Of restless goings-on, and actual dyings

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. It's called an inland sea, as are other waterways in Australia, like Lake Eyre when it's full – it's then the largest salt lake in Australia, spreading out to 9,500 square kilometres; this happened only three times in the twentieth century – and the Gulf Country in Queensland during the “wet season,” and the Gippsland Lake District in Victoria. The Coorong, though, seems less like a lake system, although its two connected expanses of water are called lagoons. Perhaps this is because it's flanked by sand dunes beyond which lies the Southern Ocean. In the Early Cretaceous period, though – around 145 million years ago – “[…] a great inland sea swamped the central regions and Australia became a group of large islands […] [s]ea monsters, plesiosaurs, swam in these inland seas and the whole world became warmer” (ABC Science Online).

2. The Coorong as a National Park was

• […] declared in 1966, to conserve the distinctive landscape, the coastal dune system, the lagoons, wetlands and coastal vegetation and the great variety of birds, animals and fish that live in or visit the area. It forms one of the largest reserves (46,745 hectares) in the region [of South Australia] […] As a habitat for numerous species of migratory birds and as a refuge for birds in times of drought the Coorong is important in a national and international sense. The Coorong was included on the “List of Wetlands of International Importance especially as Waterfowl Habitat”, maintained by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) on 21st December, 1975 and the Agreement between Australia, Japan and China for the “Protection of Migratory Birds and Birds in Danger of Extinction and their Environment” (JAMBA) on 30th April, 1981. (Kluske 4)

3. […] one could say the divine – and we would be better off saying “the divine” (theios), not God (theos) – would be the opening in things that keeps the quasi-system open to novelty, innovation, renovation. Renovabitis faciem terrae, thou shalt renew the face of the earth, but without the “thou,” and in the middle voice: the possibility of the face of the earth being renewed. (Caputo 185)

4. After the “frog perspective” [Nietzsche: “[…] merely provisional perspective, perhaps […] moreover the perspectives of a hole-and-corner, perhaps from below, as it were ‘frog-perspectives’ […], to borrow an expression employed by painters […]”], with the eye of the toad – on the same side but also on the other – we have the eye of the owl, an eye open day and night, like a ghost in the immense Nietzschean bestiary; but here too, above all, we have the scarecrow, the disquieting simulacrum, the opposite of a decoy: an artifact in rags and tatters, an automaton to frighten birds – the vogelscheuchen that we are and should be in the world of today, if we are to save, with madness and with singularity itself, the friendship of the solitary and the chance to come to a new philosophy. (Derrida, Politics of Friendship 36)

5. Since this project commenced in 2001 [“The Monitoring of Biotic Systems in the Coorong Region”], the Coorong has deteriorated as a habitat for waterbirds, and will continue to deteriorate until adequate environmental flows are re-instated in the River Murray. Environment flows of River Murray water over the Barrages during spring are particularly important for the maintenance of Ruppia tuberosa in the southern Coorong. Ruppia tuberosa is an annual plant that grows during winter and spring in shallow water around the shoreline of the southern Coorong. […] To successfully reproduce the water levels in the southern Coorong must remain sufficiently high through spring, otherwise the plant cannot complete its reproductive cycle, and will decline in abundance and ultimately disappear. (Paton 21–22)

• The lack of flows over the Barrages (at the mouth of the River Murray) has also resulted in rising salinities in the southern Coorong reducing food resources for birds and fish. The monitoring of the “demise” of the Coorong environment is ongoing, and more research is called for “… to better understand the relationships between environmental flows, salinity regimes and water levels in the Coorong and how these influence the distribution, abundance and performances of key plants like Ruppia ruberosa, various aquatic invertebrates, fish and birds” (23).

6. For no matter how rigorously an author writes her will, we can always break it, her fatal mistake being that she left it in writing (instead of living on forever), and writing can always be read otherwise. Whatever the vouloir dire or vouloir donner of their authors, texts are a little legacy, a perpetual gift that keeps on giving and (quasi-)living, long after the death of their authors, even if the latter are, biologically speaking, alive and well, in the next room autographing copies of their books. This is not to say that only the dead can give but rather that giving is a matter of life and death, life/death, survivance, neither pure death nor immortal life. Literary gifts require a living author who by committing herself to words and texts agrees to death, agrees to deal herself death, donner la mort, to give a gift without return and let her text go up in smoke, or turn to ash, that is to say, to disseminate without return, however fit she may feel when she signs her contract and checks the royalty clause. (Caputo 175)

7. Graft: here referring to hard work, usually physical (and in a sense “reading” is this physical work); and to be dishonest, unfair, gain by shady means – earlier it meant “inserting” (for instance, one part of a plant inserted into the groove or slit of another plant so as to be nourished by that plant and united with it, although always being itself (a graft); the graft, in this instance, requires a sharp knife, a stylus – an instrument to mark with, to produce another “living” thing, like writing (from the Greek work graphein (to write) – one is always a “grafter” (a very hard worker)).

8. The Coorong, one of South Australia's great natural icons, is in “terminal decline”, conservationists have warned. They say it is “a national emergency”. According to new scientific studies, the Coorong risks permanent collapse unless more water is provided for the River Murray. The warning, from [South Australia's] Conservation Council, Environment Victoria, The Australian Conservation Foundation and National Parks Association of NSW, comes on the eve of a conference in Brisbane of the Murray Darling Basin Ministerial Council. […] Conservation groups say studies of the internationally protected area show: PELICANS have not bred for almost four years, yet the Coorong was the country's largest permanent breeding colony. BRINE shrimp, never before recorded in the Coorong, are now “as thick as soup”. SALINITY levels are as high as three times that of sea water. TWELVE species of fish are locally extinct. MIGRATORY wader birds have dropped from 150,000 in the 1980s to 50,000. Conservation Council campaign director Catherine Way said the Coorong was entering a state of decline which, once established, had little hope of recovering. She said the rupia plant, Rupia tuberosa, which underpinned the Coorong eco-system had virtually disappeared. (Kelton 10)