Nature’s Active Voice // A Field Report From Plumwood Mountain
In re-animating, we become open to hearing sound as voice, seeing movement as action, adaptation as intelligence and dialogue, coincidence and chaos as the creativity of matter
—Val Plumwood, ‘Nature in the Active Voice’
Australian ecofeminist Val Plumwood’s final resting place is at her home, Plumwood Mountain,
among the plumwoods for whom she named herself. Her final article, ‘Nature in the Active
Voice’, outlined what philosopher Deborah Bird Rose would later term Plumwood’s Western
‘Animist Philosophy’: a commitment to listening for intelligence and agency in the
more-than-human world. Plumwood’s work invites readers to listen for the natural world
speaking to us in the ‘active voice: the domain of agency’. She invites us to step into
the conversation with nature, and ‘find ourselves in dialogue with … other species’ needs,
other kinds of minds’. In the tradition of Plumwood, artist Sammy Hawker and I both have
practices that dialogue with other species, that centre hearing sound as voice.
On Sunday the 13th of October of 2024, Sammy and I came to Plumwood Mountain to run a workshop called ‘Active Listening’ with assistance from artist Broni Sargeson and Plumwood caretakers Ruby Kammoora and Clancy Walker. Our day-long workshop combined active listening, microphone-enabled listening to soil and water, walking, and group chromatogram fabrication. We borrowed the term active listening from Bird Rose’s eulogical article on Plumwood, wherein she describes active listening as ‘the work participants engage in as they inter-act with other sentient creatures’. For a practical guide to active listening, we used techniques from Deep Listening composer Pauline Oliveros, adapting her teaching of active engagement with the sonic environment. We adopted the chromatogram from soil science: as Sammy told me, ‘chromatogram’ means writing in colour. It’s an old process whereby a solution of soil or other organic matter is mixed with silver nitrate and allowed to steep over a small circular piece of blotter paper. For Sammy, these chromatograms are the visual expression of vibrant matter.
On Sunday the 13th of October of 2024, Sammy and I came to Plumwood Mountain to run a workshop called ‘Active Listening’ with assistance from artist Broni Sargeson and Plumwood caretakers Ruby Kammoora and Clancy Walker. Our day-long workshop combined active listening, microphone-enabled listening to soil and water, walking, and group chromatogram fabrication. We borrowed the term active listening from Bird Rose’s eulogical article on Plumwood, wherein she describes active listening as ‘the work participants engage in as they inter-act with other sentient creatures’. For a practical guide to active listening, we used techniques from Deep Listening composer Pauline Oliveros, adapting her teaching of active engagement with the sonic environment. We adopted the chromatogram from soil science: as Sammy told me, ‘chromatogram’ means writing in colour. It’s an old process whereby a solution of soil or other organic matter is mixed with silver nitrate and allowed to steep over a small circular piece of blotter paper. For Sammy, these chromatograms are the visual expression of vibrant matter.
The focus of the day was matter’s vibrancy: visually, haptically, acoustically. We were
inspired by Oliveros, whose work has defined the Western Deep Listening lineage. For
Oliveros, to listen is to ‘heighten and expand consciousness of sound in as many dimensions
of awareness and attentional dynamics as humanly possible’. Plumwood invites us over and
over again to actively listen to the complexity of nature. Oliveros invites us over and
over again not just to hear, but to deeply listen to the complexity of our environment.
Oliveros offers us tools for Plumwood’s concepts. And through these tools, we heard the
voices of cicadas, of worms, of decomposition.
Over the course of a few months, Sammy and I discussed how to attune participants’ senses toward nature’s voicing. Participants were required to prepare by reading Plumwood's work, as well as the work by Deborah Bird Rose that contextualised it. Sammy would also introduce participants to Oliveros’ global and focal attention: listening as diffusely and environmentally as possible, and listening as specifically as possible, respectively. We would practise this global and focal active listening as a group. Through guided listening, we hoped to invite participants away from the normal (and understandable) temptation to chat amongst the human, and to turn their attention toward the birds, the frogs, the rustle of the plants, the movement of the water, the hum of the insects.
