White Beech: The Rainforest Years

  [Fluffer Nutter]

  To the CCRRS workforce, past, present and to come,

  this work is respectfully dedicated.

  Contents

  List of Abbreviations

  Prologue

  The Tree

  Eden

  Desert

  The Bird

  The Forest

  The Traditional Owners

  The Pioneer

  Timber

  Cream

  Bloody Botanists

  Bananas

  Nuts

  The Inhabitants: Non-Furry

  The Inhabitants: Furry

  Epilogue

  Works Cited

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  List of Abbreviations

  ADB Australian Dictionary of Biography

  APNI Australian Plant Name Index (on line)

  BC Brisbane Courier

  BMAD Bell Miner Associated Dieback

  CCRRS Cave Creek Rainforest Rehabilitation Scheme

  CP Cairns Post

  CSIRO Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

  DNB Dictionary of National Biography (UK)

  IATSIS Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies

  IPNI International Plant Name Index (on line)

  ISN Illustrated Sydney News

  LW Logan Witness

  MLA Member of the Legislative Assembly (lower house of state parliament)

  MLC Member of the Legislative Council (upper house of state parliament)

  MM Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser

  NA National Archives (UK)

  NLA National Library of Australia

  Q The Queenslander

  QSA Queensland State Archives

  QPWS Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service

  SMH Sydney Morning Herald

  spp. species (plural)

  ssp. subspecies

  USDA United States Department of Agriculture

  var. variety

  WA Warwick Argus

  WIRES NSW Wildlife Rescue and Information Service Inc.

  Prologue

  This is the story of an extraordinary stroke of luck. You could call it ‘life-changing’, if only every woman’s life were not an inexorable series of changes to which she has to adapt as well as she can. What happened at Cave Creek in December 2001 is that life grabbed me by the scruff of the neck. I went there as a lamb to the slaughter, without the faintest inkling that my life was about to be taken over by a forest. Some of my friends tell me now that they saw it coming. Had I not quit London in 1984 and removed to rural Essex? Was not the first thing I did there to plant a wood? Was I not prouder of my English wood (which is all the wrong trees and in quite the wrong place) than anything else I had ever done? They may not have been surprised when I bought land at Cave Creek, but I was.

  Great strokes of luck are usually disastrous. People who win millions on the lottery tell us that their lives have been ruined: their friends have turned into spongers; their families are dissatisfied; tradesmen, lawyers, bankers and accountants have swindled them and too much of the money was frittered away before they could secure their future. I was sixty-two when the forest became my responsibility, with no idea of how long I might be able to go on earning a living by my pen and my tongue. Our culture is not sympathetic to old women, and I was definitely an old woman, with a creaky knee and shockingly arthritic feet. Everyone else my age was buying a unit on the Sunshine Coast. What did I think I was doing buying sixty hectares of steep rocky country most of it impenetrable scrub?

  As will become evident, I didn’t think. I followed a series of signs and portents that led beyond thought, to find myself in a realm that was unimaginably vast and ancient. My horizons flew away, my notion of time expanded and deepened, and my self disappeared. I hadn’t been the centre of my world since menopause shook me free of vanity and self-consciousness; once I became the servant of the forest I was just one more organism in its biomass, the sister of its mosses and fungi, its mites and worms. I would be its interface with the world of humans, arguing its case for as long as I could, doing my best to protect it from exploitation and desecration. For ten years I could call it ‘my’ forest, because I had bought the freehold, but that was only for convenience. To be sure the signs I put all along the unfenced boundary said that any person found removing anything whatsoever from the property would be prosecuted, but that was not because I would consider myself to have been robbed, but because the forest would have been plundered. I never thought of the forest as mine.

  I would walk down the creek, gazing up at the Bangalow Palms and Rose Apples that soared into the sky, and say to myself over and over again, ‘Who could own this?’ The Azure Kingfisher perched on a trembling frond to scan the creek for fish had more right to it than I. The Long-finned Eel nosing under the rocks, the White-browed Scrubwren washing itself in a rock pool, the Bladder Cicada living its one glorious day of airborne life, all were co-owners with me. It was only a matter of time before the forest would be given back to itself, and a fund accumulated for its management. So I gave the place a name that referred to the project rather than the property, Cave Creek Rainforest Rehabilitation Scheme, CCRRS for short. Perhaps one day I shall earn the place’s true, historic, Aboriginal name, but for now CCRRS it is.

  How did I know on that bright December day in 2001 that the forest at Cave Creek could be rehabilitated? I thought I knew the answer to that question until I tried to answer it. On my first visit I couldn’t even guess at the rainforest on the upper slopes. What I could see was acres of exotic pasture grass with cattle dribbling into it and as many acres of soft weed. Maybe it was the entrance to the national park, with its Macadamias carrying strings of unripe nuts, Black Beans dangling their giant pea pods and watervines hanging in huge swags over the road, that told me louder than words what I should have found in the perched valley beneath. I didn’t know then how much of that exuberant vegetation was exotic weed species. I do now. Now I know that the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service is short of everything it needs to carry out its job of conservation, and that what funds it does have are exhausted by the cost of maintaining the infrastructure that is meant to protect the tourists from themselves. Governments having failed, the restoration of the most biodiverse rainforest outside the wet tropics will have to be done by dedicated individuals.

