A Single Tree Read online

  Time lengthens. On the third day we enter that meditative condition for which serious campers wait, knowing it will come: a permanent brown study in which life proceeds only in a slightly dazed condition. Camping is intoxicating.

  I watch a stationary cloud, waiting for it to move. A leaf spirals the long way to the ground. Four kookaburras sit on a log, shaking their gowned shoulders. A hundred screeching cockatoos wheel in the blue, blue sky. Our camp is a sundial marking the passage of time by the moments of shade. As the sun moves, we move the esky, the table, reposition our chairs. Then we take up our books again and try to focus on words, only to be distracted by two young magpies companionably watching us from a gum branch as smooth and creamy as a Michelangelo arm . . .

  2

  It is as if we have wandered into an episode of The Twilight Zone. Yet once we have set up the tent under a beautiful spreading elm and pumped up the li-los and got the stove going, we become aware of a great peace. Nothing is moving. Any sounds, and there are few, are muted: a dog barking far off, a lone cockatoo on sentry duty, a semitrailer changing down on the highway a kilometre away.

  We park our chairs with our backs to the waning sun and get out our books, but instead of reading we just sit. It is New Year’s Eve, and here we are, poised at the end of one year and the beginning of another in a place that is not only quiet, it is completely still. Around us, a dream of permanent settlement is slipping back into the earth. We have pitched our tent on the cusp of time.

  Born in a Tent: How Camping Makes Us Australian,

  NewSouth Publishing, Sydney, 2013

  Karen George

  1999

  1

  The majority of settlers agree that the main thing that helped them survive the establishment of their blocks was the support of friends and family, the excitement of having a ‘place of their own’ and the dreams of what it might one day become. The 48ers particularly talk of the closeness they developed through working and living together. This comradeship carried on through the years as each year’s group worked and lived alongside each other.

  John Krix arrived in 1953. ‘The camaraderie and everything was magnificent. It doesn’t happen when a settlement develops because you have got everybody at different stages, but here we were probably all broke. We were all threatened, so the camaraderie and the friendships were good, really good.’

  Men and women tended to turn to those who were at the same stage of development as themselves and it is an interesting phenomenon that there were not as many strong links between settlers from different years.

  Husbands and wives also worked closely together. Like many other women, Cynthia Carroll worked with her husband Mick. ‘We worked together as a couple. Always, always to the day he died. Planted trees, planted vines, hand-watered, shifted pipelines’ . . .

  2

  Howard Hendrick remembers ‘it was rather difficult getting started’ and the first six months were traumatic and ‘very very busy’. When he first came onto the block, his wife Win was in England. She had returned home to have her second child so that she could be with her mother and because living conditions in the River area were poor. When she arrived in Loxton Win found it very difficult to settle in and adapt to life in a Nissen Hut. Once they had planted their first trees, things began to turn around.

  ‘You start planting things, and it is like a garden, you start taking an interest in it and you start seeing things grow and that gives you a lot of encouragement. It seems to give a certain satisfaction . . . and I think you forget all your minor worries and troubles and woes that you were worrying about before. They tend to recede a bit and as months go by, each month gets a bit better once you start seeing things grow.’

  Looking back on the establishment of block 536, Beryl George sees the experience in a similar way. Arriving and starting work on their property was like stepping into the future. Whatever hardships she and Ron faced were worth it.

  ‘It was exciting and I don’t, at any stage, feel that there was any depression or sadness about that time. It was just so exciting because we were young and this was our own block and it was adventurous and we felt as if we were doing something wonderful.’

  A Place of Their Own: The Men and Women of War Service Land

  Setttement at Loxton after the Second World War,

  Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1999

  Mary Gilmore

  1939

  The Harvesters

  In from the fields they come

  To stand about the well, and, drinking, say,

  “The tin gives taste!” taking in turn

  The dipper from each other’s hands,

  The dregs out-flung as each one finishes;

  Then as the water in the oil-drum bucket lowers,

  They tip that out, to draw a fresher, cooler draught.

  And as the windlass slowly turns they talk of other days,

  Of quaighs and noggins made of oak, old oak

  Grown black with age, and on through generations

  And old houses handed down to children’s children,

  Till at last, in scattered families, they are lost to ken.

  Battlefields, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1939

  Lucy Gray

  1870

  C has been lately at a station fifty miles away & brought back a little black boy. As he rode up in the dusk, we could not imagine what it was he had behind him; it was the boy holding him tightly round the waist, & peering round his elbow, with a funny little grave face.

  At a word from C he slipped off, & stood waiting for him without taking notice of any one else. C had bought him from an old gin for a couple of handkerchiefs, at least he asked her to give him the boy, which she did willingly, & he gave her his handkerchiefs as a present, with which she was delighted.

  Whereupon C had his hair cropped, & bought him a blue twill shirt, thus for the first time in his life he was clothed, & most completely, for the garment, made for a man, came down to his heels. He followed C. silently, wherever he went, like a little dog who had found a master, standing close by him, & when C went into the house he sat by the doorstep watching for him to come out. At night he received a blanket in wh. he curled himself up, as if he had been accustomed to it all his life. I thought it looked like making a slave of him, when C put handcuffs on his little slender black legs, to prevent him in a sudden fit of home-sickness, going back to his Mammy in the night. He did not seem at least affected by this want of confidence in him, but looked on with interest, & when it was over, put his head under his blanket & went to sleep.

