Wild Country

Clare McCracken

The granite rocks of Mt Buffalo National Park (Victoria, Australia) are plentiful, charismatic, and large.  The 300m vertical Gorge rockface is one of the largest cliffs in Australia. Climbers scale it throughout the summer months staying overnight on precarious camp beds dangling from ropes.  However, the majestic rocks of the mountain have also been captured since colonisation, in sublime paintings by some of Australia’s most well-known colonial artists (Eugene von Guérard and Nicholas Chevalier) and by photographers from the 1860s on (see Hore 2022).  These paintings and photographs led to the area being protected as a notational park in 1898.

This live cross from a remote rock within the Mt Buffalo National Park will start with my memories of a hike up the north rockface of the mountain at the age of 16.  Squeezing between the snow gum filled crevasses of the rocks we slowly worked our way to the top where a surprised national parks worker declared that surely, I was the first ‘girl’ to climb such a rock face. Narratives of ‘bagging’ peaks and being the first are common in settler-colonial states. Along with the circulation of images that crop out Australia’s First People, they have perpetuated a myth that mountains such as Buffalo were ecological paradises free from human touch or barely ‘touched’.  However, as Jaquie Durrant’s research has revealed Mount Buffalo was, for at least 40,000 years cared for by the Mogullumbidj people (2020).

Inspired by Alfred North Whitehead’s questioning of non-human consciousness (1929) this live cross will conclude by ‘thinking with the rock’ to imagine forgotten pasts of violence, extraction and extinction and speculative futures. Dressed in a costume especially designed to bring me closer to the rock I will ‘think with it’, to acknowledge the ecological and social losses it has experienced since the area’s colonisation in the early 1850s and its bleak future. Located in the Australian Alps the rocks of Mt Buffalo are surrounded by a fragile ecology that are already catastrophically affected by climate change.