Gondwanan Faerie Trees: A new Talisman

Apples and Hawthorn Berries

The Autumn sun has been warming the forest garden this week. A reprieve from the impending cold and wet months to come.  The clocks were turned back one hour and the earlier dusk settling over rooftops and neighbourhoods in town has been a small shock to the system. But like all seasonal changes, our minds and bodies adapt and adjust. Usually very quickly so that within a few days you forget that longer days ever existed.

I've just finished trudging through six days of labor in the Industrial Health Care Complex. One of modern societies largest and most profitable industries. While it does put food on the table, it also has an awful draining effect on some part or parts of me that are in sore need of regeneration and nourishment. And as usual, a whole bunch of apparently unconnected things coalesce into a congealed jelly of thoughts and musings.

I 

THE BRAIN

Im reading a book called,"The Fat Of The Land" by John Seymour, which was first published in 1961 and judging by its tone and subject matter, predates the hippy movement by almost 10 years, and the Permaculture movement by a good 20 - 30 years. Of course, perhaps its just my tendency to compartmentalize things that drives a certain cynicism about modern utopian movements. Yet I am still attracted by these ideas and people who practice and write about them. I particularly like Seymours common sense approach.

 Someone had underlined a paragraph in an early chapter entitled, "We Get a Cow." Seymour writes about milking his cow...

The economics of it are terribly obscure, and I would defy all the accountants in the world to work them out. In the first place, - an accountant would say that labour was the cheif item. But how can you assess the cost of labour that you enjoy doing? That is where I think all accountancy falls down - flat on its face. An accountant will say that a mans labour costs - say - ten shillings an hour. Or five shillings an hour. Or what have you. But supposing a man is enjoying what he is doing? Then he will do it for nothing. If I were to work in an advertising agency I would want my labour to be assessed not at ten shillings or a pound an hour, but at a million pounds an hour, at least. For that is about the value that I would put on an hour of my life - knowing as I do that its hours are limited. But when I am milking brownie, I am not wastsing ten minutes of my life. I am enjoying them. And therefore I do not wish to charge my time up for anything." 

In another paragraph, he further illustrates his suspicion of bottom line realities...

We never sell anything that we produce here, excepting Sally's pots and my writing, and the occasional calf...Once you start trying to sell the produce of the land you enter a world full of theives and rogues and bounders in which you just cannot breathe...We wish to be included out of that world, please.

 Its a humble approach to ideals that have now evolved into expensive courses and "design" and "living" principles that seem increasingly coopted by the pervasive nature of capitalism, as just another thing to buy that will give your life meaning. I, like Seymour, would like as much as possible, to avoid that, thank you very much.

II 

THE HEART

I stumbled on this blog post this morning which I thought was worth sharing.  It took my interest as I have recently experimented with making fruit leathers from the Hawthorn Berry which I shared  here. It grows locally on scrubby roadsides and in areas where early European settlement originally mushroomed.  It was brought here to use as a hedge. Like so many other  naturalised plants and trees growing prolifically on roadsides and paddocks that sought the re creation, either intentionally or not,   of the landscape of the British isles. Perhaps the memory of that landscape, rooted deep in peoples psyches, and perhaps even their DNA, evoked the need for the familiar talismans of nature.

  In England and Ireland, the Hawthorn was seen as a portal to the spiritual world. These talismans of nature may have provided some psychic comfort to those that journeyed so far from home to what must have seemed a hostile and alien land.  Perhaps their presence in the landscape here, echoed the familiar spiritual paradigms of home. Possibly, their colonization of the bush roads and new farms had more to do with the practicalities of  land management and cultivation as it was understood in the European mind of that time. But in the peasant Celtic Psyche, much like the Indigenous Psyche, we might note,  land management and cultivation was intimately entwined with spiritual beliefs and practices.   Trees and plants had as much spiritual and practical significance for both of these apparently opposing cultures. Its tempting to see in Colonization, either by people or plants or both, only oppressor and oppressed. Colonizer and Colonized. Perpetrator and Victim.  I have had this polarising attitude for many years. But maybe the way we look at how the peasant  European populations colonized the Australian landscape with plants and trees, can give us a portal into a realm of understanding that help us live better in this hybrid landscape of colonized and colonizer.

 The Hawthorn tree was known coloquially as "bread and Cheese" by peasant communities in Europe, as both its leaves and berries were a great source of nourishment, making you feel "full" as you did with bread and cheese in a subsistence economy. Indigenous communities held the trees and plants that fed them in this kind of mystical esteem too,  but, unlike European society, had no political class that sought to manipulate or control the use of land for personal profit. That came with the sheep and the Hawthorn trees.

Interestingly, it seems only peasant  communities held trees and plants in this kind of mystical esteem. The political class in Europe, and subsequently Australia, sought not to live in harmony with the landscape, but to manipulate and control  it for profit, personal gain, and the maintaining of personal political power.  Which is really still happening today. This is an interesting distinction. And learning about the history and uses of the Hawthorn tree, gives me not only some very practical knowledge, but also some insight   that illuminates a broader perspective on how people have lived, and how to live now.