The Memory Tree

by Jennifer Scoullar

  Kate yelled out, but Munro held up his hand to silence her. ‘You mean donations in addition to those listed on the official register?’ He straightened his shirt sleeves, looking like he could barely believe his luck. Hellgrun, beside him, was still and watchful.

  ‘I’m not talking about political donations,’ said Fraser. ‘I’m talking about personal bribes.’

  A rising chatter was travelling through the studio audience. ‘Go on,’ said Munro.

  ‘My company, Costain Constructions, renovated Kate’s house here in Hobart, and built her holiday home on Freycinet Peninsula, along with apartments for her family in Sydney and on the Gold Coast. All at a fraction of their true cost.’

  Kate stood up. ‘That’s a lie! Fraser, what are you doing?’

  Fraser gave her an apologetic smile. ‘Ridding my life of secrets.’ His voice grew louder, loud enough to overcome Kate’s protests. ‘In return, the Premier set peppercorn royalty payments for Burns Timber to log state forests and legislated to remove planning restrictions on private ones. There’s more. I won’t go into everything now.’

  ‘How dare you!’ Kate’s voice shook with fury.

  Fraser looked genuinely remorseful. ‘I’m sorry, my dear, but it’s over.’

  Munro licked his lips. ‘These are extraordinary claims. Will you prove them?’

  Fraser gestured to the envelope. ‘It’s all there. Evidence that our Premier is keeping two sets of books. Evidence also that she received gifts and hospitality from Pierpont Casino by way of accommodation, meals and gambling money. In return, she granted the Pierpont Consortium a gratis thirty-year gaming monopoly. She ignored breaches of the Responsible Gambling Code, and allowed the casino to increase gaming tables and poker machines numbers without due process.’

  ‘An army of lawyers will be working as we speak,’ said Kate, threat dripping from each word, ‘to ensure these slanderous allegations are not repeated.’

  Fraser shrugged. ‘Truth is a defence, Kate.’

  ‘For the time being I’d ask you, Fraser Abbott, to confine your comments to ones that won’t give our legal department a heart attack,’ said a concerned looking Munro. ‘If I may, though, I’d very much like to examine the evidence for these claims.’

  Fraser rose to his feet, glass of water in one hand, envelope in the other. He gave Kate a wide berth, as if he thought she might snatch the documents from him. Then he dropped the envelope on the desk in front of Munro. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I don’t want to upset Kate any further. We’ve been friends for a lifetime and are equally guilty of treating this state like a magic pudding.’ He looked straight at the camera and raised his glass. ‘Matthew, this one’s for you, son.’

  With that, Fraser sculled his water and left the set. Audience and panel alike looked shell-shocked. Kate tried valiantly to defend herself, but it was no use. She was mortally wounded and Hellgrun tasted blood in the water. He went in for the kill with uncharacteristic brutality.

  Drake scrubbed his hands over his eyes, as if he couldn’t bear to watch. ‘I don’t believe it. I actually feel sorry for my mother.’ Penny and Matt murmured assent. The woman was withering before their eyes. ‘I’d better get down to Hobart,’ said Drake. ‘See how my parents are doing.’ He stood to leave.

  Penny hugged him goodbye. Matt didn’t know what to say so he didn’t say anything. Drake turned at the door and caught Matt’s gaze. ‘Your dad did a brave thing, my friend. I hope Mum survives his sudden attack of courage.’

  Matt remained on the couch as Drake left, too stunned to recognise at first what he was feeling. He struggled to admit it, but the improbable certainty grew stronger by the second. It was pride. Pride in his father. It hurled him back in time, back to a childhood when that kind of emotion was a common feeling. It smashed through a bricked-off corner of his mind, contradicted his carefully constructed picture of Fraser.

  Long forgotten film clips of his family were now playing. They made his insides tremble. Mum and his sisters, him and his dad. A wide-screen warmth embraced them all. His father’s hand on his shoulder, echoes of whispered well dones. The taste of salt as they sailed Kemp Cove’s black waters. Then tragedy. Fraser slumped in a chair or working nonstop, day after day, month after month. His impenetrable detachment. But what sort of witness is a boy? Matt saw now that grief had crushed his father, left him helpless to respond to the sorrow-stricken accusing child that was his son. His eyes filled with unexpected tears and he knuckled them away.

