When we first set up Olvar Wood, we kept hearing a deep mournful call carrying from far off in the early evenings, like a child speaking into a piece of poly pipe down near the large dams on the citrus grove below the retreat: Woo-hoo.

 It carried over a long distance and at first I thought it children playing: calling to each other through a poly pipe, underwater perhaps. And then guests started hearing it, too. As one writer put it: “It sounds like someone impersonating an owl.” After a time, and hearing it through the evening and early morning, in slightly different locations, on all days of the week, we began to believe it really was an owl.

Consultation with our bird books and listening to recorded owl calls on line convinced me the call belongs to a pair of Powerful Owls calling to each other. They have moved closer to our cottage over time, and now, in summer particularly, you can hear them calling from late afternoon till early morning. Or perhaps sound just carries further and we are awake longer in summer, as the bird books suggest they call more often during the mating season/winter.

The powerful owl, or Ninox strenua, is Australia’s biggest owl: about 65cm. It looks a bit like a Boobook, with a similar barred pattern, only bigger, and with a proportionally smaller head. It is also called a Powerful Boobook. They have striking yellow eyes, and intimidating pale yellow feet. All this from pictures, because I have never been lucky enough to see one. I did find a round-ended barred feather once, in the orchard, which I think could be one of the shorter back feathers of a Powerful Owl.

The shy Powerful Owl prefers open forests and woodlands, or sheltered gullies in wet forests with dense understoreys, especially along watercourses. They need deep hollows in old growth trees to nest, and roost by day in tall forest trees with a commanding view of their surroundings. Each pair has several roosting trees and they roost on different trees on different days, not always together, but always within calling distance.

Powerful Owls hunt only within tree cover. And only at night. Snatching their pray from foliage and branches in banking swoops through the forest. Their victims are mainly small to medium tree-living mammals – gliders and possums – although they also eat mice and rabbits and … are strong enough to carry off koalas! This idea upsets me, given dwindling koala numbers, and I can’t help worrying about the well-being of some of the young koalas we haven’t seen for a while. Powerful Owls apparently also eat other, smaller owls, like the Tawny Frogmouth, which sounds a akin to cannibalism… They rip their prey apart, eating it piece by piece, usually starting with the head. Sometimes they carry the hindquarters back to their roost, place it on a branch and hold it all day in their talons: tenderising owl style?

The powerful owl mates for life (over thirty years in some cases, which is somewhat longer than most human marriages last) and together pairs defend a defined territory of up to 1450 hectares. During the breeding season, the male prepares the nest, and roosts in a “grove” of twenty or thirty trees close by the nest tree, providing the female and young with a constant supply of food during the early part of the nesting period. The female incubates the eggs  - usually only one or two each season – and broods the young, who emerge later in the nesting period to hunt for food as well. Young owls remain with the parents for several months after fledging and may stay within their parents’ territory for over a year.

Powerful Owls sound like very particular birds and are a threatened species now, due to clearing of woodland like this; it is an honour indeed to live in their territory.

 It is sometimes said that Australia doesn’t have much of a nature writing tradition. I would argue that we do, it has just developed differently than in the US and UK. There are many interesting reasons for this, which are the subject of my current research project – thanks to a scholarship from the University of QLD. I’ll be very much immersed in nature writing for 2012 – though not necessarily my own!

For a start, it is worth remembering that Australia is still a relatively young country.  Gilbert White’s A Natural History of Selbourne, one of the earliest and best known examples of nature writing, was first published in 1788… the year Australia was “settled.”

The Natural History of Selbourne is an account of daily life in a Hampshire (UK) village and the plants and creatures of the neighbouring fields. It took eighteen years to complete and takes the form of a series of letters, from his correspondence to other naturalist philosophers, Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington. This is a bit of a construction, as White heavily edited his letters for the purposes of the book, including the dates, presumably for the sake of a stronger narrative.

It is White’s attention to detail and focus on one small location that set Selbourne apart. He was writing at a time when mainstream naturalism was focused on acquisition and expansion and preoccupied with the exotic. It was all expeditions, collections, classification and conjecture; post-Linnaeus but pre-Darwin … there were still some pretty wild theories in circulation about nature.

