Dry crunch of sticks and leaves as I started the breakfast fire. Fierce rush of flame as the bark caught and I was happy beyond words. A childhood feeling. I rambled remembering when we shod our feet in old Minties packets and tied bark around them as shoes, then walked the blue-metal road verges to Govett’s Leap, where Flynn of the Inland, my father’s friend, pinched my bottom (playfully) as I drank from a bubbler.
Susie wrote, eiderdown up to her chin, elbow next to an enamel mug of steaming green tea:
‘Sheep Camp. A place to put your heart and mind and body to rest. I feel the magic of the land working its way through. Waiting for the wildlife to come creeping back from being driven away by our noisy unfamiliar intrusions.’
Anna wrote:
‘Last night I had a terrible sleep. The night seemed to go on forever and at least three times I woke from a fitful sleep and upon seeing the white-green side of the tent, thought I was either blind or in a strange very enclosed space and I leapt forward in a panic to the front door.’
Here were the essentials we carried with us up to Sheep Camp from the storage room at Jeremy’s farm, starting a new phase of life:
Tools: fencing pliers, tie wire, chainsaw, fuel can, green string, spade, mattock, tomahawk, mallet.
Camping gear: small tent, large tent, three blue tarps, one silver tarp, picnic table, branding iron, candlesticks, plastic buckets, gas bottles, Esky, air mattresses, camp stool, easy chair.
Cook house: Four tin mugs, cutlery, dish tub and drainer, camp oven, frying pan, peg and griddle, triangle, toaster/griller, one large water drum (40 litres), one small water drum (20 litres), one large billy, one small billy, sieve, food safe (hanging), two toasting forks.
Remember how each simple item unpacked had an aura? How the toasting forks with their scorched wooden handles and bent prongs demanded their own lovingly fashioned hooks to hang by the fire?
One day there would be a house there on the saddle. When the house was built the discomforts and make-do’s of camping would be gone. Talking about the house made the camping sweeter.
Then we took everything away again down the hill. The drive back was without the magic of coming in. Gates closed, tracks winding out; where was the excitement? Better to be always arriving, anticipating. Departure was demolition. Except, there we were, a few hours later in Goulburn, elbows jostling around the table, wedged in the Paragon Café eating fish and chips and drinking pots of hot black tea—celebrating, already remembering through layers of experience such details as red gum tips on the skyline at sunset flaring like a roadworker’s scarlet jacket.
Next time, I made a writing camp—dashed down the freeway to arrive at Sheep Camp before sunset, three hundred kilometres in three and a half hours. In steady wind I worked like Charlie Chaplin, doing alone what needed a helper and leaning against the wind to hold collapsing tent poles until everything sprang right and I rewarded myself with a Scotch by lamplight.
I had twelve days to ‘break the back of that book’. Sleep was profounder than oceans. Next morning I walked around in a daze, feeling over-lucky, supremely privileged, and couldn’t get started. Funereal cockatoos came from the high, cool forest at my back, languorously flapping and seeming to lurch and slide through the air. They were a sign, a gift, and I remembered waiting months at Spring Farm before the black ones appeared, and when they did (tearing into the stone pines) I felt a tension rise away. That was twenty years ago. Where did the feeling come from and why? It was the same sensation when gang-gangs came out of the cold and worked their way through hawthorn bushes along Durran Durra Creek. On the gang-gangs went, fluffed and scarletgrey, nutcracker-beaked, doubled over like fists and hanging half upside-down gorging berries. One bird penetrated too far and crucified itself on the thorns, wings spread wide. Too late for any help, I found the bird mummified that windy, freezing August. Meanwhile out in the open paddocks galahs moved through the dry grass gathering seed, busy and oblivious—pink-waistcoated, grey-jacketed aldermen murmuring in undertones—and the world played a hard, bright, brass-band tune.
