When the paperwork for the purchase was nearly complete, I rang Jane.
‘I’ve bought something. Sixty hectares.’
‘Where?’
‘Gold Coast City.’
‘You’re not serious.’
‘I am.’
I was. As you come over the border from New South Wales into Queensland on the Nerang–Murwillumbah road, right by the tick gate, through which Queensland cattle may not pass southwards into New South Wales, a sign welcomes you to Gold Coast City. Anything less citified would be hard to imagine.
‘You’re losing it, girl. Why would you buy something on the Gold Coast? You don’t even play golf.’
‘It’s in the Hinterland.’
‘Let me guess: horsiness, fake villages and avenues of Cocos Palms. The food and wine trail. Bad food and worse wine.’
‘No. It’s rainforest. Or abandoned dairy farm. It depends which way you look at it.’
‘You’re the only person I know who would spend two years shopping for desert and come back with rainforest. When am I going to see it?’
I arranged a stay for Jane, her husband Peter and myself at one of many expensive rainforest retreats, which didn’t look terribly far away from Cave Creek on the map but was. We got there late after driving for an hour through blinding rain, the only guests in the place. The kitchen was closed. Morning revealed that we were mere feet away from a just-about-still-working avocado plantation full of angry bees. The ‘ancient’ rainforest our rooms overlooked was actually a mess of tangled regrowth, the only mature trees to be seen in it immense Flooded Gums. I found one luxuriant plant, a rambling passionfruit with pure white flowers, and took its photograph. I now know it only too well as Passiflora subpeltata, one of the most invasive weeds in disturbed forest.
Over breakfast, consisting of a variety of boxed cereals and DIY raisin toast, we worked out where we were, which was Mount Tamborine, and where we were going. Mount Tamborine stands on the eastern extremity of the Albert River catchment. Between it and the Nerang River lies the Coomera River catchment. Both these rivers rise on the Lamington Plateau, deep within the trackless confines of the national park, and flow northwards. The range that divides the two catchments is the Darlington Range; the western boundary of the Nerang River Valley is the Beechmont Range which runs at right angles to the McPherson Range, which extends all the way from the sea at Point Danger to Wallangarra, 220 kilometres inland. In the angle between them lies the Lamington Plateau. The movement to turn its 20,590 hectares into a national park was initiated in 1896 by a grazier called Robert Collins, who invited Lord Lamington, the then governor of Queensland, to visit the area. (Lord Lamington, who was more used to visiting his British friends to shoot on their country estates, took the opportunity to shoot a koala.) The eastern boundary of the Numinbah Valley is another national park, the Springbrook Plateau. The only way to get back from Mount Tamborine to Cave Creek was to drive down to the coastal highway and back up the Nerang. Even though Numinbah lies within a few minutes of the Lamington Plateau and Springbrook as the crow would fly, both are hours away by road.
As we drove through the devastated hinterland and along the six-lane Pacific Highway Jane uttered no more than the occasional sigh. The road up through the regrowth forests seemed longer and drearier than usual. Never was I more grateful for the dramatic entrance through the national park. Jane was stunned by the sheer variety of unfamiliar plants. We slid past strings of nuts hanging from the Macadamias and the huge pods dangling from the Black Beans, and down into the alley between the rainforest and the Hoop Pines.
‘Are these yours?’ asked Jane, looking at the rows of Hoop Pines.
‘Not now. They’re the remains of a plantation that was grown on the property before that bit of it was ceded to the national park, and now of course they can’t be harvested. They should be taken out for timber and the park should spend the proceeds on some extra weed control, but there’s no chance.’
We came to a lopsided gate. ‘This is where my property begins.’
On the left a steep slope clothed in Lantana, on the right the other half of the same. Jane was unimpressed.
‘Bit of a challenge,’ said Peter.
That bit was, if I had known it, but a thousandth part of the challenge. There was Lantana all along the forest edges and in every gully, and wherever the land was cleared but not put down to grass. Way up in the forest there are still, ten years on, fifteen hectares that were cleared for bananas that are now full-on Lantana. And Lantana was not the worst of it.
We crossed the causeway over the creek.
‘This is Cave Creek. It’s one of the headwaters of the Nerang River, which rises a bit further up and a bit further south-west, on Mount Hobwee.’
