The Tree In Changing Light Page 4

  In the 1950s, as a boy in the Gulf Country, Tom Wyatt leaned from the saddle and looked at flowers and plants rather than following the other riders on the muster. His older brothers thought he was strange even then. They were all in the same world of rocks and dust and cattle, moving through the hot, open scrub from various agreed starting points, heading for the holding yards. When they gazed around, Tom was trying to add to the experience. He loved the life—throwing sticks on the campfire—boiling the billy—watching the stars—saddling up at dawn in the dry smell of the grass clearings. In the full heat of day he knew nothing better than to follow a creek downstream, to where it came to a waterfall. And it was like a rule. There would come a break in the trees, sky ahead, a wheeling of birdlife, ducks, geese, pelicans, finches in the shadows, hawks above, fish, tortoises, freshwater crocs nosing through the shallows—the life of the north crowding in to water from the glare of the open plain. Near the drop, creekwater that seemed hardly to be moving was streaked on the surface with lines of force, eddies, whorls and question marks, and then with a glassy edge sliding over—and so everything was broken up, changed. Water tipped into space, plunged into pools creating a snappy, quickly disappearing foam. There were waterlilies in those pools. Barramundi. Leaf matter turning dark, cleansing the flow. A continuous shade. Doves making the sound of coolness.

  Tom Wyatt’s father was born in Kent, and came out to Australia in 1923 as a boy of seventeen on a farm assistance scheme. He took to packhorse travelling and prospecting. His mother came from a station in the Gulf. Tom’s father went to war with the Second AIF, was wounded at El Alamein and repatriated back to Australia. Tom was born at Mareeba in 1946, the youngest of six, and did most of his growing up at Charters Towers, among the bare and baking rocks of a tropical mining town—an unlikely place, you might think, for market gardening. But grapes and tomatoes grew there in the winter months, and vegetables thrived in a rich alluvial soil. Tom’s father disappeared for intervals of six months at a time, seeking gold. It was the life for Tom as a boy: chores from pre-dawn until after dark, milking the goats, digging the ground, harvesting the produce. And heading off into the bush whenever he could. He was meant to work on a cattle property—that was his dream—always to get back to the bush. Tom’s father taught him to be an observer, to watch what the birds ate, to try things out on his own initiative, and to learn from experience rather than just by asking. Then at a certain point he told Tom about a horticultural apprenticeship in Townsville. It was advisable for a boy to get a trade. Tom said later, ‘He pushed me into it. And when he saw what I’d done, I gave him the credit for it.’

  The sides of the hills are covered with trees, which grow separately, without underwood, James Cook observed in 1770, as he crossed the Tropic of Capricorn into Keppel Bay, off Kinka Beach. Inland there was much smoke, indicating a quantity of people. Cook observed through his eyeglass that the farther country was hilly, yet by no means of a pleasing aspect. He deduced the presence of a considerable river.

  Today, the foreground of James Cook’s view is Wyatt’s Nursery. There is a succession of basalt headlands and beaches fringed with casuarina and pandanus. The Keppel Bay coast is a landscape of mangroves and mudflats, cattle properties, pineappple farms, and holiday houses. No softness, even at dusk. Paperbarks, tough survivors, in the lagoons behind the beach; picnic tables; traffic roundabouts; a creek with fishing boats sitting on the mud at low tide; thin-leafed eucalypts; ironbarks and spotted gum, rhodes grass in the cuttings; a south-easterly making whitecaps. Nights thick with silence followed by bright, harsh days waiting for something to happen.

  Conversation with Tom Wyatt goes non-stop while he weeds. He mentions a man who bought a ten-hectare block, bulldozed the standing trees including turpentine (a fine timber species), then came and asked advice about planting natives. ‘They were natives you knocked down,’ said Tom. The man said the ones he bulldozed were ‘too ugly’. When Bos indicus (Brahman) cattle were introduced to Queensland, says Tom, graziers were told by Primary Industries they didn’t need shade, so many of them jumped in and cleared all their trees. They liked having an excuse, even if they knew damned well that all living bodies need shade. ‘Bloody pioneers’ are still a breed in Queensland in the 1990s. Old timber-getters and sawmillers had an understanding and respect for the forest: ‘Plant six trees for each one taken out.’ But ‘bloody pioneers’—they’re still around.

