Loose Living by Frank Moorhouse

piece. It obviously gave the game a different emphasis for him.)
    I said that I thought most people needed to be able to see defined zones in nature—zones of horizon, a defined ‘fore’ ground and ‘middle’ ground and a sky ‘line’.
    Often other reassuring natural boundaries or lines are present. This gives the viewer control because the lines of nature thus perceived carry the suggestion of mapping—the navigational capture of nature.
    I, myself, receive much stronger sensations fromimmersion in the forest, that is, by plunging in and being enveloped.
    It is a confrontation with Gothic nature and a surrendering to its prickly, existential embrace.
    You need to have a strong personality to expose yourself to such sensory impact and I count myself as being one of the fortunate few in this respect, and whenever I have described my approach to nature to Europeans, I notice that I rise in the listeners’ estimation.
    However, the Duc simply dribbled what I took to be a reply.
    I told him that I am curious about the fashionable predilection for nature wall charts which are, again, at the other end of the spectrum from the panorama but show the same human need for organisation in nature.
    These nature charts or tabulations of fauna and flora in their various categories—shellfish, bird life, mushrooms and so on—are now produced throughout the world, especially by National Park authorities.
    An old man in the nearby village estaminet tells me that these charts have a long history (there is always someone around in this country to tell you that whatever it is ‘has a long history’).
    He remembers them at least as far back as the fourth century. They were used to identify plants, especially for pharmaceutical purposes (the charts were called Herbals) or for gastronomic reasons, but also, he thought, as pattern books for tapestry designers. I rather enjoy the company of tapestry designers.
    What is our interest today in wall charts of nature?
    The only time I have offered a gift and had it refused was when I offered a chart of The Mushrooms of East Coast Australia to the then editor of the Sydney Review , and he refused it on the grounds that literal identification of common objects was not the purpose of art nor of decoration.
    Teaching aids, he said, were not his idea of a gift at all. Or any kind of aids. It gave me cause for thought. I realised that he was recalling Paracelsus, who said that to explore nature one must read her books with one’s feet ( mit den Füssen ihre Bücher treten ).
    When we put up the chart of all the sea-shells of the east coast of Australia, we are, figuratively, garnering or amassing them, and we feel as if we at last know the extent of the boundary of that particular small world.
    We are given existential relief from the discomfort of living in an endless and unknown universe.
    Michael Levey reminds us that maps began to be used as interior decoration in the 1500s. I think that maps probably gave this existential relief even more potently back then.
    Now we can look at the chart and believe that what we see there on the chart is all that there is to see when it comes to sea-shells or whatever.
    Furthermore, there are their names, common and Latin. If we went on picking up different shells, ultimately we might have them all.
    At this point of existential relief the usefulness of the chart ceases. I suspect that the charts are also a gesturetowards ‘green guilt’, a guilt some people feel when they do not know the names of plants and insects and birds.
    As though remembering the names of the plants and birds is somehow more courteous.
    As visual ‘collections’ the charts can offer only tepid collector-satisfaction. The charts are, after all, only an illustration of a collection, not really a collection.
    The charts could be used as an aid to the collector who goes out and seeks the sea-shells or whatever in nature. The