Ecology, Aesthetics and the Desert

Ecology, Aesthetics and the Desert

Introduction

Ian and I first worked together, over twenty years ago, on a unique desert, Antarctica, from a distance, but this afternoon my talk references working with Ian in the Menindee Lake area near Broken Hill, where the series of smaller paintings in his show ‘Degrees of Abstraction’ was made. I’d like to situate that work in its environment.

The talk is in 4 sections:

1. Seeing Australia

2. Desert Appreciation

3. Desert Explorations

   1. Place and landscape, the eco-sublime in the Menindee Lake System

1. Seeing Australia

In Rome, Claude Lorrain became known for his naturalistic frescoes. They impressed the critic Sandraat: “each tree can very well be recognised according to its special characteristics in trunk, foliage, and colouring, all as they rustled and moved in the wind.”[i] This alertness to nature’s dynamics imbues the sketches in his Compagna notebooks.[ii] Claude though is famous for his grand manner in oils, for constructing a very influential pastoral ideal around a single vanishing point of unending distance. Individual details become unimportant, fading into soporific soft-blue light.

Do you know the Claude here? Look for a temple. Ascend the steps between Doric sandstone pillars through two atriums flanked by marble columns into the sanctum of art.[iii] The location is the outer Domain, set aside in 1788 as Governor Phillip’s private parkland, landscaped like an English park.[iv] This idealised version of nature was transported to England via paintings (Poussin, Rosa but primarily Claude), and Italian gardens viewed on the Grand Tour.

Ian and I have lived on this continent for a quarter of a century, but our aesthetic was formed by English sensibilities. The pastoral’s golden-hued vision of rural life, we have all inherited, conceals harsh realities, explaining why art historian John Barrell talks of "the dark side of landscape."[v] Much of the English landscape Ian and I love is a tableaux of vandalism:

• economic / social - The English postcard scene of cute hedgerowed fields derives from the Enclosure Act which locked up common land (to the despair of the poet John Clare); this savage early capitalism triggered dirt poverty and a new social order;[vi] and

• ecological - the volcanically / glacially formed Lake District was heavily wooded.

The Claude is an octagonal early pastoral from around 1636; a lazy goatherd leans against a venerable tree, animals loiter, a water mill and reflections of civilisation on distant hills float on the lake. Beside it hangs a Constable, a copy of different Claude with goatherd and goats. This was painted nearly two hundred later, Constable wrote to his wife: “I have a little Claude in hand, a grove scene of great beauty and I wish to make a copy of it to be useful to me as long as I live. It contains almost all I wish to do in landscape.”[vii]

Andrew Sayers reminds us that that early Australian landscape artists were under “the very strong influence of 17th century artists, such as Claude Lorrain . . . [Under] this strong influence of notions of the picturesque landscape and the sublime landscape . . . artists search[ed] for subjects in these "new worlds" which really were the sorts of things that they'd been looking for in Europe, such as waterfalls and crags and interesting coastlines and mountains and so on . . .”[viii] However, the image of a European aesthetic floundering in the antipodes is not black & white. The art historian Tim Bonyhady points out: “The cliché would have it that the invaders saw the eucalypt as a symbol of everything that was different and wrong about their new home. In fact, many members of the First Fleet lauded the gum tree for its distinctiveness.”[ix]

European invasion/settlement began with agrarian promise from reports by Sir Joseph Banks but this hope evaporated.[x] The colonists lacked any sense of ecological reality and Sydney Town almost starved before the second fleet arrived.[xi] They needed agricultural land and after the crossing of the Blue Mountains, Governor Lachlan Macquarie, 4th of May 1815, upon seeing the Bathurst Plains declared them “grand, beautiful and interesting, forming one of the finest landscapes I ever saw.”[xii] John Lewins, around the same time, painted a pastoral watercolour of the plains, a Terra Nulius (both of people and biota) and without convicts (whose labour was essential for early farming).[xiii]

Two years later, inspired by north America’s westward push, Macquarie’s Surveyor-General, John Oxley went looking for good land further west. He followed the Lachlan River that ended in a swamp; he just saw “an ocean of desolation.”[xiv] We know the stories. Oxley’s successor, Thomas Mitchell also turned away from the centre, “from the parched deserts of the interior country, where we had wandered so unprofitably, and so long.”[xv] Charles Sturt headed up the Darling from the Murray arriving at Menindee Lakes (where Ian and I worked), the expedition hauled a whaleboat to cross the inland sea, but found just desert. Four years later in 1848, Ludwig Leichhardt and party attempted a westward crossing from the Darling Downs and disappeared.[xvi] Burke and Wills, after a prize for the first south-north interior crossing, reached Menindee in October 1860, eight months later they died at Cooper’s Creek. King barely survived, but the expedition had proved (again!) there was no inland sea, just desert.[xvii]

2. Desert Appreciation

The first aesthetic concept that jumps out of the desert like a bilby is the sublime.

Edmund Burke (back in 1759) contrasted beauty (small and smooth) with the sublime (grandeur, terror, awe). He described the sublime in terms of nature: it "comes upon us in the gloomy forest, in the howling wilderness . . ."[xviii]

Art historian Christopher Hussey attributed seven characteristics to the sublime; I think the desert fits these characteristics tongue and groove.

1. obscurity (physical and intellectual);

2. power;

3. privations (e.g. darkness, solitude, and silence);

4. vastness (vertical or horizontal) diminishing the scale of the human observer;

5. infinity (literal or suggested by the last two characteristics of the sublime); which are

6. succession and

7. uniformity (both suggesting limitless progression).[xix]

The advertising industry loves the sublime. Shane Gunster comments that, “SUV marketing takes the appropriation of natural themes and imagery to new 'heights,' with epic campaigns that place vehicles atop mountain peaks, in the midst of dense forests, or racing across vast deserts.”[xx] Yet the four-wheel drives filmed in pristine natural environments use vast amounts of non renewable materials, destroy the earth’s surface, pollute the air, heat the planet and endanger us directly. Urban dwellers nature becomes ‘Out There’, often sentimentalised, a cause of our blindness to our destruction of the environment.[xxi] This reminds us that there are newer forms of the sublime, e.g. technological (think of Apollo – God and rocket). Christopher Hitt writes: ‘The rapidly increasing impact of technology on the world has only heightened the urgency of the need to reconsider the sublime . . . the sublime is more relevant than ever before.’[xxii] The sublime is valuable being the first concept to take seriously the embodied nature of aesthetic experience, but was the Romantics elevated it to an ideology.[xxiii] Jean-Francois Lyotard emphasises the paradoxical (or paraloqical) nature of the sublime: terror and pleasure combine in tension.[xxiv] The concept has been under attack as imperialistic, patriarchal and class based; but the concept stays alive. [xxv]

