White Beech: The Rainforest Years

by Greer, Germaine

  I turned off the track and struggled over rocks hidden by the long grass downwards towards the creek. From the forest on the slopes above me came a noise like fighting tomcats. Possums, I thought. (Catbirds, actually.) Tiny jewelled birds were bouncing about in the Lantana. Big brown pigeons were gorging on the fruits of Wild Tobacco. I perched on one of the biggest of the rocks and contemplated the forest edge. Half a million dollars for a run-down dairy farm. I didn’t think so.

  Out from the clumps of Native Raspberry at the forest edge stepped a bird, a sort-of crow in fancy dress. He was clad in a tabard of a yellow so intense that it seemed to burn, and a cap of the same yellow with a frosting of red on the crown. He walked up to within a few feet of me, fixed me with his round yellow eye and began to move his black rump rhythmically back and forth. There was no doubt about it. He was dancing. Up and down bobbed his gaudy head, in and out went his hips, and all the time he kept a golden eye fixed on my face. Something, a wallaby I thought, thudded through the unseen gully below me. I turned my head to follow the noise and the bird sashayed after, keeping me in his sights. And all the while he kept dancing.

  ‘What do you want with me, birdie?’

  More dancing, a little faster if anything.

  Dusk in these latitudes is momentary. The pinkness of the sky above the purple scarps had drained to a phosphorescent green.

  ‘Birdie, I have to go, or I’ll be caught here in the dark.’

  More dancing.

  I stood up.

  ‘Bye bye, birdie.’

  The black and gold bird made a little bow and disappeared among the raspberries.

  As I came in sight of the house, a man was leaning on the verandah rail.

  I said, ‘Hi.’ What I thought was, ‘Sorry, mate, I’m gunna buy your house.’

  I came back at dawn the next day and spent a little time wading through the soaking grass, but there was no need. The decision had been made the night before. As I drove back out, a flock of Red-browed Finches flew up beside the car. I felt blessed, excited and frightened, all at once. The place was amazing, bursting with life, to be sure, but so battered! Battered by clearing, by logging, by spraying, and worse. The heraldic bird had thrown down the gauntlet. Was I game to take on the challenge? Could I rebuild the forest? The job was immense but I felt sure that it was doable, just about, if I lived long enough.

  I stopped on the causeway to empty a boot. My white sock was sticky with blood. I peeled it off and shook it. Out fell a sated leech. Vital substance of mine was already incorporated in the Cave Creek biomass. Around me the ground was covered with royal blue flowers, like miniature Tradescantias. With a big toe still bleeding copiously I got back into the car and drove south to the Numinbah Gap. As even Queenslanders don’t know where it is, I will use the account provided by Jack Gresty to the Queensland Geographical Society in 1947 which in a few words conveys the grandeur of the place.

  The Numinbah Valley lies between high spur ranges of the McPherson Range . . . to the west is the Beechmont Range and to the east the Springbrook Range or Plateau. At the head of the valley there is a steep declivity in the McPherson Range forming a low divide between the Tweed and Nerang Waters and known as the Numinbah Gap. On either side of the Gap the McPherson Range rises to a height of over three thousand feet.

  The road from Nerang to Murwillumbah makes its way up towards the headwaters of the Nerang River on the north-facing slopes of the McPherson Range. As it climbed toward the crossing point the roadside weeds proliferated, with impenetrable stands of Buddleia and bamboo to add to the usual garden escapes, while the broad river valley below was all but treeless and chequered with cattle-pads. Even on the higher slopes the rainforest had been stripped away. As the car slid past the tick gate and into New South Wales, regrowth eucalypts gave way to Camphor Laurel, along the fence lines, along the creek banks and along the road. I passed roadside stalls with a few bunches of bananas for sale, an occasional avocado plantation, acres cloaked in deep blue Morning Glory, and even a row of weed eucalypts planted by the local council. I began to wonder if the vivid image of a deep green native forest had been a hallucination.

  I was scanning the magazine rack in a lounge at Sydney airport, filling in time before the flight back to England, and there he was, the bird, on the cover of a nature magazine. The caption read ‘Regent Bowerbird’.

