Desert Grasslands Saskia Beudel

The landscape of a nation is fundamental to how a nation is identified. Australia had a distinctive landscape, a landscape that consisted of deserts, grasslands, huge rocks and native flora and fauna. The thing that distinguished Australia from other nations were the copious amount of harsh bushes. That is until white settlement occurred and Australia’s landscape was altered forever. The harsh bushes weren’t wiped out completely, but its strange beauty did not remain the same. Saskia Beudel and Kate Rigby discuss their experiences of Australia’s landscape and distinguish the discrepancies between what was and what occurred next in “Desert Grasslands” and “Returning to Rocky Nob: Stray thoughts on Canberra.”

Imagine returning to a land you were

affiliated to, only to realize that it has disappeared and in its place was a peculiar world full of hidden stories. That is what Kate Rigby experienced, as was written in her article “Returning to Rocky Nob: Stray thoughts on Canberra” when she returned home from England reminiscing about her childhood in Canberra. “My friends and I preferred the gentler terrain down near Flinders Way, with its soft grass, weeping willows and tiny creek that emerged into the sunlight for a brief stretch from the alluringly cavernous depths of a drainage pipe.” Her description of the landscape she once knew was contrasted with her later description of what she returned to next “I had returned home from a homesick spell in England to discover that the Canberra and well-groomed gardens, well watered playing fields and well-fed children had acquired a certain reality for me.” The previously untouched landscape was given a touch up by man. This touch up was not appreciated as she continues to contrast the differences between the landscape she knew and the landscape she returned to. She viewed the purification of places like the oak grave grove which was a place of worship as “zeal for purifying such places of the non-Indigenous.” Her argument throughout the essay reiterated the effects of White settlement on the Aboriginals “who had shaped and maintained a “nourishing terrain” for themselves over the millennia, together with many of the plants and animals that sustained them; had been decimated by White settlement in the course of the previous century.” She goes on to argue that despite the new structures in Canberra, Canberra remained exposed to the Earth and the Sky. Ken Taylor observes, “From the outset, Canberra was envisaged as a city in the landscape and of the landscape.” The natural environment incorporated with the built environment was meant to create a new sense of Australian national identity. She argued that Griffin “who intended to accommodate the city to its natural environment” saw the land as a “canvas upon which to achieve certain preconceived visual effects.” There is a certain ambiguity to how the settlers viewed the land. They wanted to maintain its natural landscape but also expand on it by building their own construction sites. This is evident in her description of the middle-class suburbia co-existing with the bushland that has been permitted to remain within these suburbs and around them. “Canberra is therefore a place of edges and abysses where you can unexpectedly fall into a seeming wilderness of Earth, while being otherwise enclosed in an extremely tame world, which seems designed precisely to keep nature at bay.” The Parliament house was situated on the hillside, it was evident to her that it wasn’t to create a sense of superiority over the land but to conform to it. However, this statement was contradicted when she goes on to argue that instead of allowing the hill to remain a hill “by accommodating the building to its contours” the hill involuntarily housed the building, to her “this looks more like appropriation than attunement.” Her overall argument was a reaction of her experience through the witnessing of a progressively changing land which was inhabited forcefully by white settlers from the hands of those who were attuned to it, the Indigenous. The Rocky Nob she viewed as her sacred place as a child remained untouched.
“Desert Grasslands” by Saskia Beudel does not dwell extensively on the negative impacts that have been inflicted onto the Australian land as Kate Rigby does, but what she does write about is her discovery of a strange beauty in the Australian desert Grasslands.

