The other day I finally managed to get my hands on a clean copy of Andrew Leith Adams’ Notes of a Naturalist in the Nile Valley and Malta, published in Edinburgh in 1870. The bit of the book that concerns us directly was the product of Adams’ ‘leisure hours and vacation rambles while on service with the 22nd Regiment’ in Malta in the late 1860s.
I’m not particularly interested in collecting old books. The one topic on which I make an enthusiastic exception is natural history. Over the years I’ve tracked down copies of Giuseppe Despott’s early 20th century works on birds and fishes, John Borg’s flora (1927), Guido Lanfranco’s many contributions from the 1950s to the 1970s, Anthony Valletta’s small but useful books on butterflies and moths, and so on.
I also have something of a penchant for post-WWII books on the birds of Malta. The combined efforts of Roberts (1954), De Lucca (1969), Bannerman and Vella-Gaffiero (1976), and Joe Sultana and Charles Gauci (1975, 1982), mean that the 380 or so species that occur locally are properly documented.
It thrills me no end to handle and leaf through such books. Partly the reason is autobiographical and therefore of no interest to anyone except me. But there’s another, deeper and broader, current.
To read Adams’ first-hand accounts of the spring migration of turtle doves, Valletta’s descriptions of butterflies collected at Wied is-Sewda, or Despott’s records of the hundreds of shot birds that daily found their way to the Valletta market, is to experience a world that feels as lost as it is alluring.
The very smell of the yellowed pages transports one to a magical place by dint of collective memory and a generous helping of imagination. It’s one up on Proust almost, as the Maltese countryside comes alive in ways one can only dream about today.
And we do. Take three types of insect: butterflies, fireflies and ladybirds. They belong to a thinly-populated and exclusive club that has as its members insects that are thought to be endearing and attractive.
There’s another thing about them. People tend to talk about a childhood when the fields at night came alive with a sea of tiny lights produced by a million msiebaħ il-lejl (fireflies). No garden was without its nannakoli (ladybirds), and there were butterflies everywhere.
To assess the historical and scientific accuracy of such memories is beside the point. The fascinating bit is the way in which these insects enjoy the totemic power to evoke a storied sense of lost nature and countryside. In this vein they are rather like my old natural history books.
The vast flocks of migrating turtle doves described by Adams are long gone. Wied is-Sewda is nowadays just a place name. To look for a valley there, let alone a valley teeming with butterflies, is rather like looking for a garden, or a king, at Ġnien is-Sultan. As for Despott’s hundreds of shot owls and nightjars, they would not be possible if letting an owl or nightjar live were punishable by death.
The feeling that we are losing our countryside goes beyond ODZ
All of which tells me more about the living and the present, than the past and its dead. I’m not sure the countryside was better (whatever that means) in Despott’s time than it is today. Certainly there was more of it, in the sense that there were far less buildings and roads and the rest. But old photographs also show that fields were fields.
They swallowed up even the remotest corners of the islands. Places that are now unwitting havens for wildlife were under intense cultivation. I doubt there was much room for poetry, let alone butterflies.
The song L-Aħħar Bidwi f’Wied il-Għasel (‘The last of the Wied il-Għasel farmers’) says it all. It is shot through with a poignant sense of loss, as the Sunday afternoon crowds descend on a valley that once buzzed with agricultural activity. The farmer’s ‘raba żdingat’ (abandoned fields) opens up recreational possibilities, in other words.
The song does not mourn the death of the countryside as environmentalists might understand it today – that is, a recreational open space armed with lists of plants and animals (preferably of special scientific interest). It simply mourns the decline of farming as a way of life and a source of sustenance.
That’s partly because it was written almost two generations ago. Our present-day sense of loss is much more radical and profound. It has the do with the countryside generally, whether or not that countryside contains farmers and their produce.
The never-ending urge to build and develop means that our experience of the countryside and nature is essentially one marked by a persistent and unavoidable sense of anxiety.
There are only very few places left where we can enjoy what we have without fearing for what we are about to lose. We inhabit our countryside in ways that are nostalgic and often elegiac.
I don’t think the feeling is just mine. Take a nature artist like Andrew Micallef. His work is essentially an elegy to a Malta that no longer exists. His chosen genre, which is somewhere between photorealism and hyperrealism, makes it all the more paradoxical and poignant. Micallef makes photographs of landscapes that no longer exist, so to say. Little wonder they are so sought after.
There are other, perhaps more consequential, clues. All over Malta, what used to be smallholding agricultural land is being carved up into even smaller holdings, and converted into inward-looking and fairly fortified (CCTV is now everywhere in the countryside) private recreational areas. It follows that, in the face of loss, people should feel the need to create their own private chunks of paradise.
The feeling that we are losing our countryside goes beyond ODZ, Posidonia meadows and lists of specially-protected species. It affects, fills with anxiety, and poisons one of the most basic aspects of the human condition, that is, the way in which we inhabit and experience place.
Some of us cope by buying a few tumoli of land in Mtaħleb and installing CCTV, others by spending their afternoons reading Adams and Despott. Either way, something’s rotten.
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