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Loving What's Left with Tessa Campisi
792 Plays11 days ago
Hello! I have been away in the bush for three days and three nights with just a tarp, sleeping bag and water to my name. No tent, no pillow, no torch, NO BREAKFAST. Off the back of this deeply moving ritual (which I'll tell you about soon), I wanted to release this equally as moving and foresty interview with Tessa Campisi.
Tessa is a writer, poet, audio visual artist, activist and radio host who speaks with the timbre of an old growth tree and tells stories that will rustle your leaves.
In this chat:
🌳 What it's like to live through a catastrophic flood
🌳 How anarchic networks can rise to meet a crisis, fast
🌳 What happens when forest conservationists are at loggerheads with traditional owners?
🌳 Strawman vs. steelman arguments
🌳 A new approach to deep listening to those you disagree with
🌳 What traditional activism gets wrong and how to be a more effective change agent
🌳 How and why to love the scraps of our beautiful, broken world
🧙♀️ LINKY POOS
Tessa's (online) exhibition ~ Framings of Wombat Forest
Article of interest ~ Reflections on forest gardening by Cam Walker https://www.melbournefoe.org.au/galk_galk_dhelkunya
Paper of interest ~ History of Environmentalist-Indigenous alliances and conflicts
Essay of interest ~ The Trouble with Wilderness by William Cronon
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Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Riskillians Podcast
00:00:07
Speaker
Hey, this is Katie and you're tuned into Riskillians, a podcast about the hard, soft and surprising skills that'll help us stay afloat if our modern systems don't.
00:00:21
Speaker
These sounds are coming to you from Jyra Country, central Victoria, where the first winter flame robins have arrived from the high country and the wedge-tailed eagles are circling low and slow over our backyard, eyeing off the chooks.
Forest Vigil Experience
00:00:36
Speaker
I'm recording this intro in advance because I'm heading into the bush tomorrow and will be completely offline till Monday, so I needed to get my shit together early for once.
00:00:47
Speaker
Meg Ullman, a Raskillian's regular at this point, is leading a few of us women into the forest for a vigil. We'll each have a spot by ourselves where we'll sit and, well, that's pretty much it, for three days and three nights.
00:01:05
Speaker
With just a tarp and a sleeping bag and water, the barest of essentials. No food, no torch, no knitting, no distractions. Breakfast is the closest thing I have to a religion, so I'm terrified to give it up.
00:01:20
Speaker
But actually, a bigger part of me is excited to see what happens. Because how often as an adult do you step willingly into a situation where you have no idea what to expect or how you'll handle it?
00:01:34
Speaker
I have done a 24-hour fasted campout before, and I remember it feeling like the longest day of my life, watching the sun tiptoe across the sky for an eternity, seeing the daytime creatures finally dematerialise and nocturnal silhouettes scurrying along the branches and rustling in the gloom.
00:01:56
Speaker
So I'll be treeside for the rest of the week, sitting or pacing or lying face down, listening to country.
Meg Ullman on Listening to Country
00:02:05
Speaker
Some folks call this type of thing a vision quest, but I love that Meg has called our ritual a listening to country vigil.
00:02:13
Speaker
Vigil like vigilant, awake to watchful, attentive, receptive. Listening like that thing you do with your ears and large intestine.
00:02:25
Speaker
Listening is the theme of the week and this episode and forests too.
Interview with Tessa Campisi
00:02:31
Speaker
I've been sitting on this interview for a while And it's with a wonderful young woman who speaks with the timbre of an old growth person.
00:02:39
Speaker
Her name is Tessa Campisi, a writer, poet, artist, friend of the forest and host of Out of the Blue, a show about coasts and oceans on three cr Today's episode it was recorded in a museum, tucked away in a dimly lit back room surrounded by cabinets full of clippings, and Tessa had just opened an exhibition at this museum called Framings of Wombat Forest.
00:03:03
Speaker
You can still experience it online, so have a look in the show notes. I've linked it there. Not knowing Tessa at all before this interview, and seeing a petite young person in a bandana and overalls sitting opposite me,
00:03:15
Speaker
I was gale force blown away as she started spilling over with stories of living through the floods in Lismore, building a relationship with the Wombat Forest, inhabiting a really tricky spot between forest activists and local mob, and how to listen.
00:03:31
Speaker
Like really listen to others, even when their opinion makes you see red. There are so many macroscopic learnings in this convo, like noticing the way that Tessa tells a story.
00:03:42
Speaker
It's so beautiful and such a hugely valuable skill. i better go and keep preparing for the vigil. But I've been rearing to reconnect with you after two long weeks between episodes.
00:03:53
Speaker
So thanks for being here and I hope you love the shit out of Tessa Campisi. And of course, a huge thank you to the Risk Alliance community on Patreon, whose donations are the lifeblood of this show.
00:04:05
Speaker
Just so you know, you're awesome and not only helping me financially, but keeping me accountable and enthused. To the wonderful Donna, Melanie and Mike, who have recently made pledges, you're legends.
00:04:17
Speaker
Enjoy this chat and I'll catch you all next time.
00:04:25
Speaker
Yeah, I had to say, like, i I didn't ever understand what it meant to to feel a connection to a landscape until I moved to the Northern Rivers and then lived through the floods of 2022. And i had just grown up in suburbia and had lived in the city my whole life.
00:04:43
Speaker
And then after COVID, I was like, I can't be here. I really need more space. And so I moved up north to where I had friends that i that I met through uni and and moving to a small town and like realizing what it meant to to build community and to suddenly be stitched into a place um where you would go to the farmer's market and you would see all your friends there and also people you didn't want to see the nature of living in a small community. and developing this kind of sense of place.
00:05:07
Speaker
I worked in bush region, so planting trees and killing weeds and all of that. So we'd go and spend time in lots of different places around the region. i got to see the landscape from all these different contours and that really gave me a sense of like the topography of the place.