I drove on under a huge cedar dressed from head to foot in Staghorns, Bird’s Nest Ferns and an enormous King Orchid, and on to a second gate. Grazing cattle raised their heads and stared as Peter got out to open and shut the gate. They kept staring as we drove on up to the house, a Queenslander of sorts, standing on cement columns topped with old hub caps, which were meant to stop termites from travelling up into the wood of the house. The key I had been given didn’t fit the lock of the flimsy front door. Before I could kick it in, Peter pried open a window at the end of the verandah, climbed through and let us in.
‘How can people live like this?’ asked Jane as she stepped into the kitchen.
The walls were filthy, but not as filthy as the doorjambs, which were black with grimy handprints. The boarded ceilings sagged, and brown dirt had sifted down through the cracks to gather on every horizontal surface. The windows were curtained with spiderwebs inside and out. The floors were covered with several layers of cheap carpeting, most of it rotten, all of it black with dirt. Three of the internal partitions were so eaten out by termites that you could put your hand through them. The floors of the bathroom and neighbouring lavatory sloped downwards; both were hanging off the side of the house because the joists had rotted away. The septic tank had a young Red Cedar growing out of it. Jane went to see if the lavatory was usable. I heard her lift the top off the cistern and force it to empty. When she ran the water to wash her hands it scalded her. I touched a switch and the light went on.
‘Could be worse,’ said Peter.
‘I’d get rid of all of this,’ said Jane, pushing her toe into the soggy carpeting. ‘And then I’d gurney the whole place out.’
Jane never goes bushwards without the wherewithal for making tea. As she put her little kettle-cum-teapot on the filthy hob she asked, ‘What’s the plan?’
‘To restore the forest.’
Jane tipped leaf tea into the holder in the top of the pot. ‘That’s obvious. But how?’
Peter, as usual, said nothing.
‘I have no idea. You can help me.’
‘You reckon. I don’t know anything about this vegetation. It’s all I can do to keep abreast of the systems on the Mornington Peninsula. I don’t even know the genera that grow here, let alone the species. Rainforests are the most intricate systems on earth. That’s why when they’re disturbed, everything goes haywire. You might think you’re restoring what was there, but in fact you’re just another interloper, doing more harm than good.’
I took a deep breath. ‘I can learn. We can learn, together.’
That was part of the idea, but typically I hadn’t consulted her.
Jane, who will no more countenance the drinking of tea out of mugs than the use of tea bags, put a cup and saucer beside me. ‘You don’t get it, do you? There are no teachers.’
Peter said, ‘The soil looks pretty good. Basalt, isn’t it? What’s the rainfall?’
‘About two metres a year.’
‘Must be worth a try.’
We drank our tea and talked of other things. A Butcherbird hopped onto the verandah rail and sang a canzonetta composed for the occasion. Behind the house King Parrots were whistling. In the pasture Crimson Rosellas were swinging on the heads of seeding grass. Wanderer butterflies sailed past in airborne coitus. The tea things stowed in their basket, we went for a walk up the main track. I was praying for something special, the bowerbird maybe, to win my sister over. We trudged uphill and came to a broad clearing where Jane stopped dead. She was gazing up at the bare rhyolite precipice that topped out above the forest like the battlements of some huge prehistoric castle.
‘Now that I do understand. That is fantastic. Can we get nearer?’
The forest edge was a mass of Lantana, with no visible opening.
Jane studied the tumbled mess of rocks around us. ‘These aren’t geologic. They’re all out of position. Just heaped and pushed about – to make the pasture, I guess.’
She was right as usual, but the truth was sadder than her guess. In these parts the farmers didn’t simply roll the rocks aside to create level tracts of pasture; they dug them up to sell. It took me months to realise that the forest had not been abused just as a farm. From 1985 the upland portion had been one of the four quarries on Numinbah Valley farms that supplied 50,000 tonnes of rock to build the seafronts of the artificial waterside suburbs that stretch from Byron Bay to Noosa and points north. The figure is merely notional; the total may be many times that much. The farmers have no weighbridges and there is no one overseeing the traffic. The rock merchants don’t care; the farmers don’t care; nobody cares. Rocks too irregularly shaped to be usable were bulldozed out of the way into creeks and gullies. Of the natural contours of that part of the northern lip of the Mount Warning caldera almost nothing remains.
The forest takes this devastation in its stride. The valiant workforce has planted into the worst heaps of spoil, and the trees have shot up just as if they were standing in deep loam, spreading their roots across the rubble, holding it all together. The answer to everything, to the instability of the land, the slumping, the landslips, the pugging and the waterlogging, is to plant more trees. Under the protection of the canopy the land heals.
In the blitheness of my innocence I pitched the project to my sister. ‘The way I see it, the pasture is an ulcer in the healthy tissue of the forest. What I have to do is to draw the healthy tissue in, little by little, till the ulcer is gone.’
‘What if it’s a rodent ulcer?’
‘It isn’t. See, the Lantana can only grow in sunlight, on the forest edge. The forest isn’t retreating from the pasture, it’s drawing in wherever it can. What I have to do is to remove some of the obstacles and the forest will do the rest.’
Jane sighed at my ignorance. ‘You’re going to have to learn about succession, my girl. And that won’t be easy, because nobody really knows how it works. To restore your forest would take about eight hundred years.’
‘I’d better not die then.’
The next day, at Mount Tamborine, we found a little information centre and in it a copy of the famous Red Book, with its original title, Trees and Shrubs in the Rainforest of New South Wales and Southern Queensland.
‘Here you are,’ said Jane. ‘Page six, Subtropical rainforest.’ She read out:
– 2 or 3 strata of trees
– diverse: 10–60 species in canopy
– leaf size large: notophylls and mesophylls common
‘What are notophylls and mesophylls?’
‘It’s a fancy way of indicating leaf size. Notophylls are leaves between about three inches, say eight centimetres and about five inches, thirteen centimetres. Mesophylls are bigger.’ She went on reading:
– leaves often compound—
I interrupted her again. ‘Meaning?’
‘Hm. That’s not so easy to explain. A simple leaf has a single blade, yes? And a simple leaf can have indentations in its outline, like a maple leaf for example? If those indentations go right to the main vein, and the bits between form separate leaf blades and the main vein becomes the rachis, you’ve got a compound leaf. The separate leaves or, more correctly, leaflets may have stalks connecting them to the rachis or not.’
‘How can you tell if you’re looking at a leaf or a leaflet?’
‘That’s easy. Leaflets don’t have axils, or rather, there are no buds in the axils, no leaf buds or flower buds or stipules. The real axil will be way back where the rachis joins the branchlet. Leaflets don’t fall separately either; the compound leaf tends to drop as a whole.’
‘So if I’m not sure, I can look for a fallen leaf?’
‘Yes, but you won’t need to do that, I reckon. You’ll get used to it pretty quick.’
Jane was wrong about that. Taking a leaflet for a leaf is one of the commonest mistakes made by the amateur dendrologist. It was to be many months before I could distinguish more than a very few species. For too long it seemed to me that I forgot more than I learned, that I was learning the same names over and over again. And then one day I found myself recognising trees at a distance, and even their saplings, and then their seedlings, which were often very different from the adult tree. I have still to master the art of recognising trees from their trunks when the canopy is out of sight, but I’m getting there.
Jane read on:
– Leaves often compound, and mostly with entire margins—
‘Entire margins?’
‘Without serrations or indentations. Not toothed, angled or lobed.’ She went on:
– stranglers (figs) often common
– palms often common
– plank-buttresses often common
– uneven, non-uniform canopy
Vines – large, thick-stemmed vines common and diverse
Large epiphytes – (orchids, ferns, aroids) common and diverse
Special features – large-leaved herbs and ground-ferns common
‘Most authorities divide rainforest into more than four types, actually. I’m trying to remember my Tracey and Webb; they divide rainforest into more than a dozen types, I seem to recall. Your kind of subtropical rainforest is this one, Complex Notophyll Vine Forest.’
Jane and Peter went home to Victoria and I was left to contemplate my folly. First of all I tramped down to the creek, and picked my way along it. It seemed preposterous to me that anyone could own anything like it and yet it was legally mine. Though the creek was full of weeds, red, pink and white Busy Lizzie, Mist Weed and Elephant Grass, it was equally full of promise. On the flat top of a rock in the creek I found a little heap of crayfish claws, indigo-blue, edged with vermilion, left there by the Azure Kingfisher. Many of the trees had snaking buttress roots, and within the curve of one of them, amid the bright blue fruit shed by the quandongs, I surprised a Noisy Pitta. I found a way into the forest and ventured into the twilight under the canopy where giant mosses and lycopods grew, and gushes of scented blossom swung down. The canopy, fifty metres above my head, was a total mystery to me.
