What has lain dormant, sleeping, beneath surface leaves and soily sheets has now risen again – has taken in all it needed by way of watery drinks and silence and stillness and darkness, and now seeks heavenward for something to dip down and meet it once more. And this thing that calls it out, calls it forth will bend down, gently, as if to kiss the rising of the plant world, the growing of the leaf, the stem, the calyx – all leaf – and in unsealing it with its heavenly lips open each plant in colour and flowering scent. Life and growth rising to meet the bending down of colour and light from the outside, dancing together, in this place where the light is so strong, and life usually so in check, except in wetter years, and at, again, this turning of the tide. Springtime. And how each plant rises! To be met by divine forces again. These plants of strange Latin names, or English look-alike-competitions, or Noongar stories embedded in stories embedded in realities. Running postmen, cowslip orchids, blue Leschenaultias, hakeas, acacias, myrtles, melaleucas, gums, banksias, donkey orchids, lambs tails, silky eremophila, fabaceae, bacon and eggs, mottlecah, etceterah. The bees that also meet them (how much I’d pay for honey such as this – as Horst Kornberger puts it, “a whole landscape condensed”), the birds that find a way in, the so called honeyeaters. All of it suggesting really that the whole flowering is but a kind of animality dipping down from outside into the plant within, which surely can be most simply seen in the form of the orchid. To sit a while in a patch of pansy, spider, pink, cowslip, donkeys – to really take them in – is to take in more than mere plant and flowering form – it is something of an animal made into flower we find before us – hence this so called ‘orchidelerium’ phenomenon – a kind of orchid fever, but really more accurately a kind of a plant animality (rather than animal or human plant-ality which is the stamp of fever). 

And so, in the time of the rising again of the sun from the earth, so the flower opens to, or is rather opened by, this same sun – the whole city becoming…and becoming a kind of sunrise, mirrored in each plant, in each species flower. 

And then…

If we look close enough we can already begin to see the kind of dying away, a kind of fading of the light. Each power has its peak, each a moment when the flower begins to slip the sun no longer rising – we cannot really say setting, for if we ourselves sit before it we find the quality and character of yet another planet on the rise – in the withering, fading of the flower, its scent, and colour, light, we find the rising of the moon within the night. Each one built into the other, each one destined again to bring the other into flight. And so the movements of the flowering plants – and we have so many here – do shift, one between the other, or rather, one within the other. The time will come when the postman runs no more, the blue becomes faded and then thin, the orchids close up as from within, the myrtle lose their roundness, the acacias turn a darker gold, and everywhere the ground is covered – coloured – with what has come before, gifted to the earth once more. 

The moon and sun a rising balance, a shifting scene that we can see, can recreate within, whenever we choose to pause enough and breathe a kind of observing, perceiving.

And on returning home I hear again the thread of the main conversation unfolding in this place – within the cities of this nation – a question put about the first people of this place, a kind of self-determination. And what have I to say on this in addition to what already has been said? It seems that nothing can be uttered further into all the voices circling, unspent. I wonder now what each one represents. I wonder now at the flowering of this continent. I wonder at its life, its light. Its colour and its scent. I wonder whether the sun is rising, or is it the moon? – and which of them has set? I wonder at our overall trend. As a so-called nation, do we, in all this tendency, rise up to something that bends down to meet us, to kiss us in all our striving? Is it a flowering? Or an animality? Is it a fever that we see? 

On the waters of all the ocean that surrounds us, on our inland rivers, and, at one time, seas, in the water that runs through each plant, in the blood of every animal – in all our rare and endangered species – in all the blood that flows within and between you and me – what is it that’s reflected? – can we say, truthfully, that we rise intuitively toward whatever deems us worthy enough to descend upon our strivings – be it moon or sun, be it some other planet – be it the past or the present – be it unmade yet waiting times to come? 

And in so doing what are we together making here? – a place of colour and of light? – a city of overflowing flowering sight? – or some other creation? And for whom do we make it? Solely for ourselves? What of all our neighbours who would wish that we also make of ourselves all that we can be for the rest of the world? – for the fullness of reality? If the world should wish to bend down and lend to us its lips, would it find there a kiss in return?…or some other gesture altogether? 

I guess in time we’ll learn.

John Stubley