Free The Idea of Home by Geraldine Brooks Page B

origin’ — an ordinary Australian suburban childhood of the sixties. I will ponder the way it led to ‘a goal or destination’: a career as a foreign correspondent and then as a novelist. In this chapter, I want to discuss how my home in Australia was a place of discoveryand a source of conviction about our responsibility to our only home, this fragile and beleaguered planet.
    I have said that I live now on the banks of a little river that was dammed in 1665. When I first left Australia in 1982, a greater river, a larger dam, was very much on my mind. That river was the Franklin, in south-west Tasmania. A river wild from source to mouth, already a precious rarity in the smeared, bleared post-industrial world. Yet a river whose wildness was in clear and present danger. Works were already proceeding for a dam that would flood a pristine wilderness to yield just 180 megawatts of power. The last thing I did before I left the country was to hole up in Bob Brown’s cottage in Liffey in the north of Tasmania. Typewriter on knee, I helped him edit mounds of handwritten notes and shape them into the text for his book Wild Rivers . We had little time: Bob was needed everywhere then, as the spearhead for a movement that encompassed political lobbying, legal manoeuvring, advertising campaigns and the largest non-violent direct action Australia had ever seen. So we worked late, by candlelight andfirelight, in that little off-the-grid cottage. Bob had decided that he couldn’t stay hooked up to electricity provided by the drowning of that already-lost gem, Lake Pedder.
    I had started covering the Franklin controversy as a journalist in 1980. Somewhere along the line, not too far along the line, I must confess, I did the thing that journalists are not supposed to do. I became an activist. The river itself turned me into one. In February of 1981, I rafted part of its length, on assignment for the Sydney Morning Herald , following Don Chipp, leader of the Australian Democrats. That river journey was, at the time, the hardest and scariest thing I had ever done. I was not what you would call an outdoorsy type. To paraphrase Woody Allen: I was two with nature.
    Until I started covering environmental issues for the Herald , I’d never gone bushwalking or slept one night in a tent, much less steered my own small rubber raft over heaving white water. That first night by the river, having carried gear all day up and down a sheer, slippery, rain-lashed mountainside, Ilay wet, aching and apprehensive, wondering what mad ambition had led me to sign up for this. The rains came down as only rains borne by the Roaring Forties seem to know how to fall. Sometime in the middle of that long night, a plaintive male voice emanated from the nearby tent which Senator Chipp shared with his wife, Idun. ‘Jesus Christ , darling. Don’t wake me up to tell me you’re uncomfortable!’ My misery, it seemed, had some distinguished company.
    But that Franklin trip changed me, profoundly. As I believe wilderness experience changes everyone. Because it puts us in our place. The human place, which our species inhabited for most of its evolutionary life. The place that shaped our psyches and made us who we are. The place where nature is big, and we are small. We have reversed this ratio only in the last couple of hundred years. An evolutionary nanosecond. The pace of our headlong rush from a wilderness existence through an agrarian life to urbanisation is staggering and exponential. In the United States, in just 200 years, the percentage ofpeople living in cities has jumped from less than four per cent to eighty per cent. By 2006, half the world’s population lived in cities. Every week, a million more individuals move to join them. The bodies and the minds we inhabit were designed for a very different world from the one we now occupy. As far as we know, no organism has ever been part of such an experiment in evolutionary