the death of j.g. ballard

Crash. Until I'd read Ballard's book, I had no idea twisted metal, burning plastic and shattered bones could be considered by anybody to be erotic. I remember diving into the text on a flight home from Canada 15 years ago. The air hostess thought I was reading about aeroplane crashes... "Ahhh. Ummm. No. Actually the book is about sex in car accidents." I think that stunned her. She didn't pose any more questions apart from those she was paid to ask. "Tea or coffee?"

"J.G. Ballard died of cancer on the 19th August, aged 78", I read over my morning toast. The first thing that sprang to mind was Crash. Then by chance my eyes fell upon the water level indicator on the front page of the paper and a vague memory of The Drought returned... people travelling miles across barren salt plains created by desalination plants to capture sea-water with paddles and sweep it homewards... it has been a long time since I read this book. Concrete Island is fresher in my mind... an architect becomes trapped in a concrete space between freeway lanes. Unable to escape, he spends days, then weeks in the company of a couple of other outcasts who call the tiny island in urban hell their home. Shades here of one of my favourite books, Kobo Abe's The Woman in the Dunes. Ballard was that kind of writer.

I only know a half dozen of Ballard's books, but of those, I'd call Crash and Concrete Island "great" works of disturbing fiction. His comments on human psychology, the bizarre but believable views he takes towards humankind's future and that of our planet, all ensure I am saddened by his passing.

the death of arne næss

A couple of weeks ago Arne Næss, the instigator of Deep Ecology, died at 96... a ripe old age! In reading his obituary I discovered he was a keen mountaineer. I am surprised by the number of philosophical writers who are also mountaineers. Mountaineering is not a very common past-time for Australians (we don't really have any mountains here and need to make a trip across the ditch to NZ to climb). Of course in Japan, New Zealand, Europe and Scandinavia (well, at least Norway) the sport is much more popular and you are likely to find yourself sitting on a train beside a person cuddling a day-pack, rope, crampons and ice tools. Still, I wonder, does the experience of mountaineering, its struggles, the extremes of temperature and slope, the ultimate dependence on your climbing partner, and the risk, breed philosophers? Or do philosophical types turn to the mountains? Whichever way it works, the allure of the world's peaks is hard to resist for any with a spirit of adventure, sturdy knees and a love for nature.

the ecologies project - first glance

I just ducked in to The Ecologies Project at Monash Uni's Museum of Art. The exhibition is still being set up so I'll not give a full run down, just comment on a few works that caught my attention.

The first surprise was Sandra Selig's spider webs (image at left). Sorry, I don't know the name of the pieces — they didn't yet have a plaque. These are beautiful works, the kind of craft and aesthetics that makes me sit up and pay attention in a gallery. I was a little disappointed they were hung so high, they would reward detailed inspection. From a distance the webs appear to be interstellar clouds and have a liquidity about them that is resolved at close range into an infinity of fine thread. The luminous colours with which they are sprayed and the black background suggests that the artist too noted the potential vastness of these structures. "To see a world in a grain of sand... and all that Blakesque philosophy". Trite but true. A grey web on black has an elegance about it that the coloured forms lack. The sheen emerges instead from the varied density of the threads and the angle of the reflected light. All the same, these are lovely!

The similarity of patterns at multiple scales is a source of wonder for many scientists and artists. To see a spider's web as a colossal structure and an interstellar cloud as a tiny pattern in a lens is to muddle the usual perspective. A spider's web is an impenetrable, deadly thicket, a home, a nuisance that makes one's heart jump as it grabs at face and hair in the dark. This multi-level, visceral aspect of the thread is well captured in Selig's frames.

I'd never seen a decent print of Peter Dombrovskis' Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend, Franklin River, Tasmania (1979)... until now. This iconic image mobilised Australians as far away as Darwin to give a damn about a dam in Tasmania. It lifted the Australian conservation movement's impact up a notch and received global attention in some quarters. I place this image's cultural significance alongside the shot of blue Earth against the enormity of space. Both images reveal a world that was hidden. In each we see something worthy of protection.