Immanuel Kant argued that only nature provokes the sublime experience; or only art working with nature.[xxvi] Eco-critic William Cronon attacks the natural sublime, and the parallel obsession with wilderness, as deriving from Romantic aesthetics, and reducing value of the local, ordinary.[xxvii] He argues, “The tree in the garden is in reality no less other, no less worthy of our wonder and respect, than the tree in an ancient forest that has never known an axe or a saw.” [xxviii] Yet awe is to be found in sublime wild areas, like mountains and deserts. Neither Ian nor I have much of a head for heights, so we have stuck to deserts.

My desert adventures have happened upon varieties of the sublime – a wedding procession appearing from nowhere, its plaintive reed music and colours disappearing back into the Sahara’s dunes; being forced to drink tea at gun point by a tribesman keen to offer Balochi hospitality; searching the big blue for recently released condors near Death Valley; then there’s the marvels of Palmyra; Petra and Persepolis conjured from sands, once surrounded by green leaves. The world is varied and dynamic, deserts like peoples and cultures are on the move; deserts thrive on unsustainable land use.

~

I have worked my way around the base of Uluru eating bush tucker, drank VBs with Aboriginal stockman way into a starry night around a campfire, but none of us here live in desert, hardly anyone does. The Greek gods lived in inaccessible places but why is remoteness important to us?

One’s first experience of being immersed in a desert is the freedom, a little like one’s first skinny dip, a surprising pleasure. Part of this is to do with solitariness, a Romantic focus, but more so space, an utterly different experiential field which can lead to a mediative experience, but one charged not relaxed. David Tacey writes on contemporary spirituality and claims: “The landscape in Australia is a mysteriously charged and magnificently alive archetypal presence."[xxix] Quoting Les Murray, he suggests that Australia is the only continent with two-thirds of its landmass effectively reserved for mystical experience. This does not reflect Aboriginal dwelling but Christian myth, and refuses to see desert ecologically, with fascinating and varied ecosystems. Yi Fu Tuan has noted the paradox: “In the Old Testament, the Sinai wastes stood for death, disorder, and darkness, but also for God’s transcendent power and redemptive love.”[xxx] The Christian desert derives from biblical themes of perfection in negative terms of ascetic poverty - retreat from the body, family and society.[xxxi] However, Tacey has a confession to make: "I idealise the desert a lot in my writings, but in reality I'm pleased to live in Melbourne. I can't cope with the heat. At this time of the year, every Australian wants a glimpse of the sea."[xxxii]

Veronica Brady is a very literary nun who argues that Australian culture views the desert as a patriarchal fantasy to be 'penetrated', 'conquered' or 'made fertile'. She states, “But if we learn from the people for whom it was home it is different, a place where we listen to it speaking of its power, splendour and the kindness which it provides those who learn to live with it and by its laws.”[xxxiii] Romantic airiness – it was home to indigenous people through highly skilled embodied encultured skilled practice. The desert is not “kind”; it’s tough even if seductive.

John Beck unpicks north American rhetorical tropes which are: “mutually supporting” and which “accommodate both negative and positive readings at the same time.”[xxxiv] Just as the Old Testament: “The desert is glorious and horrible, a refuge and a danger, horizonless and thus a threat to sanity, and so on.” He cites Los Vegas, fastest growing city in the States as space with new possibilities unregulated by old practices. In Australia we have different desert sites:

Maralinga – The Maralinga people were thrown off their land and have suffered severe social dislocation so that 9 bombs, a thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima, and 600 smaller ones could explode there in the late fifties.[xxxv] The original British cleanup left plenty of plutonium behind. Plutonium 239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, after a quarter-of-a-million years it can be considered safe.

Woomera - where we once took part in the space race and now incarcerate refugees.

Wittenoom - an asbestos mining town in the Pilbara, a ghost town according to tourism WA, one the State government want to bulldoze. It can reach 48C, has no mains power or water and the nearest pub is 130ks away, but the residents, six men and two women, average age 62, are fighting to stay.

~

Just over a century ago, Dorothea Mackellar, stuck in England, missing Australia and only 19, wrote, "I love a sunburnt country”.[xxxvi] We have 'the red centre' now, not Patrick White’s ‘dead heart'. Yet last week, a newspaper headline shouted out THE DEAD HEART, the day after news that water could be cut off to irrigators in the Murray Darling Basin.[xxxvii] John Howard asked us to pray. If I could pray, I’d pray that politicians looked to the future and listened. My partner was at Ag college in 1980, and all the warnings were well in place regarding unsustainable water practices by irrigators. And that was without the global warming scenario. All colonists want productive land. From the 1870s to the 1930s the dry mallee lands of Victoria and South Australia were labs for irrigation to 'make the deserts bloom', usually an economic and environmental disaster - soil degradation, erosion, sand drifts, dust storms, choked waterways and salination. The Murray-Darling Basin (potentially our greatest environmental disaster) reflects this history. The arid parts, seemingly stubbornly tough, have had ecosystems destroyed by feral animals, weeds, changes in fire patterns, and land degradation. Can anyone name one of the eight Australian desert mammals extinct since 1788? (e.g Eastern Hare Wallaby, Desert Bandicoot, Crescent Nailtail Wallaby) [xxxviii]

No reason you should; we live on the coast – but it is important, because biodiversity is important. I co-wrote the draft NSW Biodiversity strategy and my definition might show why:

Biodiversity is the continually changing array of life forms, the plants, animals and micro-organisms, their genes, the ecosystems they form and the processes they live by, in a unique, never to be repeated, evolutionary process that connects all life originating from the energy and matter at the beginning of the universe.

It’s a huge concept. I might add that other creatures share most of our genes, are our cousins; have co-evolved with us, and so we belong together in some sense. Now that we are so cut off from being in natural environments, from natural ways of getting food, having fun etc., aesthetics is a way for urban consumers to value ‘Nature’; vital floating in a global environment of eco-meltdown. Your garden becomes important, the remnant bushland near you, time you spend in the bush, and arts that work with nature.

