City of Trees

by Sophie Cunningham

  Buckley’s occasionally erratic behaviour was considered to be a result of the tricky business that goes with being a returned spirit. His survival has been attributed to skills that included diplomacy, a facility with language, and catching fish. He married. Once, maybe twice. He fathered a daughter. Then, around the time Melbourne was being settled, he saw Englishmen camped at Indented Head and approached them, intending to save them from a spearing by the more wary of his people. He’d lost his English but was handed a piece of bread. Buckley looked at the colonisers, he looked at the bread in his hand. The word came to him and he said it out loud. Bread.

  We brought him a piece of bread which he ate very heartily and told us immediately what it was. He also informed us that he has been above twenty years in the country, during which time he has been with the natives. Jim Gumm measured his height, which was 6ft. 7in. or 8in. He then told us that his name was William Buckley, having the following marks on his arm:– W.B. and marks like a crab, half-moon, and small man.5

  And so they knew him as an Englishman, though Buckley could no longer tell what he was. Buckley’s account of those years, given to two different journalists, was thought to be exaggerated, so extraordinary was the story he had to tell, but is now thought to be, give or take a literary flourish, close to the truth. His totem was the magpie and the ‘small man’ tattooed on his arm was in fact that small bird.

  With each step we make / history on unthinking feet, writes Barry Hill in Ghosting William Buckley and that phrase sings to me. Unthinking. Unlearning. Unwriting. These are the words that make sense to me as I get older. Hill also suggests that Buckley’s wife’s totem was a swan, and that Buckley, a keen hunter of swans, forced her to eat swan once as punishment. This bothers me. Is it fiction? Is it true? Why would he have done that? Did he, in fact, do that? What is striking about Buckley’s account of these years is what is not said. Was this vagueness, or respect for his Wathaurong family? Certainly he would have been in possession of secret business.

  Those of us who walked from Sullivan’s Cove to Dromana could not re-create what it might have been like to run from a camp, shots fired at your back, taking down one of your number, moving through land where no settlers had trodden, and speaking a language no white men had spoken. No, we were a group of ten, and the day was spring-warm but not as hot as it was in January 1803 when temperatures reached above forty degrees Celsius. We looked at settlers’ graves. Moonah twisted and danced around us, filtering the light, as they had for thousands of years. There were once thirteen thousand hectares of coastal moonah and now there are 980, fragmented to such a degree that extinction is the likely result. If development doesn’t degrade them, the rising seas will drown them. Coastal communities can shift in response to environmental change, but these responses unfurl over generations and the moonah are running out of time.

  Did Buckley run through tea tree bower, golden tunnels in the evening light, and if he did was he in any state to register the beauty? Did his heart explode with unexpected joy? Did he walk under the boughs of the very same trees we walked under? Moonah can live three hundred years, so it is possible. More likely he headed away from the coast as he cast around for a route to Sydney, a city he missed by the longest of shots. For how was a man to know where Sydney was? I imagine that he ran to what we now call Arthur’s Seat, before looking across to the Yawyangs and allowing them to set his course.

  We, in contrast, stuck to the coast. After several hours we came out of the moonah and coastal banksia forests and walked through the bay’s shallow waters, trudged over the glistening white sands. The walk took us six hours and we were exhausted, minds washed clear. We’d laughed a lot. Swans skimmed, congregated, glid, snake-necked, broad-winged, red-beaked. I waded out to cool my feet and watched them. The great birds reminded me of the egrets at Alcatraz: their guttural honks, the expansiveness of their wings.

  If Buckley had gone on the lam eight hundred years earlier than he did, he could have walked through the heart of the bay, then a grassy plain. In my imagination he is as powerful as a figure from the Old Testament, from the Dreaming, from the Koran, with his flowing beard, his moving across water, the spear taken from a grave, the spirit of a bird looking out for him, the moon carved into his arm, his taking of the bread offering, his unintended betrayal of the men and women who had been his people. Walking in the sun encourages grandiose thinking. I bring my mind back to the water lapping my feet. Sea-level rising in such a shallow bay means these beaches won’t exist in a few decades. Our unthinking feet walk a vanishing beachscape, a porous and sandy place: the past, the future bleed. Our walk takes so long that the tide falls, then rises again as Nairm breathes in, then out.

