2026
March 23, 2026
Lili:—
I’ve enclosed the seed that you asked for from the grevillea in my garden. It’s excellent for our pollinator friends and doesn’t need a lot of water provided the land where you plant it has been returned to its Indigenous conditions. It flowers in winter, which is useful for our precious pollinators because it’s not a particularly abundant season for bee food. But with the rising temperatures, you might find the flowering window shifts, so you may need to keep an eye on this and document the changes so you know what else our bee friends might need in times of stress.
We’re becoming pretty resilient to stress and change, aren’t we? You grew up among some of the worst of it. You were only nine years old when the shift began presenting itself in ways we couldn’t cold-shoulder. You were up in Cairns where the humidity heaves but the eventual downpours bring so much relief. You were relatively safe up there. But nowhere was left untouched. We were all witnesses to the weather.
Albert Camus wrote, “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion”. We were reading a lot of Camus, the year of the plague, but seemingly so was Nature. The drought, the fires, the plague, the floods — we had to acknowledge the more-than-human was rebelling against humans’ extraction, exploitation, eradication, equivocation of our one common home.
And yet those with power rooted themselves to their stubborn denialism. But a spiritual, ecological, and political awakening was in motion. People interrogated their inner gardens during confinement, tending to the weeds and decaying infrastructure, replacing the sunburnt pot plants reduced to brittle stalks. They made promises to do better. To care better. To compost and heal. We learned what we need as a bare minimum — social contact, time in nature, mental health support, universal basic income. But the bare-skinned minimum is unclad and exposed to the weather. We had to learn to find solace in the notion that change is constant. If we could hush the fear, we’d see life is composed of a wealth of expiring experiences. Equipped with elasticity, we could face the change and not be flattened.
This week I’m out on Bidawal Country for work. I find it so peaceful here. The cool ocean laps over my feet as I take a walk on a different beach each morning. It’s such a privilege to start the day this way, welcoming the salt into my skin. There are kangaroos everywhere. The locals are so accustomed to their presence — by the beach, on the roads, anywhere green. But for me, having spent so much of my life in cities, I’m always transfixed by their majestic presence. You’re not supposed to look them in the eye, did you know that? Uncle Bruce Pascoe taught me that.
He was the reason I first came out here in 2016. His writing had pulled the merino cotton wool from my white colonial-settler eyes. “We need to see ourselves as just another animal in the whole realm of the natural world,” he said. He taught me to look more closely at the trees and the rocks. To look at my own ancestry. To take my lens off auto-pilot.
He used white man’s tools to show how we’d all been blinded and brainwashed by the capitalist white patriarchy that gripped Australia (and the world). I find so much delight in the fact that it’s here, on Bidawal Country, that one of the first sites to be protected by the Rights of Nature Act lives and breathes safely.
It was hard being away for so long. Away from friends and family. Away from the landscape. The balmy Gubbi Gubbi coastline. The red Arrernte desert. The temperate rolling hills of Bratowooloong Country. It was all there, the sand and the clay and the soil, swirling around under my flesh and yet did I ever really know it intently? Listen to its grief? The more I read and learned and unlearned from afar, the more I wanted to sink my hands into the earth, trace the zigzag leaves of the banksia, carefully rub my splayed palm across the soft folds of a paperbark trunk. But as humans, we need to struggle. It prompts us to question what was commonplace; to create new theories, to test, to break, and make new knowledge. Over and over. I remember writer Arundhati Roy wrote the pandemic offered “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next”. We had to imagine that next world.
I came back in time for the referendum. They lowered the voting age, but you were still too young. And yet I feel like you’ve been actively engaged in the world around you and changing it for the better for a decade already. The Referendums on Our Interconnected Futures. You’ll be able to vote in the next one. The referendums acknowledge our mutable climate and our mutable understandings of the world around us. We the people can call for them when we see need and regularly disrupt our disruption. It was both too late and astounding the tune changed so quickly. When the extreme weather didn’t let up, we knew we had to address our Mother. We had to give her rights. The system was starting to unravel.
Our neighbours in Aotearoa were doing great things for their humans and their more-than-human world. In 2014, a former Crown-owned national park, Te Urewera, became a legal personality. In 2017, the Whanganui River and Taranaki Maunga gained the same legal standing. A forest and a river and a mountain had Personhood. Nature had rights. These living beings could sue those who disrespected them. Who tried to own them. Who did not care for them. The Maōri may have used white man’s law to protect the more-than-human, but it was Indigenous knowledges that got us to this point. “We are from the land. The land was here long before we were. We are her children,” Erin Matariki Carr shared with a conference of British farmers over a distorted internet connection. But the message was clear. It was the same message starting to be heard in Turtle Island and in so-called Australia. “Instead of owning the land, we have responsibilities to the land.”
I implore you to read the novels of Tony Birch if you haven’t already. When I was in that six-month lockdown in the grey misery of a heavy London winter, I watched a lot of lectures. Some from Australia, trying to catch myself up on Indigenous ways of knowing. Some from the UK, trying to understand the imperialist mind and its hold over gardening and farming. Uncle Tony, I watched him speak about land rights, about Native Title. From my small dark bedroom where I worked and slept, I learned how the government’s version of it didn’t really mean or do what it was supposed to. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples still needed access to land. They needed land back. For their culture, for their health, for their healing. For equality. But the land also needed their own rights. “We have to defer to Country,” he said. It’s the only way we’ll be able to calm the fury of the weather. Personhood of Nature is just one step towards reparations.
Lili, my sweet earthchild. We are not blood, but I’m so grateful you are among my kin. Do call on me for anything. And please, share with me your stories from the tropical north! Very interested to hear your reflections and how Essential Work is unfolding where you are.
Hope to see you again soon.
Aunty Isabel