White Beech: The Rainforest Years (16 page)

I parked the car under the Jacarandas, and walked up the track, between tall stands of feral Verbena and Wild Cotton. The cooling air was full of what I knew from my time in Oklahoma as Monarch butterflies,
Danaus plexippus
, known better in Australia as Wanderers, some copulating in mid-air. The story of their presence here was partly known to me; the first Monarch butterflies appeared in Queensland in 1870 or so, and the belief is that they migrated there from northern Brazil under their own wing-power. However they pupate on Wild Cotton,
Gomphocarpus fruticosus
, which is also their larval food plant, and it would seem more likely that they and it were imported together – if only the Gomphocarpus, sometimes called Cape Cotton, were not indigenous to South Africa. Wild Cotton had spread ‘rapidly in different parts of the colony’ by 1856 (
SMH
, 26 November). A related plant,
Asclepias curassavica
, is also called Wild Cotton and I could see it too growing in the tangle alongside the track. In 1879 it was already ‘common around Brisbane, and unfortunately, throughout the colony.’ (
Q
, 22 November)

I turned off the track and struggled over rocks hidden by the long grass downwards towards the creek. From the forest on the slopes above me came a noise like fighting tomcats. Possums, I thought. (Catbirds, actually.) Tiny jewelled birds were bouncing about in the Lantana. Big brown pigeons were gorging on the fruits of Wild Tobacco. I perched on one of the biggest of the rocks and contemplated the forest edge. Half a million dollars for a run-down dairy farm. I didn’t think so.

Out from the clumps of Native Raspberry at the forest edge stepped a bird, a sort-of crow in fancy dress. He was clad in a tabard of a yellow so intense that it seemed to burn, and a cap of the same yellow with a frosting of red on the crown. He walked up to within a few feet of me, fixed me with his round yellow eye and began to move his black rump rhythmically back and forth. There was no doubt about it. He was dancing. Up and down bobbed his gaudy head, in and out went his hips, and all the time he kept a golden eye fixed on my face. Something, a wallaby I thought, thudded through the unseen gully below me. I turned my head to follow the noise and the bird sashayed after, keeping me in his sights. And all the while he kept dancing.

‘What do you want with me, birdie?’

More dancing, a little faster if anything.

Dusk in these latitudes is momentary. The pinkness of the sky above the purple scarps had drained to a phosphorescent green.

‘Birdie, I have to go, or I’ll be caught here in the dark.’

More dancing.

I stood up.

‘Bye bye, birdie.’

The black and gold bird made a little bow and disappeared among the raspberries.

As I came in sight of the house, a man was leaning on the verandah rail.

I said, ‘Hi.’ What I thought was, ‘Sorry, mate, I’m gunna buy your house.’

I came back at dawn the next day and spent a little time wading through the soaking grass, but there was no need. The decision had been made the night before. As I drove back out, a flock of Red-browed Finches flew up beside the car. I felt blessed, excited and frightened, all at once. The place was amazing, bursting with life, to be sure, but so battered! Battered by clearing, by logging, by spraying, and worse. The heraldic bird had thrown down the gauntlet. Was I game to take on the challenge? Could I rebuild the forest? The job was immense but I felt sure that it was doable, just about, if I lived long enough.

I stopped on the causeway to empty a boot. My white sock was sticky with blood. I peeled it off and shook it. Out fell a sated leech. Vital substance of mine was already incorporated in the Cave Creek biomass. Around me the ground was covered with royal blue flowers, like miniature Tradescantias. With a big toe still bleeding copiously I got back into the car and drove south to the Numinbah Gap. As even Queenslanders don’t know where it is, I will use the account provided by Jack Gresty to the Queensland Geographical Society in 1947 which in a few words conveys the grandeur of the place.

The Numinbah Valley lies between high spur ranges of the McPherson Range . . . to the west is the Beechmont Range and to the east the Springbrook Range or Plateau. At the head of the valley there is a steep declivity in the McPherson Range forming a low divide between the Tweed and Nerang Waters and known as the Numinbah Gap. On either side of the Gap the McPherson Range rises to a height of over three thousand feet.

