City of Trees

by Sophie Cunningham

  The stand that I was walking through now seemed to be an example of a successful, relatively recent regeneration event—quite possibly the one that occurred in 1974. I walked deeper into the forest to grassy woodland and there I began to see more of the increasingly rare veterans. I passed a river gum with looping fused branches, suggesting it had had its limbs tied together by the traditional owners of this land, the Yorta Yorta. There were various reasons this might be done, including marking tribal territory. I sat in the hollowed-out trunk of a habitat tree and admired the smooth charcoal of its walls, the light filtering in through the doorways. As I got closer to the lake the veterans began to cluster in larger numbers; presumably the variable water line had made them harder to get to. High roots fanned outwards in sturdy swirls that gave way to other root systems as they hit their neighbours’ territory. The forces of (unnatural) selection meant many of these veterans were fabulously monstrous: thick, squat, misshapen, covered in burls. Loggers had preferred their straighter, neater siblings.

  At the lake I stood near some large rushes (natives that are thriving in the changing conditions, pushing out the more fragile plants) and looked across the lake. My hiking boots sank slowly into the mud. Normally you’d expect it to be uncomfortably hot—it’s often more than forty degrees here in summer—but it was a mild twenty-three and the rain was misting down upon me.

  It wasn’t only the river red gums that I noticed but the cracked mud of receding water, rotting gum leaves, greater eastern egrets, kingfisher, heron, ibis, ducks, emus, kangaroos, wild horses, wasps and flies. I even saw some Murray cod (critically endangered, because they’ve been overfished and the weirs don’t suit them) foraging in the shallows near the bank, and learned to look for them at the centre of ripples of golden tannin. It was the first time I’d seen them surface in this amphibian-like manner. The effect was prehistoric. A single galah feather caught in a spiderweb stretched, strong as rope, between two river gums, waved gently in the corner of my vision.

  The poet Robert Adamson once spoke to me of the ‘calligraphy of the swamp’ and that seemed right. The word cacophony came to mind as well, when a kookaburra started up, a solitary call, before being joined by dozens of them in a chorus that went on for several minutes.

  I’d read up on the area in an attempt to understand what I would find when I got there. I’d also sought to understand the political context the Barmah Forest now exists in. I knew that this was Yorta Yorta land—had been for thousands of years. In response to a native title claim submitted by the Yorta Yorta in 1995 it was determined that the ‘tide of history’ had ‘washed away’ any real observance of traditional laws or customs by the applicants. Watery puns abound. An appeal was made to the Federal Court on the grounds that the judge had ‘failed to give sufficient recognition to the capacity of traditional laws and customs to adapt to changed circumstances’.12 The native title claim was still not recognised. In May 2004 the Victorian Government signed a co-operative management agreement, which gave the Yorta Yorta a say in the management of traditional country including the then Barmah State Forest. In 2010 the area became a national park.

  In the presence of the river red gums you find yourself thinking about time differently. You wonder about the age of a particular tree, then suddenly you’re contemplating what the landscape would have looked like a few million years ago. Six million years ago the spot I was standing on was a shallow sea. The group of eucalypt species that include the red gums evolved at least five million years ago. Two and a half million years ago a species akin to Eucalyptus camaldulensis had evolved, though even today there is pronounced variation between individual river red gums as well as between subspecies. These variations have resulted in significant historic misnomers and misrepresentations. It’s worth mentioning here that the human fixation on categories leads to an illusion of clarity in the botanical world that is itself a misunderstanding. These blurring boundaries (and the resistance to recognising the blur) have serious implications in a time of human intervention in everything from the climate to the geographic spread of trees and their propagation. Such distinctions (or lack of) are more common in the popular press when it comes to fauna: polar bear or grizzly? Dog or dingo?

