Postmodern Wetlands

When European explorers and settlers first came to the Swan Coastal Plain of south-Western Australia they were faced with an alien landscape (or more precisely wetlandscape) which did not conform to their preconceived ideas of what lakes should look like. So strange were the shallow, often seasonal wetlands of this new land that explorers did not mark them on their maps nor even note the existence of lakes and swamps in their descriptions of the country. The general view of settlers right into the twentieth century was that Western Australian wetlands were not really lakes at all, and so not worthy of consideration, let alone conservation. They were also subject to the utilitarian view and found to be useless, though we now know that wetlands can even be more productive than rainforests.

In non-western, and pre-patriarchal western, cultures, however, wetlands have been (and continue to be) seen as places of both life and death, light and dark, as biologically rich and fertile, mucky and murky, vital for life on earth - in other words, as living black waters.  Pre-patriarchal cultures feminised the swamp positively as the source of new life in the snake goddess, the mistress of living black waters whereas patriarchal hierarchy with its dryland agriculture and its misogynist denigration of the wetland feminised the wetland as the environmental femme fatale, spider woman and vagina dentata.  

Why this horror of wetlands? Part of the problem with wetlands lies in the fact that wetlands are neither strictly land nor water, but both land and water. Wetlands are a taxonomic anomaly in a classificatory order predicated on a hard and fast distinction between land and water, time and space, or perhaps more precisely, their representational systems: the timelessness of maps and the spacelessness of history do not lend themselves to the changing nature of wetlands. What is needed instead are temporal maps that move with time, that show historical change in wetlands; spatial history that shows history taking place in, and in relation to, wetlands; and quantum ecology that construes “the environment,” especially wetlands, on a space/time continuum.   

The postmodern wetland is worlds away from the melancholic marshes and the slough of despond: “there can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still” (Thoreau 1854). The place par excellence in which to live literally in the midst of Nature, even up to one's chin, is the swamp. Given the difficulties the swamp poses for travel, it is the perfect place to still the senses, and the limbs, and allow the swamp to write on them, not as a tabula rasa, but as a responsive surface. As for dwellings, Thoreau enjoins us to “bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp, then (though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar)” (Thoreau 1862). The slimy edge of the swamp for Thoreau is not the place from which to flee for the bright and sublimed city lights, but the place to live for the bright swamp lights of ignited marsh gases which do not lead to madness, but could even lead to Thoreau's ultimate goal: “unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no man nor firefly has shown me the causeway to it” (Thoreau 1862).

Extract from Giblett 1996.