🍃Reciprocity: the interview

6 questions for Kate Bown

Nature writer, n. A person who delights in paying attention, being astonished, and telling about it.¹

“I hope that my writing may also cultivate trust, even in the face of adversity. And that it may encourage a sense of responsibility for the natural world — the wild nature and the nature closer to home, our roads, backyards, inner city waterways.”
~ Kate Bown 

Baby Arthur and Kate at Barron Pass, on a three day bushwalk to Frenchman’s Cap (the large dolerite peak behind us) in lutruwita/Tasmania. Read more about this adventure in her recent post, “How to climb a mountain with a baby,” available here.

My inbox is full of treasure in the form of lovingly observed writing about place, encounters both wild and gentle, imaginative kinship and renewed reciprocity. These thoughtful, talented writers kindled in me the desire to learn more about them.

Today’s guest, Kate Bown writes Wild and Wonderful. Life is an adventure. Join her here:

Kate is a writer, mother of four, wife, adventurer and teacher who lives in lutruwita/ Tasmania, a little Island at the bottom of the world.

She loves hiking in the mountains, family adventure, cooking for her tribe, and drinking tea.

In the quiet spaces of family life — before the call of birds and children — she likes to write stories.

I was charmed by Kate’s writing with this post, “Walking the Wild,” about a trekking journey with her husband and three young kids. This question stopped my heart for a moment: “If you walked through a wild place would it change you?”

---

Why are you drawn to nature writing?

I have always been drawn to the natural world — building hideouts as a child in the bush (that’s an Australian term for wilderness), exploring rock pools on the beach, climbing mountains, and hiking. I love writing too. Combine the two and it’s love. And isn’t all good writing an act of love? 

When I write I begin with my heart. Writing about nature is a way for me to share with others the wonder and beauty of the natural places that I visit. 

I live in lutruwita/Tasmania — a small Island in Australia, at the bottom of the world. It is rugged and mountainous; wild and beautiful; with clear blue skies, clean air and water, and cool, temperate rainforests. It is also the home of many unique fauna and flora. Have you heard of:

• the Tasmanian devil?;

• the platypus with its duck-like bill, webbed feet, and beaver-like tail?; or

• the Huon Pine, one of the oldest living tree species in the world, renowned for its durable rot resistant timber?

Tasmania’s natural beauty is recognised around the world. Twenty-percent of Tasmania’s wilderness is World Heritage listed. If this isn’t compelling you to visit, I’ll have to write you a story. And that’s another reason why I love writing about nature, it takes you on a journey to a place, so you can feel it, see it, hear it. And then it propels you outside, with a new way of thinking about your relationship with the world around you.

How does writing about nature affect you, in your work or personal life?

Writing about nature encourages me to be curious and to pay attention to the world. I love collecting snippets of sound and smell, and glimmers of wonder in the places that I visit. And I enjoy weaving these into stories for my Substack community. I like to think that writing about nature is an act of devotion — when I pause to look at the world below my feet, in the trees, above my head in the sky, I learn to recognise the beauty and awe around me.

Writing about nature also encourages me to reflect on my place in the world and the things that matter. Always, at the big intersections of my life — birthdays, anniversaries, illness and celebration — I visit kunanyi / Mount Wellington, my local mountain. It is there, high up on her slopes, looking down at my city, with the layers of mountain sounds in my ears, that I can finally come to terms with the past and our hurtling future. And I understand that the real measure of things is something bigger, something beyond our material obsessions. Things like mountains, lakes, trees, and birds. Wild and wonderful things that reminds us that we are part of something extraordinary and vast. And I am compelled to write, to join the conversation about our relationship with the natural world, and to share all that I have come to know.

While outside, have you ever experienced feeling small, lost or in danger? 

Yes, many times. It is a humbling experience to feel the fragility of your small human existence. Earlier this year, my family and I walked the Overland Track, an iconic 65 kilometre walk through the heart of the wulinantikala / Cradle Mountain — leeawulenna  / Lake St Clair Wilderness World Heritage Area, in Tasmania. 

