Places have memories. The small voices that echo through forests are gathered like old clothes and photographs and woven into the songs of Lyrebirds and Magpies. Trees grow on their past; Black Oak on the summit plateau of Mt Kembla suggest that there have been no fires there for years and the growth rings in the stumps of felled trees record the dry years and the good ones. For the oldest stories though, you need to go under hill, beyond the tree roots and into the stony bones of the mountain. Old mine shafts burrow into these memories, hidden behind the scrub along the coal-pony trail and the lonely Windy Gully cemetery; but access to them is now barred because their resurrection led to too many such graves.
These memories stretch back to days before Antarctica lost its forests, back to some of the darkest times our earth has known. Their story is inextricably tied to the Tunguska basin of Siberia, where the hills bear the distinct flat tops and steep sides of basalt country. Country like the Monaro grasslands that I miss deeply, where you could hear cold wind in grass and stone as hard grains of snow blew over from the mountains on their fringes; but this wilder, colder country continues beyond where our ranges and horizons, forests and deserts would set its boundaries. The Siberian Traps cover an area nearly the size of Australia – basalt ridge beyond range, lava cooled to bedrock from one of the greatest periods of volcanism in earth’s history [1]. Throwing so much ash into the air that they caused massive global winters, [2] the lava burned into even older coal seams and the resulting fly-ash poisoned the oceans on an unimaginable scale, ending nearly all marine life [3, 4]. As the bodies decayed and the pH of the ocean changed, the carbon returned to the air along with the burnt coal seam and the gases emptied from the volcanoes to utterly alter the earth’s climate. It was very nearly the end of life on earth [5]. The carnage was laid out in a vast global graveyard, coal seams and fossils, memories of life and loss. Images buried for ages that dwarf civilisation but are held in the memory of the landscape like a lyrebird’s call or a magpie’s warble can hold the voices of the birds. But these are not just images of former lives, the lives themselves hold memories of the light and air they have grown in and the things they have eaten; energy captured and stored in the coal and oil. Energy to power the red ute for the driver to drop the clutch and burn his tires, impressing a girl and filling the hills with smoke. Smoke to start me on my climb to the top of the mountain, where I can leave behind the echoes of motorbikes in the hills and enter the eerie silence of an oncoming change. In one small tree that the Dharawal called tdjeunen (Blueberry Ash), I watched a Yellow Robin, Crimson Rosellas and two species of Thornbill flit through the branches without making a call. It’s a reverent silence. The aura of a desert wind in rainforest foretelling possible snow on the higher Gandangarra country; weather for Black Cockatoos to wheel and cry on the storm, riding the front like a wave. She-oaks whistle on the plateau under a sky of ridged clouds, ripples in the lee of the range. Something ancient and wild is happening and the Dharawal daughter of the west wind is holding her breath.
Fortified and calmed by her silence, I head back down the mountain trail to where a burned out car body lies at the roadside in the pass; a four-wheel drive tailgates me as I leave. The driver can afford the diesel because Western companies staved off skyrocketing oil prices by gaining access to Iraq’s reserves, because the Coalition of the Willing invaded a country on false pretext, killing 100,000 people in one year [6]. Unarmed people for the main, people going about the business of driving their kids to school, building houses, praying, picking fruit and operating on patients. The destruction of that society caused an implosion of one group blaming the other, of grief-fuelled insanity turning brother against brother with justifications grabbed where they could be found so that the numbers had escalated to over 600,000 in the next two years [6]. And it spreads, again spurred on by Western nations securing their oil interests, secretly backing insurgencies [7] that send refugees fleeing Syria and surrounds in catastrophic numbers, then issuing stern warnings about the rebels they had backed so that their voters rally in fear and faith to the flags they stand with. Cheap fuel it turns out still has to be paid for by someone; but it’s not only by the lives of people we don’t know and don’t really care about. It was always this way; children made the old coal mines run. A boy was blown out the entrance to the Bulli coal mine in 1887 and 81 people killed because they had been given the choice to either face the danger with dangerous lighting that could cause explosions or to let their families starve. Just 15 years later, 96 men and boys were killed in the same way under Mt Kembla while unions sat in a meeting to battle the company for safer conditions. But despite condemnation from a Royal Commission, safety lights were not provided for another four decades.
People are still given the choice to work in the mines or go without. Clean, safe and renewable industries like solar and wind produce far more jobs per dollar spent [8], but the Australian Government spends $3.5 billion a year just to find new fossil fuel deposits [9] for the companies. And how our instincts betray us; people in need of cheap electricity to power big TVs and keep enormous houses at a comfortable temperature are quick to hear Alan Jones claim that wind-powered electricity costs us $1502 per Megawatt hour, somehow missing the actual figure of $80, which is just over half the price of coal power. There is money in digging up bones, but not for people trained to believe that their existence can be defined by the word consumer.