00:05:23
Speaker
And then when the floods came through and like how deeply, ah like the upheaval that came from that. And ended up after the floods, my home was completely flooded and ended up finding a little cabin to stay in a wallaby sanctuary just out of town just upstream from from where from the creek that flows into lismore and this is the place that used to be just like paddocks that the owners had spent many many years replanting revegetating looking after and and releasing all of these native species onto it that they had rebili rehabilitated um wallabies and gliders and bandicoots and
00:06:00
Speaker
It was really being in that place, in a place that had been so heavily impacted by this flood event, all the pollution, all the mud, all of the but entrails of of our society there.
00:06:13
Speaker
Being upstream on this property where people had sort of been coaxing the natural world back in, inviting it back in. And whilst I was there, they had gotten a grant and were doing tree planting and I got to be involved in that.
00:06:26
Speaker
day after day, going out and planting trees, staking them pulling out weeds, just getting to be with that piece of land. It was a period in my life where I was feeling pretty overwhelmed with the climate crisis.
00:06:38
Speaker
It felt like all my greatest fears from a child had kind of been realized where my vision of the the deterioration of the earth systems ah that help us to survive, the kind of idea that I had about that through, you know, all the data that that you read and that science presents us with was suddenly matched by my external world.
00:06:58
Speaker
The very ground beneath our feet was not stable. Sometimes you drive down a road and when you drive back, like it had moved because everything was so wet. So feeling pretty vulnerable and overwhelmed with living in the world.
00:07:10
Speaker
But being in that place, I got to drop by drop, develop a relationship with it and I felt really held by it and it was the first time that I really really think that place did a lot in in helping me heal from the flood and making me feel safe that it was okay to to love a place even if there was still that fear that we might lose it that bushfires would come through but they just had cycling Alfred through there and lots of trees are falling down on that property but
00:07:42
Speaker
that I will still continue to love it through all of its changes, no matter how it changes. And that that was something that, yeah, I could feel.
00:07:53
Speaker
And that was something that i never knew as a child. It was only... what, like five years ago less that I actually first had that sense as an adult. And I realized this thing that I'd been missing and I wondered how many other people had also been missing that relationship to place.
00:08:08
Speaker
a And what did you witness? I mean, that's such a beautiful expression of finally marrying together the cerebral analytical understanding that we have of the world and then a lived experience and how that lands in your body and how that rallies you and motivates you and shapes you in a kind of deeply profound way more than statistics ever could. so But what I want to ask you, I guess, more practically is about what happened on the ground there in Lismore
Community Resilience in Lismore Floods
00:08:35
Speaker
when you were there. What did you see in terms of community resilience? What surprised you? if there's anything you can tell us about what it was like to live through ah climate crisis.
00:08:44
Speaker
So it was... It was so many things. It was really intense. But like at first I was actually really excited, have to say. And I was with friends who had like lived in North Lismore for decades, you know, they were used to floods. we were going to have a flood party. So when you get flooded in and you buy a bunch of beers and champagne and you hang out and you play board games and you're like on your little island, your little house on stilts. And so we had like put all of our stuff up onto like tables and chairs and thought it was safe and we were going to our friend's place who to stay there where we didn't think the flood water would would reach.
00:09:15
Speaker
And I remember during the night as the waters were rising, feeling this sense of awe and wonder, like watching wildebeest migrate across the Serengeti. Like here was this massive event that me as a tiny human couldn't comprehend the size of. I couldn't hold it back. It was this thing happening all over all around us and everything was responding to it. You know, there was snakes and frogs in the rafters also climbing up away from the water and we were all kind of there on this little arc it felt like.
00:09:45
Speaker
And so you know we were drinking champagne and playing cards and put all the lanterns on and um slowly over time as we would refresh the Bureau of Meteorology page to check the river levels, we realized that they just really weren't matching up with what we were seeing. it was They were lagging, they said they were far lower than what we could see outside from the house.
00:10:04
Speaker
We started realizing that it was actually much worse than we thought it was gonna be. Yeah, we ended up putting everything up into the into the rafters and we decided to evacuate. at 5am with first light when the water started coming inside the house.
00:10:18
Speaker
And so, yeah, that was pretty surreal, um ducking under power lines as we navigated with the tinny through the flood waters. But yeah, I remember like on that first morning, someone asked me how i was going and i was like, I've been through worse.
00:10:31
Speaker
um I think that I was kind of maybe in shock. There was also... just this incredible sense of feeling feeling caught by that community the lismore community is an incredible community in that they in the northern rivers they managed to successfully kick out and keep out coal seam gas through community campaigns that came together bringing together so many different parts of that community from farmers and hippies and greenies and mob and all different kinds of people to advocate to keep fossil fuels and and fracking out of that region so there's very strong community networks and what i witnessed in the aftermath was those networks pulling together again and how that kind of formed a net that caught so many people and how quickly people could respond and that was exhilarating to be a part of it was the you know i formed a trauma bond with lismore honestly like it was the fastest kind of community making that i'd
00:11:25
Speaker
ever done. ended up volunteering for quite a few months in a little recovery cafe called Trees Not Bombs. So this is a long story but essentially there was a bunch of like forest activists that in the 90s had gone down and helped with a blockade further down south on the Bolga Plateau when they were trying to protect their forests from logging.
00:11:46
Speaker
And this community remembered that. So when the floods hit, people from the Bolga Plateau brought all of their equipment up to Lismore and set up a recovery cafe and an old blockade tent that had used you know been set up for blockades in the forest.
00:12:01
Speaker
So now it was set up in the car park of the library. um with a couple of burners and essentially it was this hub where people were bringing all of their produce from their gardens and people were turning up and just cooking meals for each other, providing cups of tea and and directing people to other support services. And it just kind of formed organically and was very community led.
00:12:24
Speaker
That lasted for for maybe six months or so. It was a really incredible space. Kind of the only place you could go and sit and have a cup of tea and that felt kind of like homely and normal and where community would gather, but everything else was just covered in mud.
00:12:38
Speaker
I feel like they're the same networks that were able to mobilize in response to trying to protect that region from coal seam gas, that these these quick kind of communications, these skills that were drawn in to to work together that that allow the community to respond so well to the floods. I think that they're the same networks, that maybe a little bit the anarchic sort of like, just do it yourself and maybe don't wait until someone tells you to do something or until you're given permission, just like, go ahead and do it.
