Slow Dance Into Spring

Swaying or dancing? Tenuiramis woodland in South Hobart

Have we been abandoned by the roaring forties? That fastidious sweeper of Tasmania’s weather threshold; that dependable bringer of showers and sunshine in equal measure, seems to have left us in the lumbering grip of moody, blunt-fingered low pressure troughs. Careless heavy rains, doldrum drear winds, and a long run of dreich* weather have been the result.

Whatever the weather, getting out is still essential, even if walking our dog in the bush has become a gum-boot affair. This morning everything is still wet. The background shush of the rivulet joins with the tickle of water in a newly eroded gully. As we climb the hill behind our house, the usually hard, dry soil,  where it’s not just plain muddy, has an unaccustomed give to it.

There is a feel of change in the air: sunshine for a start, and sunshine with warmth in it. But there are other sights and sounds of change too. The pee-paw of spotted pardalotes and the chip and chatter of other birds also signal the shift.

We find the season’s first orchids, greenhoods and spider orchids, thriving on the wet winter conditions. Wildflowers too are blossoming, from the whites and reds of epachrids to the creams and yellows of acacias and the deep gold of pultenaeas.

Signs of spring in our local bush

In places, however, water has turned from giver to destroyer. The sheer volume of winter rain – in concert with inept road drainage upstream – has stripped out great gobbets of topsoil and created open-cuts in the slopes. We climb steeply towards the head of the gully, where a huge dead tree straddles what is becoming a gorge. This survivor of the 1967 bushfires must soon be undermined and fall.

Lower down this new gully a crater has appeared. A garage-sized block of earth has collapsed due to undermining. Fully-grown stringybark trees have dropped into the hole intact. For the moment they live on, shaken and skewed, but alive. Still, given the instability of the soil, their struggle might just be beginning.

This freshly-collapsed block of earth, complete with trees, has been undermined by water.

We wander over to one of our favourite “character” trees, a Eucalyptus tenuiramis we’ve nick-named Lena on account of her near-horizontal angle of growth. Alas Lena too has been hit hard by the wildly wet winter. Already undermined by insect attack, her trunk has fractured near ground level. Instead of hovering above the earth, Lena has fallen fully to ground.

We inspect the tree, and find there are still some connections between the trunk and the rootstock. Her leaves are green and healthy looking too. She may, perhaps, live on in this state for some time. We will keep a regular eye on Lena, although we wonder whether we should rename her Reclina.

"Lena" the gum tree before (left) and after (right) the fall 

Elsewhere there are happier stories among the tenuiramis clan. The habitually dry, shallow soils have taken water deep. The tenuiramis woodlands seem to glow with health. I fancy they are swaying, dancing even: a long, slow dance to the wildly intricate rhythms of the seasons. If they know anything, they know to dance while they may. And what better reason than the stuttering, slow, but inevitable arrival of spring in Tasmania.

* a Scots word for grey and dismal.

More Than Skin Deep

Antonio Vivaldi: prolific Italian composer famous for The Four Seasons 

If Antonio Vivaldi had been a wine grower, I wonder if we’d have ended up with a very different Four Seasons. Might we have had musical evocations of leaf-fall, bud-burst and harvest, for instance, rather than spring, summer, autumn and winter?

Or if he'd been a Yolngu man in north-east Arnhem Land, might we have had The Six Seasons? For Yolngu, concepts like spring and winter make no sense. Instead they have built a six season calendar around local weather, food, and seasonal activities.

For instance early March is Waltjarnmirri. It’s the wet season proper, when flooding restricts travel, and people are concentrated around their camps. They will look forward to late March, when it will be Mirdawarr. By then hunting and fishing outings can begin, and bush vegetables will become plentiful again.

Wherever we live there are regular natural patterns that signal changes in the year. Some of these seasonal changes may be obvious, but others are more subtle, requiring a long and attentive familiarity with a home range.

After a mere 25 years in this place, I’m still a new-comer. But I am starting to notice some very particular seasonal patterns.

Take our local silver peppermint (Eucalyptus tenuiramis) for instance. Visit at most times of the year and you’ll find a prudish tree, grey-trunked, slim, blotchy and easy to overlook. Visit in late summer/early autumn and you’ll happen upon a different creature altogether. Much of the dowdy bark is gone, piled around its feet like clothes discarded in passion. 

