The Tree In Changing Light (5 page)

T
OM
W
YATT
uses shredded newspapers as mulch. He gets the papers from the corner store over the road from Wyatt's Nursery at Kinka Beach, just north of the Tropic of Capricorn. Wet, the shredded newspapers bed down like wads of spaghetti. Soon they are grey-black as certain soils, and in garden beds insects convert them to humus. In a mango orchard at the back, Wyatt dumps loads of the Brisbane
Courier Mail
and the Rockhampton
Morning Bulletin
under the trees. Also colour magazines. They look as if they have been spilt from a trailer and kicked around. This is an experiment. Wild pigs have rooted through them. (He's had dogs in to deal with those.)

Tom is amazed at the wastage of paper in this country. He's putting it back into the soil, where it will become trees again. He doesn't know, at this point, whether printers' ink and the chemicals in the paper are going to suit his purposes. He could probably find out, in the sense that someone could tell him, but he's not about to ask anyone, not about to dig through research findings and discover whatever it is that
scientists reckon. Tom Wyatt is trying this for himself, and then he will know. He's noticed that when his mangoes ripen the flying foxes don't attack them the way they do other people's. The reason is that his blackbutts come into flower at the same time, and flying foxes prefer blackbutt blossom to ripe mangoes. More people should note that. In another aside, he says that bees don't like mango flowers. He doesn't know why. If he comes back to life in another form, he muses, maybe it will be as a bee. Then he'll know.

As he talks, he pulls weeds from pots holding palm seedlings, leaving a trail of intense green stalks on the black plastic weed-mat of his nursery. In different parts of the nursery (open weekends only) his wife and some of the six children are at work. Tom calls it the farm down there. The June sun burns through the shadecloth. Tom doesn't seem like a high-speed weeder, but the work gets done quickly. Weeding is the root of this matter, the point of origin, the base ceremony of planting. If you won't weed, you're not a gardener.

Tom Wyatt is a tall, lean, dusty-pale man with a direct, hyperactive manner. He is fifty years old, with alert observant eyes and thinning hair that was once red. He looks like an earthmoving contractor or a mining engineer—a man accustomed to altering the landscape. Watching him work, flicking aside nettles and nut grass, it's emphatic that weeding is the first principle of horticulture and he's back to first principles all the time.

The everyday word for horticulture is gardening. Not a very grand word to some ears, but a good one in Tom Wyatt's. In the towns along the north Queensland coast gardening was the job councils gave to workers who were
ageing, burnt out. A lot of people thought of it as a pension. There might have been the vestige of an old idea, too, that only servants were gardeners. You weren't fully yourself if you were a gardener. You were somebody else's person. Well, Tom Wyatt has no problems with the word gardener. The thing is to change people's view on words they don't like.

Nothing in gardening follows without the tiny action of selection, a finger and thumb clearing space for a forest. Tom Wyatt doesn't use herbicides or chemical sprays on the farm. He gets down there and pulls the weeds himself. He believes it's a mistake to try and create an environment convenient for human beings. There is no balance in that view, he says—banishing bugs, pushing everything away, creating pristine shelters without recognition of where we belong. ‘Organics is ecology in action.' That's his motto. He applies the rule to himself, his own body. Life isn't something going on somewhere else. It happens inside individuals, and as far as personal health is concerned, ‘our antibodies need a boxing lesson'.

 

In the 1950s, as a boy in the Gulf Country, Tom Wyatt leaned from the saddle and looked at flowers and plants rather than following the other riders on the muster. His older brothers thought he was strange even then. They were all in the same world of rocks and dust and cattle, moving through the hot, open scrub from various agreed starting points, heading for the holding yards. When they gazed around, Tom was trying to add to the experience. He loved the life—throwing sticks on the campfire—boiling the
billy—watching the stars—saddling up at dawn in the dry smell of the grass clearings. In the full heat of day he knew nothing better than to follow a creek downstream, to where it came to a waterfall. And it was like a rule. There would come a break in the trees, sky ahead, a wheeling of birdlife, ducks, geese, pelicans, finches in the shadows, hawks above, fish, tortoises, freshwater crocs nosing through the shallows—the life of the north crowding in to water from the glare of the open plain. Near the drop, creekwater that seemed hardly to be moving was streaked on the surface with lines of force, eddies, whorls and question marks, and then with a glassy edge sliding over—and so everything was broken up, changed. Water tipped into space, plunged into pools creating a snappy, quickly disappearing foam. There were waterlilies in those pools. Barramundi. Leaf matter turning dark, cleansing the flow. A continuous shade. Doves making the sound of coolness.

