An Extract from Watershed: A discussion about the Avon River catchment Region of the Western Australian wheatbelt—From York to Lake Grace

Literary Review, Fall, 2001 by Glen Phillips, John Kinsella

Watershed is an ongoing conversation between Glen Phillips and John Kinsella, arising out of a common interest in the Avon River catchment area in the wheatbelt of Western Australia. John Kinsella's family live by the Avon at York, and Glen Phillips spent his formative years in Southern Cross, on the extreme Northern edge of the catchment, and in wheatbelt towns. The Avon is not a long river, and makes its final journey to the sea as part of the Swan River, with its mouth at Fremantle, but its catchment area is equal to the size of the island-state of Tasmania. The territory it covers is diverse--from the marginal lands with salt lakes around Southern Cross on the edge of desert country, through to the comparatively lush and fertile Avon Valley with its wheat and sheep economies. One thing, apart from the river and its catchment, links the varying geographies--destruction of land by European farming practices (wholesale clearing, mono-cultured crops, salinity etc), and the erasure of indigenous land custodianship through occupation by `settler cultures.' Watershed is an exploration of ways of articulating this crisis, and a dialogue that might contribute towards bringing an external focus to this tragedy. It is also a very personal interaction with a spatiality and history that are fluid and problematic. Questions of identity, rights and issues of `belonging,' language and culture are exchanged and considered. Both parties are in varying degrees `returning'--Phillips from the city of Perth, and Kinsella from many years living overseas, especially in Cambridge, England. Comparative models evolve and dissolve, observation and `listening' drive shifting perspectives. This is an extract from the first Watershed conversation. Others have been recorded, but are yet to be transcribed. Still others will be recorded in the future.

J: Registration: LDW70 on galvanised fencing--galvanised roofing nails--holding it in place--there are the things that are making the background sound and we've got the microphone on the Danger High Voltage plate--roofing nails holding it in place working as an amplifier--a wooden cross-beam and four wires--we're looking out over North Lake Grace which is almost empty ... it reminds me of a desiccated Ouse River right up in the north of the English Fens--it's quite incredible--with the flood plains--all the vegetation is wrong--or right as the case may be--I'm having location problems--at the moment and I'm transcribing one landscape into another--but the Ouse would never be so dry.

G: Sorry can't hear because of the wind ...

J: The actual surface of the lakebed--across the other side of the causeway--looks incredibly fine--very flat--very fine--very fine sandy soil--there's the odd bit of the old bottle and rubbish floating round--but salt bush--on the edge--the periphery, maybe, is the word. The wind has shaped these trees apparently. Very high trees leaning on the eastern edge of the lake ... Enriching emptiness ... a sense I've felt nowhere else in the world but here, where there's vast open space, it's entirely full and occupied. A little further across from where I'm standing there's a couple of star pickets out in the space in the lake bed and they've got some fencing wire on them--another marker. As Glen was saying earlier we're looking at points along the journey--the same way that I'm looking at moments in time--for me--and sort of having them collide together and move through each other and having a sense of both dislocation and intense sense of belonging as well--in a couple of weeks I'll go back to the Cambridgeshire Fens where I'm writing my Fenland poems. And I will become dislocated again and have a sense of not belonging and work hard through that phase. Trying to relocate myself in that place--and I will reconstruct this landscape in the Fen landscape in the same way as at the moment I'm struggling to reconstruct the Fen landscape--that area of great drainage--and totally human-constructed environment in this place. The sound in the distance is possibly a truck moving towards us--it's upwind so it's super intense--yes, it's another large vehicle with a warning light on top--possibly carrying equipment to the mines--I'm not sure--this is the third one we've seen. After travelling basically the whole distance without seeing more than half a dozen cars on the road we've seen four heavy vehicles in the space of maybe ten minutes--an overlength vehicle--it's carrying heavy equipment--carrying fanning equipment--looks like a large hay rake.

On the lake--the sun on the lake is quite incredible isn't it? It's burning into the water. It s actually literally melting the water--it's like it's forming a concave pit.

G: There's a causeway further up they call Bennett's Crossing and with a bit of luck when we get there we can see the sunset as the sun is actually going down and get the colour changes--it's really quite a unique place.

J: Clouds coming across, walking out onto the salt flat--past the residue of a fence--walls of wire rusted together--russet--henna--and the fence posts bleached--fragmented--shreds of bone--compacted together--the sand is bleached also--white--large crystals--and that familiar crunch of salt--ground is incredibly muddy and tacky and underneath is a black thick ooze--old tyres placed along the edge of the gravel road--reaching out into the salt lake--against erosion I guess--it's like a sandy beach along the rim--I'm tracking my way along now--over my shoulder some distance ... Isolation--sheep bones--ant trails--an ant nest--changes very slightly in a very short distance--now it's like the bottom of a farm dam--cracked--like chunks of dead skin--it is a body--a body without organs--I'm now in the lake--in the dry lake--I am part of its function--or am I appropriating? Trying to define a presence where I don't belong--maybe I belong with the tyres? The ground is hardening beneath my feet--I'm getting slowly up out of a depression--there are kangaroo prints going out on the salt--right into the lake bed--rhymically patterned--almost in the shape of a reverse question mark--and they just stop and they don't go anywhere--it is very hard to work out how the kangaroo returned--I won't want to know--or maybe it's not for me to know--that's what I'm continually troubled by--no matter how many humans have invaded this place--we have no right to be here--human invasion is another one--you can't hide behind and say well--they've already done this and this is already done therefore my being there won't add to the problem--every single step into the place is another invasion--imagine in mid-summer it would just sizzle--it would burn--suddenly you slip--the mud is just below the surface--the ooze--the veins in this body are running with thick blood--primal ooze--lift further and further out of the mud out of the basin, the lake bed goes dry and hard--the trees are burning.