04 Woolterton Marinova Horwitz

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Wooltorton, S. and Marinova, D. (Eds) Sharing wisdom for our future. Environmental education inaction: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference of the Australian Association of Environmental Education

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Chapter 4Connections in Nyungar Boodja: An Essay and a Story

Pierre HorwitzConsortium for Health and Ecology, Edith Cowan University

1. Nyungar Boodja and the Continental Corner

I have learned that I am a Wadjela man in Nyungar boodja1, and from my Nyungarfriends I understand that I should be proud of that. Nyungar boodja is country in thesouth-western corner of a vast land mass, an idiosyncratic corner of a continent. Inthis essay I explore the degree to which south-western Australian inhabitants nowengage, or connect, explicitly or implicitly, with particularly south-western Australianphenomena.

Westernised life in Nyungar boodja for inhabitants might mean walking to the beach

and while their feet nestle into the beach sands, looking out across the ocean andwatching a sunset. Some might connect with a remarkably expansive blue sky or theearly sea breezes in spring, or the Darling Range, running remarkably north-south,crossed by easterly winds that are cool in fine weather during winter but are hot insummer. The ocean is where the sun sets, always. For some, probably fewerinhabitants, it might mean engaging with a scratchy often charred forest, or pushingtheir way through reeds into one of the many wetlands, each swamp with a frogchorus that changes through the year. Perhaps even fewer see a Milky Way and fullystarry sky over an ancient flat land, or acknowledge that smell of the first line of sanddunes before they get to the beach.

For some people these things make them feel instinctively home, almost withoutbeing conscious of it. Breaking leaves off the grass tree, the balga, andabsentmindedly snapping them in their fingers while they talk or walk. Theremarkably idiosyncratic flora, now the reason why this part of the continent is calleda biodiversity hotspot, but to some inhabitants, they know the spring, and where theorchids flower, and what to do when the Hibbertia comes out, everywhere, and wherethe patches of Leschanaultia are. And the seasonal water, some people cant livehere without knowing a seasonality, where evaporation doubles rainfall annually,where sandy soils flip from moist in winter to water repellent in summer. The seasonsprofoundly influence life in south-western Australia, and the Nyungar peoplesrecognise six seasons according to the land, the climate, and their movement,

burning and hunting patterns.

2. Sense of Place

George Seddons book Sense of Place (1972), subtitled A response to theenvironment, the Swan Coastal Plain of Western Australia, emphasised thislocatedness, encouraging people (planners in particular) to be aware of where youare, and to plan appropriately and relevantly for place. His table of contents readslike a traditional geography but laced with something new for its time: the land andlandforms (the dune systems, the lakes, estuaries and wetlands); the climate (34years on this needs to be revised of course); the geological setting (the sedimentary

1The Nyungar peoples are indigenous to the south-western corner of the Australian continent. The

Nyungar word for white person is Wadjela.


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basin, the faults and the outcrops); the Quaternary geology, and the soils (windblown, river washed, lateritic or swamp soils). There is a major section onevolutionary history, the general character of the Plain, the trees of the plain (socharacteristic the eucalypts, tuart, jarrah and marri, the wattles, the banksias,melaleucas or paperbarks, the Agonis flexuosa or peppermints, casuarinas, and of

course the parasitic Christmas tree Nuytsia), and changes in plant cover. Onechapter then describes the way the Swan River was in 1827and in another section,the peoples, the Aboriginal and European peoples, and their response to the Coastallandscape, the Offshore Islands, and the wetlands.

His book finishes with a quite remarkable short chapter called A sense of placewhere he said that locale should be cherished. Seddon drew on facts of places,asked questions about carrying capacity, and whether wildflowers were worth moreto the world than wheat, encouraged us to relearn the virtue of frugality, andintroduced notions of inequality warning against growth at the expense of the poor.His work emphasised vulnerability

1. His notion of sense of place is without precedent

in the Western world. Since then, academia, from the disciplines of psychology toarchitecture and beyond, have developed a sense of place theme, dissected it,reconstructed it to be meaningful wherever you are on this planet, but moreparticularly to characterise that intuitive feel that locates and contextualises, thatconveys both identity and attachment, something that is definitively yours. His bookwas quite remarkable for its time, attempting a synthesis of what it meant to be aninhabitant on the Swan Coastal Plain.