  ____________________

  1 First People, Gary Presland, Museum Victoria Publishing, 2010, p. 91.

  2 ‘Syme, George Alexander (1822–1894)’, C. E. Sayers, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 6, MUP, 1976.

  3 daao.org.au/bio/ludwig-becker/biography/

  4 The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, edited and introduced by Tim Flannery, Text Publishing, 2017 (original text first published in 1852 and written by John Morgan).

  5 William Todd’s hand-written journal, July 6, 1835.

  367 COLLINS STREET

  (Falco peregrinus)

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer

  WILLIAM YEATS

  ROOF gardens have sprung up through Melbourne’s CBD in recent years. Some of them have planted trees and I’m keen to see how those trees meet the challenge of high winds and temperatures. But as well as thinking about trees on buildings, what about buildings as trees? For example, if you visit the building at 367 Collins Street, Melbourne, you will find (and I quote) a ‘landmark tower’ that ‘offers exceptional workspace across its 32 office levels. The double height entrance lobby creates a powerful first impression, and two levels of basement parking for 210 cars deliver ultimate convenience. A variety of bustling cafes on the ground and lower ground levels provide a “third space” for informal meetings.’ This is all well and good but I can’t for the life of me work out why they don’t mention up front the best thing about the building: it has installed a camera that allows people to live-stream the peregrine falcons that nest up there.

  Peregrines were close to extinction by the 1960s because the pesticide DDT impaired the females’ ability to produce strong eggshells. In 1970 a team of scientists and falconers came together at Cornell University in upstate New York to bring back the birds, but so few of the falcons were left in the US they had to reintroduce them from other countries.

  Their numbers in cities are now increasing: peregrine falcons do well in urban canyons. Tall buildings and bridges give them space and a perch for prey. They’re ‘weedy’, which means that they travel well, thrive in a variety of new landscapes, reproduce quickly, and compete effectively against native species.1 The most serious threat to their survival remains pesticides.

  In 2017 viewers watched the live stream from 367 Collins Street as two chicks died after being fed pigeons covered in a toxic deterrent gel. The acid eats away at the skin of the feet and the toxin goes up the food chain. Adult falcons can survive the poison but chicks rarely do. The gel is illegal in the CBD but the falcons hunt from up to ten kilometres from their nest so several councils need to revise their regulations if the problem is to be solved.

  Peregrine falcons have been nesting at 367 Collins Street since 1991. It’s a desirable spot because the building’s southeast-facing windows trap the morning sun but not the afternoon heat. Falcons don’t know how to build their own nests and instead occupy the nests of other birds on the ledges of buildings and cliffs. Before nesting boxes were installed, the breeding pairs—it hasn’t always been the same two falcons—would lay their eggs in the gutter. That was hopeless—the eggs got cold and wet then failed to hatch.

  In October 2018 four eggs were laid. Three hatched, and one chick survived to fledge. During the writing of the final draft of this manuscri
pt, I would, upon awakening, go to 367collinsfalcons.com.au. When I first tuned into it I saw a peregrine, her back to the camera, her wings spread out to encompass the chicks she’d hatched. They were named over the following weeks by an (over?)enthusiastic Facebook group of about a thousand people that included me: Fluffy, Flappy and Flew.

  The mother has yellow legs and yellow rings around her eyes. Her chest is speckled and her wings dappled grey and brown. Once her eggs hatched, I could see white fluff balls sticking their heads out from under her. Soon they were old enough to be left alone while she and her mate hunted for food. The results of the hunt, and the feeding of the chicks, was awesome to behold: the falcons would methodically rip up the pigeons they’d caught, occasionally chewing on the larger pieces to make them more manageable. The three chicks began to jostle in the hope of being given the best bits. One pushy gal always seemed to be fed first and got the most food. She shot up. A weaker chick often missed out on food altogether, slept more and didn’t grow much—indeed never grew adult feathers at all. That was Fluffy.

