Some of the ideas behind Ferntree Gully are explained in an eloquent essay by Scott Mitchell. He observes that for Panigirakis, the condition of magic is troublesome. He gives the example of a lyrebird that imitates the sound of a logger’s chainsaw. Nature isn’t pure but entangled with humanity. For Panigirakis, Mitchell writes, “the world is made up of relations – complicated, contingent, often difficult and ultimately unresolvable”. But Mitchell concedes that the mystique of the fern fronds persists; and materialist philosophy, with its endless mesh of relations, doesn’t take care of the magic. And that’s where the strongest relation between Panigirakis and von Guerard strikes me. None of the 19th-century painters had a romantic idea of their subject matter. They too saw nature as a network of relations, complicated natural histories of geology, botany and zoology. – Robert Nelson for The Age
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