The Tree In Changing Light (12 page)

A
KE AKE
was a cattle-damaged, weed-cleft eleven acres running down to a shingly beach choked in gorse and wild tobacco. It also happened to be one of the most beautiful places on earth. When we first started going there together we didn't call the place anything

Flying across from Australia each summer we camped on a ridge of kikuyu grass where our tent overlooked the shining gulf. The moon rose above stacked islands in soft marine light. There was a crumbling cliff, a high headland where a sea eagle circled, and a feeling of land running out to the sky. The hill facing the campsite had an almost conical shape and Susie had called it Kiwi Hill because of an unusual soft feather she found there. On one side lay Omaru Bay, a shallow, semi-circular, flounder-fishing haunt. On the other was a wide sea-passage between islands. Yachts moored under Kiwi Hill depending on the weather, sometimes as many as eighty but they were hidden and all we heard was the clatter of their rigging and floating music from parties at night. When the sun shone, and it was hot, the sea broke into glass splinters.
When cloud darkened, the passage went leaden grey, motionless before a coming squall. The water was scrolled by tide currents and the wakes of boats heading for shelter.

The day came when we chose the name Ake Ake, meaning ‘forever'. Nobody had that assurance of course. Forever beautiful and forever lasting? Forever to be used? Forever to be loved and repaired?

W.H. Auden wrote:

We called it Ake Ake as an assurance or promise against the realities that symbols shine through.

The ake ake tree (
Dodonaea viscosa
) resembled a tough shrub in its juvenile form and became a handsome small tree when grown. It survived on the clifftop among gorse, old pines, and twisted pohutukawa trees surrounded by a red debris of flower stamens. Ake ake timber was the hardest wood known, fashioned into war clubs and made into axle staves and even ball bearings, according to New Zealand bush lore. It had gently ascending branches and sticky branchlets. The kidney-shaped seed capsules were thin, papery and pearlised. When the seeds were ripe the ake ake rustled in the breeze like a snare drum hidden in the undergrowth.

Susie had been given the land by her father in the 1970s. Her sisters sold their portions but she held on. Before we met she thought about returning from Australia to live there, and asked Rob Morton, an island tree grower, how many trees would be practical to put in. Rob answered that around four thousand would be a good start.

When I heard that number I liked the sound of it, having once known someone on a treeless two thousand acres declare that a planting of ten trees, maximum, was enough. The definition of a tree planter I always thought was someone with a forest in their imagination and the where-withal to make the gesture with a spade. Such a simple choice but with an intricate connection awaiting. There was also the matter of having the land—good fortune, of course—but then with tree planting in mind there would always be acreage somewhere.

So they'd put them in, fencing out cattle from the beach and closing gaps in the remnant bush in the hope of shading out gorse, the dominant problem weed. Gorse had been brought from England by early settlers for hedge planting. They prized it as a solution to fencing problems on New Zealand's precipitous hills, stealing it from each other and swimming frozen rivers at night with rootlings clenched between their teeth in the hope of getting it struck.

Susie kept giving me lessons in how to look at New Zealand trees but I was a recalcitrant pupil. Except for kauri, manuka and cordyline the names were new to me—kaihikatea, puriri, pohutukawa, nikau, totara, kowhai, whau. What did they signify? I had trouble separating shades of green. Even in a forest fully grown, with ferns crowning the
upper branches of ancient trees, a great spectacle, I held something back from my admiration. New Zealand had none of the hardness I loved in Australia. Everything I defined in negatives through an aesthetic of opposites. I was an open sclerophyll woodland sort of person, I boasted, a lover of blazing sharpness where light spilled like acid and the nostrils clogged with dust or stung with bushfire smoke. Long-bladed reeds didn't cut the hands in New Zealand and thorns didn't snag. Kids ran barefoot through long grass—no snakes or bindi-eyes. My moods were attuned to bleary haze, purple distances, drought years and down-hanging leaf shades of eucalyptus, acacia, casuarina—silver, grey-green and earthred. Nondescriptness secreting beauty and a subtle, immense variety were the sights on which I was weaned. I fixed on the drying grasses on the opposite islands with a stubborn home-sickness and mistrusted easy attraction.

