White Beech: The Rainforest Years

by Germaine Greer

  Chief members of the forest community are the trees that together create the shelter, the mild temperatures and the humidity upon which the other plant and animal life depends. In most of the subtropical rainforest of eastern Australia, sixty or so species of trees support a couple of hundred other plant species. In the Cave Creek forest, which is both riparian and montane, there are more than twice as many tree species as the norm. Some of the vines that knit the trees together can grow to such massive size that they drag their supporters to the ground. Looping along the slopes at Cave Creek you can find the great writhing trunks of woody vines that have outlived several generations of rainforest trees. Conversely many mature trees have barley-sugar trunks, showing where a now-vanished vine once constricted them. The trees being the underpinning, the armature of the forest, it stands to reason that anyone thinking of rebuilding a forest would choose to begin by planting them. This is not the only way however, and there are good reasons for clearing weeds and leaving the forest to regenerate spontaneously. I chose to take the planting option.

  Many people who plant trees live to rue the day, as their chosen tree grows much bigger than they expected, cracking drains, ripping up pavements, filling guttering with shed leaves and twiggery. Suburban gardens are full of trees that have outgrown the available space, looming dangerously over houses, cars and passers-by. My mother took steps to eliminate any tree that she suspected of shading the house, regardless of whether it grew on her own ground or somebody else’s. Any eucalypt that dared to shed a single sheet of bark onto our lawn was doomed. My mother’s intolerance of trees may have been exacerbated by my father’s habit of warbling Joyce Kilmer’s famous but fatuous poem when he was in the shower. This, in the setting by Oscar Rasbach, had been a great hit for Paul Robeson in the year I was born.

  I think that I shall never see

  A poem lovely as a tree.

  A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

  Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

  A tree that looks at God all day

  And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

  A tree that may in summer wear

  A nest of robins in her hair;

  Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

  Who intimately lives with rain.

  Poems are made by fools like me,

  But only God can make a tree.

  The poem is arrant nonsense, with which my mother had as little patience as I. Trees don’t have mouths or hair or bosoms, don’t have to be sexualised in order to be praised and shouldn’t be encumbered with gender. You have to wonder whether Kilmer had ever really looked at a tree. What you get to understand when you live with trees is that they are not to be trifled with. The lords of the forest are mysterious and frightening, utterly beyond caring about us and our petty concerns, as they live on through the centuries into millennia. The longest-lived and biggest creatures on Earth are not whales but trees. They are emblems of the interrelatedness of all Earthlings, typified in the notion of the Tree of Life. Evolution itself is tree-shaped, as are the dendrites, the tiny structures that carry electrostimulation to all the cells in our bodies.

  When it comes to defining a tree or even a tree shape, language fails. The dictionary can do no better than to tell us that a tree is a perennial plant with a self-supporting woody stem that usually develops woody branches at some height off the ground. The essence of treehood would appear to be this very branchingness; figuratively at least a tree is any structure that can branch, as in ‘family tree’. Trees are everywhere, whether in the Usenet hierarchy of the Internet or the binary search tree of computer science, or the von Neumann hierarchy of sets in mathematics. Botanically speaking, the tiny bonsai in its earthenware tray and the ninety-metre-high California Redwood are both trees. The tree fern however is not a tree but a fern, the banana is not a tree but a herb, and the palm is not a tree either, because it lacks some other attributes of treehood, having no cambial layers, and hence no continuous production of bark and wood.

  There is more to a tree than meets the eye. Its woody trunk, or xylem, has an inner core called heartwood, within an outer layer called sapwood, which transports water from the root to all parts of the tree. As the tree ages the sapwood gradually becomes heartwood. The xylem is encased within a sleeve of cambium that transports its nutrients, which is in turn encased in the phloem, which carries the sugars made by the leaves during photosynthesis, and the whole is wrapped in a protective layer of bark. Most of the cells that make up wood are dead; they serve as the support for a complex system of vessels. When the leaves exhale moisture through their pores, the drying cells exert pressure on the leaf vein to make it suck up more water from the roots.

  The forest tree is a powerhouse, converting light, gas and moisture to nutrients, not only for itself but for a whole population that lives on and by it. Some of these dependants are spectacular, like the epiphytic ferns and orchids, and the mistletoes; others are subtle, like the mites that live in the water-filled cavities in the bark, and the mycorrhizas that convey and convert nutrients from the tree for the ground-dwelling plants. The tree is not only important in itself, it is also important as a contributor to the canopy, which governs the microclimate that makes possible the massive biodiversity of the forest. It is now thought that one way Australia’s tree frogs escape chytrid fungus disease is by taking to the canopy; if there is no canopy, there is no escape. We now know that canopies are universal; all kinds of organisms from seaweeds and corals and mosses to the loftiest trees tend to form canopies if they can. Canopy science is only fifteen years old and has still to formulate its basic questions, let alone answer them, but we are beginning to understand that canopies are an optimum form of vegetation (Nadkarni et al., 3–20).

