If I know anything at all about botany it’s because my younger sister taught me. For years we went together on botanising holidays. She taught me how to key plants out, something I’m still not very good at, partly because I tend to rely on my photographic memory and leap to an identification without going through the steps, from family, to genus, to species.
‘No,’ she would say, ‘go back to the beginning. Is it rutaceous or myrtaceous?’
‘It’s a Kunzea,’ I’d say, ‘so it must be myrtaceous.’
‘Wrong way round,’ she’d say. ‘What are the distinguishing characteristics of the Myrtaceae again?’ She pronounced it ‘mertacey’, which is a sign that she is a properly trained Australian botanist. A non-botanising academic like me should pronounce it ‘mertaycee-ee’, but now I say ‘mertacey’ too.
‘Um, sclerophyllous’ – which means woody – ‘simple leaves, without stipules, oil glands present, aromatic—’
‘How can you distinguish Myrtaceae from Rutaceae?’
‘By the smell?’
‘Which is?’
‘Rutaceae smell like citrus, sort of?’ This was a sore point, because I thought some of them smelt like kerosene.
Jane taught me to use a loupe to look for oil dots and to search for tiny variations in flower form, so that I could be quite sure of my identification. This is the really nerdy part of botanising, but pernickety drudgery is an essential part of any scientific discipline. At the end of a day’s rambling, after we had picked the ticks off each other, Jane and I would sit with a pile of specimens spread out on a tabletop and she would take me through them one by one.
Jane went to work when she left school, and didn’t get to university until she had raised her two sons. Then she was treated as mere ballast in the class, until they belatedly recognised how serious and how gifted she was, and began to pay more attention to her searching questions, about the hypothesis of parallel evolution, for example, and to look more closely at her practical work. She could have gone on to do an honours year, but she had no interest in academic research. She went to work again, as a practical botanist, to do what she could to preserve what was left of the biodiversity of the Mornington Peninsula where she lives. Now she has a busy practice, carrying out vegetation surveys for clients private and public, identifying plant communities that need to be protected and designing planting schemes that are consistent with the indigenous vegetation. Her own garden, with its murmuring veils of Casuarina trees standing ankle-deep in their fallen needles, its tossing sedges fringed by Coast Banksias and cloud-shaped Moonahs, and massed plantings of Correas, not to mention its lawn of Wallaby Grass that grows like green fluff and its drifts of Greenhood Orchids in the spring, is deservedly famous.
It was Jane who taught me about the perils of Australia’s steadily rising water table, which is bringing to the surface the salts deposited over millennia by the buffeting ocean winds, and carrying the spores of the Cinnamon Fungus (Phytophthora cinnamomi) that is destroying the vascular system of woody plants all over the island continent. Together we have examined the changes in vegetation that signal increased salinity, and gazed in despair at the glittering expanses that are the ulcers caused by salt. Jane is one person who is not afraid to sit beside me as I turn off the metalled roads and plunge down farm tracks and service roads, looking to see what is really going on in the great south land, counting the dead and dying trees, photographing the skeletal branches that crop out even in the greenest forest, and the new sand dunes that are travelling across the wheatbelts as the wind rakes the treeless land.
Jane, like most Australian botanists, is very interested in the uses of fire. One possible solution to the creeping death carried by Cinnamon Fungus could be fire. Many of the native species are adapted to fire, which alone will split the woody capsules in which their seeds live. They have a history of repeated exposure to fire, but the fire that would kill the fungus would need to be much hotter than usual, and might burn seeds and all, or broil the roots of trees that would normally spring into epicormic growth after fire. In most cleared districts there has been little or no fire for a century; the accumulated fuel load is enormous and tinder-dry. Some of the national parks in some of the states have instituted controlled burning programmes, which have an unfortunate propensity to get out of hand and incinerate valuable real estate. Jane’s house is on the edge of publicly owned Moonah Woodland which desperately needs to be burnt if it is not to choke in its own rubbish. One day, possibly quite soon, it will burn. When it does Jane’s beautiful house and garden will burn with it. She will do nothing to prevent nature taking its course, even if it leaves her without a roof over her head. In our botanising rambles we have learnt the value of burnt ground, for it is there that we have found the greatest diversity of native plants, bursting from the blackened earth with new vigour. The first one to sight an outcrop of blackened branches in the distance will yell ‘Burny bit!’ and off-road we will go until we get to it. We crawl through the charred twiggery until we are black from head to foot, photographing orchids, Waxflowers, Trigger Plants, Lechenaultias, Dampieras, Beard-heaths, Dasypogons, creeping Banksias. It is all the more remarkable then that I have ended up with responsibility for a parcel of land where even a whiff of burning would be lethal.
