CULTURING THE BIOSPHERE: THOUGHTS-IN-PROGRESS 1997/98

Imagine The Future Inc's founder and co-ordinator, Merrill Findlay, reflects on the genesis of Redreaming the plain, ITF's ongoing cultural development program, and on her own role as a cultural worker. First written in November 1997 and modified in early 1998. Published on-line as an archive file, July 2004.

CONTENTS
Introduction
Culturing of Lake Mungo
Culturing of Lake Mulan
Culturing of Mer or Murray Island
Whitefella stories
Reweaving the 'lost' threads
The view from West Gate Bridge
Redreaming the plain
Interactive possum skin cloak
Writing the future

INTRODUCTION

There was a time before this, a Time Before People, when ancient forests covered the soil, when the air, the water ran clear and free. The earth remembers.[1]

On this continent, Australia, Time Before People ended maybe 100 000 years ago, maybe more, maybe less, depending on how you interpret the archaeological evidence. What has happened in the millennia since is a complex interaction I call 'culturing', a concept that embraces the full sweep of human experience from that fuzzy time when the first people began imposing their consciousness upon this continent to this present moment, and into the future, which, like the past, we can only imagine.

This concept plays on two meanings of the word 'culture'. The first is the archaeological or anthropological meaning which encompasses all human activities, artifacts, and beliefs that are not passed on through our genes. The second is what happens when you add bacteria to milk and get yoghurt, cheese or simply bad milk, and the kind of 'culture' you pour into a petrie dish when you want organisms to grow in the artificial conditions of a science lab.

My own fascination with the processes of culturing this continent probably has its roots in my childhood and adolescence when I was regularly confronted by the past in the form of abandoned stone axes and querns on my family's farm on the central western plains of New South Wales. Those artifacts have since become part of my own story about my family's complicity in displacing the people of the Wirradjuri nation from their traditional land and changing the very nature of the world they had been part of for millennia. Both rural and urban Australians, both black and white, are now suffering the consequences of those post-Contact years of culturing this continent in Europe's image. But that's another story.

THE CULTURING OF LAKE MUNGO

While I was growing up, scholars believed that indigenous people had occupied this continent, not for over 100 000 years as many now believe, but for a maximum of 20 000 years. This date was challenged in the late 1960s after geomorphologist Jim Bowler discovered the carbonate-encrusted skeletal remains of a young woman eroding from a dune on the shore of Lake Mungo in south-western NSW, while he was studying the impact of Ice Age climates on inland Australia. Analysis of the skeletal material, including carbon-dating, revealed that this young woman had been ritually cremated and buried around 40 000 years ago. Mungo Lady, as she is now known, forced us whitefellas to rewrite our stories about the culturing of this continent, and in the process, blackfellas have since been able to reclaim some of their stolen past.

I was lucky enough to visit Lake Mungo with a group of archaeologists and Koories not long after the first carbon dates were published, and saw for myself artifacts and skeletal material eroding from the lake's lunettes. I made a second pilgrimage to Lake Mungo about fifteen years later to research a feature article for an environmental magazine, Habitat Australia. From the Pleistocene dunenow called the Walls of China I watched a whole day pass. A flock of galahs circled and landed on a nearby clay pan: the beat of their wings, the soft breeze, and from somewhere very close, the sigh of another woman ...

I could put neither flesh to her bones, nor words to her lips. I couldn't see the world as she saw it, nor even guess what metaphors she may have used to explain it, but Mungo Lady whispered to me yet from across the millennia. Her presence was embedded within the very land I trod, and evidence of her existence was scattered across its surface like the yarrow of the I-Ching.

Who was she? How did she live? Whom did she live with? What did this once-brimming inland lake mean to her and to her people? And why does she mean so much to me?

