White Beech: The Rainforest Years

by Germaine Greer

  In his next attempt to cross the continent from east to west, Leichhardt was determined to travel light. He added to the team of seven Europeans two Aborigines, who would help them to live off the land they were travelling through. As they had no more than one spare horse for each man, it is hard to see how they could have completed a journey of more than four thousand kilometres. The small party left Cogoon Station, on the northern edge of the Darling Downs, on 3 April 1848 and was never heard of again. Since then nine expeditions have been organised in attempts to trace the party but none has been successful.

  ‘Listen to this!’ I said to my mate Ann, who was reading Rex Stout as she sunned her knees on the verandah. ‘This is Leichhardt’s first encounter with Gondwanan rainforest – it’s in a letter to a fellow naturalist:

  And oh that you could have been with me in these brushes. Here grows the nettle tree about 80 and 90 feet high with its large leaves, and the noble red cedar (what is its scientific name?) the red Sterculia, the Sassafras, the Ricinus, the Rosewood, the cohiti wood. It will take some time before we find even their real names . . .

  – that was certainly true –

  In little gullies, where the waters went down the fern trees grew luxuriantly about 12–15 feet high long leaves of 8–9 feet long. Polypodium, Asplenium, Acrostichum grew everywhere, mosses hung down in festoons and a species of birds had knowingly made use of them to hide its nest – Lichens of various colour covered the rotten and the living trees. The lyre bird, the native turkey with its peculiar nest of leaves, the fermentation of which hatches the eggs, a kind of rat, the Echidna and many curious animals live here. (Aurousseau, ii, 632)

  ‘Where was he? It sounds just like here,’ said Ann.

  ‘He was camping on Mount Royal.’ (The Mount Royal National Park is one of the southernmost of the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia.) ‘You have to love him. He’s so full of optimism and confidence and generosity. He’s fascinated by the country he’s in, no matter whether it’s spectacular or fertile or dull and stony. He finds something to intrigue him everywhere, and he describes it simply and vividly. He gives attention to all kinds of animals, vertebrate and invertebrate, and all kinds of plants from lichens to forest giants. He knows his botany so well that he recognises plants he’s never seen before from descriptions he has read. He names natural features after ordinary people, including the boy and the convict and the blackfellow in his team. He’s special.’

  Ann was unimpressed. ‘Surely the man was a leech. How could he have shared Nicholson’s small allowance and his narrow lodgings and let him pay for everything, even his passage to Australia?’

  ‘It wasn’t as if he could work as well as study,’ I said uncertainly, because I too found Leichhardt’s willingness to live off Nicholson faintly contemptible.

  Ann went on. ‘The key to Leichhardt’s whole messy career is that he was desperate to avoid being drafted into the Prussian army. He’s supposed to do a year’s military service after he completes high school, doesn’t do it, goes to university instead. Hops from one course to another, doesn’t graduate, but he still lets people call him “Dr” Leichhardt. Then he wants to join Nicholson in England and tries really hard to convince the Prussian government that he’s unfit for service, fails, but gets a deferment and is allowed to go to England. The Prussian government won’t let him travel to France so he goes on forged identity papers. Then instead of going home to do his service, he sneaks off to Australia at Nicholson’s expense. The man was a lightweight. A chancer.’

  ‘He did have very poor eyesight. And since when did you object to anyone’s dodging the draft?’

  ‘Pfui,’ said Ann, and went back to Nero Wolfe.

  I confess that I love White Beeches mostly for themselves alone but also for the name they bear. The verdict of history is mixed. Leichhardt will remain an enigma. His last expedition will continue to seem criminally suicidal but nothing can distort the sensibility that informs his writing.

  Nowadays if Leichhardt’s beech is planted at all it is likely to be as a street tree. Its neat round-headed habit, its straight smooth trunk and tidy bole, together with its moderate rate of growth, are positive advantages when it comes to being planted in pavements close to walls and buildings. When I see the White Beeches along the boulevards of the Gold Coast, marooned between roaring carriageways, buffeted by fume-laden draughts, far from their in-dwelling invertebrates, their phalangers and parrots, their festoons of vines and garlands of epiphytes, I pray for them to disqualify themselves for such ignominy by dying soon, but instead, dwarfed, filthy and ragged, they suffer on.

