A Multicultural Landscape: National Parks and the Macedonian Experience

6. Nationalism and national parks

Why are parks national? Consider, for a moment, a question that is surely fundamental to any discussion of ethnic makeup and reserved parkland. Why do we use the word national to describe a park? This term is so familiar, so ingrained in the ‘national psyche’, that it seems as natural as the environments it describes. This in itself is good reason to subject it to a gentle questioning. We do, after all, inhabit an era where the notion of an environment being entirely ‘natural’ is contested by those who recognise how human activities, dating from the earliest Aboriginal occupation, have affected Australian ecosystems. The setting aside of a tract of land as an example of ‘nature’ is a modern phenomenon and a cultural act.

The national park concept has, to a large degree, been internationalised. Parks now occupy 8.84 per cent of the Earth.^[25] For Macedonian and Chinese interviewees, it was a familiar concept from their homeland. In Macedonian the word, not just the concept, has been directly borrowed. National park in Macedonian is national park.

National parks and the colonial experience The current internationalisation of the national parks concept can obscure the fact that this specific way of identifying and managing landscapes originally developed in the former colonial societies of Australia and the United States. In both countries there is a well established association between national parks and issues of nationality. As originally conceived, the reservation of natural spaces had a premeditated connection with a sense of emerging nationhood. These were iconic spaces: both the property of the nation and expressive of certain national virtues.

The first use of national park recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1871. N. P. Langford, writing in the New York Tribune, declared that Yellowstone Park ‘should be at once...set apart as a public National Park for the enjoyment of the American people for all time.’^[26] By then the connection between reserved land and national identity was already established. In Wilderness and the American Mind Roderick Nash recounts an incident in 1832 where George Catlin, the painter and proponent of wilderness values, sat on a bluff in South Dakota where he spread out a pocket map of the United States ‘and considered the effects of an expanding civilization.’ Catlin envisaged a magnificent park immune from the degrading influence of settlement:

what a beautiful and thrilling specimen for America to preserve and hold up to the view of her refined citizens and the world, in future ages! A nation’s Park, containing man and beast, in all the wild[ness] and freshness of their nature’s beauty.^[27]

Such pronouncements mark a trend in which wild spaces could evoke the triumphs of the nation or ease its pain. Simon Schama draws a connection between the reservation of Yosemite Valley in 1864 and the American Civil War. Yosemite, he argues, became ‘a place of sacred significance for the nation, during the war which marked the moment of Fall in the American Garden.’^[28] Parks offered a retreat into uncorrupted nature, providing an antidote to the difficulties or agonies one might encounter in what is obviously ‘historical’ space.

National identity naturalised In Australia, also, the connection between national identity and landscape elements, especially the distinctive flora and fauna, is pronounced. Consider the deployment of national symbols. In contrast to Britain, for example, which employs one non-indigenous creature (the lion) and another that is mythical (the unicorn) on its coat of arms, Australia depicts the kangaroo and emu. It is not so much the supposed power or attributes of these creatures that is important here (as in the case with the lion and unicorn). Rather, it is the fact of their being native to Australian soil. Kangaroos, emus, waratahs, wattle, wallabies, gum trees, lyre birds, all play a part in the iconography of nationhood, contributing to the sense of national uniqueness that in other, more established nations is conveyed by language, religion, folklore, dress, architecture, cuisine. This is a situation where nature – or to be specific, a culturally processed rendition of nature – plays a heightened role in establishing a national culture.

Defining ‘Australianness’ In Australia, national parks express certain national ideals, continuing a well established pattern in which ‘the bush’ provides key images in defining ‘who we are’ and ‘where we are’. National parks function as sources of nationalist imagery as well as providing physical spaces in which the citizen can participate in activities like bushwalking, camping, swimming, barbecues – often regarded as national traditions. In the NPWS we seem hopeful that reserved land can play a privileged role in defining some notion of an Australian sensibility. This is articulated in the previously cited mission document, Visions for the New Millennium. It lists among ‘key challenges and opportunities’ the Service’s role

as a leader in managing and interpreting landscapes that contain both natural and cultural values and give people a sense of being Australian.^[29]

It also asserts the need for programs that

increase understanding of our identity, history and future as Australians in those landscapes.^[30]

A critic might find a certain humour in these objectives. Does a Frenchman require a stroll through a nationally charged space – the Tuileries Gardens, say – in order to feel properly French? Or is the feeling of being French and the intimation that France is possessed of an ‘identity, history and future’ something the Frenchman can take as given?

