Mangrove Pencils

At the Cod Hole, where Eudlo Creek joins the Maroochy River, I watched the soldier crabs. Scuttling across the mudflats in their hundreds, dressed in smart blue-grey uniforms, the little round crabs would feel the vibrations of my footsteps and quickly screw themselves down into the mud and disappear. If I stood still for a few minutes they would start to twist themselves back into the daylight.

“Soldier crabs marching through mangrove aerial roots” *commons.wikipedia.org*

My dad had bought an old weatherboard beach house on the dead-end dirt road that has since become busy Bradman Avenue. We named the house Toad Hall.

“Toad Hall”, on the Maroochy River. I’m in the boat, on the left

It was just upstream from where the Sunshine Motorway now crosses Maroochy River. Bradman Avenue runs upstream from Picnic Point, along the south bank of the river and over the creek, past a dragon boat club and a tavern.

The old house held out against development for years, but it’s gone now, replaced by holiday apartments. There are still some mud flats along the creek, though. You can still scoop up a soldier crab to feel it tickling your palm, trying to dig its way out of sight.

Also on the mud flats and along the banks of the river were mangroves. I collected the mangrove seedling “pencils” and used them to draw in the wet sand at the river’s edge.

Mangrove seedlings – “pencils” *wettropics.gov.au*

I made patterns with the flower husks, like little octopuses, from which the pencils grew. Little green mangrove “books”, actually seed pods, washed up on the river’s edge too, along with sea grass fronds and scraps of pumice from ancient local volcanoes.

Only a few mangroves survive along this stretch of the river, but further upstream they still thrive across the sand and mud flats. Mangroves grow from New South Wales, right up the Queensland coast, round the Gulf of Carpentaria, across the top of Australia and throughout the tropics and sub-tropics globally, thriving in warm tidal rivers, estuaries and bays.

In many parts of the state, like Raby Bay in Cleveland and Pelican Waters at Caloundra, mangrove forests have been destroyed to make way for canal developments; but if the people, cars, concrete and bitumen disappeared, they would soon come back and resume their ancient job of filtering the mud, protecting the shoreline and pouring oxygen into the atmosphere.

Mangroves in the Brisbane River, Southbank

Except for climate change.

Mangrove dieback in the Gulf of Carpentaria
by Lyndal Scobell, Cape York NRM

Over 7,000 hectares of coastal mangroves have died along 1000 km of coastline in the Gulf of Carpentaria. James Cook University’s Dr Norman Duke said the dieback was unprecedented, and followed a prolonged period of high temperatures and unseasonally dry conditions in the region.

Dr Duke, a world expert on mangroves, said the dieback was severe and widespread, affecting 9% of mangrove vegetation from just south of the Roper River in the Northern Territory to near Karumba in Queensland. https://cafnec.org.au/wildlife-issues/mangroves-wetlands/mangrove-dieback-in-the-gulf-of-carpentaria/

I was shocked to read about this environmental disaster in the Gulf.

It will have a huge impact on fish breeding and the birds and animals of the area; the prawns, hermit crabs, and millions of humble, vital creatures of the tidal mud. The land itself will be left unprotected from erosion and inundation. It’s difficult to comprehend the scale of the dieback – 1000kms of coastline altered, perhaps permanently. In this harsh environment, mangroves have been the stalwart protectors of the coastline forever. Back in 1861, they defeated the utmost efforts of Burke and Wills, who’d travelled all the way from Melbourne to reach the Gulf, but never made it through the mangroves to the sea. Now 7,000 hectares of them have succumbed to the effects of heat and drought.

There are still mangrove forests around Moreton Bay – seven species of them, reportedly, along the coast and the islands, and up the rivers, in spite of development and climate change.

Our Lizzie has been a beach lover all her life. When she was little, we’d often visit the beaches of Maroochydore, or Townsville, or Etty Bay, making sandcastles and decorating them with shells and seaweed and pumice. We’d draw in the sand with mangrove pencils and make patterns with mangrove flowers. Lizzie is now an environmental engineer, and last month, during one of her regular scientific field trips to Stradbroke Island, she found a mangrove pencil on the sand.