The first thing I needed was a flora survey. I had been given the name of a self-trained local botanist called David Jinks. He was famous because he had already fulfilled the botanist’s dream. Scrambling in a gully above Natural Arch he came upon a new tree, which he identified as a Eucryphia. This was no mean feat. Eucryphia is a small Gondwanan genus of only seven species, two in Chile and five (counting the new one) in Australia. The new Eucryphia is called Eucryphia jinksii, and academic botanists have had to make space for David in their hallowed company. He was quick to put together a tree survey for me, and to tell me that my sixty hectares had some of the highest biodiversity to be found anywhere outside the wet tropics. He explained that because we had different soil types, rich basaltic soils and krasnozems striped with sandstone, and a constant supply of moisture percolating down from the higher scarps of the McPherson Range, the Cave Creek forest was both montane and riparian, with odd dryer spots and patches of alluvium. Add the range of altitude, from 250 to 500 metres above sea level, plus the different aspects of these steep slopes, and you had niches to suit just about everything that could grow in any high-rainfall forest within two hundred kilometres.
So I had little plastic signs made, screwed them onto star pickets and had them put up all along the unfenced boundary. ‘Cave Creek Rainforest Rehabilitation Scheme’ they said, and warned passers-by that anyone removing material of any kind from the property would be prosecuted. The name may seem odd, but a lot of thought went into it. Revegetation was the wrong word for what we were doing because it didn’t suggest the element of specificity; we weren’t just stopping erosion, we were replanting a forest. Restoration wasn’t the right word either because it made the trees sound like furniture. I went for ‘rehabilitation’ because it suggested the role that the forest would play in rebuilding itself. So CCRRS it is. The nearest thing to a logo we have is the image of the remarkable inflorescence of the small Bolwarra, Eupomatia bennettii. This is a true Gondwanan survivor, one of three species in the single genus of the family Eupomatiaceae. It was ten years before we succeeded in propagating this very special plant. Because the forest frugivores always stole the fruit before it was quite ripe, we finally decided to put a cage over the next fruiting plant we found. After watching the single fruit develop for a whole six months, waiting with increasing impatience till it was truly ripe and ready, we ended up with some hundreds of seedlings.
David discovered galaxies of rare plants, Ardisia bakeri, Rhodamnia maideniana, Tapeinosperma repandulum, Quassia Mt Nardi, Neisosperma poweri, Cupaniopsis newmannii, Lepiderema pulchella. On basalt benches under the canopy on the north edge of the property he found many examples of the Southern Fontainea or Fontainea australis, recognisable by its oddly jointed leafstalks and the two oil glands on the underside of the base of the leaf. Syzygium hodgkinsoniae, Miss Hodgkinson’s lilly pilly, more commonly known as the Rose Apple, like the Fontainea listed as vulnerable, grows profusely all over CCRRS, much to David’s surprise. I had every intention of rebuilding the forest that should have been covering the cleared acres; to discover that by restoring that habitat I would be multiplying the numbers of individuals in threatened, endangered, vulnerable or rare species was an utter bonus.
David warned me to expect a visitor from the Queensland herbarium whose job it was to check that another very rare plant on the property, the Smooth Davidson’s Plum, was still surviving. The consensus used to be that plants that survive only on land in private ownership were doomed. The three sites where this plant was then recorded are all privately owned. There was nothing the herbarium could do to stop me wiping the Cave Creek Davidsonias out of existence; they could only check to see if the record should be changed from ‘endangered’ to ‘critically endangered’ or even ‘extinct’. The Smooth Davidson’s Plum was first described by New South Wales botanists John Williams and Gwen Harden in 1979, and finally named by them in 2000, Davidsonia johnsonii, after L. A. S. Johnson.
