A night or so after standing in that water fighting off claustrophobia I was told Peter’s health had taken a dramatic dive and that he might live only a few hours. I returned to Los Angeles the next day but did not cancel my plans, which were to fly to Indianapolis, Indiana, then drive to Bloomington. Flying home to watch another father die seemed beyond me. Not again: that is what I kept thinking. Not again. It was not the death itself I couldn’t stand, but the pattern. Waiting in LAX as my fathers died, first one, then the other; sitting in darkness for fourteen hours, a sardine in a can, thinking of how things might have been different.
Four hours after I arrived in Bloomington, around midnight, I got the call to tell me that Peter was dead. I lay in a strange bed in a strange house hundreds of miles from the sea, and listened to the heating go on and off through the length of that long freezing night. I thought of the first time I said goodbye to him. We were standing in a room in an apartment in Boston in 1968. I was four years old. I was trying to understand why he wasn’t returning to Australia with us, his family. And now here I was in another anonymous apartment in America, but this time Peter wasn’t in the room telling me how much he loved me.
I found it hard to sleep over the next few weeks. Back in Melbourne, if I couldn’t sleep I would close my eyes and list the names of AFL teams. Or (really!) imagine the movement of animals throughout the city and throughout history: the herding of sheep and cattle at night, skies filled with birds, Ranee’s walk, sheep dogs mustering at the Royal Melbourne Show, horses running the track at Flemington. All manner of creatures still inhabit my city. Fruit bats fly overhead, seagulls circle the lights of the MCG; and some summer nights the sound of cicadas still fills the air. Snakes live along the riverbeds and creek beds, tiger snakes can be found in the CBD. Possums wreak havoc on our gardens. Around the wharves and wastelands of Port Melbourne as many as twenty foxes prowl every square kilometre.
But I couldn’t project myself into such a world here in Bloomington. Double glazing on the windows meant that the heating was often the only sound I heard at night, until summer arrived and air con ramped up throughout the neighbourhood. Instead I played sounds on my iPhone: rain, a breeze, waves breaking on a beach. And then, if I was awake—I often was—I took to opening the windows around dawn so I could hear the sound of the birds or, failing that, the sounds of rain, of building works, of frat-house parties. Anything. Anything other than the sound of nothing at all.
And one day I took myself off to a conference on Kurt Vonnegut, which was weird, as he’d been on my mind since I’d stood in the ocean imagining I was in a zoo, and also weird because Peter had written about him over the years. Vonnegut was a Hoosier, and that is one reason why Indiana University was having a conference about his work. I was at Indiana University to work on a novel, so Vonnegut was really a distraction, and now I find I can’t remember much detail of the conference at all, except for the statement about trauma and the opening words of a speech he gave in Indiana some time in 2004. I don’t know what the speech was meant to be about, or was going to be about, or where or why he gave it. I can only remember his opening line: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Another speaker spoke of Vonnegut’s inability to write about the trauma either of his mother’s sudden death, or of the firebombing of Dresden, which he’d witnessed soon after her death, in a direct fashion. Is that why Orwell couldn’t stay with the elephant he was forced to kill, I wondered? Why my gaze, my oath to bear witness, was wavering? Why I, we, keep living in air conditioned houses and eating meat and voting in elections and being outraged on social media and going about our day-to-day business when it is the breadth of a deeper and wider timespan: the lifespan of an elephant, of a father, of a tree, of the glaciers and icecaps, of bedrock, we must start to truly comprehend?
____________________
1 Trustees Report 1905 (DOC/15/4134) National Museum of Victoria Zoological Department Report, Museums Victoria Archives, Vol/143; DOC/15/4700, p. 28.
2 Trustees Report 1905, p. 28.
3 Trustees Report 1923 (DOC/15/4134), National Museum of Victoria Zoological Department Report, Museums Victoria Archives, Vol/143; DOC/15/4700, p. 17.
4 ‘The Elephant as a Person’, Don Ross, Aeon, October 24, 2018.
5 ‘The Scandal at the Zoo’, Mitch Keller, New York Times, August 6, 2006.
6 ‘Leaving Time at the Zoo’, Liam Mannix, Age, December 16, 2018.
7 ‘Bong Su is dead, broken by cramped and impoverished zoo conditions’, Peter Stroud, Sydney Morning Herald, October 13, 2017.
8 All quotes from Kenneth Brown and Joyce Hamilton come from ‘Queenie’s Last Ride’, Mary O’Brien, Age, August 9, 2006.
9 ‘Shooting an Elephant’, George Orwell, 1936.
10 Bradley, 2018.
MOUNTAIN ASH
(Eucalyptus regnans)
* * *
ANTHROPOMORPHISING particularly significant trees can be useful. I mean useful in the strategic sense, to advance the political action required if trees are to survive the anthropocene in a meaningful way. But there is more to it than that. I’m also responding to my genuine sense, when spending time among trees, that trees have personality. That they are, in a way, sentient. Sure, that ‘personality’ is sculpted by weather, soil and light, and by the creatures that live in and around it. But it doesn’t mean that feeling isn’t worth attending to.
Such enthusiasms make people uncomfortable. ‘Look, trees are networkers,’ cautions British scientist Richard Fortey. ‘They do communicate in their own way. What worries me is that people find this so appealing that they immediately leap to faulty conclusions. Namely, that trees are sentient beings like us.’1
I see it this way: trees need strategic thinking in these difficult times, and also they need friends. It was in the spirit of both friendship and activism that I went to visit the largest tree in Victoria. Her name is Ada and she’s a mountain ash, one of the tallest flowering plants on earth. She is a queen, an empress—a goddess—of trees. To find her I drove through patches of clearfelled forest, past the shattered, dismembered corpses of trees lying in the mud. You can see these areas from a distance, patches of harsh light that contrast with the filtered light of their forested surrounds. Whatever your view on logging, seeing clearfelling like this is to see a wounded landscape—and this particular wound was still bleeding.
I walked for a couple of kilometres through myrtle beech rainforest to visit her. I walked along the banks of clear creeks past stands of tall fern trees. It was a peaceful walk, through what felt like an older landscape, which I suppose it is. Cool temperate rainforest in Victoria is rare, a remnant of when Australia was a part of Gondwanaland, more than 130 million years ago. Although relatively small in overall size, these rainforests are the home to thirty per cent of all Victoria’s rare or threatened flora species. The tiny patches left huddle in south-facing gullies in fertile and high rainfall areas. They are an irreplaceable part of the Victorian natural landscape.
The walk took a bit less than an hour. The dense canopy, the leaden clouds, the narrowness of the gully lent the air a soothing greenish glow. As I emerged into a slightly dryer, more open landscape I began to see mountain ash around me. By the time I approached Ada I was feeling all the reverence due a tree of her station.
I stood before her; leaned forward, tentative, as if to touch her, then spread my arms out to get some perspective on her girth. I’m sure if you had been an outsider watching me you’d have thought I was about to embrace her. I craned my head back and tried to see into her crown. Ada is seventy-five metres in height, though some mountain ash reach a hundred metres. Long strands of bark drape from her like a cloak. Her crown is ragged, torn about by storms. She’s some four hundred years old, plump with carbon, and her girth is some fifteen metres. She provides shelter for more than forty species of vertebrates and innumerable more invertebrates.
Large and long-lived animals seem to be among the creatures most vulnerable to decline and possible extinc
tion. Apex predators, for example. Or whales. Large and long-lived trees are similarly vulnerable. Entire papers have been written on how you define large, or long-lived. I’m skipping that, going straight to why these trees are so important, which is simply that if we lose all our old-growth forests the implications are devastating. These trees are not simply larger versions of their younger selves. Up to thirty per cent of our mammals rely on cavities found only in trees that are hundreds of years old. Some marsupials and birds get so attached to the particular tree they live in that they will stay in the place the tree existed before it was logged, much as humans continue to live next to the remains of their house after a disaster strikes. Old trees’ crowns stand high above the forest and contribute less fuel to bushfires than middle-aged and young trees. When large old mountain ash fall, they decompose over time. The work of large old trees continues for decades or even centuries after their death. Their reign is long.
