I
Driving back from Denmark on Wednesday morning I recognised for the first time the relevence of the word "palimpsest" in the landscape architecture discourse: along the road corridors, suddenly in the middle of a mound of rocks in a paddock, in the riparian zone suviving under bridges are thin, very thin strips of native vegetation. Perhaps a single line of marri trees, an occassional stand of coastal jarra, a patch of complex riparian community surviving at a river mouth...These are the tiny lines remaining when you rub out a page of writing. Carelessly you've failed to remove a whole line of letters at the side of the page or a few strokes stay where you pressed harder to make a point and the pencil cut a little deeper into the paper; maybe the indentation of the marks remains without the lead.
So it is that a little bit of bush remains in the landscape rewritten as agriculture. Tiny remnants of Australian vegetation - or should it be pre-Australian vegetation? - these thin marks allow you to imagine a forest, a complex of interactions and timeframes and you could dream the dots and lines reconnected as a whole system. Each fragile moment hints at a vast swamp of time that it might be possible to recreate. But the new story written on the palimsest is fences, sheep and tail-docked dairy cows, an old man tinkering under a Fordson tractor, a patch of bright green sub-clover in kikuyu grass, thin and brown come summer. Try rubbing that out with jarrah and marri and Acacia accuminata.
II ...Anyhow, I was talking about writing to create the new story of talking to someone about something, making a story of a happening or an event then constructing a theory of the event, constructing a palisade on a palimpsest. Re-writing a notional contrivance to dredge up a forum of time that could conclude the swampish indulgence of and fulgence in the swamp of morass of tears. Does it come from having nothing to do; or does it come from not having anything to do?
"He told me, I must sit here and do nothing. That is what I am doing."
"I ask you again, have you nothing to say of any use?"
"Nothing doing!"
"There is nothing here."
"I don't think it'll be able to support anything now."
"I sat all day, in the sun, by a window, warm, because I did not have a thing to do."
"I did not have anything better to do."
"I have nowhere I would rather be."
"I am here because I don't have anywhere I would rather be."
"I am sorry for you."
"I wish you weren't."
[But I didn't say "I have nowhere to go," I said I have nowhere better to go.]
Ravensthorpe road
A paddock of rape stems.
A not-so-beautiful replanting in ravensthorpe.
Mt Barren Ranges from the highway.
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