The road from Nerang to Murwillumbah makes its way up towards the headwaters of the Nerang River on the north-facing slopes of the McPherson Range. As it climbed toward the crossing point the roadside weeds proliferated, with impenetrable stands of Buddleia and bamboo to add to the usual garden escapes, while the broad river valley below was all but treeless and chequered with cattle-pads. Even on the higher slopes the rainforest had been stripped away. As the car slid past the tick gate and into New South Wales, regrowth eucalypts gave way to Camphor Laurel, along the fence lines, along the creek banks and along the road. I passed roadside stalls with a few bunches of bananas for sale, an occasional avocado plantation, acres cloaked in deep blue Morning Glory, and even a row of weed eucalypts planted by the local council. I began to wonder if the vivid image of a deep green native forest had been a hallucination.

I was scanning the magazine rack in a lounge at Sydney airport, filling in time before the flight back to England, and there he was, the bird, on the cover of a nature magazine. The caption read ‘Regent Bowerbird’.

The Regent bowerbird (
Sericulus chrysocephalus
) only descends from the rainforest canopy when he is in search of a mate; then he builds his bower and displays to any likely female, spreading his tail and beating his wings, all the while uttering his wheezy call.

My Regent Bowerbird was quite silent, and didn’t display his wings and tail, so he hadn’t taken me for some outsize mate. He pranced and twisted, but didn’t prostrate himself in front of me with his tail fanned and his wings spread, so his wasn’t a mating display. I may have been close to his bower; in such a case a bowerbird will usually fly up into a tree and vocalise loudly to distract attention, rather than trying to dance the interloper away. I didn’t know when this famous cover-bird came high-stepping out of the raspberries that he had been on the 35-cent stamp or that he was the trademark of the Lodge at O’Reilly’s where the bowerbirds are so tame that tourists can get them to feed from their hands. The forest knew what it was doing. It could hardly have chosen a better envoy to help me understand where my future lay.

I dropped the letter with a cheque for the deposit into the airport postbox. The die was cast. For better or worse, the forest has me till death do us part.

The Forest

When the paperwork for the purchase was nearly complete, I rang Jane.

‘I’ve bought something. Sixty hectares.’

‘Where?’

‘Gold Coast City.’

‘You’re not serious.’

‘I am.’

I was. As you come over the border from New South Wales into Queensland on the Nerang–Murwillumbah road, right by the tick gate, through which Queensland cattle may not pass southwards into New South Wales, a sign welcomes you to Gold Coast City. Anything less citified would be hard to imagine.

‘You’re losing it, girl. Why would you buy something on the Gold Coast? You don’t even play golf.’

‘It’s in the Hinterland.’

‘Let me guess: horsiness, fake villages and avenues of Cocos Palms. The food and wine trail. Bad food and worse wine.’

‘No. It’s rainforest. Or abandoned dairy farm. It depends which way you look at it.’

‘You’re the only person I know who would spend two years shopping for desert and come back with rainforest. When am I going to see it?’

I arranged a stay for Jane, her husband Peter and myself at one of many expensive rainforest retreats, which didn’t look terribly far away from Cave Creek on the map but was. We got there late after driving for an hour through blinding rain, the only guests in the place. The kitchen was closed. Morning revealed that we were mere feet away from a just-about-still-working avocado plantation full of angry bees. The ‘ancient’ rainforest our rooms overlooked was actually a mess of tangled regrowth, the only mature trees to be seen in it immense Flooded Gums. I found one luxuriant plant, a rambling passionfruit with pure white flowers, and took its photograph. I now know it only too well as
Passiflora subpeltata
, one of the most invasive weeds in disturbed forest.