  The time when the river red gum emerged, 2.5 million years ago, coincided with an earthquake that changed the geology of the area I was standing in, and also with a shift to a drier, cooler climate. Lakes evaporated and dunes formed. After this ebb there was flow again and as recently as 120,000 years ago Australia was a land of lakes. Over the millennia these ebbs and flows created a series of quite specific ecosystems, ones that could tolerate periods of both drought and inundation. The lakes reached their peak area around 32,000 years ago and, not coincidentally, the extensive river red gum forests in the mid-Murray region date back to this time. About 25,000 years ago, a displacement occurred along the Cadell Fault, raising its eastern edge above the floodplain and transforming it into the Cadell Tilt. To my delight I saw this as I drove from Barmah towards the Cobb Highway: a ridge of the sand dunes from the ancient lakes that had been forced up as the land heaved. The Murray River flowed to the north and then the south attempting to get around the fault. The Goulburn River was dammed. As a result of all this activity, new water channels were drilled into the landscape, and existing rivers had to handle a much greater flow. An inland delta was created: the Barmah-Millewa wetlands we have today. The river gums of Barmah Forest have been dated, through pollen samples, to 3000 years ago, and the particular trees around me were (probably) up to 550 years old. River red gums are hard to age, though. Eucalypts don’t develop annual rings, and they adjust their rate of growth to environmental conditions.

  The river red gums have been managing, on their own, for millennia. But while the trees around me were certainly hardy, their environment has gone from being a robust system to a fragile one, from a self-regulating system to a dependent one. The Murray–Darling basin is now a regulated river system and the water released to maintain the wetlands must be negotiated with multiple (and successive) governments. This was something that became clearer to me as I walked along Broken Creek and past Rices Weir, where waterways were littered with skeleton trees; their banks lined by gums that appeared to totter on stilts, where their roots were exposed by erosion.

  As the land rights ruling against the Yorta Yorta indicates, humans, like fauna and flora, are adjusting rapidly to an unprecedented rate of change. But governance structures are far less flexible than ecosystems, and those ecosystems are finding their capacity to manage change is blocked by human development and policy.

  I emailed my brother, ecologist Dr Saul Cunningham, about these issues, in part because he has worked extensively on hybrid environments and, more specifically, because he’s done research in Barmah Forest. My key question was this. Why don’t we just allow environments to shift to a new normal and accept that losses are inevitable? Colloff phrases this more adeptly than I. ‘Attempting to manage for static conditions makes little ecological sense if this does not reflect a natural process.’13

  My brother told me that he thought the notion of normal, or even a ‘new normal’, was unproductive: the constant here was change.

  Water flows, which drive everything, are essentially completely scheduled by humans. Water only flows down that river if the managers decide to let it. Some flows are essentially delivering water to users downstream (think of the river as a delivery pipe between the dams upstream and the farmers downstream). Some flows are allowed for environmental reasons. In the case of a manually operated system the question is no longer ‘should wetlands be managed?’ but ‘how should they be managed?’ What water should flow? When? And to what purpose?14

  One challenge for ecologists is to map the way change was managed by river red gums in the past, and what that can teach us about managing the present, and the future. ‘Nested within the landscape are the clues that tell how ecosystems have adapted to continuous change.’15

  Another challeng
e is that these trees live for generations, whereas policies come and go in a decade. And those who care for the trees live only a fraction of the river red gum’s lifetime. Two years after my visit to Barmah, a drought is ravaging New South Wales and Queensland. River red gums throughout the river system are dying in their thousands and fish are dying by the million. Former National Party leader Barnaby Joyce has been appointed as ‘envoy for drought recovery’ and suggested that water from the depleted Murray–Darling system be taken out of the rivers and passed on to the farmers. Governments should be asking if deforestation through New South Wales and Queensland is contributing to this drought and whether areas of Australia that (to quote Joyce himself) get the same amount of rainfall as parts of Saudi Arabia can sustain current models of farming. As far as I’m aware those questions are not being asked. There is some good news: by the end of 2018 a deal had been negotiated between state and federal governments to return up to 450 gigalitres to the environment, provided this doesn’t have a negative socio-economic impact on river communities based on criteria agreed to by the states. However, at the time of writing an agreement on what is meant by ‘negative socio-economic impact’ has yet to be reached.