At Sheep Camp gifts came raining down. Gang-gangs and funereal cockatoos were common. Each morning the high forests disgorged birds in various strung-out flights heading for a day’s foraging in the farmland below. From the highest paddock I could locate Spring Farm through binoculars, but only faintly, a line of poplars away out on the plateau twenty-five kilometres away. Maybe some of the birds reached there, where a full life had once been lived, when it seemed there would never be anywhere else, nobody else.
All those years ago I read the lines, ‘We weep for our strangeness,’ and stored the feeling without knowing why.
Arranged my writing table; ran a lead to the car battery for the laptop; opened my notes and weighted them down with a stone. Definition of writing: easy postponements and contrived delays infinitely multiplied. Went up the hill and looked down at the tent on the saddle. Sunlight exploded under trees and isolated their shapes distinctly in the landscape. There was a purple haze from eucalyptus growth-tips over the forests. The tent, in cubes of green, tan, silver, was the ghost of a house or the prediction of a house. It had a blue tarp for a verandah awning and a silver tarp for the workroom floor. I half closed my eyes and multiplied its roofline. The tent was hot in the afternoons, even on cool days. Too soon for a house here yet, but the idea of a caravan beckoned, as if the house, like a seed unbuckling, would have stages of growth and each one to be gone through.
Seed pods of blackwoods crackled in the heat. The still, grey heads of yellow box trees thinned in the sun as I walked down the track to where I knew of a native cherry, half-hidden on a tangled slope—Exocarpus cupressiformis, a parasite, from which I took strength. The purple trunk of pitted armour was like iron. Turning from there I climbed through a straggly stand of half dead trees choked by mistletoe, a parasite also. The spare beauty of the mistletoe flower was like a tree-frog’s finger pads, faint coral pink on toughened stems.
Then back up the hill to my work table. My diary records:
‘Slow going with the book again. It feels too “spiritual”. Need to roughen the boy stuff a bit. Got to have people leaping from the page and don’t have it yet. Take from life. Just get it down.’
Looking up from the page I was connected through every dry crunch of leaves, each bird call, every flap of canvas to my boyhood self. Went and stirred the fire, boiled the billy. Made myself drunk on tea, bread and honey, like a grub-crazed tree-creeper. There I sat sniffing woodsmoke at the far end of longing. I was able to say to that boy, myself, far back at the beginning of longing, ‘You will arrive and be grateful.’ Gratitude was the overwhelming feeling of the person of faith—Susie found the quote—and I came into that gifted state just then, incoherently offering thanks to the light, to the moment, to the racing cloud-shadows, to the trees. I gave thanks to the flourishing parasites who gained their nutrition come what may, and whatever was needed in the writing came as I opened the letters and diaries of strangers, and streamed with invention.
‘Completely renovated. Suit artist,’ ran the ad. So we bought the old caravan and persuaded a tow-truck driver to haul it to Braidwood the next morning. We spoke by mobile phone and I accelerated onto the freeway expecting to sight the convoy close to Sydney, but it took until near the Bundanoon exit, well on the way, before there it was, sashaying along ahead, a louche hippy leftover painted in grey-blue cloud shapes, matching speed with the growling yellow tow-truck as if a propellant was lit under its swaying tail.
The renovations included a double mattress on milk crates and all the plastic caravan fittings ripped out and replaced with cheap wooden shelves. A sink cupboard was painted with a macaw. Angels were daubed on the ceiling. The curtains were tattered, dyed homespun, embroidered with spiders and a name plaintively stitched: ‘Greg’. We could hear lorikeets at evening alighting on the tin-clad skylights with a click of claws. At dawn it was two below zero inside, last night’s cocoa dregs embroidered with ice-spears.
We came again, and then again. And then one day we came in a mood of doubt and fear seeking resolution.
No easy words for this, except Susie wrote:
‘I can’t quite reconcile the softness, the round loveliness, the nurturing lovingness of the breast as host to this mutant, fearful, despised murderous abnormality. Nature is full of it, of course, plants, animals, insects of perfect exquisite God-given beauty that poison, strangle, kill. Parasites that invade have to be hacked out in order to preserve life for the host. My life versus its … Chemotherapy is poison, but the farmer destroys to grow. Think of the surgeon as farmer, tilling the land to clean it up. Radiation is natural. Rays free-float throughout the cosmos. Extant everywhere, that in therapy are mechanically focused by a machine. Find an image to use during treatment. Visualise the rays emitting from the palms of Raphael, the Healing Angel.’