Seddon makes a pertinent point:

Our language is poor in words of place. Parochial and provincial are both

derogatory, although there is nothing wrong with parochialism if your parish isa good one. These words express the expansionist faith that has drivenEuropeans for the last 300 years. We have the word timely but there is noequivalent placely. Topical literally means pertaining to place but this usetoday persists only on labels of ointments for topical application. By extensionfrom the topics of the day, topical has come to mean timely. The drive ofmuch of our technology is to obliterate distinctions of place (Seddon, 1972:262)2.

3. Technology and Place

This drive of technology results in roads that are constructed to alienate one part ofthe landscape from the other, and probably even more essentially, to allow us totravel through it at vast speed, without seeing whats locally special.

1My interpretation of this vulnerability is that our isolation in this continental corner, surrounded by

desert and ocean, perhaps for millions of years, is both our greatest asset yet our greatestvulnerability. The isolation has allowed periods of time much greater than almost anywhere on earth,for no mixing, and the development of heightened endemism, but that lack of mixing meant lack ofimmunity and flexibility to invasion.2 Nyungar language does not appear to have this obvious gap. Arguably place is a particularly diverse

part of the Nyungar language through place names, they end in up, a diversity that reflects thediverse, heterogeneous landscape.


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Our technology has allowed us to plan and construct the drain and the ditch tochange the hydrology locally, and influence it regionally. Our societal obsession withcontrolling excess water when its around actually removes us from a process ofknowing how to deal with it its a self-defeating form of control. Our taps provideaseasonal water, day by day, year in year out, giving us a false appreciation of

quality, and a false appreciation of quantity. In short were separated from thehydrological cycle.

Our separation from food production has been the subject of tomes, more eloquentlyput by other authors. Much of our food is packaged and processed and loaded withflavours and sugars, not to mention preservatives so that our capacity to learn aboutsubtle tastes and microbial decomposition is diminished.

Our supermarkets, prefabricated, off-the-shelf building structures whose rentalarrangements subsidise the large corporate stores, give nothing away about location;once inside them we might as well be in another part of the world. We can now

consume, through removal of trade barriers, and effective trade, and a given income,almost anything from anywhere at anytime.

Air-conditioning is no longer a luxury item. Its no longer acceptable to experience asequence of hot nights, or even one hot night. Does that mean that collectively weare not learning how to deal with climate induced irritability? Instead of designinghouses, or knowing when to draw blinds, shut doors and windows or when to openthem according to the shifts in the breeze, the way our grandparents coped, we flicka switch, and consume energy and water in the process.

Replacing the detail of local understandings is a variety of media that package ideasand experiences, thats ok, but they are not local. In fact the experiences are rarelytimely or placely.

Our scales of time and place have changed.1 In all of this we seem no different toother apparently civilised and developed parts of the world. My own children, nowyoung adults, are far more proficient than I ever will be with electronic gadgetry, butas dearly as I love them, I cannot help noticing their greatly reduced acquaintancewith the sands, trees, fruits and water of our neighbourhood. If I asked them to go outthe front door into the neighbourhood to find me a handful of figs in February or alemon in August, or some mulberries in September they might struggle, and may be

end up going to a supermarket, but I knew my neighbourhood fruit trees intimately.Some of you might be thinking that Ive failed as a parent.

4. A Hypothesis Alienation from the Local

The point Im making here, is that the life skills of our children of today, what theyacquire through parental engagement, schooling and tertiary education, centre on animpressive ability to deal with technology for sure, and probably more generally todeal with the abstract, but that these skills have come at the expense of an erosion of

1Of course Im generalising, and I need to be much more precise about who we are, and who the

general public is Perhaps Im talking of middle Australia, perhaps it is more widespread than that;

perhaps as an individual once you have the capacity to consume, and be subsumed under a publicservice whose objectives become saturated by security, safety and comfort, then the general public isthe subject to whom they attend.


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local knowledge, an understanding of the idiosyncrasies of their place. They are lessfamiliar with what is local than has ever been at a time in the past. I sense that thingsare getting more like this. We are increasingly alienating ourselves from theintricacies of place at a local scale, and we may even be obliterating some of theintricacies themselves. If this hypothesis has merit, what does it mean for sense of

place?

