The Tree In Changing Light (2 page)

A
T THE
back of childhood, long before I was born, my mother ran alongside a paling fence with wet potato sacks, beating out flames that rushed through the grass towards her parents' farmhouse. Her mother was ill inside the house and her father was away fighting the fire on another front, where it was expected to be worse. Overhead the sky was a dense, scrolled blue, with ash and cinders raining down. Across the eucalypts at the far end of the paddocks orange sheets of flame shot up and exploded into leaf-heads of volatile oil in a crown fire. It had leapt the Glenelg river and only my mother was there to save the house.

Later when she rode her pony to school there were smouldering logs over the track, dead lizards in the ashes. I see her crossing a scorched plateau on a sturdy pony called Creamy, apprehensive yet curious, and not wanting to miss anything that was going on. She discounted any talk of bravery, doing what had to be done. All the while the river glimmered away below, bared to the sky by the peeling away of its fringing vegetation in the intensity of flame. There was a cool spring
under the limestone cliffs where asparagus grew, clear water where roots went down and seedlings thrived among ferns.

The farm was on sandy soil, at Drik Drik, in Victoria. When my mother, Lorna, was eleven her father, my grandfather, Chester Bucknall, began dealing with the Forestry Pulp and Paper Co. Ltd., and started planting pines. He established a nursery, building a hydraulic ram and developing a watering system; it was slow but functioned day and night without any running cost. He supervised gangs of men planting out trees. My mother's eldest brother, Graeme, started work in the company as a forester. My grandfather was made a director and travelled to Geelong every quarter for board meetings. Over the next decade, the Depression years, he evolved from farmer to forester. After the war the farm was kept going by Fred, the next brother, but finally it was sold and now there are vast stands of pine over the whole district, and the farm itself, since around 1970, has disappeared under them.

Nobody, it seems, has a good word to say about
Pinus radiata
, but Chester Bucknall's were surely the best around, growing in sandy soil with good sub-surface water, producing straight, unblemished poles. Somebody made money from the trees, those firebreaked, numbered sections. It wasn't Chester Bucknall, who smoked a pipe and suffered from asthma, wore a soft felt hat and a suitcoat and tie when out and about, and had a mild, warm, ironic smile if I am to judge from his photographs. There is one where he holds me on his knee, a be-frocked infant of around twelve months of age. We lived in central-western New South Wales then, and he came up from Victoria to visit. He died when I was four, at the end of the Second World War. My mother inherited
stock in the company and after forty years started getting a few small dividends. My grandfather was revered for who he was, a friendly man whose ambitions for his children were moral, spiritual, intellectual; a good mate to his daughter, who (after my grandmother's early death) was his companion on expeditions in a T-model Ford through the Grampian Ranges and along the Murray River, down to Adelaide and McLaren Vale.

When I meet older relations they say I am like Chester Bucknall. They mean the genetic inheritance of looks, mannerisms, tone of voice perhaps. Such doubles can mean anything. But might they also mean cast of mind? In which case, although I never really knew him, I believe him to have been a dreamer about trees. Other than a forester alone, that is.

My uncle, Graeme Bucknall, worked as a forester in Victoria and Tasmania before he became a theological student and a Presbyterian minister in the 1930s. As a young preacher he drove around Gippsland in the early years of World War II, burying the dead and cheering up the living with his genial calls. One day he heard about three specialist axemen hewing beams from grey box trees with broadaxes at Wroxham. The timber was being cut for a wartime extension to the Port Kembla jetty. Graeme drove his car down into the valley where the men were working. At smoko they got yarning about timber cutting and he asked them if they had ever used a ‘bastard' file in a particular way to take the shoulder off an axe. They had not ever used one in this way; and so it was the ex-forester parson who demonstrated how to drive the back of the axe head into a narrow scarf and with the handle of the file bedded in the tree trunk, drag the file
face over the shoulder of the axe until it cut into the steel with the filings coming away in minute strips.

 

Family history as it expresses itself in an individual can feel like something coming from nowhere, because the roots are buried. It is only now, in midlife, that I feel this matter of trees as part of a line of continuation. My mind sinks back; I go into the shade; it feels like drawing water up through fine capillary veins and having leaves uncurl, and then those leaves hanging edge-on to the hard Australian sunlight. I like to think of the earth around the roots being kept damp by a sprinkler disgorging cold, silver water.

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 kangaroograss 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 slighly 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 grew up a minister's son in central and western New South Wales. We lived at Bribbaree when I was born, then at nearby Temora, and finally at Bourke at the end of the western line. A move to Sydney came at the end of my primary school years, when my father left his parish ministry and became secretary to the New South Wales Board of Missions in the Church Offices, Assembly Hall, Margaret Street.

