White Beech: The Rainforest Years (17 page)

Jane never goes bushwards without the wherewithal for making tea. As she put her little kettle-cum-teapot on the filthy hob she asked, ‘What’s the plan?’

‘To restore the forest.’

Jane tipped leaf tea into the holder in the top of the pot. ‘That’s obvious. But how?’

Peter, as usual, said nothing.

‘I have no idea. You can help me.’

‘You reckon. I don’t know anything about this vegetation. It’s all I can do to keep abreast of the systems on the Mornington Peninsula. I don’t even know the genera that grow here, let alone the species. Rainforests are the most intricate systems on earth. That’s why when they’re disturbed, everything goes haywire. You might think you’re restoring what was there, but in fact you’re just another interloper, doing more harm than good.’

I took a deep breath. ‘I can learn. We can learn, together.’

That was part of the idea, but typically I hadn’t consulted her.

Jane, who will no more countenance the drinking of tea out of mugs than the use of tea bags, put a cup and saucer beside me. ‘You don’t get it, do you? There are no teachers.’

Peter said, ‘The soil looks pretty good. Basalt, isn’t it? What’s the rainfall?’

‘About two metres a year.’

‘Must be worth a try.’

We drank our tea and talked of other things. A Butcherbird hopped onto the verandah rail and sang a canzonetta composed for the occasion. Behind the house King Parrots were whistling. In the pasture Crimson Rosellas were swinging on the heads of seeding grass. Wanderer butterflies sailed past in airborne coitus. The tea things stowed in their basket, we went for a walk up the main track. I was praying for something special, the bowerbird maybe, to win my sister over. We trudged uphill and came to a broad clearing where Jane stopped dead. She was gazing up at the bare rhyolite precipice that topped out above the forest like the battlements of some huge prehistoric castle.

‘Now that I do understand. That is fantastic. Can we get nearer?’

The forest edge was a mass of Lantana, with no visible opening.

Jane studied the tumbled mess of rocks around us. ‘These aren’t geologic. They’re all out of position. Just heaped and pushed about – to make the pasture, I guess.’

She was right as usual, but the truth was sadder than her guess. In these parts the farmers didn’t simply roll the rocks aside to create level tracts of pasture; they dug them up to sell. It took me months to realise that the forest had not been abused just as a farm. From 1985 the upland portion had been one of the four quarries on Numinbah Valley farms that supplied 50,000 tonnes of rock to build the seafronts of the artificial waterside suburbs that stretch from Byron Bay to Noosa and points north. The figure is merely notional; the total may be many times that much. The farmers have no weighbridges and there is no one overseeing the traffic. The rock merchants don’t care; the farmers don’t care; nobody cares. Rocks too irregularly shaped to be usable were bulldozed out of the way into creeks and gullies. Of the natural contours of that part of the northern lip of the Mount Warning caldera almost nothing remains.

The forest takes this devastation in its stride. The valiant workforce has planted into the worst heaps of spoil, and the trees have shot up just as if they were standing in deep loam, spreading their roots across the rubble, holding it all together. The answer to everything, to the instability of the land, the slumping, the landslips, the pugging and the waterlogging, is to plant more trees. Under the protection of the canopy the land heals.

In the blitheness of my innocence I pitched the project to my sister. ‘The way I see it, the pasture is an ulcer in the healthy tissue of the forest. What I have to do is to draw the healthy tissue in, little by little, till the ulcer is gone.’

‘What if it’s a rodent ulcer?’

‘It isn’t. See, the Lantana can only grow in sunlight, on the forest edge. The forest isn’t retreating from the pasture, it’s drawing in wherever it can. What I have to do is to remove some of the obstacles and the forest will do the rest.’

Jane sighed at my ignorance. ‘You’re going to have to learn about succession, my girl. And that won’t be easy, because nobody really knows how it works. To restore your forest would take about eight hundred years.’

