Introduction to New Nature Writing

I am lying in a bunk bed, a Tasmanian devil gnawing on a pademelon carcass under the floorboards, and I am trying to think of a song. Only I can’t remember how it goes. I’m sure it’s something to do with a star. I try to hum the tune in the hope that words will reveal its title, and I don’t care if the devil hears. 

I’m trying to think of this song to stay awake; to ward off nervousness and apprehension. I’m a city animal and I am out here in the environment of the devil, as wild as it gets, and I am not going to deny it’s an uncomfortable habitat for me. Uncomfortable is an understatement. I am scared. 

How long has it been since I have been alone, truly alone, lying in a bunk bed at least 10 kilometres from the nearest human being, from the nearest man-made source of light? I’m thinking about light because at this moment I am looking at a flickering candle and wondering how long does a candle burn? It’s my last one and when it dies in a thin whisper of smoke I’ll know I am truly on my own, isolated without even the yellow glow of light for reassurance, a friend in the night. 

Out here in the wilds of  North-West  Tasmania, with only devils and a marauding spotted-tailed quoll for company – if the world’s largest marsupial carnivores can be described as company – I’m thinking that a flickering candle can take on a new meaning, come to represent something entirely different to what it is, a flickering candle. Out here in the wilds of North-West Tasmania the candle is a comfort, a safety blanket, a sanity blanket. I’m thinking these things and it’s only my first night out in the wild. 

Within a few hours of bedding down in the shack that serves as a devil-viewing centre at Kings Run near the coastal town of Marrawah I realised just how disconnected and isolated from nature I had become. In truth, I realised I had never been that connected with nature at all. 

My window on the wild has always opened from the city and suburbia. There are certainties there, it’s a cosy cocoon, routine, predictable and safe, a cushion against the whims and sometimes destructive forces of nature.  We hear the alarm calls of birds in our gardens, smug in the knowledge that the marauding goshawk will not disrupt our lives, tear our family apart. The daily battle for survival is for other, lesser creatures even if we marvel at their beauty, or are amused by their antics. We forget, though, that all living things are travelling on the same remarkable journey of life and death as we are, a garden bird’s pain is ultimately our pain, and its joy, ours. 

It was not the birds singing in my garden that brought this realisation, however. It was the sight of a rainbow one day, arcing across the Derwent. We curse tempest, complain of rain but all the same stand transfixed by a rainbow arcing across the Derwent. We only want nature on our terms. 

I’ve been a wildlife enthusiast all my life and engaged in countless birding trips and safaris to the wilds of four continents, but could I honestly say that I was ‘‘at one with nature’’, as a London taxi driver had once put it, describing his lunch breaks in London’s Hyde Park? It occurred to me in the discomfort of the shack at Kings Run that my previous wildlife experience in a truly wild environment had been sanitised, behind the windows of a national park lodge or tourist vehicle. 

North-West Tasmania is as wild as it can get. There is no back up, no serum for snake bite, no helicopter rescue if I fall off a cliff. I don’t even have my mobile phone.

But coming here was not just about connecting with wild places and the birds and animals that inhabit them. It was largely prompted by my concern that the devil might not be around much longer, to be studied and observed in the wild. 

The Tasmanian devil has been inflicted in recent years by a terrible contagious cancer, Devil Facial Tumour Disease, cutting its numbers to about 20 per cent of what they were a decade ago. There are still pockets of healthy animals, one of them being around Marrawah. It is here that local farmer Geoff King has turned part of his property holding over to devils and the tourists who want to view them in their natural setting. At Kings Run, the farmer stakes out roadkill, and more often than not the devils come to call. 

So I found myself under Geoff King’s tutelage one autumnal evening, lighting a fire in the shack and connecting a battery-powered spotlight that is trained on an area just beyond the windows, a stage of sorts amid buttongrass and cutting reed in which the devils perform after dark. 

Hours earlier I’d raced along the Lyell Highway from Hobart, going too fast I know but trying to make the outskirts of Marrawah before dark. At the wheel, I was thinking that when it comes to mammals at least, my contact point is the highways of Tasmania and the roadkill I see. Before visiting Kings Run I had only seen a single live devil and that was crossing a road. It also occurred to me that I had only viewed some of the top tourist scenic attractions of Tasmania from behind the steering wheel, through the windscreen. The scenery along the Lyell Highway, cutting through the mountains forming Tasmania’s spine, is a case in point. It is magnificent, dominated by the frequently snow-coated Frenchman’s Cap, but I’ve never stopped to take it in; always in too much of a hurry. 