3. Desert Explorations

It’s said that Hans Heysen was the first professional painter to work on the Australian desert, but Jessie Trail was there first, though that art is lost.[xxxix] His first trip to the Flinders Ranges in 1922 was overwhelming, the experience so original he couldn’t paint. Ten years later he wrote, it was, “a wide field as yet practically untouched.”[xl] Through further returns and experiments he developed his unique style which influenced Rex Battarbee and hence Albert Namatjira and the Central Desert (Hermannsburg) School.

Constable wanted fresh direct contact with nature, writing: “When I sit down to make a sketch from nature the first thing I try to do is, to forget that I have ever seen a picture.”[xli] Impossible, but perhaps the closest one can come is within a desert. But it’s not easy. Sidney Nolan flew over the centre in 1949,[xlii] later saying, “I wanted to paint the great purity and implacability of the landscape.” “I wanted to deal ironically with the cliché of the "dead heart"; I wanted to know the true nature of the "otherness" I had been born into. It was not a European thing.”[xliii] But like Heysen, he found the experience so different that it was difficult to transfer into art. Sean O’Brien’s excellent film that follows, ‘Two Thirds Sky: Artists In Desert Country’ explores five artists working with the desert. Some dealt with this problem by focussing right down, I seem to recall Peter Sharpe working with stones.[xliv]

Like Heysen, Ian returns to strengthen his understanding and re-energise his relationship with the ‘otherness’. (Both are multiple winners of the Wynne landscape prize). Perhaps there are echoes of the ancient tradition of pilgrimage, the end point is a mirage, there are always more prayers to say, more paintings to paint. And to be worked out since our relation to the land has lost all its traditions (99% of human history was spent as hunter gatherers, my generation ids a turning point), and we Europeans never knew desert in the first place. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa Indian, writes, “Once in his life a man . . . ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listen to the sounds that are made upon it.’ [xlv]

More artists are investigating the desert. John Olsen, the first professional artist to paint the Bungle Bungles and Lake Eyre, revisited the latter in 2001 with nine other artists, producing a body of work known as 'William Creek & Beyond'. [xlvi] These approaches build on the plein air tradition of de Valenciennes and Thomas Jones, Corot and Constable. Recent site-specific desert art is more sublime.

The English sculptor Antony Gormley flew over Australia for 3 days looking "for 20sq km of flatness and a vantage point". He found Lake Ballard, a salt lake in WA, and in 2003 sited there 50 stainless steel figures (one third life-size). The work, ‘Inside Australia’ is based on scanned naked locals (in a generous sense of that term). It’s a trek; visitors are warned to take sufficient water, fuel and food. He said, "It is as if the heart beats deeper and slower in WA. The earth is of such an extreme age that it has an authority unlike anywhere else in the world. . . We're putting all those [minerals] into the alloy. So you'll have a memory of a living body but also a memory of the mineral base of this continent."[xlvii]

The work was heavily influenced by Gormley meeting Walter De Maria, whose desert piece ‘The Lightning Field’ from 1977 is sited high in south-west New Mexico. It’s a grid, one mile long by one kilometre, of 400 highly polished steel poles with spiked ends. At noon the steel is almost invisible, but very sensitive to colours of dawn, dusk and moonlight. The viewer becomes prisoner, having to stay overnight and sign an affidavit that their estate won’t sue in the event of death. (That alone provokes the sublime). Photography is forbidden, but one set of official photos show lightning striking, a phenomenon that’s never been witnessed. There is no vantage point – it takes two hours to walk around, immersed in its environment. Even if photography was permitted, that technology cannot represent the art work that places art back in the world, with an experiential embodied reflexivity ‘white cube’. It is a powerful work that has become very important.[xlviii]

Most deserts have high day-time temperatures and extremely low night-time temperatures. This is due to the air being very dry, and results (together with low pollution) in extreme clarity of sight. (By the way, early Sydney artists would not recognise the view west to the Blue Mountains so smoggy has the air become). Where better than a desert to enhance natural light and darkness? Sculptor James Turrell works with light and space and for his most ambitious work, bought an extinct volcano in the Arizona desert (the same year as De Maria’s Field). The ‘Roden Crater’ project involves excavating corridors to rooms with spectacular views of the crater’s rim, so visitors can ‘feel the presence of gathered starlight’ (a sublime notion).

Ian’s desert work relies on a piece of stretched canvas not a bulldozer. That is where the alchemy occurs. He works hard to see the landscape, to see its changes, to understand it as a series of events, rather than a static object. Gary Lease in his book Reinventing Nature writes: ‘Our many representations of nature and humans are . . . always and ultimately failures . . . [because] nature and human are not self-revealing . . .’[xlix] Rather than saying representations are always failures, I’d say they burgeon with potential:

• Potential for energised attention; the eye is active and curious, restless for meaning and pleasure; and

• Potential for the layers of paint to trap the eye where we can feel disoriented and/or stuck in an infinite moment, looking further and further into the painting.[l]

I haven’t illustrated this talk because I need time for words, and I want to you to look at the paintings afterwards (and a movie follows).

John Berger pointed out, “It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world within words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled." [li] The humble sense of ‘negative capability’ in working with nature is a trait of indigenous knowledge and emphasised in desert environments. Artists help us sense this.

But art can usefully work with other disciplines. I plug here my installation and poems at the exhibition ‘Rational Order’ celebrating Linnaeus’ tercentenary at the MACLEAY MUSEUM University of Sydney, closing Wednesday but material on their website). One could use the term ‘chorography’ - deep mapping, the practice of thick description of a region including representations, stories, poems, mapping a region (preferably a bioregion) for future collaborations between artists and other disciplines, enriching what Simon Schama calls the ‘ferocious enchantment’ of landscape.

