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Earthbeat - ABC Radio National 22 May 2004
Presented by Alexandra de Blas
Summary
In the Miles Franklin Award-winning novel, 'Eucalyptus', the main
character wants to grow every Australian species of eucalypt. This week
on Earthbeat we travel to South Australia to meet a real eucalypt
fanatic who is well on his way to achieving that aim.
The
main character in the novel 'Eucalyptus' is a man with a peculiar but
beautiful obsession. He wants to grow every Australian species of
eucalypt, from scrubby mallee to forest giant, on his property.
That whimsical fictional idea has become a real life dream for one
South Australian man. Dean Nicolle has established a eucalypt
arboretum on his property at Currency Creek, not far from the mouth
of the River Murray in South Australia.
Annie Hastwell caught up with him there to talk trees.
Annie Hastwell: I'm
standing on a hillside south of
Adelaide.
The sea in the far distance, and the hillside with a particular
significance for the whole of Australia, because it's here that Dean
Nicolle grows just about every kind of gum tree it's possible to find
in the whole continent. Now Dean, what's behind this, when did you
start?
Dean Nicolle: I
guess I started planting trees here, it
was
back in 1993, but I've been interested in eucalypts and plants in
general since I was about 8, so since a very early age. And I've
always wanted to grow or try to grow, every species of eucalypt there
is, and that's around 1,000-odd species.
Annie Hastwell: So
how unique is what you're doing here?
Dean Nicolle: I
guess it's unique in that most arboreta,
and
an arboretum is a zoo of trees, so to speak, most arboreta have been
set up in a bit of an ad hoc sort of way, trying to grow one of every
species; whereas I've set this up in a bit more of a scientific
manner, that is, growing more than one tree of every species and
taking various data on growth rates and survival rates, flowering
time, all that sort of thing. But I guess it's also unique in the
number of species growing here. There's certainly more species
growing on this one piece of land than anywhere else in the
world.
Annie Hastwell: They're
looking big and healthy, let's go
and
have a look at some of them.
Dean Nicolle: OK.
Reading from 'Eucalyptus': It was virtually an outdoor museum of
trees. A person could wander among the different species and pick up
all kinds of information and at the same time be enthralled and in
some cases rendered speechless, by the clear examples of beauty. The
diversity of the eucalypt itself was an education; the slightest
movement of the head, there was always another eucalypt of different
height, foliage and pattern of bark.
Dean Nicolle: I
guess the thing is because there's about
6,000
trees growing on the property here of about 900 different species,
it's difficult to walk past them all just in a couple of hours. Of
course you'd need a few days here just to see them all.
This one here is quite interesting. It's probably the eucalypt with
the largest fruits of all the eucalypts, or gum nuts.
Annie Hastwell: It's
quite beautiful; it's very
sculptural,
isn't it?
Dean Nicolle: Yes,
it's interesting. This species can
have
either red or yellow flowers. The seed from these four individuals
here were taken off a red-flowering individual, but two have yellow
flowers and two have red flowers, so there doesn't seem to be
anything genetic there. But the fruit size varies from as big as
this, down to match-head sort of size.
Annie Hastwell: Do
you get snakes up here?
Dean Nicolle: Yes.
As long as you're making a bit of
noise you
should be all right.
What we have here is a lignotuber, or a mallee root from a eucalypt.
This particular specimen was about 12 years old, when it was dug up
out of the ground, and you can see that the size of the lignotuber is
quite massive compared to the size of the stem above the ground. And
what it actually is, is just a mass of dormant vegetative buds, that
when the top part of the tree is destroyed, either through fire
naturally or from cutting it down like this one has been, those buds
become active and are able to re-grow, so the tree can re-sprout
after fire very rapidly. And lignotubers can get very massive in size
over a number of generations, and certainly there are examples of
individual eucalypts that have formed lignotubers up to 20 metres
across, from just getting burnt down and then growing out again,
again and again and again. And specimens like that are thought to be
thousands of years old. They can form like mushroom rings, or
spinifex rings as well.
Annie Hastwell: So
the ultimately adaptable tree, really.
Dean Nicolle: They
are, yes. They certainly can cope with
fire
very well, most species can in any case, and the lignotuber it's not
unique to the eucalypts, but certainly most eucalypt species have
adapted lignotubers to cope with fire as a means of survival.
