In the beginning of the 1990s we were blessed with our first garden. Recently arrived from Denmark and acutely aware that gardening in Australia is not like gardening at home, we shiftly acquired the freshly published The Wilderness Garden by Jackie French (1992, Aird Books, Melbourne). And though the conditions of subtropical Brisbane are nothing like Aralen Valley in New South Wales, we both were committed the idea of a pesticide and herbicide free sustainable wilderness garden that could feed us as well as be home to native wildlife. This idea has shaped our gardening ever since.
Famously, Jackie French had a resident wombat named Fudge, and wombats were subject of many, many books by French. Truth be told, we could have done with a wombat to dig deep burrows in the shale and clay soil of the foothills of the D’Aguilar Range, but of course wombats like dry sclerophyll forests at a certain height, so wombats were unlikely to take residence in suburban Ferny Grove or on Mailmans Track in Bunya, never mind the floodplains of Mitchelton.
When I still read stories for the boys, I particularly enjoyed ‘Little Wombat’ by Chris Mansell, illustrated by Cheryl Westenberg. Little Wombat had difficulty figuring out who she really was because – just like my own child self – she aspired to be so many things, tightrope walker, archaeologist, dentist, swimmer… Exhausted by all these opportunities, in the end, she choses to be the wombat that sits in the sun, listens “to the bush singe like music and be warm and brown and wombat-shaped.” She was not at all a wombat doing, but a wombat being.
It was this sense of being enough, just as you are, whether a wombat or a human that I tried to capture in this lino cut. I hope you like it too.
Pied-à-terre 