Somebody saved this place
when somebody wanted to
mine
cut
design it up
in an image of their own making
Somebody loved this place
when somebody wanted to turn it
burn it
raze it to the ground
Somebody felt this place
even when they couldn’t hear
the tiny worlds beneath the sand
between where the bees dive
and the spiders weave webs of steel
across skin the shape of stringybark
and leaves fringed in zigzag.
Somebody breathed in the boronias
and watched
the banksias glow like lanterns
as the day cooled
Somebody touched this place
and left their footprints
in the dark.
Thinking and writing about Cooloola is a grand process. It has taken me days to unfurl my thinking and write about this place and I feel I have only just begun. Where do I start? How do I end?
I could write about the fact I walked 100 kilometres of this country on the traditional lands of the Kabi Kabi and Butchulla people over five days. I could write thousands of words just about that first twenty kilometres: vast wallum country, where the shrubs and grasstrees level up to my chest, the banksias punctuate the vast plain and the top of the dune reveals a story of coastline that goes on forever.
I could write about the way I pause for far too long to gaze deep into the heart of the matter. I could write about the fringe on the leaves, the height of the pines, the pin-drop holes in the ground: home to bees, bandicoots and other burrowing kin.
I could write about the way the wind whispers here in a way that doesn’t require words but still sends shivers down my spine. I could write about the sound of an owl’s wing, a booming baseline cutting through the cicadas’ evening chorus.
I could write about the heaviness of my pack. How it weighed me down but was still lighter than the demands on a working mother.
The challenge in writing Cooloola comes because poetry is essential to this place. You have to get the silence right, and understand its vibrations. Its is almost unsurprising then that its most fervent protectors were one of Australia’s greatest poets and one of its greatest painters. Judith Wright and Kathleen McArthur’s conservation work ensured permanent conservation of Cooloola, one of the most fragile areas of coastal dunes and vegetation in southern Queensland.
There is a poetry to Cooloola. Even the name has rhythm. The story of Cooloola is spoken speak in sketches and scribbles. It requires holding on and and paying attention.
There is also more than poetry in this place. There is a poesis.
My research is forever leading me back to the work of sociologist Kathleen Stewart. Stewart works with what she calls “weak theory”. That is, she is interested in “attending to the textures and rhythms of forms of living as they are being composed and suffered in social and cultural poesis”.
The Merriam Webster dictionary defines poesis as meaning “to make”. For Stewart, poesis is a “composition”, one that is “traced through the gen- erative modalities of impulses, daydreams, ways of relating, distractions, strategies, failures, encounters, and worldings of all kinds.”1
The word poesis is etymologically connected to the word poetry.
Like I said, there is a poetry to Cooloola. Even the name has rhythm. But there is also poesis.
When it comes to Cooloola I can’t help thinking about another kind of poesis, what the French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous calls “poethics”
To write with poethics, says Cixous, is to “write where it vibrates” …to write where “there is sending, dispatching, there is jostling together, reverberating; it echoes through our memory, through our body, through our foreign memories with which we communicate our subconscious. What is of interest to all human beings is what we call the affects, what we are preoccupied with: the pre- of the occupation, or the post- of the occupation.”2
Cixous says poethics, or “poetry with philosophy”, is the most difficult of all writing, requiring both the silences, and the vibrations.
There is a silence to Cooloola. It is a silence that only poetry can fill.
And yet, the forest can also be a noisy place. It is a place that vibrates. And so I have to write that too.
Kathleen Stewart, “Weak Theory in an Unfinished World”, in Journal of Folklore Research.
Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing.