The Bush

by Don Watson

  The present forest cannot much resemble the original one. Pine plantations have replaced a lot of it and all the rest is regrowth after clearing and bushfires. There are a few small stands of black gums (E. aggregata) in the Black Forest, but the dominant black trees Gill saw were probably peppermints (E. radiata). The only other concentrations of E. aggregata occur 700 kilometres away on the southern and central tablelands of New South Wales. Once they must have grown in some profusion close to Sydney, because logs of black gum were among the early timber cargoes shipped to London. This has led some local naturalists to wonder if the Macedon black gums are not endemic but introduced, perhaps during the goldrushes. A healthy black gum is a sturdy thing, its trunk clothed in thick dark broken bark, its jutting boughs dark green. They are long-lived and look indestructible, but because there are so few mature trees and even fewer juveniles, they have been classified endangered. A warming climate will not help them. Their best chance of survival might be hybridisation. A recent study found E. aggregata are interbreeding with the silver- and creamy-trunked manna gums (E. viminalis) and candlebarks (E. rubida) that have long been getting together in this way.

  In what remains of the indigenous forest, it is the manna gums and candlebarks, the peppermints and stringybarks (E. obliqua) that dominate. On my clay soils the stringybarks are 30 metres high and straggly: in better conditions a few kilometres away, they are twice as high and imposing. Scattered about are old swamp gums (E. ovata), which don’t need a swamp to thrive and which, in resembling a small blue gum sometimes, and at others a small red gum, and being sometimes scrawny and sometimes stately, seem to sum up the whole protean eucalyptus tribe.

  The Black Forest was burned in the Black Thursday fires of 1851, the Black Friday fires of 1939, and the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983. One of the tracks I walk passes the remains of a burned-out little house: a concrete slab and on it some moss-encrusted carpet, the bricks from a chimney, and on the other side of a dried-out fallen pine tree a discarded rug, children’s toys, beer cans, wine bottles and a doorless refrigerator lying on its back. Hemmed in by gorse are two rusted car bodies, one of them a Vanguard Spacemaster, an English make that in the 1950s won a Redex Trial. When I last looked this one was a fox’s home.

  Eastern grey kangaroos (Macropus giganteus) often gather to nibble at the remains of what might have been a kind of lawn. They are not always grey; mobs often contain two or three individuals of a pale rust colour. They seem to get around in three different groupings, mobs of fifty or more, mobs of twenty, and families of three or four. Every so often there is a solitary male, sometimes old, sometimes injured, sometimes alone for no apparent reason. On evenings late in spring their backs barely rise above the glowing seed heads of the grass, and even though the grass is rye, not kangaroo or Mitchell, it’s easy to think this is a scene from the ages before white settlement: before any kind of human settlement, in fact. They look like small dinosaurs.

  The mobs are bigger when you count the joeys peering from their mother’s pouch or, when they’ve been frightened, lodged headfirst with their legs poking out. When they recline under trees with nonchalant indifference, or lie sprawled to catch the winter sun, kangaroos might be the prototypes of picnickers. Erect, the females have the appearance of profound maternal domesticity: at certain angles to the light the softer tone of their chests and stomachs makes them seem to be wearing aprons. There is a rotary clothesline on the fringe of their favourite paddock, and when they stand nearby there is no avoiding the impression that they have hung the shirts and towels on it. The dominant male of this lot is a muscle-laden monster, 7 feet tall with a tail like a tree trunk and surely weighing 90 kilograms or more. Using that mighty tail to propel him, he moves among the females impudently pawing their tails, sniffing them, then appearing to think on it. Apparently this attention, and a clucking noise he makes, causes the females to release a stream of urine in which he can sense the hormonal compounds and learn where they’re up to in their oestrus cycle.

  The kangaroos are gregarious. The male swamp wallaby, or black wallaby, (Wallabia bicolor) is a solitary thing for all but the months of June and July when a female joins it. They are black behind their ears and russet down their fronts, or sometimes all-over russet and not black at all. Lacking the spring of kangaroos, they flee with their noses almost on the ground, slip under fences rather than leaping over them and thump heavily as they go. Observing the animals’ inability to hop, settlers dug holes by their fences, filled them with water and hoped they’d drown themselves. Swamp wallabies eat bracken, which is poisonous to other animals, and unlike kangaroos and other wallabies that like to graze, they eat shrubs – such as the casaurinas, banksias and a Gravenstein apple tree I planted – and have a special tooth for cutting through the coarse material. They are different in enough ways for experts to classify them as the sole member of the genus Wallabia – all other wallabies and kangaroos being species of Macropus. The local specimen has grown accustomed to my passing in the evening, and provided I keep at least 30 metres distant, watches me go by with my dog. He sits there, skittle-shaped and a bit more than a metre high, the tips of his paws demurely one upon the other level with his navel, as if he might at any moment clear his throat and sing ‘The Last Rose of Summer’.