  Most Australians have never heard of White Beech but, for thirty years or so when it was enthusiastically promoted as an export timber, White Beech was internationally famous. In the Paris Exhibition of 1855 it was exhibited as No. 193. In the Great Exhibition in London in 1862 it was exhibited as No. 30 among the Queensland woods and as Nos 68 and 171 among the New South Wales woods. When I was little I was very proud of a ruler my father gave me. It was inlaid with specimens of Australian timber in a kind of sampler that was developed in association with timber-trade promotions. Nowadays you will find one in every local museum, each with a sample of White Beech.

  Because White Beech timber was ‘durable, easily worked and non-shrinking’, the early timber-getters sold their Red Cedar and kept the White Beech for themselves. The first dwellings, barns, stables, schools and churches in the Numinbah Valley were built of White Beech because, as an enthusiast wrote to The Queenslander (6 November 1875, 4S), its ‘most useful wood . . . never shrinks in drying, and is unequalled for ships’ decks and verandah floors, where it sits close, and like one homogeneous marble slab, under the foot’. The schoolhouse that opened at Nerang in 1876 was built by William Duncan from pit-sawn White Beech (Lentz, 33). Like all the other buildings made of White Beech in those early years, the schoolhouse seems to have disappeared.

  In 1883 local man Carl Lentz visited Beechmont: he recalls in his typescript ‘Memoirs and Some History’, compiled at the end of his long life, that: ‘There was a small clearing and a new pitsawn weatherboard house on it of beech timber, which is the easiest to cut out and the best to last. Besides, white ants won’t touch it’(15). The Queensland Department of Primary Industry and Fisheries would disagree; its website baldly states that White Beech is not termite-resistant. Lentz’s father probably knew better: ‘When Dad was preparing to start dairy farming the sawn timber needed for the milking shed was all pitsawn . . . These logs were cut from some of those beech trees that gave the mountain its name’(71). People who had the choice continued to use White Beech for as long as they could find it. In the mid-1890s Duncan McKenzie, the first permanent settler on Beechmont, built his first farmhouse from pit-sawn tongue-and-groove joined beech boards.

  Despite its high value much of the White Beech tha
t was felled was left to rot, sometimes because there was no way of getting the bullock teams within reach of the fallen timber, but as often because the timber-getters couldn’t afford the cost of transporting it. Only the biggest butt-logs were worth enough to cover the cost of cartage; the rest was wasted. By 1911, ‘Disturbing stories were coming out of the hills . . . There were tales of fallen white beech-trees, monarchs of the plateaux jungles, felled by past bullockies and timber-fellers, and forgotten.’ (Groom, 88–9)

  White Beeches cannot grow as fast as the pioneer species that shot up wherever the timber-getters tore down the ancient canopy. They couldn’t have replaced themselves quickly even if they had been given a chance, and they weren’t. The Sydney Morning Herald for 1 November 1912 reported that the supply of White Beech in southern Queensland was exhausted. Within ten years it had become the mythical hero of a forestry legend. In an article on ‘The Timbers of Queensland’ published on 28 November 1925 The Queenslander declared:

  Of all the softwood timber-trees known to bushmen and timber-getters, White Beech is generally regarded as the ideal. It is a splendid timber-tree and is recognised as such by the timber trade; but only those who have seen the sound logs and limbs in the scrubs, some of them over 50 years old, lying on wet ground, could form any exact idea of its remarkable durability. It often seems impossible for the timber to decay . . .

  It must not be thought that the wanton destruction of the Queensland forests went unnoticed. In 1916 the English Chief Forest Officer visited Queensland and was scandalised to find that: ‘There has been no survey of the forests . . . and though there has been for long a forest office in Brisbane, no forest map of Queensland, I believe, has been produced . . . Forest continued to be given away to anyone who would undertake to destroy it . . .’ In reporting this on 9 December The Queenslander added its own comment: ‘A sharp warning is given that three valuable Queensland timbers are nearly extinct – cedar, silky oak and white beech.’ Cave Creek is one of the very few places where White Beech survived.

  In the age of colonial expansion, trees in the new world were valued only as they could be exploited for the benefit of the old. What the adventurers saw as they scanned the rainforests was not whole majestic trees but a massive, soaring colonnade of potentially valuable tree-trunks, which they sampled, probably by slicing off wedges. When they saw the diffuse–porous pattern of the heartwood of the Gmelina species of Asia and Oceania, they called them beeches after the European tree that manifested a similar pattern. It took the botanists to investigate and argue about the tribe to which these tropical and subtropical ‘beech’ trees actually belonged. At first they were thought to be tree verbenas and placed in the Verbenaceae but, since about 1985 when doubts first began to be voiced about the appropriateness of this classification, White Beech and allied species have begun to be placed with the dead nettles in the Lamiaceae. The botanists have not yet reached conclusion; in most reference books you will find White Beech placed in the Verbenaceae still. It will probably take biotechnology to decide the issue once for all, proving by molecular analysis of the plants’ DNA whether the Gmelinas are more closely related to the verbenas or to the dead nettles.

