Four Fires (64 page)

I'm going to sound like I know more than I do because Tommy's the one that knows most things about the bush and fire. I mean he's uneducated and probably a bit thick with some things, but when it comes to the bush he uses the right terms and likes to get things correct and goes crook when I don't learn the Latin names for things.

John Crowe laughs and says he's always been like that. They're real good mates and have been since they were kids and he tells how when they were just little nippers and they'd go out shooting birds with slingshots, he'd be aiming at a regent honeyeater and Tommy would fire a stone into the bush and the bird would fly off. 'Why'd you do that?' John would yell at him, really pissed off.

Don't see too many of them around here, best not kill it,'Tommy would say. Even then he was a conservationist without knowing it.

'He showed no bloody mercy on crows though, even this one,' John Crowe laughs.

Tommy and John Crowe are a funny pair together, sort of a I contradiction in terms. Tommy looking the way he does and such a little bloke who never says boo to a goose and John Crowe a big bastard and the full operator, real quick on the uptake and not scared to get into a donnybrook if he has to. He's always got a scam he's working on and an opinion on just about everything.

Funny that, small ratty blokes are supposed to be the lightning lips I and the big blokes the slow ones, but Tommy and John Crowe are just the opposite. Though nobody says nothing bad about Tommy Maloney in John Crowe's presence if he doesn't want his nose broken. He's the one who most often brings Tommy home when he's been on a bender | and is down at the lake with the other deros.

Sometimes he has to carry Tommy over his shoulder like a sack of I potatoes and throws him in the back of his ute because he stinks to high heaven. John Crowe then takes him to the abattoir, undresses him, hoses him down and makes him sit in the sun in the nuddy so he can't escape.

Little Tommy sitting in a corner with his broken face resting on his clasped knees, all hunched up, drying out in the sun. John Crowe leaves him there while he comes home and gets a clean shirt and trousers then goes back and dresses Tommy before he| delivers him to us in some sort
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of respectable shape.

Other times Tommy's gear is that ratshit, that John Crowe just throws it in the abattoir furnace and buys new stuff. He never lectures Tommy, they're mates, that's all. He doesn't judge him or try to change him. I reckon Tommy loves him more than a brother, even more than us. No, a lot more than us! Tommy doesn't have that much reason to love his kids and only Sarah and little Colleen are his anyway. Nancy, though, doesn't work things that way. As far as she's concerned, for| better or worse, Tommy's our dad.

When Tommy's been up the hill, John Crowe visits him every day come rain or shine, he never misses. We're his family and have to keep to the visiting hours, which are once a week and strictly observed unless an inmate is sick or something and even then he has to be practically dying for them to let you in.

I dunno how he does it. John Crowe just walks in every morning on his way to the shire workshops, says gidday to the warder at the gate, who waves him past. Some people say he's got something on Mr Sullivan the governor but they don't say what it could be, because the boss of the prison is a pretty respectable bloke and well regarded even by the Protestants.

Anyway, John Crowe sees that his old mate is okay and usually brings him a bit of tucker, a couple of Vegemite and cheese sandwiches or a homemade rissole and a roast potato. Tommy eats like a bird anyway. John Crowe always brings in a packet of twenty Turf cigarettes and the book Tommy's asked for. The librarian, Mrs Botherington, must think John Crowe is just about the best reader of things about nature in Yankalillee. He's never explained to her that the books are for Tommy. She's a bit prim to say the least and he doesn't want to take any chances.

'Mate, never know how people in this town think,' he once said to me. 'Maybe she'd reckon a bloke doing a stretch couldn't be trusted with books. Can't take no chances, if the little bloke couldn't read, he'd go round the twist in there.'

Tommy reads a book about, say, the various types of native grasses to be found in Australia and in the book will be a reference to another book about some aspect of flora and he'll be onto it.

John Crowe will then ask Mrs Botherington to get it in from the State Library in Melbourne.

