The hero of this story is a tree or, rather, a tree species. Though it is called White Beech, it is neither white nor a beech. The beech family, which includes beeches, oaks and chestnuts, is unrepresented in Australia, unless you count the genus Nothofagus, the Southern Beech. The three Australian species of Southern Beech are now thought to belong to a family of their own, the Nothofagaceae. Antarctic Beeches, some of which were alive when Christ was born, stand on the misty heights of the Lamington Plateau to the west of Cave Creek, and on the heights of Springbrook to the north-east, but there is none in our wet nook amid the headwaters of the Nerang River. The White Beech of this story is not related in any way to beeches of any kind.
The settlers who turned up in southern Queensland in the second half of the nineteenth century were confronted by a vast array of tree species that were not related even distantly to the trees they had grown up with. Many were bigger than any trees they had ever seen. They knew Red Cedar by reputation, because ever since the beginning of white settlement generations of loggers all along the coast of New South Wales had been hard at work felling it and shipping it away. Many books have been written about Red Cedar. No book has ever celebrated the even more charismatic species known to the few who have ever heard of it as White Beech. White Beech is endemic to a far smaller and less continuous range than Red Cedar, from the Illawarra south of Sydney to Proserpine on the Queensland central coast. Rarer, and easier to work than Red Cedar, it was the first of the subtropical rainforest tree species to be logged out. It is estimated that in the Illawarra, scattered over thirty disjunct sites, fewer than a hundred White Beeches can now be found (Bofeldt).
The local Aboriginal name for White Beech is ‘binna burra’, spelt by whitefellas in the usual variety of ways (Gresty, 70). Another very different Aboriginal name for the species is ‘cullonen’, though where it is called that and by whom I could not say. Binna Burra, a well-known tourist centre on the edge of the Lamington Plateau, was named for the White Beech, and refers to itself as the place ‘where the beech tree grows’. The neighbouring town of Beechmont is thought by many of the people who visit it and even some who write about it, to have been named for the Antarctic Beech, when in fact it was originally dubbed Beech Mountain because of the number of White Beeches to be found there. There are very few growing there now.
On 1 February 2008 the Beechmont Landcare Group announced that ‘from now until April 2008, Beechmont Landcare members will be collecting White Beech seeds. These will then be propagated and grown at Council’s Nursery at Beaudesert. When ready, expected to be in late 2009, the plants will be distributed by Beechmont Landcare to local residents at the Beechmont markets.’ A district councillor declared that she had ‘no doubt that the community will put the beech back into Beechmont’. But the rainforest was in no hurry. The beeches did not fruit that year. The organisers were obliged to report that: ‘Rains have stimulated vegetative growth instead of flowers from mature trees, interrupting plans for seed collection this year. However it’s hoped that seeds will be available for propagation next summer.’ The summer of 2008–9 proved to be even wetter.
Summer in subtropical rainforest is usually a rainy season and bumper crops of White Beech fruit the exception rather than the rule. Some rainforest species fruit only once every five years or so. Others will flower profusely on only one or two branches. As Margaret Lowman, who pioneered canopy science, reported in 1999:
After thirty-five years of annual surveys on 4 hectares of rain forests in Australia, the seedling teams have found a large variability in the patterns of seed rain, seedling germination and growth of tropical trees. Mast seeding, annual seed production, and intermittent seed rain triggered by environmental conditions such as seasonal rains or high light were all successful patterns utilized by neighbouring species. Some adult trees never flowered or fruited during the thirty-five years of observations.
Among these last Lowman listed the Rose Marara, Pseudoweinmannia lachnocarpa. ‘We hypothesized that these species typically flowered infrequently – perhaps every fifty years or more – or that subtle climatic changes had led to their sterility. Only patient observations will yield these secrets of the great forest floor lottery’ (Lowman, 102). At Cave Creek in August, the last month of the Australian winter, Rose Mararas can be seen in cloudy white bloom up and down the forest slopes. The fruit ripens slowly and doesn’t begin to drift to earth till steamy February. It is not every year that the spent blossom ripens to shed clouds of fine seeds clad in brown fluff, that float down through the forest to settle on every moss-covered rock and drift into every crevice. We collect the seed by the bucketful and dump it in trays. Stout little seedlings appear in due course. It may be that the trees that were the subject of the study in which Lowman was involved were growing outside their range, and therefore lacked the stimulus to flower, which might indeed be the consequence of accelerated climate change. Lowman was working with the famed Joseph H. Connell, distinguished professor of zoology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1963 Connell set up a long-term observation in which transects were marked across two Australian rainforest plots; along these every tree, sapling or seedling had to be identified, counted, marked and mapped, to document how succession actually worked. Over the years a procession of distinguished American biologists has visited Australia to work on the Connell project. If any of them had wandered further afield than their two plots, or even consulted the odd Australian dendrologist, other possibilities might have occurred to them.
The name White Beech could refer to any one of half-a-dozen subtropical tree species (Munir). It is used for any of five Australian tree species, Gmelina leichhardtii, G. dalrympleana, G. fasciculiflora, G. schlechteri and one member of a totally different genus, Elaeocarpus kirtonii. G. fasciculiflora is native to Cairns and the Atherton Tableland, and G. dalrympleana (sometimes called G. macrophylla), with leaves twenty-five centimetres long and reddish-pink fruits, grows in northern Australia and Papua New Guinea, where G. schlechteri is also to be found. Further north still, in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, the name White Beech is given to yet another Gmelina, G. moluccana. Far away in the rainforest of Martinique Symplocos martinicensis is also called White Beech. Seven of the thirty-five species in the genus Gmelina are native to China, the rest to other parts of Asia, New Guinea and Australia.
