Willow Ross: 28 January – 6 February, 2024

Willow Ross is a geographer and activist. Ross used her residency at Plumwood Mountain to transform her Master’s thesis, on the more-than-human communities of dumpster diving, into a journal article for Australian Geographer.

Willow Ross at Deb's Car (Clancy Walker, 2024)

Plumwood As Technology

Last month, I visited Plumwood Mountain on Walbunja Country, part of the Yuin Nation. Nestled in a clearing on the mountainous escarpment between Braidwood and Bateman’s Bay, Plumwood House is a small, UFO-shaped octagonal structure, once home to local eco-feminist and philosopher Val Plumwood. The place feels like it has leapt out of the pages of one of the Ursula Le Guin or Samuel R. Delany stories in its library — one about off-planet communes, twelve-person procreation groups, and ecologariums. Yet despite its extra-terrestrial appearance (and large collection of feminist SF) Plumwood is not hugely futuristic.

Once there, I spent my week learning the fairly rustic technologies of the home: composting toilet, solar-powered LEDs, and the elaborate ritual needed to start the generator-operated and delightfully hot shower in the shattered greenhouse. Because of my enthusiasm for the house, I was also given the opportunity by my hosts to use a specific technology (social media) to share my experience at Plumwood (basically: a takeover of the Instagram account). I shared posts about Val’s garden, the library, various activist souvenirs and paraphernalia around the house, and the nearby creek. It was in the process of doing this that I realised that I was coming to view Plumwood as more than a house: instead, it was becoming a technology.

Plumwood is a technology for land back. On my first night the caretakers, Ruby and Clancy, told me about the land handback agreement currently being negotiated between the Plumwood Committee and the Walbunja, who never ceded the land that Plumwood Mountain is part of. On my last night, we sat down together to watch a final cut of the documentary Clancy had made in collaboration with the Batemans Bay LALC Walbunja Rangers, detailing the effectiveness of cultural burning and need for good fire to be returned to Walbunja land after the destruction of the recent fires. Val’s house was also one of the first voluntary conservation agreements to be set up, marking the area as a sanctuary for the rare local species and remnant Gondwanan rainforest that calls the cool, wet mountain ridge home. It is partially for this reason that the Rangers can count gliders in the area, and that some of the ancient Plumwood trees near the house were able to survive the raging fires of 2020.

As a result, Plumwood is a technology for community. You can’t stay at Plumwood house and not think about community; the oddly-shaped building with its roomy kitchen and radius of pathways leading to other cabins and outhouses feels like a blueprint for living as part of a large, unwieldy family. This, despite the fact that the house was mostly built and inhabited by Val and her partner. And this community is not just human. On my second day, I was treated to the first lyrebird song I’d heard in person. Later that night I discovered the antechinus family living in the roof of my accommodation. Messaging a friend who stayed at Plumwood the year before, I learned she’d felt the same — and was prompted to draw a map of her ideal commune based on the house’s octagonal structure. I did the same.

Plumwood is also a technology for teaching. The house was reportedly (there are many contradictory histories) built partially by Val’s students, who would come up for day visits and help to quarry stone used for the walls of the main building. The library, with its hundreds of works of eco-feminism and philosophy, feels like a leaving, breathing remnant of Val and all she thought—as well as disagreed with. Ruby and Clancy worked remotely. I wrote my article on dumpster diving, borrowing from Val’s concept of forgotten and mistreated shadow places. We learned together, often talking over dinner about what we’d read that day, what we thought about or disagreed with, or some odd find from the shelves.

Plumwood might also be a technology for return. I’m itching to go back – dreaming of a visit to the mountain shrouded in mist. I hope that wish comes true. I also hope that the technology of Plumwood continues to be built upon, to work and to malfunction. Who knows, maybe one day some of us will look back and see that Plumwood was a future – ecologariums and all.

Willow Ross by the 'bog' (Clancy Walker, 2024)

Primate Visions in Val's Library (Willow Ross, 2024)

Memory Map (Willow Ross, 2024)