A nation hostage to the gum

Paul Sheehan is a columnist and editorial writer for The Sydney Morning Herald, where he has has been Day Editor and Washington correspondent. He is the author of two number-one best-sellers, 'Girls Like You' and 'Among The Barbarians' and been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times and numerous anthologies.

January 30, 2003

Can we talk about the war that has actually started, the one in this country, the one with real casualties and no easy slogans? The war we are losing.

"We are basically at war," David Foster, the author and scientist, told me this week. He had seen the home of one his daughters destroyed in the recent Canberra inferno. "We're fighting this war with a bunch of amateurs, volunteers, and one day we'll need a professional service to fight for us and it will cost a fortune."

Foster has written often about the cunning, adaptable, dangerous, selfish and toxic species - the eucalypt - that has just humbled us yet again. In The Glade Within The Grove, the novel which won Foster the Miles Franklin Award in 1997, he offered this warning, which seems to foreshadow his own family's misfortune: "Eucalypts thrive on global warming. They are the tree of Siva. They are the tree of the future. They are the enemy of the farmer, the friend of the hunter-gatherer. 'Your days are numbered' they say to us ..."

In this week of Australia Day celebrations and the aftermath of yet another bushfire tragedy - this time in the bushland national capital - and ongoing major fires it is worth reassessing the qualities of the nation-shaping eucalypt. It is a double-edged icon. As the American scholar Stephen Pyne wrote in The Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia (1991): "Eucalyptus has given the bush its indelible character. It is not only the Universal Australian, it is the ideal Australian - versatile, tough, sardonic, contrary, self-mocking, with a deceptive complexity amid the appearance of massive homogeneity; an occupier of disturbed environments; a fire creature."

Don't be overly sentimental about the country's most successful coloniser, with its glorious fragrance, the blue sheen it creates on distant forest canopies from the oil droplets on its leaves, or the array of familiar shapes and evocative names - the red gum, the blue, the grey, the black, the stringybark, the ghost, the scribbly, the ribbon, the coolibah, ironbark, bloodwood, jarrah, mugga, yellow box, red box, white mallee, yellow mallee, red mallee, rose, salmon, tallowwood, sugar, blackbutt, woolly butt, river red and river peppermint.

Have a closer look, which people are belatedly doing in Canberra right now, where the fingers of combustible bush reached into the suburbs like insurgent forces. The triumph of the eucalypt as the dominant Australian species, made possible by its great alliance with fire, and with Aboriginal firestick farming, has made Australia a more arid country. The process is ongoing and has reached the point where rural Australia has a full-blown salinity crisis.

"The reason why we Europeans have never been really comfortable here is that they [the eucalypts] don't approve of us," says Foster. "They are not compatible with our farming ways. They make the landscape more arid. They don't produce anything we eat. They spread fire. They encourage fire. I do believe the eucalypt is actively seeking to create a drier climate. It suits their purpose."

Eucalypts are also toxic - most plants can't grow within 10 to 20 metres of them because of the toxins they drop into the soil around them, and these toxins leach downhill and into the river systems. They are not interested in the welfare of most other species, including us.

In drought, the eucalypt, especially the stringybark, drapes incendiary streamers of tinder. The oil in its leaves is flammable. Places disturbed by fire open areas to sunlight, allowing eucalypt seedlings a chance to outgrow more shade-tolerant rivals. During fires, seeds rain down from the charred canopy. The fluffy ash buries them in an environment of mineralised biochemicals. Fire has swept competition away.

Not all eucalypts are firebombers. Snow gums and alpine ash would have been devastated by the most recent conflagrations in the Snowy Mountains. But most eucalypts are prepared to endure in a hot and arid climate. Their canopy drapes downward to reduce leaf temperatures. The leaves are hard, to reduce moisture loss. They are shed infrequently, to preserve energy. As dry periods extend, the root system expands, searching for new water sources, and can grow vast as it compensates for the poverty of the soil. It obsessively retains and recycles nutrients. The seeds can remain dormant for decades.

Eucalypts are insatiable water-gatherers, while their root systems have an enormously important role (like those of other trees) in keeping the water table down and salinisation at bay, acting like an enormous hydrology system across the continent. But these benefits flow to us incidentally, and in the national battle against salinity, there are more potent natural weapons than eucalypts, most of which, in Professor Pyne's words, burn "readily, greedily, gratefully" and easily shed burning bark; their seeds require oven-like heat to germinate, and give menace to the migrating winds. No wonder the calendar of Australian history is constantly updated with conflagrations: Black Thursday, February 6, 1851; Red Tuesday, February 1, 1898; Black Friday, January 13, 1939; Black Tuesday, February 7, 1967, Ash Wednesday, February 16, 1983, and now the Black Weekend, January 18, 2003, when fire rained down on Canberra, razing 500 homes and endangering hundreds more. It could have been much worse. David Foster was in Canberra on January 18 and saw what was possible: "Firebrands were settling all over the city but the wind hit late in the day and then dropped. If it had hit at midday, there could have been fires all over the city."

The cycle of backburning, which will now intensify in the wake of these latest battles, will probably accelerate the primacy of the eucalypt, reduce biodiversity, and maintain the evolutionary march towards a drier continent. There are huge, emotional and fundamental issues about how to manage fire in this country, and no easy answers. The National Parks and Wildlife Service and the Snowy Mountains Authority are bitterly criticised for destocking land and allowing massive build-ups of combustible understorey.

The eucalypt hasn't been our most popular export, either. Ashley Hay's recent book Gum (Duffy & Snellgrove, 2002) records that Australian eucalypts have been exported around the world, sometimes with disastrous results. It is a hated tree in India and places around the Mediterranean.

The eucalypt may be beloved here, it may be the great Australian, but unless we start to understand the environment we share with it, the eucalypt could outlast the consumer society we have built here, and make a mockery of our vanities.

psheehan@smh.com.au

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