The suggestion in Visions that Australians require certain signals or experiences that will make them feel their ‘Australianness’ suggests that in this country the sense of national self is rather insecure. Indeed, the Visions document could be regarded as symptomatic of a syndrome in which considerable anxiety revolves around the issue of what it means to be Australian.

Nations are cultural constructs We might find that this anxiety exists to some extent in many national cultures – perhaps even a highly patriotic society like the French. Recognising that the concept of the nation is a social construct, Benedict Anderson, an historian of nationalism, has compared the political power of the nation state to its ‘philosophical poverty’.^[31] There are no great theorists of nationalism as there are with liberalism, Marxism or other ‘isms’. Hence a certain flimsiness of foundation – the fact, as Clendinnen writes (glossing Anderson), that ‘ethnically and religiously diverse nations like our own, cannot hold together unless they share a common vision as to how the world works, what constitutes the good life, what behaviour is worthy of respect.’^[32] These characteristics, augmented by the fact that the boundaries of many, perhaps most, nation-states are arbitrarily defined, suggest that nationalism belongs with religion and kinship, functioning by means of belief. Anderson defined the nation as ‘an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.’ It is imagined because it extends the sensations of fraternity across geographical areas. The fellow citizens, often members of diverse, even conflicting, interest groups, will never know each other ‘yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.’^[33]

Acknowledging that national parks in Australia are part of an elaborate web of cultural institutions and social structures that contribute to a sense of imagined community, we might consider the vein of national anxiety intimated by the proposition that citizens could feel their ‘Australianness’ through contact with outdoor spaces. ‘Australianness’ is by no means an innate concept. The notion of a national character or national tradition is constantly being re-defined. This sense of flux is confronting to many people, prompting on occasions extreme, even violent, manifestations. The ethnic diversity of contemporary Australia – the fact that a particular stereotype of ‘being Australian’ is under threat – has forced re-thinking (and in some cases fear and bewilderment) about what ‘being Australian’ actually means.

Social and physical ecology In this context it is salutary to realise that ecological arguments have been eagerly exploited by various parties who oppose further immigration. The League of Rights and Australians Against Further Immigration – both regarded as extreme right wing organisations – have frequent recourse to ‘defence’ of the environment. A policy statement from Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party declares that:

Australia has a responsibility to protect it’s [sic] bio-diversity and not allow its flora and fauna to be ousted from their habitats to extinction because of population or economic pressures. In comparison, the pro-immigration lobby feels we have no moral right to this land unless we push development beyond the limit. Our population must be stabilised as population growth will need to be stabilised elsewhere in the world.^[34]

It is interesting in this passage how an embattled environment becomes a metaphor for embattled Australianness. According to this logic, ‘traditional’ Aussies, like the traditional flora and fauna, are being squeezed from their habitats by feral intruders.

I cite this document in order to emphasise that right across the political spectrum, there are believers who regard ‘the Australian environment’ as a sacred and essentially immutable space. Changes to the environment and changing social practices associated with it are regarded with distrust.

It is timely, given the historic role of national parks in affirming a sense of the Australian nation – a role typically geared towards absolving differences within and between communities – to ask whether the NPWS is keeping abreast of the considerable changes occurring in society. We are very comfortable with the idea that reserved lands provide a locale for the conservation of flora and fauna. Yet we rarely think of their role in preserving social traditions and customs. In attending to the role played by outdoor spaces in maintaining communities of people, we must countenance the reality that a multicultural society, having re-defined the notion of ‘being Australian’, could be re-defining the concept of national parks?

^[25] Cited in Russell Staiff, Peter Kennedy and Robyn Bushell, ‘From Museums to Parks: An Interpretive Leap’. Paper presented to the International Symposium on Society and Resource Management, Brisbane.

^[26] The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition.

^[27] Cited in Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 101.

^[28] Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, (London: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 7.

^[29] Visions, p. 5.

^[30] Ibid., p. 10.

^[31] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (London: Verso, 1983). p. 14.

^[32] Inga Clendinnen, True Stories, p. 8.

^[33] Ibid., p. 15.

^[34] Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, Pauline Hanson’s Policy Document: Immigration, Population and Social Cohesion (Ipswich: One Nation, undated [1998]), p. 5.