Over the course of a few months, Sammy and I discussed how to attune participants’ senses toward nature’s voicing. Participants were required to prepare by reading Plumwood's work, as well as the work by Deborah Bird Rose that contextualised it. Sammy would also introduce participants to Oliveros’ global and focal attention: listening as diffusely and environmentally as possible, and listening as specifically as possible, respectively. We would practise this global and focal active listening as a group. Through guided listening, we hoped to invite participants away from the normal (and understandable) temptation to chat amongst the human, and to turn their attention toward the birds, the frogs, the rustle of the plants, the movement of the water, the hum of the insects.
A few weeks before our workshop, Sammy, Ruby and Clancy had been on the Mountain for a
different event: a landback celebration. On the eighth of September 2024, the property was
given back to its Traditional Custodians, the Walbanja Rangers, through the auspice of the
Batemans Bay Local Aboriginal Land Council. Only the Plumwood buildings and gardens would
still be managed by the Plumwood Committee. This marked the first time any heritage-listed
building in NSW had been returned to traditional custodians by a private owner since
colonisation. Aunty Ros Carriage, who helped facilitate the transfer as CEO of the Batemans
Bay Local Aboriginal Land Council, highlighted the importance of the place: ‘This is part
of the songlines that lead from the coast and over the ranges’.
The night of the landback celebration, the cicadas came out in force. Ruby described sitting outside and hearing the soil start to crackle and wriggle, as thousands of bodies simultaneously slid out of it, their seven-year larval cycle over. Once out of the ground, they ascended to plumwood trees, where their shells split open and, with the help of gravity, their fresh new bodies emerged. We arrived ready to set up on the evening of October 12th. Plumwood was hallow with cicada shells: hundreds climbing up one tree, settling on bricks, nestling into orchids. Our workshop was to follow five distinct parts: listening while walking into Plumwood Mountain, the Oliveros-inspired active listening exercise, listening to microphones buried throughout the grounds, the making of a chromatogram, the sitting and talking together. In preparation for our workshop, Sammy and I walked the Plumwood grounds in the morning, as the mist was rising and the cicadas were just waking up. We placed microphones around the land, in places where nature’s active voice felt rich: a microphone in Val’s compost; a microphone in the in-ground pool for aquatic life near her homestead; a microphone under the plumwood tree behind the homestead; and then, fifteen minutes downhill to the plumwood grove, a microphone under a big, thick plumwood tree; another under the nearby fern; another in the stream running through the grove.
The night of the landback celebration, the cicadas came out in force. Ruby described sitting outside and hearing the soil start to crackle and wriggle, as thousands of bodies simultaneously slid out of it, their seven-year larval cycle over. Once out of the ground, they ascended to plumwood trees, where their shells split open and, with the help of gravity, their fresh new bodies emerged. We arrived ready to set up on the evening of October 12th. Plumwood was hallow with cicada shells: hundreds climbing up one tree, settling on bricks, nestling into orchids. Our workshop was to follow five distinct parts: listening while walking into Plumwood Mountain, the Oliveros-inspired active listening exercise, listening to microphones buried throughout the grounds, the making of a chromatogram, the sitting and talking together. In preparation for our workshop, Sammy and I walked the Plumwood grounds in the morning, as the mist was rising and the cicadas were just waking up. We placed microphones around the land, in places where nature’s active voice felt rich: a microphone in Val’s compost; a microphone in the in-ground pool for aquatic life near her homestead; a microphone under the plumwood tree behind the homestead; and then, fifteen minutes downhill to the plumwood grove, a microphone under a big, thick plumwood tree; another under the nearby fern; another in the stream running through the grove.
Sammy and I had prepared to introduce workshop participants to active listening through the
slow walk up Plumwood’s driveway. But by the time we arrived at the gate, the cicadas were
louder than thought. Over the course of the day, it was about as necessary to introduce part
icipants to more-than-human voicing as it would be to introduce fish to water. The cicadas
made their presence felt entirely, as did the kookaburras and the frogs. Listening through
headphones to the amplified voices of water and soil critters was a relief from what Bird
Rose describes as cicadas’ ‘interminable racket’ in her Plumwood article.
