Black Swan Lake: Life of a Wetland

by Rod Giblett

Overview

Rod Giblett came to live by Forrestdale Lake in southwestern Australia in 1986. Based in part on a nature journal he kept for several years, Black Swan Lake traces the life of the plants and animals of the surrounding area through the seasons. Presenting a wetlands calendar that charts the yearly cycle of the rising, falling, and drying waters of this internationally significant wetland, this book is a modern-day Walden. The first book to provide a cultural and natural history of this place—taking into account the indigenous people’s concept of the seasons (six instead of four)—Black Swan Lake will be enjoyed by conservationists, as well as others seeking connection with place, plants, and animals in their own bioregion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781841507040
Publisher:	Intellect, Limited
Publication date:	04/15/2013
Series:	Cultural Studies of Natures, Landscapes and Environments Series
Pages:	195
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Rod Giblett is associate professor in the School of Communications and Arts at Edith Cowan University in Australia. He is the author of People and Places of Nature and Culture, also published by Intellect.

Read an Excerpt

Black Swan Lake

Life of a Wetland

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By Rod Giblett

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-704-0

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CHAPTER 1

For a Few Years

For three or four years, through the seasons, I jotted down in a notebook some occasional observations and impressions of Forrestdale Lake, what it looked like, how it smelt, what sounds I heard, what birds I saw there, what plants were present, and if and when they flowered. Those jottings form the basis for this book. They are the raw material that has been developed and extended into these writings. At the time, keeping a nature journal was an enjoyable, though seemingly pointless, pastime – except for itself. As the basis for this book it has had some point, though, and has served some purpose further down the track. The resulting book does not have much value as science (except in the sense of knowing), though it may have some value as 'poetry,' as 'nature writing,' as a record of a place, and of my sense of that place and its place in the processes of both human history and non-human nature. I wanted to connect to this place and reflect on it, and its and my life, in the broader context of 'nature' and 'society' in today's world.

Making a connection to local place, its plants, animals and their seasonal changes, seemed to me then, and still does now, a necessary response, and antidote, to the globalized world in which many people now live and work and which impacts on our lives in numerous ways. It is important to think and act locally as well as globally. Connecting to local place can be a reclusive retreat into a smaller, narrower and safer world, away from the incursions of the bigger, badder global world. But it is also a way of acknowledging and respecting the interconnectedness of all life from the local to the global and back again. Our lives are lived locally (if not also globally) and are dependent on local air, water and food, mainly supplied from within and by our bioregional home-habitat. We have aerials and cables, but we also have roots – however shallow or transient they may be. We feed off nutrients in the soil and although we may up root and change soil occasionally or frequently, we are still putting them down into a soil, drinking local water, breathing the air around us and largely eating local food. That air and soil have a history, a human and a natural history. Knowing their composition enriches our lives and helps to connect us to the other beings living in the same soil, or wetland in the case of Forrestdale Lake and its surrounding areas. That sense of mutuality between people and place is vital to conserving a place and the planet.

My observations, impressions and reflections were quite literally 'philosophy in the swamp' as I sensed, thought and often wrote there. I loved to sit in the boughs of a swamp paperbark, or on the ground leaning against the trunk of another on the other side of the lake, and look out over it and its waterbirds, listen to their calls and those of the bushbirds, to look at the wildflowers and to jot down what I saw and heard. The observations and the reflections I made, there and later on, are by no means systematic. I did not keep a journal in the strict sense of writing something every day like an explorer would do. I visited the lake when I felt like it and usually wrote while I was sitting by it. I was not attempting to record everything that was there. I recorded what came to my attention or took my fancy. No doubt I have missed out or overlooked a lot.

The recorded observations are spasmodic impressions of the life of the lake, its rising and falling waters, its residents and visitors. I wanted to tell the stories of Forrestdale Lake, to write the novel of its life, in which the major character is the lake itself, the hero of its own history. As for the minor characters, the supporting roles and the bit players, they are the native plants and animals, the banksias and melaleucas, the waterbirds and mammals, the human residents and visitors. They all play a role in the life of Forrestdale, and in its natural and human history presented in this book. It is a kind of non-fictional novel of place, people, plants and animals written from one person's point of view. Other people's points of view and stories about Forrestdale Lake are presented in the book Forrestdale: People and Place published by Access Press in Bassendean in 2006.

That book presented many people's memories and recollections of Forrestdale Lake and its surrounds. Aboriginal people camped by the lake and white people settled by it. Current residents live close to it. It plays an important part in people's stories of the place. They talk about its rising and falling waters, the birds and other animals that live around it and in it, and the plants that grow in the area. They also talk about the impacts of fire, their experience of living by the lake and the future prospects for the area.

The oldest past resident to tell her stories in Forrestdale: People and Place is Katherine Taylor Smith who was born in 1905 and came to live by Forrestdale Lake with her parents in the same year. She witnessed the passing of Halley's comet over the lake in 1910. She painted a picture of this event. She wrote a memoir of her childhood and self-published it in a book that includes this painting. When she was in her 70s she returned to Forrestdale Lake and floated on an inflatable mattress out into the middle of the lake using an umbrella for a sail, all to the mild amusement of her husband! Unfortunately Katherine passed away when she was 99 years old and before the publication of the book that retells these and other stories of hers.

