree’s green light, or against the sky’s backdrop, or across the silvery shades of water – this is the ultimate challenge, before it flies away. Sometimes a bird lingers, as if granting me permission to take its photo, or perhaps curiosity keeps it there; but for those few seconds, there’s only the bird and me, then it’s gone, back to its feathered business.

Where do birds sit in this fast-moving society? I’ve heard it said the land is healthy if there are birds. Rather, shouldn’t it be that birds are healthy if there is land (for them). As I write this I hear birds conversing outside, from the bottlebrush to the flowering gum. I wonder what they say to each other when they see developers move in on another section of their territory. Perhaps that cockatoo flying overhead last week with its sky splitting shriek was speaking for all bird kind.

Animals killed and injured on roads are a familiar sight in Australia. Within the contained security of a vehicle it is easy to speed past at over 100-kilometres an hour, scarcely giving a second thought to the lifeless bodies on the side of the road. Just hours earlier a wallaby may have been in search of fresh pick on the other side; a kookaburra may have been distracted while socializing; or a wombat may have been crossing the highway to locate water from a nearby river but met with sudden death.

The Kings Highway is a dangerous place. Many human deaths occur along this road, particularly where drivers are attempting to overtake other vehicles in their urgency to leave Canberra for a weekend down the South Coast of New South Wales, or to return back to the capital.[i] With such a large number of accidents along this stretch of highway, I have been concerned about my own safety, but it is not nearly as risky for me within the confines of a vehicle as it is for other beings that are caught out on the road. Leaving the vehicle to take photographs of the dead and maimed animals heightened my awareness of this risk, as I negotiated the oncoming vehicles.

This photo essay is a means of recognizing animals as individuals. Through the lens of a camera, I dwelled on the physicality of the being that had been living only a few hours before.  Most of us do not have the opportunity to see ‘wild’ animals up close. I forced myself to look past the bluebottle flies, the blood and disgorged guts and to take note of the details, the soft fur or the rough sole of a well-worn foot.

I was inspired to take this series of photographs after co-organising and subsequently attending a workshop aimed at crossing between the arts, the sciences and the humanities, part of an annual event called ‘The Plumwood Gathering’. Two speakers who attended the workshop, artist John Reid and ecologist Daniel Ramp, acknowledged the death of animals on roads in different but corresponding ways. John Reid’s photographic interpretation featured in the previous issue of this journal.[ii] Daniel Ramp discussed how he has found that the death of marsupials on roads has consequences far beyond the site of impact. The social structure of a marsupial population changes as a result of the large number of deaths on roads. Individuals migrate to take up territory that has been left vacant, fundamentally changing the social dynamics of a population.[iii

Plumwood Mountain, the journal, is named after a real place. It consists of densely forested land on the brow of an escarpment with wonderful views down toward the South Coast. The land can only be accessed (by humans), by turning off the frantic Kings Highway and onto a minimal bush track. It is home to an interconnected web of plants and animals, including wombats, parrots, wallabies and the odd roaming fox. Val Plumwood formed strong bonds with two individual wombats up at Plumwood Mountain, both visiting her regularly for a number of years. She fully acknowledged that these wombats had individual characteristics and a distinct personality. [iv] I had the opportunity to meet one of these wombats, Victor. When I stopped to acknowledge a wombat lying dead on the road, Victor would come to mind and I wondered about the personality of the individual whose life had been cut short. At least places like Plumwood Mountain are refuges for some of these unique individuals and it is a place that can nurture life, rather than constantly and needlessly taking life away.