A Eucalyptus tenuiramis with recently-shed bark, South Hobart, Tasmania 

Instead this Clark Kent of trees now stands proud and glowing in the fickle forest sun, trunk and boughs alluringly smooth and creamy gold. En masse tenuiramis trunks can light the forest like candlesticks.

During today’s walk I notice that the bark shedding is incomplete on some trees. Giving in to a child-like impulse I pull on one of the skeins dangling from a youthful tree. The grey, dead bark peels up the tree with a small but satisfying crackle. I tear free a ribbon of bark perhaps 3 metres long and examine this source of the tree’s once dowdy looks.

Free of its coat, the trunk is a luminous wonder. It will hold these golden good looks perhaps until the Yolngu are beginning to burn Arnhem Land’s dried grasses and woodlands: around May in our calendar.

Eucalyptus tenuiramis woodland during early autumn, South Hobart, Tasmania

Regardless I will keep visiting these Tenuiramis woodlands, and will keep finding their beauty, even when the cold winds force them to again don dull protective coats. Beauty is never out of season. And nor is it skin deep.

Tenacious Tenuiramis

[A silver peppermint tree clings to the edge of a stone quarry in South Hobart]

What a vantage point we have, caught as we are between earth and sky! You might technically call our dwelling place superficial, but taking into account the vastness of the universe, it is an extraordinarily uncommon superficiality.

There are some trees near home that highlight for me this amazing event horizon; this junction of heaven and earth. Both are humble trees, silver peppermints (Eucalyptus tenuiramis). One stands atop an old quarry in Strickland Avenue. Perilously close to the edge, the twin-trunked tree clasps the crag with crooked hands like Tennyson’s eagle moreso than a tree.

Often eucalypts have shallow roots, and certainly lack the tap roots that we associate with many plants. Rather they splay out strong, sometimes buttressed roots that give them a good toe-hold against storms. This particular peppermint stands on mudstone with a very shallow soil overlay. Both rock and regolith are poor sources of nutrient, and highly prone to drying out. So the tree has grown used to the botanical equivalent of thin gruel. And yet it has done far more than eke out an existence.

It has a handsome golden-flecked double bole, each trunk creased and rumpled, stretching and tapering with a slow and crooked patience towards the sky. Its irregular branches, some clean and straight, others arthritic and contorted, seem all well-covered with narrow grey-green leaves.

Here and there past difficulties have produced failed branches, some hollowed out to owl’s-nest perfection; others still pointing in mute accusation at an unblinking sky. The tenacity of tenuiramis is illustrated elsewhere in our local woodland, a place much put upon by fire, feet and mountain bikes.

[A reclining tree? This Eucalyptus tenuiramis has a very unusual growth aspect]

This tenuiramis seems just a sapling in terms of height, although a hard life may have stunted it. It faces up the slope, almost recumbent, as though it's about to succumb to fatal wounds. Yet on closer inspection I can’t help smiling as I see a nyad extracting her feet from a hole, or a dryad frozen in the act of escaping. No, this tree too is thriving, with a good covering of leaves, and a fair chance of weathering the prevailing nor-westers for decades to come.

I find G.K. Chesterton’s fanciful description of a tree very apt here. It is when we consider it as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the skies for no reason in particular that we take off our hats. Tenacious tenuiramis, I dips me lid to you!

Words That Paint Pictures

[Essay introducing the Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize 2009. Published in Island #118]


What if life really did imitate art? What if each of us was to throw a painter’s canvas over the place we lived? What expression of our place, our life in that place, would fill that canvas? Would it be only the universals of modern urban life: the concrete and cars; plasma screens and iPods; mobile phones and plush furnishings that are found anywhere human prosperity has reached? Would our canvas not also contain the colours of the earth beneath our feet; the dark fleeting dash of the wild creatures we share our place with; and the variegated textures of the plants that respond to the particular seasons and soils of our particular place? Wouldn’t we want to record the sudden colour splash and sound of the birds that flit and flutter through our bushes; or the whisper, whoosh and wash of the particular weather that is present only here?

The Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize was conceived in 2002 to provide an outlet for the very particular and concrete thoughts and feelings writers have about the natural world. Not just any natural world, but the particular part of the world they have thought on, interacted with and cared enough about to express in words.

