Each time the mural was painted over or slashed, the gallery replaced it. But on June 29, 2015, following Pride weekend, the mural was set on fire, which put the entire building at risk. A celebration of the mural and a protest over its destruction was held in Bryant Street two days after the fire. At least two hundred people turned up. A group of women did a traditional Aztec dance. For peace, they said.
Virginia and I went on a belated honeymoon a few months later and headed south to New Orleans. When Hurricane Katrina hit that city in 2005 the turmoil in the Gulf of Mexico led to a revelation: a bald cypress forest that had been submerged for more than fifty thousand years. The wood, when cut, still smelled of cypress sap and when we visited the Honey Island Swamp in Louisiana we smelled that same scent. Rust-coloured fronds of cypress in autumn swayed overhead as we moved through the waterways in our small boat. Cypress can live for more than a thousand years and, while they can’t live permanently in water, they can tolerate it for long periods. As we looked into the swamp we saw knotted stumps sitting above the waterline. They look much like the aerial roots of mangroves but bigger and knobblier, and are consequently known as ‘knees’. It used to be thought these knees provided oxygen when the swamps were in flood, but now scientists assume they work as a form of structural support, along with the buttress bases on the trunks. The buttresses, the knees and a strong, intertwined root system allow bald cypress to resist strong winds—which is lucky, as they’ve been hit with plenty of those.
In 2017 the states along the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico were struck by some seventeen hurricanes, the most deadly of which were Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Harvey. Category 5 hurricanes formed an orderly queue in the North Atlantic before taking turns to slam into Cuba, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and Florida. It was one of the deadliest hurricane seasons on record and certainly the most expensive. (These words come up a lot: worst, hottest, wettest, dryest, coldest.) The hurricanes prompted the then mayor of Miami, Republican Tomás Regalado, to say that it was time ‘that the President and the E.P.A. and whoever makes decisions needs to talk about climate change’. A hard call in a state where the then governor, Rick Scott, also a Republican, had instructed state workers not even to use the term. State employees were supposed to speak instead of ‘nuisance flooding’. Call it what you like. Being tricksy with language isn’t going to change what is happening now, and what will happen next.
Although tolerant of water, bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) don’t like salt, and when we visited wetlands in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, most of the cypress had died: poisoned slowly after navigation channels were dug in the eighteenth century to join Lake Pontchartrain to the Mississippi. The channels are rarely used these days and have slowly fallen into disuse, but they have continued to contribute to regular flooding.
After Louisiana we headed to Miami to drive down the Florida Keys—islands so narrow that in parts they were nothing but a sandbank lined with feral iguanas. We were heading down to see Ernest Hemingway’s six-toed cats, which proved to have, as advertised, six toes. We squinted south in hopes of seeing Cuba. And because it was our honeymoon, there was an evening where we sat by the water at Islamorada and looked across to the floating green fields—sometimes described as rivers of grass—of the Everglades National Park.
At the end of that month the New Yorker published an article by Elizabeth Kolbert. ‘The same features that now make South Florida so vulnerable—its flatness, its high water table, its heavy rains—are the features that brought the Everglades into being,’ she wrote. It’s not so much a wetland as a slow-moving river system that once spread out over three million hectares. Now one in every three Floridians relies on it for fresh water. The area is home to seventy-three endangered species including the American alligator, the Florida panther and the manatee, though I suppose they weren’t endangered back in 1845 when the embryonic state of Florida began to drain it. Now the water is becoming salty, the sawgrass is in retreat and mangroves are moving in. As of December 12, 2018 the Trump administration had unveiled a plan to weaken rules intended to protect the wetlands and streams nationwide from pesticide runoff, imperilling this area further.
Endless media reports about the death of the region do not prepare you for the vibrancy and beauty of this vanishing place. We drove up to Miami Beach and that too was more lovely and strange than I’d been prepared for. And even more expensive—it’s hard to exaggerate how much money is dug into these thirty-nine square kilometres, in real estate alone. A penthouse on Miami Beach can cost you 35 million dollars. We rode bikes from the mix of natural and human-made islands that make up Miami Beach across to Miami itself, then back again, through water that was spilling over gutters and onto roads and footpaths.
Sunny-day flooding occurs when salt water rises up through the limestone that underpins most of South Florida. It’s most likely to happen at high tide. Half a billion dollars has been spent in recent years in an attempt to alleviate the problem. Footpaths have been elevated, pumps installed… Stopgap stuff. These aren’t long-term solutions.
On one of our nights there we walked along the Miami Boardwalk alongside hundreds of feral beach cats. The cat colony dates to the early 1900s, when the city’s first mayor shipped them in to deal with the rats. Soon, in a scenario wearily familiar to Australians, the rats were gone but the cats stayed. And multiplied. We were walking down to eat at the famous Joe’s Stone Crab, a restaurant that sits on Miami Beach’s southernmost point. Going there is a step into the proverbial Hot Tub Time Machine where you’re whisked back to a heyday that never existed. You wouldn’t be surprised to see a young Frank Sinatra sitting at the bar. You order martinis. Shaken, stirred; dry and dirty. ‘I feel sometimes like we’re in Normandy in 1944,’ said Stephen Sawitz, the fourth-generation owner of the restaurant, when asked about the frequency of the flooding. ‘Where is the invasion going to come? Calais? Omaha Beach?’
Kolbert’s article talked about the irreversible decline of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. A segment of the sheet, known as the Amundsen Sea sector, contains enough water to raise global sea levels by more than a metre and to trigger the melting of other parts of the ice sheet, which would add three more metres. This has happened before, she points out, twenty thousand years ago, at which point so much more water was frozen that sea levels were almost 120 metres lower than they are today and Miami Beach sat twenty-five kilometres off the Atlantic coast.
Beginning around 12,500 BC, during an event known as meltwater pulse 1A, sea levels rose by roughly fifty feet in three or four centuries, a rate of more than a foot per decade. Meltwater pulse 1A, along with pulses 1B, 1C, and 1D, was, most probably, the result of ice-sheet collapse. One after another, the enormous glaciers disintegrated and dumped their contents into the oceans. It’s been speculated—though the evidence is sketchy—that a sudden flooding of the Black Sea toward the end of meltwater pulse 1C, around seventy-five hundred years ago, inspired the deluge story in Genesis.
These floods pulsed on for thousands of years. Closer to my home town of Melbourne, Port Phillip Bay was a grassy plain until only a thousand years ago and the people who lived there, the Boon Wurrung, still remember the sudden influx of seawater. The deluge took only a matter of days but it triggered long-term crisis and chaos.
The daily high-water mark in the Miami area has been rising at the rate of almost 2.5 centimetres a year, nearly ten times the rate of average global sea-level rise.3 Storms and associated heavy rainfall are increasing. The attempts to drain the Everglades and associated engineering works have made things worse. At the risk of oversimplifying things, it’s fair to say that wetlands act as a sponge—absorbing and contracting as needed, as varying amounts of water move through the system—and when they can’t do that, you get floods. The region may have less than half a century before it goes under.
*
Before white settlement Melbourne was also a watery place, with expanses of swampland alongside grasslands and open forests.
It’s no Everglades, but the CBD of my home town sits on top of a water catchment the size of about 150 football fields. Elizabeth Stream (also known as Townend Creek, Williams Creek and Enscoe) once ran through a valley, which became known as Elizabeth Street. That street became a drain as the vegetation that fringed the margins of streams was stripped away. It turned the natural beauty of the Elizabeth Street valley into what one observer described as ‘a brawling impassable torrent in winter and snake-haunted gully in summer’.4 A series of stepping stones that were the remnants of volcanic eruptions some 800,000 years ago formed a natural crossing of the Yarra at what we now know as Queens Bridge, and this natural bridge was known to early settlers as the Falls. It was the Falls that had determined the site for the city’s foundation: they formed a barrier between the brackish tidal water downstream and the fresh water upstream. Water moving down the river and over the Falls had carved a saltwater basin below them large enough for ships to dock and turn. But the boats couldn’t pass the natural barrier and above the Falls punts were used.