00:13:09
Speaker
And I feel like that was very empowering and I realized that so much is possible if you just have the will to to do something and you also don't have to do it by yourself.
00:13:21
Speaker
that There's so much more we can achieve when you can pull on diverse skills and resources and and ways of knowing and doing. And so, yes, the floods were did deeply troubling and a very intense time for me but they were also like a peak life experience and I learned so much and it was also amazing just how much laughter there could be in the floodplain like we also had a really good time I feel like when you see your whole life floating downstream you realize what really matters and it was it was each other that was really yeah really special
00:14:02
Speaker
Beautiful storytelling. And i wonder now what your sense is when you think about the future that is that is here right now. Like, do you have a greater sense of confidence in what our communities are capable of, what the land is capable of, having been through that?
00:14:20
Speaker
Because I feel like a big fear that we harbour when we haven't exactly seen how a crisis unfolds, haven't felt it for ourselves, it's that amorphous fear of the other, you know, what are our neighbours going to do? What kind of shit is going to hit the fan in the street over the back? And, you know, how is that going to affect me?
00:14:38
Speaker
How am I going to protect my vegetable patch? Is it going to be barbed wire? Am I going to have like a sentinel out the front? You know, what is this thing going to be? And that gets really dark. And we've seen so many films to that effect that paint like a really grim portrait of what happens when the chips are down.
00:14:54
Speaker
And I just wonder... having that firsthand experience if you actually have a more hopeful perspective having been in that situation or is it something else?
00:15:06
Speaker
That's an interesting one. I'm just getting images of like in my mind's eye just training your chickens to attack people if they come to your garden. But no, I don't think you should do that. I think that it's always going to be mixed. I really hope it's not Mad Max.
00:15:19
Speaker
And I even notice myself doing this sometimes and we go into those places of fear of just wanting to make distance between ourselves and others so we can protect protect what's close around us. We just look at our roots.
00:15:32
Speaker
course, it's really scary to consider what other people are capable of. And it's true that in the floods, there were there were some really nasty elements that came out. where, you know, there was like fake charities set up where people were taking donations that weren't actually going towards people in the floods. People were afraid, you know, like I think we saw in COVID as we can like scratch the surface and see the real scarcity of our times or like the the real s so synthetic abundance that we have that's just only holding on by threads that it's deeply destabilizing, can throw people into a panic.
00:16:09
Speaker
And I, yeah, I noticed myself wanting to just protect myself and that kind of sense of trying to protect your your body um and like prepping, right? Setting your go bag up and like running away, finding a little spot somewhere where you can just like protect your fort. But you're only ever as prepared as your community is.
00:16:28
Speaker
Also, what's the fun in that? Like what's the fun in going and being by yourself in the forest and defending your fort? That's not where the richness of of what being part of humanity is. I definitely felt like when my mental health was really bad, when I was having, being in some of those throws of real climate grief and eco-anxiety, like that was important that I experienced that and made the space to experience that.
00:16:53
Speaker
But I, would then return into Lisboa the next day, turn up at the recovery cafe and just feeling like I was part of that community again and I was entangled in those networks made me feel sane.
00:17:06
Speaker
it reminded me that those that my community was keeping me sane. That's where the real joy was. That's where like the will to keep going, that's where I found it. In the games and the laughter and the music and the poetry and the It feels a bit strange now. i'm I'm living in the city at the moment and um it's much harder to make networks and I don't feel as embedded in place there, I think.
00:17:29
Speaker
And I do notice there's more of a sense of instability. I feel more like a stranger than when I was living in a place where I felt like I was i was part of it. What keeps you in the city?
00:17:40
Speaker
Well, working on this project, I think I wanted to be down here. I wanted to be working. I started going to uni and doing doing a bit more study and so kind of being here for those reasons. But I'm really realizing that it's not it's not filling my cup the way that that living in a community did.
00:17:58
Speaker
And a real yearning to to be back. to knowing a landscape and feeling in place in it. Not that you can't get that in a city and lots of people do.
00:18:09
Speaker
And so how did you come to have a relationship with the wombat forest?
Forest Management Insights
00:18:14
Speaker
I guess the first time I visited it was when I was um a scout when i was when I was younger, I was a kid. went out camping there but didn't feel much of a connection to it, I guess.
00:18:24
Speaker
So I've been living in Lismore and um I had organised to do an internship um with the Jar Jar Wurrung clans Aboriginal Corporation. who were one of the traditional owners that their traditional lands cover some of the wombat forest.
00:18:37
Speaker
It's actually, the forest is ah the meeting place of three indigenous nations. The Wurundjeri, the Wadarung, and the Dja Dja Wurund. And so I had like organized to do an internship with them several years prior, but continued to get cancelled due to the pandemic. And finally kind of organized to come down and do it after the flood. And I think I was ready to kind of leave Lismore for a minute and came down and started working on some audio stories for for them.
00:19:03
Speaker
Kind of more further north in central Victoria, kind of focusing on on like a Tang Tang swamp, which is a wetland kind of to the north. And whilst I was there, i had a friend of mine who I'd met doing forest activism.
00:19:14
Speaker
I was pretty deeply in the forest activist scene when I was in my early 20s. Spent a lot of time at Friends of the Earth, everything from, you know, tying knots and going to blockades to kind of door knocking and letterboxing and yeah, sort of deeply in that scene.
00:19:27
Speaker
And i had a friend who messaged me and was like, have you seen what's happening in the wombat forest? And I hadn't. And so um she sent me a bunch of articles about, there was a big storm there in 2021, where about 10,000 hectares of the forest had been ah impacted by these severe winds.
00:19:46
Speaker
3,000 hectares were really heavily impacted. So up to 80% of the canopy was lost, which is the equivalent of a really severe bushfire. It was like someone had dropped a packet of spaghetti on the ground. There were just trees stacked up on top of each other. It was quite a devastating event, not only for the, you know, the communities surrounding it who were living through this, but, you know, their relationship with this place, which I think hit me pretty hard having just lived in the community in a community through ah severe weather event.
00:20:18
Speaker
and having seen the impact of that change in the landscape on on the community as well. We were grieving, but trying to pick up our the pieces of our lives while while grieving the landscape that had really changed around us.