It is because of my sister that I have been looking for a piece of land in Australia, something we could work together to manage, to protect or restore, a project we would have in common. So when one of my oldest friends sent me pictures of a property on the south coast of New South Wales, it made sense that we went off to see it together. We used to enjoy these driving marathons, fuelled by bags of fruit and aniseed jellies, with regular stops for a beer and a pie. The pies get better the further away you are from suburbia, as all the other food gets worse. Nothing tastes better than a cold beer and a hot pie at Woollabookankyah or the Black Stump.
We drove eastwards from Melbourne along the coast, past sleepy estuaries where pelicans rose and fell on the tidal swell, up through the old-growth forests of East Gippsland, gloating over the cycads and the tall sedges and the grass trees, as we dodged in and out among the logging trucks. We were heading for a place just south of the old fishing town of Eden, which stands on the north arm of Twofold Bay just over the border in New South Wales. From my first visit to Eden forty years before I remembered the gold of the sand bars, the ultramarine of the ocean surge, and the green-on-green of temperate rainforest, a typical holidaymaker’s vision. From the second I can remember only the man I was with. What I would make of the area now that the scales had been carefully removed from my eyes by my little sister, I couldn’t tell, but I wasn’t optimistic.
It was dark when we turned off the dirt track that took us from the main road to the friend’s house where we were to stay. The headlights picked out a gate with two signs announcing ‘Wild Life Refuge’. On the bigger sign, beside a fetching logo featuring a male Lyrebird in full display, was the statement:
This property has been declared a wild-life refuge under the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974 to conserve wild life and natural environments. All native plants and animals are protected.
I ground my teeth.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Jane.
‘What can this mean? That we can’t come in and kill things? It’s the old Leopard’s bane story.’
‘Explain.’
‘If you plant Leopard’s bane, Doronicum orientale, you won’t be troubled with leopards. The plant is endemic to south-eastern Europe so no leopard has ever been seen anywhere near it. Leon’s valiantly fighting off plant nappers and bounty hunters who don’t exist. Making a virtue of doing nothing. It pisses me off.’
Jane was puzzled. ‘What is this National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974? Leon’s a lawyer remember. We may be missing a trick.’
On the second sign it said:
Wildlife habitats within this property are being managed for the conservation of wildlife. All flora and fauna protected. Maximum penalty for an offence $1000.
The property had been give a number, and a caretaker’s name and telephone number appeared alongside.
‘What would an offence be?’ asked Jane. ‘Picking a flower?’
‘Certainly not planting a weed,’ I said, as the headlights picked up long lines of Agapanthus.
(A short digression: Agapanthus africanus, under its older name A. umbellatus, was introduced to Australia by Robert Henderson of Surry Hills, who won first prize with it at the second meeting of the Sydney Floral and Horticultural Society in the saloon of the Royal Hotel in George Street on 13 February 1839. The genus having undergone some revision, we cannot now be sure which species Henderson offered in 1839; the Agapanthus that is a major weed in the Blue Mountains and in coastal Victoria is now called A. praecox ssp. orientalis. In the north island of New Zealand it is known as ‘motorway weed’.)
Conservation in Australia is largely a matter of pious intentions. Badges and slogans and dedicated days abound but, with neither stick nor carrot to drive or draw it forward, no progress is made. People are neither constrained by law to care for land nor encouraged and rewarded for doing it on their own initiative. Signs crop up everywhere. Landcare! they trumpet. Land for Wildlife!
Land for Wildlife as run by the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service is supposed to support landholders who provide habitat for native wildlife on their land. The support is for the most part anything but practical. All the landholders get is information, links and contacts with like-minded people, and access to education programmes. Lots of people get to tell you what to do, but no one gives you any help in doing it, not even a tax rebate, but then you don’t have to do much. All you have to do to get the sign to put on your gate is promise not to develop, that is devastate, your land any further. You can keep farming, insecticiding, herbiciding, planting with exotics, raise llamas or ostriches or whatever, as long as you don’t actually clear any more land than is already cleared. When you sell the property, the commitment ceases. It struck me (and still strikes me) as far too little much too late. To slow the rate of extinction of Australian species much more than this half-hearted commitment will be necessary.
‘What’s eating you?’ asked Jane, as I stomped into the kitchen.
