CLAIRE DUNN Rewilding the Urban Soul. Reviewed by Tracy Sorensen
Part memoir, part urgent appeal, Claire Dunn’s new book explores how our urban lives can become more intimate with nature.
For many of us, the world of lockdown has been about life inside four walls: comfy clothes, home schooling and baking experiments under the watchful eyes of omnipresent screens with their instructions, warnings, entertainments, distractions and deadlines. In Rewilding the Urban Soul, Claire Dunn argues that it doesn’t have to be this way. Instead, we can use this moment – this unwanted pause – to consider reconnecting with the wildness just outside our doors and deep inside our own bodies.
Dunn insists we’re all wild at heart. Our animal-human senses have evolved over millennia to listen for danger and opportunity, to tune in to cracklings, shadows, weather, the comings and goings of other creatures. Our civilised urban selves are therefore clipped and dulled, endlessly yearning for something more meaningful and vital.
Writers have been exiling themselves in wilder places and reporting on their findings for a long time. The educated, ‘civilised’ person, who could easily land an office job, intentionally lives off the land and by their wits, returning with stories to tell and wisdom to impart. Claire Dunn’s previous book, My Year Without Matches, is an example of the genre. In the forest or the bush or the desert, something vital and ancient is renewed.
But once the stories have been told and the wisdom imparted, what keeps the flame alive? What happens to the beauty and potency of fire when you don’t have to make it from scratch by rubbing sticks together? Rewilding the Urban Soul is Claire Dunn’s attempt to answer this question.
This book traces Dunn’s reluctant return to city life (following a man) and what she did next. It’s driven by her own attempt to keep the wild inner fire burning in the face of shopping runs and tax returns.
The book is not simply a memoir but an urgent appeal to all of us to follow along, because she thinks that rewilding ourselves is urgent business in this time of ecological collapse.
As a former ‘greenocrat’ with an office job in a national environmental organisation, Dunn had felt herself losing the battle for hearts and minds. Shouting the truth at people wasn’t working. Perhaps what was needed wasn’t more information, but more love. The problem is that love requires intimacy, and urban lives are generally not intimate with nature.
How can I expect us to fall in love with the world in the way that’s needed if it’s dependent on going bush for a year? No, it has to be possible, right where we are.
At odds with the trope of the lonely individual’s direct encounter with the natural world, Dunn’s book is full of fellow humans. She has a lively group of followers in her Rewild Friday workshops, where group members devote six hours a week to getting out and about in local parks and waterways. She is in constant conversation with mentors, friends and housemates about the goals and methods of personal rewilding.
Dunn is clear that the project is not about two things. It’s not about personal growth such as might be found in a yoga workshop or therapy, although personal benefits may come as a bonus. And it’s not about reclaiming or preserving a pure, untouched wilderness that exists somewhere ‘out there’, beyond ourselves, perhaps fenced off in a national park.
Perhaps the real endangered species is that of the wild human. Winning that campaign would negate the need for all others. For this species, if reintroduced, could return health, vitality, diversity, and abundance to our cultural and physical landscapes, to the centres of civilisation themselves.
So, how? Dunn’s experiments in conjuring the wild in suburban Melbourne are many and varied, but one she comes back to again and again is the idea of the ‘sit spot’. It’s very simple, as these things are (‘Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity!’ cried Thoreau during his self-imposed exile in the New England forest), but that just concentrates its power. Find a spot outside, switch off your phone, and see what you can see. Go back again the next day, ideally at about the same time, and keep looking. Keep it up, and you’ll see a teeming, flapping, busy world.
Dunn’s sit-spot is just beyond the backyard of her big hippie share house in a well-to-do suburb on the banks of the Yarra River. The thriving ecosystem she observes through the seasons contains many inhabitants: grey shrike-thrush, fox, cat, rabbit, kangaroo, river red gum, eel, carp, turtle. She sees glimpses, follows tracks and scats, climbs trees, nibbles on things.
With friends, she kayaks into the Melbourne CBD from her house on the river, sleeping rough on the edge of a park en route, to the bemusement of early morning joggers. She climbs trees, skinny dips, forages for acorns (boil them for a long time to get rid of tannins) and mallow weed (eat like spinach).
She meets a young man, Gio, entirely self-taught in the ways of the non-human world. Gio shimmies up trees to peer into the nests of eastern rosellas and jumps into stormwater drains to look for short-finned eels. Another fellow-traveller is the stylishly black-clad Luciano, quintessential urban hipster, who watches YouTube clips to work out how to catch and kill backyard foxes. Dunn skins Luciano’s dead foxes for a winter coat, using the animals’ own brains to tan the leather. This is not a vegan sensibility, clearly, but one more in tune with Indigenous or traditional relationships governing eating and the eaten.
Speaking of which, information about First Nations (Australian and North American) lore and pre-modern European traditions are freely woven through the book. Mostly, these support Dunn’s central thesis by giving examples of how human beings have always lived in more earthy, lively and enchanted ways than the ‘emptiness of the overfilled life’ that is served up to us now. Sometimes, though, Dunn’s application of a decontextualised hotch-potch of ancient ceremony – the improvised sweat lodge, the drumming, the Rumi poetry – feels more like the predigested offerings readily found in places like Mullumbimby and Margaret River.
For my money, Dunn is at her strongest when she recounts precious moments of awed discovery and ecstatic communion. These are the results of long practice, time invested and repeat visits. There is nothing predigested about these experiences, because they come straight from direct encounters. Dunn’s description of finally getting close to an elusive powerful owl is striking indeed:
Without breaking my gaze, all of a sudden, the creature begins making gestures with its neck, a horizontal back and forth, back and forth, again and again. What is this dance? I am intimidated and seduced. It pauses for a second and then resumes, left and right, left and right, in rhythmic time. It’s drawing me in. I can’t remain static. I begin to mirror its movement, moving my neck from shoulder to shoulder, keeping my chin parallel to the river and my eyes interlocked with its.
This is the energy that sustains Rewilding the Urban Soul. It is made of love, and it draws us in.
Claire Dunn Rewilding the Urban Soul: Searching for the wild in the city Scribe 2021 PB 336pp $35.00
Tracy Sorensen is the author of The Lucky Galah (Picador, 2018). She was the 2020 Judy Harris Writer in Residence at the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney and is a PhD candidate researching climate change communication at Charles Sturt University.
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