00:20:29
Speaker
And so all these trees were down and the question was like, what should we done about these trees? And so the Dja Dja Wurrung clan's Aboriginal corporation, which is known as Djaara, thought there should be some sort of active management.
00:20:42
Speaker
They thought that the trees presented a fire risk and that they were impeding the understory from regenerating and so the trees should be removed and if that timber could be put to good use then it made sense to them to to use it.
00:20:54
Speaker
So they ended up working with Vic Forests, which is a Victorian, or which was, no longer exists, But it was a Victorian logging agency that was responsible for for timber in the state.
00:21:07
Speaker
And then this obviously was strongly opposed by and local environmental groups who have a deep distrust of Vic forests. And they thought the trees should be left in place and that they could break down into soil and become habitat and that removing the trees would create more harm than good.
00:21:26
Speaker
And so I was really confronted by this and I didn't really know what to think. I was pretty overwhelmed. And I ended up talking to some mentors of mine who just asked me some more questions and like, did have you do you know this yet? What about this? And I was like, you know, I actually don't know everything about this.
00:21:42
Speaker
Maybe I'll just sit and listen for a bit. And because I was interning with a corporation at the time, I got to hear some conversations there that really, i think, highlighted for me the the complexity of this space and of how we manage forests going forward. And and the politics of of who gets a say in that and so i became really interested I guess in the different ways that people came to this um and that's how I guess I decided to to work on this project.
00:22:07
Speaker
yeah You're pulling at a much more subtle thread in the reskillience toolkit of holding that complexity, listening, all of these kind of softer skills I guess you'd call them,
00:22:21
Speaker
that are going to be hardcore necessary if we're going to find ways forward and maybe ways the emphasis on the plurality of that word because there might not be one way.
00:22:31
Speaker
So yeah I'm really, really drawn to your project and your like this conversation as a space where it's not even like you're stating a position.
00:22:43
Speaker
It's actually about all of these voices at a table and how we navigate that complexity. how did you How did you go about approaching people for this project when I imagine people would have had really strong views and maybe would recognize that their voice, their audio piece is going to be shoulder to shoulder with someone they might not necessarily agree with?
00:23:08
Speaker
Like what happened there? It was really hard. Yeah. I think initially, so the project itself is like a series of 11 photographic and audio portraits where each person kind of speaks to their perspective.
00:23:22
Speaker
um And they talk about the forest from where they stand and kind of what they see and what their visions are. But initially I set out to just kind of do like a linear narrative of kind of like, what happened here? Who, what does this group say? say What does that group say?
00:23:36
Speaker
What's this? What happened next? And I realized that like, A linear narrative would mean that I would have to have a beginning, a middle and an ending. And there was no conclusion yet. Someone would have the last say, which is what i not what I wanted to do.
00:23:49
Speaker
And I think that these stories are never linear. They're so multifaceted. And i just couldn't arrive at a at a kind of a narrative arc that I thought was...
00:24:02
Speaker
appropriate. So it ended up being, yeah, many con many different voices that together kind of build this image of the forest from many different perspectives.
00:24:13
Speaker
Like you're looking down at a map and suddenly there's new bits that you can see and there's more details and more colors and more overlays. I guess I just I did it very slowly would kind of make contact with someone one and have initial chats with them and kind of tell them about what I was what the approach was and see kind of how they felt about that and sometimes people would pull out and they didn't feel like they wanted to to speak into that space which was really fair enough it was quite fraught before I began I really I just I remember i sat in my garden
00:24:45
Speaker
and I just pull my hands out, my arms out, and just like practice holding the weight of it all. And I was like, oh, this really heavy. This is really big. And can I hold this?
00:24:57
Speaker
And I really asked myself if I had the capacity to hold all these different bits. And i was like, I don't know, but I'm going to try anyway. And so, yeah I kind of started snaking out in lots of of different directions.
00:25:10
Speaker
And i would read what people said online, read through the the comments and Facebook posts, read old newspaper articles. Someone who I met briefly when I was in interning with Jara was Pete McCurley.
00:25:24
Speaker
um who is a local craftsman who lives in Dalesford. Pete is Gumbangia and Yarrabul man and has begun working for Jarrah, the corporation.
00:25:35
Speaker
And we just sat and had some really long yarns without any particular destination in mind, just some long chats about things. And I think that he's got a real capacity to hold many truths at once.
00:25:48
Speaker
And he's got a real curiosity as well. that I found really yeah really helpful for me to work out how I should approach this and the openness of it. And so the interviews themselves, when I would interview people, there would be questions that I wanted to ask and there'll be some questions that I would ask every everyone.
00:26:07
Speaker
But then i would have a series of words and the words would say things like timber or fire or resilience or grief. And then i would let them pick a word and we would just explore what that meant.
00:26:21
Speaker
And maybe I had some quotes on hand that I would read out and see kind of like what that brought up for them. so in some ways I really wanted them to direct where they wanted to go with the conversations.
00:26:33
Speaker
Yeah, i'm just I'm just feeling into that, like your history as an activist and obviously that that's a stance that you're taking. there's There's a right way and a wrong way to manage a forest and then coming into this situation where there is so much complexity because of course we want to support in local mob, Indigenous folks to enact their healing and repair and destiny and i want to look to those wise and belongingful individuals to to do what they need to do in the spaces that have been so savagely taken from them over the years and so it's like then all of a sudden the activist you and the ally you are having this interface that feels like impossible and then
00:27:22
Speaker
your ability to openly dialogue with folks in the community, like, were you looking for an answer? Or how like how did you steal that part of you that had an opinion? It's like, no, this it's wrong to take those trees away. Or we should just lock up the forest. Like, what's your what was your personal journey through that?
00:27:41
Speaker
How did I steal that part of myself? I don't think I did it perfectly all the time. i guess I just really wanted to understand why people thought what they thought. And instead of, I wasn't going in with ah the agenda of convincing anyone of anything or trying to make a gotcha.
00:27:58
Speaker
It wasn't. Yeah, like I did notice at times where maybe there was that kind of tone to my intentions and I think I just pinpointed and I was like, hey you, not right now.