‘It gets me that people can take credit for what they’re not doing, when the situation is so grave. It’s like Landcare and Greening Australia. Australia isn’t supposed to be green, for godsake. They should have called it Browning Australia.’
Jane laughed. Then she said, ‘Landcare do some good work.’
‘Do they now?’ I sneered. ‘It never seems to occur to anyone that European-style farming in Australia should just stop. You can’t have, say, a competitive cotton industry and biodiversity as well. If you do for the environment only what will “increase your bottom line”, you’ll end up doing worse than nothing. As long as people keep pretending that this is the way forward, we’ll keep on destroying our own heritage. There’s more to this than T-shirts and stubby holders bedizened with good intentions, and giving each other awards all the time. Six hundred people turn up on the weekend for a few hours volunteering and they’re given credit for controlling coastal erosion, creating wildlife corridors, restoring woodland and darning the hole in the ozone layer. It’s bullshit. It creates a fog of good intentions and phoney positive thinking that allows the government to keep ignoring the real gravity of the situation. Rivercare requires coordinated planning, not a gaggle of well-intentioned locals weeding a hundred metres of river bank. And farmers shouldn’t be helped. Only a handful of them are making any money anyway. They should be told to fuck off out of it.’
‘Well, I’ll go on working with Landcare,’ said Jane. ‘If only because it raises awareness. People can do conservation in their own backyards; if they can’t then I’m out of a job. But they need someone to give them a steer.’
‘A bum steer,’ I said grumpily, as I took a short fat bottle of freezing ‘lite’ beer out of the fridge, pushed it into a stubby holder with ‘Save the koala’ written on it in fluorescent yellow and put it in her hand.
Jane looked serious. ‘The best thing about Landcare is that they attract funding from corporate sponsors. Without serious funding from large corporations we’ll never get anywhere, and you have to fly a flag that they’ll rally to. Landcare sounds safe and cuddly, and they go for it.’
Landcare’s logo is a pair of green hands cradling a shape that resembles the outline of Australia.
‘If I thought I’d have to get into bed with Rio Tinto and Alcoa I’d cut my throat. This is exactly what I mean. A set-up like Landcare gives ruthless corporations the chance to pass themselves off as benign. And a cheap chance at that. Volunteers cost a lot less than advertising agencies.’
‘If the Landcare deal wasn’t a bargain, the corporate sponsors wouldn’t go for it,’ Jane said.
Before I was fully awake next morning I was aware of the endlessly reiterated chinking sound of bellbirds. As we breakfasted on toast and tea on the verandah, Jane pointed out, on the other side of a few acres of degraded pasture, a bedraggled stand of eucalypts.
‘See those dead branches topping out there? That’s dieback. Probably Bell Miner Associated Dieback, judging by the noise. Drink up your tea and we’ll go and see.’
The homestead stood on a knoll, in a bend of the Towamba River which rises in the Great Dividing Range, plunges over the coastal scarp and dawdles to the sea. Its glimmering reach surrounded us on three sides. We could see shifting banks and beaches of fine pink sand, some supporting an evanescent population of Hop-bushes and Cherry Ballarts, interspersed with wonderful blond Stipas with fronds that swung about in the onshore breeze like hair in a shampoo advertisement.
‘The river must be still salt up here,’ said Jane. She pointed to glassworts and saltbush growing in an inlet.
The land, all but a few acres, had long ago been cleared for sheep. We were walking through waist-high thickets of overgrown pasture grass, amid bursts of sweetbriar, bulrushes and thistles, where the odd sheep still mooched.
‘This really is the most terrible mess. What d’you reckon was here before they cleared it?’ I asked.
‘Depends,’ said Jane. ‘Down here in the river sand I reckon would have been some kind of saltmarsh, which must have been drained to provide pasture. As the ground rises you get different assemblages, different kinds of woodland. This is the driest and windiest part of the New South Wales coast. It’s in a rain shadow, because the sou’westerlies dump all their rain on the Dividing Range before they get here. I can see one familiar tree.’ She pointed to a eucalypt. ‘That’s Coast Grey Box, Eucalyptus bosistoana. I think that over there must be Silver-top Ash, Eucalyptus sieberi. Can you see how the mature leaves shine sort of silver? There’s at least one kind of stringybark and an ironbark, and I think those must be woollybutts, Eucalyptus longifolia. I’m guessing about the gums but this Black Wattle is a species I know really well.’ She pulled off a twiglet and handed it to me. ‘Acacia mearnsii. See how it’s got bipinnate leaves instead of phyllodes?’
