Seeing the Trees within the Forest

In her book Understory, Inga Simpson shows that no matter how well you know a place, and how long you might live there, you can always be surprised by some new aspect of its shape, its story, and its inhabitants.  She shows, too, how perceptions can be shaped by the stories we have heard about the place and the assumptions we bring with us to that place - and how this can sometimes blind us to significant facets of the place and its stories.

Almost forty years ago, soon after I had moved to a valley that had once been the forested home of the Darkinjung People, I was working behind the bar at the Tavern that was the hub of the larger of the two villages in The Valley.  Wollombi drew its name, it was believed, from the language of those prior occupants, and signified either a meeting of waters, or a meeting place near the waters.  The other village was smaller, had a Spanish name - Laguna, possibly from a former soldier of Wellesley's Peninsula Campaign - and possessed only a Wine Bar.

A stranger of around fifty years of age came into the bar and bought a beer - he looked around and eventually asked after certain local names and families - many of them unknown to we newer residents, and most, long departed.  He was not, it turned out, a stranger to The Valley, but we were strangers to him. He had grown up in a narrow gully at the back of one of the many dairy farms that dotted the area during World War Two. After the war, he had left in search of work, as so many young men did.  Indeed, by the time I moved there, only one dairy was still operating, and the family that ran it were all well past retirement age.

He asked me, after a while "What happened to the hills?  Why did they let the place go like this?"

I asked what he meant, and he launched into a story about the hard work done by he and others, during and just after the war.  He pointed out the many forested ridges that surrounded the basin in which the village sat, nestled at the confluence of three small rivers.

"We had all those ridges clear" he said indignantly "and now they've let all the trees grow back"

He and his fathers, uncles, and neighbours, had ring-barked almost every tree on all the ridges visible from the tavern (which had been a wine bar, too, when he was young) and many other ridges further up and downstream.  He obviously felt that all their sweat and hard work had been wasted through neglect - he thought that the current landholders should have been vigilant and active in preventing any regrowth by trees. 

His tone and words told me that he believed that what they had done had been the right thing - an effort to expand the area of pasture available to the local dairies, at a time when the production of milk and butter was a vital contribution to the war effort, and a valuable addition to the local economy.  No doubt that was the story told to the farmers by the agricultural advisors of the day.

Now the hills were covered in forest again - a thriving mix of Ironbark, Stringybark, Grey Gum, Rough Barked Apple, and Blue Gum - and no local farmer would think to clear those steeper slopes again.

The erosion had been terrible, and long stretches of the Brook and of Yango Creek had seen deep, fish-filled waterholes fill with sand.  The grass growth had been worse without trees than with, and the forests were now valued as a resource that could be selectively cut through for logs, pit timber, fence posts, and firewood, as well as providing sheltered areas for the cattle during the worst of the heat and cold.

The new arrivals and younger people in the bar at the time were astounded at the story he told of dust, sweat, and hillsides covered in stark, silver-grey skeletons of the earlier forests - to us, the existing forests looked as if they had always been there - and yet he had been helping to kill those former forests only forty years earlier.  It was not the first time, either, as I subsequently was shown a very old photo of the hill behind the Wine Bar at Laguna, and it, too, was bereft of trees, though earlier and later photos showed plenty of them on the hill behind the buildings.  That picture dated to the end of the nineteenth centurey.  It seems the the fortunes of the local forest ebbed and flowed over the decades.

The few members of the older families still living in the area could have told us that story, though none did - directly.  One old ex-dairyman liked to recall, in a puzzled voice, how the area had been suddenly swamped by a surfeit of wombats, and that this had happened at the same time as all the koalas had vanished.  It was a mystery, he said, that no one had ever explained.

If we looked closely enough, the clues were there.  Although the trees that were killed in the great ringbarking effort had mostly fallen or been felled, and had been burned in piles, or carted away for firewood many years before that afternoon in The Tavern, there were still ancient stumps - mossy and half rotten - lurking in the shade of the new forest.  The man's story opened my eyes, and I soon found many more stumps as I walked the shady hillsides - some of them of a truly remarkable size.

One day, I wandered up across the western ridge of my farm - I had not had it long and was still exploring it a bit at a time.  I found a half a dozen truly enormous Blue Gums - tall, straight, and metres in circumference.  I wondered how such trees had survived, but the clue was in the shape of the gully they grew in - the confirmation came a while later when I talked to one of the older timber cutters in the area.

His comment?  "That gully had a double dog-leg in it.  The logs wouldn't shoot down, couldn't get a dozer up there to drag them out, and couldn't get a track close enough on the ridge top to winch them up.  We had to leave them"  He sounded so disappointed that he was never able to find a way to get at those trees.

Later on, I heard a story about trees that were even bigger, and still standing.  At the end of a narrow dirt road that snaked along the ridges of the Watagan Range, and plunged down deep, shady gullies to the upper reaches of the Brook that flowed through my paddocks, a small clearing had been set aside within the State Forest for campers.  The trees that surrounded that clearing, on the banks of a clear, pebbly stream, were huge.  Five or six people might have been able to link hands around the trunk of one of the smaller ones; to see their tops seemed impossible - they were too close to the clouds.

The Darkingjung, Awabakal, and Wonnarua Peoples walked among vast forests of such trees for tens of thousands of years - now a few dozen of those trees remain in odd corners of the range to remind us of what once was here.  When I had first bought the hundred acres of creek flat and ridge country that was to be my farm, I had walked among trees that seemed astounding in their size - yet it seems that almost all of them were barely moving into a stage we could call mature, especially compared to those might Grandfather Trees still lurking in their hidden corners.

I had made that all too common human mistake, and assumed that what I could see was what had always been that way.  In truth, that is so rarely the case, and if we look and listen carefully, the stories that will tell us what had gone before, and what might come again, are there, waiting.  But don't leave it too long - so many of those older story tellers are leaving us, and leaving behind no written or pictorial record.

Among the Trees

Inga Simpson has, with her latest work A Life with Trees, given us a poignant story of the constant tension between the dreams and desires we humans try to impose on "our" land, and the drives and needs of the manifold occupants - plant and animal - that were in and on that land before us, or that have arrived from elsewhere to enjoy the side-effects our decisions and actions have wrought upon that land.

Within its pages there is a resonance with my own life amid tree and pasture, and the attachment I formed to the landscapes within which I lived, and, at times, made my living.  Like her, I have moved more than once, and cleared and planted, trying to add my dreams and desires to the existing ecology, and like her I have had to compromise between dreams and the counter forces of nature and economics.

I have been enchanted by the grandeur of a place, and by the miniscule wonder and beauty that reveal themselves to the quiet traveller or sojourner.  The first view of any landscape, large or small, always contains more than the observer can take in.  We think we see it all, but our brain, as it usually does when confronted with large amounts of information via the senses, filters and simplifies - bringing to our consciousness the "big picture" first, and then the more easily identifiable aspects, with an emphasis on things about which we already have some knowledge.

Another view, in different light, weather, or season, and different aspects are highlighted - the big picture changes shape and gains texture.  Finer details begin to come to our notice, until we make that all too common mistake and think we know all about the place, and fully understand it.

Then the light changes again, or the temperature, or rain falls, or fails to fall when expected - and the view changes again as we notice previously overlooked details.  Carefuly nurtured plants die of drought, drowning, or unseen disease, while self-sown seedlings that weren't obvious only weeks before are suddenly flourishing.  Perhaps they were there all along, rendered invisible by our ignorance, or even misidentified as weeds.

Mature trees that somehow escaped notice for years, even as we lamented the absence of that species, appear under our nose (or over our heads), and supposedly rare and endangered ground orchids suddenly, and briefly, carpet a ridge top in flowers - no matter how long we dwell in a place, it can always surprise us.  And so we add to our knowledge of place, and as the surprise fades, we again grow smug about our understanding - until the next new discovery.

The store of knowledge contained in Indigenous lore is astounding, but should not surprise - there have been many millenia of gathering knowledge, arranging it, piecing it together, and passing it on for future generations.  The Australian First Peoples have been living with this place for so long that they have seen it change as the most recent glaciation cooled the planet and lowered the oceans, and they have seen it change back as the planet warmed.

They have seen old homes and fishing spots drowned by the rising oceans, and adapted as deserts grew, and forests moved and changed - all the while adding their observations and understanding to the songs that hold their memory.  Now they are seeing it change again, as human technological ability and desire for dominance once more overtakes human understanding and ethics.

A lifetime cannot be enough for a complete understanding of a place, an ecology - be it a forest, as in Inga's case, or a shore, or a marsh.  When trees can live for centuries, even passing a millenia or more in the sun and the wind, how can one person ever fully understand a forest?  But that person can live in the forest, and learn its rhythms, and love it -though those people who choose such a path are ever more often finding themselves at odds with that other branch of humanity, who, for whatever reason, see in a forest only a short term picture comprised of dollar gains and dollar costs.

Humans are creatures of story, and it is story-tellers like Inga who help people see the view that they may not previously have noticed - to see the intricate, essential to all of us, life that, without such seeing, they could too easily trample underfoot, or consign to the blade of the bulldozer or the teeth of the chainsaw.

Understory tells of that tension between the needs imposed by "economics" and "society", and the needs of life itself - the constantly growing, moving web that makes our world liveable and beautiful, and without which no amount of money or economic growth would be of any use to the human race at all.  It is a story that has been told in other forms, about other places, by so many people - it needs constant re-telling, for all our sakes.