Collet, Anne (2016) ‘Love and Vision: The Story of Kathleen McArthur’s Care for Wallum Country’. PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature no. 12, pp. 127–134. Love and vision The story of Kathleen McArthur’s care for wallum country Anne Collet 1 In Wild Dog Dreaming, published in 2011, Deborah Bird Rose writes about ‘Anthropogenic extinction’ as ‘a fact of death that is growing exponentially.’ 2 She notes that ‘we are enter- ing an era of loss of life unprecedented in human history’ and states that ‘[t]he question, of course, is: if we humans are the cause, can we change ourselves enough to change our impacts?’ (2) Rose moves on to quote Michael Soulé’s observation that ‘[p]eople save what they love’, and asks with him, ‘[a]re humans capable of loving, and therefore of caring for, the animals and plants that are currently losing their lives in a growing cascade of extinc- tions?’ She follows this question up with another, more imperative one, ‘[h]ow [are we] to invigorate love and action in ways that are generous, knowledgeable, and life-afrming?’ (2) In interview three years later, Rose reiterates this view, urging her audience to take this moment, this challenge of the Anthropocene, ‘to enhance our capacity for love, for care, for keeping faith with earth, keeping faith with life.’ 3 This combination of love, knowledge and care were understood by Kathleen McAr- thur in the 1950s to be the best drivers of life-afrming action that would ‘keep faith with earth’. This is not in any way to give less credence to Rose’s work, but rather, to under- stand her concerns and values in relation to a history of ‘white’ environmental activism in Australia that was in large part instigated and energised by amateurs like McArthur. It might also prompt us to ask how efective these drivers are, given the time lapse involved and the increasing urgency of need. This was an urgency that was also recognised by McArthur, and one that prompted her multi-dimensional campaign to ‘save’ the wallum country of south east Queensland. ‘For those readers unfamiliar with the name, Wallum,’ McArthur explains, is the usually fat, badly drained, sandy country of the coast. It is an aboriginal word some say applied to all species of Banksia, and others say to Banksia aemula. The Wallum, being up to the present practically useless for commercial purposes provides our best wildfower shows; due, of course, to lack of interference from man and his introduced beasts. 4 McArthur understood that the loss of wildfowers in the wallum country was a cultural loss. Nature and culture were understood to be entangled. We no longer speak of ‘conser- vation’ or of ‘saving’ the environment, hence the inverted commas, but for MacArthur the project of ‘saving’ was not one of patronising salvage by the superior white coloniser, but a project of personal responsibility related to the ethics of care for earth, and a recognition of the meaning of imminent loss. In her frst book, Queensland Wildfowers, published by Jacaranda Press in 1959, she writes: The wildfowers of a nation play a big part in its culture…Ours [Australian setler culture] is still young and delicate and we must save the heritage of the land to nurture it. What is not recognisable will not be saved. So, with great urgency let us get to know our wildfowers and it will follow that we will love them and desire their preservation. 5