White Beech: The Rainforest Years (19 page)

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.’

The Traditional Owners

When they learn that I was happy to hand over a wad of money for a piece of Australia, all the while saying that I wouldn’t call Australia home until Aboriginal sovereignty was recognised, many thoughtful people will suspect that I have betrayed my deepest convictions. In my defence I can only say that I didn’t buy a home. I bought a project. It would never have occurred to me that my whitefella freehold title endowed me with proprietorial rights. The first thing I did, once the documents were signed and the transfer completed, before I had spent a single night at CCRRS, was to go in search of the traditional owners. At the Minjungbal Aboriginal Cultural Centre at Tweed Heads I thought I would find somebody who could tell me the property’s true name, and whom I should approach for permission to camp there. I even dared to hope I could find someone to perform a welcome ceremony for me. I in turn would have been more than happy to let Indigenous people use the land as they wished.

As soon as I opened my mouth, I knew I’d come on a fool’s errand.

‘I’ve just acquired the freehold of a piece of land at Natural Arch, and I’m really anxious to know its proper name. Its Aboriginal name.’

The two women behind the counter looked at each other, not at me, and said nothing.

‘Aboriginal people must surely have known about it, well, some Aboriginal people at least, about the natural bridge, I mean, and the waterfall and the cave . . .’

What I needed was an elder, a senior law woman. The youngish women in front of me were behaving as if they had never heard of Natural Arch.

I struggled on. ‘The place has been given many whitefella names but they don’t stick. I’d like to get it right if I can.’

At this point the Natural Bridge was still gazetted under its new name of the Natural Arch, though the township originally called after it was still called Natural Bridge. Apparently the Place Names Board changed the name of the rock formation to the Natural Arch in 1982, at the instance of tour operators, and without consultation with local residents (Hall
et al
., 161). After months of lobbying, the name was silently changed back to the Natural Bridge. The locals had never called the place anything else, but people living on the Gold Coast, most of whom have never been there, still call it Natural Arch. CCRRS is still in the telephone directory as Natural Arch Farm, despite repeated requests for deletion of the entry.

I didn’t suggest a welcome ceremony. I wrote down my name and the postal address on a slip of paper and put it on the desk. Neither woman picked it up.

‘Any help you can give me – I’d be very grateful.’

A year went past, but no word came from the Minjungbal Centre. I wasn’t surprised or annoyed. It wasn’t as if I had a right to their help. I kept asking around. Eventually (two years later) a magenta-haired woman selling hand-crafted wind-chimes at the Murwillumbah market told me that I needed to talk to the Bundjalung elders who would be at the next Wollumbin Festival. I Googled the festival. I wasn’t sure that I was up for a multicultural celebration of ‘the Indigenous connection with Mother Earth’ that highlighted ‘environmental awareness, healing and sustainable lifestyles’ but, before I could put myself to the test, the festival collapsed.

A year or two later, when Ann was at CCRRS on one of her regular visits, one sleepy evening when I thought she was engrossed in another of the Nero Wolfe novels I had found in a second-hand bookshop at Southport, she came round the corner of the verandah to find me gazing glumly at my laptop.

‘How is a woman expected to enjoy her book when you will keep sighing all the time?’

‘Sorry. I’ve worked on the question of traditional ownership for months and I’ve got absolutely nowhere. Nothing about the ethnology of this region makes sense to me.’

The sun had long ago slid behind the western scarp. The bats were flying and I could hear the oom-oom-oom of the frogmouth. Cocktail hour. I got up to fetch a bottle. ‘Red or white?’

Ann marked her place with a Crimson Rosella feather, and put her book away. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

Ann is possibly the wisest person I know, and also the most patient. If anyone could help me solve the riddle of the traditional owners, it would be she.

I poured the wine, leaned back in my chair and did my best to begin at the beginning.

‘The Tourism Queensland website, and all the websites derived from it, say that Natural Bridge is in the territory of the local Kombumerri people. They’re supposed to be the traditional owners of the whole of the Gold Coast region, which includes the areas drained by the Logan, Albert, Coomera and Nerang Rivers and the Tallebudgera Creek. They call themselves a family of the Yugambeh.’ (Best and Barlow, p. 9)

Since the 1980s, under the leadership of Uncle Graham Dillon, the Kombumerri have been recovering their cultural heritage. In 1984 Dillon organised survivors to campaign for the reburial of Kombumerri people disinterred between 1965 and 1968 from a thousand-year-old burial site at Broadbeach; the reburial of these remains in a dawn ceremony in 1987 marked a watershed for his people. The Kombumerri are now recognised as the dominant clan in the area covered by Gold Coast City which extends south to the border and the scarps of the McPherson Range. In 1996 a native title claim over the Gold Coast failed because the broader community did not support it; the same thing happened again in 1998. In 2001 Eastern Yugambeh Ltd made another claim which was opposed by a single clan. In 2006 Eastern Yugambeh Ltd joined forces with Jabree Ltd and one other and tried again. This time the claim extends south to the Tweed and west to Mount Tamborine and includes Natural Bridge.

Wesley Aird heads 400 families who claim to be descended from twelve ‘apical ancestors’, themselves descended from a mere six, a tiny fragment of a group that once numbered thousands, ‘Joseph Blow, Coolum, George Drumley (Darramlee), Sarah Drumley (Warri), Jackey Jackey (Bilin Bilin), Mark Jackey, Harry Jackey, Nellie Jackey, John Alexander Sandy (Bungaree), Kitty Sandy (Yelganun), Slab and Kipper Tommy Andrews’. An Aboriginal man called Blow and his wife Kitty worked for the settlers on the Nerang in the 1890s and a George Blow who eventually went to live in Beaudesert was raised by the Mills family at Gilston; Drumley is the maiden name of the Kombumerri matriarch Jenny Graham; the Jackeys are all descended from Bilin Bilin, who persuaded his people to give up resistance and throw themselves on the mercy of the missions; Slab and his wife Suzan too were well known in Numinbah; Kipper Tommy Andrews is probably not the Kipper Tommy who figures in our story who was said to be Bullongin. The Gold Coast Native Title Group claims only procedural rights and only over vacant crown land. In six years no conclusion seems to have been reached, apparently because the families who lodged the first two applications refuse to accept the authority of the families now making the claim. Both sides are descended from the same handful of apical ancestors.

‘What’s the problem?’ asked Ann.

‘It doesn’t add up. Descendants of a single small kin group can hardly lay claim to such a huge swathe of territory. What is more you won’t find the name Kombumerri used for the people of the Nerang before 1913. They were first called Kombumerri by Bullum, whitefella name John Allen, who supplied Aboriginal translations of English words put to him by schoolmaster John Lane. Bullum’s word list was published as an appendix to the Report of the Protector of Aboriginals in 1913. The name Kombumerri means “mangrove-worm eaters”. Before Bullum gave them that name, the people of the Nerang were either known as the “Nerangballum” or the “Talgiburri”. Archibald Meston always refers to the Nerang people as Talgiburri.’