Here are images of trees gathered from a country childhood, recovered from the scrapbook of memory. Ironbarks along the fringe of a dry creekbed, blond summer grass in the foreground. The sap-stained trunks dark as if blood has been poured down them and aged into the fibrous material. The line of trees looking small in daytime, thrust down by light. But later, in the gunpowder-blue twilight, looming up as if they are walking closer. All this seen from the verandah of the manse at Bribbaree, a wooden house like a land-yacht in my perception of the way it rode unseparated from the country around.

There must have been a fence at Bribbaree but I don't remember any. Was I too small to see what I saw, being just a baby lying on a rug on the verandah boards? It is the picture I have—as with so many other fragments that are like guiding images in all of our lives, with missing parts demanding to be filled in by imagination. I saw the moon rise through the branches of trees, heard crickets, frogs, watched shadows shorten. I saw it first then—moonrise through trees—the sight that promised journeys in stillness, in storm, through broken cloud.

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 farther on.

I revisited Bourke many years later. More accurately, I passed through in a rush on my way to Yantabulla, near Hungerford, on my way to my first appointment as a shearers' cook, which I tried as a break from writing in 1989 and described in
Shearers' Motel
. It was still possible to find the idealised landscape of my childhood out from the shearers' quarters in breaks between cooking. But the woody weeds from years of dry seasons and overgrazing were taking their toll. In places they showed as impenetrable stiff walls of low vegetation instead of the open parklike vistas of memory. There are beautiful descriptions of a landscape untouched by sheep in C.E.W. Bean's
On the Wool Track
, published early in the last century; but also contrasting depictions of the ravages to the thin topsoil by (at that time) at least fifty years of sheep grazing. Another ninety years have passed since then and western New South Wales is often a depressing mishmash of
claypans, scoured earth, woody weeds and burr patches. Other parts of the country—especially the towns, in terms of shade trees planted—look better than I remember them. Memory is deceptive, and many if not all good impressions in Australia depend on the season. To my eye, I was amazed by the number of trees across Bourke township. They added an oasis feel to what was always an outpost feel.

My father, Hugh Fraser McDonald, was a Queenslander, born and raised in Rockhampton. We visited Rocky from Bourke in the 1949 Chev for Christmas holidays that involved cross-country expeditions through back country. My brothers and I rode our uncles' old bikes around Rockhampton's hot, wide, empty streets. The insides of kitchens always smelled of ripening tropical fruit. Every backyard had mango trees and the fruit lay rotting on the ground. The ice-cream factory tried mango ice-cream but it had no appeal for locals. There were no other trees in Rocky, just acres of tin roofs and the mangoes, and bare yards where a battle was fought against encroaching tropical grasses, tough as tin. Rockhampton awaited the invention of the Victa lawn-mower, only then would it be suburbanised, losing its look of spare colonial calm.

After our move to Sydney the two senses of ‘the bush'—first as the place where country people lived, and second as native forest (or scrub, more commonly)—receded to images of places with a strong nostalgic pull. After the first novelty the city had negative connotations. It was a long trudge to school and home again. Other elements were missing, difficult to define. I suppose the closest to a dreamscape was the Blue Mountains, where the Presbyterian church owned a large
holiday house, ‘Balqhain', in Govett's Leap Road, Blackheath. Off the main roads the bush then was like it is now: a gallery of charred banksias, scrolls and shards of eucalpyt bark, and secretive, tough little shrubs, starred with wildflowers, in shadowed crevices or hanging onto cliffs. Where the fire has gone reveals the essence of trees, as in all life.

My father's last parish was Hunters Hill, in Sydney. I was still at school. He was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson's disease. It was a devastating time for my parents.

My father was forty-eight years old. His world closed in. He asked me if I had ever thought of being a minister. He would have been proud. Did he imagine I would continue some line of his, that he had never spoken to me about, or was unable to articulate? It was where his roots went down, not mine.

Within a decade his physical orbit was reduced to a few immediate concerns. He died in 1981. Too late the right questions came. Now I want to know what his self-image was. What was his tree?

I was seventeen, in my last year at Scots College, when I made a declaration: I wanted to be a forester. This took my parents by surprise. My father, his thinking shaped by a self-reliant childhood and the Depression years—and a new insecurity—wondered if I shouldn't leave school and work in a bank. As I recall, my mother argued against it. I was to go to university, it was not to be doubted. But
forestry
? I was a dreamer, the impractical son whose older brother did all his bicycle repairs for him, and whose chemistry set, a jumble of jars and powders, lay in a stained heap on a laundry shelf. I was the verbaliser of everything who had never shown any
interest in gardening or horticulture, and indeed I cannot ever remember planting anything at all. Not even a pumpkin seed. All I can remember is watching other people do things and imagining how it must feel.