Head to the Pilliga Scrub this week with two extraordinary observers of Australia, its landscapes, histories and potential futures. Originally published in 2016, “Changescapes” travels with Ross Gibson as Gibson travels with Eric Rolls in the quest to “graft” Rolls’ mighty environmental volume A Million Wild Acres into a film. (Wildwas released in 1993.) Gibson describes the Pilliga as “a vast scree of native Australian forest gone feral in north-west New South Wales” and A Million Wild Acres as a “marvellous vast scree of a book”; this essay celebrates just a slice of this journey, an encounter with one of the Pilliga’s residents, Muller.
Travel further into Gibson’s work with his 2009 essay “Event-Grammar: The Language Notebooks of William Dawes”, which will lead you not only into Gibson’s amazing explorations and meditations on some of the first recorded conversations in the earliest days of colonial Sydney, but also towards the second of Kate Grenville’s brilliant Thornhill Family Trilogy, The Lieutenant, through the remarkable person of William Dawes.
Gibson’s 2002 Seven Versions of an Australian Badland also featured in Reading Trail Week 1, as part of Julianne Schultz’s selection for “Australia in Three Books”.
We’re halfway through our Top 100 Australian Books-oriented spelunking of the Meanjin archive. Voting in this year’s ABC Radio National poll opens this coming Monday, August 31.
Changescapes: Ross Gibson on Eric Rolls – and Muller of the Pilliga Scrub
Event-Grammar: Ross Gibson on the language notebooks of William Dawes – follow these to Kate Grenville’s The Lieutenant
Australia in Three Books: Julianne Schultz on Ross Gibson, Marilynne Lake and Henry Reynolds, and Marcia Langton
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