Bunya: Axis limen – by Justin Russell
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1. Planting
It’s not every day that you get to plant a living fossil. On this day I am, and with early spring sunshine warming my bare arms I plod up the hill like a pilgrim preparing to perform a hallowed act. I’m pushing a wheelbarrow filled with a roughly assembled planting kit: my favourite long handled spade, native plant fertiliser, seaweed solution, clear plastic tree guards, bamboo stakes, a club hammer, a galvanised watering can and a bunya pine seedling. The little tree, no more than 30cm tall, is on the cusp of outgrowing its black plastic pot and has impatiently begun to plunge a ropey taproot from the drainage holes in the pot’s base. The tree seeks nutrient-rich earth.
The location I’ve chosen for the bunya has been carefully considered. It’s on the crown of a hill that rises at the back of our three-acre block, a smallholding nestled on the Great Dividing Range at Hampton, in south-east Queensland. The official government topographic map tells me the location has an altitude of 740m above sea level, making it the highest point in the district. The hill is already graced by trees, mostly remnant tallowoods and blackbutts, and since moving to the property six years ago I’ve gradually planted more – silky oaks, hoop pines, kauri pines, red cedars. My aim is nothing less than a new, small forest.
When I reach the site, I drop the wheelbarrow and pick up the spade. It sinks easily into the volcanic soil which is stained red with oxidised ironstone. I dig a hole twice as deep and as wide as the pot, stopping for a moment to enjoy the scent of freshly turned earth, then I take the bunya seedling, give the pot a squeeze to release the root ball, interlace the fingers of one hand with the pencil thick trunk and tip the pot upside down to release the tree.
The plant’s delicate feeder roots are pallid and hungry and the bunya nut, the seed from which it sprouted, is still visible among the potting mix. I carefully place the seedling into the planting hole, tuck soil around it and firm the dirt with the palms of my hands as if prostrating myself in an act of worship to the tree spirits. I scatter fertiliser (my soil is low in nutrients and new plantings appreciate a boost) and soak the plant with 18 litres of water – two watering cans’ worth. Finally, I bang in a tree guard with my hammer to protect the seedling against drying winds and feral rabbits. The thought of a rabbit trying to chow down on a bunya pine, with its notoriously prickly leaves, brings a smile to my face. Then I pack my gear into the wheelbarrow and follow it back down the hill.
2. Connection
The bunya pine, Araucaria bidwillii, is one of Australia’s most venerable tree species. Along with its cousins (such as hoop pines, Norfolk Island pines, and monkey puzzle trees), bunyas are part of an ancient genus of conifers that date back to the Early Jurassic period, more than 150 million years ago, when the continents of Australia, Africa, South America and Antarctica were joined as an epic single landmass called Gondwana. The bunya pine’s ancestors were literally dinosaur food.
My connection with the tree goes back a way, too, though not nearly as far. I grew up in the late eighties with a huge old bunya in my family’s Toowoomba backyard. To a twelve-year-old kid it was a monstrous tree, with an oversized power-pole of a trunk that stretched 40m into the sky, straight as a gun-barrel (mature trees can reach heights of 50m and live for around 500 years).
The tree was monstrous in other ways. Take the leaves, for example. Bunya leaves are stiff, leathery, and arranged in a helical pattern along a branchlet. At the tip of each lime green leaf is a needle-like spine, a presumed defence against leaf-grazing animals, so when bunya leaves fall onto a lawn, they create a prickly minefield ready to spike the bare feet of the unsuspecting.
Then, there are the cones. Bunya cones scream prehistoric. They’re roughly the size of an adult head, green in colour, scaly, and weigh up to 10kg. If there’s one place you don’t want to be in late summer, it’s standing beneath the crown of a large bunya pine because a cone falling from the top of a tree will reach a velocity just over 100km per hour. If that thing lands on your head, it’s lights out. As a kid, I remember bunya cone season with a mix of awe and fear. The cones give no warning that they’re about to fall. The only alarm is the terrifying sound of a cone crashing through branches for a few seconds until it hits the ground with a mighty thwhump! Mum would warn me and my siblings to stay clear of the tree over summer. Not only did she hate its prickly leaves which infested her garden, but the thought of her children being killed by a falling cone worried her so much that she called an arborist, who lopped the trunk in sections and left a stocky little stump that reminded me of a stubbed-out cigarette butt. It was the first time I’d mourned a plant.
