Nonie Sharp on a sense of place.

Do most Australian landscapes remain today largely unportrayed and unsung? George Seddon's thought in Landprints, A Reflection on Nature and Place was hard to dispute even a decade ago. At least for non-indigenous Australia. The story is quite different for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. Through the years when the newcomers behaved as though the land was unoccupied, they continued to dance, sing and depict their landscapes and seascapes. Much of their performance was about their own lives, about the spirits with whom they shared a place, about the mountains and rivers and plains, the winds, the planets, birds and other creatures. Their world lay invisible to settler people.

Now in a new century people are asking the question: why has a literature of place and landscape with which north America is so well endowed developed so little in Australia? Did the 'otherness' of the landscape make it out of bounds for most Australians? Or does the silence stem from the relative shortness of white settlement here compared with, say, north America? Do we need four centuries too to thaw out and warm to our new clime? And are we now coming of age? Willing ourselves into the realm of nature writing.

Are our sensibilities changing? The answer is certainly yes. A couple of years ago, a Melbourne writer brought up among the gums confided with honesty that, seen from London, his home in exile and even on his return, he had found Australian trees--the landscape--unappealing. 'Now', he said, 'I feel differently; I see its beauty'. He was not alone. Even twenty years ago it was rare to find an Australian like the late H.C. (Nugget) Coombs who spoke in a public broadcast of his felt joy at sighting the eucalypts on return from abroad. 'I wanted to put my arms around them'; his voice is firm; no sense of self-consciousness. There were others of course: the works of Eric Rolls, of George Seddon himself are part of a fine thread of writing in praise and defence of nature and place that goes back to the nineteenth century. Yet it has taken a long time for something like an ode to the wonder and glory of our eucalypts to appear. Ashley Hay's 2002 book, Gum, is a nice sign of a more active awakening to the aesthetic appeal of the Australian landscape.

Nature writing or a literature of place is akin to poetry; but it is also different. Poetry is written or spoken from the standpoint of the self; it is personal, characteristically oriented towards the natural world to which it responds as given. The birth of nature writing in the English speaking world is generally associated with Henry Thoreau. Its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century intimates a recognition of nature as Otherness, not simply a taken-for-granted expression of God's bountifulness. In this sense Thoreau's celebration of the landscape in its primal glory is like one early response to the loss of God at the beginning of the industrial age when Nature was becoming semisecularised. Nature writing then was an attempt to recover meaning which had begun to lose its Christian moorings.

This look at beginnings and their context offers a clue to what is happening now. We are seeing a second wave of nature writing world-wide and it is taking us along with it. If the first wave was a response to the rise of industrialism, the second is called out by a new revolution symbolised in the nowhereness of cyberspace, and a tendency towards the dissolution of embodied grass-roots existence. Importantly for the impact of second-wave nature writing, we find a decline of ritual and an emergent reflexivity, a capacity to probe and identify the sources of one's being and consciousness.

The celebration of place and, in particular, lyricism is a response to the decline of embodiment and the beginnings of an awareness that Nature exists within humanly created categories, not as an unmediated Other. While shimmering waters and moonlight on the trees may call out a universal response of beauty, what is seen as beautiful, even pristine, in Nature is characteristically created culturally.

In Australia, there are exciting signs of a break in the silence. The bringing together of people who combine literary flair with ecological sensibility in nature writers' festivals, in anthologies and artistic endeavours is timely and appealing. The Watermark Nature Writers' Muster 2003 combined an international focus with a very locally-based Australian initiative. The place was Camden Haven near Laurieton and Kendall, a place of merging waters on the north coast of New South Wales. A sense of this landmark event is given by me in number 69 of this magazine--'A Celebration and Lament for Nature'. Following on the heels of Watermark 2003 were the Tasmanian-sponsored Nature Writing Prize, an anthology of nature writing from Australia and north America and a book of essays on changing places and their meanings in Australia. Each of these books--A Place on Earth and Changing Places: Re-imagining Australia contributes importantly to our perceptions of place at a time when its meaning is undergoing rapid change. All of these developments are signs of a coalescence or attunement with a world-wide response to the transformation of the meanings we give to nature. In other words, whatever their local Australian stamp they are in step with a second stage of nature writing, a world phenomenon.

