The Bush

by Don Watson

  Had they been left, or at least large stands of them, the dust storms which have hit Kalgoorlie ever since would have been less frequent, and the salinity less rampant. A decade ago the CSIRO said salinity was threatening as much as 80 per cent of remnant native vegetation, and devouring the wheatbelt at the rate of one football oval an hour. But what becomes of the goldmines if the trees are not felled and burned? Good human lives were lived where the forest had been, enterprise was rewarded, the fellowship of men and women flourished, history was recorded. The bush we know would not exist if we had not cut it down.

  Our debt to trees continues to be absolute. We need them to bind and enrich the soil, to trap carbon, regulate the climate, lower the watertable, sustain biodiversity, and for the photosynthesis on which our survival depends. We need them for oxygen and for shade, and also because few other things on earth can tell us as much about the way life works. We need them for timber, food, drugs, fuel, chemicals, paper, and much else of a material kind, and we need them for what they give in the way of hope, beauty and inspiration. Long before tree huggers of the late twentieth century, trees were credited with instructing us in the design of the Creator, and with feelings and intelligence. They were an essential element of the picturesque, which is to say, everything in nature that was held to be agreeable to the human senses. There was no perfection without them.

  Given their profound importance to humanity – which is far greater than that of, say, sheep, cattle, dogs or horses – it might be that clearing them en masse is not without effect on the minds of those who do it. To fell, ringbark, poison, root out or in some other way bring about the death of trees may not be an act of genocide, but nor is it, surely, an act with no more implications than sweeping the veranda. It might be a little like war, brutalising or traumatising depending on the personality and the circumstances. Who knows what mental scars are left on the people who, for whatever reason, destroyed them. If the dead trees ‘got on the nerves’ of Rosa Praed, what did they do to less resilient minds? One man who spent his youth in the Strzelecki Ranges, where he ‘helped destroy for farmland perhaps the best hardwood forest the world has ever seen’, never got over the experience. His son, Lyle Courtney, wrote: ‘The guilt of being a partner in that crime haunted him for the rest of his life, and instilled in him a deep repentant understanding and mateship with nature.’

  To the young Rachel Henning, fresh from England, the red gum was a burlesque of formal grace, a made-over oak. Along the Macquarie River she thought them ‘dismal’ and ‘melancholy’. Red gums and casuarinas, especially the weeping Allocasuarina verticillata with long needly leaves that murmur in the wind, were ‘the most doleful of trees’ in Richard Mahoney’s eyes. To eyes less in need of the old familiar, red gums were the signature tree of the inland and the very essence of Australian pastoral. Around them countless landscape paintings were composed, many of them tributes not only to the tree, but to the sheep and drovers – enjoying ‘complete exemption from mental effort’, as one squatter noted – ambling by in their dusty light. The Merino evolved on the great river red gum properties; it drank from the billabongs they shaded, lay where the kangaroos had lain, in the dust among the roots.

  ‘I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do,’ the American novelist Willa Cather said a hundred years ago. Had she seen a red gum, she might have liked them even more. If we are untroubled by the notion that trees might have sufficient consciousness to resign themselves to life, we might wonder if, after a century of European occupation, they had not also begun resigning themselves to death. The first hundred years of clearing, ringbarking, logging, salinity, compacted soils and other brutalities greatly reduced the red gums, and the next hundred were not much better. Yet they hung on, along with the possums, gliders, parrots and masked owls that live in the hollows of their limbs and trunks.

  E. camaldulensis is a broad, spreading tree of the inland, the most widely distributed gum tree on the continent. ‘Spreading’ understates it: an expert on the species, Phil Kenyon, who lives near Kilmore in Victoria and loves them, found one near Melrose in South Australia that was 21 metres across. In the mid-nineteenth century William Howitt, who did not exaggerate as a rule, measured one that had fallen near Euroa in Victoria, and found it to have been 61 metres tall.

