The way it was: Coastcare groups and the nature of

The way it was: Coastcare groups and the nature of nature in Australian cities Aidan Davison Lecturer School of Geography and Environmental Studies University of Tasmania Juliet Chapman Honorary Research Associate School of Geography and Environmental Studies University of Tasmania KEYWORDS environmental groups, coastcare, native, contested natures, Australian cities ABSTRACT This paper sets the ‘coastcare movement’ in the context of shifting attitudes toward and experience of nature in Australian cit ies. It is argued that growing interest in urban nature, such as reflected in coastcare, is intensifying contests over the status of different ideas about the nature of nature. Drawing upon both the personal involvement of the authors in urban coastcare groups and upon interviews with members of such groups in Perth, Melbourne and Hobart, the paper explores some of the ways scientific, personal and cultural interests get bound together in coastcare movements. In particular, the paper explores the emotional commitment to ‘return’ coastal environments to the ‘way they were’. This commitment sheds some light on the conflict between purely scientific and community-based approaches to environmental management. At the heart of social movements such as coastcare is an emerging politics of belonging, one grounded in ideas of nativeness and biodiversity that extend well beyond strictly ‘objective’ interpretations. While drawing upon science, the work of such groups needs to be understood and represented as inherently political as well, being a response to social processes such as globalisation as much as to changes in ‘the environment’. It is argued that to advance their social aspirations, coastcare groups need not just to advocate ecological diversity, but to incorporate a self-reflexive interest in a diversity of social values.

PROLOGUE: JULIET’S DISQUIET From 1966 to 1973 as a child and adolescent I rambled around the coastal Hobart suburb of Taroona with my friends. We were stamping our mark on the beach, bush, streets and creeks. We weathered the ‘67 bushfires, and the floods that some years later that washed away the path to the beach. We ate fruit found hanging over fences, growing in gullies and on spare blocks, We dropped trails of pips and seeds, had berry and cherry plum wars and squashed passionfruit beneath our feet as we fought our way through the tangle of vines. Some families used she- oaks as Christmas trees and others radiata pines, all cut from local bushland. Somewhere along the line cotoneasters became everyone’s favourite plant and boneseed became the dominant understorey of foreshore and hillsides. Around 1991 I started my first Landcare group at Taroona primary school, which my children were then attending. The’ big bush’ next to the school had just been cleared to make way for housing for the elderly. The children were upset. I had just finished my Master of Environmental Studies and was full of facts and figures about the demise of the planet. I was fuelled by a good dose of righteous indignation and was firmly on the high moral ground. I knew there wasn’t much time to right the wrongs that were being done. And I was a purist – only native vegetation grown from local provenance seed.

Now 15 years later, after years of working with Tasmanian communities on environmental projects in urban and rural environments, I am no longer sure what I am doing. I have just started another Coastcare group at Blackmans Bay and my approach is very different. Like Taroona, Blackmans Bay is a suburb located near the mouth of the Derwent River estuary. It has a well used sandy beach, cliffs and rocky foreshore, and is a popular spot for snorkelling and diving. The local Council has recently upgraded services at the beach, which has meant concrete neatness, roads and parking. The area has also been landscaped with a mixture of plants local to the area and other coastal plants from who knows where. I preferred it how it was, but know I am in the minority. The cliffs and beach are lined with houses most of which have been there for the past 20 years, some for 50 years or more. The reserved coastal zone contains a mixture of native plants, interspersed with environmental weeds such as cotoneaster, boneseed, canary broom, African boxthorn, banana passionfruit, sweet pittosporum. Many of these plants are evident in gardens around the neighbourhood, including my own. In this highly modified landscape, what is the role of an environmental care group? There are a few simple answers to this question such as, clean up litter, raise awareness about responsible pet ownership and beach use (so that penguins and other seabirds are given space to nest), keep stormwater and sewage pollution in front of the nose of Councillors and object to inappropriate development on the coast. In such landscapes, there are also good reasons for conserving and replanting native vegetation and encouraging native animals to remain and, in some cases, to return. But there is something missing in the now familiar story of native vs exotic species that has been niggling at me for a long time. That is an acknowledgement that we can’t retrieve what is lost and go back to an original, native condition. We have to reinvent how we relate to the nature we have helped create. We can continue to spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours of volunteer labour trying to recreate a state of environment we have lost or we can pause and look at what’s happening now, more than 200 years into colonial occupation of this country, a time in which every aspect of the nature of Australia has been in some way changed. As soon as the first Europeans arrived, and the lives of Aboriginal Australians were disrupted, the landscapes (and seascapes) established over tens of thousands of years by people, plants and animals was on the way to being lost. So too, new forms of landscape were on the way to being made. Many of the relationships colonial Australians have unwittingly created in this land benefit plants and animals that struggled to survive in the old ‘natural’ Australia. Some species we have brought in are thriving, sometimes at the expense of native species, sometimes not. Native is not necessarily good and exotic bad. We have to examine the language we use as environmental carers so that we can truly begin to see the relationships that are developing in this new landscape. This won’t stop us managing the landscape. Like most animals and insects we are gardeners of the world. We promote what we want and seek to keep other elements of the world in check. We are consta ntly in relationship with every other living thing around us. Holding on to a fiction that we live in a ‘human space’, we are often not conscious of these relationships. Once this fiction is challenged, however, we may learn that the environments we have helped make are not necessarily as unnatural or as in need of redemption to a state of innocence as we often assume. They remain, nonetheless, desperately in need of our care. INTRODUCTION Juliet’s disquiet is not hers alone. From our personal involvement and our research interest in them, we know new questions are beginning to be asked about nature within some environmental groups in Australia . We know also that books such as Tim Low’s (2002) The New Nature have put to a broad audience the view that ideas such as wilderness and native may not be infallible guides in the journey towards sustainability in 21st century Australia .

