On How Marrow Bones Can Kill You

And no, this is not about a reality cook-off show where the cravated judge eats a bone marrow risotto and then dies of a heart attack*

This is the story of a plant in Western Australia that contains a poisonous compound - well there are many - but a plant in the gastrolobium family is especially famous for creating havoc with the colonisers. The names Poison Point, Poison Hill and Poison Swamp are mapped by cattlemen when driving their stock out to the coast to feed in the summertime. They mapped the areas where the gastrolobiums grew and they deliberately kept sheep, cattle and goats away from the beautiful egg and bacon plants.

This plant was later developed by the government and made into a synthetic version of its essence: sodium fluoroacetate or 1080: a biochemical weapon now used to get rid of feral animals such as cats, dogs, pigs and foxes.These animals were driving native fauna into extinction So this pretty little heart-shaped plant became weaponised against the ferals. Most native animals who fed on this plant over millennia were totally immune to its killer effects. This is why it is such a perfect poison for interlopers.

Every few months, a plane flies laps over my place. It is the baiting plane, dropping poisonous baits into the national park that surrounds me. I'm constantly warned by letters that these dried sausage baits full of 1080 are highly attractive to dogs and cats.The last time my dog ate one from the beach below my house, it cost her a general anesthetic and probably several years of her life. Her stomach was pumped out with charcoal and I copped a two thousand dollar bill. It will kill her next time. That is the cost of living next to a national park and with a wandersome old dog who still thinks she is invincible.

Every time I hear the baiting plane droning overhead me, I hate it. I really hate that plane. I know they are doing the right thing but I still hate that plane.

I haven't got to the point about bone marrow and what it has to do with sp.gastrolobium, 1080 and dogs. So bear with me here.

In 1885, a Mr Web wrote to the Australian Advertiser (28/07/1885) about cooking up a bronze wing pigeon for breakfast and giving the dogs the wish bone. "I have just had a valuable dog poisoned by eating the breastbone of a Bronze wing pigeon." The dog had died a terrible death. "I have seen dogs die of arsenic or prussic acid but their sufferings seemed mild compared to that poisoning from the bones of the bronze wing pigeon." He then went onto the idea that the bronze wing pigeons, who feed primarily on the poison bush gastrilobium bilobum, excrete the the poison really quickly from their bodies but store it in their marrow bones. This was one of the original 1080 poisonings and it came from introduced dogs eating the marrow bones of bronze wings.

'A valuable dog' 

 

It was lightning, dickhead

Yesterday's tower day began with me driving my new 'tractor' with Southern Cross tattoos to the carpark early. I'd been expecting some drama after a night of lightning strikes in the area. I always take the bush roads in as a short cut that involve crossing the Weld River bridge (more about that later) so I was suitably dusty on arrival.

A kangaroo watched me as I walked up the trail. Can you see her? She has a joey in her pouch.

 

Later in a quiet moment in the tower, I was on the phone to a man from the Shire about the condition of the road I drive every day. 'I'm in tears halfway along the track,' I said. 'The corrugations are so bad now, they are getting dangerous.'

He was one of those people who make you feel like a confidant. An Olympic version of a public servant on the phone to some random woman complaining about roads. His voice was calm and friendly. He promised to have it fixed 'by Wednesday next week.' 

Not long after that, with a trashy thriller audio book thrumming from my phone, I looked over to the west and spotted a tiny white smoke that looked like a cloud on the horizon. Except that it didn't quite look like a cloud. Sometimes clouds over that way stand up like smokes, depending on atmospheric pressure. This one was different. I thought about the lightning strikes, the ones that had sent me scuttling down from the tower the afternoon before, and then I started plotting it on the map.

By 1215, I'd radioed in a Bravo Two One Two (medium density, columnar, white) and given the coordinates. It was kinda freaky, moving around the map table and trying to work out exactly where it was. As the wind increased, the smoke began to change. The wind turned suddenly from a mild north westerly to westerly and quickened. I rang the duty officer. 'Smoke description is now a two three three.' (Medium, billowing, brown) They knew exactly what I was talking about. This fire was taking off.

On the radio channels, I could hear the DO calling all trucks in the area to head out there and summoning the spotter pilot from Manjimup to give us the exact coordinates of the fire. First and Second crews from our district have been away at other fires in the north, so it was a harried response of gathering up returning fire crew and managing fatigue levels to assess who could go to this new fire.

After all the excitement, I rattled home along the corrugated track to see water bombers flying overhead and smoke touching the karri canopies. There were two Coulson water tankers dropping water at the fire, plus the nimble bombers and crew, who I knew were working all night on foot.

This is why a facebook post from someone who should know better sparked my interest. He is part of a group that thinks we shouldn't mitigate fire, only respond to fire. Apparently, yesterday's response to the fire I've talked about so far was not up to his expectations:

His 'summary' is problematic. The date is wrong for a start. It was the 18th. I called the fire in at 1215 not 1245. The decision of it being a Donnelly fire was a collaborative one, being a border country fire. Frankland district trucks were first responders anyway. Everyone worked together after that and today there are fire fighters from Albany, Manjimup and Walpole.

Old mate's post served his MO of early detection, early suppression. (Yes,that is my job and I did my job well on Thursday.) We are working to contain a wild fire in difficult country and that's why they put so many fire bombers onto it, because it's hard to get trucks in there. That's why we are are back burning. It's a big-ass fire, caused by a lightning strike. It's in country where there are no roads, so they can't just drive up to the fire and put it out.

This afternoon I was ready to leave my other job in the office when an email came through.

'Yep. Always a 4pm on Friday,' The DO sighed. 'Main roads have decided the Weld River bridge on Beardmore road is unsafe to the public. They've told us to shut the road immediately.'

'But that's my bush road short-cut to the tower,' I said, shaking my fingers with anxiety. I always drive this road to work. It goes through jarrah, marri and karri country. This is my track.

Pete looked at me. 'Unless you're planning on river fordings, you're a highway woman now,' he said.

Telephone Road

 This story is about trying to meet and not meeting the closest fire tower person to me.

At the beginning of every fire season, I have anxiety dreams about climbing up to the fire tower. It's something I do with every hat I'm wearing. When the academic semester starts, I have anxiety dreams a little short of appearing in front of my class with no clothes on. We all know the deal. Anxiety about an approaching challenge is like getting tattooed twice - feel the pain once through apprehension, then feel the pain again when it actually happens. It's a waste of our energy, but it's real. My anxiety dreams at the beginning of fire season are all about climbing ladders, climbing out into the abyss, only clouds beneath me and a flimsy bit of rusty steel to hold me.

Which is ridiculous, because the fire tower I work on is firmly set on the top of a granite peak. There are only two ladders to climb and they are sturdy, aluminum checkerplate. The rest of the climb is concrete steps and a rather brutally inclining bitumen path, riddled with tiger snakes.

Today, I discovered the source of these anxiety dreams. For the last few years, I've heard the nearest fire tower to me (let's call it Telephone Tower) over the regional transmitters. It's always a man and he does the same as me: calls in the weather and visibility on the hour, and reports smokes. He uses the same reporting system as me - coordinates and smoke descriptions - and often the spotter pilots converse with him, as they do with me, about a new fire in the district. It's a department thing. But he is chimerical, this figure in my life. It's just his voice and the weather stats and yet here we are, both sitting atop fire towers.

We've never communicated because we are in different districts and too far away to see each other's smokes. So today on a rare day off, I decided to track down Telephone Tower and have a cuppa with the tower man. I even bought him a custard pie from a bakery on my way.

It's difficult to find this tower out Nannup way. Goggle Maps gives everyone a bum steer in this country and I've had a bit of experience with tourists getting led into goat tracks and then getting bogged. So I plugged in Telephone Road and followed my nose from there. 

 

It's hot Jarrah country. Not something I'm used to after the karri forests where I live, or the coastal heath, where I used to live. This country feels firey, like a single spark could just pop the whole place into a disaster zone. Banksia grandis, with her dinosaur-spine leaves and marvellous new flowers followed me. I drove further into the bush. I got to a pine plantation. A blue sedan was parked among the soft needles, one door open. I was thinking murder ballads.

 

There was a turn off to my left, but it was covered in pine needles and I knew the gravel ahead held the tracks of the Telephone Tower man's car, so I kept going. Took the next left by instinct and there it was! Telephone Tower, rising out of the bush like the sentinel it was.

I leapt out of the car and then realised I'd accidentally parked on an ants' nest and had to jump back and reverse the car to a better spot. Looked up at the tower:

No one was there. The gate was locked. 

After such a long pilgrimage, I felt immense relief. What kind of nutcase climbs a tower like that anyway? And then sits up there all day looking for smoke? No wonder we're called Freaks on Peaks. Just looking at those ladders made the soles of my feet go crazy. Telephone Tower man does this every day? Jesus!

Tourists often ask me, 'What if there is a fire near you? or a lightning storm?' and I feel quite smug in my answers. 'Well, on lookout, I can see a fire or a storm for miles before it gets here.' Maybe Telephone Tower man is as pragmatic as me. Dunno. I never got to have a cuppa with the guy today. Maybe I'll hear him on the radios tomorrow.

