Wildwood

by Roger Deakin

  In the hot sun of the afternoon we trod, in our Vibram-soled boots, over the ashes and black earth where a recent fire had raged through the Whipstick Forest, leaving no more than skeleton trees and bushes of pure carbon. Fire had revealed the forest in its abstract forms. We had driven out in Wolseley’s beaten-up station wagon, whose back door had refused to shut ever since he reversed it into a tree. He grasped a large drawing board with several sheets of white cartridge paper bulldog-clipped to it and looked about for charred wood that seemed promising. Suddenly he charged and swooped like an entomologist with a net, dashing the board face down in a series of sweeps across a succession of bushes burnt to charcoal. ‘I get into a kind of feng-shui trance and then dance through the bush, moving the board over the burnt trees, letting them do the drawing,’ he explained. Next he selected a fallen ironbark tree and further imprinted the paper by pressing and scraping the board against its blackened bark. Wolseley called this ‘using the tree as a pencil’. The result of all this vigorous activity was a free drawing that expressed the life of the forest with surprising accuracy. The charcoal marks on the paper suggested insects or the flight of birds, and the ironbark created the fish-scale pattern you notice in the drifted sand when you fly over a desert, or in wood ash washed out by rain: a common motif in Aboriginal art.

  Unclipping the first sheet and working with the next layer, Wolseley approached the carbon ruins of some casuarina scrub and bashed the paper against the clusters of burnt seeds. They left dancing charcoal dots like musical notations. Wolseley calls this aleatory way of working frottage, from the French verb to rub. It began, he said, when the easel accidentally fell face forward on to the top of a burnt bush, and he realized the marks it made were more interesting than his half-finished conventional drawing: the landscape was drawing itself. At the time he was drawing, painting and camping in the Royal National Park, south of Sydney, over a five-month period in the aftermath of the serious bushfires of Christmas 2001. Encouraged by the results of the new technique, he tried the same thing on a bigger scale, with another artist holding the other end of a twelve-foot length of art paper as they galloped and wove through small charred trees down a ravine, registering the black abrasions of tree-trunks and the charcoal stipples and scrapings of saplings and shrubs.

  The effects of the afternoon’s work in the Whipstick were dramatic: the frottages had all the urgency and energy of the racing bushfire itself. The abstract marks on the paper were, as Wolseley pointed out, not images but traces: signs and markings of what was once there, like abrasions, stains, negatives, watermarks or fossil imprints. It is a kind of sign language of burnt trees, each of which has been reduced to its essential mineral structure by the fire. Back in his studio, Wolseley would generally select the most interesting of the charcoal impressions and rework some of them, adding exquisite watercolours and drawings of seeds, birds, flowers, plants, insects and, quite often, his own notes, all garnered in the same place. He would paint in watercolour the ruby interior of a hakea-seed capsule, a swift moth emerging from its chrysalis in the sand after night rain, the scarlet breast of a regent parrot picking white moth-caterpillars off the green-amber new growth of a dwarf Angophora, green flames of new growth exploding from the tops of grass trees like Roman candles or the epicormic growth of buds bursting out of the burnt bark of eucalypts. The astonishing thing, he said, was how quickly signs of life returned to the bush following a fire.

  Wolseley said it took him a long time to understand the colours of the Australian landscape. He at last realized that the key to it was not green at all, but shades of grey with scarcely a hint of green. Mix greys out of white and black, and sometimes a little ochre, and you have the forest perfectly. Out in the bush, he often makes his initial drawings and notes in a pocketbook whose cartridge sheets open like a concertina. The form suits Wolseley’s breadth of vision and discursive style, and he often translates its cumulative effect into a similar form on a larger scale. He calls these impressionistic, unfolding works ‘reporellos’, an allusion to the endless catalogue of Don Giovanni’s lovers unfolded and revealed by his servant Leporello to Donna Elvira in the first act of Mozart’s opera. In his notebook he describes the making of one such giant burnt-wood drawing after the Christmas 2001 bushfires in the Royal National Park:

  I unrolled the 5 foot by 30 foot roll of 300 gsm Saunders’ and trapped a 12-foot length at each end with 2×1 strips of pine nailed together. When Carol lifted up one end and I the other the paper felt firm and purposeful, held tight like a sail in the wind. Pure white, a giant litmus paper ready to receive the tiniest powdering in the air, or record the heavy impact of burnt tree trunks. A skein of straw-necked ibis moved across the pale sky like a lengthening and contracting rubber band. Carol and I moved down the ravine. The length of paper also became a variable line – a snake-like contracting or tautening as we moved between the burnt saplings. We had different kinds of encounters with four or five different types of tree – some we gently brushed against – and then there was a more coercive meeting with a big banksia whose scaly, knobbly bark left a passage of black scales on the paper as if a huge reptile had passed over it.