Sometimes she kicks up a stink but John Crowe's got her twisted around his little finger and he looks after her little Morris Minor so she'll usually make the effort. 'I wouldn't do it for anyone else, Mr Crowe, but I know your bushfire research is very valuable, one day perhaps you'll write something we can be proud of?'

'Sure thing, Mrs Bother,' he'll laugh, 'Maybe a whole library to make you even busier, eh?'

When he told me this, he chuckled. 'Last time I wrote something real serious was this heart I carved into the trunk of a Scribbly Gum and carved me initials and the initials of this sheila I was in love with, Elizabeth Logan.'

We were sitting down and he drew this heart in the dust at his feet with his finger and added the initials:

J.C.

'I got to kiss her once but that was about it. I used to dream about touching her tits but she'd never let me. She married some bloke over in Bright and had seven kids, every one of them got plenty of what I got nothing of. There's been a kid hanging on them beautiful boobs for bloody years.'

When we are in the bush together, John Crowe knows Tommys safe from the dreaded grog and, while they don't say much, you can see them both sort of relaxing, enjoying being together, having a smoko next to a creek or laughing when they find a wombat hole or come across a veined sun-orchid tucked away under an overhanging rock. Or they'll be sitting on the bank of a river fishing, even John Crowe not chatting on for a change, the two of them watching a white-faced heron land in the reeds and, turning and grinning, sharing the moment, saying nothing but knowing something together only they know.

I'm the kid with the .22 rifle who tags along and who is being taught things. And a lot of what
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I'm being taught is about eucalyptus trees. 'Know your eucalyptus and you'll know your fire,'

Tommy says. I also do the rabbit shooting and an occasional fox. Sometimes the cow cockies ask us to cull the roos, but Tommy won't, even when their numbers have grown to plague proportions.

'It's not them that's grown to plague proportions, it's us! Rabbits and foxes are vermin, introduced by the white settler. The kangaroo and the wallaby were here before us, fuck the sheep and the cattle. Far as I'm concerned the wildlife's got the first right to the grass!' I guess Tommy, like Mr Baloney before him, would never had made a living on the land, both too interested in allowing the wildlife to have a go at surviving after the white man cometh.

Tommy also reckons that DDT and Dieldren used by farmers are doing a lot of damage to the wildlife, specially birds. 'You don't hear the birdsong like you used to and some species I haven't seen around for a few years,' he'd say when we were out and about.

He'd make me climb up a tree and look into a bird's nest. 'How many eggs?' he d shout up at me. Most often it'd only be one, sometimes two. 'Should be three.'

Once when we found a little, cracked egg on the ground, Tommy held it up ever so gently to the light, 'See that, Mole,' he said, 'the shell's so thin it's almost soft, shouldn't be like that. It's pesticides doing that.'

You couldn't prove any of this, of course, and anyway nobody would have listened to Tommy.

They think DDT is one of the great inventions of mankind and don't care if all the birds go and the little bush animals as well, as long as the lucerne, tobacco and fruit isn't eaten by pests.

Tommy said when he was a kid, it was the Chinese mostly who grew the tobacco and vegetables and they used herbs for pesticides and the birds were okay and so was the tobacco.

'Only thing that's different now is the pesticides, so it stands to reason that's to blame.'

Now let me tell you just a little about eucalyptus trees and how they came about in Australia and no other place in the world. First thing to know is that during the last 730,000 years Australia has been through eight major climatic changes from glacial, which is real cold, to interglacial, which is warm. Each time it's returned to warm, two types of trees returned, rainforest and sclerophyll (hard leaves), each fighting the other for dominance. Both managed to hang on until about 130,000 years ago when the sclerophyll won the battle and took over as the dominant species, forcing the rainforest into wet gullies and into some of the more tropical rainfall areas.

There's one thing to be said for being in prison, Tommy gets to read stuff brought in by John Crowe that he'd never normally have a chance to read. He may not know a whole lot about some things, but when it comes to the Australian bush he is a walking encyclopaedia. He can make it interesting too, so you don't get bored. Like for instance the human hair. He was talking to me about early times when Australia was drifting away, having broken off the main crust of what was the earth at that time.

