Abstract
Belinda Probert’s Imaginative Possession interweaves discussions of gardening, farming and ecology with biography and reflections upon Australian society and culture. The aim is to interrogate the author’s sense of not feeling entirely at home in the Antipodes, and to chart how this unease changed over time due to a confluence of personal circumstance (for example the decision to have children here), practical involvement with gardening and farming, and an increased appreciation of the local landscape and the things that inhabit it. Probert cites George Seddon’s claim that ‘a sense of place shows most clearly in the way a community feels about and uses the landscape’ (p. 35). For the author, how we feel about landscape has all kinds of personal resonances. She has strong landscape memories of the United Kingdom, the place she was born and where she spent her formative years (including writing a PhD in a rundown cottage on the Yorkshire moors). Probert writes that, if she was asked what she missed most about her birthplace, her reply would most likely be ‘related to the countryside, birdsong and colours’, which after some four decades in Australia still ‘surface effortlessly’ (p. 35). Her adopted home of Melbourne has, in some respects, allowed her to maintain her mis-placed landscape sensibility: Melbourne is surely the most European of Australian cities – the place where European immigrants are most likely to feel at home. This is in no small part because it lacks a dramatic setting which might regularly remind you that you are not, in fact, in Europe.…Melbourne gardens are designed around the eighteenth-century English landscape tradition. (p. 5)
The ‘Learning to Live in the Antipodes’ in the subtitle refers therefore to learning to appreciate and value the local landscape for what it is. The process resembled what anthropologist Tim Ingold has described as the ‘education of attention’. Books play a prominent role in that education of the senses and the imagination. Probert writes that she ‘needed writers to help [her] recognize and clarify [her] vague sense of unease in the Australian landscape’, and that in addition to landscape studies proper she discovered ‘many kinds of writing can…play a role, including indigenous writing, crime writing, gardening books, natural history, children’s books, memoirs, literary novels and poetry, as well as the newer field of environmental history’ (p. 17).
The emphasis on texts (including suggestions regarding which books to provide to new Australian citizens) may not appeal to people interested in landscape who are card-carrying members of the nonrepresentational, posthumanist or new materialist perspectives. It’s not so much that embodiment and affect don’t play a role in Imaginative Possession. It is more that the emphasis is on human agency and human cultural responses to nature rather than on what some current cultural geographers call nature-culture hybrids.
Yet the book is littered with insights that would appeal to materialists, phenomenologists and others interested in non-textual approaches to landscape. A good case in point is the emphasis on water, a burgeoning field of cultural analysis and art curatorial practice (i.e. the 2022 Sydney Biennale exhibition which focused on rivers, wetlands, salt and freshwater ecosystems). The material and symbolic properties of water come to the fore when Probert is discussing what it felt like to have a dam on her farm in the Otways: Having a dam feels, in itself, a mark of my Australian-ness. Dams are a ubiquitous feature of the farmed Australian landscape, and they might be thought of as an easily observed barometer, registering variations in local health and happiness. When they are full everyone is happy.…As the water shrinks to the dam’s centre, leaving a wider and wider ring of mud or clay, you know people will be talking about the weather and hoping for rain.…It rains a lot in the Otways, but dam water evaporates quickly in hot summers. (p. 82)
The power of nature to cause us to question our place in the landscape provides Probert’s narrative with a poignant critical edge. Learning to live in the Antipodes is an exercise in ecology, politics and race relations. The chapter dealing with how she learnt to appreciate the kind of landscape one finds in Western Victoria also entails a reminder that those artists and works which have venerated Australia’s pastoral lands (e.g. Arthur Streeton’s [1926] Land of the Golden Fleece) might have performed an important act of visual nationalism in getting us to value the contrast between wide open blue skies and dry golden pastures. However, it is ‘hard to look at’ such paintings ‘with the same joyful innocence’ (p. 114) after you have considered that the land looks as it does because of the environmental destruction wrought by sheep grazing, or that the original inhabitants of this landscape have been quite literally painted out of it.