The story so far: Mungo Lady lived a soft life of high culture, of plenty. She camped seasonally with her clan on a sandy beach by this lake, which was filled then with shellfish, golden perch, yabbies and Murray cod, and surrounded by temperate woodlands rich in all the resources necessary to sustain a small gatherer/ hunter population in affluence and comfort. Now, thirty, forty thousand years of climate change later, saltbush has colonised the lake floor. By the fossil shore, a few stunted bellahs. Beyond the eroded lunette, mallee as far as the eye can see. Water has not flowed into Lake Mungo for five hundred generations.[2]

Some years after my second Mungo pilgrimage, I invited Jim Bowler, who was, by then, a professorial fellow in the School of Earth Sciences at Melbourne University, to speak at the Ecoversity. Soon after, Imagine The Future Inc published 'Reading the Australian Landscape', his essay based on the Ecoversity presentation. [3] In that essay, Bowler reflected on the way geologists and archaeologists 'have opened our eyes and imagination to the immense time depth of humanity in this land, and to the no less remarkable expressions of the human spirit in times past'. He asked:

THE CULTURING OF LAKE MULAN

The site Bowler offered was Lake Mulan in the Great Sandy Desert region of Western Australia which, like Lake Mungo, had come to his attention while he was studying the impact of climate change on the geomorphology of this continent. Mulan is within the ancestral territory of the Walmatjiri people who now own freehold title to it. Unlike Mungo Lady's descendants, the Walmatjiri have been able to maintain continued occupation of their traditional country despite the pressures of colonisation. Their identity continues to be defined by stories which link them with the natural systems they have traditionally depended on for their physical and spiritual sustenance. Jim Bowler illustrated this 'people-land interaction' by recounting the Mulan creation story as it had been told to him in 1992 by Rex Johns, chairperson of the Mulan community:

This simple story was narrated in 'hushed tones' beside a large stone marking the site of the boys' escape from the predatory dogs, a stone that is very sacred to the Walmatjiri. Bowler continues:

Before I attempt to pick up the threads Bowler suggests are 'lost', I'd like to briefly recount another creation story to emphasise the diverse ways in which people have traditionally given meaning to the places they are part of, and to include Australia's indigenous Melanesian peoples. This story was told to me on Mer, or Murray Island, in the Torres Strait when I camped there with Bonita Mabo and her extended family in 1995, for the reburial of her late husband Eddie Koiki Mabo's remains near his ancestral village of Las.[5]

Eddie Mabo's homeland is a volcanic cone at the far northern tip of the Great Barrier Reef between Australia and Papua New Guinea. His ancestors were Melanesian horticulturalists from Papua New Guinea who arrived by sea probably 6500 years ago, after rising sea levels had flooded the landbridge from Australia. The language they brought with them is closely related to Kiwai, a Papuan language which is now only spoken along the mouth of the Fly River and west to the Pahoturi River. According to linguists, Meriam is completely unrelated to the Austronesian languages spoken on the Australian mainland.

The story I want to retell is about a shape-shifting hero named Gelam who escaped from his mother, Atwa, in the form of a dugong to remake the world in his own image. This typically-misogynist creation myth was told to me by Bua Mabo (no direct relation of Eddie Mabo) while I sat on an upturned boat below the high ridge that is the hero of this story's spinal column. According to Bua Mabo, Gelam lived with his mother on Mau or Moa Island in the western Torres Strait. His father, Bulbul, died when he was a baby, so Atwa raised her son alone. One day she gave him a bow and some arrows and taught him how to shoot small birds. The boy soon became a skilled hunter. Each morning, he would roam the island with his weapons and in the evening, he would collect all the dead birds and sort them. He put all the fat ones to one side to keep for himself and took all the skinny ones home to his mother.

When Atwa noticed her son's selfish behaviour, she decided to teach him a lesson. She covered her body with mud to disguise herself as a ghost and waited where she knew her son would see her. Gelam was terrified when he saw the apparition and raced back to the safety of his mother's house. His mother, meanwhile, had quickly washed all the mud off herself and taken a shortcut home so was there to meet him.

The ghost appeared to Gelam the next day, and the next, and whenever he ran back to the camp, his mother was always waiting for him. But one day he noticed a spot of mud clinging to her ear ... And that was when he decided to leave Mau and his mother Atwa to find for a place where she could never find him. Instead of going hunting the next day he looked for a tree from which he could carve a dugong to make his escape. He spent the whole day cutting down trees, but when he tested them in the creek they floated instead of sinking like a dugong should.

Then one night, his father appeared to him in a dream and told him that if he knocked on the trunk before he cut it he would hear whether the tree was of the right kind or not. Gelam followed his father's instructions, found the right tree ('we call it a tol tree', Bua Mabo said), cut it down, carved it into a dugong big enough for him to fit inside. He tested it in water, and sure enough, this dugong sank to the bottom as his father said it would.

