Is it beauty that asks the question?

by Prue Acton

Presented at Manning Clark House, Canberra, 23 September 2008

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Prue Acton, “an artist who chooses to work in the field of fashion” (her quote), spoke at a Manning Clark House dinner on 23 September 2008.

My pursuit of beauty

Beauty is the emotional response of the senses to rightness: in nature, in art, in all endeavours. Beauty brings us to consciousness of the whole of nature and the laws of the universe. Beauty is the recognition of how parts fit together into a perfect whole. Beauty motivates us to understand the evolving potential of life.

I wrote this some months ago when I first accepted the invitation to speak at Manning Clark House. Now I am entirely focused on trying to change Government policies related to Australia’s native forests, woodlands, grasslands and soils, and the opportunity we have to cut carbon dioxide emissions by stopping logging and land clearing, thus allowing nature to regenerate.

First, let me walk you through what was once a beautiful wet forest, near Bombala on the Cann River Highway. Then, after a little about my background, I will answer my initial question about how beauty motivates me in my pursuits: in art, fashion, cosmetics and nature. And why am I, along with so many others, trying to help save our natural world?

So come with me into the forest. We set off early, meet outside the Bombala pub, drive twenty minutes down the Cann River Highway, then onto a logging road, and stop. We walk down a track overgrown and thickly edged with piles of litter and fresh growth. We stop at an old tree, thick trunked and gnarled.  We are asked to compare this tree with newly-grown saplings beside the track. Which stores more carbon, hundreds of thin spindles, or this solid, massive tree?

We scramble on downwards into the forest proper and cross a pile of huge, lichen-covered, decaying logs. Though travelling only a few hundred metres, we are slowed by big and little, thick and thin, straight and crooked life. We notice the silence of our footsteps, the lightness, the ground supporting our path softly, springingly. Looking down, we can see the scratchings of bandicoots and lyrebirds, some of the many species that turn over the leaf litter, aerate the soil, break down the carbon life and store it. Centuries of forest are accumulating below our feet as organic matter – soil carbon.

We reach our destination. A giant tree soars above us, its base ten metres round, yet hundreds of metres up, it shrinks to a few branches and leaves. Feet firmly planted, grounded by elephant-like roots, this tree has stood for perhaps five hundred years. Its  warmth, its girth, its weight, its strength, support my back as cameras click, videos hum.

I feel at home in the silence, in the protection of this wildness. A few days later, a photo, a story appears in The Canberra Times, the Bega News and on Google. Forestry New South Wales says this tree will not be harvested. However, exposed, this tree will die.

There is no sign of fire, contrary to the thinking that all Australian forests are subject to bushfires. These south-eastern carbon-dense Australian wet forests do not easily burn, but if we clear around them, as New South Wales and Victoria are doing, we leave them and the towns and farms near them vulnerable. Back home, I send letters to Premier Iemma, but receive a response from ex-fire chief Minister Kopparberg, now NSW Department Environment & Climate Change. Do they know just how badly our Regional Forest Agreements are managed, as there has been no review in almost ten years? Can we believe information from Forestry New South Wales?

A few weeks later, on a pleasant New Year’s Eve day, we drive to a freshly logged area near our giant tree. We get out of the car, hear the buzz of flies and feel the dry heat. Moisture gone, shade gone, soil biota gone. Species we may never know once existed here; others borderline. Worse still, the forest is now fire-prone – vulnerable to a spark, a cigarette from a car travelling down the Cann River Highway. We find ourselves walking on hard, cracked soil. There are huge piles of forest “waste” – nature doesn’t waste anything – lying waiting to be burnt next autumn. Where are the seed and habitat trees? Behind me, on a hill still unlogged, our giant tree stands awaiting death. We feel compelled to visit. The forest is cool, moist, soft and springy underfoot. The giant is still there. Life is good.