Chapters 9 and 10 are entitled ‘Belonging in an Immigrant Nation’ and ‘Where I Am’ respectively. The work of University of Melbourne anthropologist and social theorist Ghassan Hage is discussed in terms of senses of belonging that make one feel ‘rooted’ rather than ‘possessive’ in the colonising or property-owning sense. Probert recounts how Hage, who is known for his work on multiculturalism and racism in Australia, and whose Lebanese grandparents had settled around Bathurst in the 1930s (Ghassan himself was born in Lebanon), had his own interesting moment of reckoning with the landscape when he encountered ‘fruit trees planted by his grandfather more than 50 years ago’ (p. 144). Hage is reported as having never felt ‘more Australian’ (p. 144). In Probert’s case, the journey to feeling at home is multi-dimensional and stretches from how she feels about Australian politics to whether she can ‘feel at home outside our major cities and towns’ (p. 145). But one of her more lateral observations relates to the Australian sense of humour, which she regards as ‘very distinctive’. She tells the reader her ‘most intense moments of feeling happily Australian occurred when watching Roy and HG commenting on the Olympics…or Bryan Dawe interviewing John Clarke’ (p. 155). This kind of aside appealed to me greatly as I’ve often toyed with the idea of researching place-based humour as a way of unlocking place qualities and the types of everyday creativity present in place. There isn’t a one-to-one relationship between jokes and place. But place-based humour tells you a great deal about what Probert – citing Michael Ignatieff – posits are ‘the tacit codes of the people you live with’ (p. 155).
In the ‘Acknowledgement’, which comes at the end of the book and therefore also serves as something of an ‘Afterword’, Probert makes some interesting remarks about writing and the journey she has been on with this book. She describes the text as entailing ‘the excitement of writing’ – a ‘feeling’ that she did not ‘readily associate with the academic writing’ (p. 172). The writing of this book ‘was a new experience that combined intellectual engagement with everything from archaeology to agriculture with getting to know thyself better. I could not wait to get into the library each morning’ (p. 172).
Given the book begins with a discussion of how the author buying the farm in the Otways coincided with unsuccessful job interviews for high-level managerial positions in universities in London and in Kazakhstan, Imaginative Possession is as much as anything a tale of ‘forks in the road’ and ‘what-ifs’. However, the week I worked on this review I attended an online seminar where one of the presentations was on academic retirements. From such a vantagepoint, Imaginative Possession raises the interesting question: could such a passionate and poetic work of synthesis and personal reflection have been written by a current rather than retired academic (to the extent academics ever retire)? Indeed, Probert’s writerly models seem to be people who have never held tenured positions, such as Michael Pollan and Don Watson; or George Seddon, an old-fashioned polymath, who at given times held chairs in disciplines as diverse as English, Geology, History and Philosophy of Science, and Environmental Science, followed by the Deanship of a Faculty of Architecture and Planning. It is hard to imagine new Seddons emerging in an era of research audits, university rankings, incessant restructures and where, despite lip-service to interdisciplinarity and the need for public impact, specialisation and speaking primarily to fellow academics seems to be what the system rewards.
As such, I wonder if one of the important messages in Imaginative Possession is about writing and the spaces where different kinds of writing might flourish. The author, who self-describes in Chapter 3 as having been someone whose ‘professional expertise’ lay in ‘social policy, gender in the workplace and other worthy topics’ (p. 36), narrates a personal and authorial journey driven by the importance of allowing curiosities to guide her. Indeed, the book could be read as a type of homage to ‘dabbling’ or intelligent-cum-well-informed amateurism. When discussing her university teaching Probert refers to having been ‘often only a few steps ahead of the students’ (p. 4). I wondered whether the same principle applied to her approach to gardening, farming and managing the local ecology? Whatever the answer, Probert has written a sprightly book regarding how one might get to know oneself better, and in the process learn to live better, in one corner of the world.