  A sub-fossil that is probably Eucalyptus camaldulensis, removed from nineteen metres below the Yarra River, has been dated to 8780 years ago.16 One reason these trees are considered sacred, indeed feel sacred, is that their presence traces the history of the elements, the lay of water above and below the ground. The roots of mature red gums go down ten metres, so a tree’s condition can indicate how deep the ground water lies. The patterns of their growth can follow the traces left by the water of millennia past. Remnant forests mark swamps long drained and individual trees can outlive the existence of the waterways by centuries.

  River red gums had various names bestowed on them by first settlers, including ‘Yarra’,17 also the name of the river that runs from the Yarra Ranges to Port Phillip Bay. The river was first named Yarra Yarra by John Wedge, John Batman’s private surveyor. Wedge believed Yarra Yarra was the name given to the river by the Kulin, though he later learned they’d been referring to the pattern and movement of water, not the river itself. Language was extrapolated from many different clans. Georgiana McCrae, a painter and diarist who immigrated to Melbourne in 1841, translated the words Yarra Yarra as meaning ‘flowing flowing’, and the word Yarrabing as ‘White Gum’.18 The word for red gum in Yorta Yorta is quite different. Biyala.

  The mashing of the word Yarra to mean several different things seems appropriate, given that the river red gum traces water, denotes it. The river and the red gums are, if you want to stretch the poetic point, as one. In a culture obsessed with classifications and difference I sometimes find this way of thinking—considering the not-difference between things—useful. To call a river a tree is, on the one hand, absurd, but it also draws attention to the interdependence, the relationships, that mean these two systems, forest and waterway, are a single ecosystem. The Yorta Yorta would argue that the interdependence is broader than that. A submission to the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council on Yorta Yorta connections with river red gum forests argued that there was a correlation between the loss of the Yorta Yorta’s traditional lands and health problems within the community.19

  River red gums give us pause. A consideration of their lifespan, and the time it took to create the right conditions for them to flourish, a consideration of what has occurred under and around their boughs, forces us to think more clearly about our place, its history, and our place in that history. These trees survived the Central Desert’s shift from a more temperate climate to today’s fierce conditions, the ebbs and flows of the developing Murray–Darling basin. River red gums still manage to establish themselves along creeks that have been concreted, rerouted and repurposed. They will continue to trace historical water lines and find new ones, colonising riverbeds as they dry out, sending their roots down to the groundwater that still exists below. Our survival is linked to theirs. If the river red gum can find a way to regenerate successfully then maybe, just maybe, so can we.

  ____________________

  1 Presland, in conversation and in email exchange (January 24, 2017).

  2 Wurundjeri Tribe Land and Compensation Council, quoted in ‘Indigenous Cultural Heritage and History within the Metropolitan Melbourne Investigation Area’, a report to the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council, Dr Shaun Canning and Dr Frances Thiele, February 2010, p. 23.

  3 Australian Pictures Drawn with Pen and Pencil, Howard Willoughby, Religious Tract Society, London, 1886, p. 54.

  4 ‘Conserving large old trees as small natural features’, David B. Lindenmayer, Biological Conservation, 211 (2017), pp 51–9.

  5 Flooded Forest and Desert Creek: Ecology and History of the River Red Gum, Matthew Colloff, CSIRO Publishing, 2014, p. 155.

  6 James Boyce, 1835, Black Inc., 2013.

  7 Colloff, p. 28.

  8 Bearbrass, Robyn Annear, Black Inc., 2005, p. 38.

  9 Quoted by Colloff, p. 261.

  10 Colloff, p. 261.

  11 Colloff, p. 254.

  12 Federal Court of Australia, Members of the Yorta Yorta Aboriginal Community v Victoria & Ors, [1998] FCA 1606 (December 18, 1998).

