Sydney is remarkable in being surrounded by some beautiful bushland, some of it designated wilderness. Sydney's sprawl is the result, it is said, of a conspiracy between hedonists and property developers.
Is a Sydney bushwalker making an expedition into a wilderness a hedonist or a property developer, or perhaps a little of each? How are we to balance the two, and how are we to decide which places are public, and which private?
Wilderness - what is it?
Beautiful as some of it is, none of the wilderness is pristine, all of it is marked by European and Aboriginal occupation. For example, we can measure the effects of rabbit control measures in the ages of trees everywhere - the rabbits ringbark young native trees, and so the forests have been scarred (albeit imperceptibly to us.) Interestingly, there is evidence that having dingos range around decreases the population of ferals, but of course they shoot dingos, don't they?
Wilderness is a 19th Century romantic concept, you can read all about it in Thoreau, Nietzsche, and a hundred others. Wilderness is held to have restorative and spiritual properties, and its existence is held even to be a measure of our civilisation, in that we exercise our considerable economic power in order to leave some natural places unexploited ('unspoiled'.)
By definition in the NSW Wilderness Act 1987, a wilderness is an area which is "together with its plant and animal communities, in a state that has not been substantially modified by humans and their works or is capable of being restored to such a state."
By that definition, there are perhaps no wildernesses in NSW, as both Aboriginal and Colonial land use, and the non-native fauna introduced by each have changed the state in ways we may not now be able to fully comprehend, let alone remediate.
However, and regardless of the vagueries of legislative definition: the hopelessly romantic, completely understandable desire to commune with 'Nature' (or at least those parts of it which don't involve blood, death, cruelty, mutilation, excreta, etc) is widespread in our population. I endorse the sentiment and enjoy the 'wilderness' we have as yet not despoiled.
Cartography is Power.
I have been studying beautiful old maps first drawn before I was born, of an area I have come to know reasonably well in my old age. The old maps have details lost to later generations because knowledge of the features might encourage bad behaviour and degradation of the sites. Some camping caves (which may have been aboriginal occupation sites too) and some features designated 'abo sharpening grooves' (the abbreviation due to lack of space, I'm sure) have been lost to modern maps.
I have also pieced together, from published reports, guidebooks, conversations and memories, information about other exploitable features (tracks, routes, passes, campsites, caves, aboriginal sites) which are not in the modern maps.
I understand that the elision of features from later maps has been a considered act, intended to preserve the features from human degradation. The approach has been "if people know these are here, they will be trashed." But now I can make maps, high quality maps, and publish them to billions ... what am I to do?
I understand the keeping of secrets, and the necessity that people be initiated into knowledge of the land. I understand how this totemic distribution of knowledge (through bushwalking clubs, affiliation groups) has the effect of reducing the impact of modern humans on the fragile land.
This is what the Aboriginals did. They distributed land-use knowledge totemically, initiation was required to possess a right over the land in part, or its exploitable resources in a locale.
What I'm fascinated by is how this distribution mechanism is being replicated in modern society, where the totems are now bushwalking clubs.
Initiation, Knowledge, Ethics.
I recently found a 1930s monograph from the Australian Museum containing a trip report and detailed descriptions of a large number of Aboriginal rock carving sites, north-west of Sydney. I plotted a course to them and organised an expedition. I contacted the NPWS (government authority responsible for the maintenance of wilderness) and asked their advice. Once I made it clear that I knew exactly where the carvings were, they were happy to talk to me about the expedition. They explained that the sites were never publicised, but nor were they secret. Once a person knew about them, NPWS was happy to discuss access with that person.
On reaching the first site, we found a visitor's book, much evidence of recent camping, and even a well-travelled trail off the public maps (and quite different from the dead reckoning and cairns we'd followed.) The visitor's book revealed that this was a common destination for hikes from a number of privileged private schools. This discovery has vexed me since - like the aboriginals, we have totemised knowledge of the land, made it esoteric. Unlike the aboriginals, we have ceded the keys to people whose only qualification is wealth - an elite possessed not of knowledge, but of jet skis and urban assault vehicles.
I am concerned to enquire about the nature of our initiations, whether the rituals of initiation we now perform (club membership, organised hikes) really serve to protect the land, and preserve knowledge of the land, or whether they tend to reduce our ability to even act as custodians or preserve the sacred places.
If the modern initiations are without real value, it may be because we do not recognise them as such, and we have developed them without clear understanding of what we are doing.
The aboriginal initiations are long since lost, and with them a lot of knowledge of the land. Some rituals required two generations of initiates to create a new generation, as new initiates weren't allowed to observe the construction of initiation spaces.
My question is: what form of initiation is appropriate to what little knowledge remains? We do not have the religious structure of real initiation, and for all the descriptions of 19th C Romantics of wilderness as "Nature's Cathedrals," the old gods are definitely dead - for we ourselves have killed them.
The Future is Augmented and Diminished.
Right now we're talking about maps, and about notes and reports shared through the conversation that never lulls but sometimes lulz (internet.) Soon enough it'll be ubiquitous computing, high availability network connections and augmented reality. How does one even keep a secret (even a benign one) in that kind of environment? Should one? By whom should it be kept?
It may be that most knowledge of places and things will disappear, but that what knowledge remains will be more public and more enduring than the places themselves. If that is so, what is the ethical choice to be made, to disclose, to hide or to initiate?