  ‘Journal’, September 1868–c. March 1871, in Anne Janet Allingham,

  Victorian Frontierswomen: the Australian Journals and Diaries of Lucy and

  Eva Gray, 1868 to 1872, 1881 to 1892, MA Thesis, James Cook University, 1987

  Tom Griffiths

  2001

  The fire engulfed the forests and farms from the Murray River in the north to the Princes Highway in the south, sweeping across the wedge of mainly mountainous land in eastern Victoria. Fire also broke out in the west of the state, in the Otway Ranges, in the Grampians, along the south-western coast around Warrnambool and Portland, and in South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory. The arithmetic of disaster, impressive as it was, hardly captured the enormity of the experience: 1500 people were left sheltering in temporary camps and homes; 69 sawmills were destroyed and another 14 damaged, most of them in the ash-milling belt where the greatest volume of sawn timber was then being produced; 126 kilometres of bush tramways were lost; 55 bridges, 80 horses and 700 houses were burnt, as well as a hospital and ten guesthouses and hotels; Narbethong, Noojee, Woods Point, Nayook West and Hill End were completely gutted, and Warrandyte and Yarra Glen partially destroyed; 1.4 million hectares were burnt; and 2070 million super feet (nearly 5 million cubic metres) of timber were destroyed in the central highlands alone, representing 20 years of potential sawmilling in that area.

  Another catalogue of disaster can
be compiled: one of stories and images, visual and sensual experiences, the words people used as they stumbled out of the blackened forests, the hooks upon which they later hung their memories. There was the strange behaviour of matches, which served as both warning signals and telltales, for they burnt white for days before the great fire, so they said, and blue afterward in an atmosphere charged with carbon dioxide. There was the thick pall of smoke that turned day into night, the ash that fell at sea, in Tasmania and in New Zealand. There were the deafening roar and blasting windstorms of a freak forest fire, the tornadoes that ripped trees off at the ground, the explosions of gas, the fire leaping kilo­metres ahead. There was the vulnerable innocence of those who did not know the scale of what they were fighting until it was too late. There was the machinery at bush sawmills that became a molten mess. There were the dugouts that became tombs for some and saviours for others. People told stories of taking it in turns to hold wet blankets across the dugout doors until the skin on their hands and faces curled back. There was the dead silence of the day after, with not a bird or animal or leaf to stir, and the creeks running black as ink. And there was the mist that seemed for years afterwards to hang low over the forests of ash, a mist made up of bleached, dead spars, the skeletons of the forest. The Red Cross, ‘concerned about the health of the bush fire refugees’ as they emerged from the smoking forests, appealed to the public for ‘gifts of tobacco’.

  Black Friday was not a freak event – it was one of those catastrophes endemic to the ash forests – but it had distinctive European dimensions. It was a cultural creation, a culmination of a century of white settlement and environmental practice. There had been warnings, which had been gathering apace in the inter-war period. The fires of 1926 and 1932 had been severe ones, and there had been those of 1898, 1905, 1908, 1914 and 1919 before. In the forests of ash it was the frequency – and not so much the intensity – of fires that was a result of European settlement.

  Black Friday was also a European creation in a more immediate sense: ‘These fires were lit by the hand of man.’ These were the words of Judge Leonard Stretton, who conducted the Royal Commission into the causes of the 1939 fires that was set up within two weeks of the disaster. A film made by the Forests Commission soon after Black Friday was titled The Hand of Man, and the camera zoomed in on Stretton’s single sentence indictment, underlined. It was society and not nature that was under trial. Stretton highlighted ‘the indifference with which forest fires, as a menace to the interests of all, have been regarded.’ Fire was someone else’s responsibility. It was, as one witness to the commission put it, ‘nobody’s business to put out’.

  And who were the firebugs? Rarely were they malevolent arsonists. Mostly they were farmers and bush workers, and their fire-lighting was sometimes casual and selfish, sometimes systematic and sensible, and increasingly clandestine and rebellious. They were ordinary people going about their lives who had not learnt the potential of fire and were careless with it, or who feared wildfire and wanted to pre-empt it. They were settlers burning to clear land, graziers firing the grass to promote new growth, miners blazing a path to a new reef, jackeroos signalling their whereabouts to their bosses. Burning was a rite – and a right. They were home owners who, when they saw smoke on the horizon, threw a match over the back fence. A newly burnt home paddock was like a safety blanket, a protective measure.