  Australian botanists, no matter how deeply concerned they might be about the vulnerable status of so many of Australia’s indigenous tree species, still find themselves under an obligation to assess them in terms of the usefulness or otherwise of their timber. The Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries of the Queensland government is anxious to inform the world that White Beech is the ‘premier carving timber in Queensland’, that it has been used for decking and planking of boats, for ‘furniture, joinery, carvery, turnery, picture frames’, ‘draughtsperson’s implements, templates, pattern making, cask bungs, brush stocks, Venetian blind slats and beehives’. ‘Highly resistant to decay in ground contact or in persistently damp or ill-ventilated situations’, in the early 1900s it was used for building frames, as well as flooring, lining, mouldings, joinery and cladding.

  In the 1920s attempts were made to grow White Beech in plantations. A visitor to the state forestry nursery at Imbil on the Mary River reported to the Brisbane Courier on 28 June 1924:

  During the last two years attention has been paid to white beech, which takes from six to twelve months to germinate. Propagation in the nursery is easy, but being tremendously deep-rooted there is a difficult task to prevent injury when raising for transferring to the plantations . . . With the use of tube planting the difficulty of damaging the young plants has been overcome. In white beech plantation it is necessary to enclose the areas with wire netting, as wallabies eat the leaves as fast as they grow. Growth is thus checked. For this reason, and the expense involved, growing of white beech has not been extensively undertaken.

  Rainforest trees are seldom ‘deep-rooted’, let alone ‘tremendously deep-rooted’. They live by clutching at rocks with fans of spreading buttresses. The mistake that was made at Imbil is to be found in the word ‘plantation’; if the foresters had planted White Beeches as members of a forest community and not as a monoculture, the wallabies that graze all over the forest, sampling rainforest fungi, grasses, ferns and palms as well as trees, would not have eaten all their leaves.

  Since the Imbil experiment few if any forestry projects have featured White Beech. Recently Super Forests Plantations called their new 74-hectare plantation which will ‘produce quality saw-logs from a range of quality hardwoods’ ‘White Beech’, but of the more than twenty thousand trees that have been planted there, not one is a White Beech. Just over the southern lip of the Mount Warning caldera, at Rocky Creek Dam, the local county council has used White Beech in plantations of ‘cabinet species’ on abandoned dairy farms within the catchment; out of a total of twelve species White Beech is coming ninth in the growing race, so the proliferating plans for ‘farm forestry’, in which landowners cease clearing and replant native forest for sustainable wood production, are unlikely to feature it. There is now no White Beech timber to be had anywhere. A recently updated statement on the Queensland Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries website tells us simply that ‘Sawn timber of these [Gmelina] species is not readily available. Other species of Gmelina are imported from Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Fiji.’

  The old-growth White Beeches at Cave Creek survived either because they were crooked or because they grew in places that the timber-getters couldn’t get into, or couldn’t get the timber out of, whichever. Fewer than a dozen mature White Beeches in sixty hectares is not much, but it will be enough. We have literally thousands of Red Cedars in all phases of growth from the oldest to the youngest, but the tree that for me typifies the specialness of Cave Creek as a Gondwanan refugium is White Beech.

  Here’s the how-and-why.

  I hadn’t been responsible for the forest long, when I paused on my pre-breakfast walk to watch Golden Whistlers popping in and out of an immense pyramid of Lantana on the creek edge. As the whistlers skimmed about me, I turned my binoculars upward till there was nothing to see but sky. Such a vast pyramid of Lantana had to be sprawling over a seriously big tree, but what? Most of the leaves that I could pick out among the canes arching out of the top of the towering heap were still Lantana, pale-stemmed, matt, bright green, cordate. Others, a very few, were different, bigger, denser, with a stout network of leaf veins visible against the light. I poked around on the ground under the Lantana canes and found a thick yellowing leaf, still greenish on one side, buff-gold and slightly felted on the other. I tested it against the faraway shape I could see outlined against the light. It matched. I hunted about for more but found none. I put the single leaf in my trouser pocket and took it back to the house.

  An hour later, when the white flare of the sun had spilled over the scarp and the air was full of sizzling radiance, I betook me to the shade of the verandah for a homemade caffe latte and a bit of botanising with the field guide we call the Red Book (Harden, McDonald and Williams). My sister Jane, who was on holidays and
hence not expected to go marching off at the first light of dawn, was having a late breakfast. Jane is a proper botanist and my willing but demanding preceptor in matters botanical.

  ‘So?’ she asked, mopping up the last of her stewed tomatoes with her last bit of toast.

  ‘It’s a leaf,’ I said.

  ‘Was that all you could get?’

  ‘The tree’s enormous, a hundred feet high or so, but it’s completely covered by Lantana.’

  (If you look up White Beech on the net, you may come across an advertisement that assures you that it is ‘a fast growing, deciduous, small to medium tree’ that will grow no more than eight to ten metres in your garden. A White Beech recorded at Terania Creek, New South Wales, came in at 59 metres tall and 2.65 metres round.)