The White Beech this book is named after is Gmelina leichhardtii. This is a stupendous tree, growing to forty metres in height, with a straight cylindrical trunk, only slightly flanged at the base, just asking to be cut down, slabbed up and shipped off, which is what had already happened to most White Beeches by the beginning of the twentieth century. To my anglophone sensibility the misleading imprecision of the name ‘White Beech’ conveys something of the mystery that veils my whole crackbrained enterprise, something of the riddle of the rainforest.
Forests are not just bunches of trees. Supposing you plant a few hundred trees on an acre of ground, for a few years they will grow on side by side like a plantation, until gradually the faster-growing trees will shade the others out. Some of the outstripped trees will die, others will accept life in the understorey, and still more will wait for a neighbouring tree to fall. Meanwhile the trees that are pushing towards the sky will sacrifice their lateral branches, as the canopy lifts further and further off the ground. Trees that top out over the others will spread their canopies, snaring more and more of the light. On the forest floor a galaxy of shade-loving organisms will begin to appear – mosses, fungi, groundcovers, ferns. With them will come hundreds of invertebrate species. Eventually the forest achieves equilibrium, but this is not static. The key to the forest’s survival is competition. Trees growing in forest communities behave differently from trees of the same species growing in the open. Even as the forest trees vie with each other for light, they are protected from extreme weather, from wind and frost and parching sun; often they are bound together by vines. The more time you spend in a forest the more aware you become that it is an organism intent upon its own survival.
Chief members of the forest community are the trees that together create the shelter, the mild temperatures and the humidity upon which the other plant and animal life depends. In most of the subtropical rainforest of eastern Australia, sixty or so species of trees support a couple of hundred other plant species. In the Cave Creek forest, which is both riparian and montane, there are more than twice as many tree species as the norm. Some of the vines that knit the trees together can grow to such massive size that they drag their supporters to the ground. Looping along the slopes at Cave Creek you can find the great writhing trunks of woody vines that have outlived several generations of rainforest trees. Conversely many mature trees have barley-sugar trunks, showing where a now-vanished vine once constricted them. The trees being the underpinning, the armature of the forest, it stands to reason that anyone thinking of rebuilding a forest would choose to begin by planting them. This is not the only way however, and there are good reasons for clearing weeds and leaving the forest to regenerate spontaneously. I chose to take the planting option.
Many people who plant trees live to rue the day, as their chosen tree grows much bigger than they expected, cracking drains, ripping up pavements, filling guttering with shed leaves and twiggery. Suburban gardens are full of trees that have outgrown the available space, looming dangerously over houses, cars and passers-by. My mother took steps to eliminate any tree that she suspected of shading the house, regardless of whether it grew on her own ground or somebody else’s. Any eucalypt that dared to shed a single sheet of bark onto our lawn was doomed. My mother’s intolerance of trees may have been exacerbated by my father’s habit of warbling Joyce Kilmer’s famous but fatuous poem when he was in the shower. This, in the setting by Oscar Rasbach, had been a great hit for Paul Robeson in the year I was born.
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
The poem is arrant nonsense, with which my mother had as little patience as I. Trees don’t have mouths or hair or bosoms, don’t have to be sexualised in order to be praised and shouldn’t be encumbered with gender. You have to wonder whether Kilmer had ever really looked at a tree. What you get to understand when you live with trees is that they are not to be trifled with. The lords of the forest are mysterious and frightening, utterly beyond caring about us and our petty concerns, as they live on through the centuries into millennia. The longest-lived and biggest creatures on Earth are not whales but trees. They are emblems of the interrelatedness of all Earthlings, typified in the notion of the Tree of Life. Evolution itself is tree-shaped, as are the dendrites, the tiny structures that carry electrostimulation to all the cells in our bodies.
When it comes to defining a tree or even a tree shape, language fails. The dictionary can do no better than to tell us that a tree is a perennial plant with a self-supporting woody stem that usually develops woody branches at some height off the ground. The essence of treehood would appear to be this very branchingness; figuratively at least a tree is any structure that can branch, as in ‘family tree’. Trees are everywhere, whether in the Usenet hierarchy of the Internet or the binary search tree of computer science, or the von Neumann hierarchy of sets in mathematics. Botanically speaking, the tiny bonsai in its earthenware tray and the ninety-metre-high California Redwood are both trees. The tree fern however is not a tree but a fern, the banana is not a tree but a herb, and the palm is not a tree either, because it lacks some other attributes of treehood, having no cambial layers, and hence no continuous production of bark and wood.
There is more to a tree than meets the eye. Its woody trunk, or xylem, has an inner core called heartwood, within an outer layer called sapwood, which transports water from the root to all parts of the tree. As the tree ages the sapwood gradually becomes heartwood. The xylem is encased within a sleeve of cambium that transports its nutrients, which is in turn encased in the phloem, which carries the sugars made by the leaves during photosynthesis, and the whole is wrapped in a protective layer of bark. Most of the cells that make up wood are dead; they serve as the support for a complex system of vessels. When the leaves exhale moisture through their pores, the drying cells exert pressure on the leaf vein to make it suck up more water from the roots.