I’m disconnected from wild places, and wild animals and birds, as most of us are. But my experience at Kings Run will confirm what I so often read in wildlife literature: that humans need wild places and the diversity of wildlife that inhabits them.

Unlike myself, Geoff King is a man for all seasons, a man for wild places. Several generations of his family have farmed properties in the Marrawah area since the late 1880s, originally driving cattle 200 kilometres to the mining camps at Queenstown to the south. After the great cattle runs ended with the coming of the railways and sealed roads, the Kings continued to drive cattle between their rich inland pastures and a vast expanse of coastal heathland on the Southern Ocean that now forms the Kings Run tourist park. 

Although cattle were only grazed on the property during the winter months, Geoff King grew increasingly concerned about the damage they might be doing to the fragile coastal environment. His suspicions were confirmed when he saw them pulling up and eating heathland plants that were an important food source for migrating orange-bellied parrots. At the same time, King was monitoring an increase in devil roadkill on a recently sealed road from Marrawah to the mouth of the Arthur River, going south. It was then that he decided to protect the property for the devils and their lovers. 

My lack of bush craft – my insensitivity to the workings of the wild – revealed itself within a half-hour of my arrival in Marrawah. I had foolishly emptied a water bottle, my scent on the last of its drops, upwind of the devil feeding station. Who gives a second thought to a splash of water in the human world, even if care is taken to dispose of the plastic bottle itself? Who thinks about an animal picking up their scent? But this is devil and quoll territory. Scent is everything – invisible and vital.

Shortly after arriving at the hut, with the fire lit and the kettle on the boil, King suggested that if I wanted to go to the toilet I should head off a little way to the north, to the other side of the devil feeding station, to avoid the devil picking up my scent.

‘‘The wind’s in the south-east, we should be okay,’’  King told me after demonstrating his bush craft by pointing out devil prints, as well as those of wombats and an echidna on tracks near the hut. 

I was too embarrassed to confess my guilty secret of already leaving my scent right upwind of the devils. I felt a fool – a real townie – and I wondered if King would understand. I was convinced I had spoilt our chances of seeing devils that night and that I was wasting King’s time, who stayed with me late into the evening. I reconciled myself to not seeing devils that night, and started to practise my look of disappointment. 

After a few slugs of bourbon I felt a little better and prepared to settle for King’s conversation and his tales of devils and cattle runs on horseback. He had much to tell a city boy. And I would tell him my tales of urban birdwatching; the white goshawk that comes to my garden on the outskirts ofHobart, sending the forest ravens into a panic. But it would hardly be compensation for ruining an evening with the devil. 

My concern, however, was misplaced. As I poured myself another bourbon, King announced we had a visitor and immediately switched off the internal battery-powered light. The devil on the carcass, tearing away at the flesh, appeared to be a young male, with the square jaw and head that sets males apart from the more delicately proportioned females, with their pointed head and chin. A beautiful animal, flashing white teeth, was bathed in the yellow light of the spotlight. We were lucky to see one so quickly after we had hunkered down in the hut, and the last light over the ocean had barely vanished, following the setting sun. 

The devil had only been on the carcass for about 20 minutes before it stopped suddenly, lifted its head and gazed into the night. He made a grunting, almost coughing sound, and Geoff King said this was a warning: part alarm call, part threat. Another devil was about, and the devil on the carcass had caught its scent. Suddenly a larger devil rushed into the light beam and attacked the devil on the carcass in a cacophony of grunts and screams. 

In a moment, the stage had become a theatre of screams. 

The first devil retreated, pausing briefly as if to rush back, before deciding on retreat. The second devil was enormous, with a square head that was a mass of flesh-coloured scars. The skin on its lower jaw had been ripped open in an earlier fight and hung like dried wax from a candle. King recognised it as Scarface; he had seen it on the carcass before. The mangled face, which I thought was evidence of the devil facial tumour, is common among these fighting animals, though this one was perhaps a little worse for wear. 

