Opinion: If trees could speak
By Bob Beale
Paul Keating is right: Sydney sure was tapped on the shoulder by a rainbow when it got its amazing Opera House. We are right to celebrate it and be super-sensitive to its conservation and the integrity of its setting.
But the same should apply where the rainbow touched down first - on its next-door neighbours, the Bennelong Twins. They may not be so eye-catching but they're just as central to our culture and heritage.
They're up there on that little cliff just behind the Opera House on the Bennelong Lawn. Of all the places to drink in the iconic vision of the opera house, the harbour and the bridge, few can beat this peaceful spot.
The Twins are the elegant gum trees occupying prime position on the front edge. They are forest red gums and grow so close that they may be Siamese twins, or even one tree with a double trunk. Many a weary tourist has rested on the shady bench seat there.
They're not particularly tall - about 25 metres - but their elevation means that their tops rise above the sails of the Opera House. The tree on the left as you face the harbour is the larger, with a smooth, mottled trunk about a metre thick. They fork early, fanning out to the classic eucalypt open crown, layered in clutches of lank, leathery leaves that yield see-through glimpses of the sky. In winter, they put on a fair show of fluffy white blossom that bursts from funny little pale-green buds that have long pointed caps, like a clown's hat.
They would be otherwise unremarkable except for one thing: botanists are pretty certain that they germinated in the early 1700s. In fact, they're probably approaching their 300th birthday. Too few of us appreciate what this means.
As saplings, they shared daily life with the original occupants of the area, the Cadigal, who knew Bennelong Point as Toobegully. From there you would have seen wisps of smoke from many campfires and women out fishing on the harbour in their flimsy bark canoes. You would have heard the thud of stone axes, the laughter of children and sometimes the ancient songs of the mysterious Kangaroo and Dog Dance initiation ceremony held at Woccanmagully, now known as Farm Cove.
You would have seen Cadigal men angrily brandishing their spears as the First Fleet dropped anchor, then convict work parties landing, the first tents erected, the British flag flown, gunshots fired into the air and toasts drunk to a nation on the far side of the planet. Soon enough, metal axes rang and trees began falling.
When the Union Jack was first flown on 26 January, 1788, it was not a flagpole that held it but a casuarina tree. When troops and convicts gathered for the first Christian thanksgiving on Australian soil a week later, the Reverend Richard Johnson chose "a great spreading tree" - probably a Port Jackson fig - for his church. A few weeks later, a tree somewhere on lower George Street became the Fatal Tree when the first convicts were hanged from one of its stout branches.
Within the space of a month, trees were central players in the foundation of the state, the church and the law. Sadly, all three of those trees were later felled with little thought for their starring roles in our history, as far too many others have been since.
It's easy to forget that Sydney is now utterly transformed and so is Bennelong Point. The island that once stood off it was levelled between 1818 and 1821 and the rubble used to fill the tidal flat. The native bushes and trees of Sydney Cove, Bennelong Point, the Domain and Farm Cove quickly fell to axes, fires, cattle and goats. Yet the Twins were still there in an 1858 photograph.
The Bennelong cliff was quarried to build a large square sandstone fortress with castellated battlements, Fort Macquarie, which was in turn demolished in 1901 - after more quarrying - to make way for the electric tram sheds.
Even when Government House was built, when the Tarpeian steps were hewn into the cliff face, when hundreds of homeless people stripped The Domain's trees for firewood during the Great Depression, somehow the Bennelong Twins were spared.
Australia did not rise to prosperity on the sheep's back: trees really gave the fledgling nation its backbone - everything from shelter and fuel to fences and railway sleepers, from cricket bats and surfboats to wharves and pit-props. Without them, our proud and prosperous nation could not have been built.
They are embedded in our symbols of national identity: the wattle on our coat of arms and its green and gold in our sporting colours; the coolibah in our national song, Waltzing Matilda; the sentinels in Fred Williams and Sidney Nolan paintings . . . the list is long. Yet we continue to fail to honour their status as our own living history - we can't see the trees for the Opera House.
Amazingly, incredibly, the Bennelong twins alone have survived so close to the city centre. But there's not even a plaque to alert visitors to these unique, irreplaceable living links to the nature of the place itself and to its rich and wonderful human history. Less than 20 other old "First Fleet" trees survive in the Domain and Royal Botanic Gardens, dying off one by one, like old Anzacs.
Their lack of recognition symbolises our uneasy love-hate relationship with our native trees: we may admire them aesthetically but they suffer from being useful. More than ever, we have great expectations that they can be harnessed anew to our purposes, for pulp mills, land repair, biofuels and as carbon sinks. We should honour them more and remember that they can do without us but we cannot do without them.
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Bob Beale is Public Affairs Manager, UNSW Faculty of Science, and the author of If Trees Could Speak: stories of Australia's greatest trees (Allen and Unwin, 2007). http://www.allenandunwin.com/default.aspx?page=94&book=9781741142761 |
