A paper presented at the Ideas Festival, Brisbane March 2009 by Dr Tamsin Kerr.

Creative conservation: listening

Listen like a river

In the midst of the city, we listen to human-manufactured noises – the hum of cars, passing sirens, air conditioners. Within our houses, we hear the insistent beeping of microwaves, the many sounds of messaging, the mediated noise of our media. When we listen deeply, it’s to understand a difficult idea or to comprehend another point of view. But we do also notice the overt sounds of nature, particularly at edge places. In swamp remnants where night meets day, we hear the choruses of frogs and birds. The late night guttural calls of possums, even the neighbourly barking of dogs, remind us that we live in a more-than-human world.

Yet, humans have greater qualities than just a sense of hearing. We have a creative ability to step outside ourselves and imagine an expanded future. We have ways to listen to the world; not just hear its noises. We might listen like a river. Listening like a river offers possibilities, seldom grasped, for new cultural metaphors and new ways forward. Margaret Somerville says: ‘Babble is ... a language that is ... visionary and revelatory, closer to the landscape, allied to the sounds of streams and birds.’ (Somerville, et al, 1994: 194). Perhaps it is only possible to place think, to imagine landscape embeddedness, through succumbing to wild thinking and the babble of rivers.

Deep within its waters, a river holds the memory of sounds across both time and place. River flows embrace the sound of brook, creek, and stream journeys as well as seas and oceans. Sounds travel well in water; distance meaningless to a river’s hearing. The crystal waters of its birthplace abound with young life, while pelicans swoosh down suddenly with beaks agape at the river’s mouth. Mangrove buds unfurl, root, grow, and die amidst the lifetime swirls and eddies that combine fresh and brine. And from far across the ocean comes the clear singing of whales. Human sounds above and apart from the waters are distorted and remote. Travel distance is a human concept - land and air based; this is not a river’s reality. The clearest sounds remain always within its waters. And its waters are everywhere all the time, flowing constantly from mountain to mangrove, from creek to ocean.

A river has a natural timelessness, a sound meditation that draws upon past, present, and future. At the river mouth, the river meanders slowly. A Leaellynasaura family lap the waters, barely heard above the slow wallowings of lungfish and the quicker dartings of giant platypus. A paddled canoe, a swish of fishing vine, a dart of spear, a sudden flurry of sound is almost lost amongst the teeming noises of water insects, schools of fish, the clacking of yabbies. (But, the fish still attend to their singin’ up by human elders.) Louder noises intrude: steam engines, motor boats, dredging barges; the jarring sounds of pumps and intake pipes. There are quieter, stealthier poisonings: oil and chemicals, water weeds and feral fish, litter, the tackle of fishing, choke the hum of more native life. Stirred up silt deafens and mutes sound. Waterways are hidden within concrete, creating noisier flooding, and confusing returning barramundi. The rumble of traffic almost overpowers the slow sounds of turtles as they plop and dive from sun-basking. But then the waters are raised again, the sounds of cars replaced by gardeners and picnickers alongside banks of food. Squeals of delight from young swimmers echo past memories. The river sings of its future: watery life again teeming in its midst.

If we extend time for a moment and cast off our human skins, we might imagine ourselves in this non-human form. This is sound meditation that embeds us in this place, allowing a flowing over obstacles; this is how we might appreciate both the smallest sounds of water skimmers and the greatest noises of inundation.

By listening like a river, we create a moment of ceremonial time. By listening like a river, we remember and magnify the sounds of river life. By listening like a river: we inhabit life cycles and life places. We see our past and our future stretched out before us; we know where we came from and what we might meet; we know because we listen. To listen like a river is to know our human partnership of this more-than-human world. If we listen like a river, we take the temper and the tempo of this earth, we touch the world lightly and joyously, we embrace an ocean of possibilities.

Listen slowly, listen deeply to the power of babble: platypus, dragonfly, damselfly, mayfly, caddis-fly, backswimmers and waterstriders, whirligig and diving beetles, sawshelled turtles, smooth and spiny crayfish, freshwater prawns, water scorpions and water rats, keelback snakes and azure kingfishers watching each other and their prey intently. Listen slowly, listen deeply to the natural flow and water pulses that might nourish our whole environment. Listen like a river and we dream the wild.

Footnotes:

Aldo Leopold said we must think like a mountain (as a plea for much longer-term planning); listening like a river is an extension of this line of thought.

Barramundi who, unlike trout, spawn in the sea and migrate up the streams of natural rivers to grow, can’t swim against the current of artificially channelled rivers.

Controlled flows, through the use of dams etc, confuse the wildlife, as it is often the opposite of what is expected naturally

The platypus like the river once swam around the legs of dinosaurs, it a quiet Australian way. Compare the quiet noises of animals to the machinery of humans: both the platypus and the dredging barge stir up the debris of the river’s bed and dig into the river bank, but make very different sounds.