AJE: Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, Vol. 2 2012/2013 ASLEC–ANZ 57 International Regionalism as American – Australian Dialogue: the literary and psychological terrains of William James and Henry David Thoreau in John Kinsella’s Jam Tree Gully: Poems TOM BRISTOW University of New England We wade through senses we can’t name but know are there, bothering blood. John Kinsella, ‘Spring Pollen’ Ecocriticism is engaged with the ideas of bioregional literature, an international response to common concerns of depleted biodiversity, the rate of species loss and anthropogenic climate change. Issues with respect to viewing the environment from multiple vantage points, with discrete emphases on values located within each perspective, are amplified when text and world are framed in terms of scale. The paradigm of the ecosystem and the emphasis this places on interconnection and interdependency can be neither conceptually fixed nor reduced to one vantage point that runs across all these acute architectonics of understanding and representation of human to non-human relations; these ‘situated microknowledges’—or locally anchored events in specific spaces and times—give rise to discrete ethical orientations, and rhetorical and poetic formulations in each instance. In this light, the European pastoral of the idealised life of the shepherd appears antiquated if it were to be employed to fit the human expression of the rural environment to local– global issues beyond the vantage point of the human scale, as identified above. Practical aspects of agriculture within the georgic tradition exhibit expressions of human labour in the world that are not reduced to viewing nature as simply enriching; modes can be read as shifting from peaceful repose to the depiction of the opposition of violence and care, and pleasure and pain. Writers responding to advances in literary criticism wherein a ‘newer historicism’ has broken through the barriers of a romantic ideology to secure a view on ‘the anthropocentric bias of a certain distinctive construction of history’ assist an academic reclaiming of literary genres’. This ‘new’ interest in non-human nature is not ‘an evasion of any kind’ but a ‘sincere interest in the economy of nature’ (Garrard 183). 1 John Kinsella might not wish to be aligned with this recuperative project as his pastoral is activism, a performative poetics of a custodian of the land; and yet this makes it radical: going back to roots. Kinsella attempts to move beyond the pastoral and the georgic in his activist lyricism. In Jam Tree Gully: Poems (2011; hereafter JTG) lyricism combines the microcosmic world of his settlement in the land of the Bullardong Nyungar people in western Australia to an American line of thought. What Kinsella has elsewhere termed ‘intensivism’, micro scale poetics indicates how a small place can act as an ‘anchor point’ in international communications (Disclosed Poetics 2007: 137-8). For Kinsella the WA site is representative both of the realism of the post-colonial labourer surveying the block, and of the post-Emersonian American line of literature that established a syncretic and embodied sensuality (Ryan 44-45) at the heart of environmentalist ways of knowing