Her fascination with these lands is evident through her experiences of the road trip she embarked on around the desert. In her travelling, her attention was drawn to how vulnerable the desert plants were. She wanted to contemplate about the environmental and the cultural history of the land, and through her fascination of the grasses, she found that they tell one story “of that conjoined history”. The desert had a way of seducing her to its “austerity and spare lines, tempting interpretation as pure nature, too harsh and unruly to be harnessed to prosaic economic purposes, as if existing only as itself.” The desert was autonomous, it can only be interpreted in one way, as nature per se. Her focus was mostly on Mount Leislar, which was a small area that was engulfed by bloodwood trees and “beautiful grass”. Almost more than a century later, despite white colonisation, the “very beautiful grasses, continue to thrive”. Anthropologist T.G.H. Strehlow speaks for the older Aboriginal people who had condemned environmental change. He speaks of how their country has been transformed into a desert by “the senseless whites”. Many of their native species became extinct through the introduction of new species like the rabbits.

“The old men who knew how to summon the rain clouds, how to create the animals, and how to keep the country green, are dead now; and our land is dying too”. In both essays, there is a reference to the unfortunate events of the past and the repercussions of those events on the previous inhabitants of the land. During her traveling from Alice Springs towards the Kintore Range and Mount Leisler, she passed “stretches of buffel”, with open space before and behind them. She was inquisitive as to what other seeds from the one’s she’s seen initially were waiting in these areas, “a potential landscape beneath the visible one. I kept waiting for shifts in the landscape”. The creek bed they passed consisted of sand entirely. The expanses they were travelling through were almost entirely made of sand. They also travelled through the Aboriginal land, no one was permitted to enter the rocky outcrops or hills under any condition. The Aboriginal people viewed the entire land as being sacred, people cannot walk around it wherever they desire. The Aboriginal people used the free resources that the land made available to them to create paintings and sculptures. In 1960, the Weapons Research Establishment consented to an establishment of network roads from Woomera in South Australia to the northern coast of Western Australia. The roads were to be used as a testing ground for “guided missile research establishes jointly by the British and Australian governments, and first publicly announced in 1946”. This would mean contact with the Aboriginals and further invasion of their land. Beudel continued to describe the land and the different types of plants such as “spinifexes and acacia’s”. Mount Leisler, her camp site and its magnificent rocks that “created different patterns of airflow” was referred to constantly as was Rocky Nob in the aforementioned article. Her essay was not very apprehensive towards the white settlers, there were barely any arguments. But the recount of her exploration of the land and the meaning of the land to the native people did encompass the subject of “landscape” accurately. Her vivid descriptions of the grasses were evidence of her attraction towards the land and its “strange” landscape.
The two conjoined essays with the personification of the land and the recount of both authors’ experiences have contributed to my understanding of landscape in Australian literary studies through their ability to draw the reader in.

The reader feels a sense of affinity and attachment to the land and to the Aborigines through the contrast of how the land was when it was under the care of the Aboriginal people, to how the land became when the foreigners entered and created a land of their own without entirely obliterating what was there initially. The Australian landscape was a harsh environment and still is, as was continually mentioned by both authors. The two parties who have claim over the land differently, view it as a source of income and national identity (for the white settlers) and as a source of life and nurture (for the Aboriginals). The stark nature of the land and its vast expanses that consist of rocky paths, open horizons from all areas, and bushlands with native flora and fauna left me with an affinity to the land that was. I felt like I was a part of the changing landscape with the metaphors and the personification that were used: “the growing suburbs of Canberra continue to consume even more remnants of this rural world”. Both texts gave me an idea of how landscape has created such literature within Australian Literary Studies. How? The words they used to describe the Australian landscape were literary and created many effects. The bushlands and their

experiences came to life with the use of their stylistic techniques, making their works a part of Australian Literary Studies.

White settlement had an immense impact on the history of the Australian landscape. Saskia Beudel and Kate Rigby depict their experiences inside Australia through their descriptions of the Australian landscape. The Australian landscape was viewed as a blank slate for the foreigners to create something “entirely other”. There was a lot of tree coverage on hills, vast grasslands, thriving plants and animals, fragile soil caused by erosion and expansive bushlands that identified Australia for the nation that it is. White settlers approved of the land but chose to adjust and construct on top of it in order to create a unique national identity which consists of native, natural structures and man-made buildings. The Australian landscape has gone through a massive overhaul throughout the centuries but it will always be identified for its incorrigible landscape.