Since the first biennial prize in 2003, around three hundred individuals have entered the Wildcare prize; nearly half of that number in the 2009 event. The prize has tapped into a feeling that seems to be abroad in our land: the feeling that here, in the early years of the 21st century, we Australians are finally ready to write our places into a new kind of existence. We seem eager to record in words the feelings and thoughts about being in this land that have only slowly come to the surface. It now appears important for us to read our landscape; to know our place; and to celebrate the particularity of where we live.

It’s not that disgruntlement with our leaders or perceptions of threat – the traditional motivators of environmentally-slanted writing – have gone away. Clearly the mainstream 'success' of environment as an issue, and the plethora of spin about 'clean and green', haven’t assuaged the concerns of writers. But something else is happening that is both beneath and beyond the world of headlines and politics. At last place is about more than postcodes, real estate values and the cache of locality names.

My own place is near the base of a collapsed layer cake, geologically speaking at least. It’s a cake that was baked over some 280 million years out of whatever ingredients fell to hand. Right where I sit the available element was mud; just above here it was sand, and top-most it was magma – three hundred metres of it – injected up through layers of previously ‘cooked’ sediment. Not a conventional way to ice a cake, nor a standard thickness. But whoever designed Tasmania had an inordinate fondness for dolerite.

The collapse of the cake has been barely noticeable on a human time scale. Nonetheless it has crumbled, and will continue to do so. A large scoop of cake was taken out of the mountain’s side just above here by ice as recently as ten thousand years ago. The tell-tale swale is an unmistakeable signature of ice. Vertical scars through the forest show the tracks of more recent major rock falls. Occasionally crumbs still fall from the mountain’s table, with dolerite boulders turning up even here in suburban Hobart.

To keep reading my place, I must augment the geological timescale with the much shorter-spanned biological ones. I learn that when the Permian mudstone was just ooze being washed into the Tasmania Basin, there were no flowering plants. Conifers, cycads, algae, lichens and mosses impeded the erosive running water, with bits of plants joining the shells in becoming fossils. It wasn’t until that basin had been filled, buried, hardened, and lifted back to an altogether unrecognisable surface that the rock saw its first flowering plants.

Over aeons wave upon wave of varied vegetation adjusted to the different climates, latitudes and altitudes that this mudstone has seen. Until today the shallow, impoverished regolith and soil that it produces, brings forth not the spectacular rainforests than can grow on richer soils in this climate, but instead a gnarled and humble woodland of silver peppermint, Eucalyptus tenuiramis. A spacious, easily traversed forest with crackling, straggly undergrowth, so quintessentially Australian that I half expect to find a Roberts or McCubbin character propped against a trunk, billy boiling, handing me a cuppa.

Above us Tasmania’s green rosellas might be feeding on seeds, chuckling and sweetly tinkling, reminding me why I always think of them as bell parrots. If disturbed their relaxed calling would be replaced by their more excited flight/fright call 'cussick cussick'. Are they perturbed by clinking currawongs flying low through the trees? In this stealth mode, currawongs are more intent on finding prey than drawing attention to their presence. By contrast when our apple crop is near to ripe there is no such silence. Their loud ringing calls spread the news to the whole flock.

Such are a few tiny daytime fragments I might read in my local bush. But if I’m tempted to think I’ve gained a degree of familiarity, night-time confounds me. After dark this bushland takes on a wholly foreign character. Were I adept at reading with my nose, as my dog certainly is, I could more readily comprehend the pages of this crepuscular life. Instead I’m left to look at the tracks and traces it leaves behind. Potoroo and pademelon runways; bandicoot diggings; scats, frass, fur and feathers: clues to a twilit life. They remind me how close to bio-illiterate I am, despite nearly a quarter of a century of living in and looking at the one piece of bush.

All of this may explain why nature writing is a hard-won form. Yes, any good writer should be able to write about the natural world. But to do it successfully, to do it in a way that rings true, requires the same kind of observational commitment that writers put into character, plot or sentence structure.

This year’s prize-winning pieces illustrate well the benefits of such toil. Whether describing human efforts to restore what once was, nature’s gentle irruptions into tangled urban lives, or the perils faced by all life forms, the felicity of the writing cloaks the observational labour involved. How encouraging that so many are so effectively taking on this labour of love.