The Tree In Changing Light Read online

  Also by Roger McDonald

  FICTION

  1915

  Slipstream

  Rough Wallaby

  Water Man

  The Slap

  Mr Darwin’s Shooter

  The Ballad of Desmond Kale

  NON-FICTION:

  Shearer’s Motel

  AS EDITOR:

  Gone Bush

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  The Tree in Changing Light

  9781742754680

  The writing of this work was assisted by a fellowship from the Australia Council, the Federal Government’s arts funding and advisory board.

  A Vintage Book

  Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney, NSW 2060

  http://www.randomhouse.com.au

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  First published in Australia by Knopf, an imprint of Random House Australia, 2001.

  This Vintage edition first published 2002.

  Copyright © Roger McDonald 2001.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  McDonald, Roger, 1941-.

  The tree in changing light.

  ISBN 1 74051 181 6 (pbk).

  ISBN 978 1 74051 181 0 (pbk).

  Trees – History. 2. Forests and forestry – History. 3.

  Trees – Social aspects. 4. Plants and civilization. I.

  Atkins, Rosalind. II. Title.

  333.75

  Wood engravings © Rosalind Atkins.

  Cover design by Peter Long.

  Internal design by Greendot Design.

  ‘No genuine book has a first page. Like the rustling of a forest, it is begotten God knows where, and it grows and it rolls, arousing the dense wilds of the forest until suddenly, in the very darkest, most stunned and panicked moment, it rolls to its end and begins to speak with all the treetops at once.’

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Roger McDonald

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Imprint Page

  Planting Out

  Where the Fire has Been

  Life of a Tree Planter

  Bush Gardener

  The Red Bull

  Trees Without Names

  Signs for the Gate

  The Story of Rosie

  Secrets of Tu Bi-Shevat

  The Park

  Wild Man in Landscape

  The Seed

  At Sheep Camp

  At Ake Ake

  Into the Light

  Notes, Sources & Acknowledgments

  ‘Whatever happened, there would remain the feeling

  underneath, the shape of a tree where no tree was

  before. It regathered itself and insisted on thickening

  into life. The planter appeared, arms out like branches,

  trunk measured against trunk, head moving

  against the stars …’

  IT HAPPENED best after good soaking rain in well-drained soil holding moisture to a useful depth. Behind the chugging tractor the ripper blade in a shining ‘J’ dragged along on the lumpy dirt. Movement started, the ripper lowered and bit, the metal shaft went into the ground barely breaking a seal. Slicing through parting clumps of grass it unfurled a polished banner of continuous earth. Bundles of grass roots were sectioned; worms divided. Forward of the point where the cut peeled open a swelling ran as if a subterranean animal were under there smoothly plummeting through the paddock and hurrying ahead to keep out of the way.

  Planters followed with bundles of seedlings in plastic tubes and dropped them at intervals against the furrow. It happened quickly, what happened next—the transition from which comes momentous change (or may); a spade levering earth at an angle; the planter dropping to the knee, or to both knees in a quick unconscious plea for life backed by a dirty-fingernailed routine of plastic casing off, naked root-shaft palmed this way or that, then into the ground, a bit rough; planting out was like that. Over. And on to the next one all morning, all afternoon, until a stitching of feathery-topped seedlings counted in hundreds, and then in thousands, embroidered the paddock and ran over the hill and into the dark.

  What might come of this could only be guessed. Some time later a forest? Birdlife and the layering of ecology once cleared out? Or simple failure and starting over again—no further rain this season; massed insect attack; wandering stock trampling and feeding—the dry stars overhead like so many wasted seeds.

  Whatever happened, there would remain the feeling underneath, the shape of a tree where no tree was before. It re-gathered itself and insisted on thickening into life. The planter appeared, arms out like branches, trunk measured against trunk, head moving against the stars.

  Germination was a spark of light. Seed, fine as ground pepper, scattered and struck. Seedlings emerged through leaf matter glistening with dew.

  Shoots slithered from the ground as delicately as fine hair. Two small leaves parted and bared themselves to light. The evolving architecture of the tree began. Angle of branch, buckled fold of bark, shaggy river of red sap. It was the seedling giving consideration to the elements, designing itself into the sky with tree after tree undulating along the ridge.

  ‘The tree grew not by stretching elastically (like a leech) but step by step, by means of addition or superimposition. Although the living shoot of any year lengthened until it reached its terminal bud, after that bud was formed its length was fixed. It was thenceforth one joint of the tree, like the joint of a pillar, on which other joints of marble were laid to elongate the pillar, but which would not itself stretch. A tree was thus truly edified, or built, like a house.’

  Leaves were solar collectors. They generated sugars that flowed through the inner bark and changed into the woody material of the branches, trunk, and roots. The slide of stored light (each year recorded in growth rings) was how the tree increased in size—with an effect like a candle coating itself and growing fatter at the base.

