A Questionable Survey of Suburban Eucalypts – by Uthpala Gunethilake
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY | AUSTRALIAN NATURE WRITING
image by Brian Yap
My house clings to the steep banks of the Georges River in Lugarno, New South Wales. There are 34 steps from the garage at street level down to the front door. The house is higgledy-piggledy, with rooms perched wherever the sandstone allows. The back of the house opens onto a terraced garden where each bed cut into the stone holds about a teaspoon of soil. From the wooden deck, a long winding set of timber stairs tumble down a slope of towering trees to the river. From the garden to the river, there are 139 steps.
It’s peaceful here, and feels miles away from Sydney. The centrepiece of the house is the dining room with its glass roof and walls, looking over the garden with breathtaking views of the river. When my mother visited from Sri Lanka, she loved that she could sit here and watch the boats on the water all day.
I love to sit and gaze at the green well formed by the bush on either side of the stairs. Dozens of gum trees flank these stairs, which we occasionally take to the muddy edge of the river, where we’ve stored two kayaks on a deck. At high tide, it’s possible to push the kayaks out and paddle towards Revesby Heights or around to Oatley Park. The shore is too shallow for a jetty and isn’t particularly inviting – plastic rubbish washes up regularly and the river sludge can suck you in knee deep.
From high in the glass cube, everything looks idyllic. All day, birds swoop and dive through the treetops, spinning towards the river, racing back up.
“From high in the glass cube, everything looks idyllic. All day, birds swoop and dive through the treetops, spinning towards the river, racing back up.”
I can pick the better-known species: rainbow lorikeets and crimson rosellas, king parrots and currawongs. I know there are many others such as honeyeaters and bowerbirds, eastern ospreys and powerful owls, plus the shorebirds that call all day from the mudflat. I’ve never seen them up close, and even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to name them with any certainty.
As for the trees through which they zoom in and out all day – I know them only as eucalypts.
There are several magnificent specimens down the slope; tall, always tall, with reddish-orange trunks and sprays of white blossoms in summer. Two books, one app and many websites later, I’m confused – is this a grey gum that has shed its bark or a Sydney red gum? Another has the telltale squiggle of moth larvae etched on its creamy-smooth bark, so it must be a scribbly gum. But it looks so much like another smooth-barked species, which fits the description of blackbutt. Another has bark furrowed like a Christmas log cake – is that a stringybark? The thing is, I can’t be sure. I know they’re all eucalypts, but I can’t call them by their names.
“The thing is, I can’t be sure. I know they’re all eucalypts, but I can’t call them by their names.”
As I started spending all my time at home through the pandemic, gazing at the treetops in between Microsoft Teams calls, this really started to bother me. I wanted to be on first-name terms with my suburban trees.
~
Identifying eucalypts is a tough field for inexperienced players. According to the CSIRO, whose overwhelming eucalyptus app I downloaded, there are some 900 native species across Australia and they are notoriously hard to identify. Tell me about it.
From the app and Gary Leonard’s excellent book Eucalypts of the Sydney Region: A Bushwalker’s Guide (which considerably narrowed down my task by focusing on 77 species), I learnt that I stood no chance if I only looked at the bark and blossom.
To identify a gum tree, you have to consider the shape and size of the fruit (the gumnut), the thickness and toughness of leaves, the way they hang from the stem, whether they’re the same colour top and bottom, the particular way the bark peels off the tree, whether it leaves a ‘collar’ when it drops off, if the tree is mature or juvenile, what time of year you’re looking at it (because the colour and feel of the bark depends on the season), and so much more.
I started ranging further around the neighbourhood to access a broader range of examples. Lugarno sits on a peninsula on the northern bank of the Georges River and lays claim to an old volcano, with a crater-shaped depression in the local park to prove it. The soil is fertile; the suburb was settled by market gardeners, orchardists and oyster farmers in the early part of the twentieth century. With one road in and out, two tiny sets of shops and no train station, it’s a quiet suburb today – leafy, but not in the glittering way of places north of the Harbour Bridge.
The light is softer, the river views more sedate. Woody walks clamber over riverside ridges; gravel pathways behind houses end in marshy bogs. The lushness comes partly from tended gardens and introduced plants: jacarandas and magnolias, azaleas and camellias, a dizzying array of conifers and palm trees. But there are also stands of eucalypts all over riverbank walkways, tucked into elbows along the road and sweeping their crowns over backyards.