Environmental artist Mandy Martin collaborated with an archaeologist, environmental historian, pastoralist and ecologist at Puritjarra, Northern Territory.[lii] She paints remote landscapes through their own materiality of pigments and soils. Did you see her a couple of weeks ago in ‘Painting Australia’ on ABC, out in the Simpson desert (the episode could have been called ‘Working with flies’)? Having noted particulars like Spinifex, eroded gullies and ochre colours she challenged the three painters in the masterclass to: “Try to observe really deeply and respond with humility towards the landscape rather than imposing too many structures that come out of your own previous practice.”[liii]

The recent argument that nature is a cultural construction is I believe is based on the thesis that representation is always inadequate.[liv] This may be true. David Reason writes, “An image of nature has, like Narcissus’s reflection, the status of something possessed and yet not possessed, of something seeking to snare what remains always elusive.”[lv] Landscape is elusive, can never be captured; spills off the canvas, falls from the page, stays mostly out of shot. John Fowles wrote in The Tree: ‘Nature is unlike art in terms of its product . . . [it is] creating in the present, as we experience it. As we watch it is so to speak rewriting, reformulating, rephotographing itself.’[lvi] As long as we realise we can only experience and represent nature though our senses, intellect, concepts, (culturally formed but not determined) and embodied practices, then the work of our imagination continues.

An eco approach is sensitive to these constraints. Eco-artist Lynne Hull has carved ‘Desert Hydroglyphs’ into Wyoming rock producing pools to retain water for desert wildlife. Thus the work is both solid and ephemeral.

English artist Andy Goldsworthy works in both ways too. The ephemeral you can see from the title of one piece:

Iris blades pinned together with thorns

filled in five sections with rowan berries

fish attacking from below

difficult to keep all the berries in

nibbled at by ducks.[lvii]

Qualities of attention characterise artists. Andy Goldsworthy was "really annoyed" at having to be guest of honour at the gala dedication at Stanford of Stone River, a 320-foot-long, 128 ton flow of sandstone (taking him into land art territory). He’d been photographing the work from before sunrise, as the light changed. He said. "I've stayed here watching it the whole day. I've seen incredible changes." And complained that there was now “a gap in my understanding of the piece."[lviii] How many of us can we offer a fraction of that attention to anything other than love?

Michel Foucault notes there has been a “devaluation of space that has prevailed for generations. . . Space was treated as dead, fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic."[lix] Space has been ignored for its offspring of borders, walls, territorial markers, roads, sites for hunting, farming, but even more neglected is the multisensorial – ours has been a visual culture for quite a while (the active eye dominates the passive (receptive) ear. But some artists use the ephemeral nature of sound. Jon Rose has travelled 24,000 kilometres through the outback playing fences with a violin bow and recording their diverse musics.[lx] Kaffe Matthews and Alan Lamb record the vibrations of telephone wires deep in WA’s deserts. Ross Bolleter plays ruined pianos found in the outback e.g. a pub piano at the Nallan sheep station stored in a tractor shed seven hundred kilometres north of Perth. He says: The piano is “…prepared by its environment as it slowly returns to a state of nature: all that fine 19th-century technology of levers and moving parts becoming a heap of rusting wire and rotten wood. To hear the ruined piano playing with the dogs barking, the birds singing, the trucks starting up is to sense its destiny in that moment”. A Cagean-Zen sense of entropy and the sublime NOW.

Constable experimented most successfully through the 1820s from between East Bergholt where he was born, and Dedham where he went to school on the Suffolk/Essex border, a distance of two miles. However, many artists need new environments for new directions. Deserts can shake urban habits and provoke experiments. "The desert opens enough thinking space to re-imagine all sorts of parallel new art worlds", says Andrea Zittel.[lxi] She moved from New York to her ‘High Desert Test Site’ south of Las Vegas; "23 miles past the sign that says 'Last Service for 100 Miles'", as she puts it. Her site is a studio / laboratory for her and other artists.

Artists are exploring ways of working together. Last year, at an artist camp/laboratory at Gunbalanya, (Oenpelli) Western Arnhem land, site of amazing rock art, artists originally from China, Japan and Europe, a couple of writers and a photographer worked with local indigenous artists.[lxii][lxiii] This exhibition shows Ian’s ‘Land’ next door to work local artists made, working with Ian at Mungo. They have produced a very impressive body of work, and I hear the experience had a huge impact on them. That’s the sublime for you!

Edward Casey has written extensively on place and is interested in our embodied experiences of landscape, “the living and lived surface of a body – the earth’s body.’[lxiv] This is a familiar notion to indigenous people.

Australian Aboriginal art, songs and performances (all interwoven) are ‘mytho-topographically based’, that is to say stitched into specific areas of land that hold spiritual and cultural significance, for particular peoples and initiates.[lxv] I’d like to acknowledge the Aboriginal people of this place, landscape, country, and their ways of dwelling here with their language Dharawal. The Dreaming (Tjukurrpa for central desert language groups) is a creation myth alive in the continuous present, which energises the foreground / background to Aboriginal song, as the generative principle of NOW and of country. Their poetry, their songs, is skilled practice, learning, describing, narrating, mapping and living with the land; it enacts dwelling associated with local knowledge of customs, tracks, seasons, food sources, water holes, other tribal groups, ownership, responsibilities, sites and stories.

Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri (who Ian has cited as an influence) was central to the Papunya movement (and probably the first to paint an all dot painting), he certainly saw his practice as a continuation – He said: ‘Kids, I see them all the time, painted. All the young fellas they go hunting and the old people there, they do sand painting. They put down all the story, same like I do on canvas. . . . Because everybody there all ready waiting. Everybody painted.” [lxvi]

Traditional Aboriginal Art is not mimetic, but experts situate it differently,[lxvii] saying it ‘remodels and at the same time reflects’ (Sutton[lxviii]); or is given meaning by ritual (Myers[lxix]); or tells true stories of the tjukurrpa and maps out the land, as they are both interconnected (Isaacs[lxx]); or is ceremonial (Morphy[lxxi]). Whatever the emphasis, the performative aspect governs the artefactual, and this phenomenological emphasis is echoed in Ian’s work. When I look in ‘Degrees of Abstraction’ I see the paintings being made. John Wolseley is an English artist who arrived here in the same period as Ian and myself. His work is a diary of working alone often in harsh conditions, such as the Simpson Desert; his immediate sense of process is different to Ian’s, more a narrative.

4. Place and landscape, the eco-sublime in the Menindee Lake System

Ian has painted and I have briefly photographed and written about the Lake Menindee system in Kinchega National Park. I am a poet primarily and believe poems are capable of rapidly working through cultural and natural elements.