  Red gums are the staunchest of trees. They live for anything up to a thousand years, and their experience might include thirst and starvation, drought and flood, and direct and indirect attack by insects, cattle and men. Of all the many eucalypts with the ability to survive torture and impoverishment and seemingly come back from the dead, none wears the scars of battle like the river red gum – a characteristic that inspired both Harold Cazneaux’s 1937 Flinders Ranges photographs, and the many watercolours Hans Heysen painted in the same region. ‘The great Red Gums in the creek beds fill me with wonder; their feeling of strength of limb, of vigour and life, suggest the very spirit of endurance,’ Cazneaux wrote, and gave the name ‘Spirit of Endurance’ to his most famous photograph. Heysen constructed his hugely popular watercolours round monumental and heroic specimens, and in so doing planted them at the centre of national consciousness and identity. It is not going too far to say that Australians have drawn a sense of self from the species, that they have looked upon them and seen a sort of pictorial mission statement.

  It was from river red gums that Aborigines cut the bark to make canoes and shelters. Europeans imitated this practice, while sharing the explorer John Oxley’s regret that it was not real ‘timber’. In South Australia there were pioneer families who lived in burned and hollowed-out red gums, and along the Murray, in hard times, the indigent also resided in them. Red gum made good railway sleepers, and vast quantities were put to this purpose both here and in other parts of the empire, including India. The wood was also used for wharf piles and for building stumps, slab huts, furniture and fence posts. It powered engines, including those on the Murray paddle-steamers. In the nineteenth century the old red gums by Melbourne’s Yarra River were not sufficiently iconic to avoid being dynamited when the Treasury Gardens were constructed, or cut down to make way for more interesting species in the new Botanic Gardens. Though the red gum is held to be a national icon, the trees are perfectly expendable, like kangaroos. In fact, most modern Australians who know it at all know red gum only as the stuff for which they pay anything up to $200 a square metre to put in their wood heaters.

  The Barmah-Millewa Forest near Tocumwal was as grand as any forest in Victoria when William Ferguson, the horticulturalist, saw it in 1870. Despite intensive logging, there were red gums growing eighty to a hundred to the acre. Ferguson feared for the forest’s future. Yet the forest has survived the logging, the invasions of sheep and cattle and the damming of the rivers, and camping in it still arouses senses that are dormant elsewhere. Cormorants dive and stagger to the bank with fish, dry their wings on broken tree limbs; eagles sail on the currents high above; galahs screech in the evenings as goshawks and falcons hunt them in the boughs of the old gums; the river drowns you in time. The Murray is far from the widest or the longest or the swiftest of rivers, but it has a mind-gripping force. Much of the power and beauty can be put down to the red gums that usher the river across the land. They are beautiful now and were doubtless more beautiful in 1853, when Francis Cadell steered his owner-built paddle-steamer for hundreds of kilometres down the ‘avenue’ of gums.

  Cadell’s paddle-steamer and all those that followed were enemies of the river ecology. While a mortal danger to anyone camped beneath them, the habit of mature red gums to drop massive limbs without warning creates opportunities for creatures to nest in the remaining hollow stumps, and when boughs fall into rivers or lagoons they become habitats for fish to breed in. The fish, in turn, allow birds to thrive. Clearing red gum ‘snags’ to make way for boats vandalised the ecology, just as limiting water flows and reducing the frequency of floods did, just as rising watertables and salinity did. But
the red gums need only a fraction of a chance. Along the Murray when the last drought was at its worst, some trees were dead and others seemed to be dying. Then, soon after La Niña rains, they stood waist-deep and gleaming in the flood, and the coppery leaves of slender new saplings swayed above the surface of the water.