The forest tree is a powerhouse, converting light, gas and moisture to nutrients, not only for itself but for a whole population that lives on and by it. Some of these dependants are spectacular, like the epiphytic ferns and orchids, and the mistletoes; others are subtle, like the mites that live in the water-filled cavities in the bark, and the mycorrhizas that convey and convert nutrients from the tree for the ground-dwelling plants. The tree is not only important in itself, it is also important as a contributor to the canopy, which governs the microclimate that makes possible the massive biodiversity of the forest. It is now thought that one way Australia’s tree frogs escape chytrid fungus disease is by taking to the canopy; if there is no canopy, there is no escape. We now know that canopies are universal; all kinds of organisms from seaweeds and corals and mosses to the loftiest trees tend to form canopies if they can. Canopy science is only fifteen years old and has still to formulate its basic questions, let alone answer them, but we are beginning to understand that canopies are an optimum form of vegetation (Nadkarni et al., 3–20).
Most Australians have never heard of White Beech but, for thirty years or so when it was enthusiastically promoted as an export timber, White Beech was internationally famous. In the Paris Exhibition of 1855 it was exhibited as No. 193. In the Great Exhibition in London in 1862 it was exhibited as No. 30 among the Queensland woods and as Nos 68 and 171 among the New South Wales woods. When I was little I was very proud of a ruler my father gave me. It was inlaid with specimens of Australian timber in a kind of sampler that was developed in association with timber-trade promotions. Nowadays you will find one in every local museum, each with a sample of White Beech.
Because White Beech timber was ‘durable, easily worked and non-shrinking’, the early timber-getters sold their Red Cedar and kept the White Beech for themselves. The first dwellings, barns, stables, schools and churches in the Numinbah Valley were built of White Beech because, as an enthusiast wrote to The Queenslander (6 November 1875, 4S), its ‘most useful wood . . . never shrinks in drying, and is unequalled for ships’ decks and verandah floors, where it sits close, and like one homogeneous marble slab, under the foot’. The schoolhouse that opened at Nerang in 1876 was built by William Duncan from pit-sawn White Beech (Lentz, 33). Like all the other buildings made of White Beech in those early years, the schoolhouse seems to have disappeared.
In 1883 local man Carl Lentz visited Beechmont: he recalls in his typescript ‘Memoirs and Some History’, compiled at the end of his long life, that: ‘There was a small clearing and a new pitsawn weatherboard house on it of beech timber, which is the easiest to cut out and the best to last. Besides, white ants won’t touch it’(15). The Queensland Department of Primary Industry and Fisheries would disagree; its website baldly states that White Beech is not termite-resistant. Lentz’s father probably knew better: ‘When Dad was preparing to start dairy farming the sawn timber needed for the milking shed was all pitsawn . . . These logs were cut from some of those beech trees that gave the mountain its name’(71). People who had the choice continued to use White Beech for as long as they could find it. In the mid-1890s Duncan McKenzie, the first permanent settler on Beechmont, built his first farmhouse from pit-sawn tongue-and-groove joined beech boards.
Despite its high value much of the White Beech that was felled was left to rot, sometimes because there was no way of getting the bullock teams within reach of the fallen timber, but as often because the timber-getters couldn’t afford the cost of transporting it. Only the biggest butt-logs were worth enough to cover the cost of cartage; the rest was wasted. By 1911, ‘Disturbing stories were coming out of the hills . . . There were tales of fallen white beech-trees, monarchs of the plateaux jungles, felled by past bullockies and timber-fellers, and forgotten.’ (Groom, 88–9)
White Beeches cannot grow as fast as the pioneer species that shot up wherever the timber-getters tore down the ancient canopy. They couldn’t have replaced themselves quickly even if they had been given a chance, and they weren’t. The Sydney Morning Herald for 1 November 1912 reported that the supply of White Beech in southern Queensland was exhausted. Within ten years it had become the mythical hero of a forestry legend. In an article on ‘The Timbers of Queensland’ published on 28 November 1925 The Queenslander declared:
Of all the softwood timber-trees known to bushmen and timber-getters, White Beech is generally regarded as the ideal. It is a splendid timber-tree and is recognised as such by the timber trade; but only those who have seen the sound logs and limbs in the scrubs, some of them over 50 years old, lying on wet ground, could form any exact idea of its remarkable durability. It often seems impossible for the timber to decay . . .
It must not be thought that the wanton destruction of the Queensland forests went unnoticed. In 1916 the English Chief Forest Officer visited Queensland and was scandalised to find that: ‘There has been no survey of the forests . . . and though there has been for long a forest office in Brisbane, no forest map of Queensland, I believe, has been produced . . . Forest continued to be given away to anyone who would undertake to destroy it . . .’ In reporting this on 9 December The Queenslander added its own comment: ‘A sharp warning is given that three valuable Queensland timbers are nearly extinct – cedar, silky oak and white beech.’ Cave Creek is one of the very few places where White Beech survived.