Can you lose sense of place? No, of course not, it just changes to something else.Our sense of place will increasingly reflect the scale of timeliness and placeliness towhich we are becoming adapted. We will however continue to lose theappropriateness and relevance of the local scale. Think of place identity and placeattachment a modern western child will identify with television characters, theAfrican savannah where wildebeests are attacked by lions, and have attachment to alounge room. Im exaggerating but you get my point.

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Miller (2005) in his paperBiodiversity and the extinction of experience (published in

Trends in Ecology and Evolution) described the estrangement of people from natureas being a product of increasing urbanisation:

Urbanisation has a homogenising effect on biodiversity as native habitats aremuch reduced and relatively few species, often non-native, that thrive inhuman-dominated landscapes tend to predominate To make matters worse,the native species that remain in cities worldwide tend to be segregated fromthe neighbourhoods where most human residents live Thus, a corollary of theexodus to urban areas is that most people encounter biological uniformity intheir day-to-day lives. Miller (2005: 431).

These two effects, one of estrangement and homogenisation, and one of a changingsense of place, have the same net effect. They diminish, and shift, our experiencesfrom what is local. They diminish our ability to read, interpret and understand thesystem of which we are a part. The signs seem to suggest to me that this shift isgathering momentum towards a diminishing ecological literacy.

From his book published in 1972 The closing circle: Confronting the environmentalcrisis (London: Cape), Barry Commoner gave five laws of ecology:

-Everything is connected to everything else-There is no such thing as a free lunch-Nature knows best

-Everything must go somewhere-If you dont put something in the ecology, its not there.

All of these laws are relevant here, but the last one, perhaps the most obscure of allof them, is the one that strikes accord. Its one of nestedness: there is nothing thatexists outside of [its] ecology. To Commoner, ecology then is a way of seeing thewhole, and everything has an ecology. You can see how dualisms andmisinterpretations of ecology as nature and the environment contravene this law

1 So far I have avoided the words nature and environment, mainly because they each set up an

artificial dichotomy. Nature is used to separate humans, the man and nature dualism. Environmentisalso misused since it assumes there is an other. Like the ecofeminist critique (see for example

Merchant, 1989), these dualisms create inappropriate value judgements and serve to perpetuate thealienation; rather than humans as part of a system, we become humans and the environment (whichneeds to be managed). The use is nevertheless common, and in this context too.


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because they set up the pretence that humans are separate to their ecology.Ecological literacy is reading, interpreting and understanding that of which we are apart.

5. Education, Health and Ecological Literacy

Sensing this inexorable shift, and almost like last calls from the wild, we urge oureducation system to introduce ecological literacy into a curriculum obsessed with awritten and numerical tradition, and struggle to persuade the emergency andhospital-focused health sector to see the importance of contact with nature as theultimate preventative cure. Does it really matter? Wheres the evidence that we needecological literacy and contact with nature?

A number of treatments of these topics have been published (see for instance Kellert,2002; Jackson, 2003; Maller et al., 2006), and from these it is possible to categoriseevidence (Table 1; but please note these categories are overlapping and non-

exclusive).

Table 1: Health benefits associated with contact with nature

1. The direct individual health benefits, in terms of physical fitness of:- physical activityper se- dietper se- interactive lifestyles mediated by urban design- immunity

2. Indirect consequential health benefits- tending to ones garden (caring)

- rehabilitative and restorative properties of contact with nature- regaining control (reversing alienation)- communing (spiritual well-being)

3. Ability to respond to systemic effects- as individuals- as communities

While the first two classes of evidence are relatively well treated in the literature, thethird, our ability to respond to systemic effects, is less well treated, and of directrelevance to environmental education as a profession1. How we respond to the

system is of course a learned thing, and an experiential thing. This might be bestshown with a story of latter day Nyungar boodja.

Earth Fire and WaterWe have been lucky enough to be engaged in an 11 year study of the GnangaraMound region north of Perth (McKay and Horwitz, 2006). The Gnangara Mound isthe largest of the unconfined groundwater systems on the Swan Coastal Plain (SCP),that part of Western Australia between the Darling Scarp and the ocean. It is a hugesand plain, where (running north/south) the deep sands act like a giant sponge

1 I should also note in passing that specialist disciplines are problematic because they restrict and

constrain so that we dont see the connections to other evidentiary areas. Perhaps these relationalconnections, that cut across established disciplinary views, are more important than specialistapproaches.


