JK: That’s it. A custodial consciousness. And that’s the best … so really what I’m talking about, except mine’s from a vegan perspective; but really what I’m talking about is a kind of deep appreciation of indigenous/local thinking in some ways. In terms of at least the principles of tribalism, of respecting land — they have managed to keep it in an infinitely healthier state… there were all sorts of codifications.

GP: Yeah.

JK: That didn’t mean they were any better than anyone else on an individual level — this kind of noble savage thing (that indigenous people are better than the next bloke), it’s just not true. People are people wherever they are. But it’s their land and they know it. Listen, learn, respect their knowledge. Acknowledge their custodianship.

GP: The slash-and-burn thing has devastated a lot of areas of the world.

JK: Indigenous peoples traditionally and contemporaneously will use the land as much as anyone else, but the sense that the land actually has some kind of existence in its own right is fundamental. Maybe that’s the difference, that it actually lives and breathes rather than it is just purely and utterly for use. And I just think that, I’m saying this very warily and hopefully not offensively, is that a bit of that philosophy could extend a long way across — whether you’re from — a Chinese Australian, or you’re an Anglo-Celtic Australian, or whatever, you know, Italian Australian, or Greek Australian, or Iranian Australian, whatever you are, it doesn’t matter. A German Australian, or a Nyungar Australian. Or a Balladong Nyungar, or whatever it is, that kind of philosophy, is a custodial philosophy, as you say, works. And you know what, we’re going to be forced to the point of either total tyranny, where we are enslaved by corporate governments ‘in order to survive’ [the GM scientist dictatorship!], or we are going to resist this and move towards a more collective, communal, sharing, custodial situation.

GP: Yeah, John, I have to basically agree with that. It’s that custodial consciousness which is the key. And every community in the world is susceptible to losing that sense, even if it’s once gained it, or even if it is part of the culture. I was watching a very interesting documentary the other night, on the making of Ten Canoes…

JK: I’m looking forward to seeing that.

GP: First film that’s entirely scripted in [language]…

JK: I’ll just say, we’re crossing the Brockman River, named after the Brockman family in fact, who moved into the Toodyay area in the 1830s, and this is hilly country, we’re heading up to Bindoon now. We’re not in the wheatbelt really now, we’re on the fringe of it. We’re in a kind of what they call, a kind of pine, cattle, orchard, and wine country …

GP: Orange orchards … the Chittering Valley.

JK: Sorry, Glen, I interrupted.

GP: Yeah, so in this film, it was very interesting that it was a cult … they were telling a story that began in the nineteenth century with a photographer who went in and actually documented with thousands and thousands, more than, I think something more than four thousand photographs, maybe even ten thousand photographs, he made of the people in the Arnhem land in the indigenous culture. Unaffected, almost unaffected, by interaction with Western culture. Now, making a film about it in present day, the Aboriginal guys there were very conscious of what they lost, that they’d lost in those hundred years or more. And they became extremely interested in the recovery, in that custodial consciousness, about the land, also about themselves too, their own language and everything else, because it was interesting to see how they were [mixing] English even when they were speaking in dialect in the exchanges outside of the actual script of the film. Of course, well not really scripted, because it has to be semi-scripted film. The other interesting thing was the difficulty that the director was having in trying to understand what was really going on in the dynamics that would cause them; for example, none of the guys would turn up one day, because of something that he hadn’t anticipated, didn’t understand, for example, there was the situation where the men were doing all their performance, and of course they were nude.

The director said, well, we’ll shoot the scenes with the women as well, so they brought the women amateur actors in, and of course the men said no we’re not going to perform in front of the women in the nude, so they had to cancel the whole day’s shooting. They weren’t happy. Which again also reminds us of a lot of the mythology about the noble savage.

JK: Yeah, and I mean the thing is that, one of the big problems we’re talking about, destruction of this particular landscape and making any references to indigeneity, is the references become basically empty signifiers, because indigenous people are extensively dispossessed, and even if you have an indigenous person who owns a block of land, or lives in one of the neighbouring towns and so on, their legal power over that land is entirely and largely diminished. And so, becomes a kind of gesture, of what should be, what was, and not what is. It might have symbolic and spiritual force which unquestionably it does, and should have, but it has no force in law or reality in terms of Western law or reality that’s imposed on this land.

So you’re talking about what should be and what might be, as opposed to what is. And there’s a real slippage there. So, it’s the white bloke talking about using these values, and these values have been totally and utterly separated off in terms of effectiveness, if not in spirituality and symbolic meaning. So you know, really one has to tackle it at least simultaneously on a legal Western level and that becomes the kind of difficulty from our point of view, from an academic and a writing point of view, writing through and observing these things, truisms they might be. It is only as effective as what we do with the outcomes and the end result. My hope is that when we publish these Watershed dialogues, that they’re actually pushed in the faces of politicians legal people, policemen, and so on and so on and so on, and this articulates something that we have observed over a period of time, that they no doubt observed themselves and don’t particularly want to go anywhere with. It’s useless if it’s not given some kind of, something with some strength and some teeth to it.

GP: Yes, that’s the next phase. Hopefully, we can make people listen. You can make people listen to poetry, but a very small number of people. And many of them are people who are half converted anyway. So much harder to reach the rest of them. And we are masters at resisting the things that we don’t really want because they seem to hard or too frightening, or too alarming, or simply not pleasant enough for us.

JK: So we’re approaching Bindoon now, I believe. We’re in that area. We’ve got some sheep, white gum, that’s planted actually on the side of the road there, bit of jarrah, a lot of clearing for orchards …

GP: We should have gone that way …

JK: Yeah, we should have gone that way …

And it’s hilly, rolling green pasture as they say. A lot greener than where I come from … east from here … further east around York. Which means that they’ve had obviously more rain, but it’s still very low pasture. It’s only maybe an inch or two, so they’ve still had a lot less water than they’re used to here as well, given it’s heading into the second half of July.

JK: So we’ve just driven through New Norcia. We stopped there. I got some sundried tomatoes. Glen got some oil, and various things …

GP: Bread.

JK: And bread. And there’s a bit of water lying around here, so they’ve had a bit of rain a couple of days ago, but the crops are non-existent, basically. [The Catholic monks of New Norcia still farm their substantial land holdings.] A green tinge, and what crops there are a couple of inches high. It’s pretty grim. Glen was just saying how the first poem he had published was about April being the ‘breaker month’. And how long is it since that … it’s so true, that May used to be green. Well it hasn’t been green for years of course. The seasons have been getting later. But …

GP: The winter has had a longer tail, and that’s been our saviour for the last few years. You know, how long will that go on?

JK: Well, they’re predicting it won’t be the case this year. That it will be dry right through. Next week’s supposed to be rain, but I’ll bet it’s patchy. And the thing is for most farmers it’s come too late. Too late to seed now. You know, people have actually talked about doing so, but it really won’t work, the crops will dry out before they can come to head properly and even if they do keep going, you know the heat will get them. So it is, it really has changed. Even though we just passed through New Norcia, both Glen and I find it —I find it — a restful place, bizarrely, you know it’s got a problematical history, and so on, and there are disturbing, very disturbing aspects to it [especially regarding the theft of indigenous land, the use of indigenous labour, Christian conversion of indigenous people…] but there is something strangely, even perversely restful and meditative about the place. There’s no doubt, and it’s an anomaly that kind of bizarrely seems to fit. Of course it can’t fit … but there’s something about …