Why log this “icon” forest now? It was chain-sawed in the early days and in 1992 a stop-work decision was enforced. Once logged, where do the animals go, from the hectares desecrated, deserted – eventual desert. Is not wildlife territorial? This is madness – we all lose from such an aggressive industry. Can industrialised logging of so-called ‘”managed forests” really be called “sustainable”? With re-growth periods so long, native forests cannot be considered renewable.

On my way out, Andrew Wong of The Wilderness Society asks me why I am concerned about forests. A hard question; I think deeply. I know I paint because I want to record beauty, the beauty of nature and humanity. I know I love apparent randomness, intricacy, diversity, seeking underlying patterns, order and health. By that I mean resilience, vitality, and potential. If we name our response to something as “ugly”, we are saying that the parts are fragmented and out of kilter. Psychologists talk about the “gestalt”, meaning shape or figure against a ground, the whole picture. 

As a designer and painter, I am searching to find a pattern, an order in how the parts fit together, in what I observe, imagine and then make.  So I am deeply disturbed when I see people destroying the equilibrium of the natural world.

Where did I absorb this innate love of harmony, of beauty? By whom and for what purpose was it nurtured?

My cultural training

This search for beauty began on my grandparents’ farm outside Traralgon, in Gippsland. This is where I lived with my mother while my father, an RAAF instructor, trained pilots in Benalla. I absorbed the pastoralist image – golden grass, ringbarked trees, rows of barbed wire fences, wide blue skies, ridges of hills, mountains on the horizon – Mt Hotham, the Bogan high plains, the Strezleckis to the south.

My grandmother taught me, my cousins, and our mothers to sew, knit, crochet, tat, grow veggies, grow flowers for her immaculate dining table, and bake. When baking jams, scones and roasts, we all remember and continue to use her Stephanie Alexander-like recipes.

Then life changed.  We moved to the city after the war and lived above a shop on a tram line. My training continued, however. Although my mother didn’t sew, she loved clothes, and once made me a tutu out of crepe paper, with graduated frills and shades of pink and white.  I loved it, and my wand and wings. My aunt and uncle collected fine paintings, including Streeton, Drysdale, Friend and Stokes, as well as European masters.

At kindergarten, I painted. When I was very young, my teacher called my parents in to show them a painting. There was a big blue sky, a big yellow sun, gold grass, white leafless gumtree and fences - my earliest pastoralist landscape.

At fifteen, I was making clothes, and studying art at RMIT.  At nineteen, with my parents’ backing and physical help, I designed three dresses and took them round the boutiques of Melbourne. They sold like hot cakes. Times had changed, youth had money for the first time in history and new products were needed; we girls did not want to look like our mothers. We were already making minis in 1967 when the Shrimp arrived at the Melbourne Cup. By that Christmas they were short, shorter, shortest.

My mother organised contracts in New York and Japan, and the rest is history. Cosmetics, Olympic and Expo uniforms, corporate contracts followed.

By the 1970s my generation had found our voices:  we were anti-war, anti-nuclear, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-classicism and pro- nature. The first biodegradable washing products came out, calico was in and our graphics and colours reflected the Australian landscape. Mission brown and cream homes were in vogue. These colours can still be seen in Canberra suburbs; their macramé wall hangings are almost fashionable again.

Towards the end of the 1970s, as women climbed the corporate ladder, fashion gave them big shoulder pads. The triangular shape was in demand. Idealism faded, the power suit was born, there was a focus on money, Italian glamour, fitness and dance clubs.

In the 1980s, some of us heard of global warming and droughts got worse. I met up with naturalists who were trying to save the East Gippsland forests. Too many areas had been cleared and replaced with pine plantations. Town water supplies were becoming polluted, rivers were silted and giant ash trees, the tallest flowering trees in the world and other species, had been cut down. Are those giants gone forever?

We all know of huge forest battles, some of which were successful, gaining more National Parks in return for Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs). After protests by designer Liz Davenport, Charles Court enacted legislation preventing native forest wood chipping in Western Australia; in Queensland Peter Beattie, after consultation with a top environment scientist and forester, enacted similar laws. Instead, hardwood plantations multiplied.