Selbourne is still more  natural history in its style, but as Mabey points out in his introduction, White brought “meticulousness, humility and scepticism” to the field. His writing combined clear observation with imagination, and he was able to write with “wit and intimacy.” In other words, he not only took an original approach – he was a fine writer.

As you would expect, there is plenty of sexy description:

The covert of this eminence is altogether beech, the most lovely of all forest trees, whether we consider its smooth rind or bark, its glossy foliage, or graceful pendulous boughs (21).

And charming annecdotes like the story of the female mouse (dam) who built a prefectly round ball of a house for her children in a wheat field, suspended on the head of a thistle, or the swallow that built its nest on the wings and body of an owl hanging dead and dry from the rafter of a barn.

Selbourne is, in some ways, also challenging for the modern nature lover. Despite the beautiful descriptions of birds and animals, and charming annecdotes, rather a lot of creatures, particularly birds, are shot, dissected or strung up on barn walls for the sake of natural science.

The Natural History of Selbourne brought a new perspective on the natural world and was read by writers such as H.D. Thoreau, paving the way for Walden and the many fine nature writing books that were to follow.  

Selbourne remains one of the most reprinted books in the world, popular even in Japan. The copy I have is a lovely large format, illustrated (woodcuts from previous editions as well as coloured plates) and annotated two hundred anniversary edition (1988), with an introduction from Richard Mabey, from the UQ library. Penguin’s Nature Classics edition (now there’s a series I’d like as a massive boxed set) is lovely, too, and very reasonably priced at around $12.

The ents may have lost their wives but I have found their children.

The Entlings are a little on the small side but I have no doubt they will grow into something much larger. Exactly what, I’m not quite sure; there is a dark and gnarly malevolence to them, with their tangled, mutant mangrove legs. Perhaps they are the children of huorn, and I am unwittingly raising monsters to unleash on the world. I have been half-expecting them to scuttle off, back into the wood, when I am not looking.

I found these fellows beneath a tallow wood tree by our back deck. It is afflicted with some sort of blight, which seems to kill off twigs and branches but not before they swell and blacken.

I have seen bits and pieces of it before, occasional fallen sticks about the place, but never in such intensity. And never so many creature-like pieces. They kept appearing by the back steps like lost children, one each day. As if afraid I would reject them if they all turned up at once.

I have learned not question gifts from above, from the wood, even when I do not understand. I gathered each one up, placing it with the others on the outdoor table, where I can watch them from the kitchen. I photographed them all, in case they do disappear.  And in the meantime, I set them at the empty places around the table.

It’s finally happening. An annual literary prize for Australian women’s fiction: The Stella Prize.

Do we really need another literary prize, you might well ask? The answer should be no, but it isn’t.

While there are plenty of fine books by women published and plenty of women reading, it is unfortunately still the case in this country that more reviewers of books are men, that more books by men are reviewed than books by women, and more books by men win literary prizes. The reasons for this are many and complex, and in some ways, just reflect broader disparities in our society (that old glass ceiling might be cracked, but it is yet to be shattered).

The Stella Prize is intended to help rectify this in the literary world, drawing attention to more wonderful books by Australian women writers. It has been set up rather like the UK’s Orange Prize, introduced in 1994 for the same reasons. And not enough has changed since then.

So, for now, we need the Stella.

For more on literary gender disparities see Nike’s number crunching and the lovely Susan Johnson’s response.

The word hinterland comes from the German hinderland, with the literal meaning of ‘the land behind’, usually the country behind the sea coast or a river, and traditionally, the port and city. In our case, we are behind the coast but in front of the Blackall Range, which is probably what most
people think of when they imagine the Sunshine Coast hinterland. “Oh, near Maleny” they say. And we nod, although Maleny is twenty
minutes by car and a world away by its altitude, community and climate.

