by Tim Low
In Canberra eucalypts that set down roots in Ngunnawal hunting lands now find themselves ensconced in the grounds of Government House and The Lodge. Many an old story is writ in wood. Other tribal trees throw shade over public servants’ homes and wave down from nearby hills. In Hobart a manna gum 2 metres wide at the base stands in woodland a five-minute walk from the GPO.
The reminders of the past are sometimes small. Tufts of barbwire grass (Cymbopogon refractus) in Brisbane mark out the brow of a road cutting in Turbot Street, a short stroll from King George Square. These plants, I am sure, were spawned by the sward that grew here in the 1830s when convicts toiled at the nearby windmill, Brisbane’s oldest structure. In nearby Woolloongabba a line of blady grass survives under a short stretch of original post-and-rail fence beside a house. In Melbourne native grassland with a scatter of wattles – a rare slice of the past – lines the railway line near Jolimont, one stop from Flinders Street. Sydney’s botanic gardens are home to scattered clumps of wild flax lily, mat-rush and bracken, lingering on against all odds, although I won’t say exactly where. In 1902 there were 130 wild species here, then-director Joseph Maiden noted; a dozen or so still remain.
In Perth and in Hobart genuine woodlands survive a short walk from the city heart (in King’s Park and Queen’s Domain respectively). Hobart’s Domain is a major refuge for rare plants, and so too is Adelaide’s Belair National Park. In the forest ringing Canberra’s Capital Hill, between Parliament House and the South African consulate, I’ve seen endangered button wrinkleworts blooming through the kangaroo grass. Goodbye, wrinkleworts: you are delicate and won’t last long. In Sydney’s Ashton Park, beside Taronga Zoo, sixty plant species form a viable remnant forest 3 kilometres from the Opera House. Neilson Park, Vaucluse, is more diverse, and boasts its own she-oak. (How many suburbs can match that?) In Melbourne fragments of the original forest line the Yarra at Yarra Bend and Studley Park. Here grow eucalypts, wattles, saltbushes and grasses, surviving unexpectedly 3 kilometres east of Parliament House. On the western side of town, dotted across the basalt plains, natural grasslands survive miraculously in twelve railway paddocks, four cemetery yards, two reservoirs, a rubbish-tip reserve, an army barracks and a radio transmission field. The rare species residing at some of these sites render them nationally significant.
I sometimes walk from my home to a weed-choked gully to pay respects to my local square-stemmed myrtle (Austromyrtus gonoclada), one of just sixty-five in the world. In Sydney’s gardens I once sat by the giant red gum watching two cockatoos when a wood duck whirred up and dropped into the hollow trunk. It had a nest inside. One cocky went berserk, circling about, screeching, before dropping to the rim of the bole, leaning inside and screaming out its rage at ear-piercing volumes. Inner Sydney’s oldest real estate is still worth fighting over, still plays an ecological role.
I love the old nature, the Australia that prevailed before Europeans came. But I also salute the new – the animals and plants carving out new careers in new milieux. Sydney’s Port Jackson figs (Ficus rubiginosa), once found sprouting on sandstone tors, now grow from cracks in brickwork and cuttings. They gaze down on inner-city commuters from lofty perches on chimneys and facades. I’ve seen one high up in King Street and another on the pub near Central Station. A hundred or so figs crowd the cliff beside the Opera House alongside native fork-ferns (Psilotum nudum) and sedges. A relative of this fig grows on Uluru, which means our two top icons have Ficus in attendance.
Rainforest trees – sweet pittosporum, cheese trees and bleeding heart – rise above courtyards outside Sydney buildings, from seed dropped by currawongs. In Hyde Park Oplismenus aemulus, a dainty native grass, creeps across the footpath beside William Street. Pennywort (Hydrocotyle) has claimed a lawn near St James Parade. In Melbourne a mistletoe (Muellerina eucalyptoides) hangs from a plane tree in Collins Street, between the Town Hall and City Square; another from a plane tree outside the Concert Hall. Wallaby grass (Danthonia racemosa) and native bluebells (Wahlenbergia gracilis) emerge from Melbourne pavement cracks in the least likely places. Wildness is everywhere. Native plantains and blue grass (Bothriochloa decipiens) sprout in the church lawn right beside Brisbane’s King George Square. In a 200-metre arc running west from the square, I can find, growing in cracks and beds, seedling silky oaks, umbrella trees, wattles, tuckeroo, macaranga, dwarf silky oaks, wandering jew and dwarf panic, few of which were part of the original flora here.