‘In the earliest days of Melbourne’s settlement, as in the period before Europeans arrived, people crossed the river on much the same line as Queens Bridge now lies. But what kept their feet dry then was not a bridge but a ledge of rock that spanned the river.’5 William Buckley crossed there in 1803, decades before Melbourne existed, on the run from the convict colony that existed briefly at Sullivan Bay in Sorrento. The Falls were finally removed in the 1880s during the construction of Queens Bridge—at which point the salt water moved up as far as Dights Falls and poisoned the city’s water supply.
So much engineering has gone into shifting Melbourne’s waterways, into excavating canals, rerouting rivers and building freeways that float above drains that were once chains of ponds. There is no going back to the landscape that was once here but—despite concerted effort—the waterways that fed into Elizabeth Stream have not been totally erased: they’ve just been driven deep underground. The watery places that snake and seep around and through this place we now call Melbourne are still with us; as they are still with those who live in Florida, and in the swathes of San Francisco that have been built—sometimes using rubble from the 1906 earthquake—on what were once coastal sand dunes. Our home in the Mission was reclaimed wetland built over the Mission Creek: long submerged, though it still bursts out from time to time, sending water rushing into the doorways of the businesses along Folsom and driving the homeless from their tents.
The eighteen months after our return to Australia were not made easier by the endless debates about our right to marry, which seemed to devolve into the right of LGBTQI teachers to teach and the right of bakers to refuse the supply of wedding cakes. My daily postings of #treeoftheday, always a salve, had not offset the creeping distress caused by the ‘debate’ around equal marriage. I had found my still point in this turning world—my marriage—only to have it attacked. I found having my private life talked about so publicly in this fashion quite excruciating. There were about a million of us directly affected by the debate. As a middle-class white woman I was, perhaps, naive or entitled or both. I found politicians’ concern to monitor their citizens’ sexual and emotional lives perplexing. For the most part it was white, older men insisting that it was their job to monitor and manage our lives for us. We were to be told WHAT TO DO. We were to be told WHO WE ARE. That we were instructed in these things by politicians incapable of developing a sustainable energy policy, or any other legislation that might help Australia and the world face the threat of climate change, further eroded my respect for them.
On December 10, 2016 our Australian friends, frustrated and saddened by the government’s ongoing refusal to allow our right to marry (and their right to party) threw us a surprise wedding. One minute Virginia and I were walking through the streets of Fitzroy to dinner with a couple of friends on a Saturday night, the next minute we were in the midst of a group of people that divided around us so we were effectively walking down an aisle. It was extraordinary how long it took me to get what was going on. Why was there a hot pink laser-cut perspex sign hanging from the roof saying Ginny & Soph? Was it a coincidence that Matt, who loves pink and owns a laser cutter, was filming us? Why were most of the small children I knew throwing confetti at me and looking so excited? What were my mother, old school friends, dear new friends, and our neighbours doing drinking together in a bar on a random Saturday night? Why were all these people staring at us, cheering, smiling and crying, dressed in party finery? What strange coincidence was this that our friend Carolyn, who is a cake-making genius, stood next to a two-tiered coconut shag cake decorated with grevillea? Then we got it, burst into tears and cried for approximately the next five hours.
On November 15, 2017 our marriage was finally recognised. It had been a hard few months. Thousands of us—young and old, and by no means all queer—congregated around Trades Hall in Lygon Street. The line to get into the party went for several blocks. Some of us shook the then opposition leader Bill Shorten’s hand before moving on to the more serious business of drinking, hugging and dancing. It was sweaty, hot and, by my increasingly staid and middle-aged standards, wild. Clothing was removed. Strangers were pushed together into a mob that jumped up and down on the spot singing. It was a joyous, riotous, primal scream of FUCK YOU to a government that chose to throw the LGBTQI community, along with millennials, new immigrants, refugees and the entire planet, to the dogs for the purposes of power and profit.