Not surprisingly, the two 2003 books of essays on place--some fifty altogether by talented writers--are complementary, overlapping in authorship but also to a degree, disjunctive in their aims. A Place on Earth, from the University of New South Wales Press, the first of these two books, gives special priority to lyric essays or prose poems of place. Writers in this genre 'are listening and speaking as a poet does, and that work depends on a musical, a lyric, sensibility and voice'. 'They are', editor Mark Tredinnick continues, 'giving lyric witness'.

And while lyricism is part of the strength of each of these volumes, Changing Places, from Longueville Books, puts the development of a sense of place in Australia into the larger frame of change, especially global change, so raising burning and highly controversial questions. Editor John Cameron introduces what for me is the site of a major paradox we ignore at our peril. A sense of place presumes embodiment: it is local, the home of stories of persons tied by invisible threads to one another and to locale. Yet 'cyberspace is a disembodied space that is no place at all'. Putting together these two conceptions creates puzzling questions.

The most salient of these is: can embodiment survive the onslaught of disembodied space? Can we reconcile our new luxury of an awareness of our place in the world and the universe with retaining that sense of place that ties us together with a locale and persons who also belong there? The Internet, and all that disembodies, give people 'a much-expanded sense of place in the world'. Paradoxically, that expanded consciousness gives impetus to the process of finding an Australian sense of place. The various authors fit themselves around the theme of the changing meanings we attribute to place. The outcome is neither benign nor anaemic. An extreme view where the old sense of place has become redundant ('past its use-by date') sits uncomfortably beside the concerns of those who could in certain circumstances opt to die defending the place they love.

Environmental historian Tom Griffiths conjures up an image of the mighty rivers of Australia as tigers, stirring powerful emotions; for me a Blakeian nostalgia deepened in memory by the majestic Murray River of my youth. Are the nature writings of the second wave like advancing tigers--powerful, resilient, beautiful--giving promise of oncoming understandings between humans and landscapes as living sentient beings? Do these celebrations signify that we may live through landscape, not impose ourselves upon it, a plea made by Judith Wright thirty years ago? Or are they simply feeble, self-centred glorifications of what is left as the rivers still, depleted by the pumps, or dammed up before they can flow and bound, leap and frolic spreading over their banks to lap along the flood plains as of old?

Fortunately, I believe, the thinking and intuitions of many writers and artists of place, often living in far-flung climes unknown to one another, tend to cluster (miraculously?) around the theme of place and embodiment. There is a sense that people are tied to place in much the same way as they are tied to one another and to non-humans. In this time of a terrible destruction of places and people--their dis-location--in varied ways the question is being asked: how might we live in reciprocity with nature and with each other? There is an intuition that the land is like poetry. In his beautiful book Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez--whose own place has long been in Western Oregon--says just this.

The land is like poetry; it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.

And, if this is true of land, what about us humans?

In her essay 'Wind Ensembles', poet Laurie Kutchins answers my question in words of beauty and wonder. The wind of her home place, Wyoming, echoes through her body--'human speck in this country made out of wind and sky'--body of country, Laurie's body joined through wind and breath.

Wyoming, place of winds, formed her in symbiosis 'as deeply as any human love' and the work of embodiment continues on elementally even into a time of enforced exile from her birthplace. The landscape of spirit remains uncleaven from physical terrain. The wind as connective breath goes on sculpting her even in physical absence from home. Laurie's 'connective breath' resonates with the murmurings and loud talk of the wind in the sea that joined Eddie Mabo to the sea and the land at his homeplace, Las, on Murray Island. Saltwater man exiled from his place, a man with an ache in his heart, joined to it by unbreakable threads. Whether Laurie or Eddie, we are speaking about embodied lives. In his essay 'Writing Place', Tasmanian environmentalist and poet Pete Hay evokes the same relationship to place: 'A concern for place is a concern for community is a concern for home'. Hay is speaking the same language as Kutchins, as Lopez and of many but not all indigenous peoples. The many faceted interrelatedness of place and persons is founded upon this understanding. Lopez sees the connections this way: growing into the love of a place is much the same as growing into the love of a person: 'Our blessing ... is not what we know, but that we know each other'. What ties these two together? He looks to opening yourself in the way of trust that place and people will give you. Intimacy and vulnerability are crucial to a form of awareness that draws upon the whole self. It is less analytic and cognitive, more intuitive.

