A new artists’ books

Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
Restoring corridors
2024
12 double-sided image panel artists’ book with 5 text pages, inkjet print on Canson Arches 88 310gsm, with accompanying narrative, A good soft release site is a connected site (by Gracia Haby), housed in a box with original watercolour cover (by Louise Jennison) on Saunders Waterford Aquarelle 300gsm white hot-press paper
Printed by Arten
Edition of 4

As part of our artists’ book, Restoring corridors.

A good soft release site for the ringtail possums (Pseudocheirus peregrinus) in our care needs to be a connected site. Connected to shelter from the elements and predators, as they expand and feel their way from their former footing, ‘in care’, to wild and free, beyond. Somewhere they can rest, upon their release, and build both a drey and a family, down the line. Connected to a place where there is an adequate supply of water and food, in the form of healthy, diverse native vegetation, with a dense understorey (look for tasty juvenile leaves arranged opposite each other on the stem). Somewhere there is also not already an established family of ringtail possums (look for a low scat count, and infrequent sightings). And somewhere there is little chance of an encounter with predators, in particular domestic and feral cats, dogs, and the introduced Red fox (Vulpes Vulpes); the same rings true for humans and the injuries our actions, both direct and indirect, can cause. Finding such a site is as hard as you might expect, as Jason Cowley draws together (on shared themes in nature writing), we “sense that we are devouring our world, that there is simply no longer any natural landscape or ecosystem that is unchanged by humans”[i], who tread heavily[ii].

Once you’ve found an available site that you have access to, the time of year (not too Goldilocks wintertime cold nor summertime hot), and the weather for the release needs to be taken into consideration as well, though this, coincidentally, can mean that the installing of several ringtail possum nesting boxes up high in the surrounding trees is easier for you as well (not too cold, not too hot, but just right). All of which gives the soft releasees the best chance, because it is all new to them, and this site needs to look after them as they will in turn look after the health of the site (a name, occasionally heard, for a ringtail possum is a ‘pepper shaker’; they fertilise the soil).

From the safety of the soft release site, the ringtails can form their cognitive maps, as they spatially orientate themselves. As they familiarise themselves with their environment, all of these considerations and opportunities (of which we’ve only lightly touched upon), increase their chances of survival. For while things vary, depending upon the animal species being soft released, for the main, a good soft release site needs to be connected to something larger than itself. It cannot be an island, if it is to work. It needs to be connected to a larger tract of land. To national parkland or a nature reserve, or to a green corridor which leads, leaf by rock, to parkland or a reserve.

Inside the predator-proof soft release enclosure[iii], we fill two large vessels with familiar browse (with the intention of transitioning them to local browse from the surrounding area over the course of the gentle stretch of days that make this a soft, compared to a hard, release). From the familiar safety of their nesting box, the ringtails pause, as the world around them changes. When they climb out of their nest box to see their surrounds, within the enclosure, the habitat beyond the mesh divide will be wildly different. From our urban back garden to a property abutting a national park; it will smell different, look different, and a new host of animals will scan their presence as they pass by. Will they climb across the enclosure’s roof? Sniff at the mesh, enquiring ‘who goes there?’ Will they be friend or foe or somewhere in between? We’ll never truly know, irrespective of how many night-vision trail cams we dot about the area, strapped on nearby acacia and gum trunks. Not fully knowing is all part of the handover process, as we step out of the frame, and let them return-begin, back, anew, where they were always meant to be. In the space that is both a beginning of their new life, and an end of our role in it, and a return to where they are guided by a different kind of knowing.

Of entering another kind of space, I am reminded of Annie Dillard’s individual connection with a weasel “who was looking up at [her]” as he emerged from “beneath an enormous shaggy wild rose bush”, in ‘Living Like Weasels’ from Dillard’s essay collection Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982)[iv]. “He was ten inches long, thin as a curve, a muscled ribbon, brown as fruitwood, soft-furred, alert.” They locked eyes, and it felt as though “someone threw away the key.” Held, in that connection, it “moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes.” Later, Dillard describes the impression left when the weasel disappeared as “already I don’t remember what shattered the enchantment. I think I blinked, I think I retrieved my brain from the weasel’s brain, and tried to memorise what I was seeing, and the weasel felt the yank of separation”. In that encounter, where something new emerged, a new space, a new kind of knowing, they had both “plugged into another tape simultaneously, for a sweet and shocking time.” Right there on the page, Dillard left the space she’d known, and was guided by a different kind of knowing[v].