The oldest present resident to tell his stories in Forrestdale: People and Place is Fred James who came to live in the same place as Katherine in 1940 and has been living there ever since, over 70 years now. He has lived longer in Forrestdale than anyone else. He tells some remarkable stories. During World War II there was a fuel dump in the banksia woodland on the east side of the lake. He and his wife, Edna, had to have a pass to get to and from their house. They also remember when the lake flooded across Commercial Road in 1963. They have a photo of this flood showing three of their kids standing on a log. This photo is on the cover of the book. Fred, Edna and Katherine are just three of the people who tell their stories of the place in the book. It is a valuable record of many people's stories about the place. Their stories are a guide to its unique and valuable wetlands and bushlands and their inhabitants. They also provide the basis for a strong call to conserve these values.

The present book is both a personal point of view and a kind of wetland almanac showing the yearly cycle of the lake, including drying and wetting, filling and emptying, birds coming and going, other animals doing things, plants growing, the other beings' other life, their life going on in another world to our usual, everyday life, the life of Forrestdale Lake. Yet rather than compressing several years into one and creating an artificial amalgamation, I want to preserve the specific features of a particular day, in a particular month, in a particular year. I want to convey what that day, at that time, in that year, was like with its unique characteristics and events. The features of the same day and in the same month over the years are different, though, of course, there are similarities, especially in the seasonal cycles of water rising and falling, birds coming and going and plants flowering. Tracing the differences and similarities between the years is part of the point of this book. Learning to appreciate the changing colours and sounds, the presence of plants and animals, through the cycles of the seasons and the years in all places, is another part of its point.

When I refer to the seasons and seasonal cycles I am not referring primarily to the four European seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter but to the local, Aboriginal Noongar people's six seasons:

Birak – dry and hot – December/January
Bunuru – hottest part of the year, with sparse rainfall – February/March
Djeran – cooler weather begins – April/May
Makuru – usually the wettest part of the year – June/July
Djilba – often the coldest part of the year – August/September
Kambarang – warmer with longer dry periods – October/November

This book is a celebration of six south-western Australian seasons. These seasons are linked to the rising and falling waters of Forrestdale Lake, which are linked to rainfall, and to the plants and animals that make this place home. Indeed, Colleen Hayward, a senior Noongar woman and head of the Kurongkurl Katijin Centre for Indigenous Studies at Edith Cowan University, says the Noongar seasons are related to the weather, not to the months, and to the changes in the plants.

Forrestdale Lake is an important, and registered, Aboriginal site. The recent favourable court ruling in the native title claim over the Perth metropolitan area recognizes ownership by the Noongar people of Crown Lands in the area. This includes Forrestdale Lake Nature Reserve. The decision of the Western Australian government to appeal against the ruling is a backward step to say the least. This is their land; this is their wetland. They have had a long association with Forrestdale Lake that demonstrates native title. Two Aboriginal men tell stories about the lake in Forrestdale: People and Place. It is a site of the waugal, the water-being, as discussed in that book. Joseph Collard, Indigenous Wetlands Project Officer with the Swan Catchment Council, wrote in an e-mail to me that Forrestdale Lake is a

[m]ythological site, hunting ground, rain-making site and camping grounds. If the waugal left the lake, so would the water, and if the waugal returned to the lake, so would the water. Sometimes you may see a mist or a fog early in the morning, that's the waugal. Forrestdale is a rain-making site, which basically means in times of drought and hot weather, Noongar people (men only) sang and brushed the reeds to seek rain and ask the spirits to change the weather. And if the spirits agreed, then [they] gave rain. Spirits live everywhere, under logs, in trees and in reeds, so deepest respect must be taken when doing this ritual. This information is sacred and must be respected. Education is also important and that is why I am sharing this with you.

I am passing this on for the same reason. I have seen mist or fog early in the morning on many occasions so I now know that that is the waugal. I did not know that the lake was a rain-making site. Perhaps our current 100-year-long drought is due to the disruption of rain-making rituals. Perhaps they are still being performed but the spirits have not agreed to give rain. Perhaps greenhouse gases are preventing the spirits from giving rain. Global warming has created these convoluted conundrums and unresolvable imponderables.

In modern western terms Forrestdale Lake is a semi-permanent body of fresh-brackish water nestled between the Bassendean sand dunes. The lake is located on the south-eastern fringes of metropolitan Perth on the Swan Coastal Plain in south-western Australia. It is at the south-western head of the catchment for the Swan River that flows through the centre of Perth and part of the Wungong-Southern River sub-catchment. These facts belie the flows of water, and of life, across and under the surface of the earth. Precisely in terms of latitude and longitude Forrestdale Lake is located at 32° 10' South and 115° 56' East. These are the coordinates for the place called home – a place on the earth and in the heart that has no coordinates. Trace these coordinates across a map, or on Google Earth, and they will not lead you to a place called home; they will not intersect on a human heart.