I wrote a poem there on a trip with Ian and his students, Walking into History mp3

Another poem is called

Walking into Sorcery

Trees wade from the shoreline

dead arms raised. In Noah’s dream

the sky is water, a fair exchange of light.

The fulcrum of horizon fails where William Wright,

station manager, joined Burke and Wills

abandoning the screaming massacred.

The trees are black-box eucalypts which drowned after the ephemeral lakes were dammed.[lxxii] James Woodford wrote in the Herald, “There are few more spectacular sights in outback NSW than Lake Menindee's forest of dead trees observed from the shores in Kinchega National Park. It is such a breathtaking place, especially at dawn and dusk, that the vista has for two decades been an iconic poster image for the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service.”[lxxiii] Richard Kingsford, a colleague of mine when I worked for National Parks, suggests the poster is a potent symbol of just how little people understand the ecological cost that irrigation has wrought on the Menindee Lakes system and the Darling River. The sublime dazzles, hence the assertion that: ‘Those who look upon the Parthenon, that incomparable symbol of an ancient civilisation, often do not see its wider setting . . . the far vaster ruins of an environment which they desolated at the same time.’[lxxiv]

This lake system was one of the continent's most important wetlands. Millions of waterbirds bred here, rivalling Kakadu’s fecundity. Since the 1950s more than 99 per cent of the 19 lake beds covering 88,000 hectares have become degraded. Where are the 40 species of waterbirds that once used them? Robert Dixon asks, “How do we stop knowing that Picasso is the greatest artist of the twentieth century and start noticing that the twentieth century has put out the stars over our heads and drowned the warbling of the birds?[lxxv]

Thus the question what is the condition of knowledge for appropriate appreciation for deep enjoyment and realising some responsibility?[lxxvi]

I want to introduce you briefly to Aldo Leopold. In 1935 he purchased a run-down farm on eroded prairie beside the Wisconsin River. He turned the only standing structure, a chicken coop, into a small shack. The family spent their weekends there planting tens of thousands of trees and exploring the land as they worked to restore its health. The pioneering environmentalist lost his life fighting a wildfire there in 1948. His book, A Sand County Almanac appeared a year later and has become one of the most influential of all environmental texts. He explained: “I am trying to teach you that this alphabet of ‘natural objects’ (soils and rivers, birds and beasts) spells out a story . . . Once you have learned to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it or, with it.”[lxxvii]

Leopold called for a new Land Ethic and Deborah Bird Rose writes, ‘it is clear that Aboriginal ‘caring for country’ embodies both an ethic and a structure of responsibility that answers Leopold’s call in many important aspects.’[lxxviii] She was travelling past severe erosion in the Vic River District and asked her travelling companion Daly Pulkara what he called this country, he said ‘It’s the wild. Just the wild.’ But then added: ‘We’ll run out of history because kartiya [Europeans] fuck the Law up and [they’re] knocking all the power out of this country.’[lxxix]

A feature of a natural aesthetic is to enrich and revive a deep and informed embrace of nature. The sublime is alive and invokes our embodied intelligences; landscape art, poetry and ecological awareness can all help us to see the landscape and laugh if someone repeats Anthony Trollope’s whinge, “the fault of the Australian scenery is its monotony.”

Walking into Exile

I leave the shearing quarters along the ridge

past William Wright and the intermittent lakes,

past lost sounds and early lists of sheep on clay

past Virgil strolling through river red gums

past salt-lake lattices and inland seas

imagining new tributaries to Odysseus’ journey

skirting arsenic in the flour and the kooris

I’ve worked with but never really known

towards a pair of crimson hearted parrots.

Ian’s work removes thought of positive vs. negative space in the pictorial field, drawing out the colours of light and their space. [lxxx] Desert days catch the curve of the horizon, fluent with shimmering air and sun set, moon rise, moon set, sun rise, as if a tin opener has opened up the canopy of the heavens.

Ian’s landscapes explore ontological elements and he talks of light’s physical presence. His art mediates between the visual field, the embodied experience and his skilled practice as art school student and teacher, familiar with western and other art traditions. His landscapes are abstractions built up not torn down, reminding me of something Martin Jay wrote: Cezanne, “sought the real entirely on the surface of the canvas, where subject and object, perception and the perceived, were not yet distinct and separate.”[lxxxi] This fits Karl Shapiro’s observation that Cezanne, “loosened the perspective tradition of traditional art and gave to the space of the image the aspect of a world created freehand and put together piecemeal from successive perceptions, rather than offered complete to the eye in one co-ordinating glance.”[lxxxii] The notion of working away at seeing and painting describes Ian’s ambitious ongoing project. "The art of seeing nature," Constable noted, "is a thing almost as much to be acquired as the art of reading the Egyptian hieroglyphics."[lxxxiii]

One metaphor inside Ian’s work at this time is sedimentation; the Menindee lakes lie in a vast inland sedimentary basin, their grey clay crust sits on deep sheets of alluvium deposited on older sedimentary rocks seeded with marine sediments of the old Cretaceous inland sea. The explorers were too late.

In an early essay ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’, the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty describes the painter’s act as more than the physical application of paint; it “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.”[lxxxiv]

Poetry is poetike, making things with words in the world.

[i] REF > Claude’s teacher was Agostino Tassi (1580 - 1644) who painted landscapes that were influenced by Paul Brill a Flemish painter of decorative landscapes working in Rome. In 1621, Tassi was accused of raping Artemisia Gentileschi but whether or not he was convicted in trial is unknown. He was also suspected of killing his wife.

[ii] His flowing sketch ‘A ploughed field with artists’ show his friends on a ‘field trip’ sitting in the shade of a tree, sketching - the self reflexivity of art is inescapable. Brian Sewell notes their evolution‘ . . . not until Claude began to draw with washes of grey and brown ink and touch their soft depth with leaves that shiver in opaque white did light itself become the landscape painter’s subject.’ Brian Sewell ‘The Cook who danced with shadows’, p28-9, Evening Standard 12.11.98. Yet Claude’s attention to nature is so very different in his vivid sketch books of the Compagna, and on his naturalism of his early frescoes at the Cavalier Mutio in Rome: ‘Each tree can very well be recognised according to its special characteristics in trunk, foliage, and colouring, all as they rustled and moved in the wind.’ Sandraat commented. See Virgilio Vecelloni, European Gardens: an historical atlas, Rizzoli, 1990. Claude was sketching in his Compagna notebooks in the late 1630s. They are immediate and free. My favourite work is his flowing sketch ‘A ploughed field with artists’. It show his friends on a ‘field trip’ sitting in the shade of a tree, sketching - the self reflexivity of art is inescapable.