In the south-eastern states, despite demonstrations in the 1980s and 1990s, by the Bega Valley's Wild Art group and hundreds of others and arrests of Jenny Kee and other high profile artists, RFAs, whilst providing “certainty for industry”, wreck forests, soils, waterways, water supplies, deplete already threatened species and their habitat corridors, and affect other industries like oyster growing, fishing and tourism. Incidentally, the Eden chip mill is responsible for  two per cent of Australia’s emissions and has doubled its exports, supplied by Forests New South Wales with chip logs at half the cost in real terms of ten years ago; New South Wales taxpayers are propping up that overseas-owned chip mill whilst logging yields per hectare have been halved. RFAs do not have to account for carbon emissions nor water losses from native forests, as they are a “free” resource; they have another ten long years to go. Eighty to ninety percent of logs are chipped; only four percent are used for appearance grade timber. We have a glut of hard and soft wood plantation timber, which is better for industry and can supply virtually all our needs, plus woodchips for export. Native forests are the best land-based carbon sinks and should be protected.

The world of the artist

In the early 1990s, after painting with Cliff Pugh for two years, I closed my business, then met my now partner, Merv Moriarty, and we left Melbourne, he to write a fine arts course and I to become his student. The artist uses a very different vision, not the everyday identification of objects, as with the usual Identikit pictures found in police work. Trained artists flatten their vision; Vincent van Gogh called it “looking through eyelashes”. This is something that non-artists may not have experienced.

When my eye is “in”, when I am painting and drawing fulltime every day – the world changes. I remember one day during a Summer Art School run by Merv at our Monaro studio. I was out walking; suddenly the world changed into a light show, every atom sparkled.  I have only a fleeting visual memory, yet I seek to find it and convey this atomic beauty in work. If you have never worked visually with intensity, will you ever walk through a world of pure light? Will everything be perfect, in its place? Even though the average Australian does not have this esoteric experience, we all have a connection with the beauty of nature. Australia is one of the few developed economies still with vast wildernesses.

A chat I enjoyed one day in Broken Hill would not be uncommon. I was judging fashions in the field at the annual Racing Carnival and stayed long after the crowds had dispersed. All day I had been fascinated by the clarity of the air. As the horses came towards us, it was as if I could reach out and touch them, yet they were so small, so far away. I shared a beer with a bloke and he told me of his favourite spot outside the town, where he would often go on his own, just to be. Probably all of you living in this beautiful Canberra valley have a place where you go. Here the evening light is so exciting as it colours the hills and mountains. I can never resist it.

What makes something beautiful? Are ratios beautiful? Are numbers beautiful? At school we were introduced to the golden mean – the so-called perfect proportion. Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is built on this ratio, consciously, intelligently and beautifully. We all recognise its beauty as it is universal, tapping into our inbuilt knowledge of the foundations of life. We are beauty, we see it, feel it, touch it, smell it, sing its rhythms and patterns, and hear its vibrations. We are literally moved by its laws.

Great artists

Like the great Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, Artist Fred Williams believed that understanding  nature was the purpose of his work. He felt that every decade brought him closer to this understanding, a comprehension of its structure, form, patterns, rhythms and abstract qualities. The artist brings this perception to us visually, a view of light falling across forms in space.

If beauty asks the question, it also motivates us to understand, imagine and recreate part of the structure of our world and the evolutionary potential of life. We know we have an answer when we gasp at its beauty.

We need to protect the beauty around us

Our living planet is beauty. Trees and vegetation suck up carbon from the atmosphere and give off oxygen and water vapour, the stuff of animal and human life. This is a beautiful cycle. Imagine the ugliness that will result if we destroy our planet’s atmosphere, its life force. I wonder what Manning would have thought of what we are continually doing to our world, destroying nature’s beauty.