The Tree In Changing Light Read online

  I remember trees away out in the smashed-glass glare of wheatfields: yellow box, white cypress, kurrajong. Lone sentinels shimmering in heat haze. And playground eucalypts in asphalt, their leaves pungent after rain. A tree at Bourke, it must have been a red gum, growing tall in the dirt-surfaced playground there; Aboriginal kids eating grubs from under the bark and boasting about it; our teacher taking us out to sit around under its thin shade and asking me to read out a story I had written—a ‘composition’. I remember how everyone listened.

  I remember visiting a homestead on the Darling River and staring at the orange trees: glossy leaves, creamy flowers, fruit with a skin thicker than coconut rind, flesh richer than any mango. Then up to the border at Hungerford, camping out under the stars, and my father naming the trees: leopard tree, bloodwood, wilga, quandong—peeling the sour red quandong flesh, insubstantial as a thumb-scraping, and drying the seeds that were ridged like a model of the human brain. We made a game of spotting leopard trees—their delicate distinctiveness was a prize in itself. Travelling through red sandhills my father waved his hat against the door of the car to attract emus. They came in their curious hundreds. Up there, north-west of Bourke, it was the beginning of the outback, except that ‘outback’ then was always somewhere farther on.

  I revisited Bourke many years later. More accurately, I passed through in a rush on my way to Yantabulla, near Hungerford, on my way to my first appointment as a shearers’ cook, which I tried as a break from writing in 1989 and described in Shearers’ Motel. It was still possible to find the idealised landscape of my childhood out from the shearers’ quarters in breaks between cooking. But the woody weeds from years of dry seasons and overgrazing were taking their toll. In places they showed as impenetrable stiff walls of low vegetation instead of the open parklike vistas of memory. There are beautiful descriptions of a landscape untouched by sheep in C.E.W. Bean’s On the Wool Track, published early in the last century; but also contrasting depictions of the ravages to the thin topsoil by (at that time) at least fifty years of sheep grazing. Another ninety years have passed since then and western New South Wales is often a depressing mishmash of claypans, scoured earth, woody weeds and burr patches. Other parts of the country—especially the towns, in terms of shade trees planted—look better than I remember them. Memory is deceptive, and many if not all good impressions in Australia depend on the season. To my eye, I was amazed by the number of trees across Bourke township. They added an oasis feel to what was always an outpost feel.

  My father, Hugh Fraser McDonald, was a Queenslander, born and raised in Rockhampton. We visited Rocky from Bourke in the 1949 Chev for Christmas holidays that involved cross-country expeditions through back country. My brothers and I rode our uncles’ old bikes around Rockhampton’s hot, wide, empty streets. The insides of kitchens always smelled of ripening tropical fruit. Every backyard had mango trees and the fruit lay rotting on the ground. The ice-cream factory tried mango ice-cream but it had no appeal for locals. There were no other trees in Rocky, just acres of tin roofs and the mangoes, and bare yards where a battle was fought against encroaching tropical grasses, tough as tin. Rockhampton awaited the invention of the Victa lawn-mower, only then would it be suburbanised, losing its look of spare colonial calm.

  After our move to Sydney the two senses of ‘the bush’—first as the place where country people lived, and second as native forest (or scrub, more commonly)—receded to images of places with a strong nostalgic pull. After the first novelty the city had negative connotations. It was a long trudge to school and home again. Other elements were missing, difficult to define. I suppose the closest to a dreamscape was the Blue Mountains, where the Presbyterian church owned a large holiday house, ‘Balqhain’, in Govett’s Leap Road, Blackheath. Off the main roads the bush then was like it is now: a gallery of charred banksias, scrolls and shards of eucalpyt bark, and secretive, tough little shrubs, starred with wildflowers, in shadowed crevices or hanging onto cliffs. Where the fire has gone reveals the essence of trees, as in all life.

  My father’s last parish was Hunters Hill, in Sydney. I was still at school. He was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s disease. It was a devastating time for my parents.

  My father was forty-eight years old. His world closed in. He asked me if I had ever thought of being a minister. He would have been proud. Did he imagine I would continue some line of his, that he had never spoken to me about, or was unable to articulate? It was where his roots went down, not mine.

