The Shimmer of Flying Fox Landscape – by Matthew Chrulew
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY | AUSTRALIAN NATURE WRITING
We’re flying. This way, that. We follow a rock-lined creek until it peters out, circle back past trees that jut at odd angles, converge and align. Over here they clump into tighter rows. We traverse the full shadowed canopy, dart and curve across the face of a thicket. There are greens and greens and greens, from the same palette but blotting brighter and deeper, bordering yellows and blues. Amid it all, grasses shimmer with early light. The sky is both within and beyond, the clouds above and below. The horizon bends sideways and turns upside-down, side to side. So do we, again and again.
“The sky is both within and beyond, the clouds above and below. The horizon bends sideways and turns upside-down, side to side. So do we, again and again.”
We are in William Robinson’s Flying Fox Landscape. At first we were just looking at this oil painting from 1989. We stood there trying to orient ourselves, bewildered by shifting perspectives. We knew what the artist had called it and followed his hint, searched for the flying fox. Perhaps it’s just named for the locale near his home. But that name must have come from their presence. Perhaps that’s the flying fox there, just below centre, a brush of angular purples caught up in some to-do with a magpie. But perhaps it is us. Sucked into this scene, thrown about by its winds, flipped this way and that. Zooming in here on this forking tree; landing just there on a thick, curving branch; skipping up into air and catching its drift. Engulfed by the grace of this place-painting and invigorated by the pulse of life it carries, we join in flight through the forest, bask in resplendent dawn light. Move through, and as, landscape. Flying foxed.
We wonder what it means that we are now paint. An ecstatic ekphrasis. We remember the voice of the gallery host describing the artist’s method and themes. This is what we are now: paint that moves. Paint that translates Robinson’s regular resident bushwalks, paint that evokes sensation and memory and shares experience, paint that sweeps up and transports its viewers, paint that spins wildly through the winking cosmos. Paint that morphs us into Pteropids, furs our snouts and lengthens and tissues our fingers, enlarges our senses and cultivates our wayfinding wherewithal. Paint that flips us through gusts and blows us by trees. Paint that pluralises perspective to more deeply sculpt a topography in our minds; paint drawn from the earth and used to shape us back to it, to disorient and reorient us to the multiple orientations that landscape everywhere always has been.
“We feel how the forest and the artist’s spiritual experience of it shines through in this painting, and our experience of it, as we are now – flying and foxed, caught up in roaming twists and turns.”
We feel how the forest and the artist’s spiritual experience of it shines through in this painting, and our experience of it, as we are now – flying and foxed, caught up in roaming twists and turns. We know that this is the work of a settler in dialogue with European conventions; yet we can see that in his mystic wanderings Robinson summoned Australian bush to transform tradition, drawing on his long immersion to figure its colour and character. Pitched and painted back and forth, we feel his intimate landscapes explode the alienations and enclosures of inert framing, rugged distance, horizontal horizon, singular perspective. We feel how they embody movement and change. The patterns and rhythms of place. The sequence of night and day, growth and decay, effort and rest. The rambler in the terrain, creatures soaring in flight. Mountains and gullies. Rainforest surrounds. Threatening storm or fire. Relentless ocean. Enveloping sky. The planet’s very turn and hang. We join his contemplation of the comedy and anguish and goodness of creation, his tinkering with modes of perception that disrupt estrangement and reforge connection through the art of derangement. We recall his later reflections on Creation Landscape: The Dome of Space and Time (2003–4):
This landscape developed from a static image into one that showed the time of day, the seasons, movement of clouds and ways of showing what is above, behind and in front simultaneously like the many images we take in at once when we are walking in the landscape … The observer is in the landscape, that includes all of these things, and is not an outside observer looking into framed static space.
The observer is moving paint. The observer is a flying fox in the landscape. We know this well now, enthralled as we are by the pulse of his scene. And we know and feel also how this painting’s deranged horizons suggest wider worlds beyond what is depicted. Rich and densely textured, paint transmits all it can, which is not all; yet its bustling fullness conveys layers that came before and will go on ahead.
We know as well that there’s a better word for landscape going around, one that already encompasses a plural, shared, not just human world. Country: an Aboriginal English word for the ongoing nourishing relationships of place. Ensnared as we are in the spiral of and against landscape, we want so much to be able to voice it, to live it and share it, for all our ongoing shame and separation, for all we still don’t know and don’t do. We want to find some belated place among it or at least have a go at being there, with and in, to become worthy of the unaccountably generous welcome received. So we throw ourselves doubly and triply about, fly this way and that and slam hard into cascading flying-fox-eye-views until we knock ourselves out with the sheer unsettled effort of our Country-lust.
*
We take a breath, shake off the vertigo. There they are. Flying again. Flying out, this time. An enormous mob of Little Reds taking wing from mangrove swamps at nightfall, called by flowering eucalypts inland. We read and become these words:
Flying-foxes arose in their thousands separating from the trees and from each other, taking flight and heading off towards distant places. Some travelled low towards some faraway blossoms, while others spread out over our heads. The sky was thick with them, and we could hear their wings fanning the air.
We are in Deborah Bird Rose’s Shimmer: Flying Fox Exuberance in Worlds of Peril. We are in and among the flyout as it crosses the dusk sky with astonishing drama. We’re with them and watching them, learning who they are and who are their kin and learning that through this learning and commitment she, their witness, will have become their kin too, responsible for their ongoing generations and connections. We are taken up by the force of flight, the lure of blooms, the ancient urges of pollinating treks, all the chatter and grooming and seduction and propulsion.
