White Beech: The Rainforest Years (32 page)

In the felling of rainforest, much chopping may be saved, especially in hilly country, by the use of the ‘drive’ system. This, roughly, is the cutting of say half an acre of trees only two thirds of the way through and then ‘sending them off’, with a big drive tree dropped from the uphill side; the pressure goes on slowly at first and then gains momentum, as each tree is pushed from behind and in turn pushes the one in front; the big water-vines too play an important part. The trees do not break off level at the cut; they rip and burst under the pressure, and it is a terrifying sight to see a large strip of lofty forest tearing itself to pieces to the accompaniment of sounds which cannot be described. (O’Reilly, 104–5)

If a single tree refused to give way and held up the drive, the most foolhardy member of the gang might venture in to help it on its way by sawing or chopping a little further into it. Otherwise it was a matter of waiting, for the pressure to increase, for a wind, or, some said, for the next ebb tide.

If everything went as planned each falling tree struck others until all the trees in the drive came crashing down. This was quite a spectacle, and if a really big drive was ready to go, favoured friends might be invited to watch . . . if those invited were girls, they could be counted on to bring a cake or batch of scones and boil the billy, so all present could have a picnic during the lunch hour. (Lentz, 68)

Destruction of the forest was the best entertainment going; sometimes it was done simply for the hell of it. In about 1897 Carl Lentz and his sister were invited by friends who lived at Pine Mountain (now Pages Pinnacle) to explore Connell’s Creek (now called Waterfall Creek) and view the spectacular falls (now called Horseshoe Falls). They scrambled up a high spur to the top of the falls.

The spur we were on was very narrow along the top, and open forest, very steep down both sides with dense scrub. One place along the top was full of boulders, some bigger than thousand gallon tanks. One, a very big one, was just on balance. We had an axe, cut a strong sapling, stuck one end to a glut, levered, canted it over. It rolled down against a big bloodwood tree, pushed it over, rolled along it. Near the tree head was a low sharp rock ledge. As the enormous weighty boulder rolled over that, it cut the tree clean off, catapulted the great stem, roots and all, clean over itself and speared it ahead, away down into the scrub below. The boulder gained more momentum, took everything before it and started more rocks going. It was an avalanche, the rumbling noise was terrific, and lasted a good while too. (Lentz, 70)

The entertainment value was not exhausted with the smashing of the trees. The next step in clearing land is the burning off:

The burning of felled jungle is a splendid spectacle. You have perhaps a hundred or more acres covered to a depth of twenty feet with smashed timber and dry leaves . . . The torch is applied along the foot of the clearing, and flames, advancing in a wall, rush up the slopes with a roar which may be heard for many miles. Black smoke, boiling fiercely, shoots up to one thousand feet, and there the terrible heat, contacting the icy upper air, generates a giant thunder cloud which rides majestically above the inferno . . . the steady boom of exploding rock . . . goes on for many hours after the fiercest of the blaze has subsided. (O’Reilly, 112)

In the course of such a burn millions of creatures lose their lives, from the possums and gliders in their houses in the tree hollows, the snakes and lizards that are roasted in their hidey-holes between the rocks, the tree frogs, and the giant snails, to the whole host of invertebrates. By the time the O’Reillys were clearing rainforest in Queensland in the nineteen-teens, most of the accessible rainforest areas on the east coast of Australia had already been felled, burned and turned to cropland or pasture. The process had been breathtakingly rapid; within a decade thousands upon thousands of hectares of forest that had stood for millennia had gone up in smoke.

The distinguished English scientist Sydney Skertchly, who retired from his post as assistant government geologist in 1897 and settled at Molendinar, was in no doubt about the folly of clearing and burning the rainforest.

