In Abundance

(An essay inspired by the work marrum (overflowing) (2021) which includes works and objects from Jonathan Jones, Aunty Kim Wandin, Simon Briggs, and David Doyle and is included in the exhibition Emu Sky)

A colonial world view often violently coded Indigenous peoples in terms of lack and absence. The land was functionally empty (terra nullius: nobody’s land) because it was deemed not to have been productively exploited and civilised. Indigenous societies were seen to lack complex thought, organisation, or law, and were often depicted as just barely scraping together a meagre existence in a harsh land. The settlers often did not, or deliberately refused, to see the abundance of life and meaning woven across Country. The great lie of the colonial mindset was that it was the settlers who brought the means and ingenuity to find and produce an abundance that was lacking. To tame a savage land.

To create an overflowing cornucopia of plants, seeds, tools, carriers, artworks, and their jointly told stories, is a starkly different picturing of Country. These living materials are not simply a ‘harvest’ of resources but create narratives around the reciprocal care and knowledge that allowed Indigenous peoples to thrive within the richness of their Country. Spilling out across a table we see carved emu eggs, digging sticks, shovels, buckets, gypsum canisters, and grindstones; water carriers, food baskets, and coolamon; wattle seeds, kangaroo grass seeds, quandong seeds, bunya pine nuts, grevillia, and banksia; bronze cast murnang and turnips. These inter-connected materials are presented such that they touch, hold, carry, and speak to one another – a feast of knowledge rather than produce. To share abundance, as marrum does with its audiences, is a profoundly decolonial act.

Environmental Studies Professor, Peter Timmerman, has written on the difference between ontologies of primary abundance (where the world is seen to provide) and ontologies of primary scarcity (where Nature’s resources ‘must be ransacked and “developed”’), the latter being a line of thinking rooted in early modern western thought, and threaded through settler-colonialism, the Industrial Revolution, capitalism, and contemporary neoliberalism¹. An ontology of scarcity is implicated in other logics and values: competition, individualism, hierarchical social organization, expansion, and extraction. Scarcity logics compel us to overcome nature’s supposed limits, in turn, creating the very scarcity that is feared, as resources rapidly become depleted and new ones must be found. By contrast, Tillerman describes an ontology of primary abundance as less about finite limits, but instead about understanding and respecting ‘conditions for living’ ². Nature is seen to always provide because its conditions are understood and lived with.

An ontology of primary abundance is far from a passive reception of nature’s plenty. It entails intimate knowledge of a multitude of interlacing systems in which humans participate: knowledge and practices that the things in marrum attest to. A sense of abundance thus flows, not from seeing the environment as ever full of consumable resources, but from a sense of involvement, knowledge, and care towards its many continuous stories and cycles.




References

<sup>1. Peter Timmerman, ‘The Hunger for Abundance amid a World of Scarcity’, Centre for Humans and Nature, accessed 27 June 2021, https://www.humansandnature.org/economy-peter-timmerman.↩
2. Ibid. ↩
3. Erica Violet Lee, ‘Bones’, Contemporary Verse 2, Winter 2020. ↩
4. Gladys Milroy, ‘The Black Dingo’, 2018, unpublished.↩</sup>

Scarcity logics, by contrast, often see people deeply alienated and detached from the systems and labour that produces the things they consume and own. Wealth is then jealously hoarded, even as people speculate to own more, and work to pay off both past debts and secure future aspirations. This leads to living in a shallow present that ever senses the precarity underpinning it. A sense of abundance allows us to share what we have today, because we are held in trust by the deep past and the long future.

Western environmentalist logics are also often informed by a notion of scarcity. Conservationists have historically sought to separate people from ‘nature’ to preserve areas that are threatened and endangered. Sustainability discourse often promotes highly individualised, ascetic practices positioned as self-sacrificing. The idea of degrowth attempts to slow endless extraction and consumption. And while such thinking attempts to mitigate the destruction occurring it nevertheless remains tethered to a logic of scarcity. Preserving what is left-over may not allow us to understand and grow with what we have, and to restore cycles that have been damaged.

The poem Bones by Erica Violet Lee begins: ‘The bones. Eat the bones too.’ And later: ‘Soft salmon vertebrae melting into my jaw like walm chalk’. Here, eating the bones is not a lesson in ‘sustainable consumption’, but both a sensual pleasure and means of connection. The poem finishes:

This is a lesson in scarcity, abundance, and
reclaiming relational nourishment
from what civilisation calls trash. ³

Under western logics, the ability to create trash and waste has long been a sign of abundance and decadence. Today, nearly everything we eat, wear, own, involves a quantity of waste that usually vastly outsizes what we use. To waste is to save time, to savour what is most valued, to refine what is desired. But in Violet Lee’s poem, ‘eating the bones’ (refusing waste), isn’t a practice of sacrifice or the product of mere survival. It is a unique and nourishing pleasure that is born out of living in the habit of abundance: that is, of valuing the bountiful world around us in which we are embedded and interconnected.

In another example of relational nourishment, my grandmother, Gladys Milroy, has written a story, a parable, about an old man and a dingo. In the story the dingo helps to provide healing to people, leading them to believe his coat contains healing properties. They then begin to steal the dingo’s fur until he is nearly bare, only to find that the stolen fur no longer has the power to heal. Sorry for what they have done, the people weave the fur into a blanket to cover the dingo’s naked skin. As Gladys writes: ‘They couldn’t see that it was the love between the old man and the dingo, that love and trust between them, that made the healing work. It was the power of the relationship that was important – the sacred relationship.’ ⁴ A sense of abundance comes from knowing that the cycle will continue because it is cared for. Scarcity scares us into believing we have to grab whatever we can.