  In 1855 William Howitt had described the Victorian gold-rush populace as ‘this fire-scattering race of rude men’. The diggers, he said, ‘burn up the country wherever they go, as they say, to get rid of snakes.’ Almost a century later, sawmiller Jack Ezard used the same language: ‘There is always somebody foolish enough to light fires. I have seen people burn snakes.’ But he reminded the commission that ‘These people have to burn the scrub to live.’ Although Ezard, born and reared in Gippsland, acknowledged that lighting a fire at the wrong time could be a criminal act, he also insisted that ‘I think it is almost as criminal an act not to light a fire at the right time’. When trav­elling from Powelltown to Yarra Junction it was normal to see ‘half a dozen fires on the sides of mountains’. ‘The whole Australian race’, summed up one witness to the Royal Commission, ‘have a weakness for burning.’

  Forests of Ash: An Environmental History,

  Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001

  Mrs Aeneas (Jeannie) Gunn

  1908

  Bushmen are instinctively protective. There is no other word that so exactly defines their tender helpfulness to all weakness and helplessness. Knowing how hard the fighting is out-bush for even the strong and enduring, all their magnificent strength and courage stand ready for those who would go to the wall without it. A lame dog, a man down in his luck, an old soaker, little women, any woman in need or sickness – each and all call forth this protectiveness; but nothing calls it forth in its self-sacrificing tenderness like the helplessness of the strongman stricken down in his strength.

  We of the Never-Never (1908),

  Hutchinson, Melbourne, 1974

  Charles Harpur

  1851

  A Mid-summer Noon in the Australian Forest

  Not a bird disturbs the air!

  There is quiet everywhere;

  Over plains and over woods

  What a mighty stillness broods!

  All the birds and insects keep

  Where the coolest shadows sleep;

  Even the busy ants are found

  Resting in their pebbled mound;

  Even the locust clingeth now

  In silence to the barky bough:

  And over hills and over plains

  Quiet, vast and slumbrous, reigns.

  Only there’s a drowsy humming

  From yon warm lagoon slow coming:

  ’Tis the dragon-hornet – see!

  All bedaubed resplendently,

  With yellow on a tawny ground –

  Each rich spot nor square nor round,

  Rudely heart-shaped, as it were

  The blurred and hasty impress there,

  Of a vermeil-crusted seal

  Dusted o’er with golden meal.

  Only there’s a droning where

  Yon bright beetle shines in air,

  Tracks it in its gleaming flight

  With a slanting beam of light,

  Rising in the sunshine higher,

  Till its shards flame out like fire.

  Every other thing is still,

  Save the ever-wakeful rill,

  Whose cool murmur only throws

  A cooler comfort round repose;

  Or some ripple in the sea

  Of leafy boughs, where, lazily,

  Tired summer, in her bower

  Turning with the noontide hour,

  Heaves a slumbrous breath, ere she

  Once more slumbers peacefully.

  Oh ’tis easeful here to lie

  Hidden from noon’s scorching eye,

  In this grassy cool recess

  Musing thus of quietness.

  The Oxford Book of Australian Verse, Walter Murdoch (ed.),

  Oxford University Press, London, 1918

  Alexander Harris

  1846

  The Australian twilight is short; and it was now become almost dark. Happily we had but a short way to travel before reaching our resting place for the night. We were now on that, flat bordered on the one side by the sea, and on the other limited by the mountain, which I have already mentioned as being the Illa Warra district; and at this particular point it is scarcely a gunshot across. We consequently could hear the measured wash of the sea distinctly through the solemn stillness of the evening forest. A feeling of breathless awe steals over the spirit in traversing these grand and solitary forests amidst the thickening obscurity of evening: and buoyant as my spirits then were, I could not help being sensible of this influence. Suddenly the quick, cheerful bark of a dog startled the echoes; and in another instant a voice of Irish accent called him back as he came bounding towards us fro
m round the corner of a square low building that was just discernible in the dark. A few more steps and turning the corner of this building we stood at the door of the settler’s hut, where we were to stop for the night. It was one of those huts which must be ranked among the remarkable objects of Australian life. Situated on some main track and alone in the midst of the wilderness, one of these little “cribs” necessarily becomes the nightly rendezvous of numbers of travellers. If the traveller have no food with him, a share of what there is is always freely offered him; whether any remuneration is given depends upon the circumstances and disposition of the parties. If it be a poor man whose hut the wayfaring public has thus invested with the dignity of an inn, persons in good circumstances always make him some present for the accommodation: if it be a settler in tolerably good circumstances who is thus situated, remuneration is not thought so imperative; but in either case if the traveller be a poor man, he is welcomed to whatever there may he, and nothing is expected from him in return. The same hospitality is maintained in accommodations for rest. Those who have a blanket with them contribute it to the general stock; those who have none have equal share with those who have. These customs lead very naturally to a great degree of frankness and cordiality among the persons, most of whom are thus meeting for the first time, and the evenings consequently are for the most part spent in cheerful conversation and merriment. This species of arrangement extends throughout the colony; with this difference, that off the main lines of road, and still more so the farther you advance into the bush, the usual run of travellers are not only not expected to make any recompense, but in many places it would be treated as an insult to offer it. As full two-thirds of the labouring population of the country are in perpetual migration, the custom is a very proper one. It probably originated in the first place from the smallness of the community, almost every one knowing almost every other; and there is no doubt that the great scarcity of cash in the up country parts has principally maintained it.