Any sap-thirsty ignoramus with an axe can destroy it in an hour; and the biggest fool burn it in a day. What does he get? – a light, feathery, white powder charged with all the potash and other salts laboriously stored in the tree, and he knows this is the plant-food par excellence, and thinks he is going to get it. But he won’t. Half of it is scattered by the wind, most of the residue washed out by the rain and sent into Moreton Bay, and his remaining soil is due at the same depot, for there is nothing left to hold up the water, and a few hours after a heavy downpour the vaunted scrub soil comes floating past my house. (
Q
, 13 May 1922)

On 18 December 1923, Skertchly delivered a lecture on ‘The Nerang River, its past, present and future’ to the Institute of Surveyors in Brisbane.

The scrubs, Professor Skertchly pointed out, were the greatest holders of water we could possibly have. Before they were cut down rain that fell at the source of the Nerang River took five days to reach the spot at which he lived, but when it fell now the water reached him in five hours. Not only were the waters not held up in what he described as a sponge – masses of moss and other vegetation – but they were wasted.

To-day’s forests had taken thousands of years to grow. They had been there before the arrival of the mammals, but a tree that had been growing for 2800 years could be destroyed by any dairy farmer in 20 minutes. (
BC
, 20 December)

In Skertchly’s grim vision the ultimate result of the clearing of the forests would be desertification. He reckoned without the energy with which the farmers set about replacing the destroyed forest with exotic vegetation. Superbly orchestrated forest systems are now cacophonies of weeds.

Kangaroo Grass may be good for growing kangaroos but not for European cattle bred to produce excess milk. The next great ‘advance’ in Australian husbandry came with the introduction of pasture grasses from other parts of the world. The obvious choice was Paspalum, from the humid subtropical areas of South America. The first species to be introduced in the 1870s, probably at the instance of our old friend Ferdinand Mueller, was
P. dilatatum
, which was well adapted to our high rainfall and fertile soil. Paspalum made its way to Numinbah in 1901, when Henry Stephens seeded it on his property in the Pocket. (Henry Stephens’s son Ted became the owner of what is now CCRRS in 1968.) By 1907 Paspalum, Rhodes Grass (
Chloris gayana
) and Prairie Grass (
Bromus cathartica
) were all established in the Numinbah Valley
(
BC
, 18 June).

Paspalum dilatatum
still grows at Cave Creek as a weed. In deep shade it has been replaced by another member of the genus, called by the locals ‘wet styanide’, actually
P. wettsteinii
, an indistinct species that seems to include two others,
P. mandiocanum
and
P. plicatulum
. Whatever name this wretched invader actually ends up with, it is shade-tolerant, which means that it can survive under the rainforest canopy. We expect to have to keep removing it for ever. Nothing eats it, the native herbivores finding it just as unpalatable as introduced farm animals do. Unchecked, it spreads by seed and by stolons, up and down the steepest slopes, across rocks, smothering all the mosses and ferns and the rainforest grasses.

In the 1920s a new pest threatened to cross the border between the Northern Territory and Queensland. The Buffalo Fly,
Haematobia irritans exigua
, had been accidentally introduced to northern Australia with the water buffalo, which was intended to provide transport and food to remote settlements, first to Melville Island, then to Port Essington on the mainland in 1838. The settlements were abandoned, the buffaloes went feral, and the Buffalo Fly population exploded. The Buffalo Fly breeds in cattle dung; in its native habitat its breeding was controlled by the activities of dung beetles that removed and buried the dung. Australia had its own dung beetles but they had evolved with marsupials and could not process the sloppier cattle dung. Moreover, when scrub was cleared for dairying the ground-dwelling beetle population was usually exterminated. The build-up of cattle dung in the pastures became a problem in itself, because it fouled the pasture grass and encouraged rank growth which was unpalatable to the cattle. Native flies bred exponentially in the decaying cow pats, along with various species of biting midges. The mature Buffalo Fly lives on its host, feeding continually on its blood, the female only descending to lay eggs in fresh dung. Some animals cannot tolerate the flies and rub up against rough surfaces until they have made huge sores in their withers and flanks. The Buffalo Fly also introduces a parasitic worm (
Stephanofilaria
spp.) that burrows under the animals’ skin.