‘Typical. I’ve no sooner learnt that wattles have phyllodes instead of leaves than you show me one that has leaves instead of phyllodes.’
‘What’s this?’ Jane had stopped by a knee-high set of rangy stems growing up from a basal rosette.
For once I knew it. ‘That’s Sea Lavender. Limonium.’
Jane was used to my knowing European things. ‘Exotic.’
‘I don’t think so. It looks different. I think it’s a native version.’ When we came to look it up it turned out to be Limonium australe, the native Sea Lavender.
‘Limonium’s a saltmarsh genus. That’d be a lark, wouldn’t it? Turning the run-down pasture back to saltmarsh?’
‘Maybe all you’d have to do would be to let the river inundate it regularly. That’d kill the pasture, and the introduced weeds, and then things like this would take over.’ She was pointing her boot at a clump of Sea Rushes. ‘That’s our native Sea Rush, which is pretty special, because it’s being pushed out of most marshland by the exotic Spiny Rush, Juncus acutus. You should end up with more of those fabulous Stipas as well. Austrostipa stipoides. That’s a Gahnia over there, Gahnia filum probably. The local paperbark would probably grow here too, at least where it wasn’t too salt. This is another ballart.’
She was holding a branchlet of a needle-leaved bush that had upside-down fruit on it, with a blue-black kernel hanging below white semi-transparent flesh, and gesturing with her other hand to the cypress-like bushes around it. ‘Those are Cherry Ballarts, Exocarpos cupressiformis, with fruits like this but red. They grow on eucalyptus roots, but this is different. This is Exocarpos strictus. I’m surprised to find it growing here, I must say.’ We were standing on one of the sandbanks that formed the river beach.
‘Coastal saltmarsh is an endangered ecosystem. I should say a group of endangered communities, because saltmarshes are all different, but they tend to get lumped together in conservation-speak. Wherever they are, they’re in constant danger of being “reclaimed” and built over. And they’re really essential elements in the mosaic.’
There was no need to explain. We both knew that saltmarsh is the habitat of a raft of species from the tiniest molluscs to the crustaceans and birds and fish that feed on them and on each other. They are the places where bats come to hunt insects, where baby fish find shelter from predators, and where migratory birds come to rest and refuel. For years Jane had been one of a group of dedicated workers trying to protect Hooded Plovers nesting on the back beach at Sorrento from the impact of humans and their dogs. If we were managing saltmarsh of our own Jane would have been able to create asylum for her plovers, and for Godwits and Sandpipers, not to mention the Black-winged Stilt and the White-fronted Chat.
‘Then again,’ Jane went on,’ you mightn’t have to do anything. If the sea level rises as they think it will, then this land will be regularly inundated anyway.’
We had walked on to a tongue of higher land between the pasture and the river. Jane pounced on a fluffy spike growing out of a clump of grass and pulled the inflorescence apart with her nails. ‘Wallaby Grass! The hardest thing about reinstating native grasses is finding the seed. There’s none in commerce, as far as I know, and here it is.’ She waved the flower spike and the seed lifted off like smoke.
Jane’s Wallaby Grass lawn is famous. Every year she collects the seed with a vacuum cleaner and sows a new area. I love Wallaby Grass because, even without macropods keeping it down, it never needs mowing. Lawn-mowing was the bane of my suburban childhood.
‘It would make headway only if you extirpated the exotic grasses. See this’ – she snapped off a tall frond, and pulled back a blade to show the ligule – ‘this is African Lovegrass, Eragrostis curvula. It’s virtually annihilated its less vigorous Australian cousin, E. leptostachya.’ As we walked she showed me Serrated Tussock (Nassella trichotoma), Pampas Grass, Chilean Needle Grass and Rat’s Tail grasses.
‘These are all scheduled as weeds because they degrade pasture. Half the native grasses are classed as weeds for the same reason. If you wanted to do serious conservation here, you’d have to deal with both exotic weed grasses and pasture grasses. And the exotics would be continually reseeding from the adjoining properties. Hopeless really.’
At first I had quite liked the Bell Miners’ incessant tinkling, but as we drew nearer the stand of devastated gums it seemed to bounce off the morning sky and fall on our ears like lead shot.
‘God,’ said Jane, ‘the bloody Anvil Chorus.’
The eucalypts were so defoliated that there was no way of identifying them for certain. Though the trees looked different from the Manna Gums that grow on the Mornington Peninsula, Jane thought they were probably the same species, Eucalyptus viminalis (and she was right). When we came under their ragged canopy, we could smell the Bell Miner colony. A sticky debris of leaves and twigs lay about our feet. The noise had become deafening.
