Sounds in the Silence

Away from our beloved Mountains for a week, we couldn't resist the chance to regain some altitude, and drove to the top of Mount Vincent, one of the highest points between Coopernook and Lansdowne, north of the Manning River.  It was an interesting drive, often at little more than walking pace, through damp gullies and up steep, rocky ridges - always surrounded by soaring tree trunks.

We did so because my wife's mum and aunts had told many fond tales of their childhood days at Langley Vale, a village now vanished, that once thrived near the Langley Bros Timber Mill, on the Lansdowne River.  The men of the family had worked at the mill, or cut timber for it, and the children had walked for miles across neighbouring farms and followed the old Langley Vale Tramway up through the forested gullies and ridges to picnic on the rocky heights of Mt Vincent.

The first thing that struck us was the view.  Vast sweeps of farmland and forested ridges, cut through by slow winding rivers, spread out to the south and near west.  Further out to the west, mountain ranges framed the sky, while north west soared the jagged remnants of old volcanoes, now clothed in temperate rain forest.  Even northeast, the ocean view was partially obscured by a sudden mountain. 

Distant towns, and the city of Taree were tiny specks in the vista, and a long white line of surf marked the edge of Australia and the beginning of the Pacific Ocean.

The second, notable thing was not the silence, but the sounds we could hear coming to us from miles away - cows bellowing in paddocks half a kilometre below and several kms away - the siren of an ambulance - first heard while it was still ten kms away, drawing nearer until it stopped somewhere in the village of Lansdowne.  A dog barked, and we looked down to see a tiny black speck, far below, helping its master muster cattle.

Though we live in the middle of the Blue Mountains National Park, in one of the little towns threaded like shiny beads along the Great Western Highway, and thus imagine we are in a quiet place, the silence further out, away from the surf-like roar of highways and main roads, and the accumulated hum and grumble of myriad airconditioners, mowers, cars, stereos, and businesses, is at a different order of magnitude.

Most humans now live in an ocean of sound unlike anything that has existed for most of the history of the human race - back in the village, sitting in the sun on the front verandah of the aunt's house, I was privy to every conversation in houses a hundred metres away, to the half-cocked first crowing of a young rooster on another block, the distant conversation of cattle and farm dogs, and the many birds that patrolled the yards and gardens in their constant search for food, shelter, and company.

 Silence can seem a distant memory if too many of these guys are about, though.

That I could hear  all these things so clearly (despite old ears battered by decades of violent noises and now awash in the cricket like tones of tinnitus) is testament to the amount of noise we now inflict upon ourselves and the world around us.

We adapt to the background noise after a while, just as our noses adapt to ambient smells, and our eyes to the light available.  Yet even as we adjust our perceptions, and filter out the input our brain classifies as least important, we are still buffetted by it - often to the point of significant physical and psychological stress. 

So, when you feel the need to wander among the trees, or to sit on a rock and listen to the water tumbling downstream, or to luxuriate in the crackling warmth of a campfire, far from the hustle and bustle, perhaps you are not, as some would have it, being self indulgent.  At some deeper level, you are seeking what you need for the sake of your own wellbeing.

Rainbows Made From Mud

Beyond the lawn that stretches from our back door, past our clothes line, around the corners of the orchard, there is a darker space.  Keep walking and suddenly the warmth of the sun is gone from your shoulders.  The shadows of the pines, casuarinas, hakeas and eucalypts are dense along the bank of the creek.

You can walk silently, your footfall absorbed by the deep carpet of fallen leaves and needles that is slowly darkening within those deep shadows, becoming one with the soil below.  Where your boot soles bruise the rotting carpet, scents arise to tickle the nose - mold, terpenes, slime and mud all contribute to the bouquet.  Stand quiet for a few minutes and the currents of life that stilled themselves at your intrusion will slowly resume their flow.

Insects will skitter, and skinks rustle among the leaves and fern-fronds.  Perhaps a snake will rasp across the drying leaves in pursuit, the fear inspired by your presence overpowered by its need for prey.  Wrens and finches will flit through the leaves, seeking a safe path between the serpent below the winged raptors above, and perhaps a pair of ducks will push ripples across the surface of the pool, startling the water insects, tadpoles, and minnows.

Stand still, breath slowly - more life will become obvious as you become less so.  Lower your gaze and see the tiny scurryings among the blades of grass, as ants and spiders go about their business.

A place that seemed still and empty is revealed as a thriving market place of living and dying.  Look closely, breath even more slowly - there is another level here, known more in the imagination than by any apparent movement.

Those fragments of plants and animals and fungi now fallen from their places are still busy - dying and decomposing and becoming part of the mud in and beside the creek.  Mud that binds to and is bound by the roots of the trees and shrubs and ferns and rushes and grasses and violets that thrive on its richness.  Below the mulch, the mud is alive, and is sharing its life with the fractal root-web of feeding plants. 

Just there, by the bank - see the smooth grey-green and cream dappled bark of the eucalypt that dominates the head of this pool.  Look inside it - see the miracle.  Somehow that patient, motionless, trunk is busy pumping a vast flow of liquid towards the sky.  From the sodden earth below, the sap carries microscopic fragments of that dark mud, lifting it twenty metres or more to the tiny, solar powered factories we call leaves.