Hinterland was also applied to the surrounding areas of European colonies, which, although not part of the colony itself, were influenced by the ruling colony. Although I have no wish to return to colonial times, it still fits. Local government sits on the coast and decisions tend to
be made for the greater population, which is concentrated along the shoreline and canals. The further away you are from the decision makers, and the less populated the area, the less likely revenue will be expended for your benefit or your views considered. Nonetheless, I quite like the idea that we are related to the coast but separate from its highways, malls and spreading estates. We have our own hinterland identity.

‘Hinterland’ can also be applied when talking about an individual’s depth and breadth of knowledge of other matters (or lack thereof), specifically of cultural, academic, artistic, literary and scientific pursuits. For instance, one could say, “Annie Dillard has a vast hinterland.” This usage is said to have first been applied, perhaps appropriately given its colonial reach, to British politicians. The spread of the expression is attributed to Denis Healey, former UK Defence Secretary, and his wife Edna, in the context of the supposed lack of hinterland of former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. What a dinner party conversation that must have been!

I’m not sure about the hinterland, in this sense, of our community; it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Thereare a handful with a vast cultural hinterland, and many lacking even the hinterland of Maggie Thatcher. It is a wonderful oddity of language that onecan live deep in the hinterland and yet also be lacking one. But then perhaps it went without saying, in colonial terms, that a hinterland population could not possibly possess a hinterland of the mind.

Trees, like us, live not only in the present but remember the past and anticipate the future.

The Larch, for example, remembers a caterpillar attack. The next year, it grows
shorter, stouter leaves, which don’t photosynthesise as efficiently as its usual longer, more narrow ones but are better at fending off pests. A tree shaken by wind, processes this information and responds by growing thicker and more sturdy.

A tree out on its own grows much stronger than in a forest. It has to fend for itself, put out root systems strong and deep enough to withstand winds and rain from all directions. And from a young age, too.

There are positives. A lone tree does not have to compete for light or space or nutrients; it can grow as tall and wide as it likes. And drop its limbs with freedom. It will never be in the shande of another.

I grew up admiring big old trees like that, who seemed to carry such wisdom and weight. Here, giant ficus up on the Range capture me, too, their green tangled growth, multitrunked, forming a world of their own.

It must be a lonely life though, without the comfort of others, and the richness of a whole ecosystem about you. There is only so much remembering or learning you can do on your own; surely the collective wisdom of a forest is far greater, and the company of others worth the loss of a little independence.

A ‘wolf tree’ is no longer lone. It once grew in open ground, spreading its branches wide and high, stretching and yawning with all the leisurely freedom of one who lives alone and bathed in light. If the field is left unmowed, unplowed and ungrazed, however, younger trees move in. The gather around the older tree, growing close together and reaching up for light. The original tree, its style cramped by a dense woodland of young and slender trees, is forced to send new branches upward, seeking light.

In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, there are dark forces in the forests. The Huorn are ents become more treeish, gone wild. They can still move and speak, but only with ents. They are vengeful, capable of creating darkness, moving quickly and quietly, and entrapping those who harm trees.

The Huorn are ancient, primeval, old growth; they remember a time when trees ruled Middlearth, before the awakening of elves and the rise of men. The Huorn are still angry at the impact of men and elves and dwarves and orcs on their world, harbouring resentments across the ages. Elves, it seems to me, should be welcome among trees; their only fault was a kinship to men. But I am not a tree.

In The Lord of the Rings, it is the Huorn that Treebeard rouses from Fanghorn Forest, to destroy Isengard. It is the Huorn who come to the aid of the Rohirim at the Battle of the Hornberg when all seems lost, and the Huorn who destroy the Uri-kai attempting to flee to Isengard. It is ultimately the trees that turn the tide, at every crucial point in the story, and save Midddlearth. Afterwards, their work done, they settle back into tree state.