  As we moved through the burnt forest, occasional zephyrs of hot wind stirred up tiny spouts of wood ash, dispersing them like smoke. Half cooked ourselves, we talked of fire: how it has shaped the Australian landscape, whose natural condition is so frequently drought. It was the first thing Captain James Cook and his botanist Sir Joseph Banks noticed when they were blown north off their course to Tasmania from New Zealand in the Endeavour on 19 April 1770 and sighted the Australian mainland. ‘We saw either smoke by day or fires by night wherever we came,’ Cook writes in the log, and he constantly refers to ‘this continent of smoke’. The Australians the white explorers and early settlers encountered invariably carried firesticks. ‘Firestick farming’ describes the way Aboriginal people manipulated and changed their environment on a massive scale through the use of fire. But they never farmed in the conventional sense. The Neolithic passed them by. They used fire to keep their hunting grounds open and freshly grassed by frequent, light burning on the open plains, creating open wood pasture of widely spaced trees through which they could move easily, denying the cover of under-brush to their quarry. The early settlers were all struck by the resemblance of this lightly wooded landscape to English parkland. The Aborigines left fires burning, in camp hearths or hollow trees, everywhere they went, to be taken over by others or for the replenishment of faltering firesticks. ‘It seems impossible’, says Eric Rolls, ‘to exaggerate the amount of burning in Aboriginal Australia.’

  Far from harming the land, Aboriginal fire actually stimulated new and more varied growth. Eucalypts positively thrive on fire, their thick bark protecting the living cambium and the epicormic buds hidden beneath it, ready to sprout again almost immediately. They can send up new coppice shoots, as mallee does in the Whipstick, from underground lignotubers, and their roots plunge far too deep to be burnt. A fire is often the trigger that will send their woody seeds raining from the forest canopy. By allowing in the sunlight and generating fertile ash, fire can stimulate germination, increase the variety of other plant species or trigger the growth of useful food plants like wild tomatoes and bush bananas. Aboriginal fires were mostly grass fires, aimed at keeping the land open and accessible. By aiming their fire towards an area that had already been burnt recently, they naturally curtailed it. Their fires were a kind of spring cleaning, a hallowing of the land. Once they ceased their fire farming, the volume of fuel, especially on the floors of forests, greatly increased, and so did the scale of bushfire.

  Back at Leatherarse Gully, in a part of the Whipstick which had escaped the recent fire, we drank iced tea and swam gratefully in the soupy brown waters of the Wolseley dam, clad only in Akubra hats. It was so hot that even the leeches couldn’t be bothered to attach themselves to our clay-stained bodies. That night, we lit the small flames of candles and dined outside with the crickets. If a bushf
ire came, said Wolseley, the correct thing would be to stay inside the house and hope it was not too hot and would pass by. Pumping water from the dam to douse the roof and walls beforehand can help. Perhaps the threat of fire helps explain the downright simplicity of so many houses in the bush, as if they never dared to hope that they might survive for very long.

  Next morning we walked out through the forest, dead branches crackling underfoot, and admired the giant anthills of the bull ants from a respectful distance. Each one was a low dome of fine gravel some six to eight feet in diameter spangled with tiny pearls of quartzite to form an ant volcano, from whose navel erupted hundreds of the armoured insects all gingered into frenetic activity by the rising temperature of yet another scorching day. Twigs were neatly arranged in a necklace around the black-holed omphalos of each gleaming tumulus. Wolseley said the original gold diggers were known as ‘gold-ants’.

  Hot wind swayed the tops of the ironbarks and bark peeled off the eucalypts in the heat, hanging in seductive, inflammable ribbons. Perhaps in the hope of a cooling effect on us, we talked about England and some of its artists. Wolseley spoke appreciatively of Cecil Collins, who always rose late and worked mostly in the evenings between five and seven thirty, his hand and mind having steadied by then. ‘I know about the dawn without having to be there,’ he once said. Collins liked the versatility of the verb ‘to draw’: drawing someone out, the drawing of breath, of inspiration, of water, or of a curtain to conceal or reveal things. Wolseley described an oak refectory table at his ancestral home in Somerset that dates back to 1558. It is nineteen feet long, he said, four to five inches thick, worn down by the playing of an ancient family version of shove-ha’penny in which coins are flicked the full length of it. He mentioned his Trevelyan grandfather, and his habit of dining each night in a tree house wallpapered with daily shooting tallies. Here, having donned a pheasant mask, he liked to be fed through the beak by his butler via a straw. Listening to Wolseley’s stories, told in his deep, kindly English voice, was like looking at one of his pictures, in which layer after layer of the landscape is revealed by the accretion of detail and anecdote.

