'A Single Tree assembles the raw material underpinning Don Watson’s award-winning The Bush. These diverse and haunting voices span the four centuries since Europeans first set eyes on the continent. Each of these varied contributors – settlers, explorers, anthropologists, naturalists, stockmen, surveyors, itinerants, artists and writers– represents a particular place and time. Men in awe of the landscape or cursing it; aspiring to subdue and exploit it or finding themselves defeated by it. Women reflecting on the land’s harshness and beauty, on the strangeness of their lives, their pleasures and miseries, the character and behaviour of the men. Europeans writing about indigenous Australians, sometimes with intelligent sympathy and curiosity but often with contempt, and often describing acts of startling brutality.
This collection comprises diary extracts, memoirs, journals, letters, histories, poems and fiction, and follows the same loose themes of The Bush. The science of the landscape and climate, and the way we have perceived them. Our deep and sentimental connection to the land, and our equally deep ignorance and abuse of it. The heroic myths and legends. The enchantments. The bush as a formative and defining element in Australian culture, self-image and character. The flora and fauna, the waterways, the colours. The heroic, self-defining stories, the bizarre and terrible, and the ones lost in the deep silences.
There are accounts of journeys, of work and recreation, of religious observance, of creation and destruction. Stories of uncanny events, peculiar and fantastic characters, deep ironies, and of land unlimited. And musings on what might be the future of the bush: as a unique environment, a food bowl, a mine, a wellspring of national identity . . .
From Dampier and Tasman to Tim Flannery and assorted contemporary farmers, environmentalists and grey nomads, these pieces represent a vast array of experiences, perspectives and knowledge. A Single Tree is an essential companion to its brilliant predecessor.
Dedication: To the memory of Manning Clarke with whose Documents we began
Epigraph:
The more one sees of Aboriginal Life the stronger the
impression that its mode, its ethos, and its principles
are variations on a single theme - continuity,
constancy, balance, symmetry, regularity, system,
or some such quality as these words convey
W.E.H. Stanner, 'The Dreaming', 1953
But this our native or adopted land has no past, no
story. No poet speaks to us. Do we need a poet to
interpret Natures teachings, we must look into our
own hearts, if perchance we find a poet there.
Marcus Clarke, Preface to Gordon's Poems, 1876
As the day increased, Stan Parker emerged and, after
going here and there, simply looking at what was his,
began to tear the bush apart.
Patrick White, The Tree of Man, 1955
An extract from the 'Journals of James Cook's First Pacific Voyage'
Extract from 'Death is Forgotten in Victory': Colonial landscapes and Narratives of Emptiness' in Jane lydon and Tracy Ireland (eds), Object lessons: archaeology and heritage in Australia, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2005
from Journal, State Library of Queensland, OM77-12 Box 8954
Extraced from Van Dieman's Land : A History, Black Inc., Melbourne 2008
Extract from How a Continent Created a Nation, Libby Robin, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2007
The Bush : Travels in the Heart of Australia
Scoresby
:
Penguin
,
2014
7838248
2014
single work
prose
travel
'Most Australians live in cities and cling to the coastal fringe, yet our sense of what an Australian is – or should be – is drawn from the vast and varied inland called the bush. But what do we mean by 'the bush', and how has it shaped us?
'Starting with his forebears' battle to drive back nature and eke a living from the land, Don Watson explores the bush as it was and as it now is: the triumphs and the ruination, the commonplace and the bizarre, the stories we like to tell about ourselves and the national character, and those we don't. Via mountain ash and mallee, the birds and the beasts, slaughter, fire, flood and drought, swagmen, sheep and their shepherds, the strange and the familiar, the tragedies and the follies, the crimes and the myths and the hope – here is a journey that only our leading writer of non-fiction could take us on.
'At once magisterial in scope and alive with telling, wry detail, The Bush lets us see our landscape and its inhabitants afresh, examining what we have made, what we have destroyed, and what we have become in the process.
'No one who reads it will look at this country the same way again. ' (Publication summary)
'Acts of remembering a river may have a performative function in environmental history and debates around human impact and waterways. The process of remembering and search for meaning are shaped in the present moment when the Richmond is one of the most degraded river systems on the east coast of Australia. Imbued with sentimentality, however, residents speak to the fundamental importance of the river to their lives as they were growing up in and around Lismore. Such histories may provide context for understanding contemporary affective responses to rivers and how emotion shapes our relationships with nature more broadly.' (Publication abstract)
'In The Bush (2014), Don Watson explored notions of what that most variegated of terms, ‘the bush’, meant to earlier generations, including his own family. In A Single Tree, he presents extracts from writings of all kinds for what he calls ‘a fragmentary history of humans in the Australian bush’. He takes as given the diverse applications of the word ‘bush’ over time and chooses pieces that give expression to a multiplicity of feelings, words, and thoughts around aspects of Australian place.'
(Introduction)
'In The Bush (2014), Don Watson explored notions of what that most variegated of terms, ‘the bush’, meant to earlier generations, including his own family. In A Single Tree, he presents extracts from writings of all kinds for what he calls ‘a fragmentary history of humans in the Australian bush’. He takes as given the diverse applications of the word ‘bush’ over time and chooses pieces that give expression to a multiplicity of feelings, words, and thoughts around aspects of Australian place.'
(Introduction)
'Acts of remembering a river may have a performative function in environmental history and debates around human impact and waterways. The process of remembering and search for meaning are shaped in the present moment when the Richmond is one of the most degraded river systems on the east coast of Australia. Imbued with sentimentality, however, residents speak to the fundamental importance of the river to their lives as they were growing up in and around Lismore. Such histories may provide context for understanding contemporary affective responses to rivers and how emotion shapes our relationships with nature more broadly.' (Publication abstract)