Rob Morton had a philosophy of planting that wouldn't work in thin Australian soils. It was to plant in grass, and not clear the grass away, but use it as shelter. Not all the trees thus planted survived but most flourished. Seventeen kauris were put in but only two lived. Down on the beach a planting of pohutukawas disappeared. Up at the gate, on the ridgeline where the wind blew from four points of the compass, cabbage trees shot straight as rulers and flax thrived with emblematic profusion out of kikuyu grass that was matted, twisted like wire, and feet deep.

It was amazing how a planting of four thousand and a good percentage of them surviving absorbed itself into the acreage. On the cone of Kiwi Hill and down the northern fenceline, across the cleared head of the gully in ‘islands' and
then down the gully itself to the beach the new plantings darkened and thickened—took hold. On annual visits we struggled through and did counts. Getting down to the beach was an ever more difficult scrub-bash as weeds encroached into gaps, vines frothed over treetops.

Meantime more than half the land was still unplanted but that half was a no-go zone more than ever, gorse-ridden and thick with tobacco weed, a species that grew into a tree and had wide, soft, dinner-plate sized leaves and smooth amber berries the size of glass eyes. It was noxious to humans, although not, apparently, to a lurking dope grower who macheted a way in and spread superphosphate from plastic bags lugged through dim tunnels of thorn. The haul was harvested before we ever knew it was there. A well-motivated weeder, he would have been employable in friendlier circumstances, for none of his crop was left, everything cleaned out—the tattered archaeology of plastic being the only giveaway.

Any attempt to chop wild tobacco led to more tobacco springing up and a chest-tightening wheeze that foreboded heart damage. Those who'd worked clearing it related health scares, and I felt a fist clench in my chest every time I chopped. Just here and there clumps of kanuka and manuka promised long-term regeneration, a future hope based on the idea of gorse being shaded and withering in a screened forest, which was Rob Morton's way, a tactic in harmony with ecology and looking beyond the human lifespan. Another friend, Rob Fenwick, reclaiming hundreds of acres of island land, described the Hauraki Gulf as the weed capital of the world, with passionfruit, kiwi fruit, hakea, jasmine, you
name it, going wild. No weedicides, no herbicides, though. Just letting one army of control, the indigenous, defeat another for the long term. Letting seed-eating wood pigeons drop what they ate and a pattern of interaction develop.

Each summer for six years we did more tree plantings, cut gorse, dug out tobacco weed. It was always rushed, temporary, token, although for everything put in or ripped out a blessing was made over the profusion and gifts of life. Rob Morton took wild cultivars of olive trees from other islands and we planted around sixty. Ironically they thrived where the gorse, a nitrogen enricher, grew thickest, and some of the best disappeared from view almost before the eyes, in the time lapse film that was the overrunning of Ake Ake. Leaving the job to a friendly neighbour the year Susie was ill, good work was obliterated by the time we came back, and a sense of nothing much done at all conveyed unfairly to someone who'd tried on our behalf.

Then there we were at Ake Ake again, wondering where last year's vision was gone. To keep the olives intact, there was Susie wielding a machete or breathlessly making a swipe with a brush-hook in brave attempts to stem the prickly tide. There was I, leaning over a spade and removing jellylike, waterlogged clay from a pug-hole where a tree floated rather than firmly corked in. Either we should beat a retreat, run goats, or call in an army, I declared. So the debate ran back and forth—but anyway, soon it was time to come back to Australia again.

When I wrote about New Zealand for a travel supplement I rhapsodised the differences on a kind of score card, All Blacks 100, Wallabies 0:

 

‘The water is silken smooth, the stars are skeined by mist, there are no lights on the shore, which is unpeopled, no sounds apart from the purring outboard and the knock of yacht tackle on masts. No cries of mournful night birds, no all-pervading threat of summer smoke. The tide streams in, filling the inlets with its long fingers, slapping among the mangroves, carrying the splash of fish, flowing from the deep sea into the deep land, leaving traces of a way of living in the heart and habits of life.'

