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My Friends This Landscape by Anne Collins

Reviewed by Inga Simpson
 

CollinsMy Friends This Landscape is a mixture of poetry and poetic prose set in several locations across Tasmania – including Cockle Creek, Moonah, Montrose, Mount Wellington and Cradle Mountain – a series of fragments that together form a lovely mediation on place.

You the silent walker with the light changing ever so slightly from second to second. Second by second the shadows move, second by second you feel a kind of love. Second by second is as close as you’ll get in this life, to time standing still.

There is, despite its quietness and solitude, a strong sense of movement throughout this collection: of walking, relocating, and the constancy of change. Of "Living the Night" and “Researching memory.” It is as if Collins is never quite still, never quite at rest.

Primarily a poet, Collins also publishes articles, essays and reviews. Regional writing would be one way to describe this collection, nature writing another. It is sometimes said that Australia lacks a nature writing tradition, but My Friends This Landscape confirms my suspicion that there is plenty of nature writing going on in this country; it is just having trouble reaching an audience. Ginninderra Press is to be commended for its longstanding commitment to supplying less commercial works to readers.

Collins seems to have returned to Tasmania a number of times, reminding me of Kari Gislason’s The Promise of Iceland, in which home “is the knowledge that someday you will be back.” Two very different islands, of course, but in both cases, the landscape is key to belonging.

Grey does not hurry. Even a sudden windy whip of dark grey moving low across the bay and dumping rain, means you crouch down by the acacia bushes, watch the performance, watch the paddlers work their sticks back towards the shore, only to slow down again once the cranky cloud has moved on. I am the calm fabric of grey.
            I feel like I am being absorbed into this landscape. I want to be like a rock with a lusty shine, all sea salty, aging grain by grain.

The ‘machine in the garden’ is ever encroaching development – hillsides of trees lost to housing estates and industrial areas, traffic and rubbish, chrome and steel, and, of course, climate change.

Collins’ interior landscape reflects the exterior – or is it the other way around? As Robert Pogue Harrison establishes in Forests, forests mark the “edge of Western civilization, in the literal as well as imaginative domains” (1992, 247).

There is a strong sense of loss in these pieces. Of parents, a partner, and perhaps most importantly, of place: her home of 22 years on ten acres on the outskirts of Hobart. Present, too, is a consciousness of Indigenous displacement, and stories left untold:

Many ‘discoverers’ of so-called ‘wilderness’ have done so in the company of Indigenous people or after the fact, people whose pivotal role in the landscape is unknown, ignored or relegated to the margins of an overblown explorer narrative (17).

Collins, however, keeps to the edges of wilderness, desiring access to bushland and seaside but preferring to live close by the city. On her first walk in Blowhole Valley, she is overwhelmed by the roar of the ocean and a fear of snakes, though she later enjoys the same walk. She leaves her retreat at Lake St Clair prematurely to flee a snowstorm, suffering a panic attack as she drives down the mountain. Later she imagines herself by the fire watching the snow come down and taking a moonlight walk in snow had she stayed.

At 69 pages, My Friends This Landscape is a tantalising fragment. I would have liked to know more about Collins’ reasons for leaving and returning, particularly the home she grieves for still. To drill deeper into the memoir aspects of the pieces. Similarly, there are some lovely ideas introduced: taking the risk of leaving a good relationship, people’s hostility towards the bush, changing notions of ‘wilderness’ and what it means to ‘own’ bushland. Collins’ own ambivalence, too, towards dense bushland. All of these are worthy of further meditation – and are, perhaps, connected.

My Friends This Landscape is highly recommended for those readers with an interest in nature writing, discovering lesser known Australian poetic voices – and the areas of Tasmania Collins captures so beautifully.

…it is an emptiness that takes me to my centre, and requires a kind of surrender to the landscape, even if only for the time it takes to go for an afternoon walk. An openness to a deeper organic pulse that somehow transcends mere physicality and gives me an insight into what it is to be human, beyond words, beyond the demands and routines of everyday language and culture.

Ginninderra Press
69pp
$22

About the Author

Inga Simpson Inga Simpson is the author of Fatal Development, and her novel, Off the Grid, which was shortlisted for the 2009 QLD Premier’s Award for best emerging author. Her novel, Mr Wigg, was one of the winners of the 2011 QWC/Hachette Manuscript Development Award. She is currently working on a book-length nature writing project, Notes from Olvar Wood and reading for an MPhil in English Literature at the University of Queensland.

 

 

 

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