Reading from 'Eucalyptus': With a boiled egg and a stand of textbooks
in a knapsack, Holland criss-crossed his land, absorbed in
identifying each and every eucalypt. Often it was necessary to send
specimens of fruit and leaves to a world authority in Sydney, and
seek a second opinion in other places. His affinity with eucalypts
was both vague and natural, and before long he was having slow motion
dreams about them.
Dean Nicolle: I'm
not sure why I became interested in
eucalypts as opposed to pines or willows or whatever, but I guess in
terms of the diversity, there are so many species of eucalypts.
There's not many plant groups where there's almost a 1,000-odd
species within the one plant group. And just the sheer diversity;
they vary from small shrubby bushes, up to knee-high, up to the
tallest flowering plants in the world. And then there's all the
diversity in flower colour, in bark types and leaf forms, and they're
uniquely Australian as well, so I get to travel all over Australia to
look at them, to collect them, to research them, which is really
nice.
Annie Hastwell: And
your father's pretty heavily involved
in
this; he went off to the desert with you when you were searching for
the lost eucalypt. Is that something you've inspired him to do?
Dean Nicolle: I
guess so. My dad's always keen to jump in
the
4-wheel drive and go off looking at eucalypts with me. He drives and
I basically tell him where to go and where to stop, so it works out
really well. The two of us actually walked across the Gibson Desert
in search of Giles' Mallee, which involved a walk of 120 kilometres
carrying all our water, so yes, we go to great lengths to try and
look at eucalypts and to do things that are a little bit
different.
Annie Hastwell: Have
you got a favourite, or is that an
unfair
question to ask someone like you?
Dean Nicolle: My
favourite eucalypt species, I can't grow
here
at all, it's native to the northern Kimberley region in Western
Australia. It has big balls of bright orange flowers and large waxy
grey leaves, but because it won't tolerate temperatures below about
15-degrees Celsius, it will only grow in a glasshouse this far
south.
Annie Hastwell: So
we looked at Western Australia, South
Australia, snow country, have we looked at anything that's
specifically Queensland or that side of Australia?
Dean Nicolle: Yes
well Queensland's probably got, it must
be
about 150 different species of eucalypts. Western Australia has
probably got the largest number, about 500 different species, but
that's partly of course because Western Australia takes up half of
Australia. So the two main areas of eucalypt diversity in Australia
are south-west Western Australia, the wheatbelt there, where there's
been a lot of clearing gone on over the last 100 years or so, and
also the coastal area of central New South Wales, where again there's
been a lot of disturbance from urbanisation and also clearing. So the
two main areas where you've got the greatest diversity of eucalypts,
there's also a lot of rare species because that's where there's been
a lot of settlement.
This species of eucalypt here is one of the yellow bloodwoods. It has
this lovely flakey yellowish bark. There's a group of about 12
species of yellow bloodwoods, all except one species are from the
central Queensland area, and they grow really well here on the sandy
soils and it's the bark of the tree I think that is the outstanding
feature of this species.
Annie Hastwell: That
bark must have had a use in the
past,
it's incredible, isn't it, quite thick and flakey and soft-looking,
almost a pile of it to sleep on would be quite nice, you imagine if
you're out in the bush.
Dean Nicolle: Yes,
you're probably right. The diversity
in
eucalypt bark, it's amazing. You can have the flakey papery barks
like this, and you have the real rough hard barks, and then you have
the completely smooth bark, like the lemon-scented gums behind us
here, which is actually quite closely related to these yellow
bloodwoods, but have a completely different bark type, where it's
just completely smooth.
Annie Hastwell: This
is 10 years on. What's it going to
look
like here 20 years on?
Dean Nicolle: I
guess the trees will be a lot larger in
general. I'm still planting out seedlings of a lot of different
species, of species that are already growing here as well but from
new areas. I'm not sure where my research will take me, but hopefully
because the amount of data and information coming out of the
arboretum here, the arboretum will keep going in some sort of format
and it will be here for a long time to come, hopefully.
Jackie May: That's
Dean Nicolle there from South
Australia's
Currency Creek Arboretum, and he was talking to Annie Hastwell. And
thanks to Pat Moran for those readings from 'Eucalyptus' by Murray
Bail. And you can look out for Dean Nicolle in an ABC-TV documentary,
called 'From the Heart'. It's going to be screening at the end of
next month.
Guests
on this program:
Dean Nicolle
Currency Creek Arboretum
South Australia
Further
information:
Currency Creek Arboretum
http://www.dn.com.au/
Publications:
Eucalyptus
Author: Murray Bail
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company