EUROPEAN FAERIE-TALES AND FOLK-TRADITIONS

During the interviews, European heritage sometimes emerged as a direct link in people's spiritual connection to the forests of Far North Queensland. Several of the older interviewees had come from middle European countries over thirty years ago and reported with nostalgia their memories of the forests "back home". Stories of festivals, small village activities (including environmental education) and idyllic pastoral scenes were always connected to caring for the forests, and a life lived in harmony with nature.

Peter Kalajzich, a retired journalist and plumber, originally from Yugoslavia, described how forest festivals in his village were intimately linked with their management, harvesting and replanting. His current love for nature was expressed by him through these European images of idyllic springtime festivals and agricultural life.

"You know, and this is for ALL people. And you gotta piano accordions, you got everything, you got DANCING, and girls and young boys, going chasing each other, picking up flowers. BEAUTIFUL EH? Beautiful to SEE, you know." He was very excited.

"I LOVE nature you know. I DO honest, uh. It's a BEAUTIFUL, you know, if go through and you see birds singing and you know flowering a blossom. I wish, you know, is like we got in Europe when is a four o'clock in AFTERNOON, you know, and everything coming CALM, and you hear the stream water going DOWN and the shepherds playing." Peter and I laughed. "No, is a BEAUTIFUL you know, if you look after, nature can give you BEAUTIFUL life you know."

Tacey suggests that it is inappropriate to project European Arcadian images onto the Australian landscape, in the sense that we then do not connect to the 'real' spirit of place. I wonder, however, whether BUILDING upon such images (e.g., by creating forest festivals in North Queensland based on the rich multi-cultural heritage of this region) could motivate us to create a more sustainable inter-relationship with the Australian landscape than that which we are currently pursuing.

An example of the somewhat confusing connection with place which our European culture can produce is described by Linsey, a 23-year-old woman living in eucalypt forest on the edge of the rainforest. When she was a child, living in this same area, she had an ambivalent relationship with the forests around her. She felt deeply and magically connected to the European-like forest, but separate from the drier bush.

"I think just that it was like being a faerie or something. (...) I used to read a lot of Enid Blyton, and a lot of English-European literature - 'The Secret Garden' and things like that - so I actually didn't like the bush here, I thought it wasn't real bush. (...) I wanted REAL trees - the big oaks, the ones that grow far away from people. (...) I would go out and I'd try to pretend that it was a place that it wasn't, and I actually think a lot of people are still doing that - they're still trying to live in European forests, and we're not!"

Revisiting the forests of her childhood, however, she reconnects with the spirit of place through these European images and myths.

"One of the things about coming back here, to the place where I grew up, is that I really DO FEEL a spiritual connection. (...) I go to where I've played as a kid, and I can really feel that the fairies and ghosts and things that haunted me then ... and I see that as all connected with the land and the environment."

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