‘Tell me about Bell Miners.’
‘Miners are related to honeyeaters; they’ve got the same sort of tongue, with a brush-tip, but they have a more complex social structure. They live in large groups, and mate promiscuously, and their young are fed indiscriminately by all adults, I think, certainly by other members of the colony besides their parents. They’re very aggressive in the defence of their territory and drive off all other species that try to share their food source. It seems that males far outnumber females in the colony. Which figures.’
‘Do they live on nectar?’
‘No. That’s the problem. Bell Miners eat lerps.’
‘Lerps?’
‘Lerps are the sugary coats that the nymphs of sap-sucking psyllids build for themselves. Pardalotes and other insectivorous birds pull the nymph out from under the lerp and eat that. If Bell Miners move in to eat the lerps the other birds leave behind, they drive away the insectivores and prevent them from finishing the job. Some people think the Bell Miners actually farm the lerps to get their sugar fix.’
‘Surely they’ve always done that. Why has it become such a problem now?’
‘Nobody knows for sure. In 1999 Bell Miners were removed from an area of infestation; there was an immediate influx of insectivorous birds who brought the population of psyllids down, but after ten months the trees showed no sign of recovery. The scientists involved in the experiment concluded that the real cause of the trees’ death was probably the destruction of their vascular system by guess what?’
I groaned. ‘Cinnamon Fungus.’
This was so depressing a thought that we were both silent as we walked on down to the river, where the eternal clangour of the birds followed us, echoing off the water. When we sat down in the warm sand Jane told me more about Bell Miner Associated Dieback.
‘BMAD is a huge problem, and getting worse. It’s official now that in northern New South Wales more than 20,000 hectares of sclerophyll forest are affected by BMAD. And the problem extends right down the Great Dividing Range as far south as Melbourne. Our state bird, the Yellow-tufted Honeyeater, has been driven to extinction by the Bell Miner takeover of its habitat.’
‘Why is it spreading so fast?’
‘Probably because the trees are already under stress. When the trees die, the Bell Miners simply move on to another stand and start the process all over again. They’re gradually reducing the habitat available for other birds. Some conservationists think that the increase of drought stress as a consequence of global warming is weakening the trees, making them more susceptible to insect attack, and that the Bell Miners are merely opportunists. Others believe that “controlling” Bell Miners is the way to go. Others want to eliminate the psyllids. If it’s Cinnamon Fungus that’s really to blame for BMAD, it doesn’t matter much what they do or if they do nothing.’
When Leon arrived that evening, we asked him what he was doing about his case of BMAD and he was doing exactly that, nothing. In his eyes nature could do no wrong, and everything out there was nature. There would be no killing or burning on his patch.
‘Leon, the Bell Miner population is out of control. There’s little enough natural vegetation left around here. You can’t afford to lose what old-growth forest you’ve got.’
But the conversation had moved into a more diverting channel. The Cassandra in the corner went unheeded.
The next day we were taken upriver to see the property that was for sale. As we moved out of the tidal reach the vegetation changed. The riverbank on both sides was now hidden by a thick fringe of willows. Jane, who expects me to know European species better than she, asked me which willows they were.
‘They look like Crack Willows,’ I said, ‘Salix fragilis, which is bad news because crack willows drop terminal twigs even in a slight wind, and they readily root downstream. In England Crack Willows are among my favourite trees; I’ve planted lots of them. These are a bit different. I think they must be hybrids.’
As we were stepping out of our flat-bottomed boat, stooping to pass under the willows, I tripped and fell headlong into the mat of Vinca major that was all the streamside groundcover there was. Surefooted Jane was having trouble too, for no matter how high she stepped the interlacing strings of the Periwinkle trapped her boots.
‘This is a bugger of a weed,’ she said, ‘because it allows absolutely no competition. Worse, it will thrive in deep shade and sheds its fronds which get carried downstream.’
‘Just like the willows.’
‘Yep.’
As it turned out our journey was pointless, for the owner of the property was interested in selling only if he could get an exorbitant price. He thought he might sell half of it, which would have meant that we had to share access and would live so close together that we could hear each other break wind. He was immensely proud of a huge oak tree that overshadowed his house.
‘What would you do with the property if it was yours?’ he asked me.
I didn’t say that I would fell his monster oak. ‘I’d get rid of the cattle,’ I said.
‘Oh, you couldn’t do that,’ he said. ‘You need the steers to keep down the grass.’
