Twenty Three and a Half Reasons

We live on an eccentric planet, thanks to the number twenty three and a half. That’s the axial tilt of our dear old planet, and the reason for the seasons. Which in turn is a grounds for both rejoicing and lament.

Here in the higher latitudes of the southern hemisphere, April brings a noticeable attenuation of days, a lessening of sunlight, a return of colder weather and frost. Slowly the plump warm air that has coddled us for half a year is receding, and the sun’s strength is gradually diminishing.

Everywhere we respond to this with a mixture of alarm and alacrity. No sooner are we relieved that wild fires are over, than we start gathering in our firewood. We start warming our houses, burning the dust off our heaters. We wash our woollens and put them to everyday use. Our vegetable harvest gradually slows, and salads make way for soups.

[Tasmania's green rosella: detail of head and shoulders] 

In the wider world the signs are there too. With this week’s first dusting of snow, currawongs and cockatoos congregate in our forest, suddenly more earnest in their search for food. Beside our house a flock of green rosellas (Platycercus caledonicus) lands on a kunzea bush. Without a sound – not even their soft, bell-like contact call – they work away at the seed heads.

They are normally shy, but they are so intent on eating that I can study them carefully without disturbing them. Their markings are subtly spectacular, from a fluoro lime-yellow head and chest, to a striking crimson frontal band; from a back that's an olive-blue plaid to a tail that's a rhapsody in blue-green.

[A green rosella displaying its tail feathers] 

I have observed our resident rosellas often over the decades, once peering through binoculars as several of them de-berried a cotoneaster bush. At first I thought them sloppy, as they discarded great gobs of berry pulp beneath the bush, like gormless diners talking with their mouths full.

Slowly it dawned that the pulp was of no interest to them. By rolling the berries between their tongue and beak, they were able to break up the fruit, discard the pulp and ingest the seeds. I later learned that cotoneaster berries contain cyanogenic glycosides, which are toxic. Doubtless the rosellas had learned this long before me.

Our native plants, with the spectacular exception of Tasmania's deciduous beech (see link), don’t respond to autumn via leaf colouration and deciduousness. But this doesn’t mean they don’t respond to the shortening of the days, and the drop in temperature and light levels. Particularly in colder areas, a number of our eucalypts undergo their own response to lowering photosynthesis, resulting in brilliant colouration of their peeling and fresh bark.

[A yellow alpine gum in autumn colours]

On recent alpine walks I have come across yellow alpine gums (Eucalyptus subcrenulata), snow gums (E. coccifera) and yellow gums (E. johnstonii), all putting on brilliant bark colours in the face of cold, wet weather.

[A Tasmanian snow gum] 

It appears that the withdrawal of chlorophyll allows the pigment anthocyanin to exert a stronger influence over the bark, colouring some of it red or orange – just as it does in deciduous leaves. As this older bark peels it contrasts strongly with the paler new bark that is revealed beneath. The process varies from species to species, even from tree to tree. But in the end it’s all in response to that amazing 23.5 degree tilt.

The Nature of Christmas

I recently chortled at a one-liner that bemoaned crime in multi-storey carparks as “wrong on so many levels”. I thought to invert the line and apply it to Christmas, an occasion that seems to me right on so many levels.

Signs of Christmas: waratah blooming on Kunanyi/Mt Wellington 

 At the personal level I love the chance Christmas offers to stop and to get together with some dear ones. Socially I love the “good will” option that we might take up with our neighbours and acquaintances. Theologically I love that the birth of a child in poverty, in a dusty backwater of the Roman empire, caused – and still can cause – such ructions among the powerful and self-important. I even love the crazy hodge-podge of traditions, from the heart-stopping sublimity of some carols to the head-shaking silliness of a white-bearded fat man house-breaking through chimneys.

But when it comes to nature and Christmas, as an Australian I really do get a little stumped. So many of the themes and traditions of Christmas are based on winter solstice: the shortest and darkest days; the coldest and bleakest weather. It’s a time where hope can seem deeply buried. No wonder fatted beasts are slaughtered and ale flows free!

In contrast, we in the southern hemisphere have just passed the longest day. Far from scraping up cellared food, we are surrounded by the plump fecundity of summer gardens. There is a surfeit of light, and often of heat. Roasted meats, plum puddings and mulled wines can feel a little out of place, not to mention reindeer, sleighs and songs of snow.

So what have Australians done to “indigenise” Christmas? In the late 1940s, composer WG James and lyricist John Wheeler wrote a series of carols that wove Australian outback themes into a Christmas setting. I was part of a generation of Australian school children that learned to sing about brolgas dancing and drovers singing “noel noel”. 

Brolgas in a Kakadu wetland 

Despite their blatant artifice, they remain strangely affecting for me. So when, earlier this year, I actually saw brolgas dancing “out on the plains” of Kakadu, I was thrilled. Of course we didn’t have to go to Kakadu to find Christmas birds. This year one of the first sounds of Christmas morning in our bush was the soft “ting” of green rosellas greeting the dawn. These were my gentle Christmas bells, even if they were followed by the harsh “cark caaark” of some ravens: a reminder that softness is always tempered in Australia, even here in Tasmania.

A yellow-tailed black cockatoo decorates our banksia tree 

A few days earlier we’d been visited by some wise cockatoos, perhaps the same ones which came last Christmas. Again they became the most welcome of decorations, landing on one of the banksia trees I'd planted a decade ago. And again they feasted on the banksia cones, conversing in a very Australian way, via scratchy half-squawks and atonal squeaks. 

I guess Christmas is everywhere – and anywhere – if you care to look.

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.