The first act of the authorities was to attempt to set up a quarantine: Buffalo Fly infestation was declared a disease and stock crossings were closed. At the annual meeting of the Queensland Co-operative Dairy Companies Association in December 1929, the opinion was voiced that ‘its introduction to the coastal districts of the state would be followed by severe losses in dairying produce; the fly would cause more harm to the dairying industry than ever it caused to the beef industry’ (
BC
, 14 December). By the mid-1940s the fly had reached our corner of south-east Queensland. Its arrival coincided with the beginning of a campaign to convert people from butter to margarine.

Farmers faced the decision to: 1. increase in size and try to live on butter and pig production, 2. change to beef production, 3. change to whole milk production, 4, sell the farm. The result was a combination of all four, leading to a decline in the number of farms which stabilised in the seventies to a total of sixteen farms in the valley . . . (Hall
et al
., 92–3)

One of the sixteen farms was what is now CCRRS.

In the meantime dozens of exotic grasses had been introduced to the valley. Vast amounts of energy and enterprise had been expended on finding pasture species that would grow cattle faster. Ultimately no fewer than fourteen species of Paspalum have been naturalised in the Numinbah Valley. To these may be added the improved strains that are produced by plant breeders every year. Paspalum was followed by other grasses. Cocksfoot, sometimes called Orchard Grass (
Dactylis glomerata
), has now colonised all the states of Australia except the Northern Territory. Japanese millet (
Echinochloa esculenta
) was grown for forage, as was a European fescue (
Festuca
arundinacea
). European bents (
Agrostis
spp.) were introduced as lawn grasses and are now weeds of pasture.

Paspalum was eventually displaced in our neck of the woods by
Pennisetum clandestinum
, Kikuyu Grass, as more palatable and nutritious. In temperate conditions with an average rainfall of two metres a year, Kikuyu is appallingly rampant. If it is not kept short by continuous grazing, it will grow into massive, matted sward in a few months. Along roadsides all over Australia you will see other Pennisetums, descendants of those imported by the nursery industry. There is a native Pennisetum,
P. alopecuroides
, which could be selectively bred into a useful ornamental, but as two introduced species are easier to grow, being less choosy, they are what you will find in your garden centre, and in council plantings, and on road verges in remote Australia. Another Pennisetum,
P. macrourum
or
P. purpureum
or some hybrid of the two, Elephant or Bana Grass, was imported to serve as windbreaks for crops like bananas and sugarcane. This has found its niche in creeks and watercourses, where it grows in dense eight-foot-high tussocks, completely smothering the complex and delicate riparian ecosystem.

Other grasses were introduced by accident. Meadow Foxtail and Bulbous Oatgrass (
Arrhenatherum elatius
) from Europe were introduced as hay grasses. Sweet Vernal Grass (
Anthoxanthum odoratum
) was introduced to give a pleasant smell to hay. Marram Grass comes from western Europe, where it grows on sand dunes. As far as we can now tell, Wild Oat (
Avena fatua
) was an accidental contaminant of seed. Imported cereals came in with Quaking Grass (
Briza maxima
), which is now all over temperate Australia. How did we end up with
Cenchrus incertus
from tropical America – a vicious pest, injuring the mouths of grazing animals and making wool dangerous to handle, or the barley grasses (
Critesion
spp.) that pierce the skin and damage the eyes of grazing beasts, or Twitch or thirteen introduced species of
Eragrostis
as well as sixty or so of our own? What reason can there have been to introduce
Digitaria sanguinalis
, now a troublesome weed of lawns, gardens and irrigation areas, when we had Digitarias of our own? European Barnyardgrass (
Echinochloa
crus-galli
) can mature several generations in a year and outgrows irrigated rice. Attempts to introduce South American Prairie Grass (
Bromus catharticus
) as an out-of-season forage crop in cooler areas failed but the plant now persists as a weed; we did a little better with veldt grasses (
Ehrharta
spp.) and Rhodes Grass, from tropical and subtropical Africa, introduced
c.
1900, but neither proved as drought-tolerant as Buffel grass or Green Panic. The process of acclimatisation never stops. Indeed it gathers momentum year on year.