My Story

My name is Jan Alexander.

I was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1953. My ancestry exists from Germany, Scotland, England and Spain.

My childhood years were divided between two different homes, about three hundred miles apart.

The Mornington peninsula, close to Melbourne, is near to where my father worked and it was our main home. It’s where my brother and I spent the school terms – where we mainly lived – other than during the holidays.

Our house was on a quiet dirt road lined with dense tea-tree scrub. There were several neighbours living along our road. Dusty foot-tracks wove their way throughout the commonage-type land behind and between the houses.

A significant other in my childhood was a tall pine tree who stood at the top of the rise like a giant well-wisher and was a focal point in our lives.

“See you at the Pine Tree” or “Race you to the Pine Tree” was the usual arrangement.  

That tree encouraged me to raise my face towards the vast blue sky and showed me the wonder of clouds.

Significant other : In psychology – a person (or other living entity) who has great importance to an individual’s life or well being. In sociology – it describes a person  (or other living entity) with a strong influence on an individual’s self-concept.

Primary school was a long walk from home. Secondary school was a bus ride. There was a sheltered swimming beach only a ten minute walk from our house..

We had electric heating, a mains water supply, hot water service, flush toilets, a bath and a shower, a television, washing machine and modern kitchen facilities.

~~~~~~~

Our other home was at Shadrack’s Creek, on the south-east coast of New South Wales. My mother’s parents lived there,  five miles from the small fishing town of Eden. That stretch of road is part of the coastal highway between Melbourne and Sydney.

My grandparents had a twenty acre mixed farm that ran down to a tiny sandy beach bookended by sandstone rocky outcrops. Over all the years, I must have spent thousands of hours sitting on the rocky ledge watching the sea.

When I was a very small child, my parents towed a caravan from Mornington to Eden and back every holidays. I loved waking up to the gentle rhythm of the waves spilling onto that little sandy beach. Sometimes I woke to my grandmother’s hens pecking around the caravan steps.

When I was still a young child my parents bought a ramshackle homemade holiday house that stood alone among the tall trees on the hill above my grandparents farm.

The house was constructed of log uprights and crossbeams, with corrugated iron nailed roughly onto the roof and walls. Having no insulation, it was hot in summer and cold in winter. There was only tank water, no proper bathroom and just an outside pit toilet, no television, an old wood-burning stove. In that little shack we had candles and kerosene lamps for lighting. To me it was pure magic to be there, living so simply, close to nature with none of the traps of modern conveniences.

Our daily excursions down the steep hill from our house to our grandparents soon wore a track through the forest and out onto the sandy banks of the creek. When the tide was in, we’d take our shoes off and wade across the creek, then walk along the beach up onto the grassy bank to my grandparents house.

There was such a feeling of freedom on the days when I was old enough to go off on my own. I’d hang about under the tall trees at the bottom of the track, taking in all the life there. To sit in dappled sunlight watching the wild birds, lizards and small fish busy at their various activities – the quiet lapping of the creek – was to be unhooked from time, without a care.

Some nights our grandparents would come to visit, often staying late – talking about the old times and spooking us with ghost stories.

They were more-or-less self sufficient on their small farm. My grandfather kept six or seven jersey cows, a bull, a few pigs and a couple of horses. My grandmother had a goat, a dozen hens, fruit trees and a large flower and vegetable garden. There were always cats and a couple of dogs coming and going through the open doors of their house.

Rainwater was caught in large round corrugated iron tanks. There was an old enamel bowl on the tank stand at the back door where we would wash our hands before coming in from the garden. My grandmother would slide a saucer of milk through a gap in the ceiling boards for a pet lizard called Elizabeth.

Although I was an introvert – content in my own company – I valued the feeling of being part of the extended family. Uncles and aunts and cousins would all gather throughout the Christmas holidays in summertime, our grandparents at the core of it all. During the winter holdiays we had them to ourselves and the beach was mine alone.

Shortly after my brother and I had flown the nest, our parents sold the house at Mornington and moved to live full-time at Shadracks Creek. By then they had knocked the old holiday house and built a more comfortable home in its place. Gone were the spooky trips to the outdoor loo before bed. Gone the special time with my father, watching the stars on the way back to the house. And gone were candle-lit mealtimes with their flickering shadows casting magic across our faces and along the walls.

So after I moved to Ireland in 1978, it was to Shadracks Creek I returned on my many visits home.

