Dawn – a pale pink smudge in the sky over Tuggerah’s jagged cliffs. Local tribes are camping in the tangled temperate jungle below, feasting on the forest’s seasonal bounty. Nectar-filled myrtle oranges. Tree fern hearts, good for roasting. Dried manna sap drops, good for satisfying a sweet tooth. And ice-cold creeks, good for escaping the mid-summer heat.
People abandon the valley at the first tang of smoke. They join an assortment of animals marching to the rocky southern ridge tops where fire can’t follow. Wallabies and wombats. Devils scuttle past. A wary thylacine and her mate follow them up the cliff track, maintaining their distance. Sleepy possums brave the day to treetop their way to safety. Steady streams of birds fly ahead of the haze, higher and higher, until they emerge from the cauldron and vanish above the escarpment. A woman and child pause to look back down the valley. The sky darkens with unnatural storm clouds, an eerie roar begins and they are glad they acted quickly. Fire advances faster than they can run.
But the forest can’t flee. Soft-foliaged southern sassafras and beech wither in the fierce north winds, before the flames even begin to lick at their leaves. Only the mighty mountain ash, Eucalyptus regnans, stands firm before the blast. Four hundred years. Four hundred years since the last great burning. Four hundred years of paradise for the cool rainforest understorey. It has flourished in the long absence of fire, reclaiming its ancient origins, reclaiming ancestral Gondwanaland dominance over the Tuggerah. Here and there, great pillars of trees soar a hundred metres high. All of an age, a great age. And now, nearing death, they prepare for life.
High in the open canopy of sickle-shaped leaves, clusters of white blossom lose their stamens to the whipping winds. Stamens, not petals, millions of fine flying filaments like incongruous flurries of snow. For the multitude of ripe gumnuts that set seed last year, or the year before, or the year before that repeating, their time has finally come.
On the forest floor things are heating up. Falling leaves and twigs and bark have pattered down here, day and night, century after long century. The vast accumulation of leaf litter feeds the fire racing through the valley. It pauses now and then, lingers on logs, incinerates arching fern fronds and starbursts of richea, engulfs defenceless sassafras and myrtle. But try as it might, it can’t quite reach the mountain ash crown. Frustrated fireballs fling themselves skywards, like great, dazzling Catherine wheels. But the trunks are so smooth and tall, bare of branches until the very top. There is no foothold for the flames.
Blistering winds howl in disappointment. Never mind – an entire rainforest is theirs for the taking. Sap simmers and boils. A true inferno now, creating its own weather. A pyrocumulus cloud thunders over the forest, spawning a towering vortex of super-heated air. It rips long ribbons of bark from trunks, sets them ablaze, hurls them aloft like flares. Gumnuts crackle and pop, releasing millions of seeds into updrafts pungent with the smell of smoke and seared eucalyptus. Thousands of firebrands bombard the canopy. Eventually victory is theirs. The crowns of the mountain ash explode and the doomed giants of the Tuggerah burn like titanic torches in this day turned to night.
Hours pass. The front moves on. The sky clears. A cool change comes, the kind so beloved of the rainforest. But the rainforest is gone, replaced by a landscape of black spires and white earth. For the first time in centuries, sunlight touches the ground. A steady rain of seeds drifts down to rest in the fertile ash bed. No ants to plunder them. No understorey plants to challenge them. No fungus to invade them. Two million seedlings per hectare germinate in just a few days. Somewhere in this crush of shoots is Pallawarra. He grows swiftly, opening to the sun above the river. His peers grow too. They rise around their dead parents’ trunks as thick and straight as a crop of young corn.
Fifty years pass. Adolescent Pallawarra is in furious good health. Only twenty mountain ash remain in this hectare of forest. Twenty from two million. From the outset, Pallawarra is blessed with good fortune – good soil, good light, good genes. He outstrips his companions, two metres a year, stealing their sun. Beneath his emergent crown, the rainforest stages a comeback, wet and green and mossy, dappled once more with luminous fungi. People visit this place in summer and claim Pallawarra, call him countryman.