Old Man Willow, the tree that threw Frodo into the water and trapped Merry and Pippin inside its trunk early in their journey, was a powerful Huorn. Only ancient Tom Bombadil, Master of the Old Forest, was able to sing it down:

Tom’s words laid bare the hearts of the trees and their thoughts, which were often dark and strange, and filled with things that go free upon the earth, gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning: destroyers and usurpers. It was not called the Old Forest without reason, for it was indeed ancient, a survivor of the vast forgotten woods; and in it there lived yet, aging no quicker than the hills, the fathers of the fathers of trees, remembering times when they were lords. The countless years had filled them with pride and rooted wisdom, and with malice. But none were more dangerous than the Great Willow: his heart was rotten, but his strength was green; and he was cunning, and a master of winds, and his song and thought ran through the woods on both sides of the river, His grey thirsty spirit drew power out of the earth and spread like fine root-threads in the ground, and invisible twig-fingers in the air, till it had under its dominion nearly all the trees of the Forest from the Hedge to the Downs (145).

We could do with some Huorn in our world at the moment, and an Old Forest.

I have never felt anything as quick as anger from a tree, although they would have good cause. I on the other hand, am full of rage. If I were to encounter a Huorn, a big old tree gone rogue, we would be terrible. We would rouse each other to fury, to vengefulness, ripping out powerlines and phone towers, pulling up railway lines and highways, squashing flat highrises, minister’s offices and government departments. I would ride high in the Huorn’s branches roaring, my hair aflame, the forests of the world falling in behind us. We would turn back time, descending into chaos and darkness, and the trees would reinherit the earth.

Thankfully, trees only gentle me, give me solace. They try to teach, by example, patience and acceptance. I have wandered the gullies, the seasonal creeks, and leaned against the trunks of the greatest trees in Olvar Wood and felt no malice. They impart only stillness, quiet. As the world burns, dries and dies, and we go on killing it, I hunker down, turn inwards, retreat to the wood.

The trees sometimes leave gifts for us at Olvar Wood: driftwood from the sky. Branches and fragments bleached pale grey and rubbed smooth not by the tumble of the ocean but by wind and sun and rain. They fall to earth, dry, hardened, sanded into otherworldly shapes: the bones of forest creatures.

They fall from the dead, tree-ghosts still standing guard on ridgelines, and big old trees carrying dead limbs and sections, the result of some accident or disease. Driftwood is wood half-dissolved, carved by the elements. In the sea, the process is aided by crustaceans and molluscs, in the forest canopy by ants, bugs and birds.

We had picked up an occasional piece over the years, when gardening or exploring: a pleasing shape or useful walking stick. It was only during winter this year, having vowed to source all our firewood from the property, that we really learned to see it. When the chainsaw failed, or was in the shop, we would roam Olvar Wood looking for timber to burn that didn’t require cutting: large sticks, old stumps and logs and branches that can be broken up under a steel-capped boot. The driftwood makes for the best burning; dry and dense, it does not seem to absorb moisture they way other, inexorably rotting timber does. It burns hot and is wonderful for getting the fire going.

We developed an eye for driftwood. After wind or storms we found there was often a scattered offering beneath the dead and dying trees. Each evening we would search these spots, as if for mushrooms after rain, and gather nature’s offerings up into our arms; a driftwood harvest.

We would have liked to keep many of the pieces, admiring them as we collected them, or before throwing them into the flames. But we had to keep warm. And we knew more would fall. At the nearby Maroochydore Botanical Gardens, someone has made sculptures from their eucalypts’ driftwood. Long-limbed forest people walk the gardens, beneath the trees from which they fell. One day, we will make some wooden creatures for Olvar Wood. I have put away a long leg and an arm, with a few broader pieces that might be a face, or a shell.

Like driftwood washed up on a beach, there is something magical about ‘finding’ objects in nature. When we bend to collect a piece of wood that has journeyed across the seas, nibbled and tumbled and baked into the shape of a hand or a bird, it is a treasure; the random result of so many events and processes. Making furniture and works of art from these found objects adds another layer: human creative process. The flotsam and jetsam we gather from Olvar Wood tell its story, of seasons, of life, and of death. The creatures we make from these treasures will be born of the forest.