Forest Road, that one road to Lugarno, provides a clue to what colonial surveys found here in the mid-to-late 1800s. The thick forests on the ridges of the Georges River, covered in blackbutt, blue gum, red gum, turpentine, mahogany and many other species of eucalypts, were cleared to make roads south, and they supplied much of the colony’s timber needs.
“While I have no illusions that the eucalypts I see when I head up the road are remnants of this original forest, I find them breathtaking.”
While I have no illusions that the eucalypts I see when I head up the road are remnants of this original forest, I find them breathtaking. I think I spotted a gathering of stringybark and blackbutt at a small bushy reserve at street level near my place, but I can’t be sure. A tree at a bend in Forest Road has a smooth yellow trunk that I can’t resist touching whenever I pass. I don’t know its name, but I like being greeted by its downward pointing leaf tips. My sources tell me that you can’t hope to find shade under a gum tree on a hot day. Their leaves have evolved to angle downwards to avoid the direct sun. Likewise, as Leonard says, eucalypts do not screen a view so much as soften it. Suits me fine – nothing compares to seeing the sky through the canopy of a gum tree while a kookaburra yells at you to go away.
~
I’ve lived in Australia twenty years and never before been antsy about not being able to call a gum tree by its name. I haven’t always found Australian flora so beguiling. My mother and I once took the train from Sydney to Melbourne and nearly died of boredom. Accustomed to the glowing green of tropical trees, as though lit from within, we found the bush through country Victoria and New South Wales utterly dull. I’ve adjusted my view now. It takes time.
It doesn’t help that I have fairly mainstream taste when it comes to nature. The world knows Sri Lanka as a paradise but, growing up there, I remember urban chaos, open drains, overflowing rubbish, scummy rivers and garbage-studded beaches. I dreamt of woodlands, meadows and gardens in the English style. All the books I read had them. They shaped what I found beautiful.
“I dreamt of woodlands, meadows and gardens in the English style. All the books I read had them. They shaped what I found beautiful.”
Part of me is deeply uneasy when writing about the environment around me. Woven into the fabric of life in this suburb are ancient and present-day threads representing the First Peoples of this area. My eye isn’t well-trained to read the story of the landscape as they would tell it. I don’t know their names for the trees I love. It would be ironic if I, having come from a country ruled by Europeans for nearly 450 years, spoke the wrong way about Country, and saw this landscape through the same eyes as the colonists. It would be easy to make that mistake. I’m not certain which words I can use to speak about my fledgling connection to this place.
“It would be ironic if I, having come from a country ruled by Europeans for nearly 450 years, spoke the wrong way about Country, and saw this landscape through the same eyes as the colonists. It would be easy to make that mistake. I’m not certain which words I can use to speak about my fledgling connection to this place.”
~
Where I come from, trees are simple. A mango tree is a mango tree. You can’t confuse a banana leaf with any other leaf. Jackfruit trees are distinctive – after someone’s pointed one out to you, it’s hard to get it wrong.
I also knew what these trees were for. Consider the coconut tree, so versatile that it’s known as the ‘wish-giving tree’ in Sri Lankan lore. Every part has a use, producing oil, treacle, milk, vinegar; coir, coco peat, kindling; ceremonial gear, kitchen utensils and household cleaning aids. Nothing burns so well and fast as coconut husk in my mother’s outdoor stove. The coconut ekel broom is my dad’s best tool for getting those pesky jackfruit leaves off the yard.
If you didn’t know the name of a tree and what it was for, you just had to ask. Perhaps that’s what I’m missing: being able to turn to someone and ask, ‘Hey, what’s that tree?’
~
By the time colonists started logging the seemingly impenetrable, untouched forest along the Georges River in the mid-1800s, Aboriginal people were already using well-trodden paths through the bush. The dense and ‘uninhabited’ bush was in fact alive with people.
In glimpses caught from history books, heritage reports and recent media coverage of a local campaign to save a historic property from developers, a property surrounded by bushland containing evidence of Aboriginal habitation, I learn that Lugarno is on the land of the Bidjigal people of the Eora Nation. Shell middens have been located at many sites around the peninsula. I also read about a spearhead being found in a cave when it was being cleared to build a house; it’s not far from my house. Aboriginal wall art was recorded in the mid-1980s near the local park, the one with the crater. It’s since been obscured with black paint.