  Within a decade his physical orbit was reduced to a few immediate concerns. He died in 1981. Too late the right questions came. Now I want to know what his self-image was. What was his tree?

  I was seventeen, in my last year at Scots College, when I made a declaration: I wanted to be a forester. This took my parents by surprise. My father, his thinking shaped by a self-reliant childhood and the Depression years—and a new insecurity—wondered if I shouldn’t leave school and work in a bank. As I recall, my mother argued against it. I was to go to university, it was not to be doubted. But forestry? I was a dreamer, the impractical son whose older brother did all his bicycle repairs for him, and whose chemistry set, a jumble of jars and powders, lay in a stained heap on a laundry shelf. I was the verbaliser of everything who had never shown any interest in gardening or horticulture, and indeed I cannot ever remember planting anything at all. Not even a pumpkin seed. All I can remember is watching other people do things and imagining how it must feel.

  There was nothing in our life in Sydney that inspired this suddenly declared ambition, except, I suppose, the negative sense of suburban life in its man-made smallness compared with the pull of the outdoors. The astonishing bush of the Sydney sandstone region wasn’t part of my immediate environment, except in pockets that seemed immeasurably small.

  The requirements for forestry school were all science based. My parents sent me to the Institute of Industrial Psychology in Hunter Street, where I took a vocational guidance test. The counsellor told me that being a forester had nothing to do with a love of dank earth, long shadows, banks of trees on a river bend; nor of deep, dark recesses of stillness and peace where I could take my adolescent longings and sink into oblivion. My aptitudes, so comprehensively listed in a column and illustrated in bar graphs, were verbal: they belonged to a career in advertising, law, teaching, broadcasting, or scriptwriting. Until that day I had never thought of trees as timber, something to be made use of, beautiful in their growth but only coincidentally so. A forester was a technologist, it seemed.

  I became the first person on my father’s side of the family to go to university, became a teacher, worked in broadcasting. I worked as a book editor. Nothing felt settled until I started writing novels and found myself living back in the country again.

  It was night, a low full moon coming up through ribbon gums on a rocky ridge. I stood at the back door of the house and the moon was close, a huge dimmed torchlight. I was forty years old and had planted my first tree, a linden or European lime, on the three hundred and twenty acres of Spring Farm, Braidwood.

  I went walking down the sweep of paddocks. Moonlight slipped through the hollows like milk. Lone trees stood silvery in semi-mist. Then other trees appeared. They were coming towards me—poplars, ribbon gums, peppermints and blackwoods on their rocky rises—shapes with their illusion of strolling in the dark, almost affably, conversationally, mysteriously arriving. Spirits loosened. It happened in moonrise. Durran Durra Creek ran black along a sandy bottom. The moon rose higher, brighter, harder. This was during the El Niño event of the early 1980s, the worst drought on record. Where did the moisture come from, that made dry summer nights smell as if there had just been a sprinkle of rain? Granite boulders extruded from the decomposed granite soil. They were like huge eggs and exfoliated onion-heads. Eucalypts grew among them, snow gums and ribbon gums, peppermints and a few wattles. They were raggedy and insect-chewed. Neighbouring paddocks were bare. Sand-drifts covered the Euradux Road from town. The bare
rocky moon was a desert moon.

  We had hired a digger to scoop a hole in the trickling creek and lowered a concrete well-liner to hold water. I started bucketing water to trees. The sandy soil soaked it up. I had come around full circle. Now I could have what I wanted at seventeen—a dream of trees—and be living in that feeling at the same time. I didn’t have to be scientific about it. I could try things out with trees, and if they didn’t work I could try them in a different way.