00:28:11
Speaker
And so I really just tried to sit in curiosity. um There's also, there's the concept of the straw man and the steel man. Have you heard of these? Yeah, I've actually not been really great at clarifying these for myself. So if you could assist me, I'd be most grateful. Totally. So a straw man is like, I guess when you are constructing someone else's argument or you're summarizing the argument and you make it up, but you only pick the bits that don't really have much weight to them. when You pick the worst arguments and you emphasize those.
00:28:41
Speaker
It's like you're building a straw man so that you can blow it down. And it's really easy to knock down because it's made of straw because you're representing someone else's argument in a some simple way that isn't actually, yeah, maybe doesn't hold the complexity or the the strength of that argument.
00:28:56
Speaker
um And so if in a one sided debate, one sided discourse, you're not actually creating a generative space where you're engaging with the true ideas there or the true motivations or what might be a really thought provoking argument.
00:29:10
Speaker
Whereas a steel man is like where you really try to get inside what someone who's got a different perspective to you, what they think, and you you try and steal their argument um so that it has strength to it. And then you you consider it against your perspective.
00:29:27
Speaker
And that way you can actually find and don't know, points of movement or it's more engaging because you're forced to really consider what you believe and why. And so this project, I guess, was an attempt to really understand where people were coming from and why and what the strengths of those arguments were.
00:29:47
Speaker
Saying arguments is funny because I don't think the project ended up being very argumentative. It hasn't, like, we acknowledge that there is these tensions and conflicts and forests are spaces where conflicts emerge.
Forests: Conflict and Healing
00:29:59
Speaker
There have always been spaces where conflicts have emerged. I mean, many of them were arrested violently from the hands of the traditional owners who were there. Like they have always been these sites of tension and and violence, as well as sites that we go to for solace and and rest.
00:30:16
Speaker
But I think that the project ended up being much more kind of reflective and it really explored the curiosities and joys of all these different people, of of what it is that about the forest that enchants them and what...
00:30:30
Speaker
what it is that motivates them and what they find therefore that kind of gives their life more color and meaning. And that was really beautiful throughout this too, that I found that it wasn't just about unpicking this,
00:30:43
Speaker
this conflict. It was really about getting inside the the diversity of community and the wisdom to be found there. Like in Lismore, the the strength of the community was in the diversity of skills and knowledge bases and resources that people could pull upon.
00:31:00
Speaker
and it was really quite beautiful to see all the strength that exists here amongst the people who care about this place even though they may have really different world views and values sometimes but that's not a thing that will necessarily impede finding a way forward for this place I mean, it's, this is kind of a question that I do put to a lot of people and I don't know how many thousands of times I need to hear it, but I'd love to hear your take on this. It's like in an era of very serious shit and responses that we are told have to match the urgency and scale.
00:31:34
Speaker
We need scalable solutions. We need things to happen now. We need to be decisive. Like that's the kind of rhetoric around the challenges of our times so I'm just always so interested in how and why people choose to pour their energy into projects that at the end of the day ah so much more subtle and spark joy and curiosity and wonderment and and unpredictable conversations in a gallery space and are everything that a prescription isn't for for managing a forest for sequestering carbon like
00:32:10
Speaker
It fascinates me too, because I understand that you're bringing so much knowledge and experience to this, and yet you choose this soft and tender path.
00:32:21
Speaker
Interesting. i guess, like, as I said before, I worked for a while in the regen industry, planting trees, poisoning weeds. I really felt this urgent need to be part of the earth's immune system response. I was like, I want to patch the bare bits of soil. I want to revegetate the riparian strips. I want to like be part of the, of the force that is trying to, to put this bandaid over to try and like look after the soils and, and i I realized working in that space that sometimes it's done really badly.
00:32:58
Speaker
Sometimes it's it's just done in a way which isn't going to work or in the long term will lead to more problems over time. And I ended up feeling quite despondent and disillusioned with it.
00:33:14
Speaker
And that was really confronting because i was trying to do the most that I could as a little human to try and make up for the, or try to so give back for all that I needed to take.
00:33:26
Speaker
And it felt like it just wasn't ever going to be an enough. Or that the way we were doing it was maybe exacerbating some of those problems. I tried to just do the action and i realize that if it wasn't action with thought, was if it wasn't with reflection, if it wasn't thinking deeply about the future and where we were headed and the long-term implications of that, it was never going to be effective.
00:33:51
Speaker
And so this project is much more subtle, but I think some of the things that we need to experience is as a human race right now are much more subtle. And if we just keep acting without making room for some of those kind of deeper, darker feelings, some of the real grief, wondering if we, you know, maybe there'll be species we love that will go extinct and there's not much we can do.
00:34:19
Speaker
Maybe these landscapes will be burnt by multiple successive severe fires. And how do we continue to love them after that? And how do we care for them in the aftermath of that?
Grieving Environmental Losses
00:34:31
Speaker
And not shy away from from how bad it's going to get, but really pull the look with eyes unclouded at what's coming and prepare ourselves for what what we need to do in response.
00:34:43
Speaker
And part of the work we need to do in in getting ready for for living through what the world's going to look like under the climate crisis, I think is is really just a lot of grieving and a lot of sitting in that messiness and that discomfort and finding ways to listen to each other and realizing that the solutions aren't easy.
00:35:09
Speaker
And at the end of the day, there's just a lot of hard work but maybe we can find the stamina to do that work if we've thought clearly about the reasons why ah what it is at the end of the day that where that we're doing it for.
00:35:27
Speaker
And something that Pete McCurley, again, he does really well is he just pulls us out of the present moment and he always thinks about this deep time perspective of country, that country is forever and we're all upon it, we're just dancing upon it just for this little short moment And there's all of these changes that are playing out upon the surface right now, but it'll keep going.
00:35:50
Speaker
And humans have lived through big, big changes in the past, been through ice ages and have found ways to continue to live. And so what are the the patterns and the continuities that we can carry forward from there, going forward from here, but also pulling it back to a deep time perspective, I think makes it feel less searing.
