Worlds Apart

Laura Ennis

I live in a small single story wooden house, sitting on what used to be a dry creek bed at the foot of a small hill. I have called this place my home for all of my life and just like in William Wordsworth's poem, I carry a memory of it with me wherever I go. The garden is spacious, and the house is comfy. Situated behind my home are the leafy hills of Taylor Range; the annexed bushland that forms part of a large Army barracks. My neighbours are beautiful people. One of them used to work for Brisbane Forest Park, looking after orphaned possums, sugar gliders and wallabies underneath her house. She has a frog pond which is filled with Striped Marsh Frogs. In summer when it rains and dusk has past, I fall asleep listening to their soft croaking. Rosellas and galas flitter about in the Grevillia tree outside our kitchen window every morning. Possums constantly devour all my carefully thought out herb gardens (they tend to favour parsley and strawberries). In the afternoons I listen to crickets and cicadas and sometimes I spy a Blue-Tongue Lizard by our back door. For me, it is like Mircea Eliade says “No modern man, however irreligious, is entirely insensible to the charms of nature” (The Sacred and the Profane, 1959, page 151) In the far corner of our property there grows a large Tallow Wood tree that is frequented by crows. It straddles the four gardens that meet there. One of our neighbours wanted to chop it down (because of falling branches) and my mother did everything in her power to stop them. It was a personal move to Biocentrism over Anthropocentrism (as Thomas Berry notes in The Dream of the Earth, 1988, page 165) because for her, the tree was definitely more important than the roof. While talking to an elderly gentleman who used to live in our street, she discovered that this tree is well over one hundred and twenty years old; a relic from the old Tallow Wood forest that once stood here. It is now protected under an order from our local council.

I should now mention that while this place has been my home for all of my memory, it is not where I have always lived.

For a short while I lived in a very old city, one that straddles the river Vltava in the Czech Republic: known as Prague or Praha. Instead of a house, I lived on the top floor of a six storey building at the very centre of the city, and used a rickety old soviet elevator to get from floor to floor. The place stank of cigarettes and there was no colour anywhere, only dull beige, brown and grey. People here live in concrete leviathans known as "the projects". From my bedroom window I could see nothing but rooftops, spires and the skeleton of an old tree. Without knowing it I began to miss open spaces and windows full of greenery, it seemed to me a place without a soul. I was surrounded by people all the time; my dorm mates, the people who worked in the building, the people in the street below, the people in the windows across from mine, the drunk tourists shouting at each other from opposite ends of the street at three in the morning….We were all boxed in together and unable to get away. Peter Cock notes that the removal from nature in a society with a rapid throughput of “things, people and places” contributes greatly to estrangement. “Alienation from people is strongly connected to alienation from nature,” and I think I felt this way (“Towards a village based city” in Fundamental questions paper, no. 11, 1991 page 43 and “Values for sustainability” in Fundamental questions paper, no. 5, 1991 page 3). Eventually summer arrived and the skeletal tree outside exploded into green, and once, I spied a flock of pigeons and my heart fluttered as I watched them dip and soar! One time, we climbed onto the roof, and from there the view was spectacular. The city spread out all around us, like some kind of thousand year old organism growing new brick limbs and loosing old stone ones. A visual chronology of eight hundred years worth of architecture unfolded around us. I realised that while the story of this place was not so brilliantly illustrated in the simple flora and fauna surrounding us (as it had been in my home) it was instead present in the collective memories of the people who dwelled here and the buildings they had left behind. My point is; the sacrosanct can be found in urban settings, and while a lack of nature can be alienating; cities and urban environments can inspire awe and reverence (one might suppose this is why buildings as well as natural places are Heritage Listed). When compared to my home, the city felt soulless, but when looked upon with fresh eyes I could understand the venerated nature of industrialised and urban spaces. I saw Prague's Genius loci.

All the same, I still prefer my little wooden house at the foot of the leafy hills.