When I read Rebecca Giggs on whale fall I was struck by the similarity between trees and whales. Both have a capacity to feed an ecosystem for years and decades after they have died: ‘Their massive bodies eventually sink, and simultaneously decay as they sink,’ until finally the whale:
drops, falls quickly to the sea floor, into the plush cemetery of the worms. Gusts of billowing silt roll away. The mantle of the whale’s pulpier parts settles over it. Marine snow (anonymous matter, ground to a salt in the lighter layers of the sea) beats down ceaselessly. Rat-tails, devouring snails and more polychaetes appear. The bones are stripped and then fluff up with silver-white bacteria, so that it appears as if the skeleton is draped in metres of downy towelling. Years may pass, decades even, before there is nothing left except a dent that holds the dark darker.2
Some trees are the equivalent of a city, so many millions do they support; such massive infrastructure do they provide. Others are more like towns; some are no more than a beach shack. The word tree, I’m starting to realise, is pretty vague. A creature that clones itself can be a tree, a creature with mobile sperm can be a tree, trees can change sex, trees can be hybrids, trees can kill humans (though more often they are their saviours), trees are both welcome and reviled. Some can live alone but some, like mountain ash, are happier living together. Don’t believe me, a mere tree hugger: believe the statistics. Trees transplanted to city streets might be lucky to live twenty or so years, forest trees can last millennia. Size is important in a tree and older trees have this advantage also. They stand taller. Their cavities are deeper. Their buttress roots are higher and more complex. Micro-climates form around them. They push nutrients down into the soil. They hold the forest floor together. They make a forest less vulnerable to bushfire. A forest without large old trees is like a city without enough food, water, housing or clean air.
Mountain ash forests are among the most carbon-heavy forests in the world and that’s a good thing, unless you’re cutting them down. Which we are. Mountain ash constitute one of the largest pieces of infrastructure in Victoria’s crucial wet-forest ecosystem, and are one of the least protected from logging. Only 1.16 per cent of the mountain ash estate is now old growth. That’s down from about sixty per cent. What we are left with is large old trees, known as singleton trees—yes, just like in Bridget Jones—in otherwise young forests. Queen Ada is a singleton. If she and others like her are not protected the results will be catastrophic.
It’s tricky to manage old trees over long lives—‘in many old-growth forests, the history of industrial logging is many centuries shorter than the lifespans of the trees being harvested’—but that is all by the by at this point. If changes to logging practices aren’t introduced immediately the mountain ash ecosystem will collapse, dragging the other plant species and mammals they support with them, possibly some humans as well. The forest ‘generates most of the water for the ~4.5 million people in Melbourne, stores large amounts of biomass carbon, and supports timber, pulpwood and tourism industries’.3
Australia has an appalling record of seeming disregard for its natural worth: its reefs, trees, rivers and more. Back in the 1920s ‘the American Museum of Natural History had been so concerned about the ferocious removal of Australian trees that it had made collecting from the country one of its highest priorities’.4 Little has changed. You can’t simply heritage-list the large old trees and clear everything else. In any case the few legislative protections for forests in place (which include, for example, banning clearing along rivers and creeks) are routinely ignored. At the end of 2018 it was reported that ‘trees making up some of Victoria’s most endangered ecosystems are being felled and turned into building products, paper or woodchips by VicForests, which are then sold in retailers such as Bunnings and Officeworks’.5
Less than ten per cent of Australia’s pre-settlement forests remain. Among these is a stand of mountain ash in Tasmania known as the Valley of the Giants. The former Greens senator Bob Brown has drawn parallels between the destruction of these trees and the Taliban blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. Both are acts of desecration. There is money to be made in harvesting old-growth timber, sure, and there are jobs in it. But much as Japan’s whaling industry exaggerates their citizens’ cultural fervour for eating whale meat, logging advocates exaggerate both the market for old-growth timber and the quality of that timber: the Wilderness Society has argued that as much as sixty per cent of old growth trees are unusable.6 In what universe would a reasonable person think it was okay to cut down an 800-year-old tree and reduce it to a few hundred dollars’ worth of woodchips? Ours, apparently.
