australia: the path

Sydney

 

I took this photo in the Northern Territory, in Litchfield National Park just south of Darwin, but it's a good image of the Australian woodland as archetype.  An Aussie friend saw it and said at once: "Yes, that's our national landscape.  And that's our path."  Maybe it goes somewhere interesting, but chances are it will lead to more of the same.  At once we were spinning out the Australian national character:  Don't get excited about the future; it's likely to be disappointing.  Best keep your nose down.  It'll probably just go on and on like this.

If you head out of any mainland capital and go for a walk in the woods, then except for the rare patch of rainforest it's likely to have this feel:  A pervasive grey-green or "khaki" color.  Trees of various sizes, at various densities, but mostly eucalypts, and mostly not very tall.  Shrubs and grasses, now and then an herb.  A heavy duff of dead leaves, slow to decay, smothering many sprouts. 

The soil seems color-coded by region in a way that only underscores the sameness.  In the north (pic above) there's often a burgundy tinge to the soil.  In the southeast, around Sydney and Canberra, the path is usually orange:

... and in the west, I'm told, it's often a sandy beige.   Sometimes the path leads somewhere amazing: a rock formation, a rainforest, an unusual flower or bird, but these things are striking in a distinctively Australian way, because of the reliable background on which they appear.

Even incongruity becomes reliable.  Callitris, for example, is a conifer from the cypress family (juniper, redcedar, sequoia etc.) that somehow ended up in Australia.  Conifers are so unimportant in Australian flora that I always think of Callitris as somehow exiled or astray.  I've seen it in many dry woodlands in Australia, and in its thick dark green mass it always looks an exotic from the American west or Japan.

There's nothing like deep green to make you notice how grayed-out the background is.

There were many pleasures in my quick trip to the tropical north, but the strongest impression was of this remarkable constancy.  Plants I met in the north were mostly different species of genera that I know from Sydney.  It was a different team but with the same specialised roles, playing the same game.

Comments

[Teresa]

I would SO miss the conifers. I don't know how you can bear it.

T.

[dale]

(o)

[Dave]

That kind of path is very attractive to me. Then again, I tend to favor monotony in music, too.

[wanderer]

There's a soil colour word missing J. Should you drive from any of the peripheral cities, through the axis to the other side (say, Sydney to Broome, that'll do it) there is only one colour you remember. Red. Glad you're back, wherever, safely.

[Xavier]

Cupressaceae is actually thought to be a Gondwanan family, so its probably no surprise that Callitris is in Australia, along with Actinostrobus etc...And I would disagree that conifers are unimportant in the Australian flora, given the importance of Araucariaceae and Podocarpaceae - at least in an historical sense...Nice blog though :D

[Jarrett]

X. Yes, "unimportant" was too vague. What I meant is that there are only a few places in Australia where you can find a forest dominated and defined by its conifers. In the North American west where I come from, there are very few forests where conifers are not the dominant tree.

I hadn't known of the Gondwanan origin of Cupressaceae. It's such a vast and diverse family in the Northern Hemisphere, and so attenuated in the south, that I assumed its origin was near the centre of its diversity. But now that you mention it, I do recall meeting some obscure genera in New Caledonia.

[Xavier Goldie]

Yes Neocallitropsis is found in New Caledonia...the issue with centre of diversity vs. centre of diversity is such a perennial one too...I don't think that we'll ever really be able to resolve it without a good fossil record, which sadly is usually lacking!

[Darryl]

I am interested in your observations about what you call the uniform grey of the landscape in Australia because I suspect they ring true for many urban Australians (there are few others) who also have, at best, a passing acquaintance with a country in which the substance of subtlety is overlooked and swamped by the enduring ephemera of cliche.

It has taken generations for Australian of the latest invasion to accept there is any real beauty in their landscape unless it is filtered by their inherited other world sensibilities. And even then only certain imagery is acceptable and many Australian's would not be prepared to accept that the callitris of Australia really do belong here. And then the araucaria species and the Lagarostrobos, none of which form invasive forests like northern hemisphere pines, are rarely seen by most Australians and are regarded as exotic in a loose sense of that word.