Belinda Probert

I was just about to give this book 3 stars but found myself pressing 4 (meaning it's certainly worth reading but not life-changing). When I'm not home in the bush, I'm in inner Melbourne, just around the corner from Belinda Probert’s house. I've seen her walk past and I think we've nodded, but we've yet to get acquainted. A neighbour (thanks David) suggested I read it because I've an abiding interest in sense of place and notions of belonging. Unlike Belinda I'm fortunate to feel that I belong to a place that found me.

My edition of Imaginative Possession with its scattered greyscale photos and small font has a self-published quality. Turning the first page of this gardener's memoir of separation of self from surrounds, I was convinced I would dislike both the book and its author. Like many Australians, I nurture a lip-curling disdain for the pervasive species of Englishwoman who, through opportunity or obligation, make Australia home and then, from some imagined or opportunist level of superiority, due to their hard-wired sense of class, complain.

A dimension of the book's title flagged an entitled 'pommie' arrogance. But I read the book quickly, hoping for something better and by the end, found myself feeling I had been listening to an old friend and enjoying her familiar company. Belinda has a relaxed but academic style of writing where, structurally the book moves from research question to method, to conclusion. She anticipated some of my reservations about, for example, the veracity of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu. My predisposed bristles flashed with impatience at her repetition of the line about her childhood in the chalky North Downs of Kent. Could this be some form of shorthand for an entitlement she had given up? Was it a deeper connection to land than she cared to examine?

What I liked most was something Belinda refers to as her 'personality disorder'; her inquisitive need to conduct research, pursue facts and listen to others. Her reading list is impressive but predictably conventional. I wondered if she might (like Robert Macfarlane) uncover an Australian Nan Shepherd or Jacquetta Hawkes whose book, A Land, ties an Englishwoman's self to the earth and its processes. Most of the books she turns to for advice are on my shelves. But I also wondered about the depth of her comprehension of the heroic struggles against a Eurocentric concepts of agriculture and hydrology that are the substance of Massy’s Call of the Reed Warbler (mentioned) and the battle to save Peter Andrews regenerative show-case Tarwyn Park from Korean coal miners (not mentioned). Belinda's investigations touch on the story of what could be called the pastoral era in Australia. This is a nation shaping story that few urban dwellers know of and that regional/rural Australians recall (if at all) wistfully, as personal loss. The greater part of our national story is, and continues to be, about loss. Victor Steffensen’s species specific Fire Country adds yet another dimension not only to loss but dispossession. Perhaps that’s why our national commemorations are not about victory and success but failure and defeat?

Having chaired the Southern Otway Landcare Network for some years and driven from Melbourne to Apollo Bay twice a week, I felt a deep empathy with her descriptions of the drive out of Melbourne to her house in the Otways through the ever-expanding blight of tract housing for new migrants. But Belinda appears to have missed (or edited out) the wealth of ideas that could have been found in the Otways had she spoken to passionate locals like Rowan Reid of the Otway Agroforestry Network or perhaps succumbed to transformative encounters with the Southern Aurora on crystal nights. Similarly, there is so much more she could have said about the way the flora of the street she now lives in exemplifies government ineptitude and the aesthetics of migrant thinking.

It’s not until the final chapter of this book (the conclusion) that she begins to examine the important questions about belonging and possession. But almost as soon as these questions begin to form, she turns away, preferring intellectual (even social) engagement to the visceral and retreats into platitudes about sausage sizzles.

The need for possession (in the title) could be the source of her sense of alienation? Gardening is an underlying thread in this book. The very act of gardening, in Australia, especially in the bush, asserts a form of destructive possession that since colonisation has served to wreck and lay waste to so much of this country. Gardening is an attitude of mind that seeks to dominate and shape a place - usually to a foreign aesthetic. Ownership (possession) is as foreign to the natural environment in Australia as fences. Everything changes with the humility that comes with not possessing. Instead (if we choose to) we can marvel at the wonders of ecologies that are even less understood than they are described.

Apologies, I had set out to write just a few lines here. This book prompts thought by covering familiar ground and what more can we ask of a book - short of revelation? Anyone interested in being stimulated would enjoy this gardener's memoir. There's a lot more to discuss with Belinda if she's open to it? Maybe I should just go and knock on her door? I'd love to talk about enchantment and how the land itself can not only possess us but speak to us, if we can learn to listen... In Place… (más)

Tucked up in the LH corner of the book cover, Helen Garner sums up the impact of this book so well:

'A wonderfully friendly and likeable book. It put me in a good mood for days, and taught me a thousand important things.'

A friendly book. A likeable book. These are not words we hear too often about the books we read, but in this case they're true. I've been reading Belinda Probert's Imaginative Possession at lunch time, a chapter each day, and as I've bonded with the author through the words on the page, it's furnished me with interesting things to think about and new ways of looking at my world.

You might remember from a previous post when this book was a giveaway from Upswell Press, that I liked the subtitle Imaginative Possession, Learning to Live in the Antipodes because it makes it clear that migration takes effort and humility. As a newcomer in many places, a migrant in others, and an outsider in all of them, I know this, and am sometimes impatient with the current narrative about migration being so much a matter of pain, loss and resentment against the host country. Migrants, as distinct from refugees, choose to come here, and they have an entitlement to go home again if Australia doesn't suit them. When refugees can't go home because it's not safe, and so many displaced people around the world have nowhere to go at all, it's a privilege to have a secure homeland.

Humility is not just about recognising that extraordinary privilege, it's also about recognising a responsibility to learn about the new country. Born in England, Belinda Probert has the humility to recognise this, and this book explains her efforts to learn about Australia, and her enthusiasm for the journey. Over many years, and through periods of time in Victoria and WA, she explores landscapes; plant, animal and bird life; the concept of distance, space and scale; and Indigenous culture and storytelling. She recounts amusing anecdotes about her first bullant bite and about learning not to be sentimental about some of the creatures on her bush block. She tries and fails to develop some expertise in identifying species of eucalypts, but has more expertise with birds because there's an App for that. She wrestles (as we all do) with the issue of native plants versus exotics, the topic becoming more urgent than academic as climate change limits what can survive into the future. She reads voraciously, everything from Don Watson's The Bush, to Henry Handel Richardson's Fortunes of Richard Mahoney.

In the last part of Imaginative Possession, Probert tackles the issue of 'belonging,' and what it takes to 'belong'...

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/09/30/imaginative-possession-by-belinda-probert/… (más)