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Mythological Landscapes
An essay about the shortcomings of the West’s identification with landscape on aesthetic qualities
Sitting on Bald Rock, in Australia’s New South Wales, I was watching the tremors and fireworks of a distant storm. The storm was raging about 300km east, where we had been that morning. Lightning whipped the mountains of the Great Dividing Range and the haze underneath the clouds indicated spitting rain, but the distance was so far that the thunder was inaudible. The stiff peak of Mount Warning, which I had climbed the previous day, snagged and held the grey tangle of clashing clouds. Bald Rock, the primary point of interest in Bald Rock National Park, is a dramatic feature in this otherwise undulating eucalyptus country. It’s said to be the second largest monolith in the world, a grey-coloured purple-tinged humpback 200 metres high, its sides smooth and bare but its crest covered by wind-tufted pines and shrubs. It rises above the treetops, like a separate anomalous entity, as if it had fallen from the sky and landed here randomly. From its summit I had a view whose radius stretched at least 300km. To the west, the canopies of the eucalyptus, densely huddled together like the bristles on a broom, morphed into bluish and purplish ranges, and the horizon was ablaze with an incandescent orange sunset. It was a vista – tranquil, huge, dreamy – that made me think that Australia’s worthwhile attractions are its primeval landscapes and peculiar wildlife. And yet, confronted by such beauty, confronted by an ancient intact landscape, why was I feeling that something was amiss? Why was I feeling that my stay in this park would be an experience of nature that was momentary and lethargic?
In a sense these feelings were nothing new. They were the same feelings that had vexed me ever since I had visited my first national park in Australia several months earlier. That first park had been Ottway, on the Great Ocean Road of the southern coast, Australia’s most famous road. Ottway, a temperate rainforest, one of its kind, is moist and secretive, covered by an under-storey of delicate tree ferns, and dominated by gigantic eucalyptus – their barks peeling in drapes, with each layer revealing a new colour, from amber brown patches to purplish smears, from mottles of bright grey to drizzles of delicate blue. We had explored Ottway by following the thirty-minute loop-walk that started and finished at the car park. It was a trail built of wood slightly elevated from the ground to lessen its impact, a well-marked and illustrated path: signs told you what natural features or species to look out for, and to take a moment to reflect on the extraordinary ability of the rainforest to retain moisture, a closed self-generating system with its micro climate. The trail forded a stream, then climbed uphill in a detour designed to take you around a gigantic fallen tree, its trunk hollowed by decomposition into a tunnel in which a man could stand upright. I had gawked and crooned at this enigmatic forest, but Ottway (like other national parks I visited in subsequent months) had failed to engage me at an emotional level. The way the trail had been set up – to show you a representative of that particular habitat in a manner that discouraged random roaming, hence protecting the deeper reaches of the forest; a trail that encouraged a short languorous ramble starting and finishing at the car park – left me feeling as if I had visited a habitat recreated in a hothouse or greenhouse.
Paths, or trails, are the most important feature in a landscape, for it is the paths that define a landscape and our rapport with landscape. In the mountains of Ladakh, for example, or the rainforests of Laos, I had followed paths created by peasants and farmers and shepherds, paths that connected people to places – to sacred mountains, to fertile valleys, to isolated villages. These paths were like cultural footprints, defining the relationship between the inhabitants and the land – walking them had been an exploration of the organic relationship between nature and culture. For a newcomer, for a tourist, for a stranger from a different land, these paths gave the land an emotional presence or resonance, and they provided an immediate interpretation of the land. The trail at Ottway also defined the land and its use or interpretation. It was probably designed by a consultant, someone who understood the land only with clinical scientific objectivity. This made the trail mostly educational, showing us the what and the why and the wow that made this surviving pocket of forest worthy of protection. It also made the trail inorganic and gimmicky, with hand rails, educational stations, and rambling families wearing city clothes. The trails in Ladakh and Laos were educational and organic and cultural – mythological and historical imprints. You don’t have to agree with the natives of Ladakh who believe that the gnarled 6,000-metre-peak mountains that surround them are the conduit or connection between the earth and the universe, for knowledge of that credence is enough to induce an emotional or mystic rapport with the mountains. It was the same in Laos: the villagers believed their natural surroundings had spirits. The mountains, the rivers, the trees, the forest animals – everything is possessed by a spirit, making their world an inextricable whole, as all the spirits habituate the same magical and indivisible world. As visitors, this mythology feeds on our imagination to create a powerful mood. This is what is amiss in Australia’s landscapes: mythologies.
Without mythologies, the only other thing that defines our emotional pathos in relation to landscape is the aesthetical ethos. With a heightened sense of aesthetical appreciation, this is how the Australians value their landscapes: the pleasure is all about being witness to primeval landscapes, which we in the West regard as beautiful. But beauty is just the first layer; beauty, even if it can overwhelm, is static and inert, a mere statement of perception; unlike legends and superstitions, which are stories that provoke emotional responses that alter behaviour and set beliefs. Beauty is a description of how things look; mythologies are stories about why things look like that, or are as they are. In fact, for the people (peasants) who live directly off the land, and have a deep connection with the land, landscape beauty is either irrelevant or an unknown abstraction, or only one facet of the way they relate to the land. In Ladakh, for example, the natives considered the mountains as harsh, unforgiving, and bleak. Our guide, a local shepherd, was baffled when we told him that the mountains were beautiful. That kind of aesthetical recognition didn’t exist in his worldview, and yet he had immense respect for the mountains – a kind of spiritual respect, a venerably inviolable respect.
These ideas came to me when I was at Bald Rock contemplating my surroundings with an endearment to beauty that, however aching, still felt inadequate. The other handle that I could use for greater endearment was scientific knowledge, for knowing the intriguing workings of ecosystems or individual species alerts us to the fragile ingeniousness of nature. But scientific knowledge – combined with beauty – still falls short of the power of landscape mythology. Indeed, scientific detail and beauty without mythology is like a technically-perfect painting without mood or intuitive resonance.
If what was missing from Bald Rock was mood, or fables of landscape mysticism, or cultural footprints, it was because the people who had lived on the land and off of the land for millennia, the Aboriginals, had been forcefully displaced or exterminated. I knew they had been here from history reading, and I knew that if I scanned the ground hard enough, like a detective, I might find some of their pottery shards. But what use would slivers of pottery be? What I needed was an understanding of Aboriginal legends about the land, for every land feature in my surroundings represented a parable for the once-resident Aboriginals, and the formation of every land feature was itself a subplot of creation during the ‘dreamtime’ (the time when the world was formed by their ancestral creators, whose actions moulded all the earth’s features). To start with, what was this rock I sat on called by the Aboriginals? The tag given by white Australians – Bald Rock – is merely a descriptive term, but the Aboriginal term, which has been lost, would have opened up a whole perspective arising from their traditions or spirituality.
A few days later at the Warrumbungles, another national park, I felt this loss more acutely. I was sitting on another peak gazing at the bottleneck of an extinct crater. The modern Australian name was another descriptive tag – Crater Bluff – for while the white Australians looked up and saw an extinct crater, the once-resident Aboriginals might have looked up and saw the very hand of creation. It was a loss – the Aboriginal mythology of landscape and their footprints – that made me change my mind about the role of people in wilderness. Like many Western environmentalists, for a long time I had believed (this is also a colonial attitude) that people should be evicted from pristine landscapes, for people are an alien and polluting presence. Now I could see that a landscape without people, without cultural footprints, was a landscape without human meaning.
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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