A Single Tree

by Don Watson

  As I said before they were the good old days of Pioneering in the far North in the latitude of about 20, where I and family resided until the year 1883. I must not forget the jolly old days when Sir George Nares the great naval Captain and explorer in the Arctic Regions put into Bowen on one of his great surveying trips, when we had some great sprees. I think I must call them such – as Cricket Matches. Bowen V Sir Nares & his officers & crew, and Balls and exhibitions for the benefit of all and sundry benevolent Institutions when he sent an Armstrong gun ashore to be Exhibited in the Show Room opposite the Australian Joint Stock Bank in those days and wherein I exhibited my Skull (pard-o-n my blackfellow’s) arms and legs, to the disgust of many. I remember I had to cover them up with a flag, the Union Jack, and if anyone wished to see what was under that flag they had to ask the favor of one of the committee who were afraid the Ladies might get a shock, if they were left uncovered.

  ‘Reminiscences’, Brandon Papers, Oxley Library, Brisbane, OM 75/75/3

  Trevor Winter

  1844

  On 5 September 1842, Trevor Winter made the following statement to J Blair, the police magistrate for the Portland Bay district.

  About a month ago, one of his cousin’s shepherds, when at his supper, heard the sheep rush; he went to the yard unarmed, supposing it to be occasioned by native dogs, and found the sheep gone; and following them, found they were driven away by natives. He returned to the hut for assistance and arms, and recovered, as he thought, all the sheep; but on counting them the following morning, found 196 missing: and deponent, Mr Butcher, and a servant started immediately on the tracks of the sheep, and found the remains of 35 of them a short distance from another of his stations. Deponent then followed on the tracks again till he came to a fire, where the blacks were: he told them if they would give up the remainder of sheep, he would not be angry with them: they were principally blacks that had been residing on deponent’s station, and whom he has been feeding for the last two years. One of them asked deponent, ‘What for you sulky? sheep no belong you; come on, me no frighten; buy, buy plenty you black fellow.’ They then made preparation to surround him, and the black just alluded to poised his spear to strike him, when he fired and shot him, as he has since heard, mortally. To escape being surrounded, deponent and his party then retreated, and were pursued by the blacks. Three days after, he went out with Mr Cook, his cousin, and three men, to endeavour to recover some of the sheep, or at all events the skins; and on passing through the scrub, found 80 sheep alive, with their legs twisted out of the sockets, and the remains of about 12 sheep; and proceeding further on, found where the blacks had just been encamped, which was close to the spot where he had first fallen in with them, and where they still were. Mr Cook and one of the men rode up to them, to say where the remainder of the sheep were, when they threw their spears at him and the man. Mr Cook called to deponent, who was on the opposite side of the swamp, to come over; he did so, and as he was approaching, a black jumped from behind a tree, cried ‘Come On,’ and threw his spears at him, which stuck into a tree over his head; deponent instantly fired at, and surrounded him. The spot where they had the sheep was not above 12 miles [19 kilometres] from the stations; and they had driven them by a circuit of at least 30 or 40 miles [48–64 kilometres] to it, crossing every swamp they came to, so that horses could not follow on the track.

  (signed) Trevor Winter

  Given before me at Portland, this 3rd day of September 1844.

  (signed) J Blair, JP. Police Magistrate

  Scars in the Landscape: A Register of Massacre Sites in Western Victoria, 1803–1859, Ian Clark, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra, 1995

  Tim Winton

  2015

  There was an air of promise about those early days in Gwelup Street, an unspoken sense we were making something from nothing. Everything was raw and provisional. It was like camping. Things were rough but they were new, and back in the 1960s newness was prized above anything else. In time, as the neighbourhood became more established, when there were no more building sites and all the fences and lawns were finally in, the looseness and excitement evaporated and a kid had to go abroad for his fun.