Plumwood’s writing on nature’s active voice is intertwined with her work on being prey, on the idea that we humans too are ‘part of the feast’. This was inspired in part by her own experience of nearly being eaten by a saltwater crocodile. Both concepts remind us that we are part of the more-than-human world, that communicates with us just as we communicate with it, that will consume us just as we consume it. In her article on being prey, Plumwood criticises Western human taboos around death and reluctance to admit that we are part of the food chain: ‘we may daily consume other animals by the billions, but we ourselves cannot be food for worms’. This dovetails sweetly with Olivieros’ active listening article ‘The Earth Worm Also Sings’: ‘my earth body returns to hers/where the earth worm also sings’ . Our workshop participants particularly enjoyed listening to the earthworms singing in Plumwood’s compost.
Plumwood’s writing on nature’s active voice is intertwined with her work on being prey, on the idea that we humans too are ‘part of the feast’. This was inspired in part by her own experience of nearly being eaten by a saltwater crocodile. Both concepts remind us that we are part of the more-than-human world, that communicates with us just as we communicate with it, that will consume us just as we consume it. In her article on being prey, Plumwood criticises Western human taboos around death and reluctance to admit that we are part of the food chain: ‘we may daily consume other animals by the billions, but we ourselves cannot be food for worms’. This dovetails sweetly with Olivieros’ active listening article ‘The Earth Worm Also Sings’: ‘my earth body returns to hers/where the earth worm also sings’ . Our workshop participants particularly enjoyed listening to the earthworms singing in Plumwood’s compost.
Deep ecologist John Seed once told me that the specific exercises we undertake when
reconnecting with nature are not as important as our intent. ‘As soon as you open up to it,’
he said, ‘nature just comes rushing in.’ It seemed that everywhere we placed microphones,
nature came rushing in. The highland copperhead that chose to bask right next to our
microphones in Val’s in-ground pool. The liveliness of the pool itself: the skating of
insects, the bloops and gloops of underwater breathing and filtration, the gobbling
feasting sounds in living water, the frog calls. The cacophonous sound of the compost
earthworms. The quieter creaking of the earth beneath the plumwood tree at Val’s homestead.
Participants sat patiently beside these microphones, often with eyes shut. Attentive.
The walk between the homestead and the plumwood grove was a slow fifteen minutes in thick midday heat. We had asked participants to be silent as they descended. Somehow, all twenty people honoured our request. Brushing off crunching cicada shells. Hearing only our own footsteps and the call of the cicadas until, slowly, the babble of the creek wove its whisper in. The grove has a consecrated feel to it. You descend into a basin, surrounded by the entanglements of ferns and plumwood trees. Participants soon found their way to the microphones we’d placed in the water and among the roots of plants.
Down in the plumwood grove, reverent listening quickly gave way to play. Listening to water is a noisy, immersive experience. Participants who had previously listened at a respectful remove inserted themselves into the conversation: playing with the river, diverting its flow, creating rhythmic percussion on the water’s surface. Twenty metres away, listening to the microphone at the base of a plumwood tree, I heard their compositions, the sounds of the creek moving through the soil.
The walk between the homestead and the plumwood grove was a slow fifteen minutes in thick midday heat. We had asked participants to be silent as they descended. Somehow, all twenty people honoured our request. Brushing off crunching cicada shells. Hearing only our own footsteps and the call of the cicadas until, slowly, the babble of the creek wove its whisper in. The grove has a consecrated feel to it. You descend into a basin, surrounded by the entanglements of ferns and plumwood trees. Participants soon found their way to the microphones we’d placed in the water and among the roots of plants.
Down in the plumwood grove, reverent listening quickly gave way to play. Listening to water is a noisy, immersive experience. Participants who had previously listened at a respectful remove inserted themselves into the conversation: playing with the river, diverting its flow, creating rhythmic percussion on the water’s surface. Twenty metres away, listening to the microphone at the base of a plumwood tree, I heard their compositions, the sounds of the creek moving through the soil.
The chromatogram, our final activity, allowed the group to slip back into reflection. We
mixed the organic matter of a crushed cicada shell with a teaspoon of soil from the base
of a plumwood tree. We stirred in water and sodium hydroxide. Participants shook the
solution while they reflected on their full day of listening, on the rare experience of
being permeated by the sounds not of the built environment, but of nature’s active voice.