Look up - you can see the undersides of the branches, twigs, and leaves - an airborne net to equal the complexity of the one below the surface.  Yet there is something you cannot see from there.  Back you go, back out into the sunlight, across the lawn, until you are further from the base of the tree than its topmost leaves are.

Look up again, see how the late afternoon sun is playing on the leaves - and something else.  Tiny flecks of white among the green and orange growth - the tree is in blossom.  The final destination of that miraculous flow of dissolved mud, brought all that way via root, trunk, branch, and twig, is that fragrant cluster of creamy reproductive complexity.  In a few months, some of those flowers will have become gumnuts, holding within themselves seeds tiny enough to make acorns look clumsy.

But now, as the blossom basks in the sunlight, another miracle is taking place.  Listen and look - living bells that chime and squawk and flutter and flash in shades of blue, green, yellow, orange and red - the rainbow lorikeets have arrived to feast on the nectar that is the penultimate product of that mighty trunk.  The bees that have had only tiny honey eaters to compete with are now scattered by the chattering, swirling, feathered rainbow of lorikeets, and must circle hopefully, or yield, and return to their hive, and the leaves and petals that fell last year to become mud are once again airborne.

Favourite Trees

One of my favourite trees is the Narrow Leaf Ironbark – it looks as strong as it is.  The Narrow Leaf Ironbark was a mainstay of my farming days in the ranges behind the Central Coast.  Disliked by the local termites, its dark red timber gave me fence posts, stockyards, barns, chook-runs, two houses (one of which survived a side-swipe by a tornado - the weight of the ironbark frame probably helped keep it on its ironbark stumps), cattle grids, a TV antenna, retaining walls, firewood, and a ute tailgate.

When living, the camopy of its blue-green leaves gave shelter to my live-stock, and the small, creamy blossoms gave abundant nectar for my bees - making some of the finest, palest honey around. A mature Ironbark would house different species of ants at different heights along its trunk – as well as a range of frogs and insects, small birds, possums, koalas, and epiphytic orchids, including one variety peculiar to the Ironbark tree.

A healthy stand of Ironbark would shelter the birds and wallabies from patrolling Wedgetails, and give cover to the Black Cockatoos who darted through the canopy crying warning of the Eagles approach.

The Ironbark was a good mannered tree – rarely shedding limbs to the hazard of stock or farmer; its deep-furrowed bark clung tight during the fire storm and declined to hurl the flaming streamers that 

Blue Gums, Messmates and Stringybarks so often do – nor would it explode into a pillar of searing red and black, as the Turpentine is wont to do.  The corky looking bark would cling tight to the tree, forming deep fissures as the tree expanded.  Each season's new growth would show, for a while, long red fissures where the new layer of bark had formed.

That tough, corky looking bark would, when bush fires came through the forest, char on the outside, and protect the inner bark and sapwood from the heat - yet, when taken from the tree and dried, was sometimes used by blacksmiths and wheelwrights to make an extra hot, circular fire on which to heat and expand the iron tyres that were placed over the rim of wooden wagon wheels.  The tyre would shrink tightly onto the wood as it cooled, protecting the wooden rim and clamping the wheel tightly together.

To build with Ironbark timber brought harder work than lesser timbers asked of the tradesman – the  tools needed constant care; nail-holes had to be pre-drilled and the nail-points dipped in soap – but the job, once done, was good for generations to come.  A nail, once in, would never pull out.

And, if you wanted wood for the stove, it was best cut green – aged Ironbark would strike an angle-grinder style shower of sparks from the chainsaw, and the wood ate away at the teeth almost as fast as the teeth chewed up the wood.

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.

As Seasons Fleet

Though the autumn colours are still bright in our gardens and along the hillside across the valley, already nature is preparing for spring.

The wattle may still be three or four months from flowering, but the delicate buds are already reaching out to brighten the coming dullness of winter. Not far away, the pine is readying itself for the return of warmth and light, as the tightly coiled embryos of the next summer's growth prepare to explode.

Our landlords, the resident Magpies, are still minding the last of the youngsters they hatched out in previous seasons, even though it can fend for itself quite well if they are not present to meet its demands.  Yet they are also vigorously guarding their nesting tree against future need.  In the lake, and the stream that runs down from it, the Perch are fat with roe - and, though we are yet to feel winter's blast, already all the signs of the coming spring and summer are visible to anyone who walks slowly through our valley and over our mountain.

Yet things are not quite as they should be - one sign of spring in my part of the mountains is the golden dusting of pollen, from the Radiata Pines, that drifts down into the cracks in the footpaths, and filters the light coming through any windscreen left in the open.  It is autumn, but our Pinus gold dust is present again, if in smaller quantities than the spring flowering produces. The Elderberry has flowered again, too, and the Jonquills are appearing around the garden.

The seasons in Australia are never quite as predictable as they are in many parts of the world, but I am not sure what to make of this.  I can watch this ebb and flow of seasonal life, and work it into the stories I tell - to myself and to the world.  Time will tell how pertinent those stories are.