[iii] “At Sydney’s great International Exhibition of 1879-80, a building was set aside for a fine arts display. When the exhibition closed, the exhibits became the nucleus of a government collection. The Governor, Lord Carrington, opened the original building by WH Hunt just before 1885. It has since been demolished. After Federation, the National Art Gallery (as it was then known) was rebuilt in The Domain by NSW government Architect Walter Liberty Vernon (1846-1914). This was the penultimate example of the long established, but by then overdone, use of the neo-Greek temple as a portico for a major public institution in Sydney (the final application of the Greek Temple front was the State Library of NSW). The conservative design demanded by the Sydney arts establishment must have challenged Vernon’s strong Arts and Crafts sensibilities.” Graham Jahn, Sydney Architecture, Watermark Press,

[iv] Governor Bligh’s attempts to reclaim the Domain and fence and landscape (continued by Governor Macquarie) was part of the scenario leading to the Rum Rebellion. In 1830s the expansive green space of the Domain was opened to the public who strolled and picnicked there. This new sense of attention to nature in England was encouraged by nationalism and the patronage of landed gentry

[v] John Barrell, The Dark Side of Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Kenneth Olwig views landscape as originally based locally and exhibiting uniqueness based on local practices, but which came to be seen as natural scenery which disguises the power of landowners, and tends for mobile scenic views.

[vi] As John Rennie Short points out, ‘Land was privatised and the landscape was transferred into a commercial space of regular, hedgerowed fields. The so called ‘typical’ English scene, of a patchwork of green fields, is in origin the spatial inprint of an eighteenth-century commercial enterprise.’ John Rennie Short, Imagined Country: Environment, Culture and Society, Routledge, 1991.

[vii] 1823. As a guest of Sir George Beaumont, he first saw a Claude around 1800, but 23 years later he wrote to his wife . . . Quoted in signage, NSW AG, March 07. Kenneth Robert Olwig. Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain's Renaissance to America's New World. Foreword by Yi-Fu Tuan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 2002. He situates his argument that landscape is political and cultural within Whig politics and the theatre. The following year (1824) he maintained that French painters “neglect the look of nature altogether, under its various changes" when a dealer entered his work including ‘The Hay-Wain’ to the Paris Salon. Though French critics warned that his pictures were unnaturally natural ("'What is to become of the great Poussin?' &c &c."), he was awarded a gold medal. William Feaver, 'Pictures are books', The Guardian Saturday May 27, 2006.

[viii] He continues, “The prevailing idea about the Australian landscape which you find constantly repeated in the early 19th century is the notion that the Australian landscape is very boring and dull and monotonous, and artists complain that they can't really construct these kind of pictures out of what Australia presents.” Andrew Sayers, A Brush With Landscape, part 3, presented by Julie Copeland, ANC RN, August 16, 1998. He notes that “John Glover and von Guerard start to paint an Australian landscape which really couldn't be anywhere else in the world.”

[ix] Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth, The Miegunyah Press at Melbourne University Press, 2000.

[x] Watkins Tench wrote sardonically, ‘If by any sudden revolution of the laws of nature; or by any fortunate discovery of those on the spot, it really has become that fertile and prosperous land, which some represent it to be, he begs permission to add his voice to the general congratulation.’

[xi] The Second Fleet's arrival in 1790 provided badly needed food and supplies, yet food surrounded them, especially in the sea and harbour.

[xii] “The appearance of Bathurst Plains from the Depôt extending for many miles on both sides of the Macquarie River, and surrounded at a distance by fine verdant Hills, is truly grand, beautiful and interesting, forming one of the finest landscapes I ever saw in any Country I have yet visited. The Soil is uncommonly good and fertile, fit for every purpose of Cultivation and Pasture, being extremely well watered, and thinly wooded.” Thursday 4 May, 1815 http://www.lib.mq.edu.au/all/journeys/1815/1815a.html ---

[xiii] Reference lost.

[xiv] John Oxley, Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales . . . in the Years 1817–18 (London, 1820), p90. See Michael Crozier, ‘Antipodean Sensibilities’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 98.4, 1999, p839-859.

[xv] Thomas Livingston Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia; with Descriptions of the Recently Explored Region of Australia Felix, and of the Present Colony of New South Wales, 2 vols., 2d ed. (London, 1839 [1838]), 2: 333

[xvi] Patrick White’s novel Voss, based on Leichhardt is more interested in the challenges among members of the party and how suffering is dealt with differently.

[xvii] The prize was to traverse west of the 143rd line of longitude. They set off from Melbourne on 20 August 1860 cheered by a crowd of 15,000, 19men, 23 horses, six wagons and 27 camels imported from India for the expedition, 6 tonnes of firewood, and food for last two years.

[xviii] Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1759), ed. James T. Boulton, Notre Dame, Ind., 1986, p66.

[xix] John Beardsley, Earthworks and Beyond,

[xx] “Leading the way in this appropriation of nature has been the Ford Motor Company. Although its market share has suffered recently, Ford spearheaded the promotion of the SUV in the 1990s with the Explorer which quickly became the best selling family vehicle of the decade, producing immense corporate profits.” Shane Gunster, ‘You Belong Outside', Advertising, Nature, and the SUV, Ethics & the Environment 9.2, 2004, p5-6.

[xxi] See Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modem America, New York: Basic Books, 1999.

[xxii] Christopher Hitt, ‘Toward an Ecological Sublime’, New Literary History, Vol 30:3, 1999, p618

[xxiii] Rita Felski believes we are losing, ‘the casual inattentiveness marking the everyday experience of everyday life.’ Rita Felski, ‘The Invention of Everyday Life’, new formations 39, winter 1999-2000, p26. On the other hand she believes that Modernism ignored the everyday, in an attempt to transcend, ‘the very dailiness it seeks to depict.’ Rita Felski offers a definition: 'Everyday life simply is the routine act of conducting one's day-to-day existence without making it an object of conscious attention.’ 2000, p28.

