Before the invasion, an incandescent flash
split a bough from its trunk and sparked a once-in-a-lifetime bushfire. A
relentless easterly fanned the ruin of a hundred thousand hectares of dense
wilderness and a dozen families, hundreds of people, fled their camps as all
but a blessed few succumbed to the rolling smoke and voracious orange flames.
Their remains mingled with those of innumerable kangaroos, wallabies, woylies,
quokkas, numbats, possums, tiger snakes, dugites, racehorse goannas and ants to
phosphorylate the naked earth, as their spirits took flight to haunt the spaces
within the blackened trees. The fire raged up and down bauxite gullies, and out
across the limestone plains, before satiating its hunger at the western cliffs
of the continent; a greyscale tapestry of ash and coal left exposed in its
wake.
After
2 days the trough that brought the storm finally, permanently, crossed the
coast and a meek and cleansing rain replaced the suffocating heat to perforate
the eerie silence with the tik-plik-clack of cascading droplets amongst the
giant charred trunks. It stirred up the ashes and exhausted the embers with
strangled fizzes and pops. The parched earth was slowly saturated and the dry
crackling flakes of ash transformed into thick tarry mud, which flowed in great
glacial sheets as a single semi-solid gloop down from the slopes and into the
creek beds and tributaries reaching like knotted tendrils up the valleys from
the sea.
Amid
the suffocating smoke, the furnace of flames and the flood of ash, soot and
charcoal, life maintained its precarious hold. Long
discarded by its ancestor and buried beneath a generation of compost and
encased in its baked clay bunker, life shakes a seed awake; the catalyst the intense
heat and sweet blue smoke. It quivered and stirred in its cave to send out a
single white taproot in search of nourishment and a foothold in the unstable
soil. It lapped at the moisture laid down by the drenching rains, seizing the
moment to release its stem, guided against gravity, towards the fingers of
light streaking towards it through the skeletal limbs of its family. With an
agonising effort it pierced the furnace-baked clay above, breaking the surface
of the world and flicking its twinleaves over in perfect symmetry to bask in
the warm glow of the morning. It sighed and photosynthesised. It took in great
gasps of air from above, and great gulps of water from below, with each cycle growing
infinitesimally taller, broader, stronger and greener. It took in the
metabolising energy and carbon, and breathed out its oxygen and water,
transpiring to the sky. It grew on and on.
While
the slow turnover of life minimised the deposition of compost and the constant
winter rains leached the soil of nutrients the sprout continued to expand. Its
root shot forever down, scouring the depths for food; a pocket here and there;
enough to carry on. Millions of years of constant evolution had hardened the
seed against an environment not known for its levity but for its
disproportionate fits of anger. Life had evolved to withstand the tortures of
this ancient land. The sprouts of thousands of species sprang from the black,
baked earth, competing to be the one to survive. In a land so depleted, all
nourishment was put into effect. With luck the sprout managed to tap into a
decaying root and feed on the sustenance contained within its mouldering husk.
It outgrew its neighbours, starving, strangling. Still the taproot descended,
discovering deeper veins, widening its sphere of influence, warding off any
potential usurpers. Its burgeoning arms towered above its peers. It grew on and
on.
Those
charred and ravaged by fire began their resurrection. Below the scorched
surface, their roots remained unscathed, continuing to pump their lifespring.
Budding clusters of green waxy leaves sprung out of nooks in the branches like
hair between the trunk and arms. Small plants grasping within their sphere starved,
withered and died- decomposing- strengthening those they cowed to.
The
archaic pillar beside the sapling turned its face to the sky and expired its
last, its trunk boiled right through to its core. The roots of the young tree
sucked deep of the memories of its ancestor. It breathed, sighed, transpired,
photosynthesised; descending, expanding, ascending. It grew on and on.
Green
flashed life. Of grasses, flowers, creepers, shrubs, vines, saplings and
rejuvenating giants, the scarred wilderness transformed. Animals returned to pick
over the remains of their homes and feast on the life emerging from the soot
and ash. The sapling spread its lush canopy over the earth - green hairs on a
black skin. The animals rested, mated, nursed and built their homes beneath its
boughs, safe within its protective arms. The first shreds of multi-toned
blue/grey/pink skin stripped away from its ghostly core, and the first
tentative buds ripened into white-tentacled flowers to wave at the insects, birds
and possums that spread its pollen across the valley. As they withered, the
remnant gumnuts were flung from the boughs by over eager cockatoos and spread
beyond the shade. Potential life created. It grew on and on.
The Nyoongar
returned lured by the creeks, the wildlife and the wails of the ancestral
spirits who flitted amongst the trees in search of a final place to rest. They
settled and thrived amongst the undergrowth, foraging and hunting and piecing
together the fragments of their culture. They buried their dead beneath the
luminescent trunks, which drew the bones of the people into the air to wave at
their descendants upon the breath of the wind.
The arms
reached across to hold the hands of its neighbours- a single patch within a
verdant tapestry draping towards the sea. It provided a home for a dozen
generations of cockatoos, a launch pad for possums, a resting place for owls,
and a hollowed nook left behind by a branch sheared off by the wind that became
a nest and home for generations of splendid blue wrens far above the domain of
their predators on the floor below. Within the depths of the earth the feet
gripped tight to the dirt between their toes. Water rushed through the veins
and capillaries of the wood, feeding, cooling, providing. It grew on and on.
Wadjilla
brought his culture to the place. He stalked the base of the tree and pressed
his hands to its skin and pondered not on its life, but on his own so small
against this giant. Roads cut through the undergrowth between the places he
built wherever he grew bored and indolent. He laid waste to vast swathes of
bush, where he built his walls to block the forest from entering his soul,
roofs to prevent the light from blessing his skin, and floors to forget his
connection with the earth. He clear-felled the dense forest to make space for his
unsuited crops and alien stock. The jungle lay in ruin as he cleared space over
which he could squabble for lordship in the name of profit. Wadjilla stalked
its base and pressed his hands to its skin and pondered not on its life but his own so slight.
The tree had
grown fat on its heart of dirt. Its canopy overlooked the entire region- from
the dunes in the south to the limestone in the west. It grew so deep that its
taproot, that first glimmer of life shaken from its pod, protruded through the
clay, through the ironstone, through the river underground, through the bones
of its very first ancestors to the bedrock over which life itself began. Its
canopy was a re-creation of thousands of generation of life, each extracted in the
inverse order from the strata below. Their blood passed through the channels
within the roots, retracing the stages of life on earth as they ascended, to be
thrown forth into the atmosphere and continue into infinity. It grew on and on.