  Penny sat down beside him and Matt gave her a hollow smile. ‘So Fraser really is dying. I didn’t believe him.’

  She took his hand as tears streamed from his eyes. He wrapped his arms around his wife and rocked back and forth, back and forth. Penny held him tight, like she would a child, while he wept.

  Later, they sat on the verandah with drinks in hand, watching a new moon sail over Binburra’s mountains. ‘I know Sarah stayed here overnight,’ said Penny.

  Oh. He burned with shame. ‘I didn’t want you to think …’

  ‘Did something happen between you and Sarah that I should know about?’

  Matt had learned his lesson. He told her everything. He told her about the wine and the music and Sarah’s little striptease. He told her about falling asleep on the couch and waking to find Sarah and Theo gone. He told her about the chase in the dark, and the kiss and the flirty texts.

  Penny listened quietly. When he finished, silence yawned between them, broken only by the night-time chorus of frogs in the dam. Matt wasn’t sure how long they sat like that – it felt like hours.

  ‘This has certainly been a night of surprises,’ Penny said at last. She held his gaze, eyes drilling into him. ‘Swear to me there’s nothing more. That you’re not holding things back this time.’

  ‘I swear.’ His voice rang with truth, and he felt suddenly lighter, freer, younger.

  Penny gulped down a big breath. ‘Then I believe you.’ A slight smile softened the lines of her serious face. ‘Not even you could make up that crazy story.’

  Matt felt like singing. He reached for her hand but she moved it away. ‘Not yet Matt. Give me time.’

  Chapter 32

  Pallawarra

  Dawn – a pale pink smudge in the sky over Tuggerah’s jagged cliffs. Local tribes are camping in the tangled temperate jungle below, feasting on the forest’s seasonal bounty. Nectar-filled myrtle oranges. Tree fern hearts, good for roasting. Dried manna sap drops, good for satisfying a sweet tooth. And ice-cold creeks, good for escaping the mid-summer heat.

  People abandon the valley at the first tang of smoke. They join an assortment of animals marching to the rocky southern ridge tops where fire can’t follow. Wallabies and wombats. Devils scuttle past. A wary thylacine and her mate follow them up the cliff track, maintaining their distance. Sleepy possums brave the day to treetop their way to safety. Steady streams of birds fly ahead of the haze, higher and higher, until they emerge from the cauldron and vanish above the escarpment. A woman and child pause to look back down the valley. The sky darkens with unnatural storm clouds, an eerie roar begins and they are glad they acted quickly. Fire advances faster than they can run.

  But the forest can’t flee. Soft-foliaged southern sassafras and beech wither in the fierce north winds, before the flames even begin to lick at their leaves. Only the mighty mountain ash, Eucalyptus regnans, stands firm before the blast. Four hundred years. Four hundred years since the last great burning. Four hundred years of paradise for the cool rainforest understorey. It has flourished in the long absence of fire, reclaiming its ancient origins, reclaiming ancestral Gondwanaland dominance over the Tuggerah. Here and there, great pillars of trees soar a hundred metres high. All of an age, a great age. And now, nearing death, they prepare for life.

  High in the open canopy of sickle-shaped leaves, clusters of white blossom lose their stamens to the whipping winds. Stamens, not petals, millions of fine flying filaments like incongruous flurries of snow. For the multitude of ripe gumnu
ts that set seed last year, or the year before, or the year before that repeating, their time has finally come.

  On the forest floor things are heating up. Falling leaves and twigs and bark have pattered down here, day and night, century after long century. The vast accumulation of leaf litter feeds the fire racing through the valley. It pauses now and then, lingers on logs, incinerates arching fern fronds and starbursts of richea, engulfs defenceless sassafras and myrtle. But try as it might, it can’t quite reach the mountain ash crown. Frustrated fireballs fling themselves skywards, like great, dazzling Catherine wheels. But the trunks are so smooth and tall, bare of branches until the very top. There is no foothold for the flames.

  Blistering winds howl in disappointment. Never mind – an entire rainforest is theirs for the taking. Sap simmers and boils. A true inferno now, creating its own weather. A pyrocumulus cloud thunders over the forest, spawning a towering vortex of super-heated air. It rips long ribbons of bark from trunks, sets them ablaze, hurls them aloft like flares. Gumnuts crackle and pop, releasing millions of seeds into updrafts pungent with the smell of smoke and seared eucalyptus. Thousands of firebrands bombard the canopy. Eventually victory is theirs. The crowns of the mountain ash explode and the doomed giants of the Tuggerah burn like titanic torches in this day turned to night.