Over breakfast, consisting of a variety of boxed cereals and DIY raisin toast, we worked out where we were, which was Mount Tamborine, and where we were going. Mount Tamborine stands on the eastern extremity of the Albert River catchment. Between it and the Nerang River lies the Coomera River catchment. Both these rivers rise on the Lamington Plateau, deep within the trackless confines of the national park, and flow northwards. The range that divides the two catchments is the Darlington Range; the western boundary of the Nerang River Valley is the Beechmont Range which runs at right angles to the McPherson Range, which extends all the way from the sea at Point Danger to Wallangarra, 220 kilometres inland. In the angle between them lies the Lamington Plateau. The movement to turn its 20,590 hectares into a national park was initiated in 1896 by a grazier called Robert Collins, who invited Lord Lamington, the then governor of Queensland, to visit the area. (Lord Lamington, who was more used to visiting his British friends to shoot on their country estates, took the opportunity to shoot a koala.) The eastern boundary of the Numinbah Valley is another national park, the Springbrook Plateau. The only way to get back from Mount Tamborine to Cave Creek was to drive down to the coastal highway and back up the Nerang. Even though Numinbah lies within a few minutes of the Lamington Plateau and Springbrook as the crow would fly, both are hours away by road.

As we drove through the devastated hinterland and along the six-lane Pacific Highway Jane uttered no more than the occasional sigh. The road up through the regrowth forests seemed longer and drearier than usual. Never was I more grateful for the dramatic entrance through the national park. Jane was stunned by the sheer variety of unfamiliar plants. We slid past strings of nuts hanging from the Macadamias and the huge pods dangling from the Black Beans, and down into the alley between the rainforest and the Hoop Pines.

‘Are these yours?’ asked Jane, looking at the rows of Hoop Pines.

‘Not now. They’re the remains of a plantation that was grown on the property before that bit of it was ceded to the national park, and now of course they can’t be harvested. They should be taken out for timber and the park should spend the proceeds on some extra weed control, but there’s no chance.’

We came to a lopsided gate. ‘This is where my property begins.’

On the left a steep slope clothed in Lantana, on the right the other half of the same. Jane was unimpressed.

‘Bit of a challenge,’ said Peter.

That bit was, if I had known it, but a thousandth part of the challenge. There was Lantana all along the forest edges and in every gully, and wherever the land was cleared but not put down to grass. Way up in the forest there are still, ten years on, fifteen hectares that were cleared for bananas that are now full-on Lantana. And Lantana was not the worst of it.

We crossed the causeway over the creek.

‘This is Cave Creek. It’s one of the headwaters of the Nerang River, which rises a bit further up and a bit further south-west, on Mount Hobwee.’

I drove on under a huge cedar dressed from head to foot in Staghorns, Bird’s Nest Ferns and an enormous King Orchid, and on to a second gate. Grazing cattle raised their heads and stared as Peter got out to open and shut the gate. They kept staring as we drove on up to the house, a Queenslander of sorts, standing on cement columns topped with old hub caps, which were meant to stop termites from travelling up into the wood of the house. The key I had been given didn’t fit the lock of the flimsy front door. Before I could kick it in, Peter pried open a window at the end of the verandah, climbed through and let us in.

‘How can people live like this?’ asked Jane as she stepped into the kitchen.

The walls were filthy, but not as filthy as the doorjambs, which were black with grimy handprints. The boarded ceilings sagged, and brown dirt had sifted down through the cracks to gather on every horizontal surface. The windows were curtained with spiderwebs inside and out. The floors were covered with several layers of cheap carpeting, most of it rotten, all of it black with dirt. Three of the internal partitions were so eaten out by termites that you could put your hand through them. The floors of the bathroom and neighbouring lavatory sloped downwards; both were hanging off the side of the house because the joists had rotted away. The septic tank had a young Red Cedar growing out of it. Jane went to see if the lavatory was usable. I heard her lift the top off the cistern and force it to empty. When she ran the water to wash her hands it scalded her. I touched a switch and the light went on.

‘Could be worse,’ said Peter.

‘I’d get rid of all of this,’ said Jane, pushing her toe into the soggy carpeting. ‘And then I’d gurney the whole place out.’