It’s a comfort it’s a blessing, as my mother would say. No comma. The indescribable warmth of laughter the incandescent human comfort of being alive with others. The blessing of everything that lives everything that lives is holy.
I was asked recently who I thought was the greatest nature writer in Tasmania. I scratched my head and thought: who is it that emerges above the rest as someone who best understands and articulates the haunting beauty and mystery of this ancient island’s environment? Who understands deeply the captivating endemics of this island and has been able to write best about it?
Who is the Peter Dombrovskis of the written word? Who is the John Glover who can paint Tasmania’s beauty with elegant words? Who is the Henry Reynolds who can write with credibility and passion about Tasmania’s natural history and how it has changed over time from Aboriginal settlement, British colonisation, agricultural development and then forestry, mining and urbanisation?
Over the years, since literature began here in the mid-19th century, who has written memorably, insightfully and provocatively about nature? Who best has communicated about Tasmania’s dark insular rainforests, its tall, dignified southern forests, its dramatic dolerite sea cliffs, its palaeolithic mountains, its dry sclerophyll forests full of buzzing cicadas, clicking crickets, flapping butterflies and screeching cockatoos? Who has written beautifully about our wandering wild rivers and the ancient geologic lineages that one can read in the glaciated, volcanic and sedimentary landscapes around Tasmania?
Who in words has best captured Tasmania’s natural beauty, its essence and excellence, its sometimes sacredness, and also been able to write about the significant environmental threats to its integrity and identity?
Only one name came to me to answer all these questions: Richard Flanagan.
Flanagan is the one Tasmanian writer I most identify with who best understands this island’s natural world, its delicate and robust wilderness, its extraordinary beauty and subtlety and the land’s integral links to 40,000 years of Aboriginal heritage. Flanagan understands Tasmania intimately and writes exceptionally well about the island’s beauty and achingly about the heart-wrenching destruction that has occurred in so many places in Tasmania.
To understand Tasmania and its natural environment, read Flanagan – he will enlighten you about this island like no other writer, historian or natural history scientist has been able to do because he loves this island deeply. All his writings are love stories about Tasmania. All good writing is about love.
For a little longer steam will still drift from the forest floor in the sunlight that pierces the Gondwanan caravanserai enveloping that lonely crowded car making its way to our new home in Rosebery, a raw mining village in Tasmania’s still remote west: celery top pines, pandani, Tasmanian laurels and peppers and leatherwoods, the giant manferns and primeval sassafras and craggy myrtles, the rainforest that no one then knows is the second largest of its kind in the world with its plants and trees as old as the dinosaurs.
From his first novel Death of a River Guide published 30 years ago, to his latest book Question 7, Flanagan has tried to write about Tasmania with the heartfelt memories and understandings that only a local with a gifted hand could do.
I have just read Question 7 and have marvelled at his insights and poetic prose about Tasmania, about its people, history and the environment. He is at the top of his writing game; no word is wasted in this deeply personal book. Read this book and you will have a much greater understanding about Tasmania, its precious environment, and about Richard Flanagan himself.
This is his most honest and revealing book and is a gift to all of us who love Tasmania and respect good writing.
Experience is but a moment. Making sense of that moment is a life.
His new book, I believe, is a quiet masterpiece, as Flanagan attempts to unravel his family’s history so he and the reader can reflect on his family’s life, his father’s World War II experience in a prison camp in Japan, the context of Hiroshima “saving” his father’s life (thus enabling Richard to be born), his own “death” on the Franklin River, and Tasmania’s environmental influence on his life.
This book raises unanswerable questions about war and love and life and death, especially the moralistic questions that we have been pondering for more than 75 years. Was the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan the right or wrong thing to do? Was the development of the bomb inevitable? Should they have dropped it somewhere else first as a warning? Would more people have died if they hadn’t dropped the bomb, and a ground war was pursued? These are the great questions of the 20th century that remain unanswerable still, for no one knows for sure.
But the bomb did happen. Two bombs killed en masse (more than 100,000 civilians) and Flanagan writes about the effect these events had on his family, his own life, his world view and Tasmania. This book slowly unfolds as an anti-war book, with the same humble message of another great Australian memoir, AB Facey’s A Fortunate Life.
Upon reading Question 7 we are reminded again, in case we might have forgotten, how blowing each other up is insane and war is all about suffering and war is wrong.
Hiroshima is the great tragedy of our age from which we continue to seek understanding and yet can never understand.
Maybe the answer to the question about who Tasmania’s best environmental writer is like the theme of the book Question 7, as Chekov suggests: there is no answer. There is no answer when it comes to love (who loves longer, a man or a woman?), for Flanagan writing about Tasmania is an act of love. Writing about the love, he has for this no comma rainy old god-forsaken violent convict prisoners Aboriginal genocide leech ridden end of the world that’s life beautiful place.
Question 7 is not just about Richard Flanagan and his family, and the Tasmanian environment. It is also about trying to make sense of life from both global and local historical perspectives, from visiting a Japanese slave labour camp where his father was imprisoned, to revisiting his dilapidated childhood home in Rosebery which he found is now being taken over by the plants and microbes of a dense rainforest. This memoir taunts us with questions about the largest and most minute aspects of history and experience.
I gaze up through the rainforest at Montezuma waterfall … what grips me is not the fall’s violent grandeur but the intimate green world at its base, moss gardens of tiny peach-tipped myrtles and luminous fungi growing out of fallen tree barrels. Whole and seemingly solid yet rotted completely, the tree barrels collapse into peat the moment I touch them, the way my memories crumble into questions now.
The book is a deep reckoning of Flanagan’s rafting “death” on the Franklin River and the effect it had on his view of life ever since. The book tries to unravel the questions about dying in world war or being trapped in a rapid and dying on a river from different perspectives that only the passage of time can give wisdom to. The book tries to answer the unanswerable with stories and memories about life in Tasmania that are moving and captivating.
I couldn’t put the book down. All I can say is: read this new book yourself, read other Flanagan books about Tasmania, especially his first novel about the Franklin River, and I think you too will be convinced that he is a deep lover of this island and, so far, he is the finest writer about it.
Don Defenderfer is a native of San Francisco who once went on a holiday to Alaska where he met an Australian who told him to visit Tasmania. So he did, and while here he met a woman. That was 40 years ago. He was state coordinator for Landcare for many years, a job that allowed him to be inspired by not only the beauty of the Tasmanian landscape but by the many people that are trying to repair and renew it. He has a Masters Degree in Social Ecology and a Bachelor of Environmental Studies with a minor in writing. He has published three volumes of poetry, and his work has appeared in newspapers and periodicals, including The New York Times and The Australian. Two volumes of collected essays and poems, "Tasmania: An island dream" Parts 1 and 2, can be bought through the Forty South Bookshop.