 

Tom Wyatt's father was born in Kent, and came out to Australia in 1923 as a boy of seventeen on a farm assistance scheme. He took to packhorse travelling and prospecting. His mother came from a station in the Gulf. Tom's father went to war with the Second AIF, was wounded at El Alamein and repatriated back to Australia. Tom was born at Mareeba in 1946, the youngest of six, and did most of his growing up at Charters Towers, among the bare and baking rocks of a tropical mining town—an unlikely place, you might think, for market gardening. But grapes and tomatoes grew there in the winter months, and vegetables thrived in a
rich alluvial soil. Tom's father disappeared for intervals of six months at a time, seeking gold. It was the life for Tom as a boy: chores from pre-dawn until after dark, milking the goats, digging the ground, harvesting the produce. And heading off into the bush whenever he could. He was meant to work on a cattle property—that was his dream—always to get back to the bush. Tom's father taught him to be an observer, to watch what the birds ate, to try things out on his own initiative, and to learn from experience rather than just by asking. Then at a certain point he told Tom about a horticultural apprenticeship in Townsville. It was advisable for a boy to get a trade. Tom said later, ‘He pushed me into it. And when he saw what I'd done, I gave him the credit for it.'

 

The sides of the hills are covered with trees, which grow separately, without underwood
, James Cook observed in 1770, as he crossed the Tropic of Capricorn into Keppel Bay, off Kinka Beach. Inland there was much smoke, indicating a quantity of people. Cook observed through his eyeglass that the farther country was hilly, yet
by no means of a pleasing aspect
. He deduced the presence of a considerable river.

Today, the foreground of James Cook's view is Wyatt's Nursery. There is a succession of basalt headlands and beaches fringed with casuarina and pandanus. The Keppel Bay coast is a landscape of mangroves and mudflats, cattle properties, pineappple farms, and holiday houses. No softness, even at dusk. Paperbarks, tough survivors, in the lagoons behind the beach; picnic tables; traffic roundabouts; a creek with fishing boats sitting on the mud at low tide;
thin-leafed eucalypts; ironbarks and spotted gum, rhodes grass in the cuttings; a south-easterly making whitecaps. Nights thick with silence followed by bright, harsh days waiting for something to happen.

Conversation with Tom Wyatt goes non-stop while he weeds. He mentions a man who bought a ten-hectare block, bulldozed the standing trees including turpentine (a fine timber species), then came and asked advice about planting natives. ‘They were natives you knocked down,' said Tom. The man said the ones he bulldozed were ‘too ugly'. When
Bos indicus
(Brahman) cattle were introduced to Queensland, says Tom, graziers were told by Primary Industries they didn't need shade, so many of them jumped in and cleared all their trees. They liked having an excuse, even if they knew damned well that all living bodies need shade. ‘Bloody pioneers' are still a breed in Queensland in the 1990s. Old timber-getters and sawmillers had an understanding and respect for the forest: ‘Plant six trees for each one taken out.' But ‘bloody pioneers'—they're still around.

The potential for growing trees in Australia is virtually untapped, says Tom. It amazes him. Australian imports of timber are worth more than our meat exports, yet we have the best hardwood in the world. We nail it up inside our houses and hide it from view. Recently he visited Clermont, inland, six hundred kilometres north-west of Rockhampton, and found the people there had planted vast numbers of trees on the floodplain dividing the town. They did it as a Bicentennial project in 1988. ‘They didn't know why they planted it,' says Tom. But it doesn't matter. They've got it and it's thriving. A forest of mixed species.

At the rear of Wyatt's Nusery there are mosquitoes, burrs, beehives, lantana. Waist-high grass like whips of steel and the canopy of the mango trees almost closing over. It is a reminder to me of what it's like to be back in Queensland. An impression, in the hot shade, of time suspended. You could spend your life there holding still. It would be endless and yet it would seem to be over in a moment. Why bother to do anything? I experience an impatience to get out, yet at the same time I want to surrender to what it can offer: to locate a piece of dirt, to build a board-floored tent screened off from insects, to plant trees.

