English nature viewed through Tasmanian eyes: “poisoned, domesticated, and dead”

Richard Flanagan, one of Australia’s (and the world’s) best writers, came from a poor background in Tasmania, went to Oxford on a scholarship, and hated it. Nor did he like London. He looked to escape into the English countryside, and in his recently published Question 7 he describes what he found:

“There was nothing. The rivers were sewers no one found unusual, the sky a haze of fine smog no one any longer saw obscuring the mid and far distance. There was a long-ago poisoned land, domesticated and dead, full of the sounds of diesel and the odour of chemicals, that people nevertheless regarded as bucolic and Edenic. Agri-business, highways, signs, industrial noise, a weeping urban sore metastasising into something that brought on only the impulse to flee. There was no light there, no largeness. No one noticed anything because no one any longer knew all that was irretrievably lost.”

Tragically this is an accurate description of the English countryside, even though we do regard it as “bucolic and Edenic.” (All that has changed since Flanagan wrote these words is that there is much wider recognition that our rivers are sewers.)

I first began to see the English countryside this way when a friend told the story of how his children were admiring the “beauty” of the country side while he was thinking how it had been industrialised. Determined to do something he bought a field to show them how the countryside didn’t have to be industrialised. I now see vast fields with the hedges gone and herbicides burning away the edges and hear cars almost everywhere.

Britain is one of the most denatured countries in the world, although it has signed an international commitment to revitalise nature. But will it happen?

Tasmania, with its unique rainforests, is not as denatured as Britain, but is heading rapidly in the same direction. Flanagan writes:

“But even then [when he was a child in the 60s] the rainforest was being corroded. Soon it will be pocked with the scattered melanomas of cattle runs, pine and eucalypt plantations, fire-scabbed here and there, to say nothing of a general, growing inanity, roads to nowhere, tourist resorts, unworked mines and crowded geo-tagged Insta sites. These though will be but small insults compared to what is coming.”

The rainfall will reduce, and eventually, as has already happened in much of Australia, the forest “will start to burn.”

“The intricate, myriad, miraculous relationships the sum of which is Tasmanian rainforest, a precise confusion of tree, fern, moss, fungi and microbe, of animal and bird and insect, fish and invertebrate, that might be better described as an unknown civilisation, will, along with these words, become no more than the lost jetsam of time.”