The next day, when his mother was going off to the reef to fish, Gelam told her he'd be staying home.. 'But if you see a big fish, call out to me so I can help you pull it in,' he said. He then went off to the creek where he had hidden his wooden dugong, climbed in and dived. He surfaced for breath on the southwest side of the island near where his mother was fishing. She mistook him for a very large fish and called out as he had requested. Gelam dived again and resurfaced - and this time his mother recognised him. That is when he told her that he knew she was the ghost, and that now he was going to escape from her forever.

Gelam returned to the creek to load his wooden dugong with all the things he would need for his journey: soil, yams, bananas, coconuts, pawpaws, cassava, sweet potatoes, and other island foods, and when his craft was fully loaded, he climbed into it again, dived into the sea, and swam as far as he could in an easterly direction until he needed to surface for air again. He looked back over his shoulder, hoping to see empty sea, but there was his mother's island, Mau, still clearly visible behind him. 'If I settle here, my mother will still come and visit me,' he said. So he dived again and, as he dived, some soil fell out of his submarine craft to form Nagee Island. He surfaced again, looked around, but again he said, 'No, if I settle down here, my mother will still come to see me'. He dived again and more soil fell out of the dugong to create Yam Island. He swam further east, surfaced and looked around: 'No,' he said, 'I can still see my mother and she will still come to visit me.' He dived once more, and Coconut Island was created.

The next time he surfaced was where Yorke Island is today, Bua Mabo told me. 'No, I can still see my mother,' Gelam said, and dived again. And again more soil fell from the dugong. He swam to where Darnley is now, but even there, on a very fine day, you can see Mau as a fine pencil line on the horizon, so he turned south-east and dived again. This time he surfaced at the place where Mer is and when he looked around to see if his mother was still visible, the horizon was empty. 'Ah, this must be the place,' he said, and sank to the bottom of the Coral Sea.

At first Gelam settled on the sea floor facing north-east, but the daytime wind, the nor'easterly, blew right up his nostrils. He turned himself around to face the south-west so the wind wouldn't irritate him. As he was making himself comfortable, he cleared the snot from his nose to create the tiny off-shore islands of Dauar and Waier. His nostrils are still clearly visible from those islands as two caves in his dugong face and they are very sacred to the Meriam le, the people who inhabit his body. Gelam still has to put up with the wind blowing up his nostrils, however - not the nor'easterly, but the evening or late afternoon wind, the sou'westerly! But now there is nothing he can do about it . He is stuck there on the sea floor, unable to ever move again.[6]

While Bua Mabo was telling me this story, three younger Islanders - Horace Nona, his nephew Arly Nona, and John Gaby - were hunting from a small aluminium dinghy at the edge of the coral reef encircling Mer. Horace Nona is a highly respected hunter and it was he who took upon himself the duty of providing a dugong for the feast to celebrate the traditional unveiling of his Uncle Eddie's tombstone. He explained that hunting and consuming dugong is still a very important part of Islander culture, and that no feast is complete without at least one of these marine mammals, and, if possible, a turtle as well.

Horace Nona's hunting expedition was successful. That night I fell asleep to the sound of an 'untouched' female dugong gasping for air on a sheet of rusty corrugated iron on the seaward side of the bamboo windbreak that protects Las from Sager, the sou'east trade; and to the intermittent struggles of a young male turtle trying to right himself after being turned onto his shell beside the dugong. Both sea creatures were slaughtered on the beach the following morning, and in the evening, after the unveiling of Eddie Mabo's black granite tombstone, we feasted. On that island of so many stories, there was something very complete, familiar even to a person raised on Jesus-stories inherited from our Colonial past, about eating the flesh of the creator! Or rather, in this case, the flesh of the creator's virgin daughter!

WHITEFELLA STORIES

The story of Gelam is part of the cultural 'software' which determined how Meriam people traditionally understood their environment and interacted with it. No contemporary adult Meriams believe the story literally, but they continue to tell it because, like all their other stories, it validates their identity as Meriam le and gives deeper meaning to their lives.

My mob also has stories about the creation of Mer. Our stories are about forces deep within the earth spewing forth molten rock to create a volcanic cone which became an island when the sea level rose at the end of the last Ice Age. We 'know' our stories are 'true' because we have 'facts' to 'prove' them. As the 'facts' change, so do our stories. As our stories change, so do our world views. As our world views change, so do the ways we interact with the ecosystems of which we are part - which brings me back to the concept I began with: the culturing of the biosphere.

My mob's creation stories, as told by scientists like Jim Bowler, for example, are as fantastic, as awe-inspiring and as spiritual to me as the stories the Walmatjiri or Meriam le tell about the creation of their homelands. Perhaps it was at Lake Mungo that I first began articulating the sense of 'connectedness' with creation that 'my' stories give me. The sun was already soaring towards noon as I sat on the Walls of China and watched as the earth danced her eternal orbit. The day passed. The millennia. And with each oscillation, each tilt and wobble in Earth's spin, another climate change was etched into the fossil dune beneath me.

Only a winter breeze laps at Mungo's shore today. It skims the sand, exposes stone flakes, long cold embers and ancient fires. Tribal memories. Fire and silcrete chips quarried from the lake shore were the basic tools Mungo Lady's people used to manipulate the environment. This technology was not benign, but in the hands of a small population moving seasonally across the landscape, its impact was apparently sustainable. As the climate changed, so did the culture. People adapted. They developed new technologies to exploit new resources - and survived. The last two hundred years have been their greatest challenge.

For all of us, for the planet, these last two centuries have been the deepest frown across the face of the millennia. In this brief time, my 'tribe' has become a life-threatening agent of global change. Our fires have burned too brightly, our technology has scarred too deep. Our culture has alienated itself from the very source of its nourishment.

We perch tenuously on this dune at the end of what my mob naively calls the twentieth century. Through whatever filters we glimpse the view - the laws of thermodynamics, systems theory, cybernetics, chaos theory, deep ecology, Gaia, Complexity - we are no longer at the apex of creation where our old myths once placed us. We are just part of the whole. The past, the present and the future camp here beside us.

Our planet and our sun continue their tipsy dance through the universe. We feel each tilt, each flare, each flutter of a butterfly wing, each blink of a star, though we may not perceive the effects directly. These events are beyond our control - all we can do is adapt to their consequences. Not so the impact of our way of life, our culture, on our biosphere. That we can change, and must, lest the long-term adaptations we will have to make are unmake-able.[7]

RE-WEAVING THE THREADS

And what of the questions Jim Bowler posed?

Have we really lost the threads, as Bowler suggests? Or have our stories become so complex, so diversely multicultural, so non-linear over these past few hundred years, that we can no longer see them as the threads of an all-encompassing tapestry of life? And if this is so, does it matter? If it does, can the tapestry be 're-woven', or re-imagined, so that we can once more make sense of it and wrap ourselves within in?

For some reason this question is important to me because, like every human , I am a teller of stories, and a listener, a reader of stories too. The stories we tell, listen to and read define who we are and how we see the world. As our stories change, so do our understandings, our perceptions. As the way we see the world changes, so do the ways we 'culture' it.

But what is my role in this process of cultural change? And what is yours?

THE VIEW FROM WEST GATE BRIDGE

Soon after I settled in Melbourne I drove over one of the most extraordinary bridges I had ever seen; and from its crest I beheld one of the most extraordinary views. The bridge was the West Gate that soars across the estuary of the Yarra River below its confluence with the Maribyrnong to link Melbourne's affluent east with its neglected west. The view was across the coastal rim of one of the world's largest basalt plains, and what I was looking at was the consequence of thousands of years of human interaction with the land, of thousands of years of culturing it.