 

By 1974, when he was twenty-eight, Tom Wyatt had risen to second in charge of Parks and Gardens in Townsville and knew that when the top job came round he wouldn't get it. It would go to an outsider because it always did. So he applied for the job of Director of Parks and Gardens in Rockhampton. His boss wrote him a favourable reference, but was appalled. There was a famous botanical gardens in Rockhampton, more than a hundred years old, but Rocky, said the boss, as everyone knew, was stifling, bare, hemmed in from sea breezes by those Berserker hills. It wasn't like Townsville, open to the breezes of the Coral Sea. It was a place so hot that people took blankets with them when they went to hell. Tom Wyatt shrugged and said, well, if he didn't like Rockhampton he'd come back to Townsville and take the top job. He'd be an outsider by then.

Over twenty years later Tom Wyatt is still finding things to do in Rockhampton. A photograph taken from high over the
bare shining galvanised roofs of the city in 1974, compared with one taken from the same position in 1996, shows the change: bush rolling down from the hills, shade filling the bare corridors of this Queensland town—it shows something like the creation of an urban forest with street trees and parkland plantings—a process inseparable from the person of Tom Wyatt, who came in person from the bush to the city.

One of his first projects was to propagate six thousand bottlebrushes and plant them free of charge. The night they went in, two thousand were ripped from the ground by resentful householders. Later when they saw how the bottlebrushes improved their streets they asked for replacement plantings. Parks and Gardens agreed. ‘Don't worry about the lemons. Make more lemonade,' became another motto on Tom Wyatt's lips.

Each year the Rockhampton Parks and Gardens nursery propagates thirty thousand trees. One-third are lost to vandalism and natural death. The rest survive planting out.

Recently a Victorian couple moved to Rockhampton, attracted by ‘heritage trees'. Those particular trees had been growing for only seventeen years. Tom Wyatt had planted them.

 

The office of the Director is a modern glass-walled building buried among trees, just down from the Fern House in the old Botanic Gardens. The scope of the Director's responsibilities are wide. When I arrive to see him one morning he is on the phone deciding what to do about the desecration of the statue of a Brahman bull that stands in the Bruce
Highway median strip on the southern entrance to the city. Someone has attacked the bull with a hammer, smashing its balls. To whoever he is talking on the phone the Director calls them
testes
. The perpetrator he calls a
vandal
. Official exasperation is mixed with personal high spirits in Tom Wyatt's voice: how is he ever going to catch this miscreant? It's always the same twit.
Mix razor blades in the plaster of Paris
, he mutters from the corner of his mouth when he clunks down the phone.

The phone keeps ringing. A trainload of sleepers is ready for inspection. No time today. Interview with this writer. Meetings with mayor, prisons chief, and speech to East Rockhampton Rotary club. Young female office assistant wants his advice on something.

‘Think for yourself,' shouts Tom. ‘What would you do if I had a heart attack?'

‘Jump on your chest, I'm trained in cardiac arrest.'

‘You wouldn't have a hope. My chest is like a steel plate.'

Coffs Harbour is on the phone—what do they want? They want to come up and see what he's doing. Fine. Great. Rocky is the best part of Australia. We ought to secede, cut loose, sail away. Come on up. Now what—people in Rudd Street want to move a tree? On the desk is an emu egg, a ‘No Bull Shit' coaster (barred like an anti-smoking sign), and a sticker with the message: ‘Organics = ecology in action.'

‘No-one in local government wants anything that's sensitive,' says Tom Wyatt about all the things that keep coming at him from every side. ‘So they give it to the Parks Department.'

I want to ask Tom Wyatt if he ever finds time to sit back and rest in the shade of a tree. But the question doesn't occur.
There's no time for it, and the idea of his tree gets lost in his trees, plural. Tom's on the move, jawing. He talks about bringing the bush to the city. Says this often. He's done it already but it's not enough. The way he tilts back in his chair suggests the way a bushman props himself on a stump. The bush is in charge. The idea keeps regenerating inside him. He's already out there under a tree in his mannerisms. There's a belief in the air—as if trees have a quality of making inner changes in people. ‘City people are anti-tree. Trees change the way people live in towns. We're making changes.'