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(wetlands). The city of Perth is on the SCP, as are Bunbury, Busselton andMandurah further south, and where urban development proceeds at an extraordinaryrate Mandurah is said to be the fastest developing area in Australia. North of Perththe pace is furious too, and this is where the Gnangara Mound is important. It has, atdifferent times, provided Perth with up to 70% of its domestic water, and these

extractions, plus declining rainfall have resulted in the groundwater levels droppingdramatically. In fact, the water table has dropped up to 5 metres in places, to theextent that most of the iconic wetlands are drying more than they have for thousandsof years. This drying exposes wetland soils that have developed under saturatedconditions.

We have noticed two significant trends in wetlands on the Gnangara Mound. The firstis that they are becoming acidic (more about this below). The second is that theorganic sediments in the wetlands are drying, and are increasingly vulnerable: theyare no longer able to resist fire because they are not wet. We have urged authorities,starting with our own yearly reports and latterly through particular lobby groups, to

address issues of licensing all public and private extractors/irrigators, and to allowwetlands to fill seasonally, to keep sediments saturated all year round. But in fiveyears the amount of water extracted by unlicensed operators has probably notdecreased, and the groundwater levels continue to decline.

Also, the urban development continues to expand in the environs of these wetlandsystems. Iconic wetlands1, some would argue the jewels of the SCP wetland system,are found within the Yanchep National Park, a national park increasingly surroundedby new suburban settings.2

In late December 2004, during a hot dry spell around Christmas, a car full of youngmen, none of them over 19, and, according to the prosecution case, all of themdisenchanted with their local circumstances and opportunities given to them, lit a fireon the north-western edge of the Park. As Fire and Emergency Services crew andbushfire volunteers rushed to the scene, the youths moved first south, then east,lighting fires. After nearly a week the fire had burnt through almost all of the park,destroying a Rangers home but without loss of life or other property of significance.The fire, however, did not stop there. It entered the organic soils of these threewetland systems and burnt for months, and the fires were only regarded asextinguished after heavy rainfall in April. A very rough estimate of the amount oforganic soil removed during these peat fires was 60 000 cubic metres, much of this

lost as CO2 or CO or fine particulates, thereby releasing carbon that had been storedin the wetlands for literally thousands of years into the atmosphere. The firescontinued to cast a pall of acrid peat smoke over some local residents, and at timesblanketed the northern suburbs of Perth with smoke.

The health consequences do not stop there. Fire is a severe oxidation event, and apeat fire is doubly significant, since peat is formed under conditions of no oxygen.Under these anaerobic conditions, and in the right circumstances, biogeochemical

1Including Loch McNess and Lake Yonderup.

2 These suburban settings are an idiosyncratic urban form - walled residential estates with cul-de-sacs,

accessible by car only, with 5-10% of the estate undeveloped as land zoned for recreation,manicured lawns and palm trees, each house with a two-car garage and an air-conditioner. At nightthe garages are full, but by day one sees almost no-one.


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process occur which allow the build up of iron sulphides, or pyrite. Not all peats havethese acid sulphate soil potentials, but the ones on the Swan Coastal Plain do. In factmost of them in coastal Nyungar Boodja do. While the peats stay anaerobic the ironpyrite is inert. However drying, and then a fire, changes all that. To cut a long storyshort our data have shown that after the fire in these wetlands, and when the rain

came in winter, acidic surface waters have resulted, and a shallow plume of acidicgroundwater can be detected. The surface waters of this burnt wetlands grewmosquitoes and biting midges and almost nothing else. In the groundwater plumewere very high concentrations of metals, not just iron, but also arsenic, cadmium,aluminium and so on. So severe long term changes to the sediments and biology ofwetlands and atmosphere were instigated, and severe but perhaps shorter termchanges to local water quality and local air quality were triggered, both relevant forthe people who live nearby.

Our government departments respond to this situation in a fragmented context:planning departments authorise urban structures, local governments filed complaints,

health departments measure toxicants, emergency services attend to life andproperty threats of fire, environmental agencies attend to park values, water agencieswith water. None of them see the whole picture.