Such heresy has perhaps been building, unobserved, for some time through the addition of small, everyday observations. Take, for instance, this confession from Densey Clyne (1993, 111-112) , one of the more astute chroniclers of nature to be found in Australia’s newspapers, that she ‘rather likes’ Indian myna birds: Of course they shouldn’t be here in Australia. It’s more than likely they’ve displaced some native species around the suburbs by competing for food and nesting sites. But they are amiable and cheerful birds. And I write of wildlife in the suburbs not as it ideally should be, but as it is. A similar confession is to be found in the latest book of a pioneer of Australian environmental science as notable as George Seddon: The danger of confusing political with natural boundaries has already been illustrated by the kookaburra which, like the plants, knows nothing of nationality or state boundaries. Birds know nothing of the nationality of plants, either (2005, 12). Such musing on the relative ly recent arrival of Kookaburras in Western Australia leads Seddon to conclude that he holds “two incompatible value systems” (2005, 236). On the one hand, he understands that “evolution is change” (2005, 236); that weedy, colonial species have always played an important role in this change; that humanity is perhaps the weediest species of all; and that the “recent return of the native to public esteem … is a gallant rearguard action against global forces, both natural and cultural” (2005, 234). On the other hand, Seddon maintains that there remain good reasons to resist such change and to struggle to conserve local ecological distinctiveness and biodiversity. It is interesting, nonetheless, that the reasons he offers for taking up this struggle are as much social and cultural as they are natural. Seddon’s observation that increased interest in native species raises social as well as environmental questions forms the foundation of this paper. Its content is unashamedly speculative. Its purpose is chiefly to encourage debate and interest in such questions. In the context of this conference, then, we advocate the need for conservation professionals, community members and social researchers to work together in seeking to better understand the social as well as the environmental dimensions of coastcare groups.

CARING FOR NATURE IN AUSTRALIA’S COASTAL CITIES The recent return of native species to public esteem in Australia is undoubted. So too, we suggest, is a related growth of interest in urban naturea category we shall here take to include suburban and even some peri-urban environmentsover recent years in Australia . For a start, and after a long history of neglect, the subject of urban ecology is now firmly on the Australian research agenda (eg., Daniels and Tait 2005; Lunney & Burgin 2004). This interest reflects a wider recognition amongst ecologists of the role of disturbance and flux in the evolutionary processes. As Low puts it, with the recognition that Australian cities are “extraordinary places[,] … far more significant, ecologically, than most of us think” (2002, 106), comes also recognition that “nature is seldom as natural as we think ” (2002, 57). Interest in urban nature is not, however, confined to ecologists and conservationists (Davison & Ridder 2006). Policy makers, social scientists, community groups, the media and urban residents in general have also begun to think about, represent and interact with the non-human dimensions of cities in new ways. There has been a proliferation of alternative perspectives about urban environments and their sustainability, and a proliferation of debates about the management of animals, plants, water, landscapes and coastlines in cities. Especially coastlines. As recent hype about ‘seachange’ reveals, the iconic status of the beach in Australian culture is going through a period of intense revival. Yet this revival is as much a process of re-invention, and one in which questions of nature are vital. Urban beaches and coastlines are increasingly represented as much more than the human playgrounds of the past. More importantly, the historical function of the coast in Australian settler society as a zone of ambivalence is changing. No longer is the coast a veranda, a space neither inside nor outside, as Philip

