Ten Crucial Pieces of Nature Writing
My conscious journey into the realm of nature writing began relatively recently while swooning through Inga Simpson’s Understory, a heartbreaking and heart-fortifying memoir, viewed through the refracted incandescence of nature. In hindsight, however, the formative, and maybe most cataclysmic nature writing impact quaked into me many years ago, through the epic power of The Tree of Man and Voss.
The Tree of Man (like Voss, written by Patrick White; both being perspective-tilting literary thunderbolts) and Under-story are alike in addressing a tension between nature and its harnessing for commerce, as well as the social dynamic which then unavoidably comes into play (Exhibits One and Two: Family life and community). It’s a frequently apparent theme in this selection of nature writing.
Having been brought up in country towns and, as [mis]fortune would have it, falling in with a farming crowd (by virtue of what-else-is-there-to-do-in-this-joint when we’re talking the pre-internet Golden Age of Growing Up and, well, a teenage boy can’t spend all his time playing sport, listening to punk and hunting girls can he), I inadvertently experienced first-hand the binary tropes of subjugating the land while simultaneously enjoying nature’s untamed dimensions through camping, wildlife encounters and Huck Finn living-by-the-river-type activities (Exhibit Three: Floating on tyre tubes down Tumut River with a rope-secured onion bag of beers. Note the safety rigour when securing vital resources).
Like any category of culture, nature writing’s borders are beautifully, as nature writing. For me, however, it’s instinctive, even though the control inherent within such categorisation is oppositional to nature’s amorphous sprawl.