  The potential for growing trees in Australia is virtually untapped, says Tom. It amazes him. Australian imports of timber are worth more than our meat exports, yet we have the best hardwood in the world. We nail it up inside our houses and hide it from view. Recently he visited Clermont, inland, six hundred kilometres north-west of Rockhampton, and found the people there had planted vast numbers of trees on the floodplain dividing the town. They did it as a Bicentennial project in 1988. ‘They didn’t know why they planted it,’ says Tom. But it doesn’t matter. They’ve got it and it’s thriving. A forest of mixed species.

  At the rear of Wyatt’s Nusery there are mosquitoes, burrs, beehives, lantana. Waist-high grass like whips of steel and the canopy of the mango trees almost closing over. It is a reminder to me of what it’s like to be back in Queensland. An impression, in the hot shade, of time suspended. You could spend your life there holding still. It would be endless and yet it would seem to be over in a moment. Why bother to do anything? I experience an impatience to get out, yet at the same time I want to surrender to what it can offer: to locate a piece of dirt, to build a board-floored tent screened off from insects, to plant trees.

  By 1974, when he was twenty-eight, Tom Wyatt had risen to second in charge of Parks and Gardens in Townsville and knew that when the top job came round he wouldn’t get it. It would go to an outsider because it always did. So he applied for the job of Director of Parks and Gardens in Rockhampton. His boss wrote him a favourable reference, but was appalled. There was a famous botanical gardens in Rockhampton, more than a hundred years old, but Rocky, said the boss, as everyone knew, was stifling, bare, hemmed in from sea breezes by those Berserker hills. It wasn’t like Townsville, open to the breezes of the Coral Sea. It was a place so hot that people took blankets with them when they went to hell. Tom Wyatt shrugged and said, well, if he didn’t like Rockhampton he’d come back to Townsville and take the top job. He’d be an outsider by then.

  Over twenty years later Tom Wyatt is still finding things to do in Rockhampton. A photograph taken from high over the bare shining galvanised roofs of the city in 1974, compared with one taken from the same position in 1996, shows the change: bush rolling down from the hills, shade filling the bare corridors of this Queensland town—it shows something like the creation of an urban forest with street trees and parkland plantings—a process inseparable from the person of Tom Wyatt, who came in person from the bush to the city.

  One of his first projects was to propagate six thousand bottlebrushes and plant them free of charge. The night they went in, two thousand were ripped from the ground by resentful householders. Later when they saw how the bottlebrushes improved their streets they asked for replacement plantings. Parks and Gardens agreed. ‘Don’t worry about the lemons. Make more lemonade,’ became another motto on Tom Wyatt’s lips.

  Each year the Rockhampton Parks and Gardens nursery propagates thirty thousand trees. One-third are lost to vandalism and natural death. The rest survive planting out.

  Recently a Victorian couple moved to Rockhampton, attracted by ‘heritage trees’. Those particular trees had been growing for only seventeen years. Tom Wyatt had planted them.

  The office of the Director is a modern glass-walled building buried among trees, just down from the Fern House in the old Botanic Gardens. The scope of the Director’s responsibilities are wide. When I arrive to see him one morning he is on the phone deciding what to do about the desecration of the statue of a Brahman bull that stands in the Bruce Highway median strip on the southern entrance to the city. Someone has attacked the bull w
ith a hammer, smashing its balls. To whoever he is talking on the phone the Director calls them testes. The perpetrator he calls a vandal. Official exasperation is mixed with personal high spirits in Tom Wyatt’s voice: how is he ever going to catch this miscreant? It’s always the same twit. Mix razor blades in the plaster of Paris, he mutters from the corner of his mouth when he clunks down the phone.

  The phone keeps ringing. A trainload of sleepers is ready for inspection. No time today. Interview with this writer. Meetings with mayor, prisons chief, and speech to East Rockhampton Rotary club. Young female office assistant wants his advice on something.

  ‘Think for yourself,’ shouts Tom. ‘What would you do if I had a heart attack?’

  ‘Jump on your chest, I’m trained in cardiac arrest.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have a hope. My chest is like a steel plate.’

  Coffs Harbour is on the phone—what do they want? They want to come up and see what he’s doing. Fine. Great. Rocky is the best part of Australia. We ought to secede, cut loose, sail away. Come on up. Now what—people in Rudd Street want to move a tree? On the desk is an emu egg, a ‘No Bull Shit’ coaster (barred like an anti-smoking sign), and a sticker with the message: ‘Organics = ecology in action.’

  ‘No-one in local government wants anything that’s sensitive,’ says Tom Wyatt about all the things that keep coming at him from every side. ‘So they give it to the Parks Department.’

  I want to ask Tom Wyatt if he ever finds time to sit back and rest in the shade of a tree. But the question doesn’t occur. There’s no time for it, and the idea of his tree gets lost in his trees, plural. Tom’s on the move, jawing. He talks about bringing the bush to the city. Says this often. He’s done it already but it’s not enough. The way he tilts back in his chair suggests the way a bushman props himself on a stump. The bush is in charge. The idea keeps regenerating inside him. He’s already out there under a tree in his mannerisms. There’s a belief in the air—as if trees have a quality of making inner changes in people. ‘City people are anti-tree. Trees change the way people live in towns. We’re making changes.’

  It is impossible to separate trees from people’s attitudes about themselves—their fears, their lack of self-acceptance, their timidity and their ignorance. But nothing is inflexible in human response. People can live and grow just as trees do, they can struggle and they can overcome what is in themselves. In Rockhampton, what was it that made people antitree? One thing is continuation of the pioneering spirit: a tree is there to be cut down. ‘Bloody pioneers.’ Well, that has gone too far, and the reaction needs to be fed back the other way. Tom Wyatt is feeding it back.

  ‘Such trees as he and his descendants planted showed

  the desire in a new country for imprinting the values

  of the old …’

  THE QUIET man bought a bulldozer and started clearing around his house. It was a big house like something from Wuthering Heights but in Australia. This wasn’t the sort of clearing that left a landscape torn and desolate, ready for the plough. It was delicate, personal, attentive work he did on those clunking caterpillar treads—edging the cold, heavy blade between trunks of old trees and plucking overgrown, dead and dying Monterey and Canary pines and setting them down in heaps. Around he went with this mechanised trowel. It was weeding on a big scale, a job (with time off from sheep-farming several thousand acres) that took a couple of years. He left other old trees intact although he didn’t like them much—the Himalayan cypress, the photinia, the arbutus or Irish strawberry. It was a mix of growth common to old gardens in the Monaro, but some varieties were uncommon enough to make the garden at Cambalong noted for its rarities—trees and shrubs that would once have been planted on Indian hill stations. So here was an image of Scotland twice removed to the cool high country of south-eastern Australia, in a wide grassy valley at six hundred and fifty metres. From a hill above the house the wild profile of the Snowy Mountains was visible one hundred kilometres to the north-west. Captain Ronald Campbell, a Loch Tay Scot who in 1831 first settled ‘Bombalo’ (later, when the town took that name, the property was renamed Cambalong) was ex-Indian army. Such trees as he and his descendants planted showed the desire in a new country for imprinting the values of the old. Robert Campbell comes along to reverse that trend, with reasons of his own that are like an expressive self-portrait.

  The pines had grown shaggy and stark over more than a century, towering over the house, plunging it into dank shadows. When Robert and his English wife Henny took up residence in the late 1970s the homestead had been empty for twenty years. Now there were three daughters running through its many echoing rooms. The pines Robert attacked with his bulldozer were the other side of an argument he was having with the landscape. Here was a young family needing an expansive place to grow, not a place turned in on itself.