  Hours pass. The front moves on. The sky clears. A cool change comes, the kind so beloved of the rainforest. But the rainforest is gone, replaced by a landscape of black spires and white earth. For the first time in centuries, sunlight touches the ground. A steady rain of seeds drifts down to rest in the fertile ash bed. No ants to plunder them. No understorey plants to challenge them. No fungus to invade them. Two million seedlings per hectare germinate in just a few days. Somewhere in this crush of shoots is Pallawarra. He grows swiftly, opening to the sun above the river. His peers grow too. They rise around their dead parents’ trunks as thick and straight as a crop of young corn.

  Fifty years pass. Adolescent Pallawarra is in furious good health. Only twenty mountain ash remain in this hectare of forest. Twenty from two million. From the outset, Pallawarra is blessed with good fortune – good soil, good light, good genes. He outstrips his companions, two metres a year, stealing their sun. Beneath his emergent crown, the rainforest stages a comeback, wet and green and mossy, dappled once more with luminous fungi. People visit this place in summer and claim Pallawarra, call him countryman.

  Two centuries pass. Pallawarra is a mature tree. Grand. There is no forest commission or farmer to cut him down. Europeans barely dream of this far-flung forest. But there is a consensus of creatures who declare him top-end real estate, that most prized property of all – a hollow-bearer. For the first century of his life, Pallawarra was too healthy for hollows, his bark too smooth and unblemished. But ageing skin loses resilience. Shedding lower branches cause self-inflicted wounds. Bacteria and fungi invade the breach. Termites march in through splinters of a lightning strike. Beetles and borers launch direct assaults on his trunk. Wind and rain and heat batter his bark, and here comes the rot. An army of excavators take advantage of weakened wood, expanding cavities with teeth and beaks and claws. Soon, mighty Pallawarra provides high-rise apartment living for a multitude of forest dwellers: parrots and possums, spiders, skinks and tiger snakes, owls and bats and quolls. Composting bacteria do their work, generating warmth, centrally heating the hollows. Thylacines den beneath his buttressed roots. A pair of wedge-tailed eagles take the penthouse suite. Their eyrie commands a matchless view of the resurgent rainforest. Two pygmy possums scrap for the same nest, scattering swarms of swallowtails. Beautiful butterfly orchids and emerald shield ferns decorate his mossy branches as they rise inexorably towards the sky. Pallawarra is no longer just a tree. He is a place, a world.

  * * *

  Five centuries pass. ‘That big bastard,’ says a man from Hobart. A day much like any other for the man, but not for Pallawarra. Today his good fortune has run out.

  Hundreds of cards and posies of flowers ringed Pallawarra. A second man stepped back to look at a trunk scarred with dates and names, hearts and initials. Some could not be read, for time had dulled the blade’s course. Their meaning, like the carvings themselves, forever lost. He picked up some of the cards. ‘Crikey, these cards are all for the tree. Prayers, kids’ poems, everything. Even curses.’ He picked up an ornate scroll.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ said the first man.

  The second man read the scroll:

  ‘Demeter’s Curse –

  Those who harm the sacred tree,

  By hunger plagued will ever be,

  A hunger nought can satisfy.

  They sell their souls to find relief,

  Abandon honour and belief,

  Consuming their own flesh – they die.’

  ‘Here’s another,’ he said in a worried voice. ‘Let he who harms this tree be doomed. May evil return to its source tenfold.’

  ‘Superstitious claptrap,’ said the first man. ‘Come on. We’ve got direct orders from the Premier’s department.’ He tossed the scroll, shovelled the offerings into the mud and sized up the tree. Too large for any harvester, this one. ‘It’ll be a single rider, if they can even load it on the truck. You don’t see many of them anymore.’

  A few years ago they’d have put aside their dozers and chainsaws and used explosives. But everything had to be done by the book these days. So instead, the men wielded Stihl 880 Magnums, the most powerful production chainsaws in the world. Their lethal fifty-inch cutting bars gleamed in the sun.

