As we reach the peak of Australian summer, my housemates and I continue to wage our ongoing war against our garden. Despite our best efforts at regular maintenance, enough weed killer to wipe out a large family of possums, and even the acquisition of a whipper snipper, it’s pretty safe to say our garden looks like shit. 

A few months ago, one of my housemates and I lamented that our front lawn was all but completely dead before December was out. We complained about the impossibility of keeping the garden alive. Admittedly, none of us are passionate gardeners. Still, all we sought were some green grass and plants, not exactly Versailles. However, the feeling of constantly trying to suppress a malevolent force in our backyard felt inherently wrong, especially as next door’s native garden — made up of free reigning tea trees, wattles and local flowers — looked effortlessly lovely without the blood, sweat, and tears our own required.

Inevitably, the obvious arose. Could it possibly be that our goals of maintaining freshly trimmed green green grass, deciduous trees and plants growing in neat little rows were utterly incompatible with the Australian climate? I joked that our European garden was a modern form of colonialism, waiting to be picked apart by the appropriate PhD candidate. 

A couple of weeks later, I googled “Should I decolonise my garden?” (mostly in jest) with little expectation of what I might find. To my surprise, I was met with a wealth of information on the subject. 

The seed, if you will, that had been planted in mind — that the failures of our garden were, at least, in part because it was never meant to be there — had revealed a rich history behind the conceptual “garden”. However, the rabbit hole I went down only seemed to further affirm my complete ignorance of an area with a great deal to offer. 

The very concept of the garden necessitates control of nature. A “nice”, beautiful garden is one that most effectively does this: pruning trees, cutting lawns, restricting the free reign of greenery. The seemingly benign nature of controlling something non-sentient disguises how the “garden” fits neatly into a colonial worldview. 

As asserted by Ateqah Khaki, a colonial system of organising agriculture created the means through which to similarly categorise people. If plants could be placed in a hierarchy, so could humans, allowing colonists to justify slavery, genocide, and racial categorisation. Even the notion of planting itself is linked with slave labour, as recently established European colonies would use enslaved people brought in from enormous distances to prop up a globalising system of agriculture. One that took profit not only from this labour, but the degradation of land to plant crops for financial return. 

Flora and fauna have been affected in the same way colonialism has displaced people while attempting to sever them from their cultures and histories. Today’s tulips originally grew in wild valleys of central Asia before being hybridised by the Dutch and sold for profit. This comparison is not to equate the plight of the tulip to victims of colonisation but to emphasise the ubiquity of a colonial mindset, the impact of which extends beyond humanity. Mistreatment of people is inextricably linked to mistreatment of the land.

As literature like Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu brings a rich history of Indigenous land care into the popular domain, the agricultural lessons ignored by British colonists become clear. The ANU’s very own Bill Gammage has written extensively on Indigenous burning practices that operated successfully for thousands of years, but these parts of our country’s history have not been acknowledged. They have been instead overshadowed by a violent invasion that brought with it agricultural practices that flattened forests, an endless number of harmful introduced species, and an entire economy built out of pillaging half the country’s surface for some rocks and metals. 

Of course, this is only the tip of an iceberg that one certainly could explore endlessly. However, to my ignorant but curious mind, dipping my toes into this world helped to shed a new light on how I view a post-colonial Australia. 

Bringing it back to the backyard, the notion of a native garden that seamlessly integrates local flora has certainly become more popularised in recent years, primarily arising from the fact that they are simply easier to care for because they are actually compatible with their environment. However, strangely enough, this makes them better homes for local wildlife, by containing plants that pollinate more easily and decreasing the proliferation of introduced flora and fauna. 

While the university student share house tenant has little power to change their garden, this shift in perspective is an incredibly important one. As conversations about intersectionality increase, gardens, nature and landscape must be considered in how we tackle the problems we face.