The process of induction, ongoing, has taken place over four years so far. It has been mainly through an informal listening process on my part, and I have been grateful to those including, occasionally, traditional owners, who have allowed me to hear them talking — whether that’s been at local landcare group meetings, participatory landcare workshops, during working bees, walks, or apparently idle conversations.
All of this listening has affected my vision: because of it I’ve come to see the land under my care and all that lives there differently. At first I was daunted by the multitude of names, Latin or otherwise, particularly of plants, and the certainties that seemed to accompany knowing or being able to remember them. If you’ve noticed something interesting or apparently rare it helps to be able to communicate to others what it was or resembled! Anxiety in me about such literacy however has waned as I’ve come to realise that familiarity and a name will come in due course and that true intimacy with things and beings usually comes from long practical connection.
My listening itself has also changed a little. I still do not know the calls of birds as if they were calling out to me with a message that can penetrate my consciousness. I continue to be brought up short when a more experienced landcarer stops a conversation with me or others in its tracks to comment on a call-from-the-wild that I’ve just missed. But I’m more tuned now to the wallaby thumps and changes in the wind as I hear it in our wonderful gums and sighing she-oaks; and all of the apparently randomly mixed, bizarre or discreet cries of the birds are just starting to become distentangled by my ear into their differences.
I live in Melbourne and usually only travel to the Trust for Nature property of which I am a co-trustee - located in the North Central region of Victoria - once or sometimes twice a month for short periods. My city life has over the years, and with the advent of the laptop, become primarily about reading and writing. Landcare, though, seems to need from me a different receptivity that includes cultivation of listening. It’s an initial getting oneself out of the way.