  With what seemed frightening rapidity, the two chicks that weren’t the hapless Fluffy began to stomp up and down the ledge on muscular legs that looked like down-covered Elizabethan pantaloons. They strutted along their thirty-third-storey ledge, taking in the view across Melbourne. Soon they were flapping their stumpy wings, and soon those stumpy wings had feathers on them. Their down began to drop and the grey flight feathers came through. Occasionally you’d see all three of them piled together sleeping and forget the disparity for a moment; but over the days Fluffy faded, her eyelids came down, her head began to roll, and then she died. Her tiny body was sent off for an autopsy, which was how it was discovered she’d died of an illness caused by ingesting poisoned pigeons.

  The very day that Fluffy died her parents herded the larger of the survivors to the ledge, and, almost literally pushed her off. Down she swooped, up she soared: Flew. The Facebook page began to fill up with videos people took of the parents giving flying lessons and the three falcons calling to each other above Melbourne’s city buildings. The chick left behind worked hard. She flapped away, working on her wing muscles: Flappy. Her parents kept visiting and feeding her and we kept waiting for her to fledge. But then, like Fluffy, Flappy appeared to go blind. Her head began to roll about. She died, and it was hard to watch. Flappy had shown a real enthusiasm for life in the few weeks she had. On the nights after Flew left, Flappy took to standing on the ledge, sometimes with a parent, sometimes alone. She’d look out across Melbourne as the lights of the city came on at dusk, then flickered off at dawn; as the sun rose over the Dandenongs and the city came to life.

  ____________________

  1 Quammen.

  THE AGE OF LONELINESS

  TRUSTEES Report, National Museum of Victoria, 1903:

  On Saturday evening, 19th December last, the large Indian Elephant, ‘Ranee’, died at the Zoological Gardens, and both the skin and skeleton were secured for the Museum. The whole of the skinning and the rough fleshing of the bones was carried out under my personal, constant supervision at the Zoological Gardens; and I am pleased to have this opportunity to record the valuable assistance rendered by the Director, Mr D Le Souëf, and his staff during that time.1

  Trustees Report, National Museum of Victoria, 1905:

  The large Indian elephant ‘Ranee’, which died at the Zoological Gardens in December of last year, has been stuffed, and now occupies a special case in the main hall.2

  Trustees Report, National Museum of Victoria, 1923:

  The death of Mr T. F. Moore occurred very suddenly on the 2nd September last. Mr Moore was appointed to the position of Articulator and Osteologist on the 13th June, 1900, and during his 22 years’ association with the Museum, the collections were enriched by numerous examples of his skill. One of the first examples of his work was the preparation and mounting of the skeleton of the large Indian elephant

  ‘Ranee’, which, together with the mounted skin, occupies a prominent position in the main hall.3

  Ranee is no longer in the main hall of the museum. Her remains are in off-site storage, her skeleton disarticulated. I search for her in other ways and find a newspaper photograph of her, ghostly with age. She’s looking square at the camera, dignified. Ranee was the first elephant in Australia. A gift from the King of Siam, she arrived in Melbourne from Calcutta Zoo on March 5, 1883. The trip lasted for some weeks, during which Ranee was tethered by chains to the deck, with a shed of sorts built over her head. During one particularly bad storm she is reported to have wrapped her trunk around the iron stanchions of her hut to support herself. After the ship docked in Port Melbourne she was taken to the police station at 113 Bay Street. These days 113 has dropped off the map, but there is a number 115 and the building itself is still there. It’s a lawyer’s office now. I know this because I walked in and asked the woman behind the front desk if it had once been the police station and she told me it had been. I didn’t ask her if she knew how you’d fit an elephant through the narrow door.

