Connor Tomas O’Brien is a nature writer, graphic designer and educator who lives on Wurundjeri land in Naarm/Melbourne. During his residency at Plumwood Mountain, Connor was researching a speculative fiction novella, exploring how differing ecological philosophies affect how human beings treat the world and each other.

Burrowchronological Time

While at Plumwood Mountain — Val Plumwood’s old bush property, a tiny clearing in the rolling sclerophyll forest of Walbunja Country — I find an essay from Val about home and sense of place. I am hoping for something that might confirm my sense of the mountain as special or uniquely enchanted, but instead I find a provocation: "ecological thought has to be much more than a literary rhapsody about nice places".

This is inconvenient, because after a week of mountain traipsing, my notebook is full of rhapsodising — of the nearby plumwood grove’s Dawsonia mosses shimmering at a distance with early-morning dew; of mushroom rings tracing the walls of burnt tree hollows; of lyrebirds singing like coiled springs; of wrens as quantum mechanical beings, disappearing the instant they are observed.

The project I had come to the mountain to explore was a speculative one — a set of stories exploring the long-term future of a fictional Australian forest. What, I wondered, might this mountain look like in ten years, a hundred, a thousand?

It is difficult, at least for me, to avoid lapsing into the rhapsodical mode of thinking that Val decries, in which native forests are framed as ‘timeless’ places, outside of the human realm and so outside of history. To spend a week on the mountain was to begin to see it differently, as a resolutely ‘timeful’ place — as a collection of relationships between beings that never takes the same form twice.

Photos by Connor Tomas O'Brien, 2024

To look over the Plumwood Mountain escarpment is to see visceral evidence of this timefulness — of one side of the mountain sparse and blackened, half a decade into the chaotic scramble of post-fire ecological succession. Over my stay, the moon grows fuller, until by the last night its light brightly illuminates the hillside. Further toward the coast, where the Kings Highway sluices through national park, the headlights of far-off cars bore into the forest, rendering it doubly ghostly. This is a hillside that is full of time: pyrochronological, synodic and anthrotemporal.

On the other side of the hill, toward the river and the plumwood grove, wombats are engaged in their own nightly acts of forest-making. Perhaps the networks of burrows across the mountain — some active and some disused, some expanding through concerted effort, and some in a gradual or sudden process of collapse — could be thought of as marking out some kind of ‘burrowchronological’ time, each wombat’s interactions with the mountain forming the landscape that lives beyond them.

*Wombats guard the shelves (Connor Tomas O'Brien, 2024)*

On my last morning, as I walk the trail back from the grove, marked by ribbons of old cloth tied to branches, I wonder about the cross-species criss-cross of paths across the mountain. In a post-colonial context, Plumwood Mountain has been part of a landscape subject to regimes of control, displacement, extraction, activism, and conservation. The return of the mountain to the Walbunja people of the Yuin nation marks a new era, of custodianship.

The central octagonal home comes into view. It seems to exist out of time, and yet on top it is flanked by a great solar panel – even the idea of what it means to live 'off grid' is tightly twinned to the context and technologies of a particular age. It persists through the continued stewardship of Ruby and Clancy, its current caretakers. It is a home that invites imagining of possible futures. In a hundred years, who might be here to tend the fire around the hearth? When they look out the windows, what forest will they see?

Learn more about Connor’s work at his website: https://www.connortomas.com/

Connor Tomas O’Brien: 16 - 21 July, 2024

Burrowchronological Time

Lynette Smith: 4 - 14 November, 2024

Willow Ross: 28 January – 6 February, 2024