Olvar Wood’s driftwood maps the rain – 95 inches a year – the directions it came from and with how much force, and in what combinations with sun and wind: the atmosphere of the treetops.

Sculpture, as has often been said, is as much about what is taken away as what is left behind. Cutting away those soft and inessential parts to reveal the true shape beneath, the sinews and knots; the heart of the work.

Collecting these fallen pieces brings me back to my own process: the slow craft of writing, the passing of days among trees, time shared – my heart’s wood.

15 August 2011

The woodpile is shrinking.

I had planned to chainsaw more wood today, but I’m tired and it is raining.

Yesterday we cleaned out the ash from beneath the fireplace, which had piled right up to within an inch of the grate. Usually, I park the wheelbarrow beneath the hole in the side of the chimney, remove the bricks, and shovel-assist it out into the barrow. Last summer, however, our barrow rusted clean through. We have a flash tipping wagon, which I pull behind the ride-on mower, but as I discovered after much wrestling, it is too big and square to manoeuvre in between the bricks and nearby pole. So, we (I called out for reinforcements) brought shovels, parked the wagon as near we could, and readied to open the brick hatch. We stood for a moment, hesitant; we were both feeling a little unwell, and not at all energetic. But the job needed doing.

At the first disturbance, at least a cubic metre of ash rushed out with a great whoosh, burying my feet and enveloping us in a fine white cloud. We were washed white, ghosts of ourselves.

“Great,” I said. I shovelled what I could into the wagon but most ended up on the ground about us.

We spread it around, filling a hole some animal had dug and turning up a bit of the old grate, which had melted in a hot fire, and a few other strange items.

“It will wash away when it rains,” Nike said.

“If it ever rains,” I grumped.

We shovelled a little into the compost bin and spread the rest of the small proportion we had managed to get in the wagon about the bottom of the garden.

I stamped my feet, and slapped my clothes, just spreading more white powder about. “What now?”

“Showers, I guess.”

Once clean, I lit the fire, which blazed with new gusto, able to draw with full breath. I brought down more and more wood, and watched it burn, finally heaving on the overnight log, which I could barely lift. By morning it had burned away.

Late last night we heard the koalas, a male in a brief grunting display. They are in the trees below the cottage, where the gully is deepest. It is a relief to know they are still here and safe for the moment.

I heard, too, the first bats, I think, as I was fading into sleep. Spring is not far off.

*

Nike returned from buying icing sugar for cupcakes to find a carpet snake across the driveway. She called out to me to come see it, and I ran up in my socks.

It must have been over six feet, and we watched it thread its way through the grass from its broad head right down to the tip of its tail. The rolling pattern of its scales, as it moved, was mesmerising, a sheen of colour catching the light.

“Perhaps it has recently shed its skin,” I said.

“Perfect, isn’t it?”

He made quite a bit of noise through the dry leaves and grass, making it difficult to sneak up on anything, you’d think. He was heading for my studio, which didn’t thrill me. I have seen the skin of something about that size on my roof before, and wondered, at the time, it if was coiled up behind the wine fridge feasting on native mice. As cute as they are, I’m sick of the mice this winter, and all their hissing and pooing and rapid multiplication; so the snake is welcome to as many as he likes. He had stopped right by the path to my studio door, and though we waited for some time, seemed to have settled there.

We returned to the cottage to ice the tangelo cupcakes and put on the kettle for tea. Pythons are big but not dangerous. Not to humans anyway. They are slow moving and have no venom. Still, there is something unsettling about the way a snake moves, the unlikelihood of it, the contained speed and strength.

As we sat down to “elevenses” the ‘chance of showers’ we’d been having for more than a week, finally turned into rain.

“It’s really raining,” I said, looking out through the French doors.

“Told you.”

In winter you forget. It was only January that we were cut off from the world, and watching the floodwaters rise in Brisbane. And even in March and April, surrounded by lush green and damp, we couldn’t imagine it dry, and now we can’t imagine it wet. It has been more than a month since more than a few spots had fallen, and for here, it is quite dry. We are low on water and watering the vegetables every second day.

