White Beech: The Rainforest Years (3 page)

By 1970 the effects of exposure to 2,4,5-T on the health of military personnel were pretty well understood. The result would be a series of long-drawn-out and largely unsuccessful class action suits in Canada and the US. Nevertheless the widespread use of 2,4,5-T as a defoliant in state forestry programmes continued into the Seventies and Eighties in northern Ontario, in New Brunswick, in California and the Pacific north-west, and in Brazil. In forestry programmes in south-east Queensland use of 2,4,5-T continued until 1995. Local farmers continued to use it until Picloram, another systemic herbicide for broad-leaf evergreens which was also used in Vietnam, became readily available as Tordon and Grazon. North American forestry workers who were exposed to 2,4,5-T are now pursuing class action suits of their own against Dow Chemical and Monsanto, but the Queensland experience seems to have been utterly forgotten.

It was not as if Australian scientists were unaware of the risks. In 1981 researchers at Monash University published results of their administration of tiny doses of 2,4,5-T to fertilised hen eggs, which produced pronounced and undeniable teratogenic effects. The 2,4,5-T they were using contained much lower levels of dioxin than the version that was being routinely sprayed on Australian blackberries (Sanderson and Rogers). The next year researchers at Sydney University published results of an epidemiological study that found that the proportion of babies born with neural tube defects in any year displays positive correlation with the amounts of 2,4,5-T used in the previous year (Field, Kerr and Mathers, 1982, also Field and Kerr, 1988). In 1985 there was a Royal Commission on the Use and Effects of Chemical Agents on Australian Personnel in Vietnam. Yet there has never been any kind of investigation into what Australian civilians did to themselves and their birthplace by the peacetime use of 2,4,5-T.

Back at CCRRS, I trawled the net, hunting for information on how repeated dowsing with 2,4,5-T might have affected the forest. Though there was a vast amount of information about contamination with an array of dioxins resulting from faulty manufacturing processes, there was almost nothing about the long-term consequences of routine use of 2,4,5-T. About the only relevant data came from an air force base in north-western Florida where 2,4,5-T had been repeatedly used over a nine-year period, from 1961 to 1970. Twelve years later 2,3,7,8-TCDD was detected in soils, rodents, birds, lizards, fish and insects. One of the highest residues, 1,360 parts per trillion, was found in an amphibian, the Southern Toad (
Bufo terrestris
) (Eisler, 7). Two years after the escape of dioxin at Seveso, Italy, in 1976, high levels were detected in toads (Fanelli
et al.
). Yet nobody studying the decline in frog populations in south-east Queensland has ever suggested that spraying their environment with 2,4,5-T cannot have been good for them.

Surely, I thought, nobody would have been so wanton as to have sprayed the headwaters of the Nerang River with 2,4,5-T. The river is after all the main source of drinking water for the whole Gold Coast. As I poked about, hunting in vain for an account of the use of 2,4,5-T in forestry in south-east Queensland, I came across a mention of its use to control ‘weed’ vegetation in plantations of Pinus and Araucaria (Wells and Lewty, 215). One of the doomed enterprises at Cave Creek was a plantation of Hoop Pine (
Araucaria cunninghamii
), part of which still stands. Rainforest natives have sprung up under the planted pines and are giving them a run for their money; when the pines were a cash crop such competition would have been ruthlessly eliminated. Trees do die in the forest, but now whenever I see branches of an established tree withering and dying, I feel a clutch of fear, that somewhere underground there is a sump full of poison that is slowly leaking out. All the water that drains through the Cave Creek roots and rocks ends up in the Advancetown Lake; I wonder whether anyone is testing the water for dioxin residues. If anyone is, nobody’s saying.

If you’d told me forty years ago that I was destined to come across 2,4,5-T again, and that then it would be my problem, I’d have been appalled. I am older and wiser now, and not even surprised. I’m only glad that I was offered an opportunity to make some small amends, and that I was in a position to take it. The same opportunity is out there for everyone. Supposing you live on an average suburban street. Under the tarmac there is geology, a soil type, a seed bank, and a memory of what used to be there, before the bush was ripped up, trashed and thrown away to be replaced by Norfolk Island Pines or Canary Island Date Palms and Buffalo Grass. You can stop mowing and weeding and mending what passes for lawn, and let your quarter-acre revert to Moonah Woodland and Coast Banksia or whatever. No need to put out the bird feeders, because Wattlebirds will come as soon as the Banksias flower and the Possums will move out of the roof space and back into the trees. If you can get your neighbours on side, you can combine your backyards, to make a safe place for kids to explore and for echidnas to mosey about in.

If I have written this book properly, it will convey the deep joy that rebuilding wild nature can bring. Not that the forest is peaceful, anything but. The only forest creatures that live long are the trees; they can live for aeons unless a cyclone comes to suck them out of the ground or a scarp collapses over them or the earth slides out from under them. Then all the other little trees that have waited in their shade will start racing for their bit of sky. The trees create the habitat for a vast horde of species most of which will be eaten by other species that will be eaten in their turn. The sweetest tree frog is a ruthless predator on hundreds of species including other frogs. The Spiny Rainforest Katydid that has just landed on my keyboard, dressed in his mad suit of particoloured fronds, is a voracious killer too. I sit quiet to watch him as he takes off. He is barely airborne before a Rufous Fantail flirts out of the Cheese Tree and snares him for her fledglings. Both bird and prey are wonderfully special. The katydid is dressed with such crazy excess that he looks more like a Green Man crossed with a Leafy Seadragon than a flycatcher’s meal on wings. The Rufous Fantail turns hunting into an aerial circus, whirling her wings and tail so that she tumbles and spins, only feet from my face. Her fanned brick-red tail is edged with a white so bright that it seems to leave tracks in the sunlit air.

The Tree

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.