Think about this, Mole, Australia broke away from Antarctica and drifted north at the rate of the growth of a human hair!'

That's not the sort of thing you hear every- day. 'So what stopped it so it's where it is>' I asked.

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'Nothing, it's still doing the same/ Next time you need a haircut, just remember the amount the barber cuts off is how far Australia has moved since the last time you had your hair cut.

Then, as Australia drifted further and further north, undergoing prolonged periods of drought,'

Tommy explained, 'only the tough and the opportunistic trees and bushes could make a go of it and the toughest of all these hard-leafed trees were the eucalyptus.'

Remember when he took me out that first time and went crook when I didn't know the name of a gum tree? At the time I supposed I was pretty dumb, but I reckoned there'd maybe be, you know, half a dozen types and he'd teach me their names. Well, it isn't like that, there's over six hundred species, all of which evolved and adapted brilliantly to the particular terrain they happened to find themselves in.

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Tommy lets you have bits of information, never too much at one time, so over a long period you remember all the bits because it's like only one thing to remember at a time. I recall we were sitting beside a creek near an old mining camp near Woolshed called Hopeless Dig. There'd been a bit of a bushfire in a small stand of gum but the rains had come and Tommy pointed to the canopy of a Scribbly Gum, how it was green with new leaves.

'This fire's come through only three days ago and already the new leaf is out, there's been almost no rain, but enough to get them going. If the same amount of rain had fallen but there'd been no fire, the tree would still be sitting tight. That's the eucalyptus for you, the great opportunist. You see, way back in the dawn of history they couldn t beat fire so they decided to co-operate with it, to make fire a part of their personal survival technique. They took fire head-on and won, so that they are no longer scared of the flames. Clever, eh?'

'Just them, I mean only the eucalyptus?'

'Some other trees and plants do a bit of this as well, but the old eucalyptus has elevated nutrient scavenging and hoarding to an art form no other genus can begin to match. In fact most species of eucalyptus are not only fire-co-operative and adapted but also fire-dependent. Fire is what makes them what they are and even keeps them alive.'

Tommy doesn't speak like this when he's normal, only when he s explaining things in nature, then he uses words like 'fire co-operative,

'genus' and 'fire dependent'. I think he likes the language of the books and wants to get things right.

Everyone knows that Australia has the most impoverished soil in the world. It's stuff you learn in geography at school. But lots of people don't know that this is because we've experienced almost no volcanic upheaval. Volcanic eruptions serve a purpose, they recycle the soil and make it rich again. Put this absence of volcanic activity together with the wet periods and the dry, the cold and the hot, and most of the nutrients in the soil got used up or washed away long ago and the soil became impoverished.

Tommy was explaining all this to me when he said, 'Now this is the clever part, this is where fire and the eucalyptus come in. When fire burns natural fuel, like dried bush and undergrowth, twigs, bark, seed capsules and the like, they release nutrients which would otherwise be locked away in the unused fuel material.'

'How come, locked away?' I ask.

Well, these nutrients are stored in dead wood, which is like stockpiling fertiliser in a farmer's shed. It's no bloody good there, you've got to take it out of the shed and spread it around, see.

Fire does that, unlocks the wood shed and the nutrients are in the ash. If there wasn't any fire to recycle these precious nutrients, the supply already in the soil would eventually be used up and we'd become one great big desert. We've got enough of that anyway, being the driest land on earth.'

Tommy then explains how the eucalyptus has become the supreme opportunist and has found a way to grab a hold of these nutrients not only for immediate use so that they can recover from the big burn or live through the next drought, but also to store them for later use in prolonged drought periods.

Talk about survival, how's this? Say for instance a wildfire, which is a fire that's started with lightning and is out of control, kills or severely weakens a patch of old-growth eucalyptus forest.

Immediately after the fire passes, the seeds rain down from the scorched crowns onto the burnt forest floor below.

Once we're walking along in the forest when Tommy bends down and picks up this little gum pod. You know, the ones you see lying around and don't even bother to notice. 'See this, Mole, empty.'

'What's empty?'