‘I’d better not die then.’

The next day, at Mount Tamborine, we found a little information centre and in it a copy of the famous Red Book, with its original title,
Trees and Shrubs in the Rainforest of New South Wales and Southern Queensland
.

‘Here you are,’ said Jane. ‘Page six, Subtropical rainforest.’ She read out:

– 2 or 3 strata of trees

– diverse: 10–60 species in canopy

– leaf size large: notophylls and mesophylls common

‘What are notophylls and mesophylls?’

‘It’s a fancy way of indicating leaf size. Notophylls are leaves between about three inches, say eight centimetres and about five inches, thirteen centimetres. Mesophylls are bigger.’ She went on reading:

– leaves often compound—

I interrupted her again. ‘Meaning?’

‘Hm. That’s not so easy to explain. A simple leaf has a single blade, yes? And a simple leaf can have indentations in its outline, like a maple leaf for example? If those indentations go right to the main vein, and the bits between form separate leaf blades and the main vein becomes the rachis, you’ve got a compound leaf. The separate leaves or, more correctly, leaflets may have stalks connecting them to the rachis or not.’

‘How can you tell if you’re looking at a leaf or a leaflet?’

‘That’s easy. Leaflets don’t have axils, or rather, there are no buds in the axils, no leaf buds or flower buds or stipules. The real axil will be way back where the rachis joins the branchlet. Leaflets don’t fall separately either; the compound leaf tends to drop as a whole.’

‘So if I’m not sure, I can look for a fallen leaf?’

‘Yes, but you won’t need to do that, I reckon. You’ll get used to it pretty quick.’

Jane was wrong about that. Taking a leaflet for a leaf is one of the commonest mistakes made by the amateur dendrologist. It was to be many months before I could distinguish more than a very few species. For too long it seemed to me that I forgot more than I learned, that I was learning the same names over and over again. And then one day I found myself recognising trees at a distance, and even their saplings, and then their seedlings, which were often very different from the adult tree. I have still to master the art of recognising trees from their trunks when the canopy is out of sight, but I’m getting there.

Jane read on:

– Leaves often compound, and mostly with entire margins—

‘Entire margins?’

‘Without serrations or indentations. Not toothed, angled or lobed.’ She went on:

– stranglers (figs) often common

– palms often common

– plank-buttresses often common

– uneven, non-uniform canopy

Vines – large, thick-stemmed vines common and diverse

Large epiphytes – (orchids, ferns, aroids) common and diverse

Special features – large-leaved herbs and ground-ferns common

‘Most authorities divide rainforest into more than four types, actually. I’m trying to remember my Tracey and Webb; they divide rainforest into more than a dozen types, I seem to recall. Your kind of subtropical rainforest is this one, Complex Notophyll Vine Forest.’

Jane and Peter went home to Victoria and I was left to contemplate my folly. First of all I tramped down to the creek, and picked my way along it. It seemed preposterous to me that anyone could own anything like it and yet it was legally mine. Though the creek was full of weeds, red, pink and white Busy Lizzie, Mist Weed and Elephant Grass, it was equally full of promise. On the flat top of a rock in the creek I found a little heap of crayfish claws, indigo-blue, edged with vermilion, left there by the Azure Kingfisher. Many of the trees had snaking buttress roots, and within the curve of one of them, amid the bright blue fruit shed by the quandongs, I surprised a Noisy Pitta. I found a way into the forest and ventured into the twilight under the canopy where giant mosses and lycopods grew, and gushes of scented blossom swung down. The canopy, fifty metres above my head, was a total mystery to me.

