LAYERS OF VALUES, AFLOAT ON THE DARLING<\/p>\n
It\u2019s late afternoon and Andrew Hull is punting lanterns down the Darling River in a dinged-\u00adup ex-\u00admilitary boat. This will be his last rehearsal before tomorrow\u2019s performance of \u2018Remembering the River\u2019. Five pelicans fly low in front, between steep banks, tracing the river. The sun is about to dip and the evening cool presses against our faces as the boat powers us downstream. For Andrew this is all about the light.<\/p>\n
As part of the Centenary of Canberra\u2019s One River project, Andrew will float two hundred lanterns on the Darling at Bourke. It\u2019s not a simple exercise and will involve two boats and a host of volunteers. The lanterns aren\u2019t store-\u00adbought objects of wispy fabric on thin wire frames. These are custom built by Andrew and his family, made with pine boards, dowel rods, and screws, and are closer to the size of an old street lamp than a dainty silk lantern. These are solid bits of kit whose heft seems to cast doubt in the minds of some of the others here.<\/p>\n
\u2018And these will float?\u2019 one person asks. \u2018Didn\u2019t the prototype have more foam on the base?\u2019<\/p>\n
Andrew is busy manoeuvring the boat, and examining the conditions he expects for the main event \u2013there\u2019s only the slightest breeze and no current because the river is barely spilling over the town weir. When the river is flowing the lanterns can spread and glide by the huge three-\u00adtier wharf at Bourke from which people will view the performance. No flow means the boats will have to get much closer to the viewing area, and even a gentle breeze could send the lanterns away upstream.<\/p>\n
\u2018That\u2019s the river for you,\u2019 says Andrew. \u2018It\u2019s always changing. You have to work with it, live with it.\u2019<\/p>\n
The Darling has one of the most variable flows of the major rivers in Australia. In the dry it can become little more than a series of ponds, but when the water comes down from the north east it spreads over the plains and fills anabranches and billabongs, creating a river fifty kilometres wide, and encouraging an explosion of wildlife. The boom and bust ecology here has shaped the lives and economies of the western landholders and towns. Learning to live with uncertainty is a constant and demanding process when \u2018extreme\u2019 climatic conditions can persist for a decade, or almost half a working life.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve reached the wharf and it\u2019s time to do the test run with lit lanterns. Andrew tells us he has noticed three distinct transitions in the changing light. At the beginning of sunset the lanterns appear an opaque milky white, in mid twilight the warm glow of the candle seems to make the lanterns appear solid, and by dusk the lantern lenses become translucent, revealing stories and illustrations marked on them.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a slow, entrancing change that encourages contemplation and stillness. Indeed, the idea for the lanterns emerged from such a moment of meditation. One afternoon Andrew was walking beside the river, and folded a piece of paper into a boat, like a mini sombrero.<\/p>\n
\u2018I put it in the water and I watched it,\u2019 says Andrew. \u2018I just watched it for what seemed like a couple of minutes but by the time I looked at my watch again it had been twenty-\u00adfive minutes.\u2019<\/p>\n
The boat and its journey along the river, the total absorption within his thoughts -\u00ad this was compelling to Andrew. Here was a way to use the power of the river itself to express some of its importance to the people in the west. Over several months Andrew collected the drawings and stories of school children living on the Paroo, Warrego, Culgoa and Darling rivers. The children wrote on the translucent paper of the lantern lenses. The stories are illuminated and reflected in the surface of the water. It\u2019s a hybrid work of story, text, visual aesthetics, community cooperation, and public performance. The floating lanterns and their messages meld memory, place and time. The performance emphasizes people\u2019s shared connections to the river that has shaped their land, home, and lives. This bringing people together, creatively and compassionately, is so critical after years of division that have plagued the river towns of western New South Wales.<\/p>\n
More than twenty years ago the Darling River threw up a distress signal, a \u2018flaring green ribbon\u2019, across one thousand kilometres of inland Australia. That\u2019s how Eric Rolls described the toxic blue-\u00ad?green algae bloom that choked the Darling in the summer of 1991\/92. Aerial images of a motionless and atrophied green river scribbled across grey plains made international headlines. It forced the New South Wales government to declare a state of emergency, while the Federal government rushed to mobilise the army. Rural communities and landholders living along the river were warned not to touch or drink the water for fear of severe eye and skin irritations and \u2018horrendous internal injuries\u2019.<\/p>\n