She drew me a picture, and sent me the photo. That’s one to keep.

August 25, 2022 9

Bottle Trees

Stanford University Campus, in California, is famous for its important collection of exotic trees. Among them are some iconic Queenslanders: bunya pines and bottle trees.

I first became aware of the Stanford trees when reading “The Overstory”, a Pulitzer Prize winning novel by American writer Richard Powers.

In the novel, Neelay Mehta, a young master coder and online game designer, is working at Stanford University. While thinking of fresh images and surreal graphics for a new game, one evening he crosses the campus in search of vending machine snacks. Turning a corner into the central quadrangle he sees something that amazes him: a tree that is “bulbous and elephantine …the most mind-boggling organism he has ever seen… A living hallucination from a nearby star system at the other end of a wormhole in space.”

As he reads on a placard, it’s Brachychiton rupestris – familiar to us all as the Queensland bottle tree.

Finding a bottle tree, something I’ve regarded with delight since I was a child, in a dense, powerful American novel was startling. It was as if I’d suddenly come across an old friend from the mid-west of Queensland in this glamorous Californian campus.

Bottle tree, Stanford Central Quadrangle *trees.stanford.edu*

The writer of “The Overstory”, like my own children, would have grown up with “The Lorax”, by Dr Seuss. In the book the Lorax introduces himself: “I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.” Powers does that too: he speaks for the protection of trees.

Queensland has many wonderful and bizarre tree varieties, from desert country to tropical rainforest, that could provide inspiration for fantasy novels, movies, and games. Strangler figs slowly devouring neighbouring trees, their roots snaking out across the ground around them, or dangling towards the earth. Ancient eucalypts covered in burls.

Burls on an old eucalypt, Coomera Circuit, Binna Burra

The notorious stinging tree, the gympie-gympie, that hurts so much you want to die. The rough bark of hoop pines.

Bark on a hoop pine, Brisbane City Botanical Gardens

The long, twisted, prickly leaves of bunyas; and bottle trees, tall and commanding on the bare hillsides of the ranges, slim and gently curved, or fat as teapots.

There are beautiful trees in Queensland.

Scribbly gums.

Scribbly gum, J.C. Trotter Memorial Park, Burbank

Moreton bay figs. Paper barks and casuarinas.

Mangroves.

Tallowwood trees: rich red trunks, clusters of white flowers, and generous sprawling branches that provide more shade than most eucalypts.

Koalas like tallowwoods, too.

There’s a fine old tallowwood in Yeronga Park, Brisbane. When the evening light touches it, its trunk glows.

Best of all, bottle trees. Born in Barcaldine, my mother grew up with bottle trees in the garden and across the countryside. As children, we’d look out for them on our many road trips. The younger ones can look like a tall white wine bottle; the old ones, anything from a port bottle to a malevolent goblin.

Gus and bottle tree, Queens Park, Toowoomba

Roma famously has made a feature of bottle trees.

They’re used in the street plantings of many other regional towns as well: Mitchell, Blackall, Tambo, right across the central west, and further afield.

Darling Downs, Rockhampton, even the suburbs of Brisbane.

A bottle tree goblin, one of three in a row in a Brisbane suburban street

Last year I planted a bottle tree in my garden, bought from a street-side trailer in Roma.

Bottle trees are notoriously slow growers, so I won’t live to see it look like a port bottle. Maybe one of those small, 250 ml wine bottles they sometimes serve in country pubs.

Online information about the trees of Stanford, over 43,000 of them, includes maps and many photos. Visitors can take guided tours of the campus trees. The university’s unofficial mascot is a tree, and students dress up as them.

Stanford students dressed as trees *trees.stanford.edu*

There is still a Queensland bottle tree in Stanford’s central quad; but the huge old tree described in “The Overstory” isn’t there anymore.

