My life is about landscape. It’s always been so, but as I continue to age at a rate of knots, it becomes more and more so, as if I’m only just realising, or I’m trying to hold on. It’s an odd conclusion. How can a life be about landscape, especially my life, which has always been such an urban life, suburban at least? Farmers are allowed to have landscape lives, national-park rangers too, even shooters. Not me, who dresses and walks and speaks so city.
Perhaps it’s because I’m lucky to have grown up beside Sydney’s Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park and spent countless weekends building cubby-houses there, or just being in that scrappy peripheral place, getting views from rocky outcrops to the wild landscape beyond.
Maybe it’s because when not in that scrappy peripheral place I was down at the beach with my brothers. The beach is as much about landscape as it is about ocean, a landscape of edges, of bodies, of light and depth and danger.
As a boy and as a teenager I had books about landscape. Somewhere on my bookshelves even today is Landscapes of Britain (1984), which I loved – and still love – for all the photographs of rolling misty hills. There’s Australia’s National Parks (1978); as a ten-year-old I wasn’t so much interested in the pictures of bowerbirds or rare quolls or spiders and snakes, not stalactites in caves (because caves are evil), but the pictures of thickly treed valleys, of canyons and waterfalls and waterholes.
It’s no surprise, then, that my first foray into university education was to study landscape architecture – I wanted to be an architect of the landscape, as if a man could ever be such a thing.
I’m a writer these days; it’s no easier a task.
Early last Sunday, not much beyond dawn, on the way to drop off a heater for my father in Braidwood, I spent an hour driving through this south-east tableland landscape of mine, a landscape I’ve been trying to know for twenty-five years. Tractors motionless in fields, as if the farmer has quite simply had enough. Sheep grazing thoughtlessly. An old homestead, only the chimney remaining. The melancholic blue of the ranges beyond. Driving alongside pine-tree windbreaks, spider webs revealed by the dew, the webs catching the whispers of the landscape, or the prayers, or the dreams.
I just can’t see an end to loving this.
(First published in Panorama, The Canberra Times, 9 April 2011.)
Under the counter or a flutter in the dovecote 
13 comments
Comments feed for this article
April 10, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Apr
TF
“The melancholic blue of the ranges beyond. Driving alongside pine-tree windbreaks, spider webs revealed by the dew, the webs catching the whispers of the landscape, or the prayers, or the dreams.”
Loved this.
April 11, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Apr
Nigel Featherstone
Thanks very much, Tristan. That description pretty well came to me as I was driving, and then it was worked up in an email to a friend, and then it was written down in a pad, then typed up into Word, then edited, then pasted into WordPress. So it had a bit of a long gestation and birth!
April 12, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Apr
Landscapes of the heart | fortyspot
[…] abandoned cubby huts photographed by Daniel Armstrong. These are inspiring viewing. You can read ‘a life about landscape’ and ‘abandoned cubby huts dreaming and decay’ by clicking the […]
April 12, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Apr
Gabrielle Bryden
What a beautiful post and I can so relate – it is a bit of how I look at the world – almost inexplicable, but you do a good job. I love this bit ‘I wanted to be an architect of the landscape, as if a man could ever be such a thing.’ – very wise.
April 12, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Apr
Nigel Featherstone
Thanks so much, Gabrielle. You’re very kind.
I know I’m determined, but wise?
April 12, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Apr
alecpatric
I like the questioning tone of this piece–> the mystification that the landscape should be so fundamental to who we are. As our souls begin to resemble graffiti in city alleys, what gets sprayed onto our bones feels less and less ours. Getting out in the Australian landscape we realise all of that is bullshit and we don’t even own our own skin. It all belongs to the country, and I mean this in the way it was understood here thousands of years ago. Thanks for sharing this Nigel.
April 14, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Apr
Nigel Featherstone
Thanks Alec.
It’s true that landscape is so fundamental to who we are – perhaps it’s the sense of putting ourselves in perspective, in fact the landscape might even say, this is your context – get a grip on yourself. Landscape can be a hard-nosed bitch as well as the most beautiful thing imaginable.
‘Belongs to country’? I’ll have to reflect on this…
April 17, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Apr
Mark William Jackson
I don’t know if an appreciation for landscapes signifies getting older, or the learned behaviour of feeling the moment – kids and teenagers race through life at such a pace, in a hurry to grow up. It takes us years to learn to slow down, luckily the mind acts in collusion with the body – the mind says slow down and enjoy your surroundings, the body says slow down or I’ll end it here.
April 18, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Apr
Nigel Featherstone
Thanks, Mark, for your ripper comments.
I’m not sure either if loving landscapes is a sign of getting older, particularly as I loved landscape as a kid (though I think I was born older, and just keep on getting older the…erm…older I get).
BUT I do agree that an increased appreciation of landscape might be a desire for things to be slower, less complicated. Even yesterday, on another run to see my father, I just couldn’t get enough of what was out the window. I really do feel so happy in the car, radio on, the landscape outside. It just makes me feel so alive.
At forty-two, the city is, at last, out of my soul!
April 23, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Apr
broadsideblog
I so agree….I think this is also a profoundly Canadian point of view. I grew up in big-city Toronto and Montreal but spent every summer, ages 8-16, up north at summer camp which ignited a deep passion for the outdoors (or landscape) in me. The scent of dried pine needles, sun-warmed, can move me almost to tears. The lapping of lake water against ancient granite. The shadows of wind-crippled pines. The call of a loon.
As I type this, lying in bed in suburban NY, I look out across a sea of brilliant green treetops bursting into spring bloom. I love all my landscapes and miss them when I am not in them.
Good to know that another “city person” feels this as strongly.
April 23, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Apr
Nigel Featherstone
Broadside, thanks, as always, for your wonderfully thoughtful comments.
I agree that there’s a close (perhaps even spiritual?) link between the Australian landscape and the Canadian landscape. About 15 years ago I took the train across Canada, from Vancouver to Toronto, with the remainder in a car driven by a good friend, and even though it was winter it somehow reminded me of back home: the emptiness of the interior? But also the beautiful harshness.
Even yesterday as I was driving from one town to another I couldn’t help taking note of the extraordinary autumn that was happening on the other side of the window. Yes, it’s plain old romanticism, but there’s something else: I think Mark got close to it: it’s the slowness, the stillness, that attracts.
June 12, 2012 at 9:16+00:00Jun
Mazza Hazza
And during that long drive across the country, how many boxes of Tim Hortons Boston Cream donuts were consumed? Mazza.
June 12, 2012 at 9:16+00:00Jun
Nigel Featherstone
Mazza Hazza!
Wow, good to hear from you! How are things?
Regrettably there are no Bostom Cream donuts consumed in this part of the world. But ye olde Goulburn town does have its own donut shop – I might have to celebrate hearing from you with a couple of their finest. Or a dozen.