 

Disguised as flattery I deplored my missing connections:

 

What is it about you Kiwis, I wonder, you seem to have come a straight way through the psychic shoals, bypassing the gnarled dried roots of Australian bitterness and our blazing self-consuming cynicism. Rommel noticed in the North Africa campaign that the New Zealanders opposing him were clean tough fighters while Australians were treacherous and dirty …

You are a people who stepped here from the sea. Went up the gullies. Looked back at the sea. Land no sooner materialised before it broke away into archipelagoes and gulfs. You feel the mild summer air gathering through the passages and the sea-islands, breathing along with you the flow of the tide in the dark.'

 

And then, without quite realising it, I admitted to being hypnotised:

 

‘At the ends of streets and along suburban bays people go swimming in a thoughtful, dreamy fashion. There's always
water for Aucklanders to walk down to, they don't sprint into a surf and flail the waves and re-emerge puffing and blowing as if it's a contest with death. They stand in it up to their knees island-fashion, up to their waists, dressed in t-shirts and shorts or with skirts tucked up. A girl waits on the rocks with a plastic supermarket bag while a boy gathers shellfish. He troughs around like a dog in the gutters between rocks. A family group stands ankle-deep in earnest discussion and lovers softly fin along, two heads following the pull of the star-tides. While here comes a Tongan or a Cook Islander: he rolls up his trouser legs and steps into the water, reaches down and splashes handfuls of water onto his moon face as if in a ritual. After a long staring pause he returns to the beach and strips down to red underpants. Then he surges in, breast strokes, floats. A friend joins him and they have brief swimming races, they start to splash each other, skylark, and guffaw deliciously in their language. Later on the beach they stand gravely together and seem to be discussing a piece of local authority earthworks.'

 

One morning not long ago I struggled from a dream in which I looked up from under the earth and saw white, mushroom-like threads trailing down, taking hold. I was at Ake Ake in the frame bedroom of an unfinished house. We were there in July for tree planting and the island had a feeling of being closed down for winter. The previous week there'd been rain, and all the previous day we'd been out planting, and the day before that. The soil in the gully writhed with worms as the spades went in. Where the worst weed growth exploded we'd contracted heavy machinery with
a flail and a mulcher. On the track to the beach, formerly dark and tangled, light came from a broken-open sky. Everywhere tobacco weed and gorse had been knocked down, chewed up, flung around until the place resembled a war zone. Repeated attacks reduced formerly impassable trunks and stalks to a prickly compost. Susie blocked her ears to the roar, closed her eyes, and said a prayer for damage done in passing. Formerly impassable on the western hill, the ground was now silvered, flung open. Cloud-shadows rippled along where the new plantings went in. Among thickets of wild tobacco we'd made a decision and agreed to selective use of herbicides—painting the stumps with a dichloram-diesel mixture and spraying moth plant seedlings with Roundup when they appeared like pea sprouts.

Trees from Rob Morton's nursery came on Tony King-Turner's truck. It was like a float in an agricultural show, waving with tightly-packed fronds. Tony was a track-builder and landscaper who planted with the help of a Czech traveller, Jiri. It felt like farming as I remembered it; I was up to my elbows in it. I spaded alongside them trying to keep pace, but Jiri lost me, he was a driven worker, so fast and hard he went almost on all fours from tree to tree, cigarette hanging from a pale lip and knees scrabbling the ground at speed. When he followed the chainsaw and crawled under bushes with the diesel bucket and paintbrush treating stumps it was too late to worry about anything. The Hauraki Gulf was the weed capital of the world and if scorching the earth could be described as being done judiciously then even that moment was past. Rain threatened and God help vulnerable species if the herbicide ran.

All day I found myself lingering back along the track, looking at the sets of trees awaiting planting. I still wasn't sure of names, maybe never would be, but I hardly believed what I saw. Which was?

This one's leaves like helicopter blades. That one's leaves gleaming like polished, open shells. Another's leaves like tough, plasticised tongues studded on a stick. The ferns had green, grublike central coils, and palm leaves were tough as hacked tin. Any way of describing them makes them seem strange but they weren't so strange any more. I seemed to have known them before, going back a long time—this was how the feeling came to me when it came.