City of Trees

by Sophie Cunningham

  Olive trees are under attack on other fronts as well. A disease known as olive leaf scorch has affected thousands of hectares of olive plantations. Harvests in Italy are down by almost half. This is, of course, one of the major vulnerabilities of our oldest citizens. Old trees operate on a different time scale. They watch as entire human civilisations rise, then fall, as logging policies come and go, as species they once lived with are erased from the earth. And meanwhile fungi and pathogens come up with increasingly nimble ways to attack them. If humans could think in tree time they would not be stealing old olive trees, they would be planting new ones without concern for whether they would live to see them mature.

  I saw the olives in the summer of 2018, at the beginning of a heatwave that went on to grip Europe for weeks. When in London I laughed along with other Australians about the notion that twenty-eight degrees could be considered dangerously hot, then descended to the Central line to catch the tube to Hampstead Heath. It was so hot in the train that I almost fainted. There’s no air conditioning down there and by July the temperatures in some carriages were as high as forty degrees. Fires swept through Italy, Greece, Sweden and up into the Arctic Circle. Freshwater crays floated to the surface of the Finnish lakes, having suffocated because warmer water can’t hold as much oxygen. In England long-hidden outlines known as crop marks revealed themselves as grass died and soil dried out: everything from Bronze Age fortifications to remnants of World War II infrastructure. These revelations are themselves a product of what has been described as our third world war, climate change. ‘In the North this summer, a devastating offensive is underway. Enemy forces have seized huge swathes of territory; with each passing week, another 22,000 square miles [57,000 square kilometres] of Arctic ice disappears.’2 Along the Elbe River in central Europe the water levels were so low that rocks known as Hunger Stones were rising to the surface. The oldest stone to emerge, carved in 1616, read, When you see me, cry.

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  1 italiannotes.com/pruning-olive-trees/

  2 ‘WW III is well underway, says environmentalist Bill McKibben’, Arpan Bhattacharyya, Big Think, September 11, 2016.

  BIYALA STORIES

  A COUPLE of years ago I was standing on the banks of Moonee Ponds Creek, on Railway Canal in the gap between two overpasses, looking at several river red gums. The trees were still young, maybe twice my height; their pale green leaves a delicate spiderweb filtering the sky. They were at once scrappy and beautiful.

  I was standing in this muddy place with a friend, a photographer, who told me they had germinated without human intervention from seeds washed down the creek; that, despite the fact the river red gum has the broadest natural distribution of any eucalypt, it was now rare for self-seeded trees to mature as these gums were doing.

  Once common across the open woodlands of the land we call Melbourne, now they struggle for space in the urban environment. River red gums prefer creeks, wetlands and rivers—as do freeways, an engineering preference that has led to the concreting of waterways, the rerouting of rivers, and creeks being driven underground. The freeway runs overhead with Moonee Ponds Creek below. The creek used to be a chain of ponds—separate water bodies that linked up in times of heavy rain—and ran into the West Melbourne Swamp, once situated not far from where I was standing. After the draining of the swamp, the creek was rerouted via a series of drains to run some distance further, directly into the Yarra.

  I saw these gums on a series of walks around Melbourne. It was over the months I did these walks that I came to realise that most of Melbourne’s significant older trees, the ones that pre-dated white settlement, were river red gums or Eucalyptus camaldulensis (subspecies camaldulensis). The trees known as veterans were anything from four hundred to eight hundred years old. Some were dead but had been preserved and left standing as memorials: the Fairies Tree in Fitzroy Gardens, the Separation Tree in the Botanic Gardens, the Corroboree Tree at Burnley Oval.

  Death is a mutable thing in trees. For a start, a tree’s trunk, indeed all its wood, are dead cells. The life is in the thin sliver of living tissue on the outside of a tree. This is why ringbarking is so fatal. The final stage in a tree’s life, the point when the rate of cell division lags behind the rate of cell death, is known as senescence. River red gums can remain in a state of senescence for more than a hundred years and what you might call a more active dying process can take about fifty years. Once dead, the skeletons of massive red gums continue to serve an ecological purpose. Many veteran gums are known as ‘habitat’ trees, because each tree, on average, supports an estimated sixteen mammals, forty-four birds and seven hundred insect species in the hollows created by fungus and fires, and by dropped limbs. That work continues long after the tree has ‘died’.