Scarface fed frantically, even though his stomach appeared bulbous and he was obviously well fed. ‘‘He’s full. Now he’s just topping up,’’ King whispered. ‘‘A devil never knows when he or she will feed next and so they gorge themselves whenever the opportunity presents itself.’’ 

An hour and a half later, Scarface finally retreated into the darkness. Geoff King soon joined him, leaving me alone. I watched the lights of his ute cut through the night. It was now raining, the wind blowing off the sea forcing the raindrops into diagonal stripes of light. 

King had told me to turn off the spotlight when I went to bed, to save battery life for the next night. This involved leaving the comfort of the main room of the shack to enter a passageway outside where the spotlight was connected by a metal clamp. As I opened the door a cold draught swept across the hut’s room and the candle flickered maniacally. I didn’t want it to blow out. I placed a box of matches strategically close by, where I could feel for them if the candle went out, and then braved the cold to unplug the spotlight. 

I needed a pee and ventured outside into the darkness. The rain, now fine like mist, glistened on my jumper in the light of my torch. The wind murmured among the rocks. I could just make out the boulders in the near darkness, against a backdrop of the roaring, crashing ocean. 

Back inside the hut, I stoked the fire and checked the length of the candle still to burn. I felt bereft and lonesome for the first time. The initial shock of realising I was on my own, after seeing King’s ute lights vanish, slowly subsided and I urged myself to get a grip. I was determined to enjoy this experience, an experience of my own making. After another slug of bourbon, I retired to bed where I lay thinking of devils and thinking of the night. 

Pulling my head out of my sleeping bag, I hear a pucker and an exhausted whoosh and the candle flickers, leaving behind a red glow for just a few seconds. 

Darkness, solitude, a sense of fear that gives me a dry mouth. A slug of bourbon comes to hand. I lay on my back searching through the window for sources of light. Nothing but glimpses of a lonely distant star through mist being swept across the sky. I reach for the torch and make my way into the main room and in the silence I can hear a crunching sound coming from outside, where the devil theatre is situated. I pull the curtains back and peer outside, shining the torch beam on the theatre of screams. And there is another devil, a small one this time, with the beautiful white markings on the chest and sides that appeared to be absent in the other animals I had seen. The light causes the animal to blink and rear its head. It backs off and retreats into the sedge out of sight, so I switch off the torch and wait a while. The devil returns and I point the beam away from it, slowly moving it in the devil’s direction and this somehow reassures it and does not prompt it to flee. 

I watch the devil for a further 10 minutes before it backs off and retreats into the darkness. Back in bed, focusing on that distant star, I finally drift off into sleep.

When I awake the star has vanished and the window is filled with a soft light, not yet bright enough to illuminate the hut. It is dawn and I get up to look through the window. The sea is a pale grey and I can see hints of blue sky above it. 

A sooty oystercatcher is piping from the rocks and a forest raven calls from above, the familiar wake-up call I have at home in the suburbs of Hobart. I feel relieved that the night is gone and the familiar call of the raven is at hand. Only one more night to go and I will be able to hear the raven caw from my own bed. 

Out on the beach, I clamber among the rocks looking for birds. A small party of white-fronted chats searches for invertebrates in a carpet of kelp and, in inlets between the rocks, rafts of chestnut teals ride the ocean. 

Last night Geoff King reminded me that this coastline is rich in Aboriginal sites, and he told me what to look for on walks south and north of the hut. I head south, for no other reason than the sun is rising from the south-east. I am feeling the chill and the sun’s rays will give me warmth. 

I head for two specific locations about a kilometre from the hut. King has told me of a wide expanse of white rounded rocks at the seashore, in which there are clearly defined depressions. This is where Aboriginal hunters would lie in wait for seals coming out of the water to sunbathe on the rocky beach. The Aborigines would have covered themselves in kelp, and when the seals were close enough, they would have leapt up to club them. King tells of local folklore that suggested Aboriginal women actually laid down with the seals, the seals oblivious to the dangers. 

I wander across the first expanse of rocks I come to and see depressions clearly created by something other than the tide. And close to the depressions are the thick grooves of the tyres of a four-wheel drive vehicle, which has deviated from the track I am walking on and onto the stone beach. 