The late Lawrie Johnson is the acknowledged master of Gondwanan botany in Australia, responsible for the naming of four new plant families, thirty-three new genera and 286 new species, for segregating Angophora and Corymbia from the genus Eucalyptus, and for beginning the research on the Proteaceae that is now coming to fruition. In the preface he wrote for Flowers and Plants of New South Wales and Southern Queensland in 1975, Johnson urged readers:
On the local front, resist by all legal means the unnecessary fouling of gullies by residential or other development at their heads, leading to mineral enrichment and choking by weeds. Resist ‘reclaiming’ (a profoundly dishonest word) of swamps. Prevent building on headlands and unnecessary artificial revegetation of sand-dunes. Oppose clearing, mowing, planting of roadsides; let the native vegetation or even harmless ‘weeds’ grow – they will support a rich life of invertebrate animals and some birds and other vertebrates (though certain noxious weeds cannot be tolerated and harbour for rabbits must sometimes be destroyed). Keep even the smallest patches of native or semi-native vegetation – the large reserves alone are not enough. (Rotherham et al., 7–8)
Lawrie Johnson would have understood what we are doing at CCRRS. I like to think that we have his blessing. We have since found other groups of Davidsonia johnsonii, and we have propagated it as well, so with us it is no longer rare.
David was drinking coffee on the verandah when I pointed to a small tree standing in the middle of the pasture and asked him what it was. He took one look and was off the verandah and bounding across the Kikuyu towards it. He came back bearing a twig.
‘Unbelievable,’ he said. ‘This is Corynocarpus rupestris, the Glenugie Karaka. It’s not supposed to grow anywhere in Australia outside the Glenugie Peak Flora Reserve.’
Glenugie Peak is the alternative name of Mount Elaine, a steep extinct volcano south-east of Grafton.
‘Karaka. Sounds like a Maori name.’
‘It is. The genus was first collected in New Zealand by the Forsters on Cook’s second voyage. “Karaka” means “orange” in Maori; the fruit of the New Zealand species, Corynocarpus laevigatus, is orange. It was one of the few plants actively cultivated by the Maori, who used the kernels to make a special kind of flour. The Australian species was first collected by a worker in the Glenugie State Forest in 1956, but the specimen sat around for twenty-five years until Gordon Guymer took a look at it and wrote it up in Flora of Australia [22: 214–16]. The species is divided into two subspecies. Corynocarpus rupestris arborescens is found on a few Queensland sites, but this isn’t it. You know it’s the subspecies rupestris rather than arborescens because of these stem-girdling larvae that keep pruning the tree, so it never gets any higher. No doubt about it. This is the genuine Glenugie Karaka, Corynocarpus rupestris rupestris. Look at this.’
He showed me a sharp hooked tooth at the tip of a juvenile leaf. ‘That’s really primitive.’
He might as well have been showing me the wing of a pterodactyl.
‘How do you suppose the Corynocarpus got here?’ I asked.
‘Birdshit?’
‘The Glenugie State Forest is more than a hundred ks away. Can a bird fly that far between bowel movements?’
We’ve done our best since to propagate our Corynocarpus, which we have never seen to flower or fruit. It seems that this primitive tree is ‘gender dimorphic’ or ‘gynodioecious’; though it doesn’t have separate male and female inflorescences as such, in some specimens the female organs of the inflorescence are highly developed and in others the male (Brockie et al.). And it looks as if in certain circumstances, the inflorescence may change from one to the other. Whenever a branch falls, pruned by the in-dwelling larvae, we turn it into cuttings but so far only a very few have struck and they grow agonisingly slowly.
Perhaps more important than anything else David found for me were two young men who had worked for him when he had a rainforest nursery. Simon and Will were both experienced in regeneration work and in identifying plants in the wild. Simon had worked for me for less than a week when he found a Plum Pine (Podocarpus elatus) that wasn’t on David’s list, and a pair of giant Water Gums (Tristaniopsis laurina) growing on a rocky slope otherwise covered in Mist Weed. Hardly a week went by without one or other adding new species to our flora list. Deep in the forest they found Ochrosia moorei, an endangered plant known from the Springbrook National Park.
Besides endangered and vulnerable plants, there is another class of plants that are simply rare. Some species are so demanding of a particular suite of cultural conditions that they will never dominate in any plant community, like the Veiny Laceflower (Archidendron muellerianum), Ardisia (Ardisia bakeri), the Long-leaved Tuckeroo (Cupaniopsis newmannii), Smooth Scrub Turpentine (Rhodamnia maideniana) and Milkbush (Neisosperma poweri). It makes no sense to start trying to save a disappearing plant without dealing with the conditions that are causing its disappearance, and that requires restoration of the plant community of which the rare plant is a member. Plant the commoner members of the assemblage and in their own good time the rarer ones will turn up.
