City of Trees

by Sophie Cunningham

  Eucalyptus are largely native to Australia, though some are found in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea and one species is native to the Philippines. These days, thanks to enthusiastic marketing, they’re found all over the world—but they are only a handful of the more than 388 different species of tree managed by the City of Melbourne.

  What trees should be planted in our streets? Since the 1970s an increasing number of Melbourne’s home gardeners have been planting trees native to their area but councils are not necessarily following suit. Lorikeets, reaping the rewards of changing trends, have reappeared in Melbourne after decades of absence but the opportunity to replant Swanston Street Walk with native trees was rejected by the Melbourne City Council as recently as 1992.2

  There is no disputing that there is a lot to take into account when street trees are chosen. Do their roots cause damage? Do the birds and mammals they attract cause damage? Do their limbs drop on unsuspecting passers by (river red gum are notorious for such behaviour)? Will they cause problems with power lines? There are also heritage issues, which can raise even tricker questions. If a tree’s job is to evoke history, whose history should it be representing? What heritage is being preserved when we plant, say, a London plane tree?

  The most commonly planted trees include iconic elms (Ulmus procera, Ulmus × hollandica), plane trees (Platanus × acerifolia), river red gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis), Melaleucas, lemon-scented gums (Corymbia citriodora), spotted gums (Corymbia maculata) and significant stands of conifers. The slender-needled Casuarina known as sheoak has also found some favour. Plane trees make up most of the trees within our central city, despite the fact that a sizeable percentage of the population suffer distressing asthma and coughing fits triggered by the trichome fibres planes drop in October to December. We also have particularly significant avenues of elms that survived Dutch elm disease after it laid waste to the elms of the northern hemisphere. Whatever your view on our oaks, elms and planes there is no doubt that when such trees flourish they provide wonderful shade.

  If we wanted to hark back to pre-white settlement Melbourne we’d be planting river red gums, yellow box and sheoak. In 1835, at the time of white settlement, Melbourne was a watery place alternating wetland with open forests. At the time, more than 180 bird species were counted within a two-kilometre radius of Melbourne; there were platypus in the creeks and swamps full of frogs; dingoes were common. Swamp wallabies abounded, wombats ambled here and there, emus strolled the open woodlands. Eels wound their way through the waterways and the traps local people used to catch them could still be seen in the creeks.

  When the settlers arrived aggressive clearing began—so aggressive that the first peoples of the area noted a drop in rainfall caused by the loss of trees. As early as 1840, concern was voiced in the press about such rapid deforestation. While the first plantings of street trees in Melbourne didn’t reverse this process, it was a start and the first significant street tree plantings were during the 1850s when Royal Parade (then Sydney Road) was planted with Tasmanian blue gums (Eucalyptus globulus) and radiata pine (Pinus radiata). Mayor Gatehouse planted the first elm tree in Collins Street next to the Melbourne Town Hall in May 1875; the city council initiated a program of systematic street tree planting three years later. Soon afterwards a letter to the editor called for higher tree guards in Carlton due to horses and cows feeding on young elms. Street trees have had a lot to contend with over the years. As well as the cows and the horses there was the issue of poor soil, inadequate drainage, infrequent watering, vandalism, gas contamination, insect infestation and disease.

  By the 1930s Melbourne’s eastern suburbs were characterised by avenues of the native silky oak (Grevillea robusta), elms and planes. St Kilda Road had all these, and added poplars into the mix. In 1936 a tree-planting campaign commemorated the coronation of George VI. Exotics—the poplar, elm, plane and oak—were favoured over native varieties.

  In recent decades another significant factor in the choice of street tree has come into play: climate change. Many of the species of tree we planted a hundred years ago are struggling as they become older and Melbourne becomes hotter and drier—and it’s not only introduced species that are struggling. Since the early days of settlement native trees have had their champions. The first director of Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens and Victoria’s first state botanist was the German-born Ferdinand von Mueller, and his passion for Eucalyptus inspired his life’s work. He was mocked for this, and dubbed Baron Blue Gum, a nickname intended to be unkind. However the blue gum he championed, which once thrived in southeast Australia, is struggling.

  In fact coastal banksia are one of the few species indigenous to Melbourne that are considered to stand a sporting chance as our climate changes. Other trees considered to have a long-term future down south include the already proven Moreton Bay figs and lemon-scented gums, as well as the less common Queensland bottle tree and bunya pine. Disease also threatens an increasing number of trees (myrtle rust and sycamore lace bug are current threats to the Eucalyptus, Corymbia and Platanus genera). Diversity is one way to mitigate the impact of the loss of particular species. Melbourne’s Urban Forest strategy includes a commitment to plant no more than five per cent of one tree species, no more than ten per cent of one genus and no more than twenty per cent of any one family.

  Whatever we plant, we need to get a move on. Within the next ten years a quarter of our current tree population will be at the end of their useful lives (including more than half of the elms) and within twenty years this figure will reach thirty-nine per cent.

  We need our trees—big old trees in particular—for it is they that contribute most dramatically to the city’s canopy cover. Greening the city is one of the significant ways in which a city can mitigate the extreme temperatures that are the result both of a warming climate and the fact that temperatures are often five degrees Celsius higher in our cities, creating what specialists call urban heat islands. We all know what this is like—we have driven to parts of the city where there are no trees, just baking concrete and bitumen and harsh summer sun bouncing off sheets of metal and glass. The temperatures soar above the forecast maximums and stay there. Comparable, really, to playing on centre court at the Australian Open in January.

  Melbourne is not alone in this race to green itself as a way of managing the environmental stresses ahead. Most cities struggle with maintaining, let alone increasing, their canopy as large old trees die. Singapore boasts canopy cover (depending which figures you draw on) of between 29.3 per cent3 and 40 per cent4 but most major cities, like Melbourne, sit at 20 per cent or even lower.

  Projections indicate that by 2050 an extreme heat event in Melbourne alone could kill more than a thousand people in a few days. The City of Melbourne is trying to double its green canopy to forty per cent by 2040.5 Wetlands are also being reintroduced, though that is to manage the city’s water as well as its temperature. Increasingly there is a strategy of using ‘soft’ rather than ‘hard’ methods (like concrete drains) to absorb the water that falls and flows through the Yarra’s catchment area.

  Doubling our canopy is not as easy as it might sound. It’s hard to plant trees at the rate needed to replace those that have died let alone to boost those numbers. Nursing young trees through the difficult early years is also tough—for it is then that they are at the greatest risk of dying and being vandalised. Too often I walk past newly planted trees to see stakes pulled out and sapling branches and trunks snapped. Even if all goes well it can take twenty years for a tree to become large enough to provide a meaningful amount of shade. If we are to meet the 2040 target most Melbourne municipal councils will have to replace trees as they are lost, as well as plant new ones at a rate of approximately three thousand trees per year.6 It’s a significant investment of time and money.

  The interest in a green city goes back to Melbourne’s settler beginnings. In 1854 Governor La Trobe set aside 2500 acres (ten square kilometres) to create Melbourne’s Royal Park. His express inte
nt was that the land be used for recreational purposes and this included the establishment of the Brunswick Cricket Club (1858) and its early use for football (by 1865). Some land was used for grazing (which led to the trampling of native plants) as it was in other parks but, despite this, Royal Park has managed to retain stands of remnant vegetation. It is the only inner Melbourne park to do so. Some of its original wetlands have also been replaced. The Trin Warren Tam-boore wetlands in the northwest corner of Royal Park were built in 2005 for storm drainage and some water purification. The treatment pond has had its banks densely planted with native plants that naturally treat the water.

  Standing there in the glorious dawn, I can, for a moment, imagine what the lands we now know as Melbourne once looked like. Sheoaks shiver in the morning breeze. A ringtail possum curls up in its drey. Yellow New Holland honeyeaters flit through hedges of spiny lignum (one of the species planted for filtering purposes). There are the dark Eurasian coots with their white foreheads, dusky moorhens, purple swamphens (red bills and iridescent dark blue plumage), and so-called Pacific black ducks (brown, with stripes above and below the eye). Australasian grebes pull up aquatic vegetation to build a floating platform, raucous red wattlebirds call from trees, Willie wagtails flutter about for insects and welcome swallows fly a metre above the oval, hawking for insects, while rainbow lorikeets screech in the blossoms overhead.

  ____________________

  1 Tobias Furneaux quoted inGum, Ashley Hay, Duffy & Snellgrove, 2002, p. 21.

  2 Much of the information on the history of street trees in Melbourne is by Andrew May, and can be found online, at the Encyclopedia of Melbourne.

  3 ‘Exploring the green canopy in cities around the world’,senseable.mit.edu

  4 ‘Which is the world’s most biodiverse city?’, Feike De Jong, Guardian, July 3, 2017.

  5 ‘Urban Forest Strategy: Making a great city greener 2012–2032’,melbourne.vic.gov.au/urbanforest

  6 melbourneurbanforestvisual.com.au

  ESCAPE TO ALCATRAZ

  IT’S easy to blame the tech companies for what has been happening in San Francisco. Many of the world’s largest digital corporations are based there or nearby in Silicon Valley: Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Uber and Airbnb. The companies all employ a large number of people and, like most corporations, they can seem insensitive to the culture of the place where they locate their head office. The tech kids arrived looking for work a bit over a decade ago and didn’t win any friends with their combination of well-paid jobs and corporate transport: buses that float through the neighbourhood early in the morning and late at night. The perception created by those blue-lit buses is similar to the fly-in, fly-out vibe of mining towns. I viewed it all with a combination of distress and fatalism that I suspect gave locals the shits: Capitalism, what’re you going to do? I don’t mean to suggest I was indifferent. Just that, short of a revolution, I couldn’t see things changing. At least San Francisco was one of the few places in the US you could talk about revolution.

  The strong anti-development tradition in San Francisco first emerged in the 1960s, when entire neighbourhoods were being bulldozed and freeways were carving off the edges of the city into ghettos. Being anti-development was a good thing then, but these days it’s more problematic—there is such a high level of demand for places to live, not only from the rich but also the middle class and the poor, that resisting all development is no longer an option. Nimbyism is big in San Francisco. It’s big back in my home town too, so I know it when I see it.

  One result of all this contest and contradiction is that living in San Francisco felt, on the one hand, like living in the cradle of digital civilisation, and on the other, it felt like living inside Facebook. Everything fraught. So much noise. The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity. (Yeats again.)

  San Francisco, in short, was a city I felt ambivalent about. A city that, I’m pretty certain, felt ambivalent about me: I was a gentrifier, gauche, a woman who swore a lot, an Australian given to unintentionally smug lectures on the importance of taxation, gun control and health insurance (though never, I promise, coffee). And so I searched for a place I could escape to. There is still plenty of acid in San Francisco so I suppose I could have gone that route but the one I chose was altogether more thrilling. Gardening.

  I was a gardening volunteer on Alcatraz. It’s been more than two years but I’m still signed up for volunteer newsletters and get online invitations to garden in random places around the city and when I do, I want to leap on a plane, don my park services windbreaker and baseball cap and head back over. I miss the Rock (not to be confused with The Rock). I miss it a lot.

  I learned about the possibility of volunteering there when visiting Ai Weiwei’s extraordinary installations in the old laundry quarters in early 2015: massive silk dragons made out of quotes regarding the meaning of ‘Freedom’ and Lego portraits of men and women who have been forcibly incarcerated around the globe. That exhibition was replaced by one of photos and interviews with some of the millions of children who’d lost parents to the American incarceration industry, and that was replaced in turn with one called ‘Prisoners of Age’. Some of the more striking portraits were contemporary photos of members of the Black Panthers, who’d been locked up forty years ago and were still there.

  It’s important to us, one of the rangers told me, that people don’t think we’re here to celebrate the prison. It’s a challenge to preserve a colonial history without giving way to some people’s desire to glorify it. While the federal prison years are a focus of tourist interest—and Alcatraz is one of the most visited National Parks in the US—site supervisor Kathyrn Daskal told me that she was keen to organise more art exhibitions, focus on the Native American occupation, and promote the gardens: to broaden an outsider’s sense of the island’s history and meaning. Conservation is prioritised over accessibility, which is why visitor numbers have been capped. Of course, what is to be conserved is a complicated question, too, on an island where almost everything has come from somewhere else. This includes the topsoil, much of it shipped over from nearby Angel Island carrying the seeds of the coyote brush, blue elderberry and other plants still to be found on the Rock.

  Even the place itself is in part man made: Alcatraz is bigger today than it was back in 1846, but at least nowadays the soil is self-sustaining. The gardens produce abundant compost, and a rainwater catchment system was installed in 2009. Lack of water had been one of the reasons the prison was shut down in 1963. Alcatraz became a national park in June 1971 and opened to the public in 1972. During my time on the island it was the years between prison and national park that interested me most.

  The island’s status as a place where outsiders could make a rocky, windy home meant it was chosen as the site of a significant Native American occupation in 1969. The sit-in that ensued lasted nineteen months. In among the serious demands made by the protesters was the joke, oft repeated, that anyone who’d lived on a reservation would feel right at home on a rock that lacked basic facilities like running water. At that time Richard Oakes, a Mohawk man and one of the leaders of the action said, ‘Alcatraz is not an island. It’s an idea. It’s the idea that you can recapture and be in control of your life and your destiny.’

  During the nineteen months Oakes and the others lived on Alcatraz, ceremonies were held, connections between tribes were rebuilt; people found a way back to their heritage. It was the first occupation of its kind, triggering others that followed including Wounded Knee and the fish-ins held in waters of the Pacific Northwest. The protesters were young, which was important: these self-described Tribes of All Nations rejected the approach of their elders, one in which tribal affiliation, and a certain diffidence towards those who had stolen their land and attempted to destroy their culture, was the accepted norm.

  Jane Fonda, Anthony Quinn, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Marlon Brando made shows of support by visiting the island. I like to think that’s where Brando met Sacheen
Littlefeather, who became famous for her poised rejection of the Oscar awarded to Brando in 1973. She spent the spring of 1971 on the island and still lives close by—across the water in Sausalito. Creedence Clearwater Revival donated fifteen thousand dollars for a boat to get people to and from the island. But the initial burst of energy dissipated over the months. Key players returned to their schools and colleges. Drug-taking escalated. Celebrity enthusiasm waned. Oakes’ twelve-year-old daughter, Yvonne, died on the island after falling down some stairs. (Oakes himself died soon after the occupation was over.) In May 1971 the government turned off the electricity. In June some buildings, including the warden’s house and a lighthouse, were burnt down; the argument about whether the fires were set by the government or the occupiers goes on still.

  The occupation is one of the first things you are reminded of when you dock: Peace and Freedom. Welcome. Home of the Free Indian Land. The inscription, in bold red letters on the rebuilt water tower, is particularly eye-catching, a freshly painted replica of graffiti left during the months after the activists first commandeered the Rock. The park service spent most of 2012 and 1.5 million dollars restoring the million-litre tank and thirty-metre steel tower. The task included carefully matching the graffiti’s paint and inviting the descendants of the original occupiers to participate in the work. The garden over which the water tower looms, the one around the Greenhouse, is home to poppies, roses and daisies. That’s where I worked for my first few visits, toiling away under those words, looking out to the ocean at the strong currents that seemed to tear the fabric of the bay this way and that. There is also a more informal memorial, one that captures the mood of the times better than refreshed graffiti does, and you see it when you walk around to the west of the island: piles of rubble that were once homes to prison guards and now house hundreds of Pacific gulls. The houses were bulldozed after the occupation ended to make future protests harder.