It may surprise you that I say thousands of years, especially if you have seen the view from the bridge looking west: smoke stacks and flues of all sizes spewing methane, carbon dioxide and other 'externalities' into the atmosphere; 'farms' of giant white steel tanks filled with petrochemicals and other hazardous and toxic compounds; concrete knots of multi-laned highways; giant triffid towers gridding the metropolis with the high-voltage cables; wastelands of shipping containers like children's blocks; and, as far as the eye can see, suburbia spreading like bacteria in a petrie dish

The plain on which these nineteenth and twentieth-century structures have been imposed is Kulin territory, and archaeological evidence suggests that it had already been 'farmed' for thousands of years by the time people of European descent began arriving just over 150 years ago. The 'virgin land' that so attracted the nineteenth-century invaders is an artifact, therefore, of selective burning and other Kulin land-management regimes, and vestiges of this past are still visible, even from the West Gate Bridge. But this need not always be so, as the late George Turner points out in his 1987 science fiction classic, The Sea and Summer:

Lenna Wilson, the fictional historian researching the extreme polarisation and disintegration of society in what Turner calls the 'Greenhouse Culture' replies:

RE-DREAMING THE PLAIN

My formal exploration of the pasts, presents and futures of Victoria's coastal basalt plain began in 1995 with a multimedia project Painting the future real, the first stage of Imagine The Future Inc's community research and cultural development program Re-dreaming the plain. The project was launched at the Footscray Community Arts Centre on 31 May 1996, by Paul Clark, Pro Vice-Chancellor of Victoria University of Technology and Deputy Chairperson of the Western Regional Development Organisation (WREDO), and Sandy McCutcheon, presenter of ABC Radio National's 'Australia Talks Back' .

I chose the basalt plain as the focus of Imagine The Future's R&D program not only because of the emotional impact it had on me when I saw it for the first time from the West Gate Bridge, but also because it is a clearly defined bioregion with very significant, yet still undervalued, biological and cultural diversity; an extraordinary heritage; and a full range of present-day social pathologies, including unacceptably high rates of unemployment, youth poverty and alienation, declining manufacturing and rural sectors, major social inequities, contaminated ecosystems, and very socially and ecologically damaging urban and industrial development. These lava flows are therefore extraordinarily rich in stories. And I had a crazy, perhaps even naive notion that these diverse and multicultural threads could be woven into some kind of integrated whole, like a tapestry. Because isn't everything interconnected? People and their environments? The local and the global? The personal and the political? 'Us' and 'them'? And our diverse pasts, presents and possible futures?

Unlike the Walmatjiri, the Wiradjuri, Meriam le and other indigenous peoples, my whitefella mob has not been very good at this kind of integrative thinking, or not since Newton and Descartes and their mates began telling their very reductive stories in what 'we' call the seventeenth century. Or was it Plato and his mates 2500 years ago? Whichever storytellers you choose to 'blame', whitefella society still tends to reward people who think within very prescribed boundaries, while those who follow the links between 'disciplines' tend to be marginalised. As a consequence few people, and especially not those who define and implement public policy, consider the whole. And this is what Imagine The Future was attempting to do with what became Redreaming the plain.

DIGITAL POSSUM SKIN CLOAK

The primary focus of Stage I of Re-dreaming was the creation of a series of composite digital images constructed, not around the concept of a western 'tapestry', but rather a traditional Kulin cloak. For thousands of years, Kulin people have manufactured these garments in southeastern Australia from the skins of marsupials. In pre-European days the skins were incised with traditional clan designs, coloured with ochres and charcoal, and stitched together with animal sinew or thread made from plant fibres, but no Kulin cloaks remain from those pre-Contact days, and the old designs and the stories associated with them have been forgotten under the full brutality of colonisation. Contemporary Kulin descendants continue to manufacture possum and kangaroo skin cloaks, however, and wear them proudly on ceremonial occasions as an expression of their cultural continuity.

Imagine The Future Inc's 1996/97 digital re-interpretation of the possum skin cloak was completed in collaboration with elders of the Wurundjeri clans of the Kulin nation, and their support is gratefully acknowledged. Each digital 'skin' can be read as a different set of stories about the 'culturing' of the basalt plain. The content was based on twenty-one in-depth interviews conducted in mid-1996 with local people from many different backgrounds, selected because they were socially engaged individuals who had thought deeply about the future of the bioregion. Not the future that George Turner described in The Sea and Summer, but 'a future that makes you want to be there' - which, for the sake of this project, is called a socially and ecologically sustainable society.

The Painting the future real team asked these people about themselves, about the sustainability issues that concerned them, the strategies and actions they believed were most appropriate to address those issues, and what they were doing to effect social change. The interviewees were then asked to describe their personal vision of a sustainable future - and it was from these visions, plus other research, that I developed the conceptual framework and storylines for the digital possum skin cloak. The 'skins' themselves were 'incised' by the project's consultant artist, Csaba Szamosy, using hundreds of separate images contributed by project partners.

