Trees: they’re our friends – and they’re in trouble

Though no greenie, Bob Hawke promised toplant a billion trees in 1989. That wouldn’t be enough now.

Elmswood, our home for the past 40 years, stands on a hill overlooking the merging of two rivers, the Isis and the Pages, that together form the Hunter. This is Wonnarua Country. Before white settlement, 100 ancient carved trees once stood at our river’s edge.

Built around 130 years ago, our classic Victorian homestead is a two-storey brick design, not counting attics and cellars, surrounded by verandas with traditional wrought-iron embellishments. Keeping the homestead close company – as it turns out, too close – for much of its history have been three enormous Celtis trees. They were planted by the original owners, who, we suspect, thought they were elms. They grew ever larger, surviving droughts and hurricanes until, one recent night, with reverberations that must have registered on the Richter Scale, the largest and closest of them came crashing down. Had it fallen at a slightly different angle, it would have been the world’s largest indoor plant.

This week, a young team of arborists have been skilfully chainsawing mighty and minor branches to feed into a thundering wood-chipping machine. We now have mountains of chips that will be used to mulch other old and ailing trees. But Elmswood looks very sad, and we are in deep mourning.

Droughts have killed hundreds of lesser trees at Elmswood over the years, while a recent hurricane, roaring like a vast bulldozer, ring-barked hundreds more. Lightning strikes have taken their toll. Ditto bushfires. With their high mortality rate, we can’t keep up by planting new trees. And now the climate crisis is intensifying drought and bushfires.

Yes, we’re tree-huggers who love trees deeply, and I write about them often. I’ve described my friendship with a gnarled peppercorn on the tiny farm where I grew up – and have written columns demanding that trees get the vote, imagining a Larboreal Party taking over from Labor. I’ve made woeful jokes about branch stacking and handing out how-to-vote leaflets, including gumleaflets. I vaguely recall an awful pun about “Donald Trunk for President”, for which I apologise.

Meanwhile, we slaughter Australian trees in their millions, not only via increasingly epic bushfires but by what’s euphemistically known as “land clearing”. That’s a proud tradition of colonialism, immortalised in the maxim “If it’s moving, shoot it; if it’s standing still, cut it down”.

It’s as bad across the region, where the skies darken as tropical forests are torched to make way for palm oil plantations. And grimmest of all in the Amazon Basin, described as “the lungs of the world”. We depend on trees for the very air we breathe. It’s simple: no trees, no oxygen.

Though no greenie, Bob Hawke promised toplant a billion trees in 1989. That wouldn’t be enough now. It wouldn’t even replace the losses in the last bushfires. And we continue deforestation. Look to the horror story going on in Tasmania – the logging of ancient forests, much of it for the effing woodchip industry.

So give trees the vote – they’d certainly get mine. Eucalypts for the Senate! Wattles for the Reps! Angophoras in state parliaments!

“I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree,” wrote American Joyce Kilmer in 1913. There’s not a lot of poetry in a stump.