Nature old and new – what does it mean? If conservation means saving the old, what of the new? Endangered bell-frogs and peppercresses are now part of the new urban nature, along with England’s rare scarlet malachite beetles (Malachius aeneus), which survive only around thatched cottages with roses at the door. I finally saw meerkats on my third trip to Africa after rangers told me to go outside their national park to adjoining farmland. A cow walked right behind the meerkats while I was watching. Their burrow complex was strewn with cow dung. It wasn’t what I expected, but what can we expect of nature today?
Nature is a slippery idea. To philosopher Richard Sylvan it’s a ‘marvellously rich term, perhaps the most complex word in the English language’. It pops up all over the place, as in ‘happy by nature’, ‘Mother nature’, ‘cruel nature’, and nature as the sum total of wild plants and animals, with rocks, soil, water, weather and tectonic forces often thrown in. The Oxford English Dictionary offers five major divisions of meaning, with fifteen subdivisions and forty-nine subcategories.
‘The pre-Socratic philosophers of Greece invented Nature,’ declared C.S. Lewis. ‘They first had the idea (a much odder one than the veil of immemorial familiarity usually allows us to realise) that the great variety of phenomena which surrounds us could all be impounded under a name and talked about as a single object.’ The nature of the ancients was personified as a goddess. Medieval nature was a manifestation of God on earth; modern nature a physical domain ruled by mathematical laws. Today nature is by turns tamed beast and fragile victim, fell force and province of purity. The adjective ‘natural’ gets attached to anything from orange juice to racial hatred.
Philosopher G.S. Fell noted: ‘Whenever a term is invoked to explain too vast an array of disparate phenomena it very likely explains nothing.’ For me, ‘nature’ means the sum total of native plants and animals living wild around us, sometimes with geology and climate included. That said, it’s rarely a handy term. Statements like ‘nature is this’ or ‘nature behaves like that’ rarely ring true. Animals and plants respond to us in no consistent way. We can’t say ‘forest destruction threatens nature’, because something benefits no matter what we do. Nature’s many constituents react to us in millions of different ways. As philosopher Peter Coates says, ‘despite the singular connotations of the word, nature is a plurality’. We should really be saying ‘natures’. ‘Gaia’ and ‘one-ness’ are romantic fancies.
Viewed like this, a question often asked – Are we part of nature? – loses importance. Animals certainly don’t see us as unique. Seagulls follow dolphins and whales, and seagulls follow fishing fleets – where’s the difference? If birds think we are part of nature, should we think otherwise? We should, for one vital reason: that we are ruining all the systems that support us. We can’t afford to say that a farmer bulldozing his last trees is acting ‘naturally’. ‘Nature’, in any event, is too untrustworthy a word, a plaything of poets, a chimera that changes shape every time we look its way. In these postmodern times it’s a word we can use only with irony. I cringe slightly every time I use it.
The one thing worth saying about nature in all the confusion is that a lot more change is going on than we might like. Nature never was timeless. The changes we see today are often positive, as when birds adapt to cities and small bats claim mines. These shifts can’t be written off as ‘unnatural’, as if nature would rather go back to nature. But once we embrace the idea of change, of progress in nature, we undermine prevailing conservation goals, which so often emphasise preservation of the past.
The national park, cornerstone of conservation, is all too often portrayed as a timeless place where Australia remains in its original state. If only that were true! National parks matter enormously, but what they really conserve is not the past as such, but continuity with the past. They keep changing, but mostly in ways that keep faith with the past. ‘Change is what we should be conserving,’ says geneticist Neil Murray. ‘We should be managing the process of change.’ The ancient trees in our cities matter because they offer this continuity, serving as windows onto landscapes we will never see. Bell-frogs and peppercresses also serve as connections with the past, the cresses belonging to a very old lineage. Every species is an ancient evolutionary continuity, a long experiment in time, that once destroyed can’t be remade. If species could be recreated we would not value them as much. By helping them survive, we offer nature the chance to go forward into the future. Our goal could be to ‘let being be’.