  The Regent bowerbird (Sericulus chrysocephalus) only descends from the rainforest canopy when he is in search of a mate; then he builds his bower and displays to any likely female, spreading his tail and beating his wings, all the while uttering his wheezy call.

  My Regent Bowerbird was quite silent, and didn’t display his wings and tail, so he hadn’t taken me for some outsize mate. He pranced and twisted, but didn’t prostrate himself in front of me with his tail fanned and his wings spread, so his wasn’t a mating display. I may have been close to his bower; in such a case a bowerbird will usually fly up into a tree and vocalise loudly to distract attention, rather than trying to dance the interloper away. I didn’t know when this famous cover-bird came high-stepping out of the raspberries that he had been on the 35-cent stamp or that he was the trademark of the Lodge at O’Reilly’s where the bowerbirds are so tame that tourists can get them to feed from their hands. The forest knew what it was doing. It could hardly have chosen a better envoy to help me understand where my future lay.

  I dropped the letter with a cheque for the deposit into the airport postbox. The die was cast. For better or worse, the forest has me till death do us part.

  The Forest

  When the paperwork for the purchase was nearly complete, I rang Jane.

  ‘I’ve bought something. Sixty hectares.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Gold Coast City.’

  ‘You’re not serious.’

  ‘I am.’

  I was. As you come over the border from New South Wales into Queensland on the Nerang–Murwillumbah road, right by the tick gate, through which Queensland cattle may not pass southwards into New South Wales, a sign welcomes you to Gold Coast City. Anything less citified would be hard to imagine.

  ‘You’re losing it, girl. Why would you buy something on the Gold Coast? You don’t even play golf.’

  ‘It’s in the Hinterland.’

  ‘Let me guess: horsiness, fake villages and avenues of Cocos Palms. The food and wine trail. Bad food and worse wine.’

  ‘No. It’s rainforest. Or abandoned dairy farm. It depends which way you look at it.’

  ‘You’re the only person I know who would spend two years shopping for desert and come back with rainforest. When am I going to see it?’

  I arranged a stay for Jane, her husband Peter and myself at one of many expensive rainforest retreats, which didn’t look terribly far away from Cave Creek on the map but was. We got there late after driving for an hour through blinding rain, the only guests in the place. The kitchen was closed. Morning revealed that we were mere feet away from a just-about-still-working avocado plantation full of angry bees. The ‘ancient’ rainforest our rooms overlooked was actually a mess of tangled regrowth, the only mature trees to be seen in it immense Flooded Gums. I found one luxuriant plant, a rambling passionfruit with pure white flowers, and took its photograph. I now know it only too well as Passiflora subpeltata, one of the most invasive weeds in disturbed forest.

  Over breakfast, consisting of a variety of boxed cereals and DIY raisin toast, we worked out where we were, which was Mount Tamborine, and where we were going. Mount Tamborine stands on the eastern extremity of the Albert River catchment. Between it and the Nerang River lies the Coomera River catchment. Both these rivers rise on the Lamington Plateau, deep within the trackless confines of the national park, and flow northwards. The range that divides the two catchments is the Darlington Range; the western boundary of the Nerang River Valley is the Beechmont Range which runs at right angles to the McPherson Range, which extends all the way from the sea at Point Danger to Wallangarra, 220 kilometres inl
and. In the angle between them lies the Lamington Plateau. The movement to turn its 20,590 hectares into a national park was initiated in 1896 by a grazier called Robert Collins, who invited Lord Lamington, the then governor of Queensland, to visit the area. (Lord Lamington, who was more used to visiting his British friends to shoot on their country estates, took the opportunity to shoot a koala.) The eastern boundary of the Numinbah Valley is another national park, the Springbrook Plateau. The only way to get back from Mount Tamborine to Cave Creek was to drive down to the coastal highway and back up the Nerang. Even though Numinbah lies within a few minutes of the Lamington Plateau and Springbrook as the crow would fly, both are hours away by road.