Equally, when Kathleen Jamie notes an extraordinary silence that radiates from the mountains and the sky, from “a mineral silence, which presses powerfully upon our bodies, coming from very far off”[vi] (in Sightlines, 2012), this is not unlike how it feels to be in the presence of a wild animal, to look into their eyes, to feel as though you are held in a radiant connection. That for one moment, you see the smallest of fragments of what they see. And you feel you are a million miles from ever being able to understand what they see, know, feel, are, but you have this one precious taste. An opening into the extraordinary before it is quickly whisked away in Dillard’s blink of an eye.

What does the world look like up there from the tree canopy or flying overhead? I could climb a tree and I would still not know what a possum knows[vii]. I can see the world from an aerial drone, but I can’t read the landmarks like a Grey-headed flying fox (Pteropus poliocephalus)[viii]. It is more than dotted coordinates, their ‘worldscape’. Their map, I surmise, has a feel to it that I’ll never know. In this gateway to awe, coupled with the recognition of what they can teach us, me, there is a rekindling of hope, on a tangible level.

It is also why a walk in ‘nature’ is never a solitary one. You are surrounded by so many souls. From the microorganisms in the earth to the tingling of tree roots, the caterpillars, birds, the Common ringtail possums, soon to be released and otherwise. There are thousands of senses scanning your presence. Not just eyes, that is too human, to note that you are being watched. Your presence has been detected by feelers, and I like to think, colour, like The Cassandra Cat (Až přijde kocour[ix], 1963), where the feline in Vojtěch Jasný’s fairy-tale allegory of a film, surveys the audience and ‘reads’ them for who they truly are and not just who they are presenting or fronting as. I often wonder what colour my haze would be. Is it a lime green fog? A blue soft fuzz? Does it change? Or have I relied upon my eyes once more. That kneejerk response! Is it a sound? An impression? An absence? A note? Frans de Waal understood this neatly when he posed, are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?[x] No, of course we are not.

Observing the world through the portal of another takes us close to experiencing Jakob von Uexküll’s understanding of umwelt[xi], which I have always imagined as an almost soapy bubble in which “each creature has its own modes of sensory perception”, particular to each individual, within, which in turn “creates a multiplicity of worlds rather than a shared one”[xii]. By analysing the properties of the visual systems of animals[xiii], we can create a model of how the world might look through the eyes of an animal, like a ringtail possum, but how animals operate in their sensory-immediate world will still be unknowable, ungraspable, and unfamiliar-familiar[xiv]. As Nan Shepherd understood, “If I had other senses, there are other things I should know”[xv] (in The Living Mountain, 1977). Their world, the ringies’ world, remains inaccessible to us, to me. And gloriously so.

As we open the small hatch of the soft release enclosure through which the four ringtails inside will make their way through, when they are ready, it is with a mixture of hope, happiness, and the tappity-tap of trepidation. Just as I will never find a way into their world, I hope they, and those that follow, never encounter an edge to their habitat. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of ‘wilderness’ as being ‘a wild or uncultivated region or tract of land, uninhabited, or inhabited only by wild animals’ may not hold for much longer, but for Ernestine, Henrietta, Beryl, and Bernice, I hope this remains the case, as they shake off their ‘human-given’ names.

As night gathers, one by one they will be able to make their way back to the wild. Their absence from the enclosure, in the weeks that follow, will signal their successful absorption back into the safe, free fold of the leaves; the soft and nimble embodiment of ‘wilderness’, slowly, knowing growing, their way home.

[i] Jason Cowley (ed.), Granta 102: The New Nature Writing (Granta Publications: New York, 2008), p.9.

[ii] In the spirit of Fred Pearce, when speaking of an ecosystem that is “unchanged by humans”, who tread heavily, I am referring to land that is excessively developed and leaves no room for nature, the management or mismanagement of the continued ‘urban sprawl’, road and rail lines that carve through green spaces, land clearing for industrial farming, mining, the logging of native forests et al.; I am not referring to the ongoing connection of First Nations and Torres Strait Islander People, who tread lightly, in a collaborative and reciprocal relationship with ‘nature’. “There are no pristine forests. Wherever we look — deep in the Amazon, in the heart of the Congo basin or up in the Orinoco — we find human footprints Great ancient civilisations flourished amid the trees. There was clearing, but almost always the jungles regrew. We successfully cohabited with trees, harvesting them without destroying the forests. But in recent times nature’s resilience has struggled to keep up with our seemingly unquenchable thirst for rubber and mahogany, soya and palm oil, paper and beef. From the thorn forests of Paraguay to the peat swamps of Borneo, we have downed millions of trees to meet this demand.” Fred Pearce, ‘From Paradise to Plunder’, A Trillion Trees: How We Can Reforest Our World (London: Granta Books, 2021), p. 77.