  The baby beeches were planted out in 2006. Some are already quite big trees, others are holding their breath, but they are all established. None has actually died. Having acquired their complement of invertebrate species, they are already full members of our forest community. As I walk under the canopy of our baby forests, my heart quickens with the sense of adventure. Like Leichhardt rambling over Australia, I don’t know where I’m going. Like him I struggle to comprehend what I observe, with every ounce of brainpower I have left. Hordes of unfamiliar insects appear and lay billions of eggs on trees too small to survive the infestation. What should I do? The answer comes: watch, wait, live, learn. The forest is not just the trees, it is everything that lives in and on the trees, every fungus, every bug, every spider, every bird, every serpent, every bat. As a newcomer to this community, I cannot delude myself that I should or can control it. I am glad to be the forest’s fool.

  Eden

  If I know anything at all about botany it’s because my younger sister taught me. For years we went together on botanising holidays. She taught me how to key plants out, something I’m still not very good at, partly because I tend to rely on my photographic memory and leap to an identification without going through the steps, from family, to genus, to species.

  ‘No,’ she would say, ‘go back to the beginning. Is it rutaceous or myrtaceous?’

  ‘It’s a Kunzea,’ I’d say, ‘so it must be myrtaceous.’

  ‘Wrong way round,’ she’d say. ‘What are the distinguishing characteristics of the Myrtaceae again?’ She pronounced it ‘mertacey’, which is a sign that she is a properly trained Australian botanist. A non-botanising academic like me should pronounce it ‘mertaycee-ee’, but now I say ‘mertacey’ too.

  ‘Um, sclerophyllous’ – which means woody – ‘simple leaves, without stipules, oil glands present, aromatic—’

  ‘How can you distinguish Myrtaceae from Rutaceae?’

  ‘By the smell?’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Rutaceae smell like citrus, sort of?’ This was a sore point, because I thought some of them smelt like kerosene.

  Jane taught me to use a loupe to look for oil dots and to search for tiny variations in flower form, so that I could be quite sure of my identification. This is the really nerdy part of botanising, but pernickety drudgery is an essential part of any scientific discipline. At the end of a day’s rambling, after we had picked the ticks off each other, Jane and I would sit with a pile of specimens spread out on a tabletop and she would take me through them one by one.

  Jane went to work when she left school, and didn’t get to university until she had raised her two sons. Then she was treated as mere ballast in the class, until they belatedly recognised how serious and how gifted she was, and began to pay more attention to her searching questions, about the hypothesis of parallel evolution, for example, and to look more closely at her practical work. She could have gone on to do an honours year, but she had no interest in academic research. She went to work again, as a practical botanist, to do what she could to preserve what was left of the biodiversity of the Mornington Peninsula where she lives. Now she has a busy practice, carrying out vegetation surveys for clients private and public, identifying plant communities that need to be protected and designing planting schemes that are consistent with the indigenous vegetation. Her own garden, with its murmuring veils of Casuarina tree
s standing ankle-deep in their fallen needles, its tossing sedges fringed by Coast Banksias and cloud-shaped Moonahs, and massed plantings of Correas, not to mention its lawn of Wallaby Grass that grows like green fluff and its drifts of Greenhood Orchids in the spring, is deservedly famous.

  It was Jane who taught me about the perils of Australia’s steadily rising water table, which is bringing to the surface the salts deposited over millennia by the buffeting ocean winds, and carrying the spores of the Cinnamon Fungus (Phytophthora cinnamomi) that is destroying the vascular system of woody plants all over the island continent. Together we have examined the changes in vegetation that signal increased salinity, and gazed in despair at the glittering expanses that are the ulcers caused by salt. Jane is one person who is not afraid to sit beside me as I turn off the metalled roads and plunge down farm tracks and service roads, looking to see what is really going on in the great south land, counting the dead and dying trees, photographing the skeletal branches that crop out even in the greenest forest, and the new sand dunes that are travelling across the wheatbelts as the wind rakes the treeless land.