  As we drove through the devastated hinterland and along the six-lane Pacific Highway Jane uttered no more than the occasional sigh. The road up through the regrowth forests seemed longer and drearier than usual. Never was I more grateful for the dramatic entrance through the national park. Jane was stunned by the sheer variety of unfamiliar plants. We slid past strings of nuts hanging from the Macadamias and the huge pods dangling from the Black Beans, and down into the alley between the rainforest and the Hoop Pines.

  ‘Are these yours?’ asked Jane, looking at the rows of Hoop Pines.

  ‘Not now. They’re the remains of a plantation that was grown on the property before that bit of it was ceded to the national park, and now of course they can’t be harvested. They should be taken out for timber and the park should spend the proceeds on some extra weed control, but there’s no chance.’

  We came to a lopsided gate. ‘This is where my property begins.’

  On the left a steep slope clothed in Lantana, on the right the other half of the same. Jane was unimpressed.

  ‘Bit of a challenge,’ said Peter.

  That bit was, if I had known it, but a thousandth part of the challenge. There was Lantana all along the forest edges and in every gully, and wherever the land was cleared but not put down to grass. Way up in the forest there are still, ten years on, fifteen hectares that were cleared for bananas that are now full-on Lantana. And Lantana was not the worst of it.

  We crossed the causeway over the creek.

  ‘This is Cave Creek. It’s one of the headwaters of the Nerang River, which rises a bit further up and a bit further south-west, on Mount Hobwee.’

  I drove on under a huge cedar dressed from head to foot in Staghorns, Bird’s Nest Ferns and an enormous King Orchid, and on to a second gate. Grazing cattle raised their heads and stared as Peter got out to open and shut the gate. They kept staring as we drove on up to the house, a Queenslander of sorts, standing on cement columns topped with old hub caps, which were meant to stop termites from travelling up into the wood of the house. The key I had been given didn’t fit the lock of the flimsy front door. Before I could kick it in, Peter pried open a window at the end of the verandah, climbed through and let us in.

  ‘How can people live like this?’ asked Jane as she stepped into the kitchen.

  The walls were filthy, but not as filthy as the doorjambs, which were black with grimy handprints. The boarded ceilings sagged, and brown dirt had sifted down through the cracks to gather on every horizontal surface. The windows were curtained with spiderwebs inside and out. The floors were covered with several layers of cheap carpeting, most of it rotten, all of it black with dirt. Three of the internal partitions were so eaten out by termites that you could put your hand through them. The floors of the bathroom and neighbouring lavatory sloped downwards; both were hanging off the side of the house because the joists had rotted away. The septic tank had a young Red Cedar growing out of it. Jane went to see if the lavatory was usable. I heard her lift the top off the cistern and force it to empty. When she ran the water to wash her hands it scalded her. I touched a switch and the light went on.

  ‘Could be worse,’ said Peter.

  ‘I’d get rid of all of this,’ said Jane, pushing her toe into the soggy carpeting. ‘And then I’d gurney the whole place out.’

  Jane never goes bushwards without the wherewithal for making tea. As she put her little kettle-cum-teapot on the filthy hob she asked, ‘What’s the plan?’

  ‘To restore the forest.’

  Jane tipped leaf tea into the holder in the top of the pot. ‘That’s obvious. But how?’

  Peter, as usual, said nothing.

  ‘I have no idea. You can help me.’

  ‘You reckon. I don’t know anything about this vegetation. It’s all I can do to keep abreast of the systems on the Mornington Peninsula. I don’t even know the genera that grow here, let alone the species. Rainforests are the most intricate systems on earth. That’s why when they’re disturbed, everything goes haywire. You might think you’re restoring what was there, but in fact you’re just another interloper, doing more harm than good.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘I can learn. We can learn, together.’

  That was part of the idea, but typically I hadn’t consulted her.

  Jane, who will no more countenance the drinking of tea out of mugs than the use of tea bags, put a cup and saucer beside me. ‘You don’t get it, do you? There are no teachers.’

  Peter said, ‘The soil looks pretty good. Basalt, isn’t it? What’s the rainfall?’

  ‘About two metres a year.’

  ‘Must be worth a try.’

