Between the Lines

The line pulls us through life and space in ways obvious and unseen. It contains, frees, controls, holds, breaks, embraces. We make lines, we erase lines, we see them, we don’t. Desire is destination. Line is the tool that takes us there.

The Latin linea, from which the word ‘line’ originates, means ‘linen thread, string’. From linea comes linum, the botanical name of the flax plant, from which linen is made. The first lines were threads made of plants; line was a physical ‘thing’. But it soon became something else: a concept. Take the word ruler, for example. It is both a tool used to draw a straight line and a sovereign who controls and governs a territory. These two usages of the word are closely related, suggests Tim Ingold in Lines: A Brief History. ‘In establishing the territory as his to control, the ruler lays down guidelines for its inhabitants to follow. And in his political judgements and strategic decisions – his rulings – he plots the course of action they should take. As in the territory so also on the page … ’

Lives are defined by lines.

SIDE LINE

A wilderness pushes over and through and above the parallel lines of railway and road. Callistemon trees contort beneath looping cables, casuarinas lurch from cuts in the concrete-coated landscape. Camphor laurel, cotoneaster and acacia take space where they can. Roots melt into rock.

Does this small chaos – this paradise of plastic and pollination pressed between utility – benefit from visual, hence physical, neglect? It is comforting, though perhaps overly romantic, to imagine biological riches in such places. Refuge in such places.

It is safer, sometimes, to be unseen, undesignated. An overgrown front yard is problematic because there are expectations of conformity. The land between lines is left alone; unburdened by cultural weight, by assumed functionality.

BLOOD LINE

There is a war on the other side of the world. I watch a video of a Ukrainian woman attempting to give a Russian soldier a handful of sunflower seeds. ‘Put them in your pocket,’ she yells at the man, ‘so the flowers will grow from your grave.’

THROUGH LINE

EYE LINE

A few years ago I nearly bought a block of bushland in the Blue Mountains. The vegetation was beautiful and untouched. Yet, I had the urge – weird then, weird now – to prune some of the plants. Not to remove, but to sculpt. To make the lines clearer. Why? Because it would have made my eyes happier. An interesting, but not always honourable, cause for action.

The human desire to make order out of disorder is deep, perhaps essential. Is this why we garden? Is this why our eye will not sit for long on a tangle of foliage, but lingers on a lawn?

An image with nowhere for the eye to land is harder to see. Photographer Daniel Shipp: ‘They’re the photos I try not to take. Without line there is no story.’

POWER LINE

A thread, fine and strong, ties your toes to the earth. Every step, love.

DESIRE LINE

See them, these marks on land made by feet of human and other animals. See how they weave through parks and bushland, backyards and paddocks. I want to follow them more than I want to stay on the concrete. The footpath. The designated space. I trace wallaby tracks through the trees behind my house, make my own way through parkland. I do not want my experience of place moderated by others.

See the layers of concrete and stone sandwiched between soil and sole. See, or don’t see, how desire lines are rendered invisible by this insulation. Unseen but not unactioned. Desire always has its way.

Desire lines divide. Some love them. Others don’t. Because, well, KEEP ON THE PATH! In his book On Trails, Robert Moor writes: ‘ … dictatorial architects,like actual dictators, despise them. A shortcut is a kind of geographic graffiti, pointing out the authoritarian failure to predict our needs and police our desires.’

A designer friend thinks they’re wonderful. ‘Desire lines are a great indicator of how we don’t understand ourselves. That even the most considered and rigorous design process will still miss obvious things.’ Wise designers, asserts Moor, ‘design with desire, not against it’.

ON LINE

TREE LINE

Though we may reassure ourselves that we’re atheist, agnostic and secular, our religion is efficiency, and the straight line is worshipped. Graph, fence, skyscraper, hedge. All hail.

We planted tens of thousands of trees in fenced-off rows along the paddock boundaries of our farm. It made sense for production and efficiency, and for keeping stock from eating saplings. It would not be possible to plant as many, nor would they have survived, if scattered through the paddocks at random.

Sometimes I wonder what beauty felt like, before efficiency became a god.

HARD LINE

TIDE LINE

River finds the lines in a landscape and inhabits them fully. Exploits them, even. River pushes and weaves and meanders relentlessly towards the lowest place. (Have you noticed? I write River as a proper noun. River is origin not object.) My days are metered by the swell of tide. The pushing up, the sinking away. I write and watch River. River watches me.