Winter mornings. Close to three thousand feet we are above the deepest freezing fogs. Everything still and white, with a fuzzy sun coming through. Melodious conversation of a family of choughs using low branches like stepladders to overvault each other and spread out searching for grubs. At breakfast the sun melts the frost. But away below, the Braidwood plateau remains quilted with fog that folds into the lower gullies and holds the frost down there until late morning, sometimes past noon. The school buses rumble along with their headlights dully burning. The iron bolts on the stock and station agent’s doors have to be kicked open in the cold.
What is there to do then except laugh with the beauty of the day, get the fire started, and talk about tree plantings and house plans?
‘The vision seriously intends to stay …’
AKE AKE was a cattle-damaged, weed-cleft eleven acres running down to a shingly beach choked in gorse and wild tobacco. It also happened to be one of the most beautiful places on earth. When we first started going there together we didn’t call the place anything
Flying across from Australia each summer we camped on a ridge of kikuyu grass where our tent overlooked the shining gulf. The moon rose above stacked islands in soft marine light. There was a crumbling cliff, a high headland where a sea eagle circled, and a feeling of land running out to the sky. The hill facing the campsite had an almost conical shape and Susie had called it Kiwi Hill because of an unusual soft feather she found there. On one side lay Omaru Bay, a shallow, semi-circular, flounder-fishing haunt. On the other was a wide sea-passage between islands. Yachts moored under Kiwi Hill depending on the weather, sometimes as many as eighty but they were hidden and all we heard was the clatter of their rigging and floating music from parties at night. When the sun shone, and it was hot, the sea broke into glass splinters. When cloud darkened, the passage went leaden grey, motionless before a coming squall. The water was scrolled by tide currents and the wakes of boats heading for shelter.
The day came when we chose the name Ake Ake, meaning ‘forever’. Nobody had that assurance of course. Forever beautiful and forever lasting? Forever to be used? Forever to be loved and repaired?
W.H. Auden wrote:
The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
We called it Ake Ake as an assurance or promise against the realities that symbols shine through.
The ake ake tree (Dodonaea viscosa) resembled a tough shrub in its juvenile form and became a handsome small tree when grown. It survived on the clifftop among gorse, old pines, and twisted pohutukawa trees surrounded by a red debris of flower stamens. Ake ake timber was the hardest wood known, fashioned into war clubs and made into axle staves and even ball bearings, according to New Zealand bush lore. It had gently ascending branches and sticky branchlets. The kidney-shaped seed capsules were thin, papery and pearlised. When the seeds were ripe the ake ake rustled in the breeze like a snare drum hidden in the undergrowth.
Susie had been given the land by her father in the 1970s. Her sisters sold their portions but she held on. Before we met she thought about returning from Australia to live there, and asked Rob Morton, an island tree grower, how many trees would be practical to put in. Rob answered that around four thousand would be a good start.
When I heard that number I liked the sound of it, having once known someone on a treeless two thousand acres declare that a planting of ten trees, maximum, was enough. The definition of a tree planter I always thought was someone with a forest in their imagination and the where-withal to make the gesture with a spade. Such a simple choice but with an intricate connection awaiting. There was also the matter of having the land—good fortune, of course—but then with tree planting in mind there would always be acreage somewhere.
So they’d put them in, fencing out cattle from the beach and closing gaps in the remnant bush in the hope of shading out gorse, the dominant problem weed. Gorse had been brought from England by early settlers for hedge planting. They prized it as a solution to fencing problems on New Zealand’s precipitous hills, stealing it from each other and swimming frozen rivers at night with rootlings clenched between their teeth in the hope of getting it struck.
