Ferals: Terra-ism and Radical Ecologism in Australia - [API] Network

Ferals: Terra-ism and Radical Ecologism in Australia
Graham St John
1 The Macquarie Dictionary, 3rd edition, 1997, The Macquarie Library, Sydney.
2 A reaction to the way ‘feral’ sits uncomfortably close to the politically quiescent ‘New Age’ in
popular mediations, and the forest industry’s efforts to discredit the environmental movement by
making ‘feral’ synonymous with indolence and ‘bludging’.
3 It takes some energetic contortion to conflate these nascent chthonian others with new autochthones
who, evidencing ‘the new feralism’, supplant Aborigines in a contemporary ‘search for lebensraum’.
Yet, see D Cuthbert and M Grossman, ‘Trading places: locating the indigenous in the New Age’,
Thamyris, vol 3, no 1, 1996, pp 18-36.
4 The Dongas Tribe, ‘the nomadic indigenous peoples of Britain’, emerged to oppose the extension
of the M3 Motorway at Twyford Down in Hampshire in 1992. Donga Alex, in G McKay,
Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance Since the Sixties, Verso, London, 1996, p 137. See
also L Lowe and W Shaw, Travellers: Voices of the New Age Nomads, London, Fourth Estate
Limited, 1993, pp 112-124.
5 Other labels have included ‘new age hippie’, ‘bush punk’, ‘eco-warrior’ and ‘crusty’. According to ‘Meri’
(actually Neri—Nerida Blanpain — from the band-collective Earth Reggae), the label ‘rat people’ preceded
that of ‘feral’. M Murray, ‘Ferals: the call of the wild’, Simply Living, no 77, 1994, p 54.
6 Yet human ferality is an enigmatic disposition. Vilified as green devils and ‘pests’ by rural and
regional Australia, or adopted as ‘wild’ exotica by metropolitan Australia, ferals are cloaked in
ambivalence. For a discussion of the feral enigma see G St John, ‘Ferality: a life of grime’, UTS
Review: Cultural Studies and New Writing, November, 1999.
7 U Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London, Sage, 1992, p 137; K Eder, ‘The rise of
counter-culture movements against modernity: nature as a new field of class struggle’, Theory,
Culture and Society, vol 7, 1990, p 37.
8 A Dobson, Green Political Thought, London, Routledge, 1995.
9 C Merchant, Radical Ecology: the Search for a Livable World, New York, Routledge, 1992.
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