Earlier that day, the day that the postal vote on equal marriage was counted, Virginia was working in San Francisco and I was walking through the Carlton Gardens on my way to the forecourt at the State Library of Victoria where the crowds were gathering. Virginia called me and we were both surprised by how emotional we were feeling. What if the vote didn’t go our way? I arrived at the library forecourt and found friends standing near the statue of Governor La Trobe and his ridiculous hat. At 10 a.m. the Australian Statistician, David Kalisch, slowly, diligently, took us through the results. ‘It’s probably the only time millions of Australians will gather to hear from the Australian Statistician,’ he said, and it’s fair to say that David was enjoying his moment in the sun. He talked for a few minutes longer than perhaps the agonised crowd found ideal. I struggled to hear him through the distortion of the speakers.
Seventy-nine point five per cent of the eligible population had voted. I heard that. A hush descended that made what followed clearer still. ‘Yes responses—7,817,247, representing 61.6 per cent of clear responses. That’s 61.6 per cent of clear responses were yes.’
Waldo may have been our first celebrant; David was our last. I do. We did. Married. Yes.
____________________
1 ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion, p. 84.
2 ‘Gentrification Spreads an Upheaval in San Francisco’s Mission District’, Carol Pogash, New York Times, May 22, 2015.
3 ‘Letter from Florida: The Siege of Miami’ Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker, December 21 & 28, 2015.
4 The Place for a Village, Gary Presland, Museum Victoria Publishing, 2008, p. 87.
5 Presland, p. 19.
GIANT SEQUOIA
(Sequoiadendron giganteum)
The branches beneath the wound, no matter how situated, seem to be excited, like a colony of bees that have lost their queen, and become anxious to repair the damage.
JOHN MUIR
GIANT sequoia are among the world’s oldest trees. They lived with the Mono and the Washoe people for millennia. They witnessed the arrival of the Spanish and then settler Americans who’d travelled across the continent in the early nineteenth century. They were there when California became a state (1850) and the land they’d taken root in became a national park (1890). Forty-five different American presidents have officiated on their watch, imposing their various views regarding the logging of the giant sequoia’s kin. They’re too tall to see to the top of; far too wide to hug; much bigger than blue whales.
I tell you all this but it doesn’t convey their impact. I struggle to think what would. When I walked through a grove of them tears streamed down my face. I found myself thinking, I would lay down my life for you, then left the need for language behind. Is this why they’re so hard to write about?
Richard Powers’ Booker-shortlisted novel The Overstory is one of the few things I’ve read that begins to convey how being in the presence of giant sequoia is like being in the presence of qualities Christianity ascribes to God. There are individual giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) still living that are older than Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism. If one of these trees started a religion, that is the religion I would join. They have such presence that as you walk among them you find yourself imagining they might uproot themselves and walk to higher, more expansive ground. They make anything seem possible.
But it’s not.
Redwood’s early relatives appeared in fossils that date back 100 million years and spread from Northern Mexico and the Canadian Arctic to England. During the late Miocene, some 10 to 20 million years ago, the closest direct ancestor of the giant sequoia lived in what is now southern Idaho and western Nevada. As the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range continued its uplift and the climate became drier, the giants’ range shrank. Today, the last remaining sequoias are limited to seventy-five groves scattered along a narrow belt of the western Sierra Nevada.1 There are multiple challenges for the giant sequoia. Temperatures are now too high for them, even at higher altitudes. Once considered drought resistant, they have begun to die during times of drought. They have only 144 square kilometres to call their own and that area is broken up into scattered groves. This fragmentation is one of the greatest threats to old trees and the ecosystems they support. It leaves them far more vulnerable to disease, the vagaries of weather and fire. The size of giant sequoia also presents them with problems. A small area can only support so many giants, but they have no new habitat to expand into. According to biologist David Lindenmayer and his colleagues, large old trees are predicted to disappear from California, Costa Rica and Spain within ninety to 180 years. In southeastern Australia we’ll have lost more than ninety-eight per cent of our large old trees within fifty to a hundred years. That includes Eucalyptus regnans, better known as mountain ash, the earth’s tallest flowering plant. Brazil’s fragmented rainforests have already lost half their original large trees.2
City of Trees Page 2