Lugarno is within a stone’s throw of Salt Pan Creek, the land of Pemulwuy the warrior. A community of Aboriginal people lived at Salt Pan Creek in the 1920s. Joe Anderson, a man from that community, appeared in a newsreel in cinemas across Australia in 1933, demanding recognition for his people. ‘There is plenty fish in the river for us all, and land to grow all we want,’ he said. And yet by 2016, the census recorded that a mere 0.5% of Lugarno’s population was of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander descent.
~
I became obsessed with my suburban trees. During lockdown, all of Lugarno took to the streets for exercise and entertainment. I earned curious looks from neighbours while I stroked and prodded eucalypt bark. Dogs strained at their leashes to join me in rootling in the undergrowth of 30 metre trees in search of fallen gumnuts and buds. I got in the way of kids on bikes while stepping backwards from a tree to observe its form; whether it was squat and shrubby, tall and graceful, or twisted and undulating. I picked and sniffed gum leaves, holding them up to the sun to see their oil glands. I came home with pocketfuls of leaves and twigs, gumnuts and buds.
“I picked and sniffed gum leaves, holding them up to the sun to see their oil glands. I came home with pocketfuls of leaves and twigs, gumnuts and buds.”
~
What am I looking for? Why do I want to be on first-name terms with my suburban gum trees? My husband is born and bred Australian and doesn’t agonise over any of this. I can’t be so cavalier. He can take things for granted. Not me.
For newcomers, knowledge is precious. It’s not for wearing like an ornament for display, but to tuck away for your own deep satisfaction, to be taken out and savoured when in need. To know is to form a connection. So that one bleak day when the ground beneath is shaky, when you’re uprooted, when you’re worried about family and you feel imprisoned by your own stale habits, you can look through the glass cube and there it is: this solid, upright eucalypt whose ancestors survived an invasion. You want to be able to say, ‘I know you, at least. You’re here.’
~
I learn from Leonard’s book that eucalypts like to hang out with friends. Species grow in association with certain other species. If I manage to identify one tree, then look up the species it’s associated with, I could be much closer to that ‘aha!’ moment.
One afternoon, with this principle in mind, I ramble down the slope below the house. It’s late August. Weeds entwine with native species to create a pleasant sunlit woodland. Several pittosporum are in bloom – their fragrance is heady and bees love them. Lantana broods in the undergrowth. A tangle of pink jasmine that escaped from the garden many years ago climbs ever higher in search of sunlight. Near the water, a stoic little bush pea bears a crown of yellow flowers. Heath fuchsia nods its pink and white heads into the mangrove-studded, plastic-floating water.
As for the trees, I’m now certain that most are Sydney red gums. The creamy pink bark is smooth and dimpled, the branches twisted and sinewy. In places, the trunks ooze sap. The leaves match the description in the book: lance-shaped and opposite each other on the stem, not alternating. I can’t find buds, but old gumnuts on the ground are cup-shaped and ribbed, with tiny teeth on top.
Where there’s Sydney red gum, the book says to expect blackbutt, Bangalay, Sydney peppermint, red bloodwood and grey gum. I can spot the blackbutt but I’m not sure if the remaining trees are any of the others. The grey gums confound me: I can see trees with peeling grey bark but they reveal a reddish trunk. Why would anyone decide to call this ‘grey’ gum?
European names like this have been another challenge in my quest. ‘Sydney peppermint’ and ‘smooth-barked apple’ conjure images of English greenery, not Australian eucalypt forests. The etymology of Latin or Greek-based scientific names has helped me remember certain features of trees; angophora costata, as the Sydney red gum is named, is a reminder to look for ‘ribbed’ (costata) gumnuts, which are shaped like jars or cups (angophora). While they help me identify the trees, their silence on Aboriginal ways of talking about the landscape bar me from a deeper knowing.
I give up for the day, taking a minute to watch the river flow by and listen to the treetops in the wind. I wonder what someone standing here two, three hundred years ago would have seen and heard, what they might have been doing here, who it may have been. Before I head back to the house, I turn to my questionable grey gum and say, ‘I don’t know your name for sure, but thank you. You’re beautiful.’ ▼
This work is part of our Australian Nature Writing Project suite
If you liked this piece, please share it. And please consider donating or subscribing so that we can keep supporting writers and artists.