M - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

I
am looking very closely at an emergency evacuation
notice in the reference herbarium of the Perth
herbarium in Western Australia. My car has driven
me here, almost against my will. When I entered the
front door, the receptionist immediately pointed where I
was to go – he at least, seemed to know why I was
there. I followed the direction of his finger into a room
full of about fifteen people, sitting around a big table
upon which were scattered a number of white sheets of
paper with dead plants attached to them. The room was
full of animated conversation, but when I entered, the
conversation came to an abrupt halt and everyone
looked in my direction. They also brandished fingers and
I mutely obeyed their gesture, finding myself in the room
with the aforementioned emergency evacuation notice.
This room was also busy and there were a lot of shelves
and microscopes. I did not know why I was there and
examined a fire extinguisher for clues. Eventually, I
realised I needed to backtrack, to make my way back to
reception and to genuinely ask for help. I knew this was
big, but I didn’t know where to find the entry door.
A couple of years before this encounter I had
arrived in Western Australia with the aim of
understanding something about the country of my birth.
One of the key texts I read at this time was by the
pioneering environmentalist and thinker George Seddon,
who had arrived in Western Australia a generation
Gregory Pryor
Isopogon asper R.Br., 2004, Photograph by the artist � Gregory Pryor
92
before me. As he made his way out into the alien
landscape, where the low heath land is densely packed,
ancient plants scratched his legs, and he couldn’t grasp
what was before him. Eventually, a sense of the
landscape unfolded for him through the close
observation of the plants. (1)
One of my first visits to the natural environment
of Western Australia was to the foothills of the Darling
scarp which delineates the end of the Swan coastal plain
around the city of Perth. Getting out of the car I saw a
floral display unlike anything I had ever seen anywhere in
my life. What made this even more startling was that the
strange and proliferate flowers seemed to be emerging
from or even levitating above black undergrowth that
looked as if it had been scorched from a bushfire the
previous summer. Little did I know that this was my first
encounter with one of the key relationships in the
landscape of Western Australia - the symbiotic
relationship of much of the flora with fire.
The ‘soil’ underfoot was a paradox also – it was
actually sand (being a coastal plain) and the density of
the foliage convinced the first white explorers exploring
the upper reaches of the Swan river that the ‘soil’ must
be extremely fertile. In reality, it was the exact opposite
– a bare, sandy terrain with few nutrients but with an
extremely hardy flora consisting of some of the world’s
greatest botanical survivors, which had evolved over