  But in the beginning there was always the swamp at the end of the street. It was a great wild netherland that drew everything down to it eventually: water, birds, frogs, snakes – and kids of course. As we slunk off toward it, unable to resist its gravitational allure, we left the polite tinkle of sprinklers in our wake and the rowdy sounds of nature took over. We haunted the swamp and its environs barefoot. We hid in hollow logs, tried to knock parrots from trees with our gings, and in our aimless trekking we met tiger snakes, goannas, bees and strafing magpies. There were tracks through the bush everywhere and we followed them on our fat-wheeled bikes with banana seats and T-bar shifts. The swamp never ceased to enthral; it was an enigmatic place, a spot fraught with danger. The more intrepid kids in the street made rafts from the upturned roofs of old cars and paddled precariously through the reeds onto the lake. They dug deep bunkers and made humpies where they stripped stolen bikes and garnered vast collections of frogs and tadpoles and tobacco. There were stories of quicksand, of capsizes and skirmishes with strangers. Long-necked turtles scoped the surface by the shore. They dipped away like mini-subs, paddling silently out of reach of our hooked sticks. Now and then they crawled up out of the swamp and crossed the road on suicide missions, easy pickings for cars and owls and scuff-kneed kids. On the other side of the lake, market gardens pumped up the groundwater and shot it into the air as a constant halo.

  At home or in school I hankered for the swamp and its thrum of life. Our street was uniform and orderly, but where it ended the chaos of another, older life resumed. Through swathes of reeds and sedges the steely surface of the lake appeared like the suddenly opened eye of God. Waterbirds rose from it in clouds. At the peaty shore everything hissed and trembled. We searched for lost toddlers down there, went out in phalanxes to recover dogs or bikes. We lit fires and fought them, felt the land heat and cool underfoot. Even the meekest of us went a little wild down there and we only came home when darkness fell and mothers began to bellow from every back step on the street.

  Now that wildness is gone. The wetland endures but Lake Gwelup is a tidy suburban park with cycleways and gazebos. And the old neighbourhood has been smartened up. The houses we grew up in have begun to disappear. Modest bungalows are being replaced with Tuscan villas and walled compounds. My wife’s childhood home still stands but number 14 was bowled over. I drive by every few years feeling a little foolish. Now it’s just a place of remnants and memories, but it’s long been a landscape and dreamscape in retreat. Without us ever paying much attention, the bush shrank by increments. More tuarts and marris were felled, more birds and animals displaced, more earth was scraped bare as the suburb grew and the roads around us were bitumenized. There was always fresh building activity, more families moving in, immigrants from the English Midlands, from Serbia, the Netherlands. In time the street even acquired a public phone box. People paved their drive-ways. The last big gully, a maze of tracks and bowers behind our place, was bulldozed. The trees were burnt and the ash raked flat to make way for the football oval. Year after year secret places disappeared. At the time this process felt normal and necessary, like growing up. After all, the bush was a scruffy nothing and we were civilizing it.

  The biggest and most unavoidable change came when I was ten or so. Across the hill an enormous tract of bush was torn down. It seemed to happen quite suddenly. It was like a military action, with more men and machines than I’d ever seen assembled in one place. The air was black with diesel smoke as trees were battered down and rolled into windrows high as houses. For many days and nights those piles burnt like a sacked city. At sunset we rode our bikes around the perimeter to watch the sparks rise and rise into the sky. We didn’t know it then but most of this land was to be sealed with asphalt. Developers built a shopping centre there th
e size of an airport. With all the franchises sufficient to the era, it became an ersatz indoor city. In summer its vast car parks were like baking black plains. The hyper-mall took its name from the suburb. Within a few years it was synonymous with it and in the seventies when someone spoke of ‘going to Karrinyup’ they generally meant the shopping centre, not the neighbourhood. On Sundays, where once we’d pedalled through the bush, pimply teenagers learnt to drive their mums’ Corollas across hectares of empty, shimmering tarmac.