  Jane, like most Australian botanists, is very interested in the uses of fire. One possible solution to the creeping death carried by Cinnamon Fungus could be fire. Many of the native species are adapted to fire, which alone will split the woody capsules in which their seeds live. They have a history of repeated exposure to fire, but the fire that would kill the fungus would need to be much hotter than usual, and might burn seeds and all, or broil the roots of trees that would normally spring into epicormic growth after fire. In most cleared districts there has been little or no fire for a century; the accumulated fuel load is enormous and tinder-dry. Some of the national parks in some of the states have instituted controlled burning programmes, which have an unfortunate propensity to get out of hand and incinerate valuable real estate. Jane’s house is on the edge of publicly owned Moonah Woodland which desperately needs to be burnt if it is not to choke in its own rubbish. One day, possibly quite soon, it will burn. When it does Jane’s beautiful house and garden will burn with it. She will do nothing to prevent nature taking its course, even if it leaves her without a roof over her head. In our botanising rambles we have learnt the value of burnt ground, for it is there that we have found the greatest diversity of native plants, bursting from the blackened earth with new vigour. The first one to sight an outcrop of blackened branches in the distance will yell ‘Burny bit!’ and off-road we will go until we get to it. We crawl through the charred twiggery until we are black from head to foot, photographing orchids, Waxflowers, Trigger Plants, Lechenaultias, Dampieras, Beard-heaths, Dasypogons, creeping Banksias. It is all the more remarkable then that I have ended up with responsibility for a parcel of land where even a whiff of burning would be lethal.

  It is because of my sister that I have been looking for a piece of land in Australia, something we could work together to manage, to protect or restore, a project we would have in common. So when one of my oldest friends sent me pictures of a property on the south coast of New South Wales, it made sense that we went off to see it together. We used to enjoy these driving marathons, fuelled by bags of fruit and aniseed jellies, with regular stops for a beer and a pie. The pies get better the further away you are from suburbia, as all the other food gets worse. Nothing tastes better than a cold beer and a hot pie at Woollabookankyah or the Black Stump.

  We drove eastwards from Melbourne along the coast, past sleepy estuaries where pelicans rose and fell on the tidal swell, up through the old-growth forests of East Gippsland, gloating over the cycads and the tall sedges and the grass trees, as we dodged in and out among the logging trucks. We were heading for a place just south of the old fishing town of Eden, which stands on the north arm of Twofold Bay just over the border in New South Wales. From my first visit to Eden forty years before I remembered the gold of the sand bars, the ultramarine of the ocean surge, and the green-on-green of temperate rainforest, a typical holidaymaker’s vision. From the second I can remember only the man I was with. What I would make of the area now that the scales had been carefully removed from my eyes by my little sister, I couldn’t tell, but I wasn’t optimistic.

  It was dark when we turned off the dirt track that took us from the main road to the friend’s house where we were to stay. The headlights picked out a gate with two signs announcing ‘Wild Life Refuge’. On the bigger sign, beside a fetching logo featuring a male Lyrebird in full display, was the statement:

  This property has been declared a wild-life refuge under the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974 to conserve wild life and natural environments. All native plants and animals are protected.

  I ground my teeth.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Jane.

  ‘What can this mean? That we can’t come in and kill things? It’s the old Leopard’s bane story.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘If you plant Leopard’s bane, Doronicum orientale, you won’t be troubled with leopards. The plant is endemic to south-eastern Europe so no leopard has ever been seen anywhere near it. Leon’s valiantly fighting off plant nappers and bounty hunters who don’t exist. Making a virtue of doing nothing. It pisses me off.’

  Jane was puzzled. ‘What is this National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974? Leon’s a lawyer remember. We may be missing a trick.’