Coming home, after seeing the Telephone Tower, I think Mt Frank is the best fire tower ever. We have tiger snakes, dugites and tourists. We don't have that kind of ladder and lonely.

 

Problematic wilderness

 The western narrative around wilderness is so interesting. Those places of 'moral confusion and despair', where Moses wandered for decades, where Sir Orpheo abandoned himself into the wilds to search for Euridice, growing his hair long, communing with the birds (possibly consuming a few too), hoping to entice the fairy king with his lute song, only to see his beloved wife pass by one day while falconing, her forearms clad in leather gauntlets, as she disappeared between cleaves of granite. Does not bode well for a woman to fall asleep under the ympe tree at noon.

This of course is all ancient history. 'For the Pharaoh will say of the children of Israel, they are entangled in the land, the wilderness hath shut them in.' (1) There is another quite famous couple who were driven from the garden to a harsh wilderness as punishment. In western lore, the deep forested wildernesses were home to wolves and witches; only woodsmen, hunters and abandoned children dared to enter the depths, where the trees sucked out the light. In Richard Powers' The Overstory, he writes a forest scientist Patricia Westerman walking through the thick forest to a clearing, where she thinks that these light-bathed circles 'make a reasoned argument to the loggers'. Emerging from deep karri forest undergrowth into the mossy, lichened open space of a granite cap gives me a familiar sense of psychological relief. The light, the space, the opening sky.

Millennia or centuries later, and right in the thick of the colonial project, along came the Romantics who made wilderness sexy by sublime.

 In Australia, the wilderness was still depicted by colonial artists and writers as a place of foreboding, of impenetrable forests and harsh interiors, peopled with Indigenous silences, malevolent swagmen and lost children.

 (2)

At around the same time in the Americas, the frontiers receded into rural domesticity, prompting books such as The Call of the Wild and countless Westerns. The Romantics and early environmentalists of the Americas claimed that the wild, sublime places allowed us to be closer to God. 'I'd rather be sitting on a mountain top and thinking of God, than in a church thinking of the mountain,' wrote John Muir. So the narrative flipped from wilderness flipped from being a place of purgatory and devilry, to a place with which a man (and yes, let's do that shall we?) can commune with God. The language of false idolatry, transgression and greed that originally condemned those exiled to the wilderness was now turned on those who sought to dam it or destroy its forests: 'Vandalism.' 'Desecration'.

These days the wild places are described in tourist brochures as 'untouched' and 'pristine'. Structures are built over the granites to give visitors an engineered sense of that sublime but perfectly safe near-death experience. 'Core Wilderness Values' can be almost virtue judgements which mean the difference between being protected and simply 'managed'. 

We all know that untouched wilderness is a crock during an epoch of climate change and ecological breakdown but calling a place untouched wilderness can also define it as a place empty of human beings; that as separate beings from flora and fauna, true wilderness can only exist without the human stain. And this, to me, is where the problem with wilderness starts getting pretty weird.

Advertising wilderness as pristine and untouched appeals to history's erasure. The removal of First Nations people around the world during the 19th century created 'uninhabited wildernesses' at precisely the same time as Muir was arguing for the Yellowstone National Park and the Australian John Mitchell called for a national park in the Nornalup area. 'There is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture which holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny.'(3)

 And then, back to the fall, as Cronon writes, 'If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature in nature represents its fall.'

1. Exodus, King James Version.

2. Hanging Rock, with ceremonial dance (look closer!)

3. Cronon, W. 'The Trouble With Wilderness or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature', Environmental History, 1995.

4. https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-10-02/wilderness-conservation-indigenous-science/100500954

The furies

Been riffing on aspects of women’s anger recently. I was asked to contribute a personal essay to an anthology and duly pitched what I thought was a fairly straight forward story. It had all the juice – a turf war, a love affair, state politics, a dead girl. I don’t want to go into the story itself here as the collection is kinda embargoed pre-publication. What I can write about is the process.

The project Gracias 2.0 emerged out of my latest writing job, as I needed some light in the pretty interesting places I’ve been lately. Media attention focuses on angry women every now and then in history but it’s usually when they’ve mobbed the streets with pitchforks placards to demand rights that the other half of the population take for granted. Anyway, I felt that this demonstrative anger is pretty well covered, as is #MeToo. What I wanted to write about was a series of events that culminated early last year and resulted in my feeling healed of a decades-old beef.

While collective women’s anger is a sight to behold, individual female anger is seen at best as unattractive, at worst hysterical. It’s seen as distinctly non-maternal (unless you are defending your child from bears) or unfeminine. We want to be liked after all.