I didn’t tell him that I would poison the grass, but drank up my tea, paid my respects and withdrew. Leon was disappointed. He wanted to know why I hadn’t stayed to bargain.
‘Because I didn’t want it. There’d be no way I could restore it, because every time the Towamba came in spate, I’d get all the riverine weeds back again.’
‘What weeds?’
‘Willows for one.’
‘What’s wrong with willows? Willows are lovely.’
‘What’s wrong with willows is what’s wrong with all weeds. They’re plants in the wrong place.’
Jane raised her eyebrows, interested to see how much I had understood of all her careful teaching. I ploughed on.
‘The willow in Australia is not part of a plant community. It has no competitors and supports no suite of invertebrates or fungi or whatever. Its growth and reproduction are not limited by natural factors, so the willow can overwhelm all the niche plants growing in local ecosystems. Like lots of our worst tree weeds, it originally grew from cuttings imported by homesick settlers.’
‘They probably needed cricket bats,’ said Leon. ‘Without those willows we’d never have won the Ashes.’
‘Bat willow is a variety of Salix alba. It seems more likely to me that the early settlers thought they would need osiers, for baskets, and brought cuttings of S. fragilis. The worst willow in the Australian situation is S. nigra. It’s beyond belief that S. nigra was imported from America as late as 1962, as part of the effort to combat erosion.
‘The willows’ve been hybridising across the clones for a couple of hundred years. In their native habitats this kind of interbreeding would have been prevented by natural factors, geographic distance, different flowering times, and genetic incompatibility. In Australia bastard willows can breed with any other willow growing within a kilometre radius. And the hybrids can tolerate a vast range of cultural conditions. When they take over an area they obliterate biodiversity and flourish as a hugely prolific monoculture. Within a very few years of their introduction into Australia willows had spread through the south-eastern river systems, changing their patterns of flow.’
‘Can they be controlled?’ asked Leon.
‘Not easily. Any frond breaking off and falling into the river will root downstream. Fronds washed onto a bank will get a foothold in the mud. Seeds too are carried downstream, as well as on the wind. In huge quantities. Even if we ripped out or poisoned all the willows on the lower Towamba, within a year or two the willow population would be back close to maximum density. Eventually willows would immobilise the sandbanks and obstruct the course of floodwater when the river is in spate, increasing erosion.’
‘You made the willow problem seem insoluble,’ said Jane, as we undressed for bed.
‘I didn’t tell him the half of it. I didn’t talk about loss of habitat for native species, or what happens when billions of leaves are dumped in watercourses when willows deciduate, or about the loss of subterranean water in drought seasons. Anyhow, Leon wasn’t listening. He thinks it enough that he doesn’t turn the property into a golf course or a marina.’
‘I feel like going out there right now and setting fire to the Manna Gums with the Bell Miners in them,’ said Jane.
‘You wouldn’t dare.’
‘You’re right,’ said Jane and turned out the light.
Leon even liked the Bell Miners. One thing he was sure about: no wild creatures would be shot or poisoned on his watch. No fox. Not even a rabbit. His property had been cleared more than a hundred years ago. It was more than he could do to unclear it now. So he ran a few sheep, brought friends down from Sydney for restful weekends and did a little fishing at the mouth of the shimmering Towamba, where oysters grew on the rocks. If the wedgetails took his newborn lambs he blessed them. When I clicked my teeth because the only wildflowers in the pasture were Yellow Sorrel and Capeweed from South Africa, he accused me of rabid nationalism.
‘I’m an exotic,’ he said, ‘Purebred from Bialystok. And you’re a hybrid from everywhere but here. You might as well say we’ve got no right to be here.’
‘I have said that.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Leon.
The next day we went downstream in the tinny for a look at a parcel of land that Leon was willing to sell. This was unimproved old-growth forest, opposite Boydtown, one of the few sites on the south coast of New South Wales that Aboriginal people have been able to repossess. The site, overlooking the mouth of the Towamba, was bordered with rocks encrusted with delicious oysters that I would have been happy to live on, if only the walk up and down from the river’s edge had not been quite so steep. That steepness gave me a vantage point from which I would have been able to watch the whales that visit the bay in October–November. The forest was healthy, though not undisturbed. The only serious infestation I would need to get rid of was Pittosporum undulatum, an Australian native that is classified as a noxious weed in California, Hawaii, New Zealand, South Africa, Lord Howe Island and Norfolk Island, as well as in much of eastern Australia. It was outside its range in this dry grass forest understorey, where it had become dominant because of changes in the fire regime. Controlling it would have been a doddle. But there was another problem. Under pressure from the insurance industry, new regulations for fire damage limitation have been brought in all over Australia. The New South Wales government would have required me to undertake to clear the forest for a radius of fifty metres around any house I intended to build, before planning permission would be granted. I wanted a house surrounded by native vegetation; there was simply no way that I would buy a piece of forest only to destroy it. The case probably could have been argued, specially as I wanted to build a fireproof house, but there were other, equally weighty reasons for not going ahead.