  Introduced trees had been planted at Spring Farm for well over a hundred years. As native trees were cleared the exotics went in. There were many Lombardy poplars, along with willows, black locusts or robinia, elms, hawthorns, Monterey cypresses, arbutus or Irish strawberry, Canary Island pine, and tree of heaven in a pungent, impenetrable stand. A neighbour in his eighties remembered the Lombardy poplars as big old trees when he was ten. They lined sections of creek and formed an avenue between the house and the shearing shed. Not once did they falter in the drought. They had their roots far down past layers of sand and into damp clay. Stretching a hundred feet high they made a sound of fluttery whispers when currents of air filtered past. It was a sound to fall asleep to. So was the sound of possums glissading on the corrugated iron roof of the shearing shed. In strong winds the same poplars thundered like surf. In the dark of still, clear nights, their leaf-spires sliced out sections of sky: canoe shapes, blades, candles. They were silent sentinels taking thoughts up to the stars. In spring they smelled of sweet honey. Equinoctial gales came with immense power and shook the poplars by the roots, and hauled back branches of eucalypts like a hand pulling bunches of hair. The house was positioned in a slight hollow and the worst winds curved over it. The ground rocked, slammed by the assault. I see the house sunk in its hollow, far back from any road, a dim light bulb burning outside the back door, black branches crashing in the dark. From down near the creek I hear the insistent flapping of tin at the pump shed.

  The hardest frosts were then, at the start of the eighties. Minus fourteen degrees and the pipes all burst in the walls of the house, and a small side creek running into Durran Durra Creek was still frozen at four in the afternoon. I skidded stones on the ice and our first farm dog, Sheba, chased them. Her legs went everywhere on the muddy ice. At Jinglemoney, where we lived before Spring Farm, Sheba used to stand in the shade of a linden tree and stare into the dark for ten minutes at a time. The power of that linden with its heart-shaped leaves and silvery-green trunk, so beautifully growing on a sand-ridge in the garden above the river, inspired me to plant the one at Spring Farm. The one that failed.

  The nitrogen-rich granite soil stretching ten or so kilometres out from Braidwood’s Mount Gillamatong attracted land clearing early in white settlement. Alexander Harris in Convicts and Settlers records all the useful land being taken up by the 1820s. Spring Farm lies at the edge of a zone of almost total denudation. On rocky outcrops we had ribbon gums, a few peppermints, a few wattles, including blackwoods, and even a few stubborn banksias and heath species of shrub surviving where sheep and cattle had long grazed.

  There were snow gums and black sallees with a habit of flecking their leaves silver in the bracing winter winds. But re-introducing native trees into that bleak, frost-exposed landscape was difficult. There was no longer the over-storey and under-storey of compatible, protective varieties to give even an open-forest concept a new start. I concentrated on propagating Eucalyptus viminalis seeds from a magnificent old ribbon gum near the house, and had most success with those, planting them in rows near the creek. The hardiest eucalypt I planted wasn’t local—the Camden woolly butt or Eucalyptus macarthurii. They were more resistant to Christmas beetle attack which converted many young viminalis into what looked like toilet brushes, and invariably slowed their growth. To get the most reliable responses, and also in sympathy with the already Europeanised look to the landscape, I concentrated in those first years on introduced varieties.

  Even so, at the back of my mind, there was a constant speculation about what this sandy but fertile plateau would have been like in pre-European times. It would have been environmentally rich country, holding its moisture in a delicate topsoil despite the sharp drainage of the soil type. I had a fantasy, never fulfilled, of getting some of the paddocks back to the way the landscape would have once looked. A reedy creek, wildfowl, banksias despite the fierce cold, and glittering black sallees in the frost hollows—a tree with an almost mystical attachment to the coldest places, with olive and green tones in the bark, almost like streamed shellacked paint. Here and there in the paddocks, at a rate of a few to the acre, there would have been huge old ribbon gums—or water gums to use an old common name for them. I saw them swarming with native beehives.

  Among tree planters various ways have been devised to get native trees back onto farms. They all involve hard work, disappointment, an investment of money and, most of all, take individual determination. Even then there is often failure. With Landcare—where ideas once thrust on farmers are worked through by them—some of the hopeless isolation landholders feel about trees is met with neighbourly collaboration: costs, materials and labour no longer feel like odds stacked against good intentions. (Landcare is an Australia-wide, community-based approach to fixing environmental problems. About one in three farmers belong to a Landcare group.)

  I have a different lot of land now, ‘Sheep Camp’, on a ridge of the Dividing Range, about twenty kilometres from Spring Farm as the crow flies.