[xxiv] Jean-Francois Lyotard, "The Sublime and the Avant-Garde" and "Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime," I don’t agree with Lyotard that the avant-garde can resist technology, reason, and facile art production for “the sensibility of the supermarket shopper."

[xxv] Laura Doyle and Sara Suleri suggest its ideology informed eighteenth-century British imperialism;

the Marxist Terry Eagleton suggests its use by the bourgeois subject; and

feminist critics Patricia Yaeger and Anne Mellor relate it to patriarchy. Listed by Hitt, p603.

[xxvi] Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment (1790), tr. James Creed Meredith (Oxford, 1992);

[xxvii] William Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness’, >>

[xxviii] ‘The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, in W. Cronon, Ed., Uncommon Ground. Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996, p88. ‘Indeed, my principal objection to wilderness is that it may teach us to be dismissive or even contemptuous of . . . humble places and experiences.’ William Cronon, (86).

[xxix] Tacey, On the Edge, p6.

[xxx] Yi Fu Tuan, “Desert and ice: ambivalent aesthetics,” in Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p143-4

[xxxi] James E. Goehring, ‘The Dark Side of Landscape: Ideology and Power in the Christian Myth of the Desert’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies - Volume 33, Number 3, Fall 2003, pp. 437-451 –

[xxxii] Steve Meacham, ‘Australia's deserts: better red than dead’, Sydeny Morning Herald, December 15 2004.

[xxxiii] Veronica Brady, ‘Australia: Where to from Here?’, EREMOS No. 69 Nov 1999

[xxxiv] John Beck, ‘Without Form and Void: The American Desert as Trope and Terrain', Nepantla: Views from South - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2001, p64-65. I precis his points. The desert is: 1. empty and useless, allowing that space to become the venue for unhindered experimentation, both physical and spiritual. 2. a metaphor for the apocalypse and resultant wasteland. 3. a limit to reason; its vastness alters perception, it is a physical challenge to usual modes of comprehension. 4. a space to escape, an alternative to the rational order of “civilized” life, or, conversely, representative of the chaos of an unordered primal “nature” that must be resisted and expunged.

5. revealing of aspects of contemporary capitalism (in the USA): a space without boundaries, unhindered and unregulated by old practices and habits. Las Vegas is the fastest growing city in the United States.

[xxxv] Sir Ernest Titterton explained, “Within Australia you can choose very large areas that are totally devoid of buildings, totally devoid of people.”[xxxv] Aboriginal Walter Hansen says in a typical understated manner, “We didn’t know that we were shifting for good. It was pretty sad to leave our country.”[xxxv] In 1967, the British Army conducted their final clean-up in Operation Brumby. Titterton inspected the site and announced that it was clean! In the 1980s vast amounts of plutonium contaminated debris were found. In March 2000 Senator Nick Minchin officially declared the site of the British nuclear weapons tests "clean". One zone remains prohibited.

[xxxvi] From the poem ‘My Country’.

[xxxvii] Another paper asked if this was, ‘A forlorn call or an admission that some things remain beyond our control?’ Sid Marris, ‘Time to pull the plug on prevarication’, Online Australian, Thursday, April 19, 2007

[xxxviii] RIP; Broad-faced Potoroo (extinct c1875), range southern to Western coastal areas; Eastern Hare Wallaby (extinct c1890) found inland in South-eastern Australia; Lesser Bilby (extinct 1931); Central Hare-Wallaby (extinct 1931) from the Central deserts; Desert Rat-kangaroo (extinct 1935) the size of a small rabbit, lived in the driest, hottest and most desolate environments in the Centre; Desert Bandicoot (extinct 1943) a small bandicoot of the Centre; Pig-footed Bandicoot (extinct 1950s) a small, mostly herbivorous bandicoot of arid and semi-arid plains and spinefex; and Crescent Nailtail Wallaby (extinct c1955). The last specimen collected alive was caught in a dingo trap on the Nullarbor Plain in 1927 or 1928. [CHECK]

[xxxix] In 1928 she pinned her water-colours of Central Australia to blankets at the police station for her exhibition at Alice Springs. http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A120281b.htm

[xl] Hans Heysen in Art in Australia, s. 3, no. 44, June 1932, p. 20. Jessie Traill was in the Flinders before Heysen but none of those paintings are known to have survived.

[xli] REF >>> Constable inspired Delecroix who admired the rough brushstrokes, and influenced impressionism.

[xlii] He ambitiously claimed. “It is a simple matter to trace in this old waterless and eroded surface of the earth the dreaming nature and philosophy of the Aborigines.” Sidney Nolan, diary notes, Alice Springs, June 28, 1949.quoted Geoffrey Smith, ‘Nolan's vision’, The Age May 31 2003

[xliii] Sidney Nolan, quoted in Elwyn Lynn and Sidney Nolan, Sidney Nolan – Australia, Bay Books, Sydney, 1979, p13. The National Gallery of Victoria used this quote to highlight an exhibition of his desert work in winter 2003.

[xliv] Made over a two year period, SBS’s Masterpiece On Sunday program, 22nd September, 2002. Artists featured are Peter Sharpe, Jenny Sages, Idris Murphy, Judy Watson and Gloria Petyarre.

[xlv] N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969, p83.

[xlvi] Ken Searle painted at Papunya for years working with the people. Billy Marshall Stoneking lived in Papunya – which he writes about in Singing the Snake: Poems from the Western Desert, 1979-1988, A&R, 1990.

[xlvii] Victoria Laurie, ‘Strange fruit’, The Australian, 4.1.2003. The figures are within seven square kilometres.

[xlviii] Jeffrey Kastner is unsure whether the development of land art in the mid- to late-1960s was an extension of fine art sculpture, whether the first earthworks were postmodern or ‘the apotheosis of formalism.’ It appears that they preceded popular ecological consciousness which did not emerge until the early 1970s. Jeffrey Kastner, Land Environmental Art, Phaidon, p15.

[xlix] G. Lease, 'Introduction: Nature Under Fire' in M. Soule & G. Lease Reinventing Nature: Responses to post-modern deconstruction, Island Press, Washington DC, 1995, p5.

[l] See Anton Ehrenzweig's notion of 'enveloping pictorial space', Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination, University of California Press, 1971, p 94

[li] John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London: BBC 1972, p,7.