Last week River flooded. Last year River flooded. Both times, the news reporters used phrases like ‘one-in-one-hundred-year flood’ and ‘unprecedented’, a word I am tired of hearing.

The trees come first. Sideways and clothed in mud, polystyrene baubles and water weed. Then the chemical drums, vinyl lounge chairs, kayaks, endless plastic artefacts. And the fridges. Last year there were hundreds. This year, fewer. Dead horse, dead dog, mobile home, dining table. I talk to men who have been working for the last year cleaning rubbish from the previous flood. Now they start again.

The water is light brown and too thick. Turbid, it’s called. A word ugly on the tongue, defined as deficient in clarity or purity. There is nothing clear here, only the fact that the birds who stalk the fish can’t see their next meal and the oysters are dying.

Desecration: ‘to divest of sacred character. To treat with sacrilege’. The word clogs oyster shells clinging to jetty piers, washes up on the shore in a tangle of debris, plastic bottles, fishing line and weeds; it slinks into the mud, moving in with hungry crabs and dead oysters; floats like an oil slick on top of the thickened water. It returns, again and again, on the tide.

BORDER LINE

STORY LINE

Climate activist Colette Pichon Battle is a generational native of the Gulf Coast of Louisiana. The land her family has lived on, and with, for generations will be erased by sea level rise. ‘This is going to happen, no matter what,’ she says in a recent podcast interview with Krista Tippett for On Being. ‘We will lose these places. We will lose this land.’

‘I couldn’t believe that this place that I hold so dear, that I had such a long memory of – not because I was old, but because all my life I had been told stories from a very long time ago – all of those stories are going to go. All of the trees that we sat under are going to go. Everything that I knew to be, like, who I was, even describing just who I am and where I’m from, is going to go. It’s going to be lost. I still cry about it. I still think about it. It’s not something you understand one day and then move past. It’s something you contemplate daily. I take drives now, just to make sure I witness.’

In my naivety, I imagined the lines between land and the stories told about it, from it, for it, could never be broken. But what happens to the stories when the land disappears?

CENTRE LINE

Press your finger on the equator of a desktop globe. Spin the sphere and see how the line you make is both straight and circular.

CONTROL LINE

I talk on the phone with an urban designer who tells me that shopping centre design was based on casino design which was based on prison design. ‘Essentially, they lock people into these environments. There’s no clocks, no daylight, no sense of the weather outside. It’s unclear how you exit … casino design is the inverse of prison design. With prisons, it’s about line of sight to nothing.’

Line of sight to nothing.

In the case of the prison, it’s the world that is hidden. In the case of the casino, it’s the world that is hidden. In the case of the shopping centre, it’s the world that is hidden. There are differences between these places – how and why they exist – but are they as vast as we imagine?

LIFE LINE

There is a map on the wall of my parents’ home. It is the 1910 sales poster of the farmland I grew up on. Thick black lines illustrate the boundaries of each of the farms for sale. A network of seemingly random lines accompanied by snippets of text weave beneath the grid. ‘Cleared for cultivation’, ‘Good red soil’, ‘Undulating country’. Then this: ‘Ringbarked with the exception of a few clusters of trees in patches’. This one word – ringbark – is sprinkled all over the map.

Trees live in the outer layers of their trunks. The cambium, as it’s called, is a highway of life – sugars and water and nutrients travel from root to tip, up and back, up and back. Cut a horizontal ring around a tree’s trunk, deep enough to sever the cambium, and the tree will die.

We grew wheat in the rich red soil marked on that map, underneath the words ‘cleared’, ‘ringbarked’, ‘grubbed’. We galloped our horses across paddocks planted with lucerne and phalaris. We played under white box gums growing in gullies, spared the settler’s axe by the good luck of topography. We benefited from violence, from theft, from the severing of myriad life lines. And by the time we owned it, the evidence had nearly all been erased.

Our land was once a cemetery and how I loved its loss.

TIME LINE

PUNCH LINE

A white woman wearing a black T-shirt with the words ‘Care for Country’ printed across the back stands on top of a newly planted street garden, squashing the plants in order to take a photo of the sunset.