  Governments began protecting them early in the twentieth century. When land was being cut up for closer settlement it was decreed that no tree growing on the beds of watercourses and lagoons, or for 20 metres either side of their banks, was to be ‘ringbarked, cut down, felled or destroyed’ without permission from the Forestry Department. It was paltry, but it probably helped both the creeks and the trees to survive. West of the Great Divide, red gums still line the rivers and creeks, lagoons and floodplains – gnarled old matrons, all elbows and bumps, watching over sheep and cattle, hanging on through the dry and welcoming the water lapping round them in flood. In flat or gently undulating landscapes they make the grey-green lines of the horizon as they feel their way across the land, diviners tapping the water below it. From the air or the highway they are often the only marks, and the only green, on otherwise bare and featureless plains.

  In 1828 a Captain Rous crossed the bar at what is now Ballina, New South Wales. He dropped anchor in a river he called the Richmond, after the Duke of Richmond; he called the nearby headland Lennox Head, because every Duke of Richmond is also the Duke of Lennox. With that settled, Rous sailed away to tell of things he had seen, including ‘many natives’ and their huts 2 metres high and 9 metres long. In the same year Allan Cunningham found an inland track to the headwaters of the Richmond and climbed Mt Lindsay for a view. In 1841 or thereabouts, in the midst of the great ‘Land Fever’, two squatters drove cattle up from the south, forded the Richmond at a place they called Cassino (later Casino) and took up 12 000-plus hectares of alluvial river flats, ‘grasses’ and forested hillsides. More cattlemen followed apace, and took up similar acreages. In 1844, on a tributary of the Richmond, Lismore station was established. The tributary was named Wilson’s Creek after the family that first set up there, the matriarch arriving on a raft with a dairy cow and, it is believed, the lantana plants that quickly ran wild and now choke tens of thousands of hectares. Soon all the land was taken and Shorthorns, Herefords and Devons were grazing and growing fat on the flats and low hills flanking the river.

  But what good were fat cattle that brought no more than 10 or 12 shillings a head? Or sheep that sold for a shilling each? Depression had hit the colonies. Following the example of squatters in the south, the very enterprising Clark Irving, who had taken over the lease of Cassino, erected a steam-boiling establishment on his run and he invited all his neighbours to the opening. Irving’s cattle were the first boiled down and averaged 136 kilograms of tallow each, a dividend which a contemporary declared ‘spoke volumes for the fertility of the district’, and arrangements were quickly made for the boiling down of several herds.

  Bordering the stations inside the great curve of the Richmond was a 1600-square-kilometre lowland subtropical rainforest, which the early timber-cutters called the Big Scrub. Mary Bundock, who grew up on the Upper Richmond when it was ‘a beautiful stream of clear water running over clean sand and pebbles, an ideal of beauty and purity not to be surpassed anywhere’, remembered walking ‘for miles’ in the rainforest that abutted the family station and never seeing the sun, ‘except where some great tree had fallen and made a gap in the green roof overhead’.

  The scrub of the Big Scrub was not the undistinguished stuff the word commonly implies, but the Gondwanan opposite. It was hoop pine (Araucaria cunninghamii), red bean (Dysoxylum muelleri), black bean (Castanospermum australe), yellow carabeen (Sloanea woollsii), black and white booyong (Heritiera, which made good barrels for tallow), blue quandong (Elaeocarpus grandis), blackheart sassafras (Atherosperma moschatum), rosewood (Dysoxylum fraserianum), tulipwood (Harpullia pendula),wild quince (Guioa semiglauca), Moreton Bay fig, bangalow and burrawong palms, white cedar (Melia azedarach), and species of walnut, ash, beech, birch, tamarind, fig, almond, alder, muskwood, myrtle, ferns, lilies and orchids. In all, eighty-seven species of trees, seventeen species of shrubs and twenty-eight species of vines. The Big Scrub grew on the rich volcanic soils created 20 million years ago by the volcanic eruptions of Mt Warning to the north. Deep in this jungle, on the richest patches of red loam, pushing up 2 or 3 metres higher than all the other trees, the red tips of their new growth glowing, there grew red cedar (Toona ciliata) – red gold.

