An Essay About Country and Administrative Efficiency

I wrote this short piece about ten years ago, for a book about INFRASTRUCTURE. I was worried at the time (still am!) about how the full connectedness of country was not being served by our modern regimes of administration. The editors asked for 400 words. The issue was so big and the time was so short that I decided I might as well swing hard and 'get some runs or get out', as they say in country cricket.

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UNCOMMON COUNTRY

For more than two centuries now, Australian land has been structured by English property law. This law is a presence, a present infrastructure. This law is a modification (some would say a degradation) of a previous one which asserted that a populace holds its land in common. England’s colonies have all loomed thus, in the exhaust of the commons.

Land now is less an organic system, more an artificial register of sections. Country is dismembered now into estates.

Perhaps Australian land was once a being. In other times the land might have been revered and feared as the animal that contains all other animals.* [*Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986, p. 411.] It might have been managed and obeyed in common, shared by and sharing livelihood with a communal intelligence that was formed by the all its participant inhabitants. But with the establishment of property deeds, this country, this BEING has become a myriad objects. Dismembered.

Only now are we trying -- somewhat in common -- to remember how to participate in country instead of owning property. To remember ourselves in and as country, we need to find ways to ‘ingest’ it, to know ourselves intensively through its extensiveness, to know it and us beyond the proportions of boundary lines. Take the Murray River as an enormous, urgent example: we need to re-member it as an ever-circulating and unbounded being that we share and serve in common. The Murray cannot live as the property of states or Water Boards or grazing properties or tourist charters or even local councils behaving as singular interest groups. It cannot be dismembered like this and still be in country as it needs to be.

In order to know country this way, to remember it, to ingest it, we need techniques that prevent us from surveying and assaying it only as an object. We need to be in it as it is in us.

Or, as Eugen Herrigel once summed up the quest to know Zen, you hope ‘to apprehend what you are looking at as if from the inside.”* [*Eugen Herrigel, The Method of Zen, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960, p. 22.] As we try to re-member our country and our selves, we hope to apprehend our land as a being unbounded in time and deed. We hope to know it as a system of actions, reactions, debts, repercussions and benisons. And we hope to do this even as we know that modern law – so uncommon, so partitioned -- will not yield.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Henry David Thoreau felt a similar paradox as he watched America dismembering around him. He caught the insight in his journal, when he remembered a day he’d spent scratching in ‘his’ bean field:
"I love that rocks should appear to have some spots of blood on them, Indian blood at least, to be convinced that the earth has been crowded with men, living, enjoying, suffering … that the mould I tread on has been animated, aye, humanised. I am the more at home. I farm the dust of my ancestors, though the chemist’s analysis may not detect it. I go forth to redeem the meadows that they have become." * [*Thoreau’s journals, quoted in Frederick Garber, Thoreau’s Redemptive Imagination, New York: New York University Press, 1977, p. 142.]

This would be another country. It would be landscape augmented by inscape, as Gerard Manley Hopkins might have known it.

But what we have presently is a property segmented by infrastructure.

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