  We drank our tea and talked of other things. A Butcherbird hopped onto the verandah rail and sang a canzonetta composed for the occasion. Behind the house King Parrots were whistling. In the pasture Crimson Rosellas were swinging on the heads of seeding grass. Wanderer butterflies sailed past in airborne coitus. The tea things stowed in their basket, we went for a walk up the main track. I was praying for something special, the bowerbird maybe, to win my sister over. We trudged uphill and came to a broad clearing where Jane stopped dead. She was gazing up at the bare rhyolite precipice that topped out above the forest like the battlements of some huge prehistoric castle.

  ‘Now that I do understand. That is fantastic. Can we get nearer?’

  The forest edge was a mass of Lantana, with no visible opening.

  Jane studied the tumbled mess of rocks around us. ‘These aren’t geologic. They’re all out of position. Just heaped and pushed about – to make the pasture, I guess.’

  She was right as usual, but the truth was sadder than her guess. In these parts the farmers didn’t simply roll the rocks aside to create level tracts of pasture; they dug them up to sell. It took me months to realise that the forest had not been abused just as a farm. From 1985 the upland portion had been one of the four quarries on Numinbah Valley farms that supplied 50,000 tonnes of rock to build the seafronts of the artificial waterside suburbs that stretch from Byron Bay to Noosa and points north. The figure is merely notional; the total may be many times that much. The farmers have no weighbridges and there is no one overseeing the traffic. The rock merchants don’t care; the farmers don’t care; nobody cares. Rocks too irregularly shaped to be usable were bulldozed out of the way into creeks and gullies. Of the natural contours of that part of the northern lip of the Mount Warning caldera almost nothing remains.

  The forest takes this devastation in its stride. The valiant workforce has planted into the worst heaps of spoil, and the trees have shot up just as if they were standing in deep loam, spreading their roots across the rubble, holding it all together. The answer to everything, to the instability of the land, the slumping, the landslips, the pugging and the waterlogging, is to plant more trees. Under the protection of the canopy the land heals.

  In the blitheness of my innocence I pitched the project to my sister. ‘The way I see it, the pasture is an ulcer in the healthy tissue of the forest. What I have to do is to draw the healthy tissue in, little by little, till the ulcer is gone.’

  ‘What if it’s a rodent ulcer?’

  ‘It isn’t. See, the Lantana can only grow in sunlight, on the forest edge. The forest isn’t retreating from the pasture, it’s drawing in wherever it can. What I have to do is
to remove some of the obstacles and the forest will do the rest.’

  Jane sighed at my ignorance. ‘You’re going to have to learn about succession, my girl. And that won’t be easy, because nobody really knows how it works. To restore your forest would take about eight hundred years.’

  ‘I’d better not die then.’

  The next day, at Mount Tamborine, we found a little information centre and in it a copy of the famous Red Book, with its original title, Trees and Shrubs in the Rainforest of New South Wales and Southern Queensland.

  ‘Here you are,’ said Jane. ‘Page six, Subtropical rainforest.’ She read out:

  – 2 or 3 strata of trees

  – diverse: 10–60 species in canopy

  – leaf size large: notophylls and mesophylls common

  ‘What are notophylls and mesophylls?’

  ‘It’s a fancy way of indicating leaf size. Notophylls are leaves between about three inches, say eight centimetres and about five inches, thirteen centimetres. Mesophylls are bigger.’ She went on reading:

  – leaves often compound—

  I interrupted her again. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Hm. That’s not so easy to explain. A simple leaf has a single blade, yes? And a simple leaf can have indentations in its outline, like a maple leaf for example? If those indentations go right to the main vein, and the bits between form separate leaf blades and the main vein becomes the rachis, you’ve got a compound leaf. The separate leaves or, more correctly, leaflets may have stalks connecting them to the rachis or not.’

  ‘How can you tell if you’re looking at a leaf or a leaflet?’

  ‘That’s easy. Leaflets don’t have axils, or rather, there are no buds in the axils, no leaf buds or flower buds or stipules. The real axil will be way back where the rachis joins the branchlet. Leaflets don’t fall separately either; the compound leaf tends to drop as a whole.’