White Beech: The Rainforest Years (28 page)

The ships’ carpenters of the First Fleet no sooner clapped eyes on the Australian cedars than the race was on.

Cedar quality was well known in the naval timber trade, for India had over many years supplied both cedars – the coniferous Indian cedar (
Cedrus deodara
) and the deciduous toon – to European navies and civilian merchants. It would seem that most British naval personnel and officers of marines at that time could easily identify cedar by sight and smell. At least one would have thought so. Yet it did take a while for Phillip, Hunter, Collins, White, Tench, Dawes and others who were bright enough to be excited at the discovery of a marvellous timber to drop the ‘walnut’ and ‘perhaps mahogany’ and state the obvious – those huge trees, with their beautiful rich canopy of leaves in summer, growing on the banks of the Nepean/Hawkesbury were cedars. (Vader, 21)

To the simple-minded among us, among whom I am proud to count myself, there is nothing obvious about the cedar-ness of
Toona australis
. If the Cedar of Lebanon and the other members of the genus
Cedrus
are cedars, then the Australian Red Cedar is not one. No one has ever argued that the White Cedar (
Melia azedarach
) is a cedar, obviously or otherwise. The White Cedar and the Red, and the Incense Cedar (
Anthocarapa nitidula
) are in the Meliaceae, as is the Onion Cedar (
Owenia cepiodora
),
whose wood, when the genuine article was exhausted, was soaked in running water to remove the characteristic onion smell, sawn and sold as Red Cedar, to such an extent that mature Onion Cedars are now almost as rare as old-growth Red Cedars. There are no fewer than three species called Pencil Cedar. One of them,
Dysoxylum mollissimum
, is in the same family, as is its relative
D. rufum
, sometimes called Bastard Pencil Cedar. The other two Pencil Cedars,
Polyscias murrayi
and
Glochidion ferdinandi
, are not even distant relatives, nor is the Black Pencil Cedar,
Polyscias elegans
.
Euroschinus falcata
is not a cedar either, though it is called by some Chinaman’s Cedar because its wood is another cheap substitute for Red Cedar. It is a member of the Anacardiaceae, along with Yellow Cedar,
Rhodosphaera rhodanthema
. Every one of these pseudo-cedars grows in the Cave Creek rainforest. Catch me calling anything an ‘obvious’ cedar.

In 1791 Governor Phillip sent samples of Red Cedar collected from the Hawkesbury district back to England, together with potted sample plants for Sir Joseph Banks (Vader, 21). Within a few months Hawkesbury cedar was being felled wholesale and delivered to Port Jackson for use in the new colonial buildings. What made the process easier was that Red Cedar floats high in the water. For the early timber-getters, who were working along the coastal forests and lower reaches of the rivers, it was a relatively easy matter to fell the trees, and snig the logs to the nearest watercourse, where they were lashed together and floated to coastal ports to be shipped overseas. The work was dangerous: ‘There is much bullock-punching and rafting up to your middle in water. A timber-getter has much of the aquatic animal about him, and does not care much for sharks, fiddlers or stingarees, in the muddy waters. He is a caution to snakes at any time . . .’ (
BC
, 5 August 1876)

The first attempt at regulating the industry was made in 1795 but, with no way of policing the area or of exercising legislative control, the activity of the timber-getters continued unchecked. Ships making landfall anywhere along the coast were only too ready to load up with cedar as ballast. Within months of the discovery of the Hunter River in 1797, the timber-getters had felled most of the cedar that grew along its banks. By 1798 Red Cedar was the colony’s third-largest export. In 1802 the colonial administration issued a more rigorous order, which simply proved that earlier attempts to stop the rush for ‘red gold’ had been ineffectual. The timber-getters, way ahead of the game, had already pressed northwards into uncharted territory. By 1829 they had opened up the Manning River, by 1832 the Macleay, by 1838 the Clarence, and in every case the result was the same. Once the forests were torn apart, the increased run-off brought more topsoil to the rivers. The once deep and fast-flowing streams became shallow and sluggish.