Two centuries pass. Pallawarra is a mature tree. Grand. There is no forest commission or farmer to cut him down. Europeans barely dream of this far-flung forest. But there is a consensus of creatures who declare him top-end real estate, that most prized property of all – a hollow-bearer. For the first century of his life, Pallawarra was too healthy for hollows, his bark too smooth and unblemished. But ageing skin loses resilience. Shedding lower branches cause self-inflicted wounds. Bacteria and fungi invade the breach. Termites march in through splinters of a lightning strike. Beetles and borers launch direct assaults on his trunk. Wind and rain and heat batter his bark, and here comes the rot. An army of excavators take advantage of weakened wood, expanding cavities with teeth and beaks and claws. Soon, mighty Pallawarra provides high-rise apartment living for a multitude of forest dwellers: parrots and possums, spiders, skinks and tiger snakes, owls and bats and quolls. Composting bacteria do their work, generating warmth, centrally heating the hollows. Thylacines den beneath his buttressed roots. A pair of wedge-tailed eagles take the penthouse suite. Their eyrie commands a matchless view of the resurgent rainforest. Two pygmy possums scrap for the same nest, scattering swarms of swallowtails. Beautiful butterfly orchids and emerald shield ferns decorate his mossy branches as they rise inexorably towards the sky. Pallawarra is no longer just a tree. He is a place, a world.
Five centuries pass. ‘That big bastard,’ says a man from Hobart. A day much like any other for the man, but not for Pallawarra. Today his good fortune has run out.
Hundreds of cards and posies of flowers ringed Pallawarra. A second man stepped back to look at a trunk scarred with dates and names, hearts and initials. Some could not be read, for time had dulled the blade’s course. Their meaning, like the carvings themselves, forever lost. He picked up some of the cards. ‘Crikey, these cards are all for the tree. Prayers, kids’ poems, everything. Even curses.’ He picked up an ornate scroll.
‘What are you talking about?’ said the first man.
The second man read the scroll:
‘Demeter’s Curse –
Those who harm the sacred tree,
By hunger plagued will ever be,
A hunger nought can satisfy.
They sell their souls to find relief,
Abandon honour and belief,
Consuming their own flesh – they die.’
‘Here’s another,’ he said in a worried voice. ‘Let he who harms this tree be doomed. May evil return to its source tenfold.’
‘Superstitious claptrap,’ said the first man. ‘Come on. We’ve got direct orders from the Premier’s department.’ He tossed the scroll, shovelled the offerings into the mud and sized up the tree. Too large for any harvester, this one. ‘It’ll be a single rider, if they can even load it on the truck. You don’t see many of them anymore.’
A few years ago they’d have put aside their dozers and chainsaws and used explosives. But everything had to be done by the book these days. So instead, the men wielded Stihl 880 Magnums, the most powerful production chainsaws in the world. Their lethal fifty-inch cutting bars gleamed in the sun.
The first man started the saw, picked the lay, dropped his helmet visor and angled into Pallawarra’s trunk. The saw chewed through outer bark, Pallawarra’s thin skin. Then through inner bark, his tender phloem, transporting photosynthesised food down from the canopy to nourish his roots. The pulsing saw roared and muttered, roared and muttered. It severed vital cambium tissue, the green sheath of cells which generated new shoots, tirelessly healing wounds, century after century. Not this time.
The man braced his back and shifted his feet. The blade struck sapwood, jerking and screeching, cutting the lifeline to Pallawarra’s high crown. His leaves still transpired, though nothing would replenish them now. Tree-dwellers huddled deep in hollows that offered no sanctuary. The motor howled as it hit the dark heartwood at Pallawarra’s core. Sawdust fanned a perfect arc in air thick with fumes. A second saw screamed to life. It sliced through a wind shake, a canopy-high crack between Pallawarra’s concentric growth rings, caused by centuries of straining against the weather. Trapped rainwater streamed from the wound, soaking the second man. ‘The bugger’s full of rot,’ he said. ‘Good for nothing but woodchips.’ The thousands of tree creatures cowered deeper in their homes.
A massive wedge of wood was gone from the belly of the tree. The men went in for the kill from the back, slicing towards the gaping, weeping hole in his trunk. Their chainsaws reached a roaring climax. Pallawarra struggled to stand on one narrow hinge of wood. He lost balance. Splintering timber cracked like rifle shots in the still air. The men stood back. The bush held its breath, and Pallawarra toppled in slow motion. Sticks and leaves and gumnuts rained from the sky like nuclear fallout. In a rush of branches, in a blink of time, with a deafening roar, Pallawarra crashed to the ground. The earth trembled at his passing. For a moment, even the men were impressed.
Then the first man snorted and looked around. ‘So much for the curse.’
It had been half an hour since he first set eyes on Pallawarra.
‘How about lunch,’ he said. ‘I’m starving.’
‘Me too,’ said the second man. ‘I could eat a horse.’
Then they were gone. Hours passed. Butcherbird sang a requiem. Evening closed in. Deep underground, disembodied roots remained on duty, feeding nutrient-rich fluid skywards. In vain, they sought their centuries-old connection with their crown. And in the silent forest, blood-red sap drip, drip, dripped from Pallawarra’s shattered core.