The Wild Reed: “A Mysteriously Charged and Magnificently Alive Archetypal Presence”

Wednesday, July 02, 2025

“A Mysteriously Charged and Magnificently Alive Archetypal Presence”

One of the books I’m reading while in Australia is David J. Tacey’s 1995 book Edge of the Sacred: Transformation in Australia. Following is an excerpt accompanied by some of my recent photography of the landscape of Guruk (aka Port Macquarie).

In Australia, landscape carries our experience of the sacred other. . . . The landscape in Australia is a mysteriously charged and magnificently alive archetypal presence. As Judith Wright has put it: “In Australian writing the landscape seems to have its own life. Sometimes it takes up an immense amount of room; sometimes it is so firmly pushed away that its very absence haunts us as uncomfortably as its presence could.” Although experienced by some as dull, flat, and uneventful, the Australian landscape is in fact a most exciting archetypal field. The land is, or seems to be, the sacred which bursts in upon our lives, which demands to be recognised and valued. As George Johnston wrote: “nothing human has yet happened in Australia which stands out above the continent itself.”

. . . The Australian landscape is our greatest asset, our assurance that any society here cannot afford to become complacent, that the other around us cannot be ignored or deprived of its shocking revelatory and transformative power. The only way to develop a spiritually powerful culture in Australia is to enter more into the psychic field of nature; to “shamanise” ourselves in the image of nature. We need to become less human and more like nature: in that way we may become more fully human, and experience anew the sacred fount from which all life, including human life, arises.

. . . [As a youth growing up in Alice Springs, the land] seemed to me to constantly point to, or hint at, other realities. The crumbling rocky ridges and tall ranges, the piles of rounded boulders and hills of granite, the fragmented sandstone and embankments of clay and ochre: all this seemed near-magical to me, to point to ancient civilisations or to worlds of other beings. I remember knocking on a pole with my shoe, hoping to discover the secret coded rhythm that would bring the invisible beings to light. I was delighted to find some time later that novelist Martin Boyd had felt the same about Australian landscape: “There is no country where it is easier to imagine some lost pattern of life, a mythology of vanished gods, than this most ancient of lands.”

The early British arrivals had called this country terra nullius, the empty land, but I found it teeming with mythic images, with sacred resonances, and with openings into other worlds. I scampered over rocks and explore gullies with the same enthusiasm that people nowadays reserve for their pilgrimages to the ruined temples and ancient cultural sites of Greece or Rome. . . . I felt I was somewhere special, in a cosmos of rock that was drawing me out of my habitual ego.