The cedar-getters forged onwards, into the vast rainforest known as the Big Scrub in the valley of the Richmond River and swiftly on to the Tweed. Others were also moving southward from the new convict settlement of Moreton Bay, now Brisbane. Here they encountered resistance from the local Aboriginal peoples but, even so, ‘valuable rafts of cedar, beech, pine &c’ were a common sight on the southern reaches of Moreton Bay (
BC
, 5 August 1876). By 1870 the valuable timber was gone from all the accessible parts of south-east Queensland. One of the few places where it could still be found was Numinbah.

Timber-getting was a tough way to make a living anywhere. Bernard O’Reilly gives a wonderfully vivid account of how his brothers and cousins dealt with forest on the other side of the Nerang Valley, on the Lamington Plateau, forest very similar to CCRRS. ‘First hooks were used to slash the thorny, stinging entanglements that defied entry to the great forest . . .’ (O’Reilly, 101–2) The hooks were what Australians call brush hooks, which are the same as the British hedging tools called slashers. To keep its operator out of range of lashing spines and stinging leaves, not to mention the odd affronted snake, the brush hook has a long straight handle and a heavy slightly curved blade. It is used as much to bash down the brush as to slice through it, but the blade is kept razor-sharp, to fell at a stroke any of the many saplings that crowd the forest floor. The understorey for several yards all around the target tree would be slashed with the hook to allow room for the axe swing, leaving serried ranks of pointed stakes.

The thorny entanglements are many, most commonly Cockspur Thorn, Lawyer Vine and Prickly Supplejack. Cockspur Thorn (
Maclura cochinchinensis
) will grow right through forest trees, to emerge in the canopy as branching sprays of long sharp spines. Lawyer Vine (
Calamus muelleri
), also known as Hairy Mary and Wait-a-while, is actually a palm, that grows in long canes that loop and snake through the undergrowth. Every part is armed with thousands of spines, all sharp and capable of drawing blood, but worst of all are the almost invisible developing flower spikes whose tiny hooks catch in flesh or cloth and hold on. To struggle is to give the springing fronds another opportunity to take hold. To pick the toothed fronds off is to end up bloody. Prickly Supplejack (
Ripogonum
spp.) is easier to deal with, but not much.

The stinging guardians of the forest are first and foremost what the old botanists called
Urtica gigas
, the tree nettle, now called
Dendrocnide excelsa
, but still in the Urticaceae. O’Reilly, who tells a harrowing tale of how his brother Tom ended up wrapped in the branches of a giant stinger, called it Gympie Gympie. (Gympie is a version of a Yugambeh word meaning ‘stinging tree’.) The true Gympie Stinger is
D. moroides
, common further north. Our Giant Stinger has bigger leaves that are truly heart-shaped, whereas the Gympie Stinger leaves are ovate and often peltate, which means that the leafstalk instead of attaching to the edge of the leaf blade is attached within it. Both trees sting like fire, delivering formic acid through fine stellate hairs that cover every part of the plant. From the beginning of our work in the forest I have loved this species and worked hard to propagate it. (No professional grower will offer it, for obvious reasons.) Not only are the young trees very beautiful with their foot-long heart-shaped leaves of apple-green silk-velvet, each accurately pinked around the margin, they are exceptionally willing, springing up wherever there is disturbance, holding up their huge leaves like shields to screen the wounded forest from draughts and other noxious influences. They offer a salient reminder that trees are not for hugging. There is no room for touchy-feeliness in the forest.

You’d reckon that such offensiveness in a plant would be principally a protection against being eaten, but in fact
Dendrocnide excelsa
is the worst victim of herbivory in the whole forest community. Every mature stinger has leaves reduced to lace by a chrysomelid beetle,
Hoplostines viridipennis
, whose mouth parts are not such that it is troubled by stinging hairs.