  From the bare gate a kilometre off a particular tree on the high sandy plateau resembled a child’s transfer. Scattered across the slope were others of the same species. Some showed brittle, skeletonised limbs and gappy, insect-eaten foliage. Others seemed to have been drawn with a snapped pencil. The light showed through all of them. As I drove closer the one tree thickened and spread, showing itself immense in the winter light. The way it played back and forth with scale, now puny, now enormous, was a conversation we had every time I drove the last kilometre. When I left the car the trunk rose sleek as marble, cold and weighted to the touch. Checking it over by feel, smoothing the bark, impressed by its elephant-like presence, I stepped back seeing what sticks had fallen while I was away (upper wood with a habit of loosing itself and crashing). There was a matting of twigs underfoot, a rain of firewood fallen among corkscrewed scrol
ls of bark and layered leaves. Out came a cardboard box and in moments enough kindling was gathered for the fire.

  Inside the house the Warmray stove crackled with flame struck from the tree’s stored light.

  At night outside, trees led the eye back to the stars. The scatter of stars and the pattern of branches joined. The farthest bud and the farthest beginnings of life connected.

  On summer nights tree insects swarmed. I went outside batting scarab beetles from my face and wondering where the roar of wind came from.

  Moths on a windowpane held the shape of the tree behind them. The tree was a cut-out shadow against the stars. And the stars were a spiral of moths.

  Clouds settled in the tops of trees. The fretworked tips of leaves and moisture droplets combined. So it rained under the trees, but nowhere else, condensation forming a drip line. Boys climbed the trees with the aim of getting higher. In their hearts they raced the clouds, though a poem could have told them:

  Too much rain

  loosens trees.

  In the hills giant oaks

  fall upon their knees.

  You can touch parts

  you have no right to—

  places only birds

  should fly to.

  ‘Right to the end we said we would

  never leave …’

  AT THE back of childhood, long before I was born, my mother ran alongside a paling fence with wet potato sacks, beating out flames that rushed through the grass towards her parents’ farmhouse. Her mother was ill inside the house and her father was away fighting the fire on another front, where it was expected to be worse. Overhead the sky was a dense, scrolled blue, with ash and cinders raining down. Across the eucalypts at the far end of the paddocks orange sheets of flame shot up and exploded into leaf-heads of volatile oil in a crown fire. It had leapt the Glenelg river and only my mother was there to save the house.

  Later when she rode her pony to school there were smouldering logs over the track, dead lizards in the ashes. I see her crossing a scorched plateau on a sturdy pony called Creamy, apprehensive yet curious, and not wanting to miss anything that was going on. She discounted any talk of bravery, doing what had to be done. All the while the river glimmered away below, bared to the sky by the peeling away of its fringing vegetation in the intensity of flame. There was a cool spring under the limestone cliffs where asparagus grew, clear water where roots went down and seedlings thrived among ferns.

  The farm was on sandy soil, at Drik Drik, in Victoria. When my mother, Lorna, was eleven her father, my grandfather, Chester Bucknall, began dealing with the Forestry Pulp and Paper Co. Ltd., and started planting pines. He established a nursery, building a hydraulic ram and developing a watering system; it was slow but functioned day and night without any running cost. He supervised gangs of men planting out trees. My mother’s eldest brother, Graeme, started work in the company as a forester. My grandfather was made a director and travelled to Geelong every quarter for board meetings. Over the next decade, the Depression years, he evolved from farmer to forester. After the war the farm was kept going by Fred, the next brother, but finally it was sold and now there are vast stands of pine over the whole district, and the farm itself, since around 1970, has disappeared under them.

  Nobody, it seems, has a good word to say about Pinus radiata, but Chester Bucknall’s were surely the best around, growing in sandy soil with good sub-surface water, producing straight, unblemished poles. Somebody made money from the trees, those firebreaked, numbered sections. It wasn’t Chester Bucknall, who smoked a pipe and suffered from asthma, wore a soft felt hat and a suitcoat and tie when out and about, and had a mild, warm, ironic smile if I am to judge from his photographs. There is one where he holds me on his knee, a be-frocked infant of around twelve months of age. We lived in central-western New South Wales then, and he came up from Victoria to visit. He died when I was four, at the end of the Second World War. My mother inherited stock in the company and after forty years started getting a few small dividends. My grandfather was revered for who he was, a friendly man whose ambitions for his children were moral, spiritual, intellectual; a good mate to his daughter, who (after my grandmother’s early death) was his companion on expeditions in a T-model Ford through the Grampian Ranges and along the Murray River, down to Adelaide and McLaren Vale.

