White Beech: The Rainforest Years (41 page)

All of which are good guesses, but they are guesses. What this sterility has to mean is that
D. johnsonii
can propagate itself only vegetatively, in other words, that our plants are clonal. This could be a sign that the species has run to the end of its evolutionary tether, having lost all genetic variability. It may survive like that for millennia, but not if it is required to adapt to changed climatic conditions. What does seem odd is that the plant tends to turn up in the ecotone between cleared land and the forest rather than in the undisturbed forest. Its suckers, which are its sole way of propagating itself, tend to proliferate where the ground has been disturbed. We have propagated it successfully from those suckers, and planted them, not where they were originally found on the steep dark slope where tenants of the past threw their tin cans, beer bottles and car tyres, but on the edges of our forest tracks where they can see the light. Meanwhile, since the coral tree rotted away, the original Davidsonia stool has suckered all over the creek bank. The next move will be to encourage the Davidsonia’s tendency to form a monoculture by removing all competing vegetation within the circumference of the stool.

None of the three species of Davidson’s Plum is being produced commercially on a large scale. In 1999 botanist Kris Kupsch set up Ooray Orchards at Burringbar south of Murwillumbah; he is now growing upwards of 2,000 Davidsonias, including eighteen
D. johnsonii
types from eighteen different sites. It is Kupsch’s intention to collect and propagate Davidsonias from as many genetic populations as possible, in a bid to increase their chances of survival.

Most of the seed developed by any rainforest fruiting species is first and foremost a life-support for the invertebrate members of the forest community and for its birds. Ripe fruit hits the ground carrying a larval load that can be anything from microscopic to gross. All the seeds we collect for planting must first be soaked to drown the larvae that would otherwise eat the seed before it germinated. For the fruit-eating birds, the worms that infest the fruit they eat are an important, often their sole, source of protein. Every single rainforest tree has at least one dedicated insect species that pollinates its flowers and lays its eggs in either flower or fruit.
Drosophila
, the genus that includes the fruit-fly species that helped us to understand genetic mutation, is well represented in the rainforest. No sooner had the settlers cleared the rainforests and planted their fruit groves than the dispossessed fruit flies mounted their counter-attack on behalf of the nurturing forest.

In the rainforest a single tree species is likely to host up to three fruit-fly species in densities of up to seventeen fruit flies per 100 fruits. What this signifies is that populations of endemic fruit flies exist in balance with their host trees and do not threaten their survival. The great majority of fruit flies in their natural habitat are limited to a single plant genus, and most to a single species within the genus (Novotny
et al
.). Pest fruit flies, whether from the Mediterranean or islands in the Pacific, tend to infest a wide variety of fruits, from stoned fruit to citrus, guava and papaya. Attempts to keep pest fruit flies out of Australia have been both expensive and largely ineffective. Our best bet is to nurture the native fruit-fly populations in the hope that they can hold their own.

For years Australians have been planting olive trees, some as a tax dodge, others because lifestyle magazines recommended them for hedging, and some because they hoped to make money from olive oil. Unfortunately the select European types were deemed unsuitable for Australian conditions, and vigorous new varieties were grafted onto African rootstocks (Spenneman and Allen). Because the cost of the manpower needed to collect the fruit and prune the trees was prohibitive, many commercial olive groves were found to be uneconomic and subsequently abandoned. Birds ate the fruit left on decorative olive trees, foxes ate the fruit that fell in the abandoned orchards, and both excreted the seed kernels up hill and down dale, where they sprouted, grew into more trees, produced more olives that fed more birds and foxes and so on exponentially ad infinitum. Since 1992 the olive has been listed as a noxious weed in South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. I would have grown the native olive,
Olea paniculata
, even if it hadn’t been eaten by eight rainforest bird species and even if it hadn’t been impossibly elegant, with its glossy dark leaves and pale branchlets, because its dedicated fruit-fly species are our only defence against weed olives.