The Franklin is an unseen place. Spectacular wilderness that is anything but mundane. For some, just the thought that places like this exist is necessary. Without them the world is somehow impoverished, albeit in a way that is often poorly articulated by those who have never experienced wilderness directly. (There I go complaining again about how others don't understand things as well as I do. I must break this irritating habit!) In Dombrovskis' image the river is wild, powerful and primal. This water is not just "The Franklin", it is all wild rivers, even all wilderness and this idea must be preserved. "No Dams", as a young high-school student this was (I think) the second time environmental issues appeared on my radar. The first was an effort to, "Save the Whales". I cannot recall any specific iconic image, only a pin badge I somehow acquired for the cause and non-specific footage of whales being slaughtered. Morning Mist is no 20 cent pin badge. It is the kind of accessible spectacle that hangs as well on a gallery wall, a board-room alcove, or as a poster in a politically-aware share house.

The Earth from space is in many ways the counterpoint to the Franklin. It is the everyday Earth. The planet on which we live. But its bounds are rendered explicitly. Its fragility and above all its uniqueness, dominate the image. Not its strength. The Earth is not a symbol for all planets nor is it a concept, it is just Our One Earth. On that globe all of humanity lives. All of history, all art and love and war. All the ecosystems of which we are a part share this tiny bubble in the enormity of the universe. Unlike the Franklin, the Earth is tiny, meek and mild. It is us, and we are alone. How pitiful, how insignificant are our battles. And yet, how vital it is that we fight them — from down here, the spider's web is a galaxy and we are flies trapped in it. We cannot escape to view our Earth from afar.

There's one more image (actually cinema footage) that immediately sprang to mind when I started considering Morning Mist. That's the footage of the last Thylacine pacing its cage in the Hobart Zoo (1930s). I've written about this footage before. A desperate animal, impatient, captive, the only thing certain is its death and the extinction of its kind. This sums up our colonisation of Australia, the way we treated its inhabitants and the way we continue to disrupt the ecosystems that have evolved here. We have a lot to be Sorry about.

Also in The Ecologies Project was a wall-sized video projection of an open-cut mine shot from its floor. Trucks and diggers shunted rock around a whitened, dusty landscape. The pale powder had been spread around the gallery and a rather flimsy looking white sculpture reminiscent of a drill or over-head pump had been erected here also. This work troubled me somewhat. I think the idea has potential but it fell a bit flat on first viewing. The video lacked punch, the machines lacked energy, the footage was bleached and pale, perhaps to convey the dusty greyness of the mine, perhaps the projector was just not up to the task. The sculpture looked cheap and impotent beside the seductive moving imagery. Was this deliberate?

Whilst there were several works in the exhibition I really thought were weak, this wasn't one of them. I just haven't worked out what I saw in it that kept me watching. I suspect that I have become so numbed by Hollywood's spectacular visual feats that video-art needs to pack a super-human punch to reach me or to take a completely different tack. At least the work wasn't a one-line gag!

The bleak minescape was certainly "interesting" but the video did not convey the awesome size of the site, nor the equipment, nor the immensity of the damage the mine symbolises. I think The Eden Project's breath-taking and theatrical approach is far more thought-provoking (The Eden Project was built in an old open-cut mine.) The immensity of the Grand Canyon is far more awe-inspiring. This work needs to do more than depict something that is better experienced first hand. Morning Mist succeeds where this fails because the photograph romanticises the wilderness. It takes the hard work, the biting cold, the mud and fierce rapids out of the river and leaves us with a symbol upon which to hang an imaginary wilderness. The mine footage takes all of the dust and noise out of the open-sore in the Earth, but I feel it leaves us with nothing and for this reason perhaps it failed to arrest me, despite my hope that it would.