Richard Flanagan’s essay ‘Out of Control’, written a decade ago, paints an extraordinary portrait of corruption, political will and devastation in Tasmania’s Styx Valley:
…the world’s last great unprotected stands of old-growth Eucalyptus regnans are being reduced to piles of smouldering ash. Over 85 per cent of Tasmania’s old-growth regnans forests are gone, and it is estimated that fewer than 13,000 hectares of these extraordinary trees remain in their old-growth form. Almost half of them are to be clearfelled…The hellish landscape that results from clearfelling—akin to a Great War battlefield—is generally turned into large monocultural plantations of either radiata pine or Eucalyptus nitens, sustained by such a heavy program of fertilisers and pesticides that water sources for some local communities have been contaminated by Atrazine, a controversial herbicide linked with cancer and banned in much of Europe.7
Flanagan also details the large number of protected species—wombats, bettongs, potoroos and others—that die in large numbers as a result of this pesticide use; and makes clear that it’s not just about jobs, nor even money. At the time he wrote that essay, logging contracts were being slashed to offset the decline in woodchip sales.
One of the species we’ll lose if the mountain ash forests collapse is the Leadbeater’s possum. By the time of the Black Friday fires in 1939, the tiny marsupial was thought to be extinct. In 1961, a colony was discovered near Marysville in Victoria. The combination of forty-year-old regrowth (for food) and large dead trees left still standing after the fires (for shelter and nesting) encouraged the Leadbeater’s possum population to reach a peak of about 7500 in the early 1980s. Then in February 2009 the Black Saturday bushfires destroyed forty-three per cent of possum habitats and the wild population of the possum halved with it. The tiny possum doesn’t live only in mountain ash, but another favoured habitat, the snow gum (Eucalyptus paucifloria), is also under threat. The increasing frequency of bushfires makes regeneration harder and takes out those seedlings that do manage to spring up.8
Under business-as-usual management, large, hollow-bearing trees will decline to less than one per hectare by 2067, leaving the Leadbeater’s possum and some species of gliders and other marsupials with almost nowhere to live. Gliders have already disappeared from some of our national parks and are in dramatic decline in mountain ash forest around Australia.
I saw a greater glider, larger and more robust than a sugar glider or a Leadbeat
er’s, one dark night in a national park east of Canberra. I remember the creamy glow of its underbelly soaring, the inelegant thud as it landed. The joy of, the miracle in seeing, such a rare and beautiful marsupial glide from treetop to treetop. There is much that broke my heart when researching the essays in this book. But it is this, our wanton destruction of the mountain ash and those that live in them, that has brought me closest to giving up hope.
*
So it is fair to say as I stand before Ada, arms held wide, that I am exactly the kind of person Richard Fortey cautions against. I leap to conclusions, faulty or otherwise. I drop to my knees, say a prayer, swear an oath: I will drive, I will wade, through fields laid waste by clearfelling, through ancient and perfect rainforest, to stand before you, my queen. I don’t say this out loud of course, but I think it, in the hope she’ll pick up my thoughts.
She does.
Ada rises above me. The wind rustles through her and the frogs croak in her, giving her voice. She holds a Leadbeater’s possum in her hollow like an orb, she brandishes her branches as a sceptre, as a sword.
I honour you, I say. I pledge my allegiance to you, to this city—to our planet—of trees.
____________________
1 Quoted in ‘Do trees talk to each other’, Richard Grant, Smithsonian Magazine, March 2018.
2 ‘Whale Fall’, Rebecca Giggs, The Best Australian Essays 2016, Black Inc., 2016.
3 ‘Hidden collapse is driven by fire and logging in a sociological forest ecosystem’, David B. Lindenmayer and Chloe Sato, PNAS, vol. 115, May 15, 2018.
City of Trees Page 19