It is probably important to point out at this juncture that the Queensland Fruit Fly that is a major pest of Australian horticulture is not a Drosophila but a tephritid fly called
Bactrocera tryoni
. This fly too is endemic to northern New South Wales but, unlike the dedicated Drosophila species, it attacks more than a hundred different fruit crops; its hosts in its native forests are thought to be Syzygium species.

The forest fruit harvest is deeply unpredictable. One year we will have cartloads of native tamarinds and another year none. Some years the forest will be carpeted with black apples, variously called
Planchonella
or
Pouteria australis
. As I crawl around the forest floor, picking up black apples and ticks in almost equal quantities, I am very aware that I am in competition with other animals. One (or more) species eats the apple flesh, leaving the big seeds in little heaps, and the other (or others) leaves the flesh and eats the seed. I needn’t have begrudged them. Pouterias were amongst the first tree species we propagated, and we propagated far too many. We would have had to turn our rainforest into a black apple orchard if I hadn’t taught the workforce their first bitter lesson and made them throw half the precious seedlings away. I stewed the black apple flesh, which was woody enough to make your teeth squeak, and then strained it, to see if there was any pectin in it. There wasn’t. The syrup didn’t set, so I added water and froze it in moulds to make popsicles.

The exploring botanists of the nineteenth century were supposedly looking for ‘useful’ plants that might be suitable for cultivation. Any botanist must know that even the most delicious European apples are descended from small sour crabs, and all the plums from bitter sloes, but wild Australian fruits were expected to be of the same order of toothsomeness as highly bred European ones. It was not until 1851 or so that Australians were informed that they had a native version of the famed Tamarind: ‘The Australian Tamarind is a tall tree, growing in nearly all the scrubs and jungles near the coast, and bears a fruit resembling in appearance and taste the tamarind of the West Indies.’ (
SMH
, 28 August) The Australian tamarinds belong to the sapindaceous genus
Diploglottis
, whereas the historic Tamarind, originally endemic to the Sudan, and now grown from West Africa to China, is fabaceous. The fruits of the Australian tamarinds are held in brown, furry capsules, which split to release brown seeds encased in orange-yellow arils. The sharp tang of the fruit of
Tamarindus indicus
is a valued element in cooking across half the world, but rather than develop the Australian fruit to rival it, Australian horticulturists imported seedlings of
T. indicus
from anywhere and everywhere. The Australian version remained unexploited until ‘Bush Tucker’ became the fashion in the 1980s. Even now nobody seems to want to do anything with Australian tamarinds but make them into jam or a drink.

The settlers in the Numinbah Valley were not horticulturists but farmers with families to feed. One of their motives for choosing the Numinbah Valley was that it gave them the opportunity to grow a wide range of tasty and nourishing fruit. The trend was set by the very first settler. From childhood Frank Nixon would have been regaled with his mother’s praises of the paradisaical fruit gardens made by her forebears in the West Indies. Thomas Dougan’s Profit plantation boasted an astonishing array of fruiting trees.

At its sides are smooth walks of grass; and between these and the sugar-canes are borders planted with all the choice tropical fruits, rendering a promenade upon the water, or its banks, most fragrant and inviting, and offering to the eye and the palate all the variety of oranges, shaddocks, limes, lemons, cherries, custard apples, cashew apples, avagata pears, grenadilloes, water-lemons, mangoes and pines. (Pinckard, 203–4)

Shaddocks are the citrus we now call grapefruit; cashew apples are Linnaeus’s
Anacardium occidentale
, which is called ‘marañon’ in most Spanish-speaking countries, and ‘caju’ or ‘cajueiro’ in Portuguese; ‘avagata pears’ are avocadoes, ‘pines’ pineapples. When William Guilfoyle visited the Tweed in 1870 he was impressed by the fruit garden Rosalie Adelaide Nixon had planted at the Hill.