I will revisit the gallery and see if I change my mind!

diorama gallery

The American Museum of Natural History has some lovely dioramas... and they are illustrated in the diorama gallery on their website! I adore these miniature worlds. An African plain, Californian valley, an Asian mountain range or an Australian desert all can be compressed into a virtual, tardis-like space along with the appropriate flora and fauna. A long walk for little legs can take a kid from one window to the next and an opportunity to gaze into the world's habitats. Is there anything more comforting than strolling down the halls of a museum at a travel destination and encountering a scene taken from the forest back home?

Of course at home in Melbourne's Museum Victoria we have had some fascinating dioramas also. I suspect that they may no longer exist. Please somebody tell me I am wrong! That would be a serious loss. Of course they reflected 1950s attitudes to Australian Aborigines in particular and present our landscape in simplistic, romantic ways. They are icons of their time, like Women's Weekly advertisements for white-goods aimed at Anglo-Saxon housewives and nuclear families. Australia's landscape is an integral part of the identity of the European settlers who colonised it and those who migrated here much later (but have taken the time to get out of the metropolises along its eastern seaboard).

Viewing the continent's flora and fauna from behind the glass wall of a museum exhibition is quite appropriate. We see the landscape as outsiders, peering in on a strange diorama, limited in the range of perspectives we adopt by the cultural baggage we have carried with us from Europe. Who are we staring at? It used to be that we stared at the Aboriginal people, standing holding spears and boomerangs in a dusty, grass-dotted plane, roasting a lace monitor on the fire. They belonged in the landscape with the kangaroos and koalas. We gawked stupidly from behind the safety of the glass.

But here we are, shaping the diorama as we see fit. Placing its inhabitants in idyllic hunter-gatherer settings that romanticise the history we cruelly interrupted, whilst hiding its difficulties and completely ignoring the damage we continue to inflict. Living here is a wonderful privilege, the cost of which has been born by others. Who'd have thought a museum diorama could hold so much?

wilderness: the edge of the map is in the middle

I've just read Shaun Tan's latest book, Tales From Outer Suburbia. Lovely! It is so strongly reminiscent of suburban Melbourne I can't help but feel Shaun was brought up down the street from me. One of my favourite stories tells of two young boys off to seek the end of the street-directory. What is beyond the edge of the map? After travelling for hours into outer, outer suburbia, past countless shopping plazas and endless suburban streets, as the sun sets they find out. I won't say what they find out, you can read the story yourself.

The edge of the map is a fascinating concept. Behind the cricket nets, the Antarctic, a secret passage, the ocean's depths. Maps don't reach everywhere. Has Google ruined this? Of course I am amazed at the technology that allows me to zoom in to satellite images from a computer anywhere in the world, or to trace a path I have followed through the wilderness or the alps. I am slightly unsettled by the view of suburban streets Google offers. It seems like every place is Google-able, even my front door and private (!?) back garden.

On more careful reflection, even Google stops somewhere. For instance, where are the web pages that a Google search doesn't find? When I search for a document using an English keyword millions of non-English pages are ignored. They lie in a document-wilderness, a hidden place or faraway space. This is true of all literature, all communication, and all ways of thinking that I am unable to interpret. All this information buzzes around my head but I am blind to it.

Whilst it may show the South Coast track in Tassie from above, Google is blind to the muddy creek crossings, the bountiful waterfalls, the massive towering gums. Google misses the subterranean drains, the hollow trees. In fact, Google Earth misses so much of the Earth. If its not on the map is it there? What is it? I'd say this is wilderness.

Wilderness then is all around us, especially under our noses. It is right in the middle of the maps we view. Wilderness lies in between things on the map, as well as off its edges. An evocative book by Robert MacFarlane, The Wild Places, travels the UK in search of local wilderness. These are places that have fallen off the daily map. As people become dependent on different maps, the places unmapped become wilderness left to discover. Wilderness lies between your home and your workplace... when was the last time you stopped your car, got out, and walked around out there? I bet you travel through this wilderness every day, never stopping. Can't see wilderness? Just take a look at the end of your street.

Afterthought: If something isn't mapped but it needs looking after, who will do so? Who will look out for the unclassified organisms? The unmapped forests? Will they die a lonely, quiet death under the developer's bulldozer?