One participant described the cicadas as ‘a mix between a vipassana and a music festival’. We spoke of the feasting in the compost: the earth worm’s song, the song of decomposition. As the plumwood grove mix etched its journey over the silver nitrate-soaked filter paper, we hugged goodbye. The light began to fade.
My favourite of Sammy’s chromatograms is the one she took of Plumwood’s grave. To me, it
looks like the iris of a beloved, or perhaps a crocodile. Moving from a yellow centre,
through a white halo, to soil brown. As Sammy has reflected, the colour palette and
gradient of the ‘Val’s Grave’ chromatogram is almost exactly the same as the one she took
of a nearby plumwood tree.
Early evening. The participants had gone, the sun had begun to set, and the cicadas had softened to a persistent chorus. Sammy, Broni and I sat next to Plumwood’s grave. We asked the grave for permission to record it, and we felt a pull towards the stones at its border. I slipped two contact mics into the edges, where the stones met the soil. And there, loud as thought, crackling. Movement. We listened for five minutes to the crackings and rumblings of life in that grave. Was it feasting or singing?
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Sophia Dacy-Cole lives and works rurally, on unceded Ngunawal Country. She is a recent PhD graduate, an emerging Environmental Humanities Scholar, an artist, a writer, and an unschooled ethnoecologist. Her work centres coming home to the more-than-human world through deep sensory immersion, decolonial action and relationality.
Sammy Hawker is a visual artist working predominantly on Ngunawal / Ngunnawal / Ngambri Country [Canberra Region, ACT]. Through practices of reciprocity (facilitated acts of co-creation), Sammy's works explore the potential of interspecies dialogue, giving voice to the presences of more-than human worlds. These works reflect on how knowledge and memory is inscribed within materials, spaces and bodies.
Early evening. The participants had gone, the sun had begun to set, and the cicadas had softened to a persistent chorus. Sammy, Broni and I sat next to Plumwood’s grave. We asked the grave for permission to record it, and we felt a pull towards the stones at its border. I slipped two contact mics into the edges, where the stones met the soil. And there, loud as thought, crackling. Movement. We listened for five minutes to the crackings and rumblings of life in that grave. Was it feasting or singing?
Sophia Dacy-Cole lives and works rurally, on unceded Ngunawal Country. She is a recent PhD graduate, an emerging Environmental Humanities Scholar, an artist, a writer, and an unschooled ethnoecologist. Her work centres coming home to the more-than-human world through deep sensory immersion, decolonial action and relationality.
Sammy Hawker is a visual artist working predominantly on Ngunawal / Ngunnawal / Ngambri Country [Canberra Region, ACT]. Through practices of reciprocity (facilitated acts of co-creation), Sammy's works explore the potential of interspecies dialogue, giving voice to the presences of more-than human worlds. These works reflect on how knowledge and memory is inscribed within materials, spaces and bodies.
Souces Cited
Bird Rose, Deborah. ‘Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: Attentive Interactions in the Sentient World.’ Environmental Humanities 3, no. 1 (May 1, 2013): 93–109.
Hawker, Sammy, Sophia Dacy-Cole, Ruby Kammoora, Clancy Walker and Broni Sargeson. ‘Active Listening Workshop: Plumwood Mountain.’ Accessed February 3, 2025.
McDonald, Alasdair. ‘Walbunja Traditional Custodians Gifted Estate of Activist, Academic Val Plumwood in NSW.’ ABC News, September 23, 2024.
Oliveros, Pauline. Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. iUniverse, 2005.
———. ‘The Earth Worm Also Sings: A Composer’s Practice of Deep Listening.’ Leonardo Music Journal 3 (1993): 35–38.
Plumwood, Val. ‘Being Prey.’ Terra Nova 1, no. 3 (1996): 32–44.
———. ‘Nature in the Active Voice.’ Australian Humanities Review, no. 46 (2009).
Plumwood, Val, and Lorraine Shannon. The Eye of the Crocodile. ANU Press, 2012.