CHAPTER 2

Rising Waters (August/Djilba/Late Winter)

The lake is calm this morning. The water levels are slowly, but perceptibly rising, part of the drying/filling cycle that characterizes this, and other, wetlands, of the south-west of Western Australia. I walk down to the lake's edge where land and water meet and mingle, where there is no dividing line (fine or otherwise) between them. Henry David Thoreau called this area of wetlands where land and water intermingle the 'quaking zone.' This place is not fixed and stable. It can produce fear in those who desire fixity and stability. Here there is no position of mastery with feet planted firmly on solid ground to view from above the wetland lying supine below. The wetland quakes in sloshy movement and some people quake in abject fear at that movement, and their own. The quaking zone is a feature of the wetland, and human perceptions of it. Motion and emotion meet. Here, as elsewhere, humans and nature are not separate. Here you feel it in your body, in your bones and guts, your affect in a word.

My coming down to the lake disturbs some purple swamphens who rise lumbersome, like Hercules aircraft, protesting raucously at being disturbed, or at least that is how I construe it. Pizzey's field guide to Australian birds says that their 'voice' consists of 'high-pitched rasping screeches; nasal 'nerks [sic – whatever they are]; cooings; unusual liquid thuds.' I must be getting the screeches. The coots, though, are not disturbed and carry on unperturbed to let out their long drawn-out 'pee-weet' and 'glue-out,' or some such linguistic/musical bastardized annotation or approximation, sounding like a slowed-down recording of a water drop hitting a tin lid. Pizzey says their voice is 'noisy; harsh notes, a sharp "kyik!" or "kyok!"; repeated raucous screeches, "tok's", etc.' I am not getting their screeches. The swamphens must have been perturbed by my coming and protested accordingly, whereas I do not seem to bother the coots if the calls of both birds are anything to go by and I have construed them correctly.

Wearing wellies, I slosh through ankle-deep water for 50 metres until I find my favourite swamp paperbark where I sit writing notes in its gnarled and twisted branches, its roots reaching down like hoses into the life-giving ooze. There are not many of these big old paperbarks in this north-east corner (if an oval shape can be said to have a corner). There are a lot of young ones, saplings from self -sown seedlings, reaching up straight and taller than I. Do they grow, or go, twisted and bent with age like humans? Or does the wind mould and shape them every which way? To live a life sailing close to the wind, leaning into it and being moulded by it, is to live an outdoor life shaped by its forces. My life is spent too much indoors and does not grow gnarled and twisted; only slumped and sagging.

A musk duck dabbles leaving concentric ripples on the surface of the lake as a light plane flies over – Forrestdale Lake, after all, is a navigational point for Jandakot Airport – you cannot miss seeing a 200ha lake from the air. A tyre squeals and traffic drones in the background along Armadale Road as another light aircraft approaches from the south. This is no wilderness experience! The lake is not a place remote from modern industrial technology. It is more overworked nature, nature made over by modern culture – in a word, 'culnature.' Or in different terms, it is uncultivated, but modified country on the edge of the city – in a word, 'countricity.' It is not agricultural country now, though it was once when cattle fed on the western side of the lake; they are blamed for destroying the native understorey and allowing the invasion of arum lilies. In the past many people who lived here sought, and gained to some extent, their livelihood from the soil of the place. Nowadays the only people who do that are the people who work in the egg farm-factories and flower or seedling nursery-factories dotted around the place, but who do not live there by and large. Their place of work and their home are separate.

Despite the distance from the lake and the buffer zone around it, what is beyond the lake impacts on it, on its water quality for a start. Cattle grazing out to the west on low-lying ground defecate on it and yield nutrients that flow into a drain that flows into the lake. The land, water and air show the marks, visible and invisible, of settler intervention and industrial modification. There is no hard and fast divide between culture and nature, or city and country – and this place shows it.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Black Swan Lake by Rod Giblett. Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
 
Part I: Wetlands calendar
    1. For a few years
    2. Rising waters (August/Djilba/late winter)
    3. Other place (September/Djilba/early spring)
    4. Other life (October/Kambarang/mid-spring)
    5. Wetland world (November/Kambarang/late spring)
    6. Drying up (December/Birak/early summer)
    7. Dry as a rule (January–February/Birk–Bunuru/mid-, late summer)
    8. Still water (March/Bunuru/early autumn)
    9. Big puddle (April/Djeran/mid-autumn)
    10. Water’s back (June/Makuru/early winter)
    11. Birds are back (July/Makuru/mid-winter)
Part II: The downflow
    12. The ballad of black swan lake: Homage to Henry David James
    13. The black swan: Homage to hoax writers
    14. The blackness of the black swan: Homage to Herman Melville
    15. Black swamp city: Homage to Hugh Webb
    16. The body of the earth and the body of Australia: Homage to the human body
    17. The way of water: Homage to Master Moy Lin-Shin
    18. The seasons: homage to Henry David Thoreau
    19. The black arts of sublime technologies: Homage to Henry Adams
    20. People and the place of the whistling kite: Homage to Haliastur sphenurus
    21. Living black waters: Homage to horrifying marsh monsters
    22. Living with the earth: Homage to home-habitat
 
Further Reading