Although Shadrack’s Creek wasn’t our full-time home as children, it is definitely the place I think of as home. The little sandy bank of the creek, under those tall trees, is still my heart place that I frequently visit in my mind from twelve thousand miles away.

Throughout my entire childhood, I only ever met a few indigenous people. Sometimes I noticed a couple of men around Eden, but mostly they were avoided and ignored by the white people of my culture.

Why were those people so lost-looking, so downtrodden? It was disturbing and mysterious to me as a child. It seemed like they were left out of everything.

When I enquired as to what those Aboriginal people were doing there, my mother looked sad and stayed silent, while my father explained that Aboriginal people were ‘a dying race.’ My grandfather, who worked on the roads alongside some Aboriginal men, said ‘Those poor people got it very hard.’ I waited for more, but that’s all that came.

I figured that must be how the world worked. Perhaps one day our race would also die out, to be replaced by a different, newer race of people. But even with the dying race explanation, it still disturbed me to see those people looking so out of place and lost, at the edges of our small town.

At school we learned about Australian history. We celebrated the anniversary when Australia was discovered and we learned about our queen, who lived in England on the other side of the world.

Our history book had a drawing of an Aboriginal man on the cover. He was standing at the edge of a cliff wearing a stern expression and holding a spear, while below him Captain Cook’s ship sailed into the bay.

That image confirmed to me that those Aboriginal people must have already discovered Australia before the English ships sailed in from the sea. I didn’t grasp what was being taught to us at school and I didn’t have the courage to raise my hand and ask a question.

Our  history lessons didn’t explain what a land-grab was nor did it tell of the brutal manner by which the Aboriginal peoples were dispossessed from their own lands. Although the words ‘British colony’ were used, there was nothing to explain that the process of colonisation meant killing and casting out the people who were there first.

Colonisation : the act of taking control of an area or a country that is not your own, especially using force, and sending people from your own country to live there.

Dispossessed

• evicted, as from a dwelling, land, etc., ousted, without property, status, etc., as wandering or displaced persons, rootless, disfranchised. Having suffered the loss of expectations, prospects, relationships, etc; disinherited, disaffiliated, alienated.
• The dispossessed: people whose land, possessions, etc., have been taken away from them.

The bushland around Shadracks Creek, however, told a different story from what I was taught.

There was a sense of timelessness in the silence of the dark waters of the creek; the haunting song of bellbirds chiming from high in the trees; the unique scent of native bushland after rain; the soft rustling sound of dry leaves as a lyrebird performed his intricate dance; the timeworn hollows and rounded rock pools at the mouth of the creek.

It was like feeling the truth with my fingertips but never being able to hold it in my hands. Like most children, I simply wanted to know the truth.

The discordant call of the red-tailed black cockatoos that perched high in the trees above my grandfather’s small dairy. The way they carried long sticks way up above the treetops then just let them fall to the ground. What were they trying to tell me?

The sharp warning call of the plovers, who reared their young along the sandy banks of the creek, their footprints marking the land as their own. The dynamic call of the kookaburras echoing through the treetops spoke to me of ancient, wild and free.

From all those signs I intuited a deeper story that wasn’t being told by my people. That Australia was not a ‘new country’ but a very very old one.

I couldn’t have known then that Australia wasn’t actually my country at all. Nor was there any hint left behind that some of my ancestors were more than likely among the many white settlers of that time who took up rifles and cleared the land of it’s people.

Although those stories were not handed down to the generations that followed, somehow a sense of shame transferred from the past and cast its sorrowful shadow over my days.

I was well into my teens when the long-held secrecy began to crumble under pressure from the truth rising up from the land. And from the stories and plays and songs and artworks of many Australians, both indigenous and non-indigenous. The truth started trickling out of the cracks in what was plastered over and white Australia’s black history began to become more commonly known.

Now, sixty years or so later, my sense is that the haunted, lonely feeling I felt off the land as a child was that of Country longing for its people to return.

I found out much later, when I was living on the other side of the earth, in Ireland – a country also scarred by colonisation – more of the details of how the continent of Australia had been invaded. How the British parliament had taken control of the land through makey-uppey laws that over-rode the laws of creation – forcefully implemented through cruel and brutal violence. And how that tragic story was obliterated by generations of silence.