In the age of colonial expansion, trees in the new world were valued only as they could be exploited for the benefit of the old. What the adventurers saw as they scanned the rainforests was not whole majestic trees but a massive, soaring colonnade of potentially valuable tree-trunks, which they sampled, probably by slicing off wedges. When they saw the diffuse–porous pattern of the heartwood of the Gmelina species of Asia and Oceania, they called them beeches after the European tree that manifested a similar pattern. It took the botanists to investigate and argue about the tribe to which these tropical and subtropical ‘beech’ trees actually belonged. At first they were thought to be tree verbenas and placed in the Verbenaceae but, since about 1985 when doubts first began to be voiced about the appropriateness of this classification, White Beech and allied species have begun to be placed with the dead nettles in the Lamiaceae. The botanists have not yet reached conclusion; in most reference books you will find White Beech placed in the Verbenaceae still. It will probably take biotechnology to decide the issue once for all, proving by molecular analysis of the plants’ DNA whether the Gmelinas are more closely related to the verbenas or to the dead nettles.
Australian botanists, no matter how deeply concerned they might be about the vulnerable status of so many of Australia’s indigenous tree species, still find themselves under an obligation to assess them in terms of the usefulness or otherwise of their timber. The Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries of the Queensland government is anxious to inform the world that White Beech is the ‘premier carving timber in Queensland’, that it has been used for decking and planking of boats, for ‘furniture, joinery, carvery, turnery, picture frames’, ‘draughtsperson’s implements, templates, pattern making, cask bungs, brush stocks, Venetian blind slats and beehives’. ‘Highly resistant to decay in ground contact or in persistently damp or ill-ventilated situations’, in the early 1900s it was used for building frames, as well as flooring, lining, mouldings, joinery and cladding.
In the 1920s attempts were made to grow White Beech in plantations. A visitor to the state forestry nursery at Imbil on the Mary River reported to the Brisbane Courier on 28 June 1924:
During the last two years attention has been paid to white beech, which takes from six to twelve months to germinate. Propagation in the nursery is easy, but being tremendously deep-rooted there is a difficult task to prevent injury when raising for transferring to the plantations . . . With the use of tube planting the difficulty of damaging the young plants has been overcome. In white beech plantation it is necessary to enclose the areas with wire netting, as wallabies eat the leaves as fast as they grow. Growth is thus checked. For this reason, and the expense involved, growing of white beech has not been extensively undertaken.
Rainforest trees are seldom ‘deep-rooted’, let alone ‘tremendously deep-rooted’. They live by clutching at rocks with fans of spreading buttresses. The mistake that was made at Imbil is to be found in the word ‘plantation’; if the foresters had planted White Beeches as members of a forest community and not as a monoculture, the wallabies that graze all over the forest, sampling rainforest fungi, grasses, ferns and palms as well as trees, would not have eaten all their leaves.
Since the Imbil experiment few if any forestry projects have featured White Beech. Recently Super Forests Plantations called their new 74-hectare plantation which will ‘produce quality saw-logs from a range of quality hardwoods’ ‘White Beech’, but of the more than twenty thousand trees that have been planted there, not one is a White Beech. Just over the southern lip of the Mount Warning caldera, at Rocky Creek Dam, the local county council has used White Beech in plantations of ‘cabinet species’ on abandoned dairy farms within the catchment; out of a total of twelve species White Beech is coming ninth in the growing race, so the proliferating plans for ‘farm forestry’, in which landowners cease clearing and replant native forest for sustainable wood production, are unlikely to feature it. There is now no White Beech timber to be had anywhere. A recently updated statement on the Queensland Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries website tells us simply that ‘Sawn timber of these [Gmelina] species is not readily available. Other species of Gmelina are imported from Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Fiji.’
The old-growth White Beeches at Cave Creek survived either because they were crooked or because they grew in places that the timber-getters couldn’t get into, or couldn’t get the timber out of, whichever. Fewer than a dozen mature White Beeches in sixty hectares is not much, but it will be enough. We have literally thousands of Red Cedars in all phases of growth from the oldest to the youngest, but the tree that for me typifies the specialness of Cave Creek as a Gondwanan refugium is White Beech.
Here’s the how-and-why.
I hadn’t been responsible for the forest long, when I paused on my pre-breakfast walk to watch Golden Whistlers popping in and out of an immense pyramid of Lantana on the creek edge. As the whistlers skimmed about me, I turned my binoculars upward till there was nothing to see but sky. Such a vast pyramid of Lantana had to be sprawling over a seriously big tree, but what? Most of the leaves that I could pick out among the canes arching out of the top of the towering heap were still Lantana, pale-stemmed, matt, bright green, cordate. Others, a very few, were different, bigger, denser, with a stout network of leaf veins visible against the light. I poked around on the ground under the Lantana canes and found a thick yellowing leaf, still greenish on one side, buff-gold and slightly felted on the other. I tested it against the faraway shape I could see outlined against the light. It matched. I hunted about for more but found none. I put the single leaf in my trouser pocket and took it back to the house.
An hour later, when the white flare of the sun had spilled over the scarp and the air was full of sizzling radiance, I betook me to the shade of the verandah for a homemade caffe latte and a bit of botanising with the field guide we call the Red Book (Harden, McDonald and Williams). My sister Jane, who was on holidays and hence not expected to go marching off at the first light of dawn, was having a late breakfast. Jane is a proper botanist and my willing but demanding preceptor in matters botanical.
‘So?’ she asked, mopping up the last of her stewed tomatoes with her last bit of toast.
‘It’s a leaf,’ I said.
‘Was that all you could get?’
‘The tree’s enormous, a hundred feet high or so, but it’s completely covered by Lantana.’