But how can we treat ‘nature’ better in a world of rapid change, when meanings keep changing and national parks can no longer be entrusted with the work of conservation? For a start, we should acknowledge the extent to which animals and plants, including endangered ones, are now bound to us. Our cities and farms are important ecosystems. We should do more to accommodate the species that are now obliged to live among us. The way rare bell-frogs were protected at the Sydney Olympics site provides a stand-out example of this. No attempt was made to round up the frogs and dump them in a national park, where they would have perished; instead the Olympics site was redesigned with frogs in mind. Full marks.
But rare animals in cities are sometimes treated unfairly. An example that preys on my mind is the persecution of flying-foxes in Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens. Francis Ratcliffe concluded in 1932 that although grey-headed flying-foxes sometimes visited Victoria in summer, they spent the winters up in Queensland. They first roosted in the Melbourne gardens in 1981 during severe drought further north. By 1986 there was a permanent camp in the Fern Gully. Numbers rose from one hundred in 1981 to a summer peak of almost 20000 in 2001 (most of them still migrate north each winter). These bats, as we’ve seen, have taken up city ways, feeding from planted trees and (probably) relying in winter on urban heat (cities on clear, still nights can be five degrees warmer than surrounding lands). They are now damaging trees in the Fern Gully and splattering ferns with their faeces.
Grey-headed flying-foxes are not really ‘winners’. Although their numbers are rising in Melbourne they are dropping overall. The northern edge of their range has contracted dramatically. By Ratcliffe’s day they weren’t found north of Rockhampton, and today they hardly range north of Bundaberg. At the same time their range has shifted south, and numbers have plummeted as a result of forest clearing and slaughter by orchardists. Grey-heads are also losing ground to the black flying-fox, a related bat that does better in suburbia, perhaps because it’s more omnivorous and more willing to feed near the ground.
When bats moved into the Royal Botanic Gardens they were tolerated at first. Indeed, many visitors considered them a wonderful asset. But as their numbers rose, damage was noted to some palms and figs. Gardens director Phillip Moors feared graveyards of dead trees. Smoke machines, water sprays and noises were deployed to disperse the bats, to no avail. The next idea was to shift 1000 bats to Gippsland, a bizarre plan that was dropped when the cost worked out at $400 a bat. (Most of the bats would have returned anyway.) Moors then decided that the bats must die. To justify a cull, a remarkable campaign of disinformation ensued. The gardens gave out postcards (addressed to the state government) and posted signs containing the most astonishing comments. ‘Imagine Melbourne without the Royal Botanic Gardens’, they said; and ‘the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne faces the greatest threat in its 155-year existence’. These gardens are made up of rolling lawns, flowerbeds, lakes, paths, buildings and trees, all of which would allegedly be done away with by a camp of bats, leaving Melbourne ‘without the Royal Botanic Gardens’.
The media, instead of exposing this as preposterous nonsense, played along with it. The Age ran an editorial in January 2001 complaining of ‘noisy, smelly, disease-carrying grey-headed flying foxes’, repeating the claim that ‘the gardens might be destroyed’. In an opinion piece entitled ‘Cull the bats or kill the Botanic Gardens’, urban-design professor Dimity Reed offered this: ‘Are we prepared to lose this important institution that so seamlessly blends scientific research and civic pleasure? We must understand that if we do not act immediately to control this invasion, these gardens that were established to celebrate plant life will die within 20 years . . . Let’s exercise some common sense and cull the bats now.’ A learned professor was asking readers to believe that a bunch of bats could destroy a scientific institution.
To make the cull more palatable, many false claims were made.1 Phillip Moors alleged that bats occupied 40 per cent of the gardens, which was patently untrue. Most of the gardens are made up of lawns and a lake, with the bats confined to one gully and nearby trees. The estimate of 5 per cent made by Humane Society activist Lawrence Pope sounded more plausible. The gardens website claimed that ‘In the wild, flying-foxes typically roost in an area until the tree canopy is totally destroyed.’ Not true. I drive past a permanent bat camp every time I visit my parents, and over the years I’ve yet to see one tree die. Trees at camps are occasionally killed, but mainly by little red flying-foxes, which don’t visit Melbourne. Lawrence points to the irony of a botanic gardens peddling disinformation: ‘Their role is to educate the public, and they have failed absolutely as educators.’