Next came Rob Price and Lui Weber, who found Endiandra hayesii, another vulnerable inhabitant. Rob and Lui are proper old-fashioned botanists who are interested in the whole forest assemblage. They teach me the liverworts and lichens, ferns and mosses, sedges and grasses, orchids and vines, thousands upon thousands of species. Every time they come by they find more tree species.
Sixty species in the canopy would have been the top of the predictable range; CCRRS had more than twice that. The point of restoring the forest was now reinforced. To let the Cave Creek forest reclaim its own would leave a living museum of genetic diversity that might even survive global warming, given its curious situation in a suspended drainage basin that could not dry out.
It was probably inevitable that I would begin the restoration of the forest by making a bad mistake. I employed a local contractor to clear the forest edge and cut access paths while I was away in England. I came back to find that his huge machine had ripped down, as well as the curtain of Lantana that blocked access to the forest, dozens of young trees and as many branches with their epiphytes and birds’ nests, and had chewed out steep tracks that carved through root systems and gashed tender buttress roots. It had even run over a sleeping python. My friend Ann flew up from Melbourne to find me perplexed and uncertain. Will, who greatly disapproved of the heavy machinery approach, had been taking the workforce up into the corner of the property that was surrounded by national park and was teaching them to remove weeds by hand, following the method established by Joan and Eileen Bradley in the 1960s (ADB). He and his co-workers simply pulled out exotic soft weeds by hand, one by one. The soil was far too moist and fertile to remain naked for long; the area was no sooner cleared than it was time to clear it again. Will’s instinct was to leave all native vegetation; Native Raspberry, Kangaroo Vine and Cayratia were allowed to spread unchecked. In his wisdom he left all and any native tree, including the pioneer species Bleeding Heart (Omalanthus populifolius) and Native Mulberry (Pipturus argenteus). It took more than five years to happen, but eventually the pioneer species that he protected formed a canopy dense enough to shade out the weeds. This corner of the property is now genuine rainforest, with a knee-high understorey of Pollia crispata, shining in the gloom like a rising tide of four-pointed green stars. Female Paradise Riflebirds love to perch in the branches of the Native Mulberries.
Back in 2003 it seemed that we were getting nowhere, slowly. We had yet to plant a single tree. The only place we had clear to plant was a half-hectare by the entrance gate that had been stripped by the excavator. It was fast filling up with Lantana again.
‘You’ll have to use herbicides, won’t you?’ said Ann.
I thought so. ‘The excavator was too much, but we can’t pussyfoot around either. We have to clear and plant, and then keep the competition down until the little trees start casting shade. What I don’t know is whether the baby trees have to be shaded. Whether we should be planting them with nurse trees, pioneers that keep them shaded until they’re tough enough to grow in full sun.’
We had plenty of nurse trees, mostly Blackwoods (Acacia melanoxylon). The conventional wisdom is that these ‘nurse trees’ safeguard natural forest succession, but I could see that the rainforest saplings that had germinated underneath them were holding their breath. Some of the land originally cleared at Cave Creek had become what seemed to be a monoculture of Blackwoods until you walked through it and found hundreds of Red Cedar saplings standing underneath the wattles. By the lichens growing on the leaves you could tell that the saplings had been there for generations, waiting in vain for the Blackwoods to collapse. Forestry researchers have found that when Acacia melanoxylon leaves rot down they generate sufficient toxicity to inhibit the growth of surrounding plants, a phenomenon known as allelopathy (González et al.). Another sinister aspect of Blackwoods is that their seeds need extreme heat to germinate, and they pop up everywhere after fire. Their ubiquity at Cave Creek is a direct consequence of the original settlers’ use of fire to clear the rainforest.
‘What I’m thinking is that the trigger for the saplings in the rainforest to grow is the opening of a gap in the canopy. The little old trees you see in the understorey are waiting for a look at the sky, waiting for a neighbour tree to fall. They don’t want to be shaded. Being shaded will keep them small.’
Ann was puzzled. ‘When you see rainforest trees in the open, they grow out instead of up, don’t they?’