[iii] Louise Jennison and I operate a soft release program for the ringtail possums in our care, under our shelter, Tiny but Wild, with the Koala Clancy Foundation, and have been doing so since 2022. We care for the ringtails for roughly six months, raising them from around 80 grams until they are 600 grams ready. Working this way, we have the means to raise two groups of four ringtails per year. The “Koala Clancy Foundation plants trees for koalas on farms and private land, creates new habitat and advocates for better protection of wild koalas. Koala Clancy Foundation is an independent registered charity and not for profit organisation.” Koala Clancy Foundation, https://www.koalaclancyfoundation.org.au/, accessed 2nd May, 2024.

[iv] Annie Dillard, ‘Living Like Weasels’, Teaching a Stone to Talk (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1982), pp. 66–67.

[v] Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing (London: Daunt Books, 2022), p. 118

[vi] Kathleen Jamie quoted by Ewa Chodnikiewics in ‘Keep Looking, Even When There’s Nothing Much to See: Re-imagining Scottish Landscapes in Kathleen Jamie’s Non-fiction’, The Poetics of Space and Place in Scottish Literature, ed. by Monika Szuba and Julian Wolfreys, (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), p. 94.

[vii] Thomas Nagel’s posed, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, in which the answer is, to be a bat is impossible to know. “The analogical form of the English expression “what it is like” is misleading. It does not mean “what (in our experience) it resembles,” but rather “how it is for the subject himself”. Thomas Nagel, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, The Philosophical Review, Vol. 83, No. 4, 1974, p. 440, JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2183914, accessed 4th March, 2024.

[viii] “With the aid of advanced technology, humans had now been granted the ability to see the world through the eyes of a whale, a shark, or a seal. But what the privileging of the first-person perspective occludes is how images are procured in the first place: the trapping and continuous tracking of animals, subject to the desires of humans (and to the durability of the device). … Moreover, rather than offering, even in the form of a simulation, an animal’s individual experience, these images in fact rehearse early cinema’s phantom ride — the mounting of a camera on a moving vehicle for the production of thrill. They no more tell us what it is like to be a whale than the phantom ride tells us what it is like to be a train.” Anat Pick, ‘Why not look at animals?’, Animals, Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies, Spring 2015, https://necsus-ejms.org/why-not-look-at-animals/, accessed 12th April, 2024.

[ix] Až přijde kocour was also released under several different titles, When the Cat Comes; The Cat Who Wore Sunglasses; One Day, a Cat; and That Cat.

[x] Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (London: Granta Books, 2016).

[xi] “‘Umwelt’ theory offers an understanding both of species and their evolution that is characterized by radical interdependence. It asserts that species cannot be properly understood other than in relation to the environments they inhabit, and specifically to those aspects of their environments that are relevant to their existence and with which they are … in Uexküll’s own favorite metaphor, in a kind of “contrapuntal musical performance”.” Una Chaudhuri, ‘Bug Bytes: Insects, Information, and Interspecies Theatricality’, Theatre Journal, Vol. 65, No. 3, 2013, p. 324, JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24580496, accessed 4th March, 2024.

[xii] “There is no space independent of subjects”, Jakob von Uexküll quoted by Elisha Cohn, ‘Paperback Tigers: Breaking the Zoo’, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Winter 2015), pp. 576–577, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24735044, accessed 17th March, 2024.

[xiii] Lisa Hendry, ‘How do other animals see the world?’, What on Earth?, Natural History Museum, https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/how-do-other-animals-see-the-world.html, accessed 12th February, 2024.

[xiv] “That a duck or a rat or a cicada can have his or her glory days, his or her days of toil, his or her days of devastating tragedy … , and that as we open ourselves to this aspect of the being of others — that if we look at them as if we shared such things — we can find our own being, mind, world, our own portions of Being, Mind and World, incrementally (if only infinitesimally) expanding.” David Brooks, ‘Mind. Being. World’, Turnin: Approaching Animals (Blackheath, NSW: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2021) pp. 16–17.

[xv] Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2008), p. 105.

Image credit: Celeste, Linus, Lute, and Sylvie, pictured above, in their outdoor enclosure and with their impressive winter coats becoming plusher by the day, will be the next quartet of ringtail possums to be released with Koala Clancy, come spring. But before this can happen, we head to the trailer to clean her up and wheel her down the hill, now that the previous four, Ernestine, Hen, Beryl, and Bernice, are no longer using the trailer, and have become a part of the Brisbane Ranges. Somewhere, they’ll be, deep and snug, living their best lives, eating Eucalyptus radiata by the leaf-load.

In the showers, cleaning up the trailer for the next group, is a brief, but important part of the cycle for us. We feel so fortunate to be able to work with Koala Clancy, and their members and volunteers, to make this happen for the possums.