Nature: Deliverance on a Tasmanian River
This is from a beautifully written feature (Good Weekend 21/02/1981) with detailed but quiet observations of both people and places. Geraldine Brooks accompanied then Australian Democrats leader Don Chipp and six others on a five day trip down the then endangered Tasmanian Franklin River.
As they pulled Don Chipp aboard the boat, a TV camera whirred. The reporter was ready with his questions.
“What did you think of the Franklin River, Senator Chipp?”
Don Chipp rubbed a hand across his five day stubble. The hand was scratched from the rocks and sharp sticks it had clutched during portages around the rapids. It was blistered from five days’ rowing. The voice, when he answered, was tired and slow. Different from the snappy, smooth voice that has easily answered so many interviewers’ questions.
“The Franklin is beautiful. More beautiful than I can begin to tell you.”
The Franklin is beautiful. Beautiful as we saw it first from the towering height of Mount McCall: a bright ribbon of water frilled with white, lacy rapids – water the colour of clear, cold tea, stained by the tea-trees that line its banks.
In microcosm, the beauty of the river is in the tiny shards of mica, glistening like gold dust under the water or in the russets and browns of fallen leaves floating, trapped in quiet pools.
Note the way Brooks carefully describes the detail of Chipp’s hand as she sets the scene for his answer to the reporter’s question. It is the literary equivalent of a film-maker going in for a close-up and slowly panning from the speaker’s lips to his hand. She abstracts “the hand” and “the voice” which recreates a sense of hesitation in the writing as the tired Chipp hesitantly answers the question.
His answer is simple but the scene that Brooks has created suggests that this simple insight is hard won and authentic.
She then uses the quote as a linking phrase of her own to begin another carefully crafted description, this time of the river.
There is nothing sentimental about Brook’s nature-writing, it is rooted in concrete detail. Her colour description – “clear, cold tea” – is no casually chosen version of “brown” she lets us know that this is because the tea trees line its banks.
The “glistening” surface is linked directly to the “tiny shards of mica”.
Brook’s uses simple but evocative language, but nothing is over wrought or casually chosen everything is rooted carefully in observed detail.