I press further on, looking for raised areas close to shore in which King says there is evidence of Aboriginal hut hollows. Again, without King pointing them out as he planned to do later in the day, I find them and marvel at how such a relic, even if it is only a hollow in the ground, has survived for so long. Where land had met sea, just above the high-tide mark, the Aborigines dug out an area about a metre deep and three metres wide so they could anchor a hut of bent tea-tree branches and wallaby  hides. The location offered a view of the surrounding rocks and ocean from where the Aborigines could watch their children at play, and watch for enemies. Close by I find a midden and flint tools and a Boag’s draught beer can. 

The Aborigines, thlyacine and devils trod the same lonely path along this coast, the Aborigines and Tasmanian tiger to a rapid extinction once the white settlers had arrived. Another vital thread to the fabric of this corner of the planet, the wedge-tailed eagle, hangs on like the devil,  defying brutal winds of change as over the eons it has learned to defy storm and hurricane blowing in off the Southern Ocean.  As I continued south along the coastal track, towards the mouth of theArthurRiverin the far distance, I was soon  joined by an eagle companion on my early-morning adventure. I turned after watching sooty oystercatchers on russet, lichen-covered rocks to see the  wedge-tailed eagle appear as if from nowhere. 

I had not seen it in the sky, or on the horizon and suddenly there it was, heading straight for me with slow, deliberate flaps of the wings, its eyes firmly fixed on mine. I expected it to merely fly by, rising high over my head, but as it reached me it splayed out its wings, the outer feathers like long, delicate fingers trembling in the wind. 

The eagle, coming from the direction of the rising, weak and mellow sun, cast its shadow over me. Two metres of wingspan and a ferocious beak just above my head.

When I see eagles passing over my home inHobartthey are always escorted by angry ravens, trying to send them on their way. Although there were ravens on the beach this morning, they were clearly giving the eagle a wide berth. They knew that this was an eagle that meant business; a mean, hungry killing-machine, and I knew it too. The eagle appeared motionless, save for a slight correction of wing pitch, quivering outer feathers and the blink of an eye. It caught the wind rising off the ocean and rode the gusts of salty air. It was now only about 10 metres above my head, bending its neck to view my every move. Not that I was moving. I was still rooted to sand and shingle.

King explained later, when I asked him if he fed eagles, that this magnificent creature of the winds was using me to flush wallabies and pademelons from the undergrowth so it could pounce. 

I was looking for connections and here I was connected in time and place to a wedge-tailed eagle, symbolic of wild places. It was not just the sight of the eagle but the setting, a vista that would not have changed in tens of thousands of years. 

One thing was missing, though: the ancient Aboriginal hunters. And instead of following them, the eagle now chose me, drawing on a knowledge implanted in its consciousness over a period of 40,000 years; that tramping, running, hunting humans can represent a meal, even if indirectly. So the feeling there was a connection, a bond between us was not misplaced. 

With no evidence of humans, save for a discarded beer can and four-wheel drive tracks, I sit on a rock and watch the eagle riding the wind coming off the seas, and listen to the chattering of white-fronted chats and the piping of the oystercatcher beyond the rocks. 

The Aboriginal people hunting these shores would have heard the same bird sounds and been familiar with them. Did the twittering of the welcome swallow tell them that spring had arrived? That there would be fresh grass for the wallabies to feed on, and new hunting grounds? Did the monotonous chiming of the striated pardalote also signal spring for the Aborigines, as it did for farmer Geoff King and his forebears? 

Birdsong is our immediate link with the past. The melodies, the chimes, the tweets, the clucks, the coos, the caws and screeches; they echo through history. These calls predate the Aborigines, the Dutch and French explorers, the settlers from theBritish Empire, men and women who drove cattle, men who came in search of minerals to mine, and now a visitor looking for his connection to the wild. Not only have we lost our connection with wild places, we have lost our connection with our past. 

Humans need wild places. From the time humans first stood up and learned to walk on two legs, the distant horizon has challenged our mobility, urged us to go forward to explore what lies over the hill. We look to mountains and want to climb them, look to forests and jungles and want to know what secrets they conceal. We cast our eyes across great oceans and want to cross them, to set foot on the other side. 