(If you look up White Beech on the net, you may come across an advertisement that assures you that it is ‘a fast growing, deciduous, small to medium tree’ that will grow no more than eight to ten metres in your garden. A White Beech recorded at Terania Creek, New South Wales, came in at 59 metres tall and 2.65 metres round.)
My sister was unimpressed by my lack of enterprise. I went on, ‘I couldn’t even see the branches, let alone climb them.’
‘As if,’ said Jane, who is six years younger and a good deal fitter than I. ‘Describe what you’ve got then.’
‘Simple. Well, I think it’s simple. It doesn’t look like a leaflet. Largish.’ Even in its slightly withered state the leaf was eight centimetres long, with a stalk more than two centimetres long. ‘Stout, er, kind of tough.’
‘What’s the word for kind of tough?’
‘Coriaceous?’
‘Go on. Shape?’
‘Egg-shaped, I mean, ovate or obovate. With a slight point. Hairless, or glabrous, if you’d rather, on the upper side, softly felted on the under.’
‘Felted?’
‘Tomentose.’
‘What about the base of the leaf?’
I was stumped. Jane took the leaf. ‘See how it doesn’t narrow into the petiole? That structure’s probably diagnostic. It’s certainly not common.’
I believed her, although to me it seemed like the quintessential leaf, leaf-coloured, leaf-shaped, leaf-ish. Jane was warming to her task.
‘You’ve already got a stack of identifying characteristics, even in this one leaf. You should be able to key the whole tree out just from that. Palaeobotanists often have to work with less. What you don’t know is leaf arrangement; you don’t know if it’s opposite or alternate, but you do know that it’s not compound. This leaf is as simple as they come.’
‘It looks verbenaceous,’ I said.
‘Don’t speculate. Investigate,’ said Jane sternly, and got up to clear away. While she washed the dishes, I struggled with the key.
‘It begins with leaf arrangement,’ I whinged. ‘I can’t key it out if I don’t know that.’
‘What about the edge of the leaf? Is it toothed or frilly or lobed?’
‘No. It’s, um, straight.’
‘No, it’s not. It’s curved. We describe a leaf that has an uninterrupted margin as what?’
‘Oh, entire.’
‘What else have I taught you to look for?’
I knew that one. ‘Oil dots.’
‘So get the glass and look for them.’
I squinted through the loupe looking for translucent dots like a jeweller looking for flaws in a diamond. ‘No oil dots, as far as I can see.’
‘What about the venation? What can you tell me about that?’
That was interesting. The veins were not arranged symmetrically. ‘The veins seem sort of haphazard, and, they’re incised on the upper surface and really prominent on the underside.’
Jane took the leaf from me.
‘Impressed. Not incised, impressed.’
I ploughed through the Red Book until I was only one page from the end. ‘What about this?’ I read out,
Leaves 8 to 18 centimetres long, ovate or broad-ovate, bluntly pointed or acute, rather thick and tough, the main veins impressed above, strongly raised and prominent below . . . leaf-under surfaces, softly and densely hairy with fawn hairs—
‘Use your glass again.’
‘It’s just like thick blond fur! So this must be White Beech.’
‘Not must exactly.’ Jane was still looking at the leaf. ‘More may. That petiole’s interesting. It’s quite stout, and channelled on the upper surface.’
The Red Book didn’t say anything about the leafstalks. ‘Can I work backwards now? Can I look up White Beech in Floyd?’ Alex Floyd is the daddy of everyone who works on our rainforest. Although his Rainforest Trees of Mainland South-eastern Australia was published more than twenty-five years ago it remains by far our most useful reference book; for all those years the publishers, the New South Wales Forestry Commission, remained deaf to all pleas for a new issue. The CCRRS copy had seen such hard service that its boards had fallen off and were now held on by a sticky mess of yellowing sellotape. I had orders in with every specialist bookshop in the world for another copy but nothing was forthcoming. A university press advertised it; we sent off an order only to receive the entirely unnecessary information that the book was out of print. At some point two heroes of the rainforest, Nan and Hugh Nicholson, decided that they would take the matter in hand. They had the original publication electronically scanned, and carefully edited every entry. Then they formed themselves into Terania Rainforest Publishing and published the revised edition in 2008, which was long after the day I sat on the verandah puzzling over my single White Beech leaf.
‘Here we go,
Leaf stalks 15–37mm long, somewhat thick, densely hairy . . . lateral veins eight to ten, straight and forking toward the margin, at 45º to the midrib. (Floyd, 1989, 173)
‘What family’s it in?’
‘The Verbenaceae.’
‘So you guessed right. What made you say you thought it was verbenaceous?’
‘The leaf shape, for one. And its feltedness.’ Jane was to have the last laugh after all, because White Beech is not now in the Verbenaceae.
If my tree was a White Beech, it would bear flowers ‘in large panicles at the end of the branchlets’, followed by blue fruit. It would be those flowers that would remove the White Beech from the company of the verbenaceous, because they are white velvet versions of dead nettle flowers, with petals fused into a tubular bell with a protuberant lower lip marked with ‘two yellow flight-path bars’ and four stamens, ‘a long and a short pair overarching the flight paths’.