‘Yes, but that’s where the competition comes in. The trees that are heading for a gap in the canopy have to go up and up. They self-prune by shedding their lateral branches, because they have to make it to their place in the sun. The shaded lower branches die off and fall. What we’ll do is plant the full suite of canopy trees at one-metre centres, and let them fight it out between them. The fastest-growing, the Macarangas and Bleeding Hearts and Polyscias, are also the shortest-lived, so when they fall over, the slow growers will get their chance.’
‘What are you going to do about the cattle?’
‘Everyone says that I need them to keep down the grass, but they get up in the forest and eat the young Native Ginger and all the fallen fruit. I think I’ll have to get rid of them. I’ve tried electric fencing but it seems to malfunction all the time. Too much wet vegetation, I think. We can’t stop the cattle peeing and shitting in the creek either. And they trample the pythons.’
‘Does the bloke who owns the beasts actually pay you for letting them graze here?’
He didn’t.
‘So get rid of them.’
I did. It was a sad day, because there were two little steers that I rather loved. They had been household pets in their former home and knew how to get treats by being cute, but they got loaded onto the truck with all the others and away they went. I asked Garry to pull out all the barbed wire, wherever it was, and take it to the dump. We knocked over the hay shed, which was just a roof on posts sunk in 44-gallon-drums filled with concrete, and pulled down the dairy. The young Red Cedar that had been growing through the dairy roof threw up its arms to the sky. Borer had got into part of it, but we carefully cut the diseased part away and the tree never looked back. Someone collected the portable muster yard with its bails and rails.
‘You realise that you’re steadily reducing the value of this real estate,’ said Ann.
‘Mm. David thinks that revegetating land like this will one day be understood to enhance its value, but I’ll be long dead by that time, supposing such a time ever comes.’
Almost without noticing I had taken over the project. David had been meant to direct it, but progress was too slow. It was all very well for me to draw up lists of tree species that I would plant; I had to find someone to grow them for me first. The Cave Creek rainforest trees were not the kind of thing you’d find in every neighbourhood garden centre. I found Charlie Booth of Bushnuts, who could already supply about half the species I needed, and was happy to collect seed at CCRRS and grow more. And so in May 2003 the first half-hectare was planted. To keep the weeds down and the soil around the baby trees moist, we had to use a thick layer of mulch. What we used were the fronds stripped off sugarcane at harvest, efficient but costly. Even with the mulch we had to spray herbicide, and twice we removed native vines that were intent on dragging the little trees to their deaths. For a year nothing much happened. The little trees were still only knee-high. I felt my heart sinking. Rebuilding a forest was proving much harder than I anticipated. And much more expensive. The costs per tree were shooting up while the trees remained the same size. Hours after we finished a second planting on the creek bank, a black curtain of rain came roaring over the scarp. Hour after hour, pulse after pulse, it kept coming. The creek rose and rose until the torrent overflowed into a side channel and tore out all the new little trees. When the fresh subsided Simon and I crawled through the detritus dumped by the creek, combing through it with our fingers to find the uprooted seedlings and replant them.
I went back to England with a heavy heart.
At a formal dinner at my college a woman sitting at my table asked me about the rainforest. Unwisely perhaps I began to tell her. The man on her right interrupted.
‘Surely all you need to do is to lock up the forest and let it restore itself. What you’re doing is just a very expensive version of gardening. If the rainforest can survive it will. If it can’t, nothing you do will make any difference.’
I should have saved my breath, and let him score his point, but I couldn’t. ‘You could be right, but I don’t think so. The forest can reclaim its own only if certain obstacles are removed. When old-growth forest is logged, apart from the devastation of trees surrounding the target tree, Red Cedar or whatever, the vines go berserk. One of the most reliable indicators of logging in the past is the proliferation of Kangaroo Vine which climbs right into the canopy and literally suffocates the canopy trees. Lawyer Vine too is an indicator of disturbance; when plants like these fill up gaps in the forest, it turns to scrub. Seedling trees and saplings can’t cope with the sheer weight of the rampant vines. Add to that the fact that the biggest forest emergents are the slowest-growing, there’s no way that the forest can rebuild itself without assistance.