“We are taken up by the force of flight, the lure of blooms, the ancient urges of pollinating treks, all the chatter and grooming and seduction and propulsion.”
We were just reading this book at first. We sat there trying to orient ourselves, absorbed by the interwoven storytelling, the firestick wisdom, the scenes and knowledge and insight relayed. Taken by the mystery of flying fox evolution, the beauty of mass flyouts, the marvel of wayfinding, the familiar attachments formed in maternity camps, the lively pleasure of their sex. Gripped most of all by Rose’s reflections on the ancestral power that surges through the rhythms of flying fox lives, their distinctive ethos passed down between generations across millennia. Intrigued by the way she invoked the Yolgnu name for this ancestral power: bir’yun, shimmer. The fragile, essential pulse of life. The power inherited from those who came before.
We were uplifted by the joy of Rose’s passionate immersion, pulled along by her unruly commitment. Scarred by her testimony of mass deaths in heat waves, the cruelty of bounties and violent dispersals. Shaken by the author’s account of her own long illness and her proleptic rendering of her coming death. Saddened and heartened to learn how she completed her book, left it in the hands of family and colleagues to be sent forth, so that its stories and concepts, words and witness might go out in service of the places and people and beings and beauty she loved.
We wonder what it means that we are now words. More ekphrastic ecstasy. Words that put images in our minds and stories in our souls. Words that relate experience and observation, analysis and evidence, events and judgements, words that recount other words read in books and thoughts mulled in armchairs and explanatory fables told around campfires by mates with filled stomachs and cups. Words wielded to combat the destruction of Country, the genocide and ecocide of people and animals and plants, all the ongoing unworlding. Words that transform readers, convey them into the flyout, the dispersal, the heatstroke and the care work, the rehab and release, the rooting and roosting and rearing and roving. Words that renew the worlds from which they emerged.
We know from being paint and words, now, that we can fathom and share many flying fox things unknown to ordinary experience if we listen to those who tell us who they are and what they’re like: their Aboriginal kin who share their substance and stories, the scientists who track their movements, the carers who mend their wings. If we labour hard enough at systematic and ethnographic and philosophical and painterly attention and reflection and creation. If we work to express the bluster of an outback flyout, the wanderlust that impels their travel, the cognitive maps they navigate by on nomadic journeys, the graceful swoops by which they crisscross a valley as the sun rises to the left-leaning east.
We hope, too, that Country shines through in Rose’s carefully wrought words that describe the shimmer of life; life that glistens in the flowering of nectars in spring, in the sparkling of river water gleefully dipped, in what is graciously reported of the bir’yun of a Yolgnu painting that opens up Country in ceremony and closes it back down again. We know that though the cancer has taken her, the generative ancestral power she strove to articulate lives on in her words now as they are read or remembered, related or inhabited, reminding us that death works with life to keep things going.
Yet we struggle, still, battered by calamity, extinction, climatic excess, death twisted upon itself so that regeneration is ruined. From Rose’s deep, furious dive into the colonial sciences of control, we know that all this doubled death has long been bolstered by the hard and soft warfare of biological management; that it endures today in the flying foxes’ ongoing decline. We behold this death in the babies that drop from their mothers, the juveniles that heatwaves melt to electric wires, the hungry caught in orchardists’ nets, the wildlife shot from the sky under the authority of the very Conservation Act that names their endangerment, all those bountied and beaten and pushed to the brink.
“We’re flattened by the magnitude of the suffering and loss. When all is painted and written, what might still become? How can beings of paint and words work to honour and favour this ongoing creation?”
We’re flattened by the magnitude of the suffering and loss. When all is painted and written, what might still become? How can beings of paint and words work to honour and favour this ongoing creation? We strain against these realities, throw ourselves this way and that, dreaming of winds with the tempo and power to lift us away from this storm. We wonder what it can mean when the very possibility of new living meanings is what is being so widely stripped away. We know there is no justification for the cruelty of God or nature or the brutality of colonies and capital or the diabolical hybrid catastrophes now mounting. Yet still we know that life calls and answers. Still we know that the only decision is to stand together with suffering and celebrating worlds. To fight against their wounding and disappearance. To call forth the shimmer of paint, of words, of ancestral power, of generative life.
We feel what shines through Robinson’s paintings, and hear his reflections on the mystery of spirit and substance: ‘There is a pulse of which we are part – the same matter. One earth, from which there is no escape, we are not made from anything that has not always existed. In my paintings of the landscape I hope to reveal something of our inclusion.’ We imagine Rose glowing in recognition as she gazes at Flying Fox Landscape, relishing its dynamic quality, its creative exuberance, its multiple perspectives, its pantheistic spirituality, as she too becomes its moving, seeing paint.
Sustained by exemplars like these, we take up the challenge of the arts of life and place: to transform and embolden and vitalise ourselves and our craft to encompass the colour and complexity, vibrancy and movement, detail and depth of the worlds we encounter; and to gesture at that which exceeds the frame, at everything that went before and brought us here and is still to come: the deep and near dreaming of Earth’s fragile becoming.
We fly now, young tucked under our arms. Transfigured by multiple angles and views. Buoyed by world-crazy zeal. Lured by life-giving buds. It is dawn, and dusk, and dawn again.
We fly. This way, that. ▼
Image: Flying Fox Landscape by William Robinson
This work is part of our Australian Nature Writing Project suite.
If you liked this piece, please share it. And please consider donating or subscribing so that we can keep supporting writers and artists.