I couldn’t bear the thought of a tree so sumptuous smothered under the heap of rampant Lantana. The CCRRS workforce was supposed to be proceeding in an orderly fashion, clearing zones in sequence, but this was a case for ETR, emergency tree rescue, our first but by no means our last. Nothing is more rewarding than to spy an ancient rainforest aristocrat struggling under a blanket of suffocating Lantana or Kangaroo Vine, and gently to remove its load. It can’t be done quickly; to rip out canes or vines is to rip the tree. Instead we hack our way in under the marauder, scraping and poisoning as we go until all its connections with the ground are severed. The stock and roots are then painted with neat glyphosate stained turquoise blue with a vegetable dye.
If we’d dragged the Lantana canes out of the old White Beech hundreds of epiphytes, orchids, ferns and mosses would have come out with them. Instead we waited for the canes to die, to become light and brittle and finally to break and fall. The first bearded branches to emerge from the twiggy mess of dead Lantana seemed half-rotten themselves. I watched them anxiously week by week until they began to push out furry new leaves of a thick pastel green unusual in the rainforest. Before the leaves had finished coming in, the great old tree sent up a silent shout of victory and gushed torrents of blossom, china-white cymes that turned violet-blue as they aged. The struggle to get a sight of them involved a good deal of rock-scrambling and tree-climbing and subsequent tick infestation, but the sight of the tree in its glory was well worth it. Amongst the blossoms in the canopy, Sulphur-crested Cockatoos eyed us quizzically, never pausing as they nipped off the big dead nettle flowers at the neck and threw them to the forest floor, while around them a billion insects plundered the pollen and the nectar, laying their eggs in the flower hearts as they went.
After the torrent of blossom came loads of fruit, flattened spherical drupes of the same china-white and violet-blue as the flowers. We waited till the fruit began to rain down, turning the forest floor fluorescent lavender-blue. As soon as the sun slid behind the edge of the Lamington Plateau, and only minutes ahead of the hordes of small nocturnal herbivores who would grab the fruit and hide it away for future consumption, we would gather up all we could find, mindful of Floyd’s grim account of propagating White Beech.
Germination is very slow, such as 37% after five months. Percussion and shell removal is either not feasible or beneficial. Flesh should be removed and seed soaked for 2 months, then dried in the sun for one day, followed by further soaking before sowing. (1989, 173)
Half the fruit I gave away to a professional grower. The rest I prepared myself. Nothing about soaking seed for two months made sense to me. As my eyes had become attuned to the green of the White Beeches in the canopy I knew that the species did not specially favour creek sides. Immersion of the seeds for two months sounded too much like drowning, but I guessed they did need an alternation of very wet and quite dry. Most growers of rainforest species soak the freshly gathered fruits overnight to drown the larvae that will otherwise hatch in almost every one and eat the seed kernel before it can germinate. The activities of the larvae clearly reduce the fertility outcome for the tree, but in the crowded rainforest environment long-lived trees like the White Beech are in no immediate need of hordes of descendants. Seedlings that germinate from the fruit might have to wait years, even generations, before a gap will open in the canopy and trigger their upward surge. Most of the extravagant crop of the White Beech was destined to be used by the other denizens of the forest, and they included me. My self-appointed task was temporarily to maximise the White Beech’s reproductive potential so that it could reoccupy its old niche in the forest. Whether this is a realistic aim or a useful objective was by no means clear to me, but I felt in my bones that I had no choice. Someone, something else was calling the shots.
After the fruit had soaked for a full twenty-four hours, I took on the toil of peeling off the drupe, which was more woody than fleshy, to lay bare the squat round nut with its inset lid. Within minutes my hands were thickly coated in an odd-smelling brownish exudate, that so stuck my fingers together that I could hardly wield my knife. I struggled on for hour after hour as my fingers got pulpy from repeated immersion and stiffened under the relentless build-up of the exudate, which I had regularly to peel off my fingers with the knife blade. As I got progressively clumsier the knife found more opportunities to slip off the small wet nut and bury its short blade in my palm. I had no way of knowing, as the uncomfortable hours crept by, whether what I was doing was for the best, or even necessary. I let the seeds dry off, but not in the sun, tucked them into a special compost in an old broccoli box scavenged from the supermarket, wetted them through, and put over them a car-window pane that I had found lying under the old farmhouse. For six months the box remained forgotten on a shelf, among old woolsacks, broken furniture and rusting machine parts. It was one of my mad ideas. No one else was interested, and anyway, it would never work.
When I came back from England six months later, I made sure that my box was one of those placed in our makeshift propagation unit, where it would be watered automatically twice a day. A month went by. I didn’t even ask about my box because I was so sure that the effort had been wasted. Now and then I’d check to see that the lads hadn’t thrown it out or planted something else in the box. I was fussing over Garry’s bull terrier bitch one morning when Garry stuck his head out of the door of the propagation unit and said, ‘Sump’m here you should see.’
At first I didn’t recognise the five plantlings that stood stiff and erect in the loose planting medium, five furry stems each bearing a single pair of leaves, not entire like the leaves of the adult parent, but with five teeth on each margin. (This phenomenon of dissimilarity between juveniles and adults is not uncommon among the primitive Australian flora.) Though the first five leaf pairs of the baby beeches were different in shape from those of the parent tree, they were the same unmistakeable kitchen-cabinet green. Every day more baby beech trees popped up until we had 150 of them standing proudly side-by-side in their old polystyrene box. I don’t know how people feel when they win the lottery, but I’ll bet they’re no happier than I was then.