00:36:11
Speaker
Sometimes i do just feel really despondent and I do just want to run away from it all. But i think it's kind of finding the other people that really care as well that also continues to inspire me to keep going.
00:36:25
Speaker
Yeah. I'm curious as well about your perspective on this. Why do you have conversations? Like what is it that, that makes you seek out people to have these conversations with?
00:36:36
Speaker
And this is part of the work that you're doing. Yeah. What, what drives you there? Oh, thank you for asking. o There's so much mystery about, you know,
00:36:48
Speaker
why we do the things we do and what our role to play is. And I feel kind of committed to the compulsion of conversation and alliteration.
00:37:01
Speaker
And there's something in like, I'm actually just thinking of this as I sit here and just witness your, your unfettered like passion and, and like arising, you know, just allowing of the things that arise within you. And I feel like, wow, I'm so,
00:37:17
Speaker
I'm so here to witness people's special thing. And that can feel a little crippling at times because I have this tendency to to compare or to feel like, oh, I need to care about this or i need to care about that. or why can't I articulate myself in that way? So it's funny, like self-referential thing that happens. But I actually feel, you know, behind that scene, why I do this is to To bring all of these things into a space and to not only for myself, like witness and reflect and mirror and like honor someone sitting in front of me. And I think that's, you know, as a as a person to person interaction, a really beautiful thing that we can share and like some kind of healing for both of us that is made public and then lands in some way with someone who we can't see right now.
00:38:05
Speaker
But yeah, i suppose I just believe in these conversations. I just believe in airing things. I i believe in the the chaos of the first drafts that we share with each other and what that might germinate like somewhere just like scatter sowing all the seeds in the garden bed and we know that they're there in the bank and when the conditions are right some of these ideas are going to come up it's a beautiful way for me to ask you about your your ecological niche your what you've felt in yourself to be your role say in a forest system in a social system like how do you position yourself and kind of stay alive to what you know the world wants from you i have the answer don't have the answer i have an answer what i have the answer um
00:38:55
Speaker
um
00:38:58
Speaker
I did want to say really quickly, like I think I really share that with the wanting to to witness and ask people questions, just like wanting to know the real curiosity about how do you do it and what what is it where do you get deep and like trying to um pull those things out of people and the learning to listen as well I think has been really cool part of working with audio.
00:39:19
Speaker
It makes it really confronting for me to be interviewed now and I'm just like, oh my god am I sounding like a wanker?
Connecting Diverse Perspectives
00:39:24
Speaker
But like and big part of these audio stories that I've done is to remove my voice completely so it's just other people speaking and I think that that links to I think my place is like a little pollinator.
00:39:35
Speaker
I think I'm just a little, I've always really wanted to be a beetle. And they're very beautiful, very colorful, and they can like actually fly really high, which is good. Cause like, I don't know that I want to be a bird as such, but a beetle?
00:39:46
Speaker
Yes. Cause they get to go from flower to flower and they get to bring the different pollens around and they get to be down in the dirt and like up high in the canopy and see, see the forest from all these different perspectives.
00:39:58
Speaker
And they get to visit all these different flowers and make them bloom more. And I think that's what I really like doing. I like kind of cross-pollinating ideas. And a really cool thing about interviewing all these different people for the project as well has been like putting them in contact sometimes.
00:40:14
Speaker
Being like, oh, that's a really interesting idea. You should talk to this person. I think they'll have a perspective that you find really intriguing. And in the process of of doing these interviews,
00:40:24
Speaker
And pulling these kind of people together, it's been very, even the process itself has been something I think that and I'm not sure if it's made a big difference, but I think that it has just made a difference. It's made people more open to talking to each other and realizing there's not necessarily and an impasse, that there is, that there's room and it's dynamic.
00:40:47
Speaker
And that tensions and conflicts can be a really generative space um where solutions can arise from. We don't know how exactly, like you were saying with the seeds, like when you throw stuff in there, what's going to germinate? I don't know. We'll see what the rain brings.
00:41:00
Speaker
But yeah, there's creative tension there. And it's so much more exciting than trying to come up with answers on your own. So you're not drawn to being the expert? Because I often feel like a bit of FOMO that I didn't get so so so so deep into like the life cycle of a bot fly or something
00:41:20
Speaker
Yeah, no, i when I would interview someone like Anna Senior, the skink oncologist I interviewed. it's a perfect example. Oh yeah. Just so much knowledge about the lives of these particular skinks and like, yeah, just rich, rich, like experience with catching them and observing them and their little life ways. But i got I guess I got to experience that vicariously through her.
00:41:42
Speaker
But I also, yeah I loved hearing Gary Lawrence, for example, who's the curator of the Dalesford Museum, and talking about the geology and the rocks and the water and and those kind of processes rather than just the one creature and so i feel like i'm always going to be that little insect that's just kind of running around and listening to all the different things and trying to find the connections between them or maybe i am the connection between them as a little pollinator yeah i think i'm happy being being the bit that moves between and it feels like a bit of ah a cliffhanger
00:42:14
Speaker
at this point in the conversation, where is the wombat forest at now? How was there a decision made around if the logs were going to be taken out or I know the Dara Forest Gardening Program, like I've read about that and it's amazing to dive into that, but what's actually happening there on the ground?
00:42:32
Speaker
Yeah, look, complicated space. So the Wombat Forest is on the path to becoming a national park. It was declared that it become a national park in the same month that the storm happened in 2021, actually.
00:42:44
Speaker
So that is still in process. It's not clear when it's going to be officially national park, but that's in process. Native forest logging in Victoria has ceased to exist. um As of the 1st of January 2024, the state of Victoria has decided that we're not going to manage our forests for timber anymore. So Vic Forests has been dismantled.
00:43:06
Speaker
A lot of those contractors have gone on to work for Forest Fire Management Victoria. And so they have continued to do storm salvage works for fire mitigation, um which continues to come under a lot of fire by conservationists who are concerned about the way it's being done and whether it is actually reducing fire risk in the forest or if it's just increasing the fine fuels.
00:43:28
Speaker
So that continues to happen. And, you know, there are still places where fire mitigation is is an important thing that that needs to happen. But the way it's being done is is still the object of critique.