Perhaps it died of old age; or perhaps amidst the sumptuous Spanish Mission style architecture, arched sandstone colonnades and wonderful trees of Stanford it died of homesickness for the dry hills and plains of Queensland’s central west.

Bottle trees where they belong *Wikipedia*

January 14, 2022 2

Brisbane’s Suburban Charm

“I hate Brisbane. It’s nothing but traffic, traffic lights, bitumen, powerlines and car yards. Everyone’s in a rush. It’s ugly. It’s impersonal. In the country, everyone knows everyone else. I can’t wait to get back home.”

That’s what people from Queensland’s farms and regional towns sometimes say, after a reluctant and fleeting visit. They’re right about the ugly side of the city; but that’s not the whole story. Brisbane is a beautiful place, once you turn off those main roads with their frantic traffic.

It’s a city of hills and creeks and gullies. David Malouf wrote, “Brisbane is hilly. Walk two hundred metres in almost any direction outside the central city and you get a view – a new view. It is all gullies and sudden vistas.”

The hills can be a challenge. David Malouf also wrote, “Brisbane is a city that tires the legs and demands a certain sort of breath.”

It’s because of its terrain that Brisbane has so much green space. The creeks and river rise up in heavy rain and flood the banks, and debris across parks and walkways marks just how far the water came up. You can’t build houses on these flood plains. Instead there are sports fields, playgrounds, plantings, fig trees, bushland and pathways.

A disc golf goal on a course beside the creek at Moorooka

Scattered along the pathways and suburban streets are cute little street libraries and honesty boxes of home-made jams and pickles.

Street Library in an old fridge, Kelvin Grove

You can go from the top of Mount Coot-tha to the river, and even to Moreton Bay, on walking tracks or cycle paths along the creeks. Without leaving the city, you can find an octopus on the sand at Redcliffe or explore the mangroves at Wynnum.

An octopus washed up on Suttons Beach, Redcliffe

Some quiet suburban streets and cul de sacs are secret heavens. I walk down them on a typically beautiful Brisbane day, and think, “People here must feel smug – they’ve found a perfect place to live.” Down every gully there is a green and peaceful park, often lovingly nurtured and developed by a local Bush Care group, and in many, a flourishing community vegetable garden.

Almost anything will grow in a Brisbane backyard, from avocado trees to cacti, and there are mango trees and bananas, lemon and lime trees and hedges of rosemary.

In the occasional yard there is nothing growing but grass, which must take dedicated mowing over years on the part of the owners, in a climate where wattles and eucalypts, African tulips and coral trees, cassias and camphor laurels will grow without encouragement on any empty piece of land.

There are quirky sights in the suburbs, such as on an otherwise boring, 1960s block of flats in West End, where a creative solution to clothes drying has full-sized rotary clothes hoists, as normally seen in back yards, planted on each balcony.

Creative clothes line solution at West End

There are gardens with old-fashioned flower beds, charming letterboxes and quaint creatures among the plants.

At Holland Park, a letter box that matches the house

There is a collection of old engines in a sprawling Sunnybank yard.

Old steam engine, part of a collection at Sunnybank

There’s a skeleton guarding a rooftop not far from Greenslopes Hospital.

Last year, in that strange time of lockdowns and isolation, Con and I went exploring on foot, and we saw the suburbs of Brisbane in more detail than ever before.

There are trees flowering all year round, but they are most spectacular in Spring: jacarandas, silky oaks, flame trees and poinsettia, and the natives: sterculia, huge spreading tallow woods and gums.

I’ve begun a new Pandemic project: to collect all the colours of frangipani. They grow easily from a broken-off piece, left to dry in a dark place. Carrying a plastic bag to stop the sticky sap dripping, and seeking low branches hanging over front fences, I now have acquired pieces of red, yellow, apricot and deep pink-flowering trees. I’ll plant them in a row in a new stretch of garden beside the house. They’ll be a reminder of a challenging time, when I found comfort in walking the suburbs of a beautiful city.

January 9, 2021 7

Tag: mangroves

Mangrove Pencils

Bottle Trees

Brisbane’s Suburban Charm

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