  In St Kilda Junction there is a living veteran, a twenty-metre-high river red gum known as the Ngargee Tree. When Queens Road was upgraded from a track to a road in 1875, it was diverted around the tree. The finest stand of river red gums I know of in Melbourne can be found on RMIT’s Bundoora Campus. There is a ring, or fused tree, that lies on the ground now, but is still quite magnificent, a large weathered hoop where its limbs were tied together. That tree is just one of the more than a dozen veterans estimated to be eight hundred years old, including three canoe trees and the six Keelbundoora scarred trees. Scarred trees are trees that have had bark cut out of them to make anything from a coolamon to a large canoe or shelter. Keelbundoora was a Wurundjeri clan ancestor who was present at the signing of the Batman Treaty in 1835 (the treaty that purported to ‘buy’ Melbourne for some knives and shirts). Better known scarred trees exist in Treasury Gardens and Yarra Park. One of the two Yarra Park trees was recently presumed to be dead and was therefore cut back but, in a not-atypical red gum manoeuvre, it started to sprout from the base of its trunk and now has the growth patterns of a young tree, despite being several hundred years old. The second scarred tree has been standing there, exuding charisma, for anything up to eight hundred years and has been polished by the elements to a high silvery-grey sheen. Up close the bark is rough as an elephant’s hide, and the line of the scar has curled to form a lip. The tree kept growing after the bark was removed, so the wood underneath is stretched taut and smooth. Archaeologist Gary Presland has argued that this particular scar is more likely to be the result of a fire crack than the excision of bark using stone axes.1

  But whether scarred by fire or hatchet, a special connection exists between trees such as this and contemporary Wurundjeri people, a connection that ‘underpins the high significance of these places. Once they are destroyed, the connection is largely destroyed.’2 Argus journalist Howard Willoughby wrote as early as the 1880s that:

  In the Yarra Park an inscription on a green tree calls attention to the fact that a bark canoe has been taken from the trunk. The canoe shape being evident in the stripped portion, and the marks of the stone hatchet being still visible on the stem. The blacks would find their way to the river impeded now by a treble-track railway that runs close to their old camp…3

  Over in the Royal Botanic Gardens, there are two river red gums designated as significant by the National Trust. The more famous of them, the 400-year-old Separation Tree, stands on the site where citizens of Melbourne gathered on November 15, 1851 to celebrate the news that the colony of Victoria was to separate from New South Wales. The original Separation Tree was damaged in two separate ringbarking attacks in 2010 and 2013. After the first attack bridge grafting succeeded but the second attack undid that good work. By 2015 it was clear the tree was dying, so its canopy was slowly reduced. Vandals have attacked other veteran red gums as well. Development isolates these older trees, making them vulnerable: to diseases, to storms, to heat stress. The soil these lone trees grows in often becomes depleted. At the same time, the rarer the veterans become the more we value them.

  We have left it too long to begin to replace our older trees. It can take hundreds of years for these trees to become old enough to support the
insects, birds and mammals that rely on them. They have to be large enough, weathered enough, to have developed cavities.

  Individual large old trees and small stands of such trees can act as living ‘micro-hotspots’ with levels of species richness and individual species abundance substantially greater than the surrounding environment. Indeed, many species of animals occur in a given area only because of the presence of large old trees. Several studies have shown that patterns of nesting, denning and other social behaviour by cavity-dependent animals are dramatically altered when populations of large old trees are reduced.4

  River red gums were felled in large numbers as Melbourne expanded—commercially harvested from around 1863—and it’s hard to know how many were lost. Scientists have developed various estimates, all putting the numbers in the millions, but perhaps consider this. The wood of the river red gum is dense and is used for railway sleepers. About six hundred sleepers are used for a kilometre of track. Between 1864 and 1891, the railway networks of Victoria and New South Wales grew from 410 kilometres to 7650 kilometres.5 That’s just short of 4.5 million sleepers in twenty-seven years—and that is just one use the tree was put to.

  These trees have not been replaced. Although there is now more consideration of these issues by councils and some policymakers, there will still be a gap of some two or three hundred years between the establishment of the new generation of trees into the old age in which they will contribute most to the ecosystem. It’s in old age, too, that these trees hold the highest carbon load.

  It was when I went to visit the Separation Tree that my relationship to the river red gum shifted from one of appreciation to a deeper curiosity. I noticed a second gum close by, one I hadn’t read about. Like the Ngargee Tree, this second tree stood about twenty metres high, perhaps higher. I stopped in front of it and looked up into its thinning crown, its feathery pale green leaves sitting like lacework against a bright blue sky. Down lower it was lumpy and covered in burls. The river gum stood by the Ornamental Lake, once a swamp connected to the systems of wetlands around the Yarra River. When it germinated some centuries ago it would have been closer to the banks of the wandering river than it is today, and would have stood by while the Anderson Street (now Morell) Bridge was built—over dry land, before the Yarra River was rerouted beneath it. The tree would have felt, deep down in its roots, that the river was changing course, becoming shorter, straighter.

  It is hard to convey the intensity this particular tree emanates as it stands, like a sentinel or an ancient god, looking across the land, without sounding slightly crazy. The publication of The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins back in 1973, which suggested that plants communicate with each other, was met with mockery. The author of the more recent The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben, argues something similar though he is more careful with his language. Of course there is an enormous leap between suggesting trees within a forest communicate with each other and that they communicate, like Tolkien’s Ents, with other species. What I know is this. As I stood by the Ornamental Lake I found myself thinking: to understand Melbourne, its history, our environment, I need to know this tree.

  Another way of putting this is that the tree came into focus. I saw something in it that was clear both to our first people and to some colonisers: these trees have practical uses at the same time as having a particular quality I’m going to describe, until a better, perhaps more accurate word, strikes me, as spiritual. Historian and author James Boyce saw this also.

  It is surely something of a miracle that such stupendous living connections with the Yarra world of 1835 have survived. There are two especially beautiful specimens in the Botanic Gardens around the lower lagoon, once part of the reserve in which the Kulin took early refuge before being expelled into less valuable swamps…I return to them often in my imagination because their roots, endurance, graceful hospitality, silent majesty and very survival seem to testify that…there is some force greater than us.6

  That Baron Ferdinand von Mueller became such an eminent eucalyptus specialist leads me to believe that he too was struck by this tree and its kin. Certainly it’s not just this particular eucalypt that projects this quality. Dr Matthew Colloff, author of a book on the history of the river red gum, spent ten years researching the ecology of the tree and its capacity to adapt to change. He writes, ‘This tree connects time, place, people, land and water, desert and forest. The story is the history of our continent. The river red gum is central to that story.’7

  River red gums are not just central to the story of this place, they inspire story. They have a powerful capacity for survival and you will find photos of river red gums flat out (like a lizard drinking), or fallen trees that have regenerated from a series of epicormic shoots reaching upwards from a horizontal trunk. When river red gum limbs drop or fire splits trunks and branches, sap heals the gash to protect the tree from fungus, and wound wood forms. When prolonged floodwaters threaten to drown them they can develop aerial roots. Their heartwood can burn or be eaten away, leaving their remnant lower trunks to form cathedral-like arches around a space that may be as large as a small room.

  Questions are raised by most considerations of the river red gum, and those questions slip easily into narrative. During drought river red gums drop limbs suddenly, without warning; the occasional person has died as a result. Who was the person who died, what was their life like? How long has the drought been going that caused the tree to cast a limb? How much longer will that drought go on? Narrative formed when bark was cut to make a canoe for a river that ran a different course from the course it runs today. Or when the tree in the Royal Botanic Gardens provided temporary refuge for the Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri who’d been driven out of central Melbourne. The narrative continues when that tree becomes the focus of political ceremony and is turned into a tourist attraction, and deepens, more tragically, when that tree is murdered. Ola Cohn’s desire to carve the Fairies Tree in the early 1930s revealed a desire to turn the river red gum, quite literally, into a story, ‘mostly for the fairies and those who believe in them, for they will understand how necessary it is to have a fairy sanctuary—a place that is sacred and safe as a home should be to all living creatures’. Personally, I’m struck by the moment in the 1840s when Melbourne’s largest river gum—still standing—was used as a makeshift belfry for St Francis, Melbourne’s oldest Catholic church, before being cut down in 1878 and carved into a throne for St Patrick’s Cathedral. Prior to its execution, that tree was so big St Francis’s planned expansions were impeded and the gum was described as ‘terrorising’ the church. After it became a throne it was sat on by Archbishop Mannix, a man who wielded significant political influence for forty-six years. More recently the controversial Cardinal Pell used it.8 The author of Tree Stories, Peter Solness, became convinced the river gum ‘was a genuine (if dormant) cultural icon, full of potential narrative’.9 People would tell him stories about these trees, and about other trees, as he photographed them.

  I’ve slipped here from the river red gum in particular to trees in general, but my point is that the river red gum provokes more stories than many beings do, sentient or otherwise. And we need its stories. ‘Its innate toughness and capacity for survival inspire and motivate us. In the twenty-first century we need new narratives and new images of our connection with our land and waters, as well as respecting and celebrating those we already have.’10

  I visited Barmah Lake, in the recently formed Barmah National Park on the border between Victoria and New South Wales, in early January. I wanted to see river red gums in a forest, not just as individual and ageing survivors. The Barmah-Millewa forest is a Ramsar site (a wetland of international importance), and at 71,575 hectares the largest river red gum forest still extant in the world. The reason the area has been saved from any development other than timber harvesting is that regular flooding makes the land unfit for pastoral use. That said, seasonal grazing has occurred over the last century, and wild horses run there still.
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br />   As I walk to Barmah Lake from the carpark, what first catches my eye is not the vertical lines of the thousands of young red gums reaching up to the light, but the horizontal ones: striations of greys, charcoal and ochre that delineate the levels of various inundations. Both the homogeneity of these trees’ size, and their density, are the result of human intervention. They’re resilient, but they can go for decades at a time without producing seedlings that mature. Both timber harvesting and grazing (with the consequent trampling of seedlings) have taken their toll on the tree’s populations and, to quote Matt Colloff, ‘Each phase of the forces of change has left its mark.’11

  After extensive timber harvesting between the 1860s and the 1880s there was a massive regeneration event, one that produced an established stand of trees. Germination is always relatively straightforward but a seedling’s journey to maturity is not. It requires a delicate balance of conditions, including a cycle of floods of the right depth and length of time, and more temperate conditions. Up to eighty per cent of the seedlings can survive but a two per cent survival rate is just as likely. By the 1960s full regeneration was occurring less and less frequently.