  The land-clearing going on around us in the 1960s was just a skirmish in a much wider assault that persists to this day. The population of Perth is growing at a hectic rate, and to accommodate the expectations of newcomers and young people wanting places of their own, the city spreads and sprawls. The bushland of the Swan coastal plain continues to be bulldozed for property developments and the urban footprint is now colossal. There’s an unbroken swathe of red roof tiles from Mandurah in the south to Two Rocks, a hundred and thirty kilometres to the north. Most planners, transport gurus and environmental scientists agree that the sprawl is socially and ecologically unsustainable. Every fresh subdivision comes at the cost of bushland. And every new suburb requires infrastructure. The habitat loss from the construction of roads and freeways alone is astounding. As a result of such frenetic land-clearing the prospects of several native species of mammals, reptiles and birds look dim.

  All these dwellings and suburbs are erected in a largely dry region with a shrinking rainfall pattern. But home owners still want lush lawns and European gardens, so groundwater hangs over these tracts in a perpetual reticulated mist and the waterways and aquifers absorb a steady trickle of phosphates and pesticides. From the Darling scarp to the sea the ancient, life-giving Swan River is slowly dying. Within three generations the river has gone from larder to drain. Toxic algal blooms occur summer and winter. Mass fish kills have become common in the upper reaches where black bream float belly up in their thousands and the mangroves and foreshores are spangled with their stinking carcasses. The prawns I used to catch and cook on the shore with my family every summer are gone. So too the cobbler we speared with gidgies in the shallows.

  In 2009 the unique cohort of Swan River dolphins began to display mysterious lesions on their bodies and soon they were showing up like all those bream, bobbing bloated amongst the reeds and paperbarks, their hides horribly disfigured. Within a few months twenty-five percent of the dolphin population was dead. For many years, Professor Jörg Imberger, the state’s most senior water researcher, has declared the river dead at depths greater than two metres. The waterway is choking on 251 tonnes of nitrogen every year, most of it coming from the fertilizers spread on farms and suburban lawns. First mooted in 2007, the Fertiliser Action Plan to reduce the flow of soluble phosphates into the river has yet to be implemented, and given politicians’ reluctance to upset their supporters in the fertilizer industry, there seems to be no real hope it ever will be. Under pressure from recreational fishing lobbyists the government sponsors the seasonal release of prawns, as if the waterway were a pond on a dude ranch. Meantime the emasculated Swan River Trust deploys oxygen pumps in the upper reaches and with all those busy brown bubbles the river looks and smells like a careless boy’s aquarium. The Swan is desperately sick. And although a simple cure is ready to hand, the river is put on life support. Those pumps are emblematic of a city and a political culture for whom the glib fix and the photo-op will always be first choice.

  I imagine there are still kids living out at the edges in transitional places like the one I knew in Karrinyup, but given the accelerated pace of change, and the ubiquity of all those surveyors’ pegs, I wonder if these days they even have time enough to feel at home there.

  Island Home: A Landscape Memoir, Penguin, Melbourne, 2015

  Judith Wright

  1946

  Then there were the ‘deaf-adders’, about whom there were many myths. Were they really deaf – certainly they never moved out of one’s way – or were they really death-adders from whose bite no-one had been known to recover? Their numbers had increased enormously as the prickly pear spread and gave them shelter from their predators, the eagles. The pear was kept down with difficulty around the homestead, but beyond the garden fence it threatened to take over entirely. Across the creek it was ineradicable before my father resorted to the spectacular control of cactoblastis (an introduced moth which destroyed cacti) and, in its wake, the impenetrable forest of green thorn-studded pads simply deliquesced. One year there, the next, nothing more than newly revealed, barren ground where the thorns, which were too hard to die with the pear, persisted to threaten shoe soles or horses’ hooves. We collected those thorns to use for gramophone needles or as dress­maker’s pins. Hard as they were, they were not such a threat as the tiny clusters of thornlets the pads carried, which would dive into one’s flesh and defy removal.