  The kangaroo mobs graze in the open paddock on the other side of the road, giving the impression that the two fences and 200 metres that separate them from the swamp wallaby are all that has separated the two species in a million or so years of evolution. Roo hunters used to call swamp wallabies stinkers because their flesh has a powerful smell. Seeing them sitting there, alive but still and staring, or hearing them plunging away in the bush, they smell powerfully of loneliness.

  There had been a swamp in my patch of bush, but it dried out in the long drought which showed no sign of ending. Everywhere there were fallen trees and every week there seemed to be another one down. The trunks snapped when they hit the ground and spewed their papery insides, the powdery clay clinging to their roots. The bush sets a slovenly example to the people who dwell in it. Chaos, not form and order, draws us in. The stillness and silence is at the same time disquieting and seductive. You can understand the impulse to clear and burn.

  Little except gorse grew on the forest floor, and occasional purple sarsaparilla, some tender bracken shoots one month, after a couple of showers, an orchid or two. No heath or clematis, no moss or lichen; even the wattles were thinly spread. Wood ducks sat in the trees and with sorrowful honks seemed to ask where their swamp had gone. Like blackberries, gorse was introduced as a hedge plant, and like blackberries it outstrips native plants and pasture and adds to the fire hazard. The seeds are prodigious in number and can lie dormant for seventy-five years. Gorse has taken hold wherever there is moisture or there used to be. In many places it can’t be penetrated by human being or kangaroo. But in the absence of any other undergrowth, it’s in the gorse that the wrens and robins flit and call and make their nests.

  On a sunny day, beneath the elegantly curved boughs and airy canopies of the peppermints, the soft, clear, grey light mingles with shadows and even in the midst of feral pines and gorse enchants the degraded bush. Once, after a fortnight of fierce heat, the weakest of cold fronts had passed and the millimetre of rain it yielded was enough to make the trees exhale. The air was thick with eucalyptus and something that smelt like smoke: the smell you get when you throw water on the embers of a campfire.

  Then the weather really broke. This was La Niña. The rain came down in volumes we hadn’t seen for decades. The gorse lengthened stride and took even more of the bush, including the ruins of the house and the Vanguard Spacemaster. Dozens of eucalypts washed out of the ground and revealed the puny root balls on which they had somehow balanced all their lives. Forests of fungi sprouted. Tiny flowering plants popped out of the ground. Bulrushes, like the ones we saw as children, appeared and grew 2 metres in a month or so. Frogs burbled and croaked. Butterflies swarmed. The bracken grew and glistened.
Manna gums and blackwoods sprouted and grew 6 metres in a season. The wood ducks celebrated and bred up multitudes of ducklings. It was a new world.

  Mt Macedon occurs as a kind of afterthought at the end of the Great Dividing Range. The Wurrundjeri called it Geboor, which probably meant ‘the mountain’. The explorers Hume and Hovell named it Mt Wentworth, after William, the Sydney plutocrat. When Thomas Mitchell saw it in 1836 he made a south-eastern detour from his path through Australia Felix and renamed it Macedon, because from the summit – which he reached from the north-west without getting off his horse – he could see Port Phillip. The Phillip of Port Phillip was the unimposing Arthur, first governor of New South Wales, but the name aroused the major’s Hellenism. Phillip II of Macedon came to his mind, and it followed that a hill 50 kilometres away should be Mt Alexander, after Phillip’s celebrated son, and a river in between (now half choked by willows) had to be Campaspe, Alexander’s lover.

  Travelling to Macedon, Mitchell’s men found an English cut-throat razor. They could only presume an Aborigine had dropped it there, but where the Aborigine got it was anybody’s guess. It might have come down from the Murray, after Sturt’s 1828 party, or up from Portland where, as Mitchell was to soon discover, the Hentys were running sheep on the boundless grasslands. It might even have been lost by William Buckley, the convict runaway who lived for thirty years with the Indigenous people of the Otway Ranges.

