Creature of the Shade

confronting vegetation: Angophora costata

When you turn a camera on Angophora costata, they'll seem to be performing for you.

But I can't photograph how they really look to someone hiking the forests around Sydney.  The curious color and what I can only call a vaguely animal presence, especially when seen in the very corner of your eye.  They are the kind of tree that makes you feel the forest is watching you, maybe even making jokes about you behind your back.

Flesh-colored would be the easy term, though of course they weren't that until 1770 when people of that color arrived.  But I'm of that color, so I'm ready to see human arms waving in the forest.

Saturation is a challenge.  Did I exaggerate the color in the pic above, or understate it below? Who knows.  Angophora is one those complex sense-impressions that never quite comes through in a photo.

I'm fond of this image of an Angophora flowing over a rock.  You can sense the curious roughness of the bare surface, again fleshlike, and perhaps a bit feminine

Like the closely related Eucalyptus, Angophora often makes a big show of shedding bark.  It surrounds itself with a deep mound of slowly-decaying matter, as though preparing its own pyre.  The shedding happens mostly right at the base, leaving the distinctive bare trunk. 

Often the mound of droppings is easier to look at than the tree.
 

So I frequently find myself dealing with an Aussie tree by studying the litter below it.  Sometimes this happens becuase the tree is huge and its foliage is lost in the canopy.  With Angophora, well, the rich textures of the droppings suggest that they, as much as the towering form, can tell me what this thing really is. 

 

grass

When I spent Christmas 2006 near Canberra, at the height of the drought, the land was bareness gathered into knobs by tufts of over-grazed grass, forming a rough, dirty carpet.

Thin, scraggly sheep.  Rabbits, here and there, fast bolts of lightning across ruined ground. 

That's El Niño in Australia.  And here is La Niña.

Wherever nobody has mowed, the grass around Canberra is a meter high.  The kangaroos and rabbits can't multiply fast enough to eat it.  I wonder if farmers on gray days are having trouble counting their sheep.

 
I came to Canberra expecting a hot, quiet summer of writing.  I imagined myself in the shade, writing at a picnic table, bottles of cold water in the esky at my side.  Instead, it's been unstable weather, often overcast and even chilly.  One midsummer day had everyone digging out their scarves and mittens. 

Australia is like this, all gestures of excess.  In inland North America, they're used to the blasting difference of summer and winter, but in Australia the difference between years is as great as that between seasons.  Aussies speak hopefully of seasonal cycles, and indeed, winter is usually colder than summer, but there are no guarantees, and the less predictable cycles of the El Niño Oscillation can sweep everything to one side or the other.

Floods ravage Queensland and Victoria, and might come for us next.  Until then, we watch grass grow.