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Draft programme for dialogue:

Please note that this proposal is open for negotiation. And I need topics as soon as possible!

Friday 30th

Saturday 31st

Martin Mulligan,convenor of the dialogue
phone:03 9380 1257
email
mail : 9 Hooper Cres, West Brunswick Vic 3055

ACADEMIC FORUM: DIALOGUE ON IDENTITY AND ENVIRONMENT

LET THE DIALOGUE BEGIN!
The Identity and Environment Dialogue,
Braidwood, March 30-31, 2007

Places are limited, so please book early. Contact Martin Mulligan

Please inform us if you need accommodation. You will need to book your own travel, but we can arrange transfers from Canberra Airport for those coming by air, provided you provide arrival and departure times with plenty of notice.

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Thoughts from Martin Mulligan, convenor of the 2005 Two Fires Festival and this year's academic forum:

UK environmental poet Terry Gifford and our own Peter Hay have been added to the list of presenters for the Environment and Identity Dialogue that is part of the second Two Fires Festival in Braidwood. It's an impressive list and the confirmed presenters are, in alphabetical order:

Aidan Davidson, Terry Gifford, Peter Hay, Don Henry, Tamsin Kerr, Martin Mulligan,
Val Plumwood, Kate Rigby, Libby Robin.

We will have two sessions - Friday 1-5 pm, Saturday 9-1 pm - of 45 minutes each, with 25 minutes for presentation and 20 minutes' discussion. The sessions will be held in the library of the Braidwood Central School.

All presenters have made public contributions, including several books, on the topic of identity and environment, and will draw on past work in addressing this broad topic. Specific criteria to be addressed, either directly or implicitly are:

1) To demonstrate that Judith Wright's legacy has great contemporary relevance; and
2) To find effective ways to project a positive Australian identity in the way we relate to the rest of the world.

Towards a framing of the dialogue

Wright's legacy

In an essay written 45 years ago, Judith Wright wrote:

Australia is still, for us, not a country but a state - or states - of mind. We do not yet speak from within her, but from outside: from the state of mind that describes, rather than expresses, its surroundings, or from the state of mind that imposes itself upon, rather than lives through, landscape and event….

Now that's a broad, generalizing kind of statement but it still seems to make a point that has not become any less relevant in the long period since. Maybe this point is becoming even more important as we seek to understand the ways in which a weak sense of identity might manifest itself as a belligerence towards perceived threats to 'Aussie values'. Of course, we might want to think more specifically about the landscapes in which we dwell and some of you might challenge the alleged totality of our disconnection with this land. However, we might also ask if this is still a useful starting point for thinking about contemporary debates on Australian history and 'Aussie values'? Does it help us to understand the Howard legacy? Does it help to find a way to deal with that legacy?

Of course, we know that Judith Wright contrasted our sense of not belonging with the profound sense of belonging of the indigenous Australians and she and her mate Nugget Coombs were prominent in promoting some kind of 'reconciliation' between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians -- they favoured a treaty. We also know that the movement for 'reconciliation' has been effectively marginalized by the Howard government. At the first Two Fires Festival (in March 2005) a panel of prominent Aboriginal speakers agreed that the movement for 'reconciliation' has probably achieved as much as it can and that it is time to drop the word 'reconciliation'. If that is the case, what lessons can be learnt from the reconciliation movement and its significance to debates about Australian identity? How can the widespread desire for reconciliation inform the future of the debate on environment and identity?

Wright used her poetry to contemplate the link between the conquest of Australian nature and the violent dispossession of the Aboriginal people. In the famous early 1950s poem 'At Cooloolah' she watched with some envy as a blue crane fished in Cooloolah's twilight because the graceful bird appeared as 'the certain heir of lake and evening' while:

… I'm a stranger, come from a conquering people.
I cannot share his calm, who watch his lake,
being unloved by all my eyes delight in,
and made uneasy, for an old murder's sake.

This often-cited expression of assumed guilt might take us nowhere except that Wright latter added the lines:

I know we are justified only by love,
but oppressed by arrogant guilt, have room for none.

and she ended the poem by saying that like her grandfather before her she 'must quiet a heart accused by its own fear'.

Can we make room for love when we talk about environment and identity in the current political environment? Is there a role for a 'poetic politics'?

A new context

The Queensland Aboriginal/Murri writer Wesley Enoch put it well when he suggested that John Howard dealt with the fear of becoming prime minister of a big country by setting out to make the country smaller. This government's policies reward greed and selfishness, and have created a covert national cultural policy that seeks to undermine empathetic engagement with 'otherness'. Many of the policies would not be overturned by a future Labor government, and their legacy is likely to be enduring.

So how can a discourse on environment and identity respond to such a legacy? How can spaces for meaningful dialogue be opened or kept open? How can the conservative cultural policy be effectively challenged? Is there a role for poets in challenging this government's legacy?

Past debates on environment and identity in Australia have focused heavily on the need for a deeper understanding of Australian ecosystems and for rethinking Australian history. The frightening realities of global climate change -- that have finally entered into public debate - suggest that we need to take a more global approach to this debate. This means we need to move beyond the legacy of Judith Wright, but does her legacy help us to link the local and the global in any way?

What is a more contemporary version of past debates on environment and identity in Australia?