  When I meet older relations they say I am like Chester Bucknall. They mean the genetic inheritance of looks, mannerisms, tone of voice perhaps. Such doubles can mean anything. But might they also mean cast of mind? In which case, although I never really knew him, I believe him to have been a dreamer about trees. Other than a forester alone, that is.

  My uncle, Graeme Bucknall, worked as a forester in Victoria and Tasmania before he became a theological student and a Presbyterian minister in the 1930s. As a young preacher he drove around Gippsland in the early years of World War II, burying the dead and cheering up the living with his genial calls. One day he heard about three specialist axemen hewing beams from grey box trees with broadaxes at Wroxham. The timber was being cut for a wartime extension to the Port Kembla jetty. Graeme drove his car down into the valley where the men were working. At smoko they got yarning about timber cutting and he asked them if they had ever used a ‘bastard’ file in a particular way to take the shoulder off an axe. They had not ever used one in this way; and so it was the ex-forester parson who demonstrated how to drive the back of the axe head into a narrow scarf and with the handle of the file bedded in the tree trunk, drag the file face over the shoulder of the axe until it cut into the steel with the filings coming away in minute strips.

  Family history as it expresses itself in an individual can feel like something coming from nowhere, because the roots are buried. It is only now, in midlife, that I feel this matter of trees as part of a line of continuation. My mind sinks back; I go into the shade; it feels like drawing water up through fine capillary veins and having leaves uncurl, and then those leaves hanging edge-on to the hard Australian sunlight. I like to think of the earth around the roots being kept damp by a sprinkler disgorging cold, silver water.

  Somewhere in my early childhood I absorbed images of an ideal bush. Two places come to mind. One was not bush-proper at all, but a backyard at the edge of an inland New South Wales town with a tennis court, some pepper trees, a few eucalypts dense enough to hide and play in, and (most importantly) to climb. I don’t remember what variety they were, but they were aged enough to have hollows formed by fallen branches containing wild beehives, and other hollows big enough for a child to climb into. Water was on tap but always in short supply. On the outer edges of the trees, through a fence and across a dirt road, were wheatfields. They were well cleared except for a few ringbarked dead trees and dark, shimmering clumps of native cypress. In the harvest season around Christmas there were sheaves and haystacks to play in. Alternating images of enclosure, darkness, and hiding places, compared with openness, brightness, and distant views, were the contrasting combinations.

  Though this first ideal image of bush was not native bush at all, but a Europeanised mongrel remnant, it is mostly what we meant in Australia when we used the term ‘the bush’ (which also meant everywhere outside the cities). It was on the outskirts of Temora, in central-western New South Wales.

  The other image is more timeless in feel. It was a kangaroograss hillside at the back of a small Riverina town, with granite boulders among scattered wattles and gums, and with small shrubs hardening their seeds past their spring flowering. There was the incessant hum, hop, click and scratch of insects, and the constant presence of birds. It was not farmland but unwanted land, and so had survived as bush in the second sense. I do not know if it is still there. It was the season for sawfly grubs, who linked themselves in a long, rhythmic chain and jerked along the earth with the unity of a single organism, and other species endemic to eucalypts, including the ones called hairy caterpillars. We raced around dropping them inside each other’s shirts, creating allergic reactions. From a slighly elevated
position it was possible to look out over the town and west into the wider inland. Like a lot of bush it only existed to the passing eye in a good season, when it responded and burst into life. Otherwise it needed closer ways of looking to be understood. It was at Ardlethan, in the eastern Riverina.

  I grew up a minister’s son in central and western New South Wales. We lived at Bribbaree when I was born, then at nearby Temora, and finally at Bourke at the end of the western line. A move to Sydney came at the end of my primary school years, when my father left his parish ministry and became secretary to the New South Wales Board of Missions in the Church Offices, Assembly Hall, Margaret Street.

  Here are images of trees gathered from a country childhood, recovered from the scrapbook of memory. Ironbarks along the fringe of a dry creekbed, blond summer grass in the foreground. The sap-stained trunks dark as if blood has been poured down them and aged into the fibrous material. The line of trees looking small in daytime, thrust down by light. But later, in the gunpowder-blue twilight, looming up as if they are walking closer. All this seen from the verandah of the manse at Bribbaree, a wooden house like a land-yacht in my perception of the way it rode unseparated from the country around.

  There must have been a fence at Bribbaree but I don’t remember any. Was I too small to see what I saw, being just a baby lying on a rug on the verandah boards? It is the picture I have—as with so many other fragments that are like guiding images in all of our lives, with missing parts demanding to be filled in by imagination. I saw the moon rise through the branches of trees, heard crickets, frogs, watched shadows shorten. I saw it first then—moonrise through trees—the sight that promised journeys in stillness, in storm, through broken cloud.