  Ranee was walked to Royal Park, where the zoo had been built in 1862. She was walked late at night, in the dark, so that there wouldn’t be people panicking and horses stampeding. This was not an unreasonable concern. When Hanno the Elephant arrived in Italy in the winter of 1514 locals trampled fields, crashed in roofs and tore through walls to see Pope Leo X’s magnificent gift. Hanno died three years after he arrived in Rome aged seven, which is very young for an elephant. His remains were discovered under the Vatican in 1962. Elephants throughout history have been given as gifts, and throughout history have caused similar stirs.

  I couldn’t find a record of the exact route Ranee walked, so I walked the most obvious roads that existed back in 1883. I walked up Bay Street to City Road and Whiteman Street. I was stuck for a while at the Yarra, where I became fixated on how she would have crossed the river. Princes Bridge had been built by then, but it seemed a long way out of the way. There was a pedestrian bridge where Queens Bridge is now. I’d read something that suggested that bridge was a rope bridge, and assumed it wouldn’t have been strong enough to carry her weight. When I called my mother to discuss this with her, she emailed me a series of paintings she’d found of animals being transported by raft. After we did the walk my fellow walker Kelly Gardiner did some digging around and found an engraving of Melbourne in 1880. Falls Bridge, as the earlier iteration of Queens Bridge was known back then, looked sturdy enough, so I suspect that is our answer. Then I walked along William Street, through the relative quiet of the Flagstaff Gardens—punctuated by calling birds and the occasional screech of possums—past the empty Victoria Market, which existed when Ranee walked slowly past, and even now looked much as it had for a century. I walked under the plane trees that line Royal Parade before heading into the darkness of Royal Park. The park was full of ghosts. Wind rustling sheoaks, the flapping of a fruit bat. The moon was bright, the sky was clear and the air cold.

  In that half-light I got a glimpse of the otherness of the landscape and felt—or imagined that I felt—how it might have been for Ranee, just off a boat after a long voyage, walking through the darkness towards her servitude, none of her own kind with her, no possibility of shared language. And elephants do have language. Philosopher Don Ross’s description of standing in a herd of elephants conveys this:

  The most peaceful group feels electric with communicative action. There’s continuous eye contact, touching, trunk and ear movements to which others attend and respond. Elephants engage in low-frequency vocalisation, most of which you can’t hear, but you can certainly see its effects.

  He goes on to describe the multiple strategies elephants have for talking to each other, which sound (read) to me like a kind of purring. They generate vibrations in the ground and softer low-frequency vibrations in the air; sound emanates both from their trunks and their guts. They trumpet and use ‘a range of standard trunk and head gestures’ and formal ways of touching each other.4 Ross goes on to argu
e that this capacity for language, this ‘hypersociality’ makes elephants (along with parrots, corvids and toothed whales) persons. Should bestow upon them, legally speaking, personhood.

  The night a group of us did Ranee’s Walk together, the streetlights dropped away as we got close to the zoo. We could hear the animals calling, smell them in the night air. The entrance looked much as it had for decades, give or take a few yarn-bombed palm trees. Ranee is reported to have walked the nine kilometres from the police station calmly until she saw the zoo, at which point she attempted to bolt. Was it the smell of other animals? Their calls? Did she imagine what lay ahead: public viewings six days a week, Monday to Saturday from 11 a.m. until 12 midday and from 2 p.m. till 4.00 p.m. in the charge of her keeper? The society’s minute book for March 19, 1883 records that she was ‘gentle and in good health’ and that she was undertaking training so she could give people rides, which, it was reckoned, she’d be able to do after two weeks. The impetus was pragmatic. The Age reported in early 1890 how much the fast-growing ‘patient monster’ ate; but also that, as a favourite with children, ‘it’ earned its own living. Ranee’s upkeep amounted to £150 per annum; average takings for rides round the enclosure were £170.

  The thing I kept asking myself, that felt most pressing, was this: was she lonely?