Thankfully it turns out that the first people weren’t a dying race after all. That the colonisers declaring Australia ‘Terra Nullus’ (empty land) was actually fake news. Lies propagated by those men in charge – the authority that imposed itself on the land and murdered so many of the original people who belonged to that land,  displacing countless others from their homelands.

The true story of what happened was not obliterated by generations of silence in First Nations societies. They recorded what happened and handed it down through stories and songs and artworks. And Country holds the memory.

I am beyond grateful to all the first and second people who have passed down, recorded, researched, written the truth of what happened and what was lost and what is being retrieved and restored and offered. Bill Gammage, Sally Morgan, Tyson Yunkaporta, Germain Greer, Dr D Gondarra, Richard Trudgen, Kate Grenville, Alexis Wright, Uncle Max Harrison, John Pilger, Bruce Pascoe, Peter McConchie, Sinem Saban and many many more.

My spirit lifts when I read the Declaration made by the Yolngu Nations Assembly of North East Arnhem Land, which was presented to the Northern Territories Parliament in 2016 and to the United Nations in 2017. Charles, Prince of Wales – now King of England – was also provided with this Declaration together with a letter-stick to deliver to the Prime Minister of Australia in 2018.

“We declare that we have not been conquered.

We declare that to this day we are a sovereign people.

We declare that we are subject to our Madayin system of law constituted by the Unseen Creator of the Universe and revealed to the Givers of Law: Djanj’kawu and Barama, and we continue to steward this system through our lawful authorities and government.

Our Madayin system of law establishes Magayamirr – peace, order, and good government; is dhapirrk consistent in its statutes; and is assented to by all Yolngu citizens through the Wana Lupthun assent ceremony.

Our Madayin system of law is guarded by the Yothu Yindi separation of powers.

Our Madayin system of law is a rule of law not a rule of man.

Our Madayin system of law is the equal of any other system of law.”

See how I am? I set out to write a profile page but end up speaking about what’s important to me – what matters. What causes grief and what brings me alive.

School Education

I didn’t like school-learning. Maths, science, home economics, sport, music, geography, languages, gymnastics – the subjects on offer at school, were of no interest to me. History would have been of great interest had it told the whole story – but it was only told from our cultural perspective – which of course only perpetuated division.

What school did teach me, however, was how to make myself sit still inside a classroom, enduring immense boredom and the longing to be out in the fresh air. And what I gained from school was the friendship of three other children who have remained close to me ever since.

School also taught me how to become alert to potential danger of bullies, how to spot them first and duck away quick. And probably like many introverts, I learned how to pretend I was not bothered about things I was deeply bothered by.

My parents allowed me to end my school education at fifteen. They viewed an education as a privilege, which neither of them had the opportunity to partake in. So it was hard on them that I hated school so vehemently. Out of economic necessity, my mother had had to leave home at fifteen to go to the city to find work. I had it easier and could take a year off before starting work at sixteen.

It turns out that school days were not in fact the best days of my life, but the worst. And the things that captivated my interest were not found on the blackboard or in books but in nature – with the trees and the creek and the shore and in the gentle company of animals and wildlife.

J. Krishnamurti 1895-1986:

In my late teens a friend gave me a book by  world teacher J. Krishnamurti. I have come to treasure these vast teachings throughout my adult life and surprise myself now as I recognise, in reading back what is written here, so much of what he was pointing to.

I was twenty four when I flew out from Australia.  Looking out from the small oval window as the plane taxied along the runway, I saw the enormous buildings, the immense activity, the frenetic, relentless industrial development spoiling everything of beauty. The skyline above the city of Melbourne was full of cranes.

I thought of those gentle, peaceful people who belong to this land – their lives and ways of living scattered to the four winds. ‘They’ll never survive this,’ I thought.

Thankfully, I was wrong. I could not have foreseen the consistent advancement and visibility the First Peoples have achieved today against such a backdrop of disparaging vilification from those fortifying the status quo of the dominant culture.

I have immense respect and greatly admire the First Peoples of Australia – their resilience, kindness, their wisdom, their unbroken spirits and free minds, their loyalty to their Culture and to Country. And I honour the immortal spirit and devastating beauty of their vast lands, upon whose shores I learned everything of greatest value to my life.

