The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place

Figures of Life: Beverley Farmer’s The Seal Woman as an Australian Bioregional Novel

164 T H E B I O R E G I O N The Otway Plain bioregion, in the southwest of the state of Victoria, Australia, is bordered on one side by the Otway ranges and on another by the western shore of the vast Port Phillip Bay, with the town of Queenscliff sitting on its furthest point.1 On one side of this outpost town is Bass Strait, a major shipping lane that separates the mainland from Tasmania (Antarctica is the next landmass to the south); on the other, formed by the small peninsula on which Queenscliff sits, is Swan Bay. Close by is the township of Point Lonsdale. Between them, Queenscliff and Point Lonsdale have three magnificent lighthouses, all still in operation. B I O R E G I O N A L I S M A N D S E N S E O F P L A C E A sense of place is strong in contemporary Australian writing. I have seized the opportunity offered by this collection of essays to discuss the work of Beverley Farmer who, to my mind, is Australia’s most “bioregional” writer. Since her first novel, Alone (1980), Farmer has written across a number of genres—short stories, essays, poetry, mixed genre works, and the novel— always with a strong sense of place, whether of her home place or other places in which she has sojourned. As the scope of this essay does not permit an overview of Farmer’s work, I have chosen to focus on her novel The Seal Woman (1992), which offers a meticulous exploration of a cherished R u t h B l a i r Figures of Life Beverley Farmer’s The Seal Woman as an Australian Bioregional Novel Figures of Life 165 locality. It also gives us ways to think about what a “bioregional novel” might be, as one of the vehicles through which the creative imagination and language form our relationships with place. For the greater part of her writing life, Beverley Farmer has lived in Point Lonsdale, in the shadow of its lighthouse and amid its typical coastal vegetation of indigenous banksias and tea trees. Much of her writing and photography gathers within the folds of this landscape. In his essay “Landscape and Narrative,” Barry Lopez describes a “pervasive sense of congruence ” that the reader will feel upon reading a narrative whose integrity derives from respect for the “exterior landscape” in which it is conceived (66). This challenging point is borne out by Farmer’s writing that seems deeply to derive from a sense of place, not in any decorative sense but as its sine qua non. More than this, however, the inflection of Farmer’s attention is bioregional in the sense that the lives she describes are stitched into the physical environment. It is not their “setting” and they are not its “inhabitants .” Rather, life, as represented in Farmer’s writing, is a constant process of relationship and negotiation among phenomena. Farmer’s writing is highly considered in Australia, yet there remains something elusive about her work.2 I suggest that reading for the bioregion Queenscliff and the Otway Plain Bioregion, Victoria, Australia Ruth Blair 166 (as opposed to “reading for the plot”) makes The Seal Woman “readable.” It is the deep foundation that Lopez describes. The very idea of the bioregion, with its sense of locality as the way to begin to understand how we humans live on the earth, gives me a way into the core of Farmer’s work that I believe is not available when critical scholarship cleaves to human-centered approaches, seeing her environmental interests as yet another theme (with, for example, feminism) and not the groundwork of it all. I must at this point establish a position in relation to the somewhat contested ground of the bioregion. I have invoked the concept of the local and have done so in cognizance of Ursula Heise’s and others’ strong dissection and questioning of the term.3 In Australia, bioregion is well bedded down as a working term in a range of areas and government agencies, from science to agriculture to environmental activism.4 It is a term that relates to the land itself, encouraging the consideration of where one lives in terms of its “geology, landform patterns, climate, ecological features and plant and animal communities” (Australian Government, Department of Environment , Water, Heritage and the Arts...