This story is not told because its an isolated case, but because its symptomatic ofwhat has been described above. Our overuse of water, our alienation from oursurroundings, a naivety about fire, and a fragmented government, are properties ofour modern ecology. Increased incidences of wildfire or peat fires, or acidic water, ormosquito borne disease, are emergent properties of the system. The system bitesback, responding in multidimensional and unpredictable ways.

My interpretation is that the young men, as calculated as it may seem, had no idea ofthe calamity they might cause by their actions. How should we interpret their actions?

Could it be criminal behaviour? Was it malicious wanton attempt to causeharm to others? Two of the men have been convicted of offences associatedwith their actions. Charges of arson are extraordinary because it can be verydifficult to isolate arsonists and gather enough evidence to charge them due tothe secretive nature of what they do. Is this behaviour a psychiatric disorder? Arson can be regarded as apsychiatric disorder (psychopathologic firesetting). In the past the

demographic of arson was predominantly middle aged men; this has shifted toyounger men, even boys. Is this behaviour a response to an alienating urban form that does not caterfor older boys or young men? They lived in an alienated urban setting,developing a particular sense of place that revolves around cars, roads,garages Is this a failure of a social system that does not prepare its young with anunderstanding of fire, and how to use it in non-urban settings? The morealienated we become from fire, the more scared we are of it. For millenniapeople have grown up with fire, everyday there was fire, in one form oranother, fire was part of our psyche, learned in the family (the home is the

hearth), tightly socially regulated, and recognised for the multifaceted thing itis, capable of sustaining, benefiting, creating and destroying. This has


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gradually diminished over time urbanites no longer collect fire wood, set firesin fire places, cook with fire, deal with charcoal, glowing embers, smoke outtheir living rooms accidentally, no longer understand it. Is this the environment having an effect on us? The Environment has Effecton Health headline is the nave interpretation. Such headlines miss the point

that the effect is one observable response in a series of inter-relatedprocesses. A systems approach provides consciousness tools to raiseawareness to deal with messy cross-sectored puzzles like the story givenhere. They are as much health puzzles as they are planning, housing,environmental or legal ones. Is it an example of a loss of ecological consciousness? Can we tell thedifference between the above interpretations, and a loss of ecologicalconsciousness?

6. A Final Comment

Using local anecdotes of the elements, particularly earth, water and fire, I hope tohave developed a theme of never-ending interdependence in Nyungar boodja, andhow we ignore it at our peril. We are linked to our past and our future in a way thatcannot discount the systemic nature of our surroundings. I am wadjela and I have arelationship with boodja.

We seem to have slowly but surely got the point about thinking global, but weveallowed ourselves to be seduced by globalisation, and now we have to relearn tothink local, to slow down, and to cherish our locale. Relearning about place is asmuch environmental education, as learning about the globe. Perhaps it should bemore.

References

Commoner, B. (1972). The closing circle: Confronting the environmental crisis.London: Cape.

Kellert, S.R. (2002). Experiencing nature: Affective, cognitive, and evaluativedevelopment in children. In Kahn, P.H. and Kellert, S.R. (Eds). Children andnature: Psychological, sociocultural, and evolutionary investigations (pp. 117151). New York: MIT Press.

Jackson, L.E. (2003). The relationship of urban design to human health andcondition. Landscape and Urban Planning, 64, 191200.

Maller, C., Townsend, M., Pryor, A., Brown, P. and St Leger, L. (2006). Healthynature healthy people: contact with nature as an upstream health promotionintervention for populations. Health Promotion International, 21(1), 45-54.

McKay, K. and Horwitz, P. (2006). Annual Report of the Gnangara MoundMacroinvertebrate Monitoring Programme. Centre for Ecosystem Management,Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, Western Australia.

Merchant, C. (1989). The death of nature: Women, ecology and the scientificrevolution. New York: Harper Row.


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Miller, J.R. (2005). Biodiversity and the extinction of experience. Trends in Ecologyand Evolution, 20, 430-434.

Seddon, G. (1972). Sense of place. A response to the environment, the SwanCoastal Plain of Western Australia. Perth: University of Western Australia

Press.

Ulrich, R.S. (1993) Biophilia, biophobia, and natural landscapes. In Kellert, S.R. andWilson, E.O. (Eds). The biophilia hypothesis (pp. 74137). Washington: IslandPress.

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