Lopez is able to draw on his own experience of being in the landscape, of being with and of it. This puts him in tune with indigenous people. Unsurprisingly, he turns to his experience of indigenous people as they enter one of their villages or landscapes: their intercourse with that place is many-faceted as they weave together diverse elements. Theirs is the obverse of the tourist experience that turns nature into scenery and commodities to be consumed. It is more, much more, than this. There is a spiritual alongside a corporeal human affinity with the landscape, a profound reciprocity. Lopez's understanding puts me in mind of William Stanner's sense of Yolgnu people's two-sided ties with land--both corporeal and spiritual.

Philosopher and environmentalist Kate Rigby offers a sense of the interconnection between the spiritual and the corporeal in her essay, 'Tuning in to Spirit of Place' through 'embodied co-presence'. Hers is a 'coupling of physical manifestation and sensuous perception'. Here we have again something like the I and the Thou of human and place; going with that living intertwining is again a recognition of the mystery and arcaneness of what she calls 'the indwelling spirits of place'. As in Lopez's understanding, the many faceted sense of the complex interrelatedness of place and community rests upon the realisation that divine knowledge is a mystery; and, like all mysteries, only partly fathomable. These essays and others inch close to a sense of living through a sentient landscape, rather than off it as a thing to be managed and coerced.

Are these writers responding to an awareness of malaise? Is there a connection between some people's sense of urgency about conserving, reaffirming and nurturing an embodied life and its inexorable undermining by those remote and faceless processes whose outcomes we find so convenient--the internet, our emails, the mobile, the One World? What should nature writing be about, what is its role and value? And are the second-wave nature writers among the children of a privileged age able to indulge ourselves as the last dancers on the planet earth celebrating and lyricising the beauties of forest and river before they vanish?

Pete Hay's sense of the task of nature writing today accords with that of Lopez and others. Perhaps 'the primary project of place and nature writing is to reclaim and to assert the corporeality of place and the processes of nature'. This context is a recognition of a growing tendency to deny the existence of anything beyond the text. This spells dissolution, a total freedom from constraint. He is among the writers with something like a primal responsiveness--people like Judith Wright ahead and behind them--to the deathly Terror of our times. Place is a gift--like parents, family, like children--and gifts have a claim on us to give back. Alaska, nature writer Richard Nelson's long adopted place, is a gift of 'incomparable magnitude' and he explains in 'Island of the Rain Bear' his feeling of responsibility to give back in return. This, as everyone senses, is a 'knowledge' people feel in their bone marrow. The spirit of the gift. Alaska or Wyoming, Glenlyon, Tasmania or Sherbrooke Forest, it doesn't matter. They nurture us and bid us nurture them. 'Responsible occupancy', Barry Lopez's phrase, means nurturing. It may also denote beginning to live differently not only to succour one's place on earth but as witness to others.

Among the second wave of nature writers there are some shared understandings: that progress is not linear, that living through nature is qualitatively distinct from absorbing scenery and commodities and, above all, that where we lose touch with an embodied existence we lose ourselves.

It is more than sixty years since I took my first steps into the lyre-bird forest in the hills near Melbourne. The place of my heart is now changed ... But the Eucalyptus regnans, the mountain ash that tower to the heavens, remain. They have taken on an exalted aura for me.

Some people's experiences take them beyond celebration, even to a way of being lyrical that resounds with the spirits of the places they have struggled to defend. Exemplary people. As I have said before of some of those who gave their all to save a river, to remake Tasmania, here the lyrical may transform into something more than a poetic genre. To return to Tom Griffiths' metaphor about river tigers, I find these people like tigers--powerful, resilient, shimmering like the striped waters of the beginnings of morning. From dark to light?

Nonie Sharp is an editor with Arena Publications. Her latest book is Saltwater People: The Waves of Memory (Allen & Unwin, 2003).