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| Different cultures = different stories = different ways of seeing = different ways of being. |
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| Digital composite created by Csaba Szamosy for Imagine The Future from images contributed by project partners. |
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| A European pine on the foreshore of Port Phillip Bay where once only locally endemic species thrived. |
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| Photo by Merrill Findlay, for Imagine The Future Inc, 1996. |
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People of different cultures have viewed the basalt plain in very different ways.
In pre-colonial days, the indigneous peoples felt part of the plain in a way that was deeply spiritual, and told stories that linked them with every plant and animal species, with every waterhole, river and stream, every hill and valley, and with the horizon-to-horizon distance between these natural features. The stories these people told gave profound meaning to their lives, and defined their sense of who they were.
Early Europeans saw the plain in ways that were determined by the stories they brought with them from the other side of the world. For many, the grasslands, wetlands and woodlands of the plain were resources to be exploited, controlled, and managed. These newcomers mapped the land, mined it, drew new kinds of boundaries upon it, constructed fences, roads and permanent buildings, and introduced new animals and plants: sheep, cattle, horses, domestic fowls, rabbits, foxes, sparrows, starlings, pine trees, domesticated cereals, 'improved' pastures, roses and geraniums. They built social institutions like schools, churches and prisons that replicated the institutions they, or their forebears, had left behind. Yet when they died, they were generally buried in the soil of the plain they had come to call their home.
Other migrants from other parts of the world are now telling new stories, building new institutions and introducing new species of plants and animals to make this place more like where they, or their own forebears have come from. And so the plain evolves.
As the plain changes, as people change, as the world around us changes, so do our stories. And as our stories change, so do the ways we relate to one another and to the biological systems on which we all depend. That's what stories do; they help us to see things in different ways. And there are many new stories yet to tell about Victoria's basalt plain.
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| 'Evening, Hobsons Bay', a wood engraving published in The Illustrated Australian News, January 2, 1871 (Ebenezer and David Syme, Melbourne). |
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| Original image by colonial artist James Robertson (1813-1885) engraved by Robert Bruce (1839-1918). Contributed by the La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria. |
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How do you see the basalt plain? What are your stories about it? What is the relationship between the stories people tell and the way they behave?
Copyright Imagine The Future Inc 2002.
Text by Merrill Findlay.
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