To the First Nations peoples of south-east Queensland, the Wakka-Wakka, Barrangum and Yuggera, the bunya tree is sacred. The seeds held within the cone are nutrient bombs with a hefty payload of healthy fats, protein and carbohydrates. So prized were the nuts as a food, Indigenous groups would make a journey, sometimes hundreds of kilometres long, to the Bunya Mountains north-west of Toowoomba. Here, every three years when the cones were most plentiful, they would gather in their thousands for a months-long festival, a time to feast on fire-roasted bunya nuts but also to conduct important cultural and spiritual business. Lore was taught, goods were exchanged and dances shared. Marriages were conducted. Kids romped.
Tom Petrie, a Scot who arrived at Moreton Bay in 1837, attended a bunya feast in the Blackall Ranges and gave a first-hand account to his daughter Constance:
Great times those were, and what lots of fun these children of the woods had in catching paddymelons in the scrub with their nets, also in obtaining other food, of which there was plenty, such as opossums, snakes, and other animals, turkey eggs, wild yams, native figs, and a large white grub, which was found in dead trees. If there were unfortunates who had been unlucky in the hunt for food, it made no difference; they did not go without, but shared equally with, the others.[i]
The last big festival in the Bunya Mountains occurred in 1902. After years of frontier violence, white settlers felt threatened by large gatherings of Indigenous groups so they rounded up the people, forcibly removed from their traditional lands and relocated them to reserves.
3. Forest
‘Climb the mountains and get their good tidings,’ wrote the Scots-American naturalist John Muir in The Mountains of California, 1894. I book a cabin for a weekend away on the Bunya Mountains with my wife, with whom I’m about to celebrate 24 years of marriage. I warn Kylie beforehand that I’ve got a secondary interest in the trip: I want to see if I can get the ‘good tidings’ Muir wrote about. She is enthusiastic, sharing my love of the mountains with their cloak of lush forest.
I’ve visited ‘The Bunyas’ regularly since I was eleven. The Bunyas rise from a vast black soil floodplain. Their highest points, Mount Mowbullan and Mount Kiangarow, both reach heights above 1000m, which in Queensland terms is significant. I can clearly remember that first drive up the mountains, snaking across creek causeways before ascending in a series of hairpin bends through eucalypt forest on the lower slopes, vine thicket midway up and on the plateau, spectacular, otherworldly rainforest. On the anniversary trip with my wife, I feel my breath slow as our car reaches the top. Arriving on the mountain feels like a kind of homecoming.
It takes no time at all to see the first bunya pine. The skyline is generously scattered with them and once you’ve seen a big old bunya, silhouette like an open umbrella, you’ll never forget it. Trees in open ground often retain branches most of the way down the trunk, giving them a conical form not unlike the Gherkin in London. Forest bunyas have branches only at the crown, leaving metre upon metre of roughly-barked trunk.
Rainforest has clad these mountains since the last ice age, when warming temperatures swept upwards from the plains to meet cooler air, releasing moisture in momentous summer thunderstorms. Rainfall on The Bunyas is relatively moderate now, a bit over 1000mm per year, but when combined with a relatively cool microclimate, this upland is moist enough to sustain a richly diverse rainforest ecosystem.
The morning after our arrival in the mountains we load daypacks with water bottles and rain jackets in preparation for a bushwalk. At the trailhead we pass through a boot-cleaning station, a recent initiative to prevent the spread of plant diseases, and begin our journey into the forest. The track we’ve chosen starts at a location known as ‘Paradise’. Soaring bunyas, whitewoods, native figs and other rainforest trees overshadow an uncluttered groundcover of ferns, shade-loving shrubs and seedling trees. The unmistakable cheeew-it of whipbirds and the uncanny meowings of green cat birds reverberate among the tree trunks. The musty smell of decaying leaf litter, indicating a wood-wide-web of fungi-rich soil, seems to activate an ancient part of my brain. I’m convinced this is as pretty a forest as any I’ve seen in Australia.
We walk on, stopping now and then to take a photo or read an interpretive board. I wonder if we should be more reverent than this in such a holy place, but we’re excited, happy to be together on the trail. It’s not until later, back at our cabin, that I think about time, about the people who have been coming to the mountains for generation upon generation. I think about the trees themselves, acknowledging that some individuals were saplings centuries before the arrival of Europeans. Most of all I think about the forest. For millions of years this symbiotic community of plants, animals and fungi – a collective governed by interrelation – managed to survive planetary cycles of fire and ice by retreating to protected gorges. Only when climatic conditions on the exposed peaks were more favourable, did rainforest re-emerge as the dominant ecosystem.