  Entering a clearing, we stood in the crazed, baked mud of a parched dam with only our hat brims for shade. A thirsty wallaby moved listlessly behind a white gum. Further on, we met the spirit of Essex: the lichen-encrusted body of a sky-blue Ford, the chrome upper-case characters spelling out ZEPHYR across the wide beak of its bonnet. Half sunk in sandy earth, it stood near the edge of the site of Mr Flett’s eucalyptus oil distillery, now reduced by the termites and ants to a few brick chimneys and sagging tin roofs, rusting railway track, tangled cables, cog wheels and pulleys, a wooden gantry rigged as a crane, a tilted rainwater tank.

  On the way home we followed one of the rusting wire fences of the Whipstick improvised from the steel windlass cable that once hauled up barrels of gold-dirt in the mine shafts. If Wolseley has a totem animal, it must surely be the mole. Again and again he returns to the body of the earth: making camps in remote caves, sampling the colours in Aboriginal ochre mines, painting the iron-ore mine at Mount Newman, working for weeks in the giant meteorite crater at Haast’s Bluff, or digging into the desert and burying his work for a year or more at a time before returning to exhume it. He talks about painting landscape ‘as it is experienced in the ground’, subsuming himself into the landscape through what he refers to as ‘this “camping alone” business’ in order to achieve a direct intimacy with it. ‘Often’, he writes in his journal, ‘I isolate a small piece of landscape, or part of a lizard, or a petal, or an item of litter, and I meditate about it on the paper. On such a small area I can be “slight”, and tentative, and investigate the shapes or colours in a gentle exploratory way – abstracting areas of detail and writing associated thoughts and feelings as they come.’

  If there is a mystical quality to John Wolseley’s journeys into the Australian wilderness and his experience of the camps as recorded and distilled in his work, it is only an expression of the poetic, respectful response to a deeply loved land that prevailed for thousands of years, long since trashed by the people who raised the tall buildings in Sydney. The mole’s-eye view John Wolseley offers is that of a thoughtful naturalist, not of a mining corporation.

  The Pilliga Forest

  Now and again in a lifetime a friend introduces you to a writer and you discover a soul-book, a work that engraves itself on your heart: one you read over and over, falling in love with it more deeply each time. This is what happened to me with A Million Wild Acres by Eric Rolls. It is an ecological history of the Pilliga Forest beyond the Liverpool Plains of northern New South Wales, originally published in 1981, written by a poet, farmer and naturalist with a countryman’s ear for a good yarn and a laconic wit that could only come out of Australia. Its central story is about the coming of the white settlers and how they changed the entire nature of a forest and, by extension, a whole continent.

  ‘Pilliga’ comes from the Aboriginal Kamilaroi word peelaka, a spearhead, and may refer to the shape of the elegant river oaks, a species of casuarina, or of the indigenous white cypress pines, Callitris. The Pilliga Forest lies beyond the Great Dividing Range in New South Wales and ranges from Narrabri in the north to Coonabarabran in the south. Extending inland across the plains, it begins at the village of Baan Baa and reaches as far as the country town of Baradine to the west. It is chiefly a mixture of eucalypts, acacia and various kinds of cypress pines.

  Eric Rolls contends that before the coming of the European settlers the whole of Australia was much more like a vast English parkland in appearance than the dense forest people like to imagine. With the exception of areas of high rainfall and groves of rainforest strung along the eastern valleys and in the ravines of the Dividing Range, the Aborigines kept the land open and grassy by regular burning off. It carried relatively few trees to the hectare, although some were very old and tall. The arrival of European settlers put an end to the fire farming of the Aborigines, and the forests of Australia as they appear today began to spread into the lowland bush. Rolls’s controversial interpretation of the Australian forests and their history suggests that most are no more than a hundred to a hundred and forty years old. Everywhere he finds his contemporaries referring to ‘the great primeval forests of Australia’, yet the historical records, he finds, tell another story:

  ‘Everywhere we have an open woodland,’ wrote Charles Darwin on his 1836 visit. ‘Nowhere are there any dense forests like those of North America,’ explained Chambers Information for the People in an article on Emigration to Australia written in 1841. Such statements are made over and over in early writings. De Beuzeville was aware of them. He reasserted them in his Australian Trees for Australian Planting. ‘Even along the … gullies and the contiguous streams,’ he quoted, ‘the country resembled the “woodlier parts of a deerpark in England”.’ In the seventy-two forests declared in New South Wales in 1879 the tree count of those assessed varied from two and a half mature trees to the hectare to eighty on the tablelands and coast. The Forestry Commission, in experimental plots in the Yerrinan section of the Pilliga Forest, found that sixty-year-old white cypress pines thinned in 1940 to two hundred to the hectare produced the best timber over the next thirty years, but, if thinned to six hundred to the hectare, they produced the most timber. Nowhere, in a search lasting months, did I find reference to former stands of timber as thick as those modern thinned stands.

