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Donald Knowler

Dancing on the Edge of the World

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City dwellers cast into the urban wild

August 8, 2021 Don Knowler

My “sit spot” in the foothills of kunanyi/Mt Wellington allows me to be immersed in the world of nature, a haven and sanctuary from the pressures of life.
Once I would have described this window on nature as merely a seat fashioned from a fallen blue gum. The term “sit spot”, however, now stems from a book I have been reading, Rewilding the Urban Soul by Claire Dunn.
The Melbourne-based author sets out to discover the “untamed heart of the urban jungle” and succeeds in unpeeling the mysteries and magic of the green veneer of our cities.
I picked up the book expecting a natural history of an area of Melbourne that gives me a “sit spot” in a broader sense, the Yarra River where I take a time-out during family trips to the Victorian capital to study mainland birds not found in Tasmania.
I wanted Claire to guide me to the powerful owls that reside amid the red river gums on the Yarra banks but from the first page she took me far from the mindset of bird-watcher, to that of hunter-gatherer.
This book is not just about seeking out birds like the powerful owl, and the other flora and fauna of the city. It soon morphs into a guide to sustainability, and makes a passionate plea for city-dwellers to re-connect with nature.
The author speaks with authority because she lived in the bush for a year as part of a wilderness survival program, an experience she wrote about in a previous book My Year Without Matches.
She brings her own skills as a hunter-gather to a new life centred on the “Riverhouse” she shares with friends on the Yarra, five kilometres east of the Melbourne CBD.
From there she plots rewild events, learns to “read” animal tracks and even learns to skin a fox. This together with communicating to the birds surrounding her.
She also forages for food among weeds and flowerbeds in city spaces. It might appear eccentric behaviour until Claire points out just how many food sources are overlooked, especially in the context of how the first Australians made use of virtually everything they found close at hand.
A sobering statistic is the fact that, although there are more than 20,000 edible plant species in the world, 75 per cent of food comes from just 12 plants, along with five animals.
Claire’s message is we should pay “reverent attention to the seasons, cycles, and mirrors of wild earth”, and be embedded in it, literally at times when she sleeps on bare ground.
It’s the author’s connection with the Yarra, though, that captivates me. As she writes: “The story of the river and the people who gravitate to its banks is still being written. What thread might I add to this myth.”
Rewilding the Urban Soul is published by Scribe.

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