Susie kept giving me lessons in how to look at New Zealand trees but I was a recalcitrant pupil. Except for kauri, manuka and cordyline the names were new to me—kaihikatea, puriri, pohutukawa, nikau, totara, kowhai, whau. What did they signify? I had trouble separating shades of green. Even in a forest fully grown, with ferns crowning the upper branches of ancient trees, a great spectacle, I held something back from my admiration. New Zealand had none of the hardness I loved in Australia. Everything I defined in negatives through an aesthetic of opposites. I was an open sclerophyll woodland sort of person, I boasted, a lover of blazing sharpness where light spilled like acid and the nostrils clogged with dust or stung with bushfire smoke. Long-bladed reeds didn’t cut the hands in New Zealand and thorns didn’t snag. Kids ran barefoot through long grass—no snakes or bindi-eyes. My moods were attuned to bleary haze, purple distances, drought years and down-hanging leaf shades of eucalyptus, acacia, casuarina—silver, grey-green and earthred. Nondescriptness secreting beauty and a subtle, immense variety were the sights on which I was weaned. I fixed on the drying grasses on the opposite islands with a stubborn home-sickness and mistrusted easy attraction.
Rob Morton had a philosophy of planting that wouldn’t work in thin Australian soils. It was to plant in grass, and not clear the grass away, but use it as shelter. Not all the trees thus planted survived but most flourished. Seventeen kauris were put in but only two lived. Down on the beach a planting of pohutukawas disappeared. Up at the gate, on the ridgeline where the wind blew from four points of the compass, cabbage trees shot straight as rulers and flax thrived with emblematic profusion out of kikuyu grass that was matted, twisted like wire, and feet deep.
It was amazing how a planting of four thousand and a good percentage of them surviving absorbed itself into the acreage. On the cone of Kiwi Hill and down the northern fenceline, across the cleared head of the gully in ‘islands’ and then down the gully itself to the beach the new plantings darkened and thickened—took hold. On annual visits we struggled through and did counts. Getting down to the beach was an ever more difficult scrub-bash as weeds encroached into gaps, vines frothed over treetops.
Meantime more than half the land was still unplanted but that half was a no-go zone more than ever, gorse-ridden and thick with tobacco weed, a species that grew into a tree and had wide, soft, dinner-plate sized leaves and smooth amber berries the size of glass eyes. It was noxious to humans, although not, apparently, to a lurking dope grower who macheted a way in and spread superphosphate from plastic bags lugged through dim tunnels of thorn. The haul was harvested before we ever knew it was there. A well-motivated weeder, he would have been employable in friendlier circumstances, for none of his crop was left, everything cleaned out—the tattered archaeology of plastic being the only giveaway.
Any attempt to chop wild tobacco led to more tobacco springing up and a chest-tightening wheeze that foreboded heart damage. Those who’d worked clearing it related health scares, and I felt a fist clench in my chest every time I chopped. Just here and there clumps of kanuka and manuka promised long-term regeneration, a future hope based on the idea of gorse being shaded and withering in a screened forest, which was Rob Morton’s way, a tactic in harmony with ecology and looking beyond the human lifespan. Another friend, Rob Fenwick, reclaiming hundreds of acres of island land, described the Hauraki Gulf as the weed capital of the world, with passionfruit, kiwi fruit, hakea, jasmine, you name it, going wild. No weedicides, no herbicides, though. Just letting one army of control, the indigenous, defeat another for the long term. Letting seed-eating wood pigeons drop what they ate and a pattern of interaction develop.
Each summer for six years we did more tree plantings, cut gorse, dug out tobacco weed. It was always rushed, temporary, token, although for everything put in or ripped out a blessing was made over the profusion and gifts of life. Rob Morton took wild cultivars of olive trees from other islands and we planted around sixty. Ironically they thrived where the gorse, a nitrogen enricher, grew thickest, and some of the best disappeared from view almost before the eyes, in the time lapse film that was the overrunning of Ake Ake. Leaving the job to a friendly neighbour the year Susie was ill, good work was obliterated by the time we came back, and a sense of nothing much done at all conveyed unfairly to someone who’d tried on our behalf.
The Tree In Changing Light Page 9