The interviews are very revealing and, when read together, clearly articulate the complex relationships between biological systems and social systems which must be understood if we are to create socially and ecologically sustainable communities. As Hue Nguyen, a community worker at the St Albans Migrant Resource Centre, noted when she was interviewed by seventeen-year-old Janet Ho, we can't change what has happened in the past, but we can change what will happen in the future. In Hue Nguyen's vision of a sustainable society, Melbourne's multicultural West is 'a community of harmony' in which people nurture and celebrate their cultural diversity.

'Everything is propaganda in a sense,' she said, 'and what I'm trying to say is that we should promote positive propaganda so people will be less racist and we can have greater harmony in the community. And so young people can believe in the future.'

Gaye Hamilton, then the Director of Weribee Zoo, emphasised the importance of biological diversity when she was interviewed for the project. In her vision of the future, people are growing endemic flora species in their gardens to provide habitat for now-endangered native fauna instead of roses and geraniums. The remaining corridors of native vegetation which still exist along some of the creeks, sewage lines and railway verges have been preserved, extended and enhanced so that wildlife can move freely from one natural ecosystem to the next. 'I'm not suggesting that we should deprive ourselves of aesthetic pleasures, but for me, those pleasures must include being able to watch a sunset or sunrise over undisturbed wetlands, or a flock of orange-bellied parrots flying by.'

Resident Roger Holloway also talked about the relationship between humans and the other species we share the planet with. 'I ... see great changes in our landscape,' he said. 'I see a more diverse range of land uses, a richer tapestry, if you like. I see permaculture gardens in urban settings. I see more multiple smaller scale cropping activities. I see ... much more native vegetation in the landscape than we've had. In the western volcanic plains area of course, I see the retention of the grasslands and an increasing recognition that native vegetation has a very positive function in the landscape from a productivity point of view, and from a biodiversity perspective.

'I also see a restructuring and consolidation of our urban communities,' he said. 'I see an emphasis on higher density housing in urban villages that are clustered around public transport nodes and multiple-choice transport options - because of all the urban infrastructure services, transport is the single biggest financial constraint - so that most people live within 5 minute's walking-distance from public transport. Further out, I do see a continuation of the conventional suburban home on its fifth of an acre block, with dual occupancies and other opportunities, but I also see a willingness to address urban sprawl by containing its spread within certain limits ... Our urban settings will be much more diverse and multidimensional rather than being monocultures in clearly designated residential or commercial or industrial zones.'

Not surprisingly, John Hennessy, Director of the Western Regional Economic Development Organisation, emphasised regional economic self-reliance. 'In my vision of the future, this region is leading the way in the transition from the world of today to the world of tomorrow,' he said. 'This future world will probably be a lot more focused on home-based activities, a lot more focused on small enterprises, and people will have a much more global perspective. There will be no reason why people who are developing products and services in the West can't market them all over the world with the telecommunications technologies that are coming on stream right now.

'You can already catch glimpses of this future,' Hennessy explained. 'At Melton, for example, a pilot project based on the employment node principles ... is being developed on about 500 hectares of land. Employment nodes are about creating self-sufficient local communities where people can work, recreate, educate and live in the one area rather than having to commute to and from Melbourne each day, as 90 per cent of the workforce in outlying growth areas like Melton, Werribee, Sunbury and Craigieburn does at the moment. So you might have light industry adjacent to household living and socialising areas next door to some sort of tertiary education facility and all set in parklands with a lake.'

Urban planner Peter Atkins, Development Project Coordinator with the City of Maribyrnong, also emphasised regional self-reliance in terms of employment, public amenities, water, and energy in his vision of the future. 'I think a sustainable city would also be more self-sufficient in a social sense,' he said. 'There'd be more opportunities for friendships and personal support, for example. And that again would reduce the need to travel.'