  A couple of years previously Robert had planted four gum trees in front of the house, Eucalyptus viminalis, ribbon gums. They were the first of a large number he planned to put in, slender with pale creamy trunks and grey curling bark, pleasing to the eye and suited to the landscape. Up in the high gullies and ridges above Cambalong fantastic, shapely old ribbon gums had survived sheep and cattle. There were forest casuarinas there too, hardy as old iron left gnarled and isolated on the ridgelines. Many of them would have been growing before white settlement. There was a saying about native trees in Bombala—where clear-felling of native forests in the mountains towards the coast had left tens of thousands of hectares looking like the battlefields of the Somme—‘if you planted any new ones you were a greenie’. What was a greenie anyway? It was hard to tell. Someone ‘different’, that was for sure. Someone who wasn’t from Bombala. So where did Robert Campbell fit in?

  He put a greenie sticker on his car.

  Robert Campbell was born and raised at Bombala. His father gave him his first rifle at the age of six. He did correspondence school supervised by his mother. Whenever there was anything interesting happening on the property he was allowed to drop whatever he was doing and get involved. The things that fascinated him most were graders and bulldozers. At the age of twelve he experienced the shock-troop initiation of boarding school. Tudor House at Moss Vale was regimented but Cranbook in Sydney was better. His father had been there in the 1920s and gave Robert hints on how to get out of work. After leaving school he worked the property with his father and on the side started a trucking company. In his early twenties he hauled timber from the state forests around Bombala until his experience of forests laid waste by clear-felling sickened him. He did a lot of driving getting his work done, organising trucks and drivers, and keeping up with a social life. He liked good cars, he liked driving fast. When he went before a magistrate for a second speeding ticket in a short space of time he found himself in trouble. He was given three months’ imprisonment. Gaol? Just for speeding? It was unthinkable. An appeal went before a judge. The judge was inflexible. The appeal went against him. Three months it was. Young men of good family had to be shown an example.

  In Goulburn Gaol the screws told Robert Campbell they thought he shouldn’t be in there for such a trivial offence, but when they saw his drivers coming to see him and discussing trucking company business they were resentful, and they locked him in maximum security. Robert Campbell will tell you it wasn’t such a bad experience for someone who’d been at boarding school—living among hardened criminals—that it was much the same. These were grown men who meant what they said. They looked you in the eye and you knew where you stood. They, too, in certain circumstances, you might imagine (if, say, they lived in Bombala), would have had the defiance to put a greenie sticker on their cars.

  In the cold air of the Monaro a red bull makes its way down a dusty hillside and crashes through a fence. Inside that fence is a garden planted more than a century ago. Dense shaggy pines and deciduous specimens formerly choking each other to death are tangled in windrows after the passage of the bulldozer blade. The red bull makes its way almost delicately through the
mess, an invader from the drought-stricken paddocks. Riding the skies behind him are flocks of white cockatoos, five thousand and more wheeling and screeching.

  Branches scrape muscled shoulders and scratch dribble-streaked, rough pink nostrils. The bull has something in mind. Between old buildings he comes on, trotting and swishing his tail, crashing past the weatherboard station-hands’ cottages and the neglected stables, past the old-time cooks’ rooms and maids’ quarters, and along the high granite walls of the homestead until he stops.

  He stands on a square of lawn. At the far side of the lawn, delicate in the cold light, are four high-country trees, Eucalyptus viminalis, ribbon gums, in front of the homestead where carriages used to draw up and early motor cars disgorged their travel-sick loads from Cooma. They are the first plantings inside the garden of species native to the landscape. The bull seems to have them in mind. Anyway that is the direction he is headed.

  ‘The tree’s solitary unhappiness took on beauty and

  almost sang, or at least cried out …’

  YEARS AGO the painter Tom Carment went to Zimbabwe and was so overwhelmed by the roaring spectacle of Victoria Falls that he turned his back on the boiling river and drew only one picture, a dung beetle struggling along a path.