[lii] The rock shelter Puritjarra where Mike Smith made significant archaeological finds in the 1980s proving 35,000 years of Aboriginal occupation. See Mandy Martin, Libby Robin and Mike Smith, Strata: Deserts Past, Present and Future. An Environmental Art Project about a Significant Cultural Place, Mandurama, Mandy Martin, 2005.

[liii] ‘Painting Australia’ ABC television, April 2007

[liv] As Tim Ingold writes: ‘The theory that reality-as-we-know-it is fashioned by the mind, on the basis of sensory information that has its source in the world, actually reproduces a distinction between mind and world that lies at the heart of modern Western thought. In short, the very logic of cultural construction implies that there must exist a world to be perceived, a world that is ‘out there’ (as opposed the mind ‘in here’), and that is given quite independently of the presence and activity of human beings. It is, if you will, a kind of ‘real reality’, absolute and universal.’ Ecological aesthetics Ref >>>

[lv] David Reason, ‘Echo and Reflections’, p168.

[lvi] John Fowles The Tree, Aurum Press, 1979, p37.

[lvii] Andy Goldsworthy, A Collaboration with Nature, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990

[lviii] BARBARA PALMER, ‘Andy Goldsworthy's Stone River joins outdoor art collection’, Stanford Report, January 23, 2002

[lix] Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge.Selected lnterviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980, p70. This is too simple, time has become mechanised. Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum has recently shown how modernity has been overcome by the clock's pervasive influence. History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders. Trans. Thomas Dunlap, The University of Chicago Press, 1996.

[lx] He also document the experiences of those who work with these fences.

[lxi] Jerry Saltz, ‘A Thorn Tree in the Garden: Robinson Crusoe and Mad Max by way of Walden Pond, St. Augustine, and Greenpeace’, Village Voice, 3.2.2006

by http://www.villagevoice.com/art/0606,saltz,72064,13.html

[lxii] Funded by the Australia Council organised by 24HR Art, Darwin. See Artlink: Vol 27 no 1, April, 2007

for Guan Wei’s work there.

[lxiii] Southern Exposure vi – Mungo: interpreting the land, Hazelhurst Gallery, Gymea, April/May 2007

[lxiv] Edward S. Casey, Representing Place; Landscape Painting and Maps,University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2002, p153.

[lxv] Berndt, Ronald M. & Berndt Catherine H., Australian Aboriginal Art: A Visual Perspective, Methuen, 1982, p68.

[lxvi] http://www.jintaart.com.au/bios/cliffbio.htm

[lxvii] Geoffrey Bardon explains the same concept in relation to Western Desert art by saying that "the images do not provide a mere graphic equivalent of spoken words, thereby attaching themselves to the temporality implicit in the ordinary syntax of a sentence. Quite to the contrary, and importantly: time has become space. There is no conventional sequentiality in the 'stories', but rather the accretion of space or 'place'. Since the space or 'place' is only the retelling of a story already known to a painter, the so-called story is an eternal idea in the culture of the painter. The elements or images of the story therefore have no reading direction as we understand it,’ Bardon 1991:34 >

[lxviii] ‘Together these symbolisms constitute a complex code of interaction that continually remodels, and at the same time reflects, Aboriginal cosmology, sociality, and notions of the person.’ Sutton 1988, p14.

[lxix] The rituals, some restricted by gender and others, less sacred, for the whole community, give the art meaning Myers 1991, ibid p32.

[lxx] Isaacs 1993:39 >

[lxxi] Morphy suggests that it is through the ‘attributed properties’ from ceremony knotting beliefs and meaning together, that a paintings meaning ‘comes to be known.’ Morphy, 1991, p101.

[lxxii] "There are few worse examples of wetland degradation," Dr Kingsford says in a scathing new report, Waterbirds and Effects of River Regulation on Menindee Lakes of the Darling River.

[lxxiii] James Woodford, ‘Stark beauty masks landscape of death’, SMH, 8.2. 2003 But for a scientist,

[lxxiv] J Donald Hughes, Ecology in Ancient Civilisations, UP of New Mexico, 1975, p1.

[lxxv] Robert Dixon, The Baumgarten Corruption, Pluto Press, 1995, p40-44, p55-6.

[lxxvi] Marcia Eaton argues that, ‘Knowledge does not simply deepen the experiences that imagination provides, it directs them, or should direct them if we hope to preserve and design sustainable landscapes. Concepts such as imaging well make no sense unless one knows what the object is one is talking about . . . and something (in fact as much as possible) about the context in which the object is found.’ Marcia Muelder Eaton, ‘Fact and Fiction in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56:2 1998, p152, Emily Brady finds this too tough: ‘Are we required to read up in the nature centres before we head out? Many people will possess basic concepts of what they appreciate, but is it fair to expect each of us to find out as much as possible about the ecology, geology and so on of the environments we aesthetically appreciate?’ Emily Brady, Aesthetics of the Natural Environment, U of Alabama P, 2003, p162. I too prefer a weak cognitive theory – ones that bases aesthetic appreciation on some epistemological foundation (generally this is from the natural sciences) – the problem is then is to understand what is the condition of knowledge for appropriate appreciation.

[lxxvii] Susan Flader & J. Baird, Callicot, Eds., The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold, U of Wisconsin P, p337. Mary Austin, much less known, was a great writer on American deserts.

[lxxviii] Deborah Bird Rose, ‘Sacred Site. Ancestral Clearing, and environmental Ethics’ in Emplaced Myth: Space, Narrative, and Knowledge in Aboriginal Australia and Papua New Guinea, Alan Rumsey and James F. Weiner, Eds., Honolulu HI: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001, p116.

[lxxix] In 1986. Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo makes us Human, 1992, p234

[lxxx] Yi-Fu Tuan writing about desert and ice, both of which Ian and I have tackled, notes they share an austere, minimalist reduction of "multiple sensory experience." Yi-Fu Tuan, 1993, p144.

[lxxxi] Martin Jay, 'Modernism and the Specter of Psychologism', Modernism/Modernity 3.2, 1996, p100.

[lxxxii] Karl Shapiro, Study of Cezanne, 1952 ref

[lxxxiii] A lecture he gave in Hampstead towards the end of his life. See Feaver.

[lxxxiv] Merleau-Ponty ref. It could be called Constable’s doubt, he was always anxious about his art and its reception.