London was too big, too noisy, too many people, too lonely and not enough trees. I found out that Ireland was only a short train and boat journey away. There was a job advertised at the Australian Embassy in Dublin for a secretary. My typing test was sixteen words a minute, but remarkably, I got the job. And I fell head over heels in love with Ireland – both the land and its people.

The Dublin pace was slow and the people were down-to-earth, full of humour, welcoming and friendly. I was twenty-four, meeting new friends and slowly discovering this magical country.

Very many young people were heading to Australia to find work and make a new start. I was following a different path and the new start I was looking for slowly became my life.

On my many excursions around the countryside in those early years, it dawned on me that the famous Irish oak forests of the songs and legends were nowhere to be seen. Once out of the city surrounds I’d expected to see native forests and woodlands as far as they eye could see. Most of the countryside seemed to be grazing land for farm animals.

The vast swathes of tree farms of North American spruce seemed to have become confused in the peoples’ minds as being forests. But they were not forests at all – only single species trees planted in straight lines, with no understory or essential forest community. Felled at forty years or less as a timber crop.

Some years later I returned to Ireland after five weeks away visiting my parents, to find the country was in chaos. A violent storm had passed through Ireland and many beautiful old roadside trees had come down in the storm. There was a mop-up operation in progress. The County Councils promoted the felling of all the old roadside trees to prevent future problems and the result in many areas was carnage for trees.

Perhaps it’s true to say that new eyes see furthest. I noticed so much of what was happening at that time, including the largely negative attitude the people seemed to hold towards trees.

Mainly what I noticed were the gaping  holes in the sky where ancient crowns had stood and were no more. There being little or no hardwood sawmills in Ireland to process the valuable timber, that storm was a bonanza for firewood merchants.

The following year I launched an NGO called Crann – the Irish word for Tree. It attracted considerable media coverage and interest, in both urban areas and in the countryside.

But it was an interview with Gay Byrne on the Late Late Show in 1988 that resulted in immense recognition and support for Crann and for tree planting in general.

It turned out I wasn’t the only person who cared deeply about trees. Re-treeing Ireland with broadleaved trees became the pursuit of many people in several parts of   the country and I’m still meeting people today, over thirty years later, who remember that interview and tell me that they subsequently planted trees.

Twelve years later myself and my partner, now husband, purchased twenty six acres of farmland in County Cavan. We kept and cared for a small herd of pet cattle who, although a huge amount of work, were a joy to know. Gentle creatures, quick witted and humourous, they became family members and I reflect on those twenty years with the cows as being an immense privilege in my life. None of them were put to death in a slaughterhouse – they all lived trauma-free lives and passed away in their own time at home on our farm. The land holds their memory and I very often ‘see’ them in the places they frequented.

We planted about a third of our land in mainly native broadleaved trees. They are thirty years old now and the woodland community is establishing over most of the area. Regeneration is starting to occur.

We’ve left some areas devoid of human intervention so that nature has the freedom to create. Those areas are like a university of learning for me. There are also several ‘People-free-Zones’ making up about ten acres all told, where wildlife can take sanctuary – free from the relentlessly  staring eyes of humans.

Beyond the boundaries of our little woodland and wilding fields is an ocean of  grassland and hedges as far as the eye can see. The land tells of the dominance of animal grazing – the determined pursuit in our culture for profit, driven by financial incentives from a system of governance that has no heart for, nor heed of, nature. – The adherence to a system that still strives for economic growth, despite the land so visibly asking for reprieve from decades of mistreatment. It tells of land-use rather than land care – the lack of deep relationship with nature and with the land itself.

In 1986 when I started Crann, I thought that native tree planting was the solution to all our ills. But the ills seemed so much fewer and much simpler then.

The complexities we didn’t understand back then are racing to the fore and are now snapping at the heels of our young people.

We all seem to recognise now that the way we do things has to change, – but most of us are reluctant to actually change. This, I see, as the main challenge.

It’s hoped that this Revelationaries for Nature site might encourage some deeper examination of the subject, away from the majority views that are fostered by the very system that steered us into this mess.

Mess: a situation that is confused and full of problems. 

 Photo: Shadrack’s Creek – following Nature’s incorruptible rules of law – not rules of man. Photo by Julie Fourter.