In this town there are two trees that I know of that are historically significant, yet so many of them must have stood for hundreds of years watching the world change. Many stand dead, like ghosts stopped still on the way to somewhere, expired by way of drought or, in the middle of fields, from suspect agriculture. Or maybe they were just done. Either way they're like fences or the sky - something always there and present, and easily missed unless you were paying attention.

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I wonder about those who knew these trees as an essential part of their life. Out walking, I stop to look, really look, at what we've called the smoking tree for many years. We've been told that this gum, now fenced in the water refuse land beside us, used to be used to smoke fish by the indigenous folk who lived here before the graziers moved them on, we presume. We're close to a river, so it made sense. We don't know the real story, as there's no one around here to tell it.

Two streets away there's one that's on a map, protected by the National Trust. It's dated at 300 years old, and the scar on it's belly showed the absence of wood taken - for a container likely, perhaps a shield. Scarred trees across this country show evidence of the life of people that came before us, the marks on them hinting at temporary shelters, food implements, canoes and tomb stones for the dead. There's thousands of them across the country, and they're meant to be protected, though no one can stop anyone cutting them down for firewood. When the highway came through they roped the significant trees off, drove bulldozers around them rather than through them. But many have gone, cleared for agriculture of course, for development. The ones that remain are just there, and we forget - they are just things, not pulsating with history and life:

We call it the gum tree, as if it were just a thing
Not pulsating, not whispering, not rustling around, not shedding skin,
Not perfuming, not drinking, not perspiring, not growing, not trembling,
Neither swaying, waving or sheltering
Not watching, not listening, not stretching, not changing colour,
Not bleeding, not blooming, not breeding, not singing, not shrieking,
Not crying, not sleeping, not grieving, not breathing, not scratched and bleeding from a frightened goanna,
Not tolerating raucous mobs of parrots, children
Just there, sticking out of the ground,
As if we weren't so very blessed to have it there.

Graham Ballard: Gum Tree

Of course, they were more than just things.

Upon them too were carved intricate sworls and loops and spirals, for thousands of years marking burial sites, were sites of initation, and spoke the stories of the people who carved them. They were said to perhaps mark the landscape as spiritually significant. They haven't done this for over a century now - Europeans encouraged burials beneath cold stones with other iconography of course. What rites and stories were lost, as the children were taken from fathers, families separated, culture destroyed, a whole nation dispossessed? Only the standing trees know now.

Grave of a Wiradjuri man at Gobothery Hill, near Condobolin, 1817

And many were carved up and cut up and sent to museums, like the skulls of the people examined like animals, that were classed as part of the flora and fauna of Australia until 1967. Many anthropologists moved up rivers, photographed them, allowed them to be taken away to foreign lands, other places bereft of the people who breathed with these trees. I haven't been to Corrymongle, but there, in NSW, are 60 of them in a cluster, more than anywhere in the country.

And thus, we might call it just a gum tree, but it is much, much more than just a thing.

Do you have culturally significant trees in your area? Are they still revered and protected, or do they stand like ghosts, forgotten?

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