  That day I saw a pasture bounded not by forest but by impenetrable curtains of tangled Lantana canes. I had no idea how to remove them, but I knew they could be removed. The other thing I knew was that it was my responsibility to remove them. Why? Because I could. I had money, enough to get started at least. Once I got started I wouldn’t have money for anything else, but that didn’t scare me. I didn’t need anything nearly as much as I needed to heal some part of the fabulous country where I was born. Everywhere I had ever travelled across its vast expanse I had seen devastation, denuded hills, eroded slopes, weeds from all over the world, feral animals, open-cut mines as big as cities, salt rivers, salt earth, abandoned townships, whole beaches made of beer cans. Give me just a chance to clean something up, sort something out, make it right, I thought, and I will take it. I wasn’t doing it out of altruism; I didn’t think I was saving the world. I was in search of heart’s ease and this was my chance to find it. I didn’t know it until a bird showed me, as you shall see if you read on. I needed a sign and the bird was it.

  The bird was an ambassador from the realm of biodiversity, which is every Earthling’s birthright. Biodiversity is our real heritage as the ostentation of extinct aristocracies is not. We have inherited a planet that is
richer and more various than could ever have been imagined. Every day brings discoveries of new riches, coral reefs in the darkest depths of arctic seas, crustaceans living in boiling sulphuric water, thousands of species in thousands of genera, some older than history and some brand-new. Biodiversity is the name we give to the extravagant elaboration of this our planet, to the continuing creativity of evolution. Every one of the millions of life forms on Earth is an Earthling like us, closer to us than any yet to be discovered life form in a distant solar system. The tiny snail negotiating the edge of that lettuce leaf is my cousin; it and I share most of our genes. Its survival and the survival of its kind depend on me. I could pick the little creature off the leaf and crush it under my boot, or I could leave it for a hungry thrush, or I could bless it unaware, as Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner blessed the snakes of the Sargasso Sea:

  Within the shadow of the ship

  I watched their rich attire:

  Blue, glossy green and velvet black,

  They coiled and swam; and every track

  Was a flash of golden fire.

  O happy living things! no tongue

  Their beauty might declare:

  A spring of love gushed from my heart,

  And I blessed them unaware:

  Sure my kind saint took pity on me,

  And I blessed them unaware.

  That self-same moment I could pray;

  And from my neck so free

  The Albatross fell off, and sank

  Like lead into the sea.

  We all carry our own version of the dead Albatross hung around the Mariner’s neck. Our Albatross is the guilt that should weigh on us for making war on other Earthlings, invading and disrupting their habitat, slaughtering them in their millions and condemning millions of others to death and extinction. The Ancient Mariner didn’t know why he shot the Albatross, any more than the early settlers in Queensland could explain why they shot and killed vast numbers of koalas. The Mariner’s sudden surge of love for the snakes (snakes!) was like the sudden awareness of kinship that overtakes some of us as we enter the contemplative phase of life, when we find ourselves watching flies and midges instead of swatting them. The Ancient Mariner didn’t know, as Coleridge didn’t, that the opalescent sea snakes that were thronging about him were eels that had travelled halfway round the world to breed in the Sargasso Sea. The truth is even more wonderful than Coleridge’s fiction.

  The Mariner learnt that ‘he prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast’; true it is that entering fully into the multifarious life that is the Earthling’s environment, while giving up delusions of controlling it, is a transcendental experience. To give up fighting against nature, struggling to tame it and make it bring forth profit, is to enter a new kind of existence which has nothing to do with serenity or relaxation. It is rather a state of heightened awareness and deep excitement. As I limp back down the mountain with my pockets full of fruit, on my way to prepare the seed for planting, I know that as many will grow as should grow. I am like Ganymede in the talons of the eagle, caught up and carried along by the prodigious energy of the forest. If the forest has its way, paucity will be replaced by plenty; once the vanished trees return, an invasion will follow. Mosses, lichens, ferns, orchids, mites, weevils, beetles, moths, butterflies, phasmids, frogs, snakes, lizards, gliders, possums, wallabies, echidnas, all will reappear in their own sweet time.

  The forest is the bottom line. Without it the thousands of species that have evolved with it will fade from the earth. Technology has no solutions to the problem of biodepletion. There is little point in accumulating gene banks and none whatever in breeding threatened species in captivity. The only way of keeping the extraordinary richness and exuberance of this small planet is to rebuild habitat. If you put nets into the Wenlock River to trap Green Sawfish, and then truck them hundreds of kilometres to Cairns, where they will be loaded into an aircraft and flown to an aquarium in Missouri, you will be doing nothing to aid their survival, though you may be earning yourself as much as fifty thousand US dollars. The sawfish may survive in the aquarium, but they will survive as White Beeches do when they’re planted as street trees. They will have been forced to exchange a life of astounding plenitude for mere existence. If their habitat has disappeared, they can never return to it; if their habitat was restored, they would never need to go to the other side of the world, there to dwell in a tank.