The first thing I needed was a flora survey. I had been given the name of a self-trained local botanist called David Jinks. He was famous because he had already fulfilled the botanist’s dream. Scrambling in a gully above Natural Arch he came upon a new tree, which he identified as a Eucryphia. This was no mean feat.
Eucryphia
is a small Gondwanan genus of only seven species, two in Chile and five (counting the new one) in Australia. The new Eucryphia is called
Eucryphia jinksii
, and academic botanists have had to make space for David in their hallowed company. He was quick to put together a tree survey for me, and to tell me that my sixty hectares had some of the highest biodiversity to be found anywhere outside the wet tropics. He explained that because we had different soil types, rich basaltic soils and krasnozems striped with sandstone, and a constant supply of moisture percolating down from the higher scarps of the McPherson Range, the Cave Creek forest was both montane and riparian, with odd dryer spots and patches of alluvium. Add the range of altitude, from 250 to 500 metres above sea level, plus the different aspects of these steep slopes, and you had niches to suit just about everything that could grow in any high-rainfall forest within two hundred kilometres.

So I had little plastic signs made, screwed them onto star pickets and had them put up all along the unfenced boundary. ‘Cave Creek Rainforest Rehabilitation Scheme’ they said, and warned passers-by that anyone removing material of any kind from the property would be prosecuted. The name may seem odd, but a lot of thought went into it. Revegetation was the wrong word for what we were doing because it didn’t suggest the element of specificity; we weren’t just stopping erosion, we were replanting a forest. Restoration wasn’t the right word either because it made the trees sound like furniture. I went for ‘rehabilitation’ because it suggested the role that the forest would play in rebuilding itself. So CCRRS it is. The nearest thing to a logo we have is the image of the remarkable inflorescence of the small Bolwarra,
Eupomatia bennettii
. This is a true Gondwanan survivor, one of three species in the single genus of the family Eupomatiaceae. It was ten years before we succeeded in propagating this very special plant. Because the forest frugivores always stole the fruit before it was quite ripe, we finally decided to put a cage over the next fruiting plant we found. After watching the single fruit develop for a whole six months, waiting with increasing impatience till it was truly ripe and ready, we ended up with some hundreds of seedlings.

David discovered galaxies of rare plants,
Ardisia bakeri
,
Rhodamnia maideniana
,
Tapeinosperma repandulum
,
Quassia
Mt Nardi,
Neisosperma poweri
,
Cupaniopsis newmannii
,
Lepiderema pulchella
. On basalt benches under the canopy on the north edge of the property he found many examples of the Southern Fontainea or
Fontainea australis
, recognisable by its oddly jointed leafstalks and the two oil glands on the underside of the base of the leaf.
Syzygium hodgkinsoniae
, Miss Hodgkinson’s lilly pilly, more commonly known as the Rose Apple, like the Fontainea listed as vulnerable, grows profusely all over CCRRS, much to David’s surprise. I had every intention of rebuilding the forest that should have been covering the cleared acres; to discover that by restoring that habitat I would be multiplying the numbers of individuals in threatened, endangered, vulnerable or rare species was an utter bonus.

David warned me to expect a visitor from the Queensland herbarium whose job it was to check that another very rare plant on the property, the Smooth Davidson’s Plum, was still surviving. The consensus used to be that plants that survive only on land in private ownership were doomed. The three sites where this plant was then recorded are all privately owned. There was nothing the herbarium could do to stop me wiping the Cave Creek Davidsonias out of existence; they could only check to see if the record should be changed from ‘endangered’ to ‘critically endangered’ or even ‘extinct’. The Smooth Davidson’s Plum was first described by New South Wales botanists John Williams and Gwen Harden in 1979, and finally named by them in 2000,
Davidsonia johnsonii
, after L. A. S. Johnson.

The late Lawrie Johnson is the acknowledged master of Gondwanan botany in Australia, responsible for the naming of four new plant families, thirty-three new genera and 286 new species, for segregating
Angophora
and
Corymbia
from the genus
Eucalyptus
, and for beginning the research on the Proteaceae that is now coming to fruition. In the preface he wrote for
Flowers and Plants of New South Wales and Southern Queensland
in 1975, Johnson urged readers: