Aaron Pedersen and Holly Ringland visit Northeast Tasmania, tebrakunna country, exploring kinship on the stunning Bay of Fires coast.
At the Bay of Fires, the intense orange lichen is a marriage of fungi and algae: the fungi provide structure, and the algae photosynthesises food. Together they flourish.
Aaron and Holly venture onto sea country to St Helen’s Island to encounter the area’s last remaining seal colony, contemplating our bond with these curious creatures.
The Bay of Fires was given its English name in March 1773 by Tobias Furneaux. It wasn’t because of the vivid orange lichen, but the many campfires along its beaches and headlands.
First Nations people have lived here for at least 42,000 years. Aaron and Holly meet academic and trawlwulwuy woman Emma Lee. She tells them women are of the sea, men are of the land, and everyone is from the night sky. For the trawlwulwuy there’s no notion of humans as separate from anything else in nature: everything is connected by the thread of kinship.
Venturing inland to the forests of The Blue Tier, Aaron and Holly discover rock carvings which elders believe were once part of ceremony. They visit an old tin mining tunnel, where Chinese migrants lived and worked. In the forest they encounter an enormous Swamp Gum that’s believed to be the widest tree in Australia. Holly pens a message to this gentle giant.
Near Anson’s Bay in the Black Peppermint Gum Forest, we meet Jamie Graham-Blair, a trawlwoolway pakana and science student. He tells Aaron and Holly that the trees are his ancestors, his kin. He leads us to a Gathering Site, an enormous hill composed entirely of seafood shells, where his ancestors met for at least 10,000 years. Together they imagine the gatherings here.
Production credits: Back To Nature is a Media Stockade and Threshold Pictures production. The series was commissioned by ABC TV and funded in association with Screen NSW and The People and Parks Foundation.
Executive Producer: Aaron Pederson, Series Producer: Jane Manning (Threshold Pictures), Producers: Rebecca Barry and Madeleine Hetherton (Media Stockade), Directors: Kimberley Benjamin, Dena Curtis, Jane Manning, Sophie Wiesner ABC Executive Producer: Frances O’Riordan, ABC Head of Entertainment: Nick Hayden.
Aaron Pedersons quiet dignity and love of nature was a defining feature of his previous appearance on our screens. However, his new show, “Back to nature “was diminished by his collaboration with Holly Ringland. Her self obsession and superficial comments have significantly lowered the general tone of the show, making it more about her than nature itself, and I for one won’t be watching any further episodes.