  The good news is that as soon as a depleted ecosystem begins to rebuild, the creatures that have evolved with it will flock to it. As soon as the Sloaneas we reared at CCRRS were shoulder-high, we found in the domatia on the undersides of their leaves mites that were practically identical with those found in the domatia of their fossil ancestors (O’Dowd et al.). It really doesn’t matter what ecosystem any might be, the creatures that belong within it are unique. They may be the same species as elsewhere, but their interaction with diverse habitats and different co-residents creates diverse behaviours. Monitor lizards lay their eggs in termite nests. There are few termite species in subtropical rainforest; the few there are make their nests high in the trees. The gravid lizard must climb the tree, break into the termite nest, get inside and lay her eggs, which might explain why in our local version of the Lace Monitor (Varanus varius) the female is less than a third the size of the male. The eggs laid, she leaves the nest, and the termites reseal it, so the eggs will be incubated in constant warmth and humidity. Legend has it that when the eggs are ready to hatch, the mother lizard will visit the nest once again and tear it open to free her hatchlings. Nobody seems to have actually witnessed this event but we keep watching.

  As any threatened ecosystem begins to recover it may wobble. When the weevils that evolved many millennia ago with our Bolwarras found the ones we had planted at Cave Creek, they overwhelmed them (Williams and Adam). The creamy-white porcelain flowers were nothing but writhing brown knots of insect bodies, until the weevils’ predator caught up and lunched largely and long. Balance in the rainforest is largely a matter of stalemate, for no single species can opt out of the eternal struggle and no single species can be allowed to win it. Any species that dominates is doomed. Survival depends on finding your niche and keeping it.

  I had no idea in December 2001 that what was about to fall into my hands was a hotspot of biodiversity. Gondwana was nothing but a name, no realer to me than Middle Earth. The first botanist to take a look at what I had was excited; those who followed were more excited. I knew that my patch was surrounded on two sides by national park, which was a plus, and I knew the national park was at the northern extremity of a World Heritage Site that was then called the Central Eastern Rainforest Reserve Area. That area, consisting of a broken string of small rainforest remnants, is now called Gondwana Rainforests of Australia. The forest fragments are of major conservation importance because of their high rate of endemism; what that means is that surviving in them are many species that can survive nowhere else. The rate of endemism grows higher in the northernmost fragments; it is highest in the Springbrook National Park, and that system includes Cave Creek. This is the astonishing stroke of luck.

  I didn’t go shopping for exceptional biodiversity. I would have taken whatever came my way. When our first planting stopped holding its breath and shot up to make a forest, I was amazed. As I walked under its low canopy I felt a special kind of comfort in the knowledge that here at least the devastation of Australia’s astonishing biodiversity could be reversed. When I saw that caterpillars were already feeding on the leaves of the new little trees, I rejoiced that the system could still rebuild itself, that insects and plants that had evolved together many millennia ago could find each other again. For years I had wandered Australia with an aching heart. Here was balm indeed, worth every cent of the millions of dollars I have since turned into trees. The stock market may stagger, but the trees grow on.

  This book could have been named for any of the myriad species that have their being in that small chunk of rainforest. I could have calle
d it ‘Platypus’ or ‘Gastric-brooding Frog’, or ‘Pencil Orchid’ or ‘Blue Crayfish’ or even ‘Green Mountains’ but ‘White Beech’ is the name by which the book announced itself to me. I didn’t know that I wanted to write a book about the rainforest, until I woke up in the middle of the night with those two words written in white neon under my eyelids. I began to write the story before I knew the half of it. I still don’t know the half of it; I didn’t know till a few weeks ago that the fruit of the Cave Creek quandongs is blue not because of a pigment but because of nanoscale photonic crystals like the ones that give us the blue feathers of the peacock and the blue scales on butterflies (Lee). Every day brings a new encounter with the wonderful. There are as well encounters of a different kind.

  I had all but finished this book, when a last terrible twist was given to the tale of the forest. I thought I knew all the outrages and insults that had been inflicted on it. The land had been stripped naked, the forest knocked down, burnt, the ground flattened and dug up time and again. It never occurred to me that the area might have been poisoned, and that with the deadliest compound that man has ever made.

  I was innocently stowing my recyclables in the big yellow wheelie bin at the Resource Recovery Centre, when one of the locals came over for a natter.

  ‘I notice those people over the road from the national park are trying to grow organic vegetables,’ he said. ‘Bloody ridiculous.’

  (I didn’t tell him that they had lost so much money trying to distribute their organic vegetables that they had already given up.)