  Toona ciliata is a straight-trunked deciduous tree of the eastern coastal rainforests, from Ulladulla south of Sydney to the McIlwraith Range on the Cape York Peninsula. It averages 40 metres and will grow to more than 50 if conditions are ideal. Red cedar is endemic to New Guinea, and parts of Burma, southern China, India and Pakistan. The North American tree of the same name is a different species.These days you will struggle to find a living example of an Australian red cedar outside half a dozen major public gardens. However, dead ones abound. In the Sydney Town Hall, for example: the interior of this mid-nineteenth-century monster, by turns French Second Empire, Italian Renaissance, Jacobean and English Aesthetic in style, swallowed an unknown number of red cedars from the Hawkesbury River stands. As the material of choice among mid-Victorian designers of public buildings, unpainted red cedar turns up in the walls or furnishings of town halls, parliaments, post offices, churches, libraries, courthouses and railway stations built on the eastern seaboard before 1880. Being strong, light, durable, and easily carved and turned, it was put to use in house frames and picture frames, interior panelling in trams and railway carriages, staircases, doors, floors, ceilings, shutters, window sashes, skirting boards, carved mantelpieces, veneers, boats, cigar boxes, fine furniture and coffins. It will very likely be found in any sizeable private house of the same period, including the Sydney masterpieces Elizabeth Bay House, Tusculum and Rockwall, designed by John Verge, who got the cedar for them from his property on the Macleay River. Throughout the colonies, red cedar was the epitome of wealth, status and success, of sturdy civic values, of civilisation itself. Being as well a means of bringing to the new colonies British taste and values, Toona ciliata articulated the whole colonial project.

  The trees were seen in the vicinity of Parramatta soon after the First Fleet arrived, and such was the attack on them, seven years later the Governor prohibited any felling without his permission. Two decades later Governor Macquarie also tried to contain the industry, which by then had spread to the Hawkesbury. But no authority could stop the harvest. The sawyers in the Illawarra were ‘slaughtering away in all directions’, Alexander Harris wrote in the 1830s. Over the next century, from Illawarra to Cape York, almost all the trees were taken.

  Just a year after the first squatters reached Casino, a little brigantine, the Sally, crossed the bar and sailed several kilometres up the Richmond River. As they went, the story goes, the occupants threw biscuits to the Bundjalung Aborigines on the bank, and the Bundjalung threw them back. They hardly needed biscuits: a midden near the mouth of the river at Ballina has been estimated to contain 23 000 tonnes of shells, affording the people who gathered them 4600 tonnes of mollusc meat. Opposite the river’s junction with Pelican Creek, a party of sawyers and their families stepped ashore into the rainforest. They put up rough huts for the women and children, and established a store. Soon there was washing hanging out in the Big Scrub and axes ringing in woodlands.

  They had come north from the Clarence River where the remaining cedar was mainly on the squatters’ stations, so-called ‘located’ Crown land to which the cedar-getters’ £4 licence did not grant legal access. In recent months the Crown Lands Commissioner had been travelling about looking for the ‘runaways . . . thieves and vagabonds’ inhabiting the cedar gullies. As once had a few squatters with similar murky backgrounds, the sawyers looked for new grounds beyond the law’s reach.

  Two rushes thus occurred at the same time. For the squatters, odd stands of cedar on the f
ringes of the Big Scrub were both the perfect timber for their homesteads and a useful cash crop, and the very thought of ruffians making off with it was an outrage. Nor did they take kindly to the cedar-getters’ bullock teams eating grass that the Crown had recently deemed was properly their shorthorns’. Some of them arranged licences for men to do no more than cut the cedar on their runs and leave it to rot on the ground. The historian of the district, Louise Tiffany Daley, has it that the squatters – ‘Gentlemen’, she calls them ironically – rode around the country ‘chasing friendly blacks, nicking the trees to mark the station boundaries, even helping . . . the Commissioner, with his mounted police and his flogger, to track down their outlaw mates’.