Scott Family Environmental History – one perspective
December 29, 2022 By: Richard Scott
My grandfather emigrated from Glasgow, Scotland to Dunedin, New Zealand before the First World War. He was in the Merchant Navy and thought of better living in the southern hemisphere. His paths were laden with water – his work, his life and its directions, and future were all environmentally dependant on the world’s oceans.
His life nearly ended on the Gallipoli coast in Turkey in WWI. Again, water was involved, northern Aegean Sea, where Churchill’s mistaken invasion of Turkey was a catastrophic event that led to huge loss of life. (Gallipoli to Australians and New Zealanders is the Vimy Ridge and Flanders Field of Canadian history.)
Grandfather was shipped back home after being injured in France. But I do wonder whether the sea and ocean were becoming his home. Like my life movements, its fluidity blurs that sense of home. Having one means of transport to move internationally, my grandfather developed an affinity with water and its sustaining and transformative power.
He met my grandmother on a trip to Samoa and left the merchant navy for a posting with a trading company; water-dependent as well. My father was born in Solomon Islands, where they were forced to move to Australia, when the Japanese invaded in World War II, again by sea. My grandmother, uncle, and father left early while grandfather stayed to organize the remaining evacuees and tie up company loose-ends. Lifestyle products and sustaining food was to be cut off when trade ceased. He was the last person of the company to leave the Solomons.
We grew up on the coast in Sydney, Australia, after my father met my mother at a beach social for the local church. When my father died, we scattered his ashes off that very beach, with all the history of water of his and his father’s lives. It was an apt location and a ‘tipped hat’ to the environment they both loved.
My brother and I seem to have the ocean within us, as it’s always close both physically and emotionally. Perhaps it’s the island we grew up on, with our upbringing involving the ocean constantly, or our environmental heritage from our grandparents, or probably both that influenced us from the time we were born. It was an environmental legacy of our ancestors – four island nations of three generations.
Apart from water, the natural resources that sustained our ancestors, families, and communities weren’t thought of or passed down to our generations. I feel ignorant of the environment that sustained us in childhood, as the abundance of flora and fauna on the east coast of Australia, made us lack for nothing to be healthy and strong. We lived in the city, away from where resources were grown inland; so I spared no thought of environmental value in my middle class upbringing. Likewise with resources brought in via ships, straight to supermarkets. It was just there and I focussed on my world instead of how I impacted it, or where the resources that sustained me came from.
What I’d like to have known then was how English methods of farming, both with animals and plants, provided a sustaining environment for family growth. Also, the indigenous culture held much to learn from, with respect for plant and animal life, sustenance through natural means (what the earth provided), and a sustainability of reaping natural resources and moving on to other ground to allow replenishment: the nomadic lifestyle of Australian aboriginals.
But information sought now makes me feel how much I’ve missed out on understanding where my family has come from and how it survived and flourished. Like Canada, Australia is a wealthy country and it is because of natural resources and a colonizing culture. However what is wealth judged by? – the dollar seems all-encompassing but happiness and sustainability must count within a “wealthy place to live”. And it’s environmental history and the thinking of nature impacting people, instead of the usual other way around, that seems to hold my key to unlocking my past and understanding how my family moved through the ages.
My current situation and from the recent past, from when I married and had children, has shown astounding changes in both environmental ways and awareness. From simple recycling and composting in the 1990s, to taking produce and carry bags into supermarkets from 2010s, to picking up litter as a matter of course (on our small island), and to discussing environmental themes constantly, the awareness of my environmental footprint has grown exponentially in the last 30 years. While I am suspicious of the extent to which human activity has caused climate change, I have always pressed environmental buttons of more care and nurturing of the nature around us.
In the 1980s, Sydney was second to Los Angeles as the most polluted western city in the world. I remember how this deeply effected me and the relief I felt when unleaded petrol (gas) came through and government changes healed our air. This seemed to be a precursor to the climate change debate and how the environment began to take centre stage. Humans used nature without thought of how it effects nature. Now we are paying the cost of that lack of thought. Awareness and action must take place. The slow process is indicative of the dollar winning while nature and happiness suffers.
I took this course to become more aware. Perhaps it will push me to action. But it has healed the ignorance of my ancestors in their stories that should have been passed down to our generations. My daughter is vegetarian and her respect for nature and animals reminds me of earlier cultures and the future one I wish to know.