BOOKS ON THE ROAD

I resolved to travel light on my tour of the north. I packed my computer (not needed) and the bird book and Paul Muldoon’s The End of the Poem for a shared-reading group I’d been invited to join for an evening, plus one book for reading on the road. I can’t read in a moving car, and besides, why would I read when I could be staring out at the ever-changing surround? The book I took for reading was Ashley Hay’s Gum, a copy from the Hobart Library that Irene borrowed for me. There’s a subtitle on the cover, but the barcode is over it, and the titlepage itself says only Gum. The book is about Eucalyptus, the dominant tree here. “Tree” I say, but it exists in hundreds of species, no certain count known even yet. Though DNA research seems to indicate that trees quite various from each other might turn out to be members of the same species.

The book opens with an aboriginal legend about the eucalyptus, and then goes on to track European—and Australian—awareness of them. Hay notes various explorers’ records of them, and the first attempts to collect and classify them. Joseph Banks, who sailed with Captain Cook, began collecting, and returned to England with an enormous number of specimens, but never got around to publishing descriptions of them or naming them. The early white inhabitants of the continent found the trees generally too hard to be useful for timber products, and besides they wanted clear land to farm. Forests in North America were also not what settlers wanted, but at least the trees there bore some resemblances to—or in fact were—trees already known in England and on the continent. Eucalypts were regarded as not good for much, and far from beautiful for a long time.

Hay traces the growing knowledge and understanding of the eucalyptus through time, and the slowly changing attitudes towards it, as white Australians grew more attuned to the land here. Though John Glover had painted it accurately very early, in general early painters made the forests here look more like English woods until late in the 19th century. Hay also outlines the 20th century development of the woodchip industry and of forestry, the period in which trees were seen as a useful crop to be harvested, and then the slow growth of conservation ideas that challenged those utilitarian notions. She writes, too, about its relationship to fire.

Her book is very readable in part because of her choice to structure the information around various individuals who were engaged with or by the tree, so the reader gets a series of portraits of people as well as of the trees. She writes clearly and the story is interesting enough that I found myself settling with it compulsively before bed each night on the trip.

Though I only took one book with me, I’ve brought 3 or 4 more home to Hobart. On that first day on the road we stopped at The Shop in the Bush, on the Tasman Highway between St. Helen’s and Scottsdale. The shop bills itself as “Tasmania’s Top Bric-a-Brac Shop” and it does indeed have all sorts of stuff in it, but I only trolled through a few shelves of books. I came away with two finds: a book on books, Australian-born John Baxter’s A Pound of Paper about his adventures as a collector and writer (a good read, I’m half-way through it now) and a lovely little bird book published in 1956, illustrated with watercolour drawings: Some Common Australian Birds by Alan and Shirley Bell. Each bird gets a full page of text (sometimes with generous bottom margin) and a full-page drawing. The very first bird in the book is my companionable Blue Wren (Malurus cyaneus), and here’s a lovely sentence about this tiny creature: “Often one of these atoms of polished elegance, as he hunts the undergrowth and runs down insects, is shepherded by three or four soberly-feathered brown wrens—a concourse of wives, it has been suggested, but more probably the current brood, a family of females and young males.” Atom of polished elegance—very nice!

I also bought a glovebox-sized, spiral-bound handbook of birds on farms, a landcare project more about that later—and Clive bought for me a pamphlet about Highfield House. So the collection grows—