2001
Somewhere in my early childhood I absorbed images of an ideal bush. Two places come to mind. One was not bush-proper at all, but a backyard at the edge of an inland New South Wales town with a tennis court, some pepper trees, a few eucalypts dense enough to hide and play in, and (most importantly) to climb. I don’t remember what variety they were, but they were aged enough to have hollows formed by fallen branches containing wild beehives, and other hollows big enough for a child to climb into. Water was on tap but always in short supply. On the outer edges of the trees, through a fence and across a dirt road, were wheatfields. They were well cleared except for a few ringbarked dead trees and dark, shimmering clumps of native cypress. In the harvest season around Christmas there were sheaves and haystacks to play in. Alternating images of enclosure, darkness, and hiding places, compared with openness, brightness, and distant views, were the contrasting combinations.
Though this first ideal image of bush was not native bush at all, but a Europeanised mongrel remnant, it is mostly what we meant in Australia when we used the term ‘the bush’ (which also meant everywhere outside the cities). It was on the outskirts of Temora, in central-western New South Wales.
The other image is more timeless in feel. It was a kangaroo-grass hillside at the back of a small Riverina town, with granite boulders among scattered wattles and gums, and with small shrubs hardening their seeds past their spring flowering. There was the incessant hum, hop, click and scratch of insects, and the constant presence of birds. It was not farmland but unwanted land, and so had survived as bush in the second sense. I do not know if it is still there. It was the season for sawfly grubs, who linked themselves in a long, rhythmic chain and jerked along the earth with the unity of a single organism, and other species endemic to eucalypts, including the ones called hairy caterpillars. We raced around dropping them inside each other’s shirts, creating allergic reactions. From a slightly elevated position it was possible to look out over the town and west into the wider inland. Like a lot of bush it only existed to the passing eye in a good season, when it responded and burst into life. Otherwise it needed closer ways of looking to be understood. It was at Ardlethan, in the eastern Riverina . . .
I remember trees away out in the smashed-glass glare of wheatfields: yellow box, white cypress, kurrajong. Lone sentinels shimmering in heat haze. And playground eucalypts in asphalt, their leaves pungent after rain. A tree at Bourke, it must have been a red gum, growing tall in the dirt-surfaced playground there; Aboriginal kids eating grubs from under the bark and boasting about it; our teacher taking us out to sit around under its thin shade and asking me to read out a story I had written – a ‘composition’ I remember how everyone listened.
I remember visiting a homestead on the Darling River and staring at the orange trees: glossy leaves, creamy flowers, fruit with a skin thicker than coconut rind, flesh richer than any mango. Then up to the border at Hungerford, camping out under the stars, and my father naming the trees: leopard tree, bloodwood, wilga, quandong – peeling the sour red quandong flesh, insubstantial as a thumb-scraping, and drying the seeds that were ridged like a model of the human brain. We made a game of spotting leopard trees – their delicate distinctiveness was a prize in itself. Travelling through red sandhills my father waved his hat against the door of the car to attract emus. They came in their curious hundreds. Up there, north-west of Bourke, it was the beginning of the outback, except that ‘outback’ then was always somewhere further on.
The Tree in Changing Light, Knopf, Sydney, 2001