All too often a book is praised on the ground that it defies easy categorization. Sadly, this often reflects merely a rather muddled piece of work. Here, however, George Seddon has produced a volume that could easily, and rightfully, find itself on bookshop shelves devoted to history, to botany, or to practical gardening. This is, however, simply what we have come to expect from the man known to many as ‘the Professor of Everything’. Seddon was equally at home as a geologist, a literary critic, a philosopher, an environmental planner, a garden designer, and an historian. This book, the last he published before his death last year, manages coherently to reflect all his passions.
Reflecting Seddon's lifelong commitment to learning, the book is series of reflections on the ways in which settler Australians have learned – or failed to learn – to live comfortably and sensitively with their environments. ‘We live in an old landscape’, he writes, ‘with limited water and soils of low fertility, yet with a rich flora that is adapted to those conditions, as we are not. There is much to learn from it, but we have been slow learners.’
Ignorance can have drastic consequences. The famous explorers, Burke and Wills, for instance, ‘died of starvation in a natural open-air restaurant’ for want of a way to see the food surrounding them. P. E. Warburton, who explored parts of central Australia in the 1870s, so misread the hydrology of the terrain he traversed, he was forced to abduct indigenous women to show him where to find water. Not all have been slow to learn, however, and Seddon introduces us to a select list of those who had the will and the ability to listen to ‘this old, unyielding land’, from the explorers such as William Dampier and George Grey, to the botanical artists Ferdinand Brauer and Celia Rosser.
The difficulties many Australians have had with their surroundings have had much to do with the fact that the language they speak was shaped by natural rhythms not known in Australia. The aptly named judge and poet, Barron Field, for instance, deplored the eucalypts that kept their leaves year round. He was, however, ‘missing more than an autumnal leaf-fall’. He grieved instead for a metaphor of ‘a death that brings life’. It has taken time for Australians to find this metaphor elsewhere, but they have found it. Many species of eucalypts rely on fire to regenerate. The seeds of some only germinate in the ash-beds of fires intense enough to destroy the original forest. So as Seddon puts it, ‘the wheel also turns in this southern continent.’
Commendably, Seddon resists the urge to use today's knowledge as a stick to beat the past, to indulge in what E. P. Thompson called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’. Although we can now clearly see the mistakes and myopias of those who went before, Seddon is well aware this should not trick us into believing ourselves equally clear-sighted when it comes to our own challenges. As Seddon eloquently notes, we are still yet to develop the language necessary truly to take ‘imaginative possession’ of this country and for as long as we lack the ‘knowledge, associations, stories, and images’ to do so, can claim only to have ‘alighted rather than settled’ here.
Part of the difficulty arises from Australians' exclusive possession of their continent. No other nation state in the world takes up an entire continent; so Australia is then the only place in the world where political and ecological borders are more or less co-terminous. For some time now, Australian gardeners have been encouraged to plant native species rather than exotics. This is a slippery piece of rubric, though, and it has led to many wildly inappropriate introductions, with species from one part of the continent used indiscriminately in others, with often-regrettable consequences. It now also appears uncomfortably close to fascist beliefs about the importance of blood, soil, and purity. Indeed Australian flora is much more cosmopolitan than many believe, and Seddon teases out the fascinating affinities between a number of iconic Australian species and plants from Africa, or the Pacific, reflecting the shared ‘Gondwannan’ heritage of all these lands. These examples serve to remind us to attend closely to the specificities of place, while at the same time alerting us to the dangers of what one might call ecological parochialism.
The structure of the book is, like its author, somewhat unconventional. Several of the chapters – replete with magnificent photographs – explore the surprising histories of particular species of Australian plants, such as the Boab tree of north-western Australia, or the beautiful banksias of the south-east. Spliced between these chapters are meditations on the ways in which Australians have responded to and understood their environment. At times this does seem a little haphazard; Seddon does not always connect the dots for us. But The Old Country is not a closely argued monograph. It is, rather, a suggestive invitation to informed contemplation, a gentle challenge to think critically, but sympathetically, about both the history and ecology of this oldest but least understood continent. It is an invitation to action, too. Sprinkled amongst the historical and scientific insights are practical gardening tips, ‘companion plantings’ if you will. These bridge the gap between the mistakes and discoveries of our forebears, and our own daily lives and surrounds.
