Koikyennuruff (Stirling Ranges)
These mountains have always been a special place for me – one of my existential places in the world. They’re not especially high, nor extensive, but they are ancient and, as far as I know, poorly understood from a geological perspective. Something to investigate. They emerge abruptly, mysteriously, from the immense flat plains of the South West of Western Australia; scribbles upon the horizon, irruptions on the plane, that eventually loom large and majestic as the road wends through. There is something solitary and surprising about them – one of the few places in Western Australia where the land actually reaches to the sky.
I’ve been here many times, my own unfolding time, entranced by their unique sudden-ness, their sense of place. They hold personal histories for me: mountains scaled as a teenager, through young adulthood; passionate love, new lives, efforts to climb, hoping one day to see miraculous snow; the fleeting, roiling sky. Memory. Autobiographical metaphor.
And these days, time later, I understand them as effigies of Deep Time, shards of the Albany-Fraser Orogeny, a connection betwixt the Yilgarn Craton and East Antarctica, theories about Laurentia, Rodinia and truly ancient time; entire continents lost long before humans despoiled the Earth – billions of years. A palimpsest of where life began, in folds of an ancient shallow sea.
Yes, amazingly, a record of the origin of life on Earth. Part of a much bigger cosmological story.
And, of course, before my personal mythos or absorbed scientific physis, they were re-imagined through Colonial eyes, through companions of Flinders, Baudin, Darwin and others, where the Australian Romantic Landscape (Chevalier, Piguenit etc.) articulated through the semiotic of C.D. Friedrich and the Northern Tradition (Constable, Turner et al.) and the Noble Savage (Rousseau, Cook etc.) was bloodied by dispossession and brutalisation of the Menang Noongar peoples of South Western Australia.
But they survived – and their originary stories have passed down through time immemorial. A living knowledge that, amazingly, survived all of this. I’m slowly learning what stories they have to tell. Trust is something to earn.
But for now – here it is. Seen from the sky, satellite eyes, radiometric observations from non-human wavelengths, technology built by thousands upon the basis of hundreds of years of technical evolution as we truly head into the new Machine Learning Age. Satellites orbiting the Earth, hundreds of kilometres above the atmosphere; charged-couple devices, the silicon language, beaming binary information to receiving stations, to databases, to vast data repositories, accessible around the world, where I can remotely run software routines based on ideas from the 17th-Century and earlier, to reimagine these pixels into a navigable space in a Game Engine, running on a computer at home.
And all made from the same originary quantum fields as the mountains are. As we are. It’s bizarre when you think about it. From time before there was time.
