Reclaiming the Future at Goolengook: Going Feral and Becoming Native in Australia

The darkest horror lurking in the imaginings of nineteenth century Australians was that this wild continent might somehow claim them, or their children, to itself. As the currency lads and lasses grew up, tall, barefooted and at ease in the bush, those dark fears increased, for their parents saw degeneration in every deviation from standard European practice. Growing awareness of modernity's environmental despoliation and the planetary momentum towards an 'unsustainable future' has triggered the raising of a global ecological consciousness. For the Australian 'ecological pioneers' who are disenchanted with the exploitative disposition of settler society, new mateships and sacrifices form around environmental sensibilities. The feral milieu possesses a curiously enigmatic and ambivalent status in the national imagination. Based in the mountain forest hinterlands of Victoria's East Gippsland, Geco is one node in a national and international network of forest activism.