In Their Branches: Stories from ABC RN's Trees Project

By Gretchen Miller

A very special collection of over one hundred stories, memories, and reflections on trees that have had a special meaning in the lives of Australians, from ABC RN.

We all have a favourite tree. We scaled their trunks in childhood, planted their saplings in memory of someone we loved, and carried their silhouettes in our hearts across lifetimes and continents. We have watched them grow and watched them burn, skylarked around in their foliage and cried into their trunks. Up in their branches we have let our imaginations soar, found a sanctuary away from our troubles, and felt connected to nature and life and the ages.

When ABC RN asked its audience for stories for their trees Project, the response was astounding - listeners sent in their memories and reflections on trees they've loved and trees they've lost. Gretchen Miller has lovingly gathered over one hundred of these deeply personal stories and poems into this exquisite collection. In their Branches is the perfect book for the arborist, the dreamer and the tree hugger in all of us.

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Apr 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781460704271

Gretchen Miller

Gretchen Miller is an award-winning radio features producer and presenter at ABC RN. She is passionate about making stories of the landscape and environment, crafting intricate sound design and working collaboratively with listeners, who bring their unique and original writing and ideas to the projects.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

by Gretchen Miller

The children in the tree. Hidden by leaves, their quick, quiet eyes follow me and I might never know, but for a sensation on the back of my neck which tells me I’m not alone.

I was once one of those children, communing with the tree as a friend. And there’s a part of me always up there, looking down – mystified by the adult world, but powerful in my invisibility.

I know my territory not by the streets and shops and houses, but by the trees. The markings on the bark at eye level, the climbability of the boughs above. And I never fully forget this, as I pass from the whispering, leafy world to the sharp-cornered one of the grown-ups.

Anyone you might care to ask has a ‘tree story’. Whether a half-held memory from childhood, or an unspoken acknowledgement of a tree regularly passed by as an adult, trees snake their roots deep into our psyche.

This connection between trees and people goes right back to the forests of the first humans, when trees were part of our pantheon of gods. Robert Harrison, Professor of Literature at Stanford University, describes in his illuminating book Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (University of Chicago Press, 1992) how our ambivalent relationship with trees can be traced forward through to the here and now, via fairy tales, mythology and science.

But this relationship begins afresh for each one of us, in childhood. For some hard-to-define reason, trees provide a kind of nourishment of the soul, whatever our belief system. We find a freedom, a deep comfort and a profound joy when we climb a tree; when we sit with and commune with something we believe to be sentient, even if in a vastly different way to ourselves.

In 2013 ABC RN asked its audience for stories of the trees they loved and the trees they had lost – and as director and curator of the project I was astonished by the volume of correspondence, and deeply moved by the unique nature of the very personal stories told. Each spoke in a contemporary way of archetypal engagements with the arboreal world.

This collection offers an insightful and beautifully expressed selection of those stories – snapshots of lives lived with trees – with which I hope you’ll find a connection.

Some anecdotes tell of trees I think of as ‘history trees’, the ancient giants that remain in pockets of the country. There’s GC Smith’s Great-Grandad Snow Gum, surviving raging bushfires in the highlands of the Snowy Mountains and flowering nonetheless, and John Bennett’s Archaeopteris, which blanketed the world and lives on in the tallowwood forest reaching into his back garden. There’s Alex Tewes’s heart tree, which ties together generations of his family in Córdoba, Argentina, and Tini Cook’s family home in the Strzelecki Ranges where her woodsmen forebears lived in the stump of an enormous tree. These are trees whose living history stretches back into unfamiliar and now vastly altered landscapes, and are a reminder that we were not here first.

Do you remember the ‘delicious trees’ of your childhood – the mulberry stained clothes, the fruit-tree tummy aches? Margret Keath does, and I laughed aloud when I first read Peter Mayer’s story of the cockatoo and the walnut tree.

Then there are the ‘sanctuary trees’ to which we fled as small children to take comfort in the arms of a silent protector, or where we hoped to make contact with a spirit more intangible. Jackie Standish becomes part of the shadow dance of her fig tree; Mark Sargeant’s secrets are whispered into the sap of his tree. These trees seem to have a spirit that inhabits and protects those who seek their embrace.

And there’s a particular place in my heart for trees which dwell not in urban landscapes but in wilder environments. Myfanwy Jones’s red gum stands anxious sentinel over a dry landscape, and I can picture it there, holding strong. Anna Dunkley’s delicate nursery seedlings, whose parents are the wild trees on the sides of outback roads, might yet become gigantic trees that grow under ‘cold stars in cloudless skies . . .’

Robert Harrison was an important influence on RN’s Trees I’ve Loved documentary. In an interview for the program, he told me about the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, who wrote that back at the beginning, when we first cut down trees to make a habitable clearing, we opened ourselves up to the looming sky. We could see the sky, but the sky could also see us.

From those first clearings, our gods and goddesses shifted slowly, from being deities of the forests to powerful sky gods: Zeus, of the Greek Pantheon; the Christian and the Muslim gods. And without the protection of the trees, these gods observed us, made their judgements, and toyed with us. And from there we progressed towards civilisation.

What happened to the old gods and goddesses of the forest is an interesting question. Elyse Rider certainly still feels their presence in her ritual exchange of comfort with Moreton Bay figs. And a three-hundred-year-old stand of blue gums is a sacred space, its bellbird’s ‘dip of notes’ is a reminder and witness to a friendship lost for Vanessa Kirkpatrick.

Robert suggests that the gods live on in the tree-like architecture of our churches and sacred buildings – and perhaps this is the connection: why we still sense something like a spirit in our trees, vital and otherworldly, and why we sometimes turn to trees for comfort and replenishment when the loss in our lives gets too great.

The embodiment of the gods in certain trees might also explain the deep loss we feel when a tree is cut down, and why we loathe the cutter as a personal enemy. Fiona Lawrence is convinced an impassioned childhood curse successfully ruined the neighbouring driveway when her favourite ancient log was cleared for a development. The trees we have loved and lost live on as shimmering phantasms in our mind’s eye or, for Barbara Fern, have the last laugh from cyberspace, when the block of flats proposed for the site of their bulldozed grove doesn’t sell. Her trees remain, preserved as a computer screensaver.

It’s possible to find a soul connection with a tree. When I was a child, I moved cities with my family, and my best friend told me to put my arms around the tree in my front garden, because it would mean I would return one day. I still remember this advice and have secretly touched the old gum trees in the remote landscapes I love, to ensure I’ll see them again. Their voices are the birds, like Fiona Vaughan’s currawong, and the sound of the breeze in the leaves, like Erica Riley’s wind tree. We are spiritually bound to these ‘soul trees’, and we bleed with them, as another young writer and contributor to this book, Niabie Squires, has expressed.

And, yes, some people do cut trees without regret. You can track the desire to tame nature back to the tale of Gilgamesh – the very first written record. Gilgamesh, the Sumerian King and founder of the city of Uruk, who lived four thousand, five hundred years ago, looked over the walls of his city and saw the forest far away. Its apparent permanence filled him with dread. So he asked the Sun God’s permission to cut the forest down.

‘The forest has an immortality that [Gilgamesh] doesn’t have,’ Robert Harrison told me. ‘And in a certain sense, he is taking revenge on the natural world for his own mortality. And so much of our human behaviour in relation to nature, and especially to forests, seems to