Like many young people within the bioregion, twenty-five-year old Sunshine resident, Nick Pastalatzis, whose parents migrated from the Greek island of Samos, was very concerned about unemployment. 'I'd like there to be some sort of guarantee that there will be a job out there but not the sort of guarantee that a job is for a life-time,' he said. 'I just don't want to see people being afraid of unemployment. I want people to listen to each other, to be prepared to try a few different things, be prepared to change and learn how to cope with change better. I want to see people prepared to learn, because some people in society, they don't want to learn from their history ... But for me, the most important thing about thinking about a sustainable future, is that there will be a future.'

'That's what I'm saying, that there will be a future! ' Pastalatzis emphasised. 'And it could be really good! But people need to be prepared to listen to new ideas and to take a few risks to see if the ideas work or not. We need to experiment.'

Every day, such stories are being told in kitchens, playgrounds, classrooms, council chambers, lecture theatres, offices and boardrooms across the basalt plain, across the nation, across the globe. These stories are important because they have the power to change the way we collectively think and the way we impose our thoughts upon the world - or the way we 'culture' it. While they provide no guarantee that The Sea and Summer will not be this bioregion's destiny, they do give hope that there will be a future, and in confusing times that is surely a good enough psychological starting point for making the world a better place. Without it, George Turner's dystopia seems much too disempoweringly close.

WRITING THE FUTURE

The interactive possum skin cloak created in Stage I of Re-dreaming the plain is not yet in the public domain, although it has been previewed in Netscape at a number of conferences and other events around Australia. Stage II has been funded with a grant of $87,000 from the New Media Unit of the Australian Film Commission and is now in progress. The AFC support will enable a number of established writers, most of whom live on the plain itself, to spin new literary hypertexts about the pasts, presents and possible futures of the bioregion, and these stories will be 'woven' through the Stage I composite images. New content will be accessible on the World Wide Web at www.ecoversity.org.au from early 1999, and the completed Stage II is expected to be formally launched and fully on-line in August 1999.

The Re-dreaming the plain interactive multimedia content is expected to be used in Imagine The Future Inc's schools program, Re-imagining your Neighbourhood, a sixteen week program that was successfully piloted by Carmen Stewart at Sunshine Secondary College in 1997, in association with Brimbank City Council, with funding from the Reichstein Foundation and Sidney Myer Fund . The 1998 program now being conducted with two schools in Brimbank is sponsored by VicHealth, The students' community arts project work, which is a singificant component of the program, will be launched in Sunshine and on the World Wide Web in early December '98.

Stage III of Re-dreaming the plain is expected to enable students participating in Imagine The Future Inc's futures education programs, plus storytellers from non-English speaking backgrounds and younger multimedia artists who live on the lava flow to develop new web-based interactive multimedia content that truly reflects the richness of the bioregion's cultural and biological heritage. To me, this will be the most exciting stage of the R&D program. (The Re-dreaming web site will one day be managed and administered by a committee of local residents, activists and scholars, but at this stage, Imagine The Future Inc is still inventing the concept.)

By the end of this millennium the virtual possum skin cloak with its myriad of interconnected stories about what this bioregion has been in the past, what it is now, and what it might yet become, will, in some chaotic, non-linear way, be doing what it was designed to do: help change the way people think about the bioregion, and therefore the way we culture it. And then ...?

The rest of this story is still to be told. In its telling, answers will, I hope, emerge to those questions I asked thousands of words back. What is my role, as both a teller and listener of stories, in this process of culture change? And what is yours? Perhaps even Jim Bowler's question might find an answer: 'What value this mythology?'
_____

1 Merrill Findlay (1997), (then) unpublished manuscript, Republic of Women, published in 1999 by University of Queensland Press.

2 Merrill Findlay (1990) 'Climate Change: Culture Change', in Habitat Australia, October 1990, Australian Conservation Foundation.

3 Jim Bowler (1995) 'Reading the Australian Landscape: European and Aboriginal Perspectives', in Cappuccino Papers No. 1, Imagine The Future Inc, Melbourne, pp 9-14.

4 Bowler (1995), pp 13-14

5 Merrill Findlay, 'Eddie Mabo Comes Home' in Good Weekend, June 1, 1996.

6 Bua Mabo (1995) taped interview with the author on Murray Island.

7 George Turner (1987) The Sea and Summer, Grafton Books.

 

Content created November 1997, modified 1998 and July 2004. Page posted as an ITF archive, July 2004. Copyright Merrill Findlay, 1997.