00:43:40
Speaker
Jara are no longer working with Forests. That was a really difficult process for them. Yeah, yeah. This is in the pieces as well, but it ended up being really, they, you know, when they would try to direct how they wanted things to happen and they just kind of wouldn't be listened to. so they ended up stepping back from that completely and they have their own kind of forest management practices that they are developing.
00:44:05
Speaker
So they have some trial sites. They're working together with different researchers and academics to, as well as with communities. So they'll trial things like ring barking or doing some thinning in some areas and putting the logs on the ground for example or turning that into cultural objects but then they will meet with mob and they'll get feedback from a community in their own kind of consultative processes to develop those those kind of tools.
00:44:33
Speaker
That's something that's not done on any kind of scale at the moment, it's in a trial state. But they are working with Hepburn Shire Council, yes, with some of the exotic species such as pines in the forest working out how to turn those into a timber resource or diseased trees in parks and gardens. So along the Kingston Avenue of Honor, it's not in the forest itself, but some of those trees have died now. And so they have been milling that wood as well.
00:44:58
Speaker
They're kind of working both in the forest and with timber kind of more broadly in the region. But in terms of what happens going forward, I i don't know.
00:45:09
Speaker
Yeah, I really hope that this project is a conversation starter. and maybe as a catalyst for some more reflection in this space. I think it's going to be really hard any kind of forest management activities from here going forwards because there's been such a long history of mismanagement of forests and the memory of the environmental sphere is long as well.
00:45:35
Speaker
And honestly, there's been a lot of trauma, I think, being dragged through court cases, you know, there were people hired as private investigators to follow environmentalists in some cases, like there's a lot of distrust in that space.
00:45:48
Speaker
And so I think a lot of hard work is going to be have to be put into the communities feel like they have a say in what's happening going forwards and how we look after forests is appropriate for what what we want them to be going forwards and how we think we should care for them.
00:46:04
Speaker
But yeah, those relationships and dynamics are still unfolding. yeah Reading part of your blurb for the exhibition, and you asked a few really provocative questions. And one is, how do we love what's left?
00:46:17
Speaker
So the Wombat Forest was declared at one point a ruined forest. And for all of us, we see we see the ruin we see the pollution, we see... the tragedy of all of our collective choices in front of us every single day. And that just feels like such a huge question in my life.
00:46:36
Speaker
And I'd love to know how you love what's left, whether that be the places that you roam in the city or the forest that you visit. How is it that you're putting that into practice and paying your respects to this world that is scarred, but also so strong? Mm-hmm.
00:46:56
Speaker
I think what you said, scarred, is really interesting.
Finding Solace in Nature
00:46:59
Speaker
In the forest, you can see the the scars from the sneak tracks where where logging tracks pooled logs through. you can see where the watercourses have been redirected because they've been churned over looking for gold.
00:47:12
Speaker
You can see the places that have really thick eucalypt regrowth because of logging past where there was hot reset burns that stimulated those those thick eucalypt regrowth. There's all those layers there.
00:47:24
Speaker
I find like real solace in the details. Balanced on the edge of the moment, like being just in the present and noticing maybe a little crawl between two currawongs in the tree above, or like a really perfectly balanced wombat poo on top of a log, or the place that an insect has eaten through a leaf to leave my initials.
00:47:47
Speaker
um And those tiny little details, think just really finding delight in those and remembering that there's the force which st drives the momentum of metabolism and life in this place is still so strong.
00:48:03
Speaker
And I don't know what that force is, but but it's there's such a richness there still. There's still all these relationships and relationships it continues to carry on And like, I remember seeing all these flying foxes flying overhead um when I was in Lismore, when I was having a really, really despondent moment, really not knowing what to do or what my role should be or or what, how to act in a world that felt like it was falling apart around me.
00:48:36
Speaker
And just witnessing the flying foxes flying overhead, going out to forage for blossoms, You know, it wasn't because they said they felt that they should or that they must. It was just what they had to do.
00:48:50
Speaker
And that that was already in relation. By going out finding those blossoms, they would be pollinating the eucalypt forests. They'd be in these deep relationships with this web of the world.
00:49:03
Speaker
And so finding ways to just be in a little relationships, even if it's just with my tomatoes in my garden or filling up the birdbath for the... Indian miners not even native species but just those little relationships and those little moments I think they just give me that they let just fill the cup a little bit more and if you get enough of them then there's enough to keep going.
00:49:24
Speaker
Was there anything that we haven't touched on that you were really poised to talk about today that I haven't asked you? Yeah I guess I guess if people are engage with the exhibition.
00:49:35
Speaker
I would want to caution about the danger of ah of a single story. This is something that an author, a Nigerian author, I really love, Chimamanda Ngyodi Adichie, she talks about, but in relation to the betrayals of Nigerian people of Africa. And if you only have one narrative of what that continent is, then you're robbed of the complexity of of who the Nigerian people are or African people are.
00:50:01
Speaker
And sometimes we don't make room to hold multiple stories. We don't have time. we don't have the attention spans. I think that in listening to these audio pieces, listening to just one story would just really rob you of the richness of of how will these voices interweave and that they do overlay on each other and they build a bigger picture.
00:50:27
Speaker
And I think the world is made up of lots of stories and that through hearing all these stories together, it actually weaves a tapestry that that we can read better as humans.
00:50:38
Speaker
And so taking the time to to listen to multiple and to really just suspend belief, suspend maybe preconceived ideas about what is right or or the way forward from here, just to stand a minute beside somebody and see what they see just for a moment and then you can move on.
00:51:02
Speaker
But I think that in that practice there is A lot of wisdom to be found when we learn to hold those diverse wisdoms. And how does that serve us into the future?
00:51:17
Speaker
When we're like learning, like I was saying with Lismore, so beautiful finding the place that where you just want to be enmeshed in it. It can also be really fucking difficult. Community can be full of conflict and tension and and there's just drama. There's stuff that can be really hard to manage.
00:51:35
Speaker
But learning to work with people and finding their strengths and finding the places that there is common ground and and realizing that we're all on this planet together, whether we like it or not.
