As an Aborigine, I long ago abandoned the hope that the invaders of my land might learn about the languages and discourses of my ancestors in order to discuss this, and so I have worked hard to learn the language and literature of several European cultures at university, in order to try and discover the reason why our land has been systematically destroyed over the last two hundred years. Surprisingly, I found some answers in the works of the English Romantic poets, such as "I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud" by William Wordsworth.
This poem separates people from nature through inverse personification, with "I wandered lonely as a cloud". This ridiculous phrase portrays a compartmentalized European discourse of nature. My people might ask, what kind of cloud? What season is this? What place? How can you call clouds lonely when they are all really part of one cloud mass, coming from one land, one sea, one dreaming? In general terms, Indigenous discourses of nature are more holistic, incorporating land, language, culture, time, place and relationships between all things in a way that makes our peoples a part of nature, rather than separate from it.
Language really does affect our relationship with land. In many Indigenous languages there are no words for numbers beyond three, which prevents the tendency to quantify or exaggerate natural objects, as occurs in many European and Asian languages. Wordsworth uses numerical language in his hyperbole to assign a value to his flowers, with "ten thousand I saw at a glance." Of course, this is then linked to the concept of material gain with the choice of the word "wealth" in the line, "what wealth to me the show had brought". Note also the word "show", implying that the main function of nature is purely to entertain syphilitic, old drug-addicted romantic poets.
I object to the disconnected, Anglo-centred imagery of the daffodils, reflected in the simile of "as the stars that shine and twinkle in the milky way". This device places the focus on what is shiny, or valuable, rather than what lies beneath and between and around, binding all things. In my worldview the spaces and shapes made between stars are the seat of creation, and contain story. But Wordsworth positions his readers to accept an individualistic, materialistic ideology instead, by focusing only on the bright objects in the landscape.
This greedy, childish view of the land, as merely a mine of pretty things to collect, dominates the language of these Romantic poets. Their works formed a large part of the British literary canon, and influenced the way many European emigrants viewed land. Many brought this self-centred, materialist discourse of nature to this country. Not content with the abundant landscape they found, they sought to recreate the English countryside. Bush and forest was cleared to make way for Wordsworth's flowery English meadows of blooms that "stretched in a never-ending line" - the assonance of "e" sounds, the hyperbole of "never-ending" seducing immigrants into an orgy of destruction in the name of creating a "line", a Romantic natural aesthetic.