  Burning raised the fertility of the land, and when the fresh new grasses and herbs came up they attracted the kangaroos and other grazing animals the nomads hunted. They could be driven across open ground, often by the use of fire, and trapped or killed. Dense forest would provide them with cover and was in any case unsuited to the use of long spears, which the trees and bush would obstruct or break. Boomerangs too would be too easily lost. When John Oxley, the first white explorer, came to the Pilliga in 1818 he saw ‘a very thick brush of cypress trees and small shrubs’, but most of it was a ‘forest’ of hu
ge ironbarks and cypress pines, three or four of them only to the hectare.

  The ecological history that followed the settlers was complex. Even before they settled, their cattle preceded them, breaking up the delicate, thin crust of the earth and trampling it. The fragile Australian land was not designed for the cloven hoof. Kangaroos spread their weight on their long, soft haunches and powerful tails, and when they cross country are mostly airborne. Cattle and sheep turn good land into dust that, when the rains come, washes away into the rivers. First pastoralists, then small farmers, came and went on their allocated runs and farms, often abandoning them because of poor farming, bad luck, drought, disease or skulduggery. By the 1870s the failed and abandoned farms and cattle runs were being overrun by seedlings of gum and cypress pine in their tens of thousands. The Aborigines and their regular cycles of fire had all but disappeared. The little rat kangaroos that used to nibble down seedlings were destroyed by introduced foxes, and the native grasses were being overwhelmed by the vigorous new species the farmers brought with them. Cypress pines took over the land.

  Rabbits came late to the Pilliga Forest and didn’t achieve great enough numbers to suppress the seedlings, as the rat kangaroos had, until the 1890s. There was little more growth of pine or scrub until 1951, when a huge fire germinated seeds soaked by heavy rain in 1950. At the same time myxomatosis destroyed the rabbits, and, as Rolls writes, ‘the lovely tangle that is the forest today came to life.’

  The highest praise I can sing for A Million Wild Acres, which I have never really stopped reading for long, is that it defies classification. Les Murray calls it ‘a deeply disobedient book’ in his 1985 essay ‘Eric Rolls and Golden Disobedience’. In the scope and economy of its narrative, he compares the book to an Icelandic saga. Rolls’s ‘golden disobedience’, he suggests, is towards literary convention, in his innate freewheeling ability to transcend the conventional boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, and between the ‘human’ and ‘natural’ worlds. In attempting nothing less than a complete account of his large subject, says Murray, the book’s enterprise may be seen as Proustian. Rolls introduces us to a gigantic cast of timber-getters, sleeper-cutters, rabbiters, trackers, rogues, outlaws, charcoal-burners, pig-hunters, farmers and cattle-drovers. As Les Murray notes, ‘They appear with the sudden naturalness of old friends mentioned in a fireside yarn’, yet they hardly stand out from the presentation of the interrelated non-human world, and everyone is accorded the dignity of a name, including the walk-on players. It is a naturally democratic book, and Eric Rolls emerges as part of the place, struggling with the competing demands of his farm as he writes the book. The writer himself comes to seem a million wild acres, speaking for a forest crammed with human histories and natural histories. Rolls’s great book works through the accretion of striking detail, portrait and anecdote, so the Pilliga Forest grows in the imagination like an Aboriginal dot-painting: Les Murray calls Rolls’s way of writing history ‘almost pointillist’. It is by no means extravagant to call this book, as many people do, an Australian classic, according to Italo Calvino’s definition of a classic as a book that has not finished saying what it has to say. That must be what drew me to reread the book again and again and eventually compelled me to go to meet its author and explore some of the Pilliga for myself. The first time I met Eric and his wife Elaine Van Kempen we spent several days up the big river fishing in Sojourner, the wooden boat that is kept under their house beside the Camden River on the New South Wales Coast at Camden Haven, and we wandered the old-growth coastal forests of big eucalypts together. This time, two years later, I was returning to make the journey inland with him back to his old haunts in the Pilliga Forest.