Many people began to blame irrigation. The former owner of some cotton properties in western New South Wales wrote a letter to the editor declaring the Darling was a \u2018national disgrace\u2019 and that the brazen and domineering culture of cotton meant that although \u2018many people in Darling River towns had been aware of the problem for years\u2019 they were \u2018intimidated into silence\u2019. Allan Amos, who had worked for the Department of Water Resources in Bourke in the 1970s, told historian Siobhan McHugh that his wife began to fear for his safety when he started trying to enforce water laws. The local police wouldn\u2019t offer protection, telling him until someone had \u2018taken a shot at [him] with a rifle\u2019, they were not going to get involved. Social relations were strained in small towns across the plains.<\/p>\n
Bourke residents told historian Heather Goodall a story about how the \u2018the river runs backwards\u2019 whenever the irrigators turned their pumps on. Even though this was unlikely, the phrase expressed their anxieties about the power of the irrigators\u2019 machinery to interfere with the plains environment as they had known it. Goodall reported that whenever the story was told it always sounded the same, \u2018spoken in a worried, uneasy tone, or with a disgusted shrug\u2019. It was, \u2018no admiring boast of the power of modern technology\u2019. People were distressed about the changes to their home environment and concerned for their own wellbeing. They had no real say over the changes that were taking place.<\/p>\n
The Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined a word for this type of feeling \u2013 \u2018solastalgia\u2019. It combines solacium (comfort) and the Greek root \u2013algia (pain) and in contrast to nostalgia \u2013 the melancholia or homesickness one feels when separated from home \u2013 it refers to the distress one feels when the environment of home itself changes. As Albrecht explained, \u2018it is that feeling you have when your sense of place is under attack.\u2019 Cotton became a target even if it wasn\u2019t the only cause for the poor ecological conditions that were apparent in the Darling. It was the most visible industry affecting the western rivers. It arrived with an assortment of new chemicals, large machinery, and different values for managing the environment.<\/p>\n
The lives of the people around Bourke are deeply embedded in the commodity industries that have dominated the region.<\/p>\n
\u2018There\u2019s no black and white,\u2019 says Andrew. \u2018There are a lot of grey areas\u2019<\/p>\n
Andrew Hull spent ten years working in the cotton industry doing contract laser levelling and earthworks. He built three of the four large storages on one well-\u00adknown property.<\/p>\n
\u2018Cotton was celebrated here,\u2019 he says. \u2018It brought real money, real paycheques.\u2019<\/p>\n
Not everyone felt the same, even if the town benefitted as a whole economically, and Andrew acknowledges some of the fears. He wrote a song about the river called \u2018My Darling\u2019, which he sings to crowds of locals and tourists three nights a week. It tells the story of an ancient and powerful river, but one that is challenged by the demands people make of it:<\/p>\n
My Darling struggles bravely with the changes she has faced<\/em><\/p>\n The pieces taken from her that can never be replaced <\/em><\/p>\n The memories of landscapes now centuries erased<\/em><\/p>\n The efforts that are made to bend her will <\/em> While changing plans are forced upon her still<\/em><\/p>\n Andrew now works for the Catchment Management Authority but the switch from cotton contractor to environmental manager was not what prompted an interest in the land here. He has written about local places and local stories since he was a child.<\/p>\n In fact, it was sitting on top of a tractor that Andrew first began to share his poetry publicly. \u2018I annoyed a lot of people on the UHF radio\u2019, he recalls.<\/p>\n When mobile phone networks began operating he would call radio stations from the tractor and recite his poetry. He wrote a new poem every week until he became known as \u2018the tractor-\u00addriving poet\u2019. His inspiration was the short stories and poems of turn of the twentieth century Australian writer Henry Lawson. This is the sensitive, gritty writing of the Australian outback, not the sentimental ballads and humorous popular verse that is often associated with bush poetry. Before Lawson, he\u2019d only been exposed to British poets. Discovering stories about Hungerford and Bourke, about the Bogan and Darling, was \u2018just a watershed mind-\u00adblowing experience\u2019 for Andrew.<\/p>\n \u2018You could go to the spot that it was written about, you\u2019d be walking through this landscape that I\u2019ve always known, this was the landscape where my toes go into the ground like an old gum tree, and these words belonged here, they were written here, for here\u2019.