ILLEGITIMATE NATURES:
Suburban Dreams and the Imagining of Nature in Australia
Aidan Davison
School of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Tasmania , Hobart , Australia
Abstract
At the beginning of the twentieth century, as the Australian nation was being imagined into existence with the help of rustic images, Australia housed the world's most suburbanised society. The majority of Australians find their home still in the union of city and country. This fact troubles many environmentalists. The phase ‘suburban sustainability' has seemed too gross an oxymoron even for literatures comfortable with the glib formula of sustainable development. In response, I emphasise the importance of imagined natures in Australian suburban history. Visions of harmony with nature, of a return to Eden , were prominent during the first suburban boom of the 1880s. Dreams of domestic refuge in nature acted as a counterweight to dreams of technological domination of nature in the negotiation of the modern project of progress. However, growing disenchantment with the technological reality of suburbs after the second, postwar boom has seen dreams of refuge in nature thoroughly re-imagined, and re-imaged. The loss of suburban innocence is an important and overlooked element in the processes through which wilderness grew sacrosanct and the city moribund in the environmental imagination of many Australians. I conclude that if images of nature are to contribute to a truly democratic transition toward environmental sustainability in Australia , it is vital that such images fire the imagination of suburbanites about how all aspects of their lives and their homes are inextricably embedded in the extraordinary and irrepressible possibilities of nature.
Even naturalists are uninterested in pigeons
Who loiter everywhere in the cities,
Birds who have sullied themselves
By learning to live with man
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