  The first man started the saw, picked the lay, dropped his helmet visor and angled into Pallawarra’s trunk. The saw chewed through outer bark, Pallawarra’s thin skin. Then through inner bark, his tender phloem, transporting photosynthesised food down from the canopy to nourish his roots. The pulsing saw roared and muttered, roared and muttered. It severed vital cambium tissue, the green sheath of cells which generated new shoots, tirelessly healing wounds, century after century. Not this time.

  The man braced his back and shifted his feet. The blade struck sapwood, jerking and screeching, cutting the lifeline to Pallawarra’s high crown. His leaves still transpired, though nothing would replenish them now. Tree-dwellers huddled deep in hollows that offered no sanctuary. The motor howled as it hit the dark heartwood at Pallawarra’s core. Sawdust fanned a perfect arc in air thick with fumes. A second saw screamed to life. It sliced through a wind shake, a canopy-high crack between Pallawarra’s concentric growth rings, caused by centuries of straining against the weather. Trapped rainwater streamed from the wound, soaking the second man. ‘The bugger’s full of rot,’ he said. ‘Good for nothing but woodchips.’ The thousands of tree creatures cowered deeper in their homes.

  A massive wedge of wood was gone from the belly of the tree. The men went in for the kill from the back, slicing towards the gaping, weeping hole in his trunk. Their chainsaws reached a roaring climax. Pallawarra struggled to stand on one narrow hinge of wood. He lost balance. Splintering timber cracked like rifle shots in the still air. The men stood back. The bush held its breath, and Pallawarra toppled in slow motion. Sticks and leaves and gumnuts rained from the sky like nuclear fallout. In a rush of branches, in a blink of time, with a deafening roar, Pallawarra crashed to the ground. The earth trembled at his passing. For a moment, even the men were impressed.

  Then the first man snorted and looked around. ‘So much for the curse.’

  It had been half an hour since he first set eyes on Pallawarra.

  ‘How about lunch,’ he said. ‘I’m starving.’

  ‘Me too,’ said the second man. ‘I could eat a horse.’

  Then they were gone. Hours passed. Butcherbird sang a requiem. Evening closed in. Deep underground, disembodied roots remained on duty, feeding nutrient-rich fluid skywards. In vain, they sought their centuries-old connection with their crown. And in the silent forest, blood-red sap drip, drip, dripped from Pallawarra’s shattered core.

  Chapter 33
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  Matt sat with Penny and Fraser in the dining room at Canterbury Downs. Afternoon sunshine streamed in the French doors, highlighting the glossy brochures spread out on the table before them.

  ‘That unfortunate tree business,’ said Fraser. ‘That was Kate settling the score. I want to make it up to you.’

  Matt and Penny had been devastated by Pallawarra’s passing, along with the rest of Hills End. Such an iconic part of the town’s history, central to so many stories, connecting so many families. And it wasn’t just locals who mourned him. Pallawarra had become a symbol of the natural world throughout Tasmania and beyond, beloved of children and adults alike. If the Government’s election campaign was in trouble beforehand, Pallawarra’s demise hammered the final nail into its coffin.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ said Penny, crying and smiling all at once.

  Matt couldn’t believe it either. He took the glossy brochure his father handed him. A photo of Pallawarra in his prime graced the cover. The Pallawarra Project: Challenging current principles of forest management.

  ‘You wrote this?’ asked Matt.

  ‘My marketing department did, yes,’ said Fraser. ‘What do you think?’

  Matt read the first paragraph.

  This visionary project aims to demonstrate the true value of our state forests by showcasing products shaped from a single tree. Fifty specialty timber workers will create pieces ranging from musical instruments and sculptures to fine furniture. Everything will be used, right down to the branches, leaves and gumnuts. An iconic, centuries-old Eucalyptus regnans, mistakenly felled in the Tuggerah forest, has been selected to provide the materials. Burns Timber released the tree – affectionately known to Tasmanians as Pallawarra – into the care of local sawmiller and project administrator Ken Murphy, who will be operating under the guidance of the Tasmanian Timber Design School. Their challenge is to increase the value of a tree destined for the woodchip pile by 1000 percent. The Pallawarra Project aims to show how wasteful woodchipping is, and demonstrate the enormous potential for industry in downstream processing of our forest resources.