We could have grown more, but White Beech is not dominant in our forest. Rightly or wrongly (and there is disagreement on the point) we are concerned to keep our own races pure, at least until we know more about the exact identities of our species, subspecies and varieties, and the extent of their variability. In none of the books could I find any account of the asymmetric venation of our leaves, which can make them look quite lopsided. I know now that the leaves are opposite, but the leaf veins are mostly subalternate, and some actually fork where they leave the midrib. I don’t know if the oddity of the leaves on the CCRRS trees puts them in a different variety or subspecies, but I do know that we won’t mix them up with White Beeches from further away, not yet anyway. The issue is more important than it might seem. Speciation is an ongoing process; the Cave Creek Gmelinas with their lopsided leaves may be in the process of turning into a distinct subspecies or even a species, in which case we should let nature take its course rather than accidentally or deliberately causing our clones to revert to an earlier type.
Botany is an inexact science. What is more, frequent name changes make Australian plant taxonomy rather more challenging than it needs to be, especially as the ill-tempered factionalism that characterises all academic disciplines leads some botanists to leap on the new names as soon as they appear while others steadfastly refuse to use them. Gmelina leichhardtii has been that for a good while now; what is not clear is just who has accepted that the genus is in the Lamiaceae, or why. The taxonomic problems presented by the genus Gmelina and allied genera are currently being investigated by the Lamiaceae Team of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. As long as they think White Beeches are lamiaceous that’s good enough for me.
When Victorian government botanist Ferdinand Mueller came to identify the specimen of White Beech that had been collected by Ludwig Leichhardt at Myall Creek on 20 November 1843, he decided that it was in the related genus Vitex, and gave it the species name leichhardtii (Fragmenta, 3:58). At Kew George Bentham had the advantage of being able to compare the specimen he was sent with other members of both genera, Vitex and Gmelina so, when the name was published in Volume 66 of his Flora Australiensis, it was silently corrected to Gmelina leichhardtii, the specific name being allowed to stand. Mueller greatly admired Leichhardt, which is about the only thing I am happy to have in common with him. Other observers have expressed less favourable opinions (Chisholm, passim). Because Leichhardt’s way of being a naturalist (as distinct from his way of conducting expeditions) seems to me the right way, I shall impose upon your patience by telling you more than you probably want to know about him.
Ludwig Leichhardt was born in Trebatsch, Prussia in 1813, sixth of the eight children of the Royal Peat Inspector. He was accepted by the universities of both Berlin and Göttingen to study philology, but in November 1833 he met a young Englishman called John Nicholson who turned him on to natural science. When Nicholson’s younger brother William came to Germany in 1835, he persuaded Leichhardt to change his field of academic study at the University of Berlin to natural science. As Leichhardt’s family did not have the funds to support him, he had been living in direst poverty. William Nicholson offered not only to share his accommodation with Leichhardt, but also to pay his tuition fees and other expenses. When Nicholson returned to England he invited Leichhardt to join him there so that they could collaborate in studying natural science, in preparation for a career as explorers of Australia. The two travelled and studied together in France, Italy and Switzerland. They were together in Clermont-Ferrand when, on 24 September 1840, Nicholson announced that he no longer intended to follow a career as a naturalist in Australia but would return to England and practise as a physician. Nicholson paid for Leichhardt’s passage to Australia, and his clothing and equipment, and gave him £200 in cash.
Leichhardt arrived in Port Jackson on Valentine’s Day, 1842. For six months he looked for employment in Sydney; then he set off alone on an expedition from Newcastle along the Hunter and across the Liverpool Range to New England, collecting and annotating as he went. After resting a while at Lindesay Station he travelled to Wide Bay and it was on this part of his journey that he collected the first specimen of White Beech at Myall Creek. He was then invited by Thomas Archer to accompany him to his brothers’ property at Durundur on the Stanley River and use it as the base for his explorations of the district. Leichhardt remained at Durundur for seven months, and then set off back to Sydney. On the way he stopped at Cecil Station on the Darling Downs where preliminary plans were laid for his next, far more ambitious enterprise.
An overland expedition from Sydney to Port Essington had been recommended by the Legislative Council in the hope that it would open a lucrative trade route between south-east Asia, India and the colony. The surveyor-general Sir Thomas Mitchell had agreed to lead the expedition but Governor Sir George Gipps refused to authorise ‘an expedition of so hazardous and expensive a nature’ without support from the British government. When Leichhardt offered to lead an expedition of volunteers, newspaper editors decided to assist him in raising a private subscription. The route chosen led from the Darling Downs to Port Essington on the shores of the Arafura Sea, a total of 4,800 kilometres. The ten men involved, with their 17 horses, 16 bullocks, 550 kilos of flour, 90 kilos of sugar, 40 kilos of tea and 10 kilos of gelatine, left Jimbour on 1 October 1844.
They travelled north along the Burdekin, the Lynd and the Mitchell rivers to the shore of the Gulf of Carpentaria, which they followed to the mouth of the Roper River before turning inland, skirting Arnhem Land to the east. Though Leichhardt had few bush skills, and was happier rambling and botanising than working out logistics, it took them less than fifteen months. They reached Port Essington on 17 December 1845. On the way two men had left the expedition and John Gilbert, himself an expert bushman and naturalist, had been killed by Aborigines. No one had suffered from the scurvy that had crippled Sturt’s expedition inland from Adelaide, because of Leichhardt’s awareness of the nutritional value of the native herbage he saw around him. The team returned by sea to Sydney where Leichhardt was greeted as a hero.
