Bush Salon, Wee Jasper, July 2015

One of the first times we experimented with collective walking as method, was during a bush salon weekend in Wee Jasper last July. Veronica was over from Canada as a visiting scholar. Mindy came up from Melbourne. Lesley, Tonya and I were already there, hanging out in our respective shacks next to Micalong Creek. It was a unseasonably wet winter.

We’d been playing with the idea of finding a method for exploring desire with/for the more-than-human. Mindy and I had just finished writing a chapter called ‘Queer Departures into More than Human Worlds’ and the year before, we’d written an article called ‘Queer worlding childhood’ where we experimented with using a mostly textual diffractive method to explore what Karen Barad refers to as ‘nature’s inherent queerness’. So queering nature and queering our desires for the more-than-human world was on our minds. But how to translate this into a method of literally following our desires to flirt with the materialities of this particular place?

We decided to walk up the mountain behind Micalong Creek to get another perspectives on where we were. The idea was to allow ourselves to be drawn by whatever sights, sounds, smells, movements, rhythms, forces, patterns, entities or living creatures caught our attention, sparked some kind of curious desire. Surrendering control of the route up, we let ourselves be led by whatever drew us into relation. We tried to stay open to being surprised – by unexpected or unlikely encounters – and to pay attention to the mutual affect of these encounters. The sounds of wind rustling through the melaleuca heathlands and the smell of tea-tree oil carried by the same breeze drew me into a catacombed bushy underworld of wombat trails that I didn’t know existed. When we finally reached the top, we found a number of wombats wandering around in the open, grazing. Very queer behaviour for these nocturnal, solitary, burrowing animals.

Affrica Taylor