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not surprise that story would play a fundamental role in the \u2018Remembering the River\u2019 artwork for One River. Andrew interviewed Ian Cole, the head of a major irrigation business in Bourke. Ian\u2019s first relationship with the river was not about how much water he could extract as an irrigator, but rather about the places he used to swim and memories of the catfish he could catch. For most people in Bourke there are layers of values. It\u2019s these multiple values that Andrew wants to tease out in his art project.<\/p>\n He invited the residents of Bourke to the old three-\u00adtier wharf on the Darling on Saturday 6 July to write their own stories on the remaining lenses. By mid-\u00adafternoon, on a clear and warm winter\u2019s day, people begin sitting at park benches writing down their memories and stories inspired by the river. Volunteers plunk away with mallets, tapping the lids on the finished lanterns, while crowded markets sell everything from cake stands and fudge and from second hand books to \u2018abflexes\u2019. A band is setting up on the lawn-\u00adcovered levy, children hold red, yellow and aqua balloons, and there are at least nine prams just on this side of the tree. Here is a community coming together to pay homage to their river. It\u2019s a stark contrast to divisive arguments over environmental change and degradation.<\/p>\n Andrew didn\u2019t want a standalone artwork, but something that was more of an open dialogue with people in his community, and with the broader public who might see the work online or on a lake in Canberra when it is re-\u00adpresented there in August.<\/p>\n \u2018If we can get them to come down to the river and they have a look at it, and they write something on a lens for their own lanterns, they start to think. . . well I\u2019m part of the river, this is my country,\u2019 he says.<\/p>\n Overwhelmingly, the words were dedications to family, and many were to loved ones who had died. For the participants, imagining the lanterns floating down the river invoked deep cultural associations with memory, loss, and honouring.<\/p>\n ‘To Opa, Thinking of you every day. We miss you.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n \u2018Dad xxx A true Bourkite, RIP.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n The power of art and story is in its recognition of how our emotional connections with place shape our ecological relationships. This is what has been missing from the top-\u00addown project-\u00admanaged reforms of river management and legislation. It\u2019s in a different realm to bureaucratic consultation meetings with stakeholders. Andrew sees the art project providing local people with agency, with an intense and intimate connection with the river. It provides people with a voice at a time when conversation and connection has been lost. Its focus is on bringing people together by exploring their common interest in the river.<\/p>\n At five o\u2019clock around two or three hundred people have gathered for the welcome. Phil Sullivan, a Ngemba traditional owner and cultural heritage officer, stands on the levy and addresses the crowd.<\/p>\n \u2018Today we celebrate not just my story, or your story, but our story about the river,\u2019 Phil says.<\/p>\n Andrew slips away to meet his helpers down at the boats. The crowd moves across to the top of the old wharf. Now at twilight, gathered on the pale surface of the Darling, are two hundred and twenty softly glowing stories. Tranquillity spreads through the crowd. No voices shouting over others here. No contrived outrage. No privilege for the well-resourced few. Just the dusk chatter of roosting birds, the shuffle of three hundred townsfolk, the awesome stillness of river red gums gilded by the last light, and the stories \u2013 stories sharing the river.<\/p>\n One of the most important moments for Andrew was just after his team had floated the lanterns and they were sitting in the boats and heard the crowd go silent. An old friend from Bourke in the boat downstream from Andrew said, \u2018From this day on, we\u2019re all river people\u2019. That encapsulates the heart of this art project. They are not irrigators or environmentalists, mountain dwellers or city people, they are river people.<\/p>\n Is this an elegy for a river, or a new communal beginning? Andrew Hull hopes the project will evolve and become an annual event. In this way it will be become a ritual.<\/p>\n People will celebrate what unites them. New generations will grow up with shared values for the river. You can\u2019t protect a place if no one cares about it. For years Phil Sullivan has been urging Australians to create a \u2018foundation\u2019 for working with caring for our rivers. Andrew\u2019s project is one way of contributing to that task.<\/p>\n Cameron Muir<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" LAYERS OF VALUES, AFLOAT ON THE DARLING It\u2019s late afternoon and Andrew Hull is punting lanterns down the Darling River in a dinged-\u00adup ex-\u00admilitary boat. This will be his last rehearsal before tomorrow\u2019s performance of \u2018Remembering the River\u2019. Five pelicans fly low in front, between steep banks, tracing the river. 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\n. . . <\/em>
\nShe knows the greed of men and their capacity for waste <\/em><\/p>\n