I couldn’t make Leon see that the serious environmental weeds, the willows, the Smilax, the blackberry, the sweetbriar, the pines, the exotic grasses, had to be tackled. He thought it was enough to plant the occasional tree. A free load of whips had been supplied by some agency or another, and planted directly into the rough grass in front of the house, where they languished for lack of the water necessary to get such little trees started. If the tags that still fluttered on them were any guide, few of them were true natives of the area. No botanical survey had been done of Leon’s properties, nor could one have been particularly helpful, for practically every form of vegetation on most of the properties was a feral exotic. Some of the native species he selected would become feral in their turn. I tried to make him see the beauty of the Cherry Ballarts growing on the undisturbed sandbanks at the river mouth, and the cloud shapes of the Melaleucas along the low shore, but he was not inspired to act. I talked to him about endangered dry grass forest communities and the importance of keeping robust competitors out until the trees and the grasses have had a chance to re-establish, but he didn’t listen. It would have taken hard work, a lot of money, and rigorous mental discipline to have restored even a modicum of the biodiversity of his consortium’s string of bits of land; without consensus we couldn’t even begin. Meanwhile, beyond the boundaries of the property, the area was losing its amenity with every day that passed.
Twofold Bay has been in trouble ever since it was visited by Bass and Flinders in 1798. In July 1803 Her Majesty’s armed tender Lady Nelson fired cannonballs into the cliffs for no particular reason. Sealers who used the bay to flense their catches had no scruples about removing the Kudingal women for their own use and shooting Kudingal men who presumed to object. Such is the reverence felt by Australians for their own brief history that the old whaling station, where the fat was boiled off the great beasts, so that the stench of rotting whale meat hung over the bay and decaying matter choked it, is now a carefully manicured tourist venue. The town of Eden popped up on the shore when more and more hopefuls arrived by boat to try their hand at panning alluvial gold at Kiandra in the 1850s. There were grandiose plans for a city, but by 1866 the gold had petered out. At one point the citizens of Eden got very excited when their town was considered as a possible site of the Federal Capital, but Canberra was chosen instead. Eden remained a backwater, logging for railway sleepers and fish canning its only industries. In 1999, after fifty years of operation, the Eden fish cannery was finally closed because it was not ‘globally competitive’, throwing 12 per cent of the total population of the town out of work. Eight months later the site was sold, for the building of a tourist resort. Meanwhile the beauty of the bay had not been advanced by the building of a fuel storage depot on Lookout Point, smack in the middle of the two lobes of Twofold Bay.
Eden has been described as a town forever waiting to be saved by the next major development. In 1970, when the Daishowa Paper Company of Japan, which had been logging in the old-growth forests of south-eastern New South Wales and Gippsland, opened its woodchip mill on Munganno Point, most of the citizens of Eden were convinced that prosperity would follow. Opposition to the demolition of the forests came from outside, from middle-class greenies who lived in the cities, who became more vocal as more and more old-growth forests were logged. The state government’s only response was to guarantee ‘resource security’ to Daishowa; each year the quotas were increased and the royalties reduced, to offset raised transport costs as Daishowa had to go further afield to find the trees to fell.
Conservationists hoped that the chip mill would close in 1997. When it showed no signs of doing so there were public demonstrations which resulted in its temporary closure in 2000. Harris-Daishowa, since 2003 called South-East Fibre Exports, is once more running full-bore, though in June 2005 work stopped for a day when activists entered the mill and lashed themselves to the conveyor belt between the chipper and the stockpile. In 2004 observers from the action group Chipstop counted the number of trucks bringing timber to the mill, an average of 163 per day; 79 per cent of the loads contained old-growth trees, many of such girth that they had had to be split before loading.
I wondered whether it might not be my destiny to be caught up in the struggle to preserve the forests of the south-east. It wasn’t as if I could ignore it, if I became a landholder in the area. The mill and its wharf and the container ships are visible from all round the bay. The noise from the mill carries way up the river, augmented by the constant noise of the timber transports turning off the main road and along the purpose-built road through the bush. Not to fight against the destruction of the forests would be tacitly to support it. I couldn’t see the activists letting me stay out of it, come to that. I didn’t have the stomach for so hopeless a fight.