I’m struck by a line in Oliver Sacks’ book The Island of the Colorblind. He too had visited a rainforest, one near sea level on the Micronesian atoll of Pingelap, and reflected that ‘the sense of deep time brings a deep peace, a detachment from the timescale, the urgencies of daily life’. Does this sense of deep peace equate to John Muir’s concept of good tidings, I wonder?
4. Anthropocene
Sacks goes on the to write that ‘in the jungle, I feel part of a larger, calmer identity; I feel a profound sense of being at home, a sort of companionship with the earth’. I can understand intellectually what Sacks is getting at, and I can recall times in my life when I’ve experienced a similar feeling of companionship, a desire to simply melt into the forest and never return to civilised life. But now, as a middle-aged father with teenage children, any feelings of the ‘primeval sublime’, as Sacks puts it, are undermined by nagging thoughts of guilt and responsibility. I can’t walk through a forest like that at Paradise and not feel this nag. It irritates me like a stone that’s worked its way into my shoe. The thought that this magnificent forest, millions of years old, is being threatened by the human species and may not survive for very much longer, bruises my heart.
Threats to the bunya forests are real and immediate. A water-borne mould called Phytophthora multivora, colloquially known as ‘dieback’, has become established in fifteen sites across the mountains where it rots the roots of mature trees, severing the life-giving flow of nutrients and water. As a consequence, the canopy begins to turn brown and die. In severe cases the entire tree will wither from crown to foot, leaving behind a grey skeleton of trunk and branches.
The disease has been introduced by humans, one way or another. It arrives in the mountains on car tyres, in mud clinging to the sole of dirty boots. Feral pigs have invaded the Bunya Mountains National Park and spread disease on their hoofs and snouts. Hygiene is one way to slow phytophthora’s spread, hence the boot-cleaning stations installed at each trailhead, but these measures mostly prevent new infections, they don’t remove the infestations that are already present.
A larger threat again, by multitudes, is climate change. Global warming is amplifying the boom-and-bust cycles of Queensland’s climate system, causing more severe rain events and more intense droughts. As you might imagine, rainforest, a place defined by dampness, doesn’t cope very well with drought. When I visited the mountains during the most recent drought-inducing El Niño the forest was clearly suffering, especially on the more exposed western and northern fringes. Bushfire is a thirsty rainforest’s arch enemy.
In his 2019 book, Underland: A Deep Time Journey, the English writer Robert Macfarlane makes a case for thinking about climate change in terms of the future:
The Anthropocene compels us to think forwards in deep time, and to weigh what we will leave behind. What is the history of things to come? What will be our future fossils? As we have amplified our ability to shape the world, so we become more responsible for the long afterlives of that shaping.
5. Crossing
What is the history of the bunya forests in the future? What will be our impact as human custodians? Will these living fossils have their eons-old story severed by our actions, by our unwillingness to feel responsible for their welfare?
Pondering these questions takes me away from my present-day concerns and connects me with a vaster sense of the world. I begin to see the earth in ways that are transcendental, mythological. I think about the world tree of Norse cosmology – Yggdrasil – the geographical centre of the universe, an axis mundi that connects the heavens with the earth.
I wonder if the term could be applied to the bunya tree, and then it hits me: this ancient species, survivor of multiple geological epochs, remnant of the dinosaur age, source of nourishment and connectedness to millennia of First Nations peoples, bringer of life and joy to people in the present, isn’t so much an axis mundi but an axis limen (Latin, a threshold/border). I begin to see the bunya as a connective thread that stretches back into deep time and forward into the future, passing through the threshold, the liminal time and space of the here and now.
It’s a concept that gives me an abiding sense of hope. It exists in defiance (but not denial) of the scientific modelling that suggests the planet is on a path toward an uninhabitable future. Bunya, an axis limen, whispers to me: ‘I’ve seen it all, young one. I’ve survived fire and ice. I’ve gobbled more carbon dioxide and exhaled more oxygen than you can imagine. I go on, and if you listen, so will you.’
I grab my wheelbarrow, fill it with forest mulch and my watering can, and march up the hill to tend to my little bunya trees. They could probably go it alone just fine, but I’ve come to understand that to nurture, is to be nurtured. ▼
Endnotes
[i] Tom Petrie. Reminiscences of Early Queensland. Watson Ferguson & Company, 1904.
Image: Naoto Sato
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