  Every passing cloud seems to catch on Mt Macedon, a little snow falls near the summit most winters, and in foggy, cool and misty microclimates, forests of mountain and alpine ash, and snow gum woodlands grow. Yet Macedon’s singular presence is misleading: in the variety of soils and vegetation on its slopes the mount is typical of the continent itself. The ash and snow gums of the upper reaches give way to forests of stringybark standing as high as 70 metres, and open woodlands of box, peppermint, manna, candlebark and casuarina. On some slopes there is loam good enough to grow potatoes and raise thoroughbred horses; elsewhere there is only clay.

  ‘Let us regard the forest as a gift . . . to pass as sacred patrimony from generation to generation’, Ferdinand von Mueller wrote in 1879. Some chance. From the beginning, the little mountain was attacked by timber-getters; sheep, cattle, goat and potato farmers; eucalyptus distillers and horticulturalists. It was quarried, blasted, chopped, clear-felled, replanted, burned, invaded by weeds and assailed by English taste. Mt Macedon was remade to satisfy something in the European that needed the picturesque as much as food and drink.

  In 1872 William Ferguson, the newly appointed Victorian Inspector of Forests, was given the task of establishing a state nursery at Macedon. This he did with great assiduousness. He cleared 2.5 hectares of native regrowth – the original forest had already been cleared for milling – and soon had half of them planted with Himalayan and Californian timber trees. The historian Paul Fox tells how, soon after, Ferguson added Mexican varieties and another ‘twenty seven species and varieties of Coniferae’; then, on the approach to his residence, he planted an avenue of ‘firs, pines and cypresses, Queensland and Chilean araucarias, and cedars from India, Mount Atlas and Lebanon’, and on a southern slope a thousand Cupressus lambertiana.

  Near the summit, Ferguson cleared 130 hectares and planted rows of exotic forestry trees, which despite bushfires, wallabies and rabbits, stand there still. Californian redwoods grew so well he looked forward to seeing them towering everywhere in the ‘mountain ranges and cool districts of the colony’; likewise, English and American walnuts, hickories, chestnuts, elms, and so on. He planted cork oaks, deodars, Himalayan spruce, ash, sycamores and tea. After the ‘dismal appearance’ of the indigenous forest they replaced, his plantings, he said, gave ‘great relief to the eye’.

  Gondwanan foliage could grant the same relief. In 1870 William Guilfoyle, principal designer of the Melbourne botanic gardens, took a trip to Mt Warning, the soaring, ‘kingfisher blue’ volcano responsible for the red soils on which the Big Scrub grew. The sublimity of the scene and the beauty and rareness of the surrounding vegetation sent him into raptures. As soon as he had replaced his erstwhile tutor, Ferdinand von Mueller, as director of the gardens, Guilfoyle put his obsession to work. He raided the gullies of the Dandenongs, Otways and Mt Macedon for their ferns, musk, hazels and clematis. The old red gums that von Mueller had tolerated Guilfoyle ripped out and replaced with palms, ferns and ficus from around Mt Warning. The Big Scrub lived on in South Yarra.

  It was the great age of plant migration. From abroad came the rhododendron, hydrangea, and other shrubs delightful for their form and colour, often functional for their shade, and redolent of conquest and adventure. A rose, a cypress hedge, even a snapdragon or agapanthus lent the stamp of civilisation and empire to the humblest garden, road gate or paddock. Should the empire ever fade, these vegetal scrapings from its vast extent would still grow in Australian gardens.

  While Ferguson and Guilfoyle were busy planting, the clearing frenzy continued in the colony’s native bush: the wholesale removal of Gippsland’s ash and blue-gum forests for farms, the ironbark forests of central Victoria for nothing more than their bark; the stands of the Gondwanan remnant myrtle beech (Nothofagus cunninghamii) in the Otway Ranges for little more than firewood and palings, the red gums of the Melville Forest in western Victoria. Ferguson urged the authorities to rein in the felling and burning and ringbarking before everything was lost. And in place of the cleared native species he recommended planting every imaginable exotic conifer, ash, oak and bean tree, and spreading the seed of golden wattles throughout the land.

