Image: Val Plumwood Photo Archive, Undated

MEET THE MUSE: VAL PLUMWOOD

We’ve mentioned Val Plumwood once before, briefly, at the end of our Crocodile blog (which is really fun and worth reading). A footnote. A name to look up.

We’ve decided that was not nearly enough. Her story about her near-death encounter with the world's largest and most aggressive reptile is truly extraordinary, but that’s because she was one hell of a cool woman.

Val Plumwood was born in 1939 on a poultry farm near Sydney, grew up in a house with walls made of hessian sacks dipped in cement, and went on to become one of Australia's most significant environmental philosophers. A woman who spent her life arguing against the human assumption of supremacy over nature.

She was, by all accounts, constitutionally incapable of timidity. Dux of her school. Philosophy degree at Sydney. In the 1970s, she and her partner built a house by hand from local stones on a mountain near Braidwood, NSW, and from that house, she wrote the books and papers that helped launch Australia's environmental movement.

When the marriage ended, she stayed on the mountain. She took the mountain's name as her own. Plumwood Mountain, named for the ancient Eucryphia moorei tree, became her home, her laboratory, her life's work.

Images of Val's patched canoe after her crocodile attack in 1985.

Images from the National Museum Australia

Then came the canoe ride of February 19, 1985.

Val was alone in Kakadu National Park, paddling a borrowed canoe through the East Alligator Lagoon in driving rain. The crocodile seized her. She was death-rolled three times, each time surfacing, dragging herself to the bank, and being seized again. She escaped with her left leg exposed to the bone.

Then she walked. Then she crawled. Three kilometres back to the ranger station, alone, through the dark. Navigating by the stars and intuition.

She later requested that the crocodile not be killed, a reflection of the philosophy she had spent her life building. The animal had done what animals do. She was in its water. She was prey. That was not a problem to be punished. It was a truth to be understood.

The experience cracked open her thinking in ways that shaped everything that followed. She described it as a glimpse of the world "from the outside," a universe in which she was not the centre, not the protagonist, not exempt. Just another creature, in a food chain, on a planet that would continue entirely without her.

Images: Val Plumwood Photo Archive, Undated

She wrote about it. Both an article and her posthumously published book, The Eye of the Crocodile, were created from that morning on the water. She was still writing it when she died.

Val Plumwood died on February 29, 2008, from a stroke, alone in the house she had built with her own hands. She was given a green burial in the garden of that house, on the mountain she had loved and whose name she had taken as a symbol of her own independence and belonging to a life in deep conversation with nature.

As the people who loved her stood around the open cardboard coffin, a large butterfly flew among them and settled on her body.

She was not defined by what almost killed her. She was enlarged by it. This idea is worth keeping in your back pocket for when you are in the jaws of your own personal crocodile. A death roll can take on many forms: grief, sickness, fear, or plain exhaustion. And we all have our own mountains that can become our sanctuary, one worth naming yourself after.

Read her essay "Being Prey". It's one of the most extraordinary pieces of writing in and about the Australian landscape. It's freely available online. We reckon you'll love it.

MEET THE MUSE: VAL PLUMWOOD

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