  On the second sign it said:

  Wildlife habitats within this property are being managed for the conservation of wildlife. All flora and fauna protected. Maximum penalty for an offence $1000.

  The property had been give a number, and a caretaker’s name and telephone number appeared alongside.

  ‘What would an offence be?’ asked Jane. ‘Picking a flower?’

  ‘Certainly not planting a weed,’ I said, as the headlights picked up long lines of Agapanthus.

  (A short digression: Agapanthus africanus, under its older name A. umbellatus, was introduced to Australia by Robert Henderson of Surry Hills, who won first prize with it at the second meeting of the Sydney Floral and Horticultural Society in the saloon of the Royal Hotel in George Street on 13 February 1839. The genus having undergone some revision, we cannot now be sure which species Henderson offered in 1839; the Agapanthus that is a major weed in the Blue Mountains and in coastal Victoria is now called A. praecox ssp. orientalis. In the north island of New Zealand it is known as ‘motorway weed’.)

  Conservation in Australia is largely a matter of pious intentions. Badges and slogans and dedicated days abound but, with neither stick nor carrot to drive or draw it forward, no progress is made. People are neither constrained by law to care for land nor encouraged and rewarded for doing it on their own initiative. Signs crop up everywhere. Landcare! they trumpet. Land for Wildlife!

  Land for Wildlife as run by the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service is supposed to support landholders who provide habitat for native wildlife on their land. The support is for the most part anything but practical. All the landholders get is information, links and contacts with like-minded people, and access to education programmes. Lots of people get to tell you what to do, but no one gives you any help in doing it, not even a tax rebate, but then you don’t have to do much. All you have to do to get the sign to put on your gate is promise not to develop, that is devastate, your land any further. You can keep farming, insecticiding, herbiciding, planting with exotics, raise llamas or ostriches or whatever, as long as you don’t actually clear any more land than is already cleared. When you sell the property, the commitment ceases. It struck me (and still strikes me) as far too little much too late. To slow the rate of extinction of Australian species much more than this half-hearted commitment will be necessary.

  ‘What’s eating you?’ asked Jane, as I stomped into the kitchen.

  ‘It gets me that people can take credit for what they’re not doing, when the situation is so grave. It’s like Landcare and Greening Australia. Australia isn’t supposed to be green, for godsake. They should have called it
Browning Australia.’

  Jane laughed. Then she said, ‘Landcare do some good work.’

  ‘Do they now?’ I sneered. ‘It never seems to occur to anyone that European-style farming in Australia should just stop. You can’t have, say, a competitive cotton industry and biodiversity as well. If you do for the environment only what will “increase your bottom line”, you’ll end up doing worse than nothing. As long as people keep pretending that this is the way forward, we’ll keep on destroying our own heritage. There’s more to this than T-shirts and stubby holders bedizened with good intentions, and giving each other awards all the time. Six hundred people turn up on the weekend for a few hours volunteering and they’re given credit for controlling coastal erosion, creating wildlife corridors, restoring woodland and darning the hole in the ozone layer. It’s bullshit. It creates a fog of good intentions and phoney positive thinking that allows the government to keep ignoring the real gravity of the situation. Rivercare requires coordinated planning, not a gaggle of well-intentioned locals weeding a hundred metres of river bank. And farmers shouldn’t be helped. Only a handful of them are making any money anyway. They should be told to fuck off out of it.’

  ‘Well, I’ll go on working with Landcare,’ said Jane. ‘If only because it raises awareness. People can do conservation in their own backyards; if they can’t then I’m out of a job. But they need someone to give them a steer.’

  ‘A bum steer,’ I said grumpily, as I took a short fat bottle of freezing ‘lite’ beer out of the fridge, pushed it into a stubby holder with ‘Save the koala’ written on it in fluorescent yellow and put it in her hand.

  Jane looked serious. ‘The best thing about Landcare is that they attract funding from corporate sponsors. Without serious funding from large corporations we’ll never get anywhere, and you have to fly a flag that they’ll rally to. Landcare sounds safe and cuddly, and they go for it.’