  Because the exotic species prospered and temperatures were cooler 1000 metres up, Mt Macedon became a sort of Darjeeling for the well-heeled of Melbourne. Unlikely numbers of knights of the realm, judges, professors, governors and company directors took up pieces of the place to enjoy the views, gain relief from Melbourne’s summers, and satisfy the needs of the displaced spirit. It was not a place for dried-out bushmen. Clearing 8 hectares or so and keeping a handful of the more imposing mountain ash, the mount’s new owners built grand houses ringed with lawns, and planted yet more elms, oaks, maples, beeches, lindens, larches, dogwoods, ash, yews, firs and hollies, which lent shade to the summers and colour to the autumns. They locked out the unchanging bush and, in the nature of Wordsworth, ‘sate reclined’ and exalting in the passage of the seasons. With a regular dusting of snow, and even more regular fog, winter looked a little like the winters of Europe, and spring came with daffodils and crocuses bursting from beneath the trees. Glades of rhododendrons mixed with original tree ferns (acceptable to the European aesthetic). Camellias, azaleas; drifts of foxgloves, hellebores, hollyhocks, acanthus, bluebells, periwinkle and ivy bordered spring-fed streams and the native forest. They created ‘Victoria’s Garden of Eden where the works of man and Nature were in complete harmony’. In harmony with it, behind bulwarks against it: they built dry-stone walls 3 or 4 metres high, and on their gates hung names such as Glenrannock, Ballantrae, Duneira.

  My local native-nursery man sells plants that are endemic to this region and nothing else. I need only step outside to see his point. In the space of two or three years, a species of sticky wattle native to East Gippsland (Acacia howittii) has joined the other native ‘foreigners’, Ovens wattle (A. pravissima) and Cootamundra wattle (A. baileyana) in colonising patches of my block. I suspect the nurseryman would not grieve the death of any number of plants he counts as invaders, and I’m on his side.

  Yet I can’t let go of plants which have been as much a part of my landscape as blue gums and blackwoods, and remain no less fixed and vivid in my memory. With my confused and contradictory affections I want the ‘stunning ensemble’ William Guilfoyle created in his botanic gardens. Plane trees and cypresses I can easily do without, but sometimes I want a persimmon and a Florida palm more than I want another acacia or eucalypt, and for that matter I want a salmon gum from the other side of the continent more than a local stringybark. I want the salmon gum for its pinknes
s, the stark elegance of its trunk and branches, and its graceful arcing canopy. It will be in some measure a visual relief among my forest of senescent pensioners, the dull, misshapen stringybarks with their tatty little canopies.

  Stringybarks are not dismal, but nor are they delightful – or functional in the way a tree needs to be in a garden. They litter the ground with their dull incendiary leaves, drop branches at random, and threaten at any moment to fall over on my rhododendrons. They provide neither structure nor shade. They don’t draw the eye. They live in anticipation of a fire. The longer I live here, the stronger grows my desire to clear them. I could replace them with native but not endemic trees that resist fire, such as boobiallas (Myoporum) or silky oaks (Grevillea robusta), or let blackwoods grow in their place, but European oaks and maples will provide more resistance and more shade, more colour, and their leaves, unlike native leaves, will rapidly break down to mulch.

  A fire will come to Mt Macedon one day and burn us all out. People will say we should never have been allowed to live here. Too much fuel, they’ll say. Bloody idiots, they’ll say. Don’t know anything about the bush. I’m inclined to agree. Probably our houses should sit on an acre of lawn or gravel surrounded by curtains of poplars and pistachios, fire-resistant exotics which have slowed, stopped or turned bushfires in recent years. We would not be living in the bush of old, but who does? And even if the surrounding vegetation were nearer to pristine, is it living in the bush to work in the town or the city and spend the evenings in the spa on your entertaining deck? Is it more authentic to spend the weekend astride your ride-on mower, ‘reducing fuel’? It might be best if we cool-burned our blocks each year, if we were required to do it ourselves, or have it done by a fire authority or the stalwarts of Landcare. Were we all to pitch in each year, who can say that our communities would not be enlivened and the national spirit bolstered from the ground up. It might reawaken in all of us the fellow feeling and common purpose that fire has always aroused in Australia’s rural bosom. Mateship plus Indigenous cultural practice sounds like a promising combination. The quality of the air would suffer of course, and nature would be black for a while, but the frontier was always burning, as it was before the Europeans, and burning the bush again could put us in touch with an authentic past, even our authentic selves. In concert with our neighbours we might evolve a mosaic system like the Aborigines’, and in time (a century or two?) find ourselves living in a bush more in keeping with the park-like landscapes described in the earliest European accounts. Alas, very likely there is far too much bush to burn. We should think about going back to the city.