00:51:49
Speaker
and that there are such strengths to be found in finding the ways to come together. And these places like the Wombat Forest, like the natural world, has this incredible power to bring us together and tease us away from maybe the places that we thought we belonged and create a togetherness.
00:52:11
Speaker
to To do the work that... that we need to do to look after these places into the future, to prepare them or or respond to the challenges they face. We're going to need to to learn to to work with each other.
00:52:25
Speaker
And that's not always going to be easy, but I think it's a real skill we need to practice.
Embracing Complexity in Solutions
00:52:32
Speaker
Because I think our contemporary society really creates binaries and it has something to gain from from keeping those binaries distinct, from having an either or perspective.
00:52:45
Speaker
And we feel like we retreat back into these camps and we feel safe, but I think it it's actually really damaging. And that only when they we begin to see that there's actually a both and, there can actually be multiple valid ways of seeing and thinking.
00:53:04
Speaker
is there like the precipitation of maybe some of the answers to some of those problems. And I feel like that's a really esoteric way of talking about this, but I don't know that there's another way that I can. So yeah.
00:53:16
Speaker
Oh, feel inspired to ask you some more off the back of that. Sorry, I'm just going to hold you hostage for another few minutes. Yeah, go for it. Something that I've been talking with Jord about in recent times is this idea of like being able to take a position and say, no I can say, i can I can deem that behavior or that fucking war or whatever as as the wrong thing as in my world objectively bad so I get I get kind of overly passive and whimsical and almost permissive in a way because I want to understand every single person's position and I want to see it as part of ah domino that started you know way back before time even began of things that are not really within our control and
00:54:00
Speaker
question free will and I have all of these questions that become like a self referential spiral of not even doing anything or not wanting to take a position and wanting to to just be so open that you know my brains fall out and so yeah this question that we or this this chat we've been having is when do you take a position and say I'm actually going to push against that or I want to intervene because that's just not right in my books versus being able to hold this maybe it isn't a versus maybe it is an and i'm just unsure about like when we when we exercise some some some agency and when we sit back and how to kind of navigate that decision making process i don't know it's really hard right because
00:54:46
Speaker
without talking about specifics, it's and it's really hard to know. I guess like having a really strong feeling and then stepping back and and listening and just suspending it for a minute.
00:55:01
Speaker
And maybe gathering information and being really willing to hear what a different perspective is in a way that's not going to cause... Because when we have those that really strong belief about something, it can cause us to ma ah react emotionally or from a place of feeling...
00:55:19
Speaker
attacked or distressed rather than actually being able to hear what someone has to say. And what someone has to say we might still really disagree with, but we don't we can't analyse the merit of their arguments. We can't get inside what they think and feel and where they've come from to maybe hold this perspective or or to present their alternative argument.
00:55:41
Speaker
And so I think suspending and making space to listen to that and then returning to maybe what you felt and seeing if you still feel the same way. And then maybe that means that you can continue to have to act, but in a way that has compassion for the other person or acknowledges the the complexity there and is focusing. Maybe that can also help to focus what would actually It can define what the challenge that needs to be addressed is.
00:56:15
Speaker
it It might actually pinpoint a little bit better so it can be more strategic what you're doing. The fault is not necessarily, for example, farmers who are misusing their land which is causing the insecurity in food insecurity or causing there to be masses of soil erosion. Maybe the problem is a step back.
00:56:38
Speaker
Maybe attacking farmers for particular way that they have to manage their land isn't actually an effective thing solution maybe it needs to be a step back to to the accessibility of of the seed industry for example or the way that those farmers are caught in the bigger supply chains and having to supply to the food system it can just help us to pinpoint what actually is the the what we see is the problem because we maybe just lump that person in with the problem where that person isn't necessarily
00:57:11
Speaker
the problem so yeah maybe i would say suspending for a minute which is what I think I had to do in this project was just be like oh my god I feel so uncomfortable about this I don't know what to think and suspend it and and just be willing to hold many perspectives and then come back to it and be like oh okay this is actually the thing that I think that I disagree with and This is the the way forward that i I could see as being reasonable.
00:57:42
Speaker
Yeah, the first emotional reaction to something can actually be more, it can actually impede effective action. So brilliantly said. And it is a little bit of a tease because we're talking about your exhibition or collaboration between you and a few other folks as well um that may not be around if people ever enter enter this wonderful realm of Dalesford. So yeah, how would you direct people's attention if this conversation has really pricked their ears?
Tessa's Exhibition and Ocean Radio Show
00:58:09
Speaker
Yeah, um so it's online at framingwombatforest.com.au and there you can find all of the portraits as well as all of the audio. Yeah, it'll also be coming to Melbourne.
00:58:22
Speaker
um So it'll be at Friends of the Earth and at Black Spark Gallery. So it'll be around later in the year. all All of the audio and images are online. And I feel like that might even be a better way to really engage with it because you can just lie back and listen.
00:58:39
Speaker
And what about for you? Is there anything... upcoming on the horizon? I've started to present a radio show with 3CR about the ocean. Yeah, it's a real pivot for me. I don't really know anything about the ocean and I don't really like sand or direct sunlight. I'm not really a beach kind of gal, but but I do like stories.
00:58:59
Speaker
So I'm going to start presenting ah about once a month. You can catch to me on the airwaves. Oh my God, does that start effective immediately? Yeah, I've already done one and I'll be... on it next weekend yeah fantastic um triple r's radio marinara was like one of my favorite shows when i lived in melbourne so anything c and pun related definitely does it for me so i really hope you can weave those two beautiful things together i will try my very best Thank you so much for making time for this conversation today, Tessa, and reaching out and just being such an incredible role model. Thank you. Thank you for coming and being willing to really delve into this with me and pull me out and make me say things.
00:59:41
Speaker
I hope it wasn't too painful. No.
00:59:48
Speaker
That was Tessa Campisi, and you'll find a swag of links, including to her exhibition, in the show notes.
Episode Wrap-Up
00:59:55
Speaker
Thanks for listening, friends. Reskillians will be back in a fortnight with another good egg of a human hatching all kinds of natural wisdom.
01:00:03
Speaker
Catch you then.