  13 Colloff, p. 253.

  14 Private correspondence between the author and Dr Saul Cunningham, January 13, 2017.

  15 Colloff, p. 253.

  16 Colloff, p. 37.

  17 Colloff, p. 21.

  18 Yarra, Kristin Otto, Text Publishing, 2005, p. 16.

  19 Submission to Victorian Environmental Assessment Council (VEAC) on Yorta Yorta Connections with River Red Gum forest on public land in Study Region, Dr Wayne Atkinson, University of Melbourne, June 13, 2005.

  COOLIBAH

  (Eucalyptus microtheca, E. coolabah)

  Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong Under the shade of a coolibah tree

  BANJO PATERSON

  LET’S be clear about this. The swagman under the coolibah (Eucalyptus coolabah) was not jolly. He stole a sheep, was caught by a squatter and rather than be captured by troopers for sheep stealing, he drowned himself. The coolibah, the provider of shade, stood sentinel: the only witness in an ongoing war between those who own sheep and those who would steal them.

  Trees have witnessed a lot and, notwithstanding the way we abuse and exploit them, that gives them cultural cachet. In 1933 the Lone Pine (Pinus brutia), grown from a seed in a cone from a solitary pine on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey, was planted at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance. That tree died in 2012 but was replaced by a descendant of the same pine. Today there are some two hundred memorial trees on the shrine’s grounds. Many of our country towns have planted avenues of honour, tree-lined boulevards that commemorate the lives of local men and women who died in World War I. Ballarat in Victoria has the longest avenue (twenty-two kilometres and 3912 trees). The trees are usually deciduous—elms, oaks, poplars, plane trees—and the avenues are spectacular in autumn. A few more adventurous towns have planted avenues of flowering gums.

  Alongside these official memorials, individuals have been carving their initials into trees for centuries. Basque shepherds carved pictures into aspens along the west coast of the United States, soldiers carved the initials of those they loved through the forests of France and Germany before going into battle. In Australia explorers carved their initials into trees as they walked and rode across the continent. In his great novel Voss, Patrick White captured the spirit in which they did so.

  ‘Voss left his mark on the country,’ he said. ‘How?’ asked Miss Trevelyan, cautiously. ‘Well, the trees, of course. He was cutting his initials in the trees. He was a queer beggar, Voss. The blacks talk about him to this day. He is still there—that is the honest opinion of many of them—he is there in the country, and always will be.’

  I’ve seen a faint S in one of John McDouall Stuart’s trees, not far from Daly Waters, but there are several others known as Stuart trees, carve
d as he made his way, over several attempts, from the south to the north coast of Australia. Katoomba has the Explorers Tree, allegedly blazed by Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth in 1813 after their successful crossing of the Blue Mountains. The tree, now a fenced-off stump by the Great Western Highway, is believed to be a fake carved early in the twentieth century to attract tourists to the area. The stump gets three stars on TripAdvisor and a couple of desultory comments.

  Ludwig Leichhardt, the explorer upon whom White based Voss, blazed an ironwood tree (Erythrophleum chlorostachys) during his first expedition in 1844. That now sits, according to cultural and social anthropologist Richard Martin,1 in a museum in Borroloola, ‘amidst the flotsam and jetsam of the town’s colonial history—weathered saddles, rusted stirrups, dingo traps, broken spectacles, glass bottles, moth-eaten uniforms, reproduced photographs, scraps of text’. Martin also writes of the Gregory Tree, a boab (Adansonia gregorii), which was named after the explorer who ‘discovered it’ near Timber Creek during his expedition of 1855–6. That tree is also a registered Aboriginal sacred site. In Burketown there is the Landsborough Tree, blazed by William Landsborough when he was searching for Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills. That tree was vandalised (burnt down) in 2002.

  But the arborial star of the Burke and Wills show was, of course, the Dig Tree. In 1860, the Victorian Government sponsored an expedition to make the first south–north crossing of Australia to the Gulf of Carpentaria, a distance of 3,250 kilometres, led by Burke and Wills. Burke and the party reached Cooper Creek by December 1860. From there Burke and Wills travelled north with Charles Gray and John King while four men led by William Brahe were asked to wait with supplies for three months. They waited four.