There was even worse in the offing. In 1999 it had been announced that Twofold Bay was the site chosen by the Australian government for a new naval munitions wharf and storage facility. A 200-metre-long wharf in East Boyd Bay was to be connected to the shore by a jetty seven metres wide; the bay would be dredged to a depth of 10.5 metres to provide the berth and turning space for the munitions ships. A new access road was to be built from the shore to the roadway and on to a storage depot fifteen kilometres away in the state forest, amid fire-prone sclerophylls. The Nature Conservation Council of New South Wales objected to the proposed construction, citing the effect it would have on the protected seagrasses, and on the rare Weedy Seadragon (Phyllopteryx taeniolatus), on the likelihood of polluted run-off and the importation of sea pests, the change in patterns of tidal flow, deposits of sediment and erosion. They could have made a more convincing case if they had been given time, but it would have made no odds.
The port, which in my innocence I thought would never be built, opened on 17 October 2003. All arguments against its siting in Twofold Bay had failed, mainly because all the other suggested sites were too close to centres of habitation. One of the benefits of the remoteness of the area and the depression of the rural economy was that local opposition was minimal, and apparently further afield nobody cared. The local MP Gary Nairne declared, ‘The Navy Wharf project has been an enormous boon for the Eden and Bega Valley Regions, creating 112 local job opportunities and potentially attracting millions of dollars of private investment to the region.’ Whales may no longer play there, and the oysters on the rocks may be too dangerous to eat, but everyone will be, potentially, richer.
Environmental degradation spawns its own inevitability. When it was suggested that Eden’s mussel farm be extended from twelve hectares to fifty, it was argued that fifty hectares of bobbing buoys could hardly detract more from an area of great natural beauty than the chip mill, the fuel tanks on Lookout Point, and the munitions wharf already did. On 4 April 2004 a toxic bloom of the dinoflagellate Dinophysis acuminata was discovered in Twofold Bay. This organism infects shellfish, rendering them toxic at very low concentrations. Not for the first time, oysters, pipis and mussels from Twofold Bay were declared inedible. Yet in 2005 the state government signed off the permission for the mussel-farming project to proceed to its second stage. This may not be as stupid as it looks, because one way of reducing the overabundance of nitrogen that favours the proliferation of mixotrophic algae is to have mussels filter it out of the water. If I had bought Leon’s parcel of forest, I’d have had a munitions wharf and storage depot, a chip mill working twenty-four hours every day, and 163 timber lorries a day, and fifty hectares of mussel farm to look at and listen to, as well as several losing battles to fight.
Before I left the south coast I made one last attempt. The local estate agents had a ‘historic’ homestead on the books, so Jane and I went to see it. Our way up into the pastoral district of the Monaro took us on zigzag timber roads over the coastal scarp through the higher-altitude sclerophyll forests, where far too often we could hear the cling-clang of the Bell Miners. As we got further inland the native forest gave way to huge dark plantations of Monterey Pine. The road fizzled out and navigation got harder, as we wove our way through the crisscross logging tracks. We seemed to be driving for hours without getting anywhere. I was convinced that in my obsession for travelling cross-country I had finally succeeded in getting us properly lost when the five-barred gate of the station was suddenly in front of us. I jumped out, stepped up to unhook the chain and open the gate, and froze. Beyond the gate the broad, undulating pasture lay grey and dry, watched grimly by the distant pines. In the birdless, terrible quiet, nothing moved. The sky too seemed drained of colour. It was as if my vision had gone from colour to black and white.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Jane.
I didn’t know. ‘I don’t want to go in,’ was all I said. My hands were cold. My sister studied my face and said nothing. We’d been driving for more than three hours to get to this place, but she didn’t ask even to stretch her legs. I got back in the car, turned it around and drove the three hours back again. I apologised for my strange behaviour. Jane shook her head.
‘You didn’t see yourself. Your face was grey.’
It was many months before I found out that the property we went to see was the very station where, sometime in the 1840s, a whole Aboriginal community was murdered. The story, which has been passed down by one to another manager of the station ever since, is that the Aboriginal people used to sneak into the dairy at night and lick the cream off the top of the milk in the separating dishes. Nothing was simpler than to lace the milk with strychnine. Somebody must have bought the station ultimately, for I see it’s operating once more, but I’m glad that someone wasn’t I.
Thus ended my search for a place in New South Wales.