  Right to the end we said we would never leave Spring Farm. And so it seemed through all the eleven years we owned it, planting trees, running sheep, writing books, raising three daughters. Here I learned tree-planting habits. They started with water and the practicality of getting water to trees and keeping it up to them. Bucketing water to seedlings in a drought was a daily task.

  There was an old Dangar Gedye piston pump near the power pole in the lucerne paddock, ten metres from the creek. I learned to dismantle it, to fit new leather buckets and gaskets, and to put it together again. I built the all-weather pump shed—the first structure I ever made with my own hands. It had to be done in three days to get county council approval and the power connected in time to be useful. The shed is still there today, loosening its roofing iron. I see myself down in the dark, summoned from bed, nails between my teeth, and wielding a hammer to stop a mad, wild flapping.

  Contractors built a one-hundred-and-ten-thousand litre concrete tank in the top paddock, eighty metres head above the creek and a kilometre away. It was finished on 12 December 1982, the date scratched in wet cement. Gravity-fed water plunged down the hill in a fat pipe, and then radiated out in narrower pipes down to eight millimetre spray lines. There was an old system of troughs and I connected watering lines to them, fencing-in tree plantations. Polypipe made it easy to be a bush plumber. The sandy soil made digging easy.

  The kitchen table was always covered with tree catalogues from bulk suppliers. They were inevitably Victorian. Lucas Farm Trees in the Dandenongs was the main enticer, with a new wonder-tree in vogue each year—paulownia, matsudana willows, hybrid cypress. (If I come back in another life and want to go into business it will be as a farm tree supplier, a purveyor of dreams.) We tried many, but had best results with what we found ourselves through local knowledge. The Tablelands of New South Wales have frosts of such severity that they defied the credibility of early explorers. The enemies of seedlings are frost, wind, poor soil, rainfall, insect attack, stock damage. Trial and error remains the rule, down to spots a few metres from each other.

  My mother, on the phone from Rockhampton, talked about the sandy soil at Drik Drik. Spring Farm had the same sort of soil, the same bracken, the same almost instant flush of green after rain, the same equally rapid drying-off, and also the same promise of trees to be grown in sandy soil as long as there was water. When the trees got their roots down to the water table—and they were the right trees—there would be no stopping them.

  I kept thinking about where I would plant a small f
orest of timber trees. Hovering around in my head was the thought of my grandfather. His plantings. My plantings.

  I met two foresters. The first was Lawley Burrows, a West Country Englishman who grew pines and poplars near the Shoalhaven River. As soon as he realised I was interested in trees he sent his offsider, Graham McGrath, over to Spring Farm with a truckload of poplars and the free labour to plant them. We chose a boggy spring area near the cattle yards. There was a circle of stones on the ground and it was not until a decade later, when the spindly poplar cuttings were grown into stocky, vigorous-trunked trees, that I realised the stones marked a well, and I spent a week digging it out. I went down into the earth and down into the last century, when teams of itinerant well-sinkers travelled the countryside, lining shafts with tight-fitting stones.

  Lawley Burrows was excitable, sharp-tongued, infectious with information about trees, and had the Johnny Appleseed quality of planting trees whenever he could. Later I learned that this was the mark of true foresters: they were not restricted to log counting, but threw their enthusiasms into planting. There is a row of poplars alongside the Braidwood sewerage works on the Bombay Road, planted around the same time as mine. They were Lawley’s. I recognised his South American clones in other places. I saw some in the Colo Valley once, north-west of Sydney, and remembered Lawley had been there.

  He wasn’t in Braidwood much longer. He had followed trees earlier in his life, from country to country, and he returned to England following trees again. Graham McGrath came and did another job for us: he put a fence around seven acres of rocky hill above the house. We called it Conservation Hill and kept stock out. It was a great picnic spot, with a boulder the size of a house offering views down through trees to the creek, with bare paddocks sweeping away across neighbours’ land towards the Shoalhaven River. A lot of talking was done there at those rocks. I loved making fires in the stones in winter, reading a book, boiling the billy, inhaling leaf-smoke, dreaming and having the dream at the same time. Judith Wright came one day and made a declaration: ‘This would have been an important place.’ She meant in Aboriginal lore. After a year or so the hill name evolved to Conversation Hill.