On the first day, climbing the Cradle Mountain Plateau, the weather was wild and frightening. The rain began to freeze. The wind blew us over. We shivered into our jackets, pulled neck warmers around our cheeks. I worried about the children. I felt vulnerable in this place of extremes, like a spider web strung across two branches, tethered by something only a little more than luck — the thin skin of our Gortex rain jackets? But it was also exhilarating walking on the top of a mountain, in an ocean of dark clouds, on the edge of the world.

What’s a favorite memory of nature from your childhood?

I grew up on a small farm beside the sea. My siblings and I would spend our weekends on the beach, peering into rockpools and making cubby houses in the sheeoak forest that hugged the coast. Just around ‘the point’ there was a group of sandstone boulders in the tide-line. On summer we each claimed a boulder and built a ‘home’ on top of it with driftwood and flotsam and jetsam (manmade things that float on the surface of the sea and arrive on the beach after a storm). We collected seaweed and abalone shells to adorn our creations. And harvested mussels to cook on a fire for lunch. It was a magical time — the days long and salty until the sun melted into the sea and we could hear our mother calling us for dinner.

What do you hope for, for your writing? 

I hope for a society that values and preserves the environment, acknowledges and learns from history, and prioritises human dignity and justice. It is a society that has at its foundation, love and care, for all things. 

Hope is an intoxicating word. But it is something that I hold on to, despite catastrophic climate change and the devastation and destruction of our natural world. As a mother of four young children, I often think about legacy and loss and the sort of world that I would like to leave my children. Cultivating hope is the work that I must do, especially in my writing. 

And I’m thinking of the lines of the poem Trust by Tasmanian poet,  Adrienne Eberhard — 

        He reads the latest reports, insist they only fish 
	in waters swept by Southern Ocean currents, 
	while each day, his sons salvage bones and fossils, 
	shells and starfish to line the bedroom window sill, 
	pulling the river one wave closer each time
	until at night it laps at their ears and they sleep, 
	their world too small yet for pollution, poison, extinction, 
	knowing only renewal, their trust huge in his hands.

I hope that my writing may also cultivate trust, even in the face of adversity. And that it may encourage a sense of responsibility for the natural world — the wild nature and the nature closer to home, our roads, backyards, inner city waterways. 

A writer or other creative artist who makes you hopeful for humanity and the earth.

Novelists and fiction writers make me hopeful for the future. They make use of their imaginations. And they can dream a different future — a future with a flourishing natural world and communities bound by love and trust. 

When I was studying environmental policy at university I was introduced to the work of Richard Flanagan, one of Australia’s finest nature writers, world renowned novelist (his novels have been published in 42 countries), and winner of the Man Booker prize in 2014 (The Narrow Road to the Deep North).

Flanagan’s lyrical prose evokes the beauty and power of the natural world, while also exposing our dark stories — the dirty, mouldy and decaying. Flanagan’s novels are powerful because they take the reader beyond the place where they live and they bring Tasmania, into the eye of the world.

And then there are the fiction writers telling stories with alternative points of view, sharing nature’s marginalised voices.² Writers like Tasmanian Robbie Arnott, whose debut novel Flames included characters from Tasmania’s ecology — a water rat as the Esk River God, the clouds as a divine being in love with the River, and a fire spirit called Jack. Arnott’s writing rejects anthropocentrism and compells us to connect our suffering and grief to the relationships that we have with nature. 

Extract from Flames  — 

He even met others like him—beings of rock, of sand, of earth and ice, that lived in much the same way he did, although they weren’t the same, not really. Some wore fur and feathers and watched over the creatures they resembled. Some floated high in the sky and released rain, on a whim, to extinguish him. Some swam through rivers and called themselves gods. Some were kind. Some, like a blood-hungry bird spirit he encountered deep in the southwest, were cruel. Most were calm, seeking only to care for the creatures and land that they felt drawn closest to.

---

If you enjoyed this post, a lovely ❤️ keeps me going. Another way to show love is to share this post with others by restacking it on Notes, via the Substack app. Thanks!

---

For more inspired nature writing and artwork from the best of Substack, check out the articles in NatureStack journal.

---

In further service to Substack’s nature writers,

Rebecca Wisent

curates this lovely directory of nature-focused writers:

1. thanks, Mary Oliver

2. I can’t resist linking to this essay, Nature is a marginalized voice, too