A few enormous Red Cedar can be found on the southern face of Mt Kembla – winderong was their name before we forgot it. Next year will be the 200th anniversary of the night when a baby cried in the darkness, giving away the location of the Dharawal to Macquarie’s soldiers who then drove them off a cliff and hung the bodies of the warriors Durelle and Cannabayagal from trees as warnings to any possible survivors [10]. We may have lost their names that night, but small birds still flit through the undergrowth in the shelter of the trees, and leeches stand upright on ferns waiting for passers by. Something in me recoiled from the idea of leeches feeding on my blood when I first moved here from drier places, but I soon recognised how little they asked and how little they hurt, how easy it was to break the seal with my fingernail and put them back on a plant without hurting them. Below this place, coal trains echo along the escarpment with a volume that demands attention and a force that will ride over any life in their path. Australia exports 50,000,000 tons per annum of coal to China, a country where quarter of a million people die every year from the smog it produces. Not all of those deaths are ours; our percentage of coal is responsible for about 3,900 deaths, or 41 Mt Kembla coal-mine-disasters per year. Thought and memory are hard, hard things to entertain; they leave you feeling stained and unclean, and too often there is an aroma of death in their wake. Perhaps that’s why the old Norse legends said they were ravens. It’s easier to let them pass, not to hear them croak in the afternoon emptiness; once you’ve heard them you can no longer listen unknowingly to the sound of the power lines crackling with the harnessed energy of Pangaea’s mass grave. We block our ears and cover our eyes, we buy a bigger TV to distract ourselves more effectively, a more comfortable car. Distractions from thought, tools to re-write memory and history, and to repeat that history with new foolishness. But life continued after Tunguska. The continents cracked and spread, colliding to build mountains, rising to provide wanderers passage to new country and falling to cradle new life. The world became wider and richer and the Illawarra rainforests cloaked the slopes and plains. And there in the shadow of the yander-airy and winderong the lyrebirds collect the voices of their forests into memory. White coachwood bark glistens in the shadows over moss and ferns, she-oaks whistle on the heights and the daughter of the west wind stands watch over an age of coal trains, chimneys scattering poisons over people trapped into their servitude; the wheels of a machine attempting to impose permanence and comfort with destruction and fear. Old, wild things hidden in the shadows and hollows, waiting for people to discover that humanity can be something more than the next great extinction, waiting for brave people to leave the path, listen to the wind, love the small things and meet memory with thought.
- Reichow, M.K., Pringle, M.S., Mukhamedov, A.I. Al, Allen, M.B., Andreichev, V.L., Buslov, M.M., Davies, C.E., Fedoseev, G.S., Fitton, J.G., Inger, S., Medvedev, A.Y., Mitchell, C., Puchkov, V.N., Safonova, I.Y., Scott, R.A., Saunders, A.D., 2009. The timing and extent of the eruption of the Siberian Traps large igneous province: Implications for the end-Permian environmental crisis. Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 277, 9–20. doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2008.09.030
- Saunders, A., Reichow, M., 2009. The Siberian Traps and the End-Permian mass extinction: a critical review. Chinese Sci. Bull. 54, 20–37. doi:10.1007/s11434-008-0543-7
- Grasby, S.E., Sanei, H., Beauchamp, B., 2011. Catastrophic dispersion of coal fly ash into oceans during the latest Permian extinction. Nat. Geosci. 4, 104–107. doi:10.1038/ngeo1069
- White, R. V, 2002. Earth’s biggest “whodunnit”: unravelling the clues in the case of the end-Permian mass extinction. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. London 360, 2963–2984.
- Sahney, S., Benton, M.J., 2008. Recovery from the most profound mass extinction of all time. Proc. R. Soc. B Biol. Sci. 275, 759–765. doi:10.1098/rspb.2007.1370
- Burnham, G., Lafta, R., Doocy, S., Roberts, L., 2006. Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey. Lancet 368, 1421–8. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(06)69491-9
- U.S. Department of Defense Iraq Report, August 2012. http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pg.-291-Pgs.-287-293-JW-v-DOD-and-State-14-812-DOD-Release-2015-04-10-final-version1
- Grudnoff, M., Denniss, R., 2014. Will we let the sun shine in? – Trends in the Australian Solar Industry. Policy brief No. 65. The Australia Institute
- Bast, E., Makhijani, S., Pickard, S., Whitley, S., 2014. The fossil fuel bailout: G20 subsidies for oil, gas and coal exploration. London. http://priceofoil.org/content/uploads/2014/11/G20-Fossil-Fuel-Bailout-Full.pdf
- Liston, C., 1988. The Dharawal and Gandangara in colonial Campbelltown, New South Wales, 1788-1830. Aborig. Hist. 12, 49–62.
Talking Trees 