Leichhardt lost no time in raising money for a second expedition and this time the government came on board. The plan was to cross the continent from east to west. The team left in December 1846, but managed to cover only 800 kilometres before flooding, malaria and starvation forced them back. Leichhardt then set off on his own to explore the country around the Condamine River.
In his next attempt to cross the continent from east to west, Leichhardt was determined to travel light. He added to the team of seven Europeans two Aborigines, who would help them to live off the land they were travelling through. As they had no more than one spare horse for each man, it is hard to see how they could have completed a journey of more than four thousand kilometres. The small party left Cogoon Station, on the northern edge of the Darling Downs, on 3 April 1848 and was never heard of again. Since then nine expeditions have been organised in attempts to trace the party but none has been successful.
‘Listen to this!’ I said to my mate Ann, who was reading Rex Stout as she sunned her knees on the verandah. ‘This is Leichhardt’s first encounter with Gondwanan rainforest – it’s in a letter to a fellow naturalist:
And oh that you could have been with me in these brushes. Here grows the nettle tree about 80 and 90 feet high with its large leaves, and the noble red cedar (what is its scientific name?) the red Sterculia, the Sassafras, the Ricinus, the Rosewood, the cohiti wood. It will take some time before we find even their real names . . .
– that was certainly true –
In little gullies, where the waters went down the fern trees grew luxuriantly about 12–15 feet high long leaves of 8–9 feet long. Polypodium, Asplenium, Acrostichum grew everywhere, mosses hung down in festoons and a species of birds had knowingly made use of them to hide its nest – Lichens of various colour covered the rotten and the living trees. The lyre bird, the native turkey with its peculiar nest of leaves, the fermentation of which hatches the eggs, a kind of rat, the Echidna and many curious animals live here. (Aurousseau, ii, 632)
‘Where was he? It sounds just like here,’ said Ann.
‘He was camping on Mount Royal.’ (The Mount Royal National Park is one of the southernmost of the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia.) ‘You have to love him. He’s so full of optimism and confidence and generosity. He’s fascinated by the country he’s in, no matter whether it’s spectacular or fertile or dull and stony. He finds something to intrigue him everywhere, and he describes it simply and vividly. He gives attention to all kinds of animals, vertebrate and invertebrate, and all kinds of plants from lichens to forest giants. He knows his botany so well that he recognises plants he’s never seen before from descriptions he has read. He names natural features after ordinary people, including the boy and the convict and the blackfellow in his team. He’s special.’
Ann was unimpressed. ‘Surely the man was a leech. How could he have shared Nicholson’s small allowance and his narrow lodgings and let him pay for everything, even his passage to Australia?’
‘It wasn’t as if he could work as well as study,’ I said uncertainly, because I too found Leichhardt’s willingness to live off Nicholson faintly contemptible.
Ann went on. ‘The key to Leichhardt’s whole messy career is that he was desperate to avoid being drafted into the Prussian army. He’s supposed to do a year’s military service after he completes high school, doesn’t do it, goes to university instead. Hops from one course to another, doesn’t graduate, but he still lets people call him “Dr” Leichhardt. Then he wants to join Nicholson in England and tries really hard to convince the Prussian government that he’s unfit for service, fails, but gets a deferment and is allowed to go to England. The Prussian government won’t let him travel to France so he goes on forged identity papers. Then instead of going home to do his service, he sneaks off to Australia at Nicholson’s expense. The man was a lightweight. A chancer.’
‘He did have very poor eyesight. And since when did you object to anyone’s dodging the draft?’
‘Pfui,’ said Ann, and went back to Nero Wolfe.
I confess that I love White Beeches mostly for themselves alone but also for the name they bear. The verdict of history is mixed. Leichhardt will remain an enigma. His last expedition will continue to seem criminally suicidal but nothing can distort the sensibility that informs his writing.
Nowadays if Leichhardt’s beech is planted at all it is likely to be as a street tree. Its neat round-headed habit, its straight smooth trunk and tidy bole, together with its moderate rate of growth, are positive advantages when it comes to being planted in pavements close to walls and buildings. When I see the White Beeches along the boulevards of the Gold Coast, marooned between roaring carriageways, buffeted by fume-laden draughts, far from their in-dwelling invertebrates, their phalangers and parrots, their festoons of vines and garlands of epiphytes, I pray for them to disqualify themselves for such ignominy by dying soon, but instead, dwarfed, filthy and ragged, they suffer on.
The baby beeches were planted out in 2006. Some are already quite big trees, others are holding their breath, but they are all established. None has actually died. Having acquired their complement of invertebrate species, they are already full members of our forest community. As I walk under the canopy of our baby forests, my heart quickens with the sense of adventure. Like Leichhardt rambling over Australia, I don’t know where I’m going. Like him I struggle to comprehend what I observe, with every ounce of brainpower I have left. Hordes of unfamiliar insects appear and lay billions of eggs on trees too small to survive the infestation. What should I do? The answer comes: watch, wait, live, learn. The forest is not just the trees, it is everything that lives in and on the trees, every fungus, every bug, every spider, every bird, every serpent, every bat. As a newcomer to this community, I cannot delude myself that I should or can control it. I am glad to be the forest’s fool.