It is strange, but becoming less strange to me as I begin to understand the forest, to think that the role of the Giant Stinger is not to protect itself from herbivory but to defend the forest. The leaves of mature trees up in the canopy sting far less than the leaves that their juvenile offspring present at the level of face or neck.
D. excelsa
is helped by a sneaky relative,
D. photinophylla
, the Shiny-leaved Stinger, which is far less distinctive, having leaves of regulation Hookers Green that resemble the leaves of lots of other understorey plants.
The native herbaceous nettle,
Urtica incisa
, stings with almost as much vim as its tree relatives. In all three cases, to wet the skin is to reactivate the delivery system in the hairs, renewing the painful burning, sometimes for weeks.

In the Cave Creek rainforest the huge trees clutch at the rocks with wandering flanges rather than sending down a single anchoring root. As O’Reilly says, the trees ‘are supported mainly by high buttresses which in many cases extend more than twelve feet from the tree proper and which make tree-felling from the ground level an impossibility. This calls for the use of a springboard; made of light wood, four feet long and a foot wide, it has at one end a steel tip, which is inserted into a horizontal slot cut into the tree.’ (102) The tip of just such a springboard has been found by the workers at CCRRS. The timber has rotted away; all that is left is the massive forged iron V and four stout nuts and bolts still hanging in their sockets. There is a downturned tooth at the apex of the V so that as the axeman bounced on the board he drove the tip further into the trunk.

Some fellers cut toe-holes in the tree so they could climb up and fix the springboard, others knocked up a makeshift platform-cum-ladder. Before chopping or sawing could begin, the cutters had to study the tree, assess any twist or hollow in the trunk, decide which way it would fall, and cut out a shallow wedge or ‘scarf’ on that side. They would tap the tree with the back of the axe, listening to hear if it was ‘piped’, that is, if there was a hollow running up inside it. The scarf was offset slightly to leave a heel, in the hope of preventing the tree’s suddenly snapping off as the saw teeth or axe blade cut further into it. The bark was then peeled away so that it wouldn’t clog the teeth of the saws. If the scarf was wrongly placed, and the weight of the tree pulled it in the wrong direction, the saw would be trapped, so wedges were driven into the cut to keep it open.

on this narrow rocking perch the settler swings his razor-edged axe, sometimes twenty and even thirty feet from the ground, which bristles with the sharp stumps of slashed undergrowth. Then, when the tree begins to go, he must descend swiftly, bringing not only his axe but his springboard. All good fellers bring their boards to the ground to obviate the possibility of fouling by the falling tree. (O’Reilly, 102–3)

There is no knowing now how our springboard came to be abandoned in the forest. The forged iron tip would not have been jettisoned even if the springboard had broken; it would have been unscrewed from the broken board and fitted to the new one. If it was left behind, it was because retrieving it was impossible. For a springboard to be abandoned, there must have been an accident, one of many in the forest. I keep the iron tip as a sacred relic, sacred to the memory of the human beings – and the trees – that lost their lives.

The O’Reilly boys all at one time or another sustained terrible injuries from their own axes. Ped and Herb both severed leg tendons; Pat buried his axe in his abdomen; Norb stitched a cut on his leg with needle and cotton. By way of variation on the self-injury theme, Mick fell from his springboard and was impaled on a spike. The most dangerous things in the forest were not however the men’s axes but the enormous trees, with their long clear boles and heavy canopy. The largest living Red Cedar recorded was 54.5 metres tall; dropping it must have been like dropping Nelson’s Column.

The swaying of the heavy tops may form wind cracks right up through the heart of the tree. Suppose – and here I quote a case that is not infrequent – a man on a springboard fifteen feet from the ground has just chopped into the heart of a tree: a puff of wind bends the heavy top outwards. Then with the sound of a bursting bomb, the trunk splits up through the heart as far as the branches; the riven half lashes out and upwards, perhaps sixty feet, with a fearful sweep, as the head drops forward; for a split second the tree may balance horizontally by the middle on the shattered, upright trunk sixty feet above, then, pivoting wildly, it drops full length beside the stump. From first to last the calamity may have taken three seconds or less; even had there been time for action, no one could predict the ultimate position of that one hundred and fifty feet of tree as it struck the ground . . . (O’Reilly, 103)