As I finish my third cupcake, I am worrying about the woodpile, down to a few day’s worth, and the snake. We are to do a few hours writing today and I can’t put off returning to my studio much longer.

“I’m sure it moved on once it started raining,” Nike said.

“Maybe it knew it was going to rain, that’s why it curled up in there, under the grass.”

“Maybe it’s curled up inside now,” she said, “under your desk.”

*

The snake was not under my desk, nor anywhere that I could see. Later I hear birds squawking rather frantically outside; perhaps sounding the alarm as the snake travels south, towards Nike’s office.

We heard helicopters late yesterday, and joked of war and surveillance. As it turns out, a man has been arrested for the murder of Daniel Morcombe and the police and SES are out searching wetlands near Beerwah – about thirty kilometres south – for his body.

It is harder to get out of my mind than the snake. Daniel was taken not far from here, in 2003, and went to the same school as our own children. His disappearance, unresolved,  has shaped this community. Parents are fearful, teachers vigillant; any sense of a safe and carefree rural environment  in which children roamed free - the childhoods nike and I knew and were nostalgic for - was gone before we arrived.

I hope Daniel’s body will soon be found, and the trial process concluded quickly, giving his parents, his brothers, and the rest of the community some closure.

The name Olvar Wood is taken from Tolkien’s The Simarillion, in which the olvar are growing things with roots in the ground and the kelvar are animals.

It was Yavanna (giver of fruits), the second greatest of the Valar (pure, god-like beings), who planted the first seeds and watched over living things. In physical form, she is described as tall and garbed in green or as a tree reaching for the heavens. Yavanna tended the gardens in Valinor, the lands of the Valar, and created the Two Trees, one silver and one gold. The light of the Two Trees waxed and waned in a twelve hour cycle.

Among the Valor, however, there was a bad egg, Melkor, who coveted the magical light of the Two Trees and poisoned them. Their last flower and fruit became the moon and the sun. Melkor would go on to become Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, summoning the balrogs and corrupting the hearts of men.

When Yavanna’s husband, Aulë the smith, first created the dwarves, Yavanna (worried about their sharp axes, and the Elves and Men that were yet to come) went to Manwë, the Lord of the Valar. “Is it not enough that Melkor should have marred so many? Shall nothing that I have devised be free from the dominion of others?”

“If thou hadst thy will what woudst though reserve?” said Manwe. “Of all thy realm what dost thou hold dearest?”

“All have their worth,” said Yavanna, “and each contributes to the worth of the others. But the kelvar can flee or defend themselves, wheras the olvar that grow cannot. And among these I hold trees dear. Long in the growing, swift shall they be in the felling, and unless they pay toll with fruit upon bough little mourned in their passing. So I see in my thought. Would that the trees might speak on behalf of all things that have roots, and punish those that wrong them!”

So it was that the Shepherds of the Trees, or the Ents, were created to walk the forests and protect the olvar.

Yavanna returned to Aulë, in his smithy, probably with hands on hips and chin upraised. “Now let thy children beware! For there shall walk a power in the forests whose wrath they will arouse at their peril.”

“Nonetheless they will have need of wood,” said Aule, and he went on with his smith work.”

Re-reading The Simarillion and The Lord of the Rings since we moved here, it is even more obvious how central trees are to Tolkien’s mythology; he valued them highly and, it seems, foresaw their future.

We came here to care for and protect our little patch of trees. The relative wilderness that seemed boundless when we arrived, was quickly encroached upon by clearing and developers, home-owners and builders eager for a view to the sea. Like Yavanna, we became anxious for our Olvar and kelvar, though they are not of our creation.

The opportunity to secure the property next door, putting the two pieces of land back together as it were, felt right. The dam and creeks and slopes worked together, were part of a whole, and the boundary that had lain between them strange and impractical. It was one place, the wood, and as we searched for a name, Olvar Wood stuck.

We have had regrets, since mind you; people seem to have such trouble remembering or pronouncing the name. Three years on, we still receive bills, mail and emails addressed to Mr Oliver Wood or Ms Olive Wood.