‘Then there are the pioneer species that volunteer to fill gaps in the forest. The idea that they aid the reconstruction of the forest community is just wrong, I’m afraid. No wild species is altruistic. All the forest volunteers are in it for their own species. The proteoid roots of Silky Oak, Grevillea robusta, excrete chemicals that bacteria turn into alumina. Eucalypts too tend to establish monocultures because the chemicals in their leaf litter inhibit the germination of other species. In Numinbah whole hillsides which should be supporting rainforest have been taken over by Brush Box. Brush Box, Lophostemon confertus, is myrtaceous, and like eucalypts in other ways too. It’s supposed to be fire-retardant, a concept that makes no sense to me. I think it means that it burns more slowly than eucalypts, which surround themselves with highly inflammable vapour and literally burst into flame. Rainforest is fire-sensitive. Elsewhere in Numinbah Valley you can see rainforest saplings pushing up under regrowth eucalypts, Sydney Blue Gums and Flooded Gums. When the eucalypts catch fire, which they do every two or three years, the rainforest saplings are all killed.
‘Then there are other pioneers, Kurrajongs, Polyscias, Bleeding Hearts, Macarangas, all quite capable of filling up spaces that are then not available to rainforest species. A worse problem is grass. When the land was originally cleared, the forest was clear-felled and burnt. The pasture grasses that were then sown either conked out or became rampant. Small trees can’t push against Kikuyu, which is the dominant grass in the Numinbah Valley. It spreads incredibly rapidly, by stolons and by seed, and builds up great mats within months.
‘Then you have to deal with the exotic trees that the farmers planted, of which the worst by far is Camphor Laurel. Not to mention the feral fruit trees that are all that remain of the local fruit-growing industry.’
The gentleman opposite had let me run on quite long enough.
‘If the forest can’t defend itself against these invaders there’s no point in trying to restore it, surely.’
I have never trusted people who use the word ‘surely’ in argument and answered with more certainty than I felt. ‘Oh, but there is. If we can rebuild the original plant community, it will be strong enough to fight off the competition.’
‘And how do you propose to do that?’
‘By gathering seed from the old-growth forest, propagating it, and planting it out on cleared land, and keeping the baby forest weed-free until it can fend for itself.’
The gentleman turned away, bored with the subject. The fatty lump of farmed salmon in front of me was cold. The waiter was waiting to take my plate, and the other diners were waiting for their pudding. As I toyed with my Tarte au Citron, I thought about the weeds that choke regrowth forest. Every year brings a new one, each worse than the last. I thought of Madeira Vine with leaves and fruit so heavy that it will reduce a mature rainforest tree to a pole, and grow away across the canopy dropping aerial tubers. I thought of Balloon Vine, and Moth Vine, and Morning Glory, and Glycine, and White Passionfruit, and Siratro and now, worst of all, Kudzu. All of them flourish in the subtropical rainforest. I thought of the Wandering Jew (Tradescantia fluminensis) that is blanketing the native groundcovers. We could extirpate them all, with maximum effort and expense. Was I mad to think it would be worth it?
As we were taking port in the senior common room, the woman who had raised the subject touched my arm. ‘I’d like to help with the work if I can. Can I make a donation?’
A donation. I thought I couldn’t accept a donation. The woman smiled. ‘You need to set up a charity and give your forest to the charity. Then we can all help.’
The thought of giving up the forest made my heart hurt, but then I would have to give it up one day, wouldn’t I? I was going to die, wasn’t I? I put the idea in the too-hard basket, to be dealt with later.
When I next drove through the gate, our first planting was five months older and three metres taller. As I let the car roll slowly down the track, I found myself looking into brand-new forest, with a canopy, low to be sure, but a canopy that cast shade. I pulled up, hopped out of the car and walked under the young trees. The sunlight was no more than an occasional coin-dot on the soil which was already disappearing under mats of Commelina and Oplismenus. I walked to where Brush-turkeys had scraped all the expensive mulch into a huge new mound inside which their eggs were already incubating. All my anxiety ebbed out of memory. How could I have thought that I was in this by myself? I had helpers, thousands, no, millions of them, as well as five humans. Cave Creek wasn’t just another anthropogenic biome after all. We were all working together, bacteria, fungi, invertebrates, reptiles, amphibians, birds and trees, plus the odd human. As I walked back to the car an Eastern Water Dragon ran ahead of me, upright on its back legs, its tail held high. Into my head came God’s reassurance to Julian of Norwich. ‘All shall be well,’ I thought, ‘and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.’