White Beech: The Rainforest Years (18 page)

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.