Mr [George] Nixon’s house stands upon a very charming site and one day, not far distant, it will be surrounded by an orchard of the choicest fruits. (
BC
, 7 January)

Around his Numinbah homestead Frank Nixon had ‘a garden planted with oranges, lemon trees, vines etc.’. The settlers who moved into the valley after him followed his example. Queensland government agents tried to lure settlers by portraying the colony as offering extraordinary opportunities for horticulture, with ‘supernatural yields of fruit . . . oranges and grapes growing by the wayside . . .’ ([Carrington], 8–9)

The very first exotic fruit to be grown in Australia was probably an apple. In 1788, when his ship the
Bounty
, then charting the south-east coast of Tasmania, called in at Adventure Bay on Bruny Island, William Bligh planted ‘three fine young Apple-Trees in a growing state’. When he returned in 1792 he found that one had survived. In the 1820s Tasmanian settlers began to sell the surplus production of their private orchards on the open market and by 1860 apples were an important export. In 1966 6 million boxes of apples were shipped from Port Huon, but the industry was already in decline. Australia now produces only 0.1 per cent of the world’s apples, while China produces 40 per cent. The variety most often chosen for Tasmanian cider is the Sturmer Pippin, born and bred only fifteen kilometres from my house in England. In England it has never been favoured for cider production, which is centred not on Essex in the rain-poor south-east of the country where I live, but on Somerset and points south-west.

In 1797 when George Suttor decided that, with twenty pounds to his name, he would emigrate to the infant colony of New South Wales, he turned to Sir Joseph Banks for assistance. He and the other settlers who arrived on HMS
Porpoise
in 1800 were each given a grant of 200 acres of land, a house, tools and two or three indentured labourers. Suttor had no sooner secured his land in the Baulkham Hills than he set about growing oranges; by 1807 he was selling them at the market in Charlotte Square for the considerable sum of two shillings and sixpence a dozen. In 1839 Richard Hill acquired land on the Lane Cove River, where he established a successful citrus orchard to which he often travelled in a boat rowed by ten Aboriginal oarsmen. When George Bennett visited The Orangery, as it was called, in 1858, he found Seville, Navel and Mandarin oranges as well as lemons growing in profusion; Hill, who was shipping oranges to the goldfields, had already sold nearly half a million that year, and was making £50 profit per day (
ADB
).

Nobody stopped to consider whether or not such introductions might disrupt the native vegetation. The native vegetation, on which the indigenous inhabitants had thrived for forty thousand years or more, was thought to be mere scrub, valueless. Nobody sought to quarrel with the conviction that ‘There are few wild fruits in Capricornia, and such as there are, are poor and tasteless.’ (Bennett, 131)

Even as they headed out to collect specimens of an astonishing variety of native plants, the first explorers took with them cherry pips and peach stones to plant as they went along. Allan Cunningham, travelling with John Oxley along the Lachlan River in 1817, planted acorns, quince seeds and peach stones wherever the soil seemed particularly good. As the son of the head gardener at Wimbledon House, Cunningham must have known not only that his peaches were most unlikely to survive without cosseting, but also that if they did, they would almost certainly revert to a wild form. The many cultivars of the peach are assumed to belong to a single species which, although it is originally Chinese, was named by Linnaeus
Prunus persica
. What the type may be nobody knows, because Chinese horticulturalists had been selectively breeding peaches for at least two thousand years before the fruit came to the knowledge of Europeans. Self-seeded peaches have turned feral in thirteen of the United States; they are listed as significant weeds in the Adelaide Hills and on the Galapagos Islands.

Ludwig Leichhardt too was given peach stones to take with him on his journey overland from the Darling Downs to Port Essington. On 26 January 1845 he reached a creek north of the Mackenzie River which he named Newman’s Creek after the horticulturist Francis William Newman: ‘Here I planted the last peach-stones, with which Mr. Newman the present superintendent of the Botanic Garden in Hobart Town kindly provided me. It is however to be feared that the fires, which annually overrun the whole country, and particularly here, where the grass is rich and deep even to the water’s edge, will not allow them to grow.’ (Leichhardt, 122) When Leichhardt passed that way again two years later he found no vestige of a peach tree (Bailey, J., 304). We should be grateful that Leichhardt’s peaches didn’t grow. Thanks possibly to that same Mr Newman, feral peach trees are now serious weeds in the bushland around Hobart.