Drew (1994) so astutely observed it had been for so long. Rather than providing a vantage point from which settler Australians could gaze over water toward a distant homeland while keeping a wary eye on the unfamiliar immensity behind them, the coast is gaining recognition as more than an adjunct to something else. To a growing number, urban coastlines, in particular, appear to be taking on significance as nothing less crucial points of orientation in the encounter between cultural and natural realities in Australia . Coasts may be becoming, that is, spaces in which culture and nature are no longer defined through opposition to each other, but through entanglement with each other. We suggest that Australia’s environmental care movements have played a significant role in the changes sketched out above. Taking hold first in rural environments, in the form of landcare, these movements have spread rapidly over the last fifteen years within the suburban coastal cities in which the majority of the Australian population has made its home for over 50 years now (Salt 2001). Such groups are well-known to environmental policy-makers and managers. They have, in fact, been deliberately cultivated for a decade now by a Federal Government policy of devolving responsibility for environmental managementvia the National Heritage Trust and associated funding mechanismsto voluntary community groups. This policy has not been universally celebrated. Some conservation scientists, for instance, have argued that the funding of such groups has come at the expense of scientific research. Not only this. They argue that the work of such groups, while wellintended, is often misdirected, unscientific, poorly monitored and inadequately coordinated across ecologically meaningful scales (Lunney et al. 2002). Whatever their environmental merits, however, the number of these groups has grown at extraordinary speed, potentially changing the character of Australian environmental awareness in the process. Rural environmental care groups have long been a subject of social research and have a justifiably international profile as a positive example of community-based environmental management (Lockie 2004; Wilson 2004). Urban environmental care groups, however, remain almost entirely undocumented in the Australian ‘landcare’ literature. This neglect of what seems, on the surface, at any rate, to be the rapid emergence of a significant social movement is perhaps not surprising. As noted above, it has long been the case that questions of nature and questions of culture have been treated separately and preferably in separate disciplines, by researchers. While wilderness has been represented as the rightful home of authentic nature, the city has been presented as the home of culture. Since the 1960s, the environmentalist defence of nature in Australia has been explicitly organised around the idea of wilderness. In this defence, real, authentic nature is argued to begin at road’s end, beyond the lights of the city. By implication, the urban majority of the population has been understood to live in tragically fallen environments in which dreams of escapeto commuter bush blocks, eco-tourist weekend retreats, Arcadian hamlets by the seaoffer most hope of reunion with nature. The irony, of course, is that environmental movements in Australia have had, until recently, an overwhelmingly urban constituency (Hutton & Connors 1999).

ECOLOGY AND DESIRE IN URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL CARE One result of the conceptual, not to say, physical, opposition of culture and nature in Australian settler society, is that the idea of urban nature has been virtually absent from Australian discourse, until recently. Social researchers interested in exploring relationships to nature have generally headed out of cities to do so. Little is thus known about the ways in which stories of nature not built around the purity of wilderness and the impurity of the city may be have begun to be told with increasing confidence. At a pragmatic level, little is known about exactly how many people are involved in urban environmental care groups, and of what demographic composition, or how many within the wider community are broadly sympathetic towards their aims and activities. As one way of responding to this lack, one of us has recently conducted interviews with members of environmental groups, including coastcare groups, in three coastal cities (Davison 2006). While this material has informed the argument set out here, it awaits comprehensive reporting. We do know, because it is their explicit aim and one championed in countless grant applications, that the majority of environmental care groups are acting upon a general concern to defend precolonial

ecologiesthat is, those ecosystems thought to have been in place at the time of European colonisationagainst weedy invaders. We know also that such groups are equipped by the Australian preoccupation with gardening, and particularly with a gardener’s familiarity with weeding, as they seek to ‘reclaim’ and ‘restore’ a variety of urban open spaces, from waterways and coastlines to remnant bushland and disused landfills. It seems to us worth asking, for instance whether positive intent to remove environmental invaders may be, in part, fuelled by guilt over the colonisation of indigenous cultures and resultant uneasiness at the ‘introduced’ and ‘invasive’ status of nonAboriginal Australians. Equally important is the question of whether positive desire to preserve local ecological distinctiveness fed by anxiety stemming from the erosion local social distinctiveness by the intensifying flows of globalisation and resultant desire for new ways of belonging (Landstrom 2005; Lien 2006). To ask such questions is not, in our view, to diminish or seek to undermine the dedicated voluntary work done by members of environmental care groups in Australia’s coastal cities. Nor has it stopped us from joining in this work. Our aim in this brief and, we admit, somewhat polemical paper has not been to dismiss concerns about biodiversity, ecological sustainability and environmental carelessness. We have argued, though, for such concerns not to be hidden behind the inscrutable face of objective, a-social ‘nature’. As Juliet observed in the prologue with which this paper began, the challenge faced by these groups, and by all Australians, is nothing less than learning to care for the nature we have helped create. At the heart of social movements such as coastcare is an emerging politics of belonging, one grounded in ideas of nativeness and biodiversity that extend well beyond strictly ‘objective’ interpretations. While drawing upon science, the work of such groups needs to be understood and represented as inherently political as well, being a response to social processes such as globalisation as much as to changes in ‘the environment’. To advance their social aspirations, coastcare groups need not just to advocate ecological diversity, but to incorporate a self-reflexive interest in a diversity of social values that may energise them.

EPILOGUE: PINING FOR HOME People develop relationships with their environment often at an unconscious level. Landscapes and seascapes become embedded in body sense and is integrated into the memory of every day experiences. It becomes part of the fabric of personal history and strongly contributes to shaping our values. When loved landscapes are threatened they are strongly defended. Mature radiata pines growing on the coast at Taroona on top of an aboriginal midden seem perfectly sensible choices for removal by the local Taroona Environment Network, a dedicated coastcare group that has been working to restore the natural values of the area over a period of more than ten years. These trees are the centre of a passionate and often nasty debate going on in Taroona at the moment. They have value to some local people who strongly object to their removal. Are they wrong? I don’t think so, but I don’t think they are automatically right either. There are layers in any landscape that reflect different histories of use and experience and desire. What we value most highly at any given time rests of restlessly shifting social sands. Taroona was, not so long ago, a farming landscape of orchards and crops. The hills were stripped bare of native vegetation. Now there is a good cover of woodland on the hills, between the housing areas, that grew back when the farming stopped. The place where the school stands was part of the territory of the Big River Tribe for thousands of years. The point is covered in a midden that extends under playing fields and buildings. The people and that lifestyle have long gone from Taroona. A farm was there before the school. The old farmer and his house were still part of the school grounds when I went to school there. The house was demolished when the old man died. Is wife is said to have planted the pines, which have hidden numerous student misdemeanours from the vigilant eyes of teachers on duty. They are part of the fabric of the teenage history of the generations of past and current students. Now there is another layer being created in the landscape that values native vegetation in public open spaces of Taroona. In the past ten years or more TEN (which I founded) have altered the public coastal landscape. Swathes of boneseed, blackberry, mirror bush, cotoneaster and broom varieties have been removed

and the areas replanted with native vegetation. I thought it was the right thing to do. I still don’t think it’s wrong or misguided. I just wonder whether it’s necessary to be quite so zealous. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Aidan Davison acknowledges the contribution of Ben Ridder to ideas put forward in this paper, the generous involvement of interviewees in research informing this paper and the support of the Australian Research Council (Discovery-Project 0344074). Both authors also wish to acknowledge the many inspirational and generous neighbours and friends who they have worked alongside and continue to work alongside in the name of care for coastal environments. REFERENCES Clyne, D., 1993, The Best of Wildlife in the Suburbs (Oxford University Press, South Melbourne). Davison, A., 2006, Urban nature and Australian environmentalism: The urban experience of members of environmental groups in Hobart and Perth. Proceedings, State of Australian Cities Conference II, Brisbane, Nov-Dec 2005. Davison, A. & Ridder, B., 2006, Turbulent times for urban nature: conserving and re-inventing nature in Australian cities, Australian Zoologist (forthcoming). Drew, P., 1994, The Coast Dwellers: a radical reappraisal of Australian identity (Penguin Books, Melbourne). Hutton, D. and Connors, L., 1999, A History of the Australian Environment Movement (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Landstrom, C., 2005, 'A More Authentic Australia': cultural narratives in biological control research, Science as Cu lture 14 (1):59-75. Lien, M., 2006, Weeding Tasmanian bush; biomigration and landscape imagery. In Holding Worlds Together; Ethnographies of Knowing and Belonging, edited by M. E. Lien and M. Melhuus (Berghahn, Oxford) (forthcoming). Lockie, S., 2004, Collective agency, non-human causality and environmental social movements: a case study of the Australian 'landcare movement'. Journal of Sociology 40 (1):41-58. Low, T., 2002, The New Nature: Winners and Losers in Wild Australia (Penguin, Melbourne). Lunney, D., Dickman, C. and Burgin, S. (eds), 2002, A Clash of Paradigms: Community and Research-Based Conservation (Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, Mosman, NSW). Salt, B., 2001, The Big Shift: welcome to the third Australian culture, the Bernard Salt Report (Hardie Grant Books, Melbourne). Seddon, G., 2005, The Old Country: Australian Landscapes, Plants and People (Cambridge University Press, Melbourne). Wilson, G. A., 2004, The Australian Landcare Movement: towards 'post-productivist' rural governance? Journal of Rural Studies 20:461-484.