Much was made of the fact that bats were damaging a historic site – a fernery planted by early gardens director William Guilfoyle. But the gardens management ignored earlier pleas by herbarium botanists to conserve a small remnant of original kangaroo grass that survived within the grounds. It was bulldozed when the observatory area was redeveloped.
Claims that the bats warranted protection fell on sceptical ears in the Melbourne press. ‘There is argument about whether the bats are an endangered species,’ noted The Age. ‘In this place, they are prospering.’ Dimity Reed averred that ‘a simple application of common sense would indicate that they are certainly not endangered’. But the federal government disagreed. In April 2001 environment minister Robert Hill called on his Victorian counterpart, Sherryl Garbutt, to explain why a cull had been allowed. Hill was awaiting advice from the Threatened Species Scientific Committee on whether the bats should be listed as nationally vulnerable. Ms Garbutt had rejected her own committee’s recommendation to list the grey-headed flying-fox as a vulnerable species in Victoria, sparking the resignation of committee member Angus Martin. Of 500 recommendations made by the committee over the years, this was the first one ever rejected.
The most fiendish players in the anti-bat campaign were two columnists in the Herald Sun. Andrew Bolt began an article with the statement ‘Bats have always seemed evil.’ They were ‘flying rats’, he claimed. His colleague Ross Brundrett called them ‘vermin’ and ‘nocturnal pests’ that should be evicted into outer space. A kinder touch came from cartoonist Michael Leunig, who drew a woman calling out to a sinister being behind a tree, ‘I’m not sure whether you’re a flying fox or some kind of weird dirty old sexual pervert but if you are a flying fox then you’d better jolly well get out of these botanical gardens quick smart because you’re not welcome.’
The bats were eventually evicted, but rather than moving to a site prepared for them at Ivanhoe, they chose inconvenient locations, as bats often do. A truce was called when most of them settled five kilometres away in Yarra Bend Park, Kew, where they can be seen today. Some established in Geelong, where they are tolerated, and in 2010 a camp appeared in Adelaide, in tall pines by the zoo.
The Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney had its own bat camp problems. A tolerant approach was taken at first, with bat experts brought in to trial methods of protecting vulnerable trees, but a decision was eventually made to drive the animals out. On an
informal visit to the gardens in 2015 I was told that early morning efforts are still needed to stop their return.
Flying foxes have become Australia’s most controversial wildlife, as more camps appear near cities and towns. Their unpopularity peaks when eucalypts in a region flower heavily, attracting large numbers for a month or two. The discovery of two diseases transmitted by bats, caused by bat lyssavirus and Hendra virus, has not helped, even though the risk to humans is very low. The hostility bats face in some country centres is now extreme. The bat camp in Lissner Park in Charters Towers incites far more anger from the community than it would in a similar park in Brisbane. This rural intolerance contrasts sharply with Australia’s past when country folk were ruggedly stoic about inconvenient wildlife. Today they are apt to sound hysterical when claims made about bats causing headaches, rashes and depression go unchallenged. Country politicians sometimes stir up anger with exaggerated claims about disease. To them, bat ‘plagues’ have become a symbol of a world gone environmentally mad, in which flying ‘pests’ are treated as precious wildlife deserving protection. Suburban camps in large cities attract more empathy and more acceptance that the disease risks are negligible.
Bat camps arouse fears because they challenge the assumption that in cities and towns, people are firmly in control. Bats can be remarkably difficult to evict unless trees are removed, and those that refuse to leave an urban park can be seen as an affront to human supremacy. They can certainly make difficult neighbours, producing noises, smells and droppings, but some residents magnify their suffering by convincing themselves that the air is toxic and their gardens are unsafe. Many local councils have spent large amounts on mostly unsatisfactory attempts to evict bats, with the animals remaining, returning, or shifting to other inconvenient locations.