I started reading Jackson’s Track on the flight back to Ireland from Australia last month and I’ve just finished it. The one good thing about long flights is that you get reading time. Not so easy to get when I’m back on the farm and at my desk.
Jackson’s Track is a true life tale of a man who lived in the West Gippsland forests in Victoria, about 100 miles from Melbourne. His wife and the majority of his friends were first Australians, – aboriginal people. He and his brother, like two of my own great grandfathers and many others at that time, had bought what was called ‘Crown Land’ and set about logging the trees and clearing the forests for farming.
I found myself thinking about my mother’s father and of the many yarns he told me when I was a child about the bush and the aboriginal people he had known from working on the roads, which he did for many years to supplement the income he got from farming. My grandfather told me that his aboriginal workmates were decent people and I remember noticing the sadness that came over his face when he spoke about them. This book has helped me to more fully imagine their lives and to understand more deeply my grandfather’s sadness around this subject.
Euphemia Mullett Hood - Daryl Tonkins wife with baby son, Russell
The aboriginal people of West Gippsland, where Daryl Tonkin’s story was lived out, were forest dwellers. I know the area quite well from childhood days and I’ve always treasured the tall forests of that area, although what’s there now is massively reduced from what Daryl Tonkin describes was there in his day:
“In early 1937 we found ourselves looking at mostly second-growth timber with only the odd giant blue gum looming through the thick bush now and again. Before the old sawmills first started cutting trees out of this country in the 1880′s, the forest was fairly open as the trees were the original growth and never had big bush fires through them. But after the mills had finished their work, the floor of the forest was thick with the heads of the fallen trees, and when the big fire of February 12, 1898 came through, it changed the bush as the hot fire germinated the seeds and a dense mass of saplings came up,making a second-growth forest so thick it was almost impossible to penetrate.”
So there it is again. A description of nature at work: 1) A fairly major catastrophe occurs in the form of a forest fire made more ferocious than usual by the forest harvesting practices of the European Australian’s. 2) Nature’s response is to throw in millions of saplings in order to repair the forest . 3) The process of renewal begins again.
One of the aspects of the close-to-nature approach to forestry that excites me is that nature knows no boundaries, and although the climate and latitude might be different, the steps nature takes are consistent everywhere.
"I thought about where the people could have roamed and camped and how the bush had changed. I wondered about their way of life and wished I knew what they knew. There were none of those people here now, just second growth timber and ruins of the old, original mills." Daryl Tonkin
In a previous post, I spoke of the time of the early settlers, and how Australia became deforested, so you can imagine how interested I was to read this book Jackson’s Track. Here’s another quote from Daryl Tonkin that gives me a greater and more sympathetic understanding of how such a thing could happen: The trees were that big that, now, I think it would have been better if we had left it forest. Back then it seemed like it would never disappear. He said that once he met Euphemia and began living with her people, he lost interest in his brother’s vision of clearing the land and becoming a farmer. He says “I left off clearing the land forever. I became a bushman, a man of the forest. I loved the beauty of it. I was taking one tree at a time, working along the contours of the land, letting the creeks and big trees determine where I went and how I logged.”
Over time the demand for timber grew and his beloved horse team was replaced by machines.”It was very quick, quicker than the horses, but I felt bad about it. I knew that by turning my back on the horses I had let something change which could never be recovered. I guess what changed was a set of values.”
Eventually of course the big timbers were all used up. The aboriginal people who lived on Jackson’s Track and worked in the forest had been moved off the land by the Authorities and the ‘church people’. His brother had died, and some of his closest work mates. He lost heart. He sold off a lot of the forest land and kept just what he needed himself. His description of what happened after that makes grim reading.
In our day and age we know what happens when land is sold to developers. But he and his generation hadn’t had that experience and as forest people, their imagination could do nothing to warn them for what was in store: “They were leaving nothing standing. Not even any wind breaks. They didn’t seem to know what they were doing. They pushed down and dragged away all the trees along the creeks. Everyone knows a creek needs its trees. As the season turned warmer the unfiltered sun dried everything to dust. The earth cracked underneath our feet and grit ground in our teeth, our skin blistered and hardened. The birds disappeared. I had never dreamed it would go like this. I thought there would always be bush. We were in the middle of something unnatural, in the middle of a place destroyed, in the middle of nothing……..”
Carolyn Landon, who took down this story from Daryl Tonkin and turned it into Jackson’s Track (Published by Penguin Group Australia, 1999) has done a great service not just in re-telling this fascinating story but also in helping us to understand the story of Australia’s forest history in a very readable and accessible form.
The huge stump of a tree from another time dwarfs the parkland trees in the Botanic Gardens, Brisbane.
Related posts:
- Fruit Bats and The Web of Life
- New Life on the Forest Floor
- The Questions of our Ancestors
- Close-to-Nature on the Foreshore
- Fiona’s Forest
Tags: Australian forests