I remember saying to a lover that I couldn’t verbally hold him to account for lacking the courage or inclination to tell the truth about me because “I want you to like me.” Instead I internalised my wrath in a perfectly presentable shit storm of self-harm. How ladylike, Sarah Toa. I’ve been turning away from rage lately. Anger, pointed in the right direction and for the right reasons, is a powerful change agent, but there is so much of it spraying around at the moment I feel it’s often unproductive and provokes pointless anxiety. I can feel it in my gut when I’m on Twitter.

In the midst of all this I am writing that piece on women’s rage. I wrote one version of the essay. Then I wrote another. I wrote a third but that one wasn’t very good because I’d been drinking gin. I went through myriad ethical decisions. What about her family? How can I build a story on her death and not have the story become the Dead Girl trope? How do I criticise those people and not let them off the hook? How not to include my family? It was excruciating.

I rang the editor, after she noted that my submission was five days late. “I’ve lost my nerve,” I told her. “I used to be so brave.” I explained my ethical dilemmas and she stepped through them like any disciplined philosopher. She then said something really surprising. Her and the other editor were discussing that very morning how difficult many writers in the collection were finding this topic. She had almost the same conversations as the one she was having with me.

How bloody interesting, I thought. Writing is a lonesome pursuit and a witchy one too. Sitting for hours with a brief to create trouble and toil can be a tough gig. To write a personal essay on anger is to do a Lazarus on old grievances: they arise out of the ground quite fresh. Then of course, they have to be dealt with. People don’t tend to feel rage towards a tree or a rock or a dog. It’s generally a hominid, so the ethics and libel horrors show up. And women’s rage isn’t pretty, as I said. Staying staunch and strong in a literary depiction of injustice requires refined rage. So those three things – reliving trauma, ethical choices and overcoming gendered expectations. In a room on your own. Writing is hard.

Anyway, just thought I’d pace that one out here. Thanks for walking with me.

Ps. The essay is in.

Letting the light come in

John Austin and I met at a forest festival in Northcliffe last year. He was sitting in the pop-up café. My first impression was of a man who observed his space in a quiet, intense but unobtrusive manner. I’ve known other professional photographers who have the same way about them. Witnesses, I guess, those people astute of eye and with a mind that constantly frames the scene. They are lens rather than subject. We talked about going into the forest that day. ‘I can’t go into the forest any more,’ he said quietly. ‘It just makes me too sad.’ *

On Friday John is showcasing the very best of his work over the last twenty three years and a major part of the exhibition is about the forest protests of the 1990s and early 2000s.

 'Watch', Lane SF, detail

                                                                                              Broke Inlet

John also photographs landscapes and portraits, and is particularly enamored with the littoral . He and his wife Rae came to stay at Broke Inlet while I was there a few months ago. In the early morning, I saw their figures stepping through reeds and around trees on the shore of the inlet. They'd been here many times before to photograph the place where water and land constantly renegotiate boundaries.

                                                                                      Broke Inlet Fishtrap

Later we had breakfast in Claire House and chatted. In 1994 John had decided to move down to the southern forests, to work in a more quiet and contemplative way. ‘But when I moved into the forest I found the truth.’ The battle to save the south west’s old growth forests from large scale logging wasn’t even on John’s radar until he moved to the tiny timber town of Quinninup. ‘There was nothing quiet and contemplative about it all,’ he said. ‘It was mayhem. It was like a battle scene.’*

                                                                                       Tank Girl and her Mate

   
  

Aerial

   

In the thick of it

John Austin's survey documents an integral part of our recent cultural clashes when it 

 comes to primary industry versus conservation in small towns of the south west. I would liken it in context to the work of photographer Ed Smidt in Albany, who documented another eco-cultural turning point in the 1970s: people protested the killing of another monolithic species -  the whales - while the industry's working class clung to 'the way things were' and the businessmen bailed when world's markets dropped out.

I'm really pleased and proud to be opening John Austin's exhibition this Friday at the Bunbury Regional Art Gallery.  After I met John and Rae at the cafe in Northcliffe, he read Salt Story and asked me to write the essay for his survey catalogue. He said he wanted something different to the usual art theory essay. I was happy to oblige and after many hours interviewing John with my phone and pen and paper at Broke Inlet, and later in his darkroom, we had an essay ready for the exhibition.

John Austin: Survey II 1994 - 2017 will open this Friday at 6pm and run until 26th of November.

*Excerpts from 'Letting the Light Come In: John Austin's relationship to forest, woman and land's edge.' By me.