At first nature had to be tamed, mountains conquered, oceans charted. We have moved on from that, and now we look at forests and mountains and sweeping vistas for what they are: Mother Nature’s handiwork; beautiful, restorative, calming. Wild places tell us from where we have come and where we are going. Wild animals and their habitants tell us that we are animals ourselves, just one species out of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions if all life forms are taken into account. 

But still the mantra ‘‘If it moves, shoot it; if it grows, cut it down,’’ prevails. For many, wildlife has lost its value because we’ve lost our connection with wild places and the animals and birds that live there. We and nature are symbiotic, although it is one-sided in nature’s favour. We can’t live without all the other species that inhabit the earth. We need them more than they need us. 

Devils, an eagle and now another player from nature’s A-list of stars – the tiger snake – was to  take its place in the theatre of screams, if only in an unseen, supporting role. 

When I return to the hut, I tidy up the detritus and debris from the previous evening, washing glasses, cups and binning empty cans. Clearing molten and congealed candle wax from the mantelpiece over the fire, I see a large glass jar with a rolled-up snake skin in it. 

When King arrives I ask him about the skin. He tells me that a guest one summer had seen a large tiger snake leaving the back of the hut, by way of a water tank that collects water off the roof. King checked the ceiling and discovered the skin shed by the snake. Clearly the snake lived in the cavity between ceiling and roof that summer, explaining perhaps why possums had steered clear of the roof. 

‘‘Don’t worry,’’ King said, sensing my agitation that there might be a snake above my head. ‘‘It’s coming into Winter and all the snakes will be hibernating.’’ 

As if loneliness and disconnection had not been enough to feed my anxiety the previous evening, now my mind was focused on snakes. I kept my fear of snakes to myself as King and I set up the spotlight for another night’s devil spotting. As we shared another bourbon, I listened intently for a continuous slow movement, not the scurrying of a rodent, that King said indicated there was a snake about. 

Scarface was back just after sunset. He gorged himself again but there was a surprise. Instead of another devil arriving to challenge him on the roadkill, it was a spotted-tailed quoll. The quoll, a big male, approached the devil, eyed him off, and no doubt encouraged him to flee, but the quoll had picked on the wrong animal. The devil grunted and showed the quoll a set of ferocious teeth. The devil stood his ground and the quoll was soon on its way. 

After Scarface left, replete, another devil turned up. It was raining again and the spots of rain fell on its black coat, sparkling like diamonds sprinkled in the night. The second devil, another male, possibly the same one Scarface had chased off last night, was next to settle on the rapidly diminishing carcass. 

After I put out the spotlight a third devil arrived, a small female this time. The carcass had been staked into the ground so it could not be pulled away form the light, but she managed to pull it free. Instead of pulling the remaining carcass, just skin and bone and tail, into the darkness, the devil pulled it towards the hut and through a hole in the side of the building. Its path was clearly defined. For the rest of the evening I could hear it crunching on the bones, letting out growls and shrieks when other devils, smelling the carcass, tried to come under the hut. 

Lying in bed on the second night I’m feeling a little easier and confident now. King brought me some extra candles to keep the dark at bay. It’s nearly winter, so there won’t be snakes in the ceiling. 

In this context, the crunching of devil on pademelon bones has become strangely reassuring. I venture outside the hut and the rain and mist of the past few days has cleared and there is a magnificent sky, the Milky Way weaving through it like a giant star-spangled snake. A shooting star streaks across the sky, falling to the north and I when I get back to the hut the candle has blown out. I don’t bother to light it. The sky and one particular distant star is providing plenty of light to ease the darkness.

And I’ve finally remembered that song. It’s called ‘‘Lonestar’’.

*This article first appeared in the spring, 2012,  edition of Island magazine, Island 130.

 

Pigeons frighten me. They are the stuff of nightmares. They don’t come in the dead of night, pecking, cooing and fluttering, bobbing their heads; waking me. The spectre of the pigeon comes by day in Hobart, strutting in the shopping mall, in alleyways and lanes. 

I’ve been a bird-watcher all my life but the feral pigeon is one bird I can’t get to grips with. When I see pigeons in the city, I wonder why I am a bird lover at all, they make me recoil in horror. Perhaps it’s the notion of human and pigeon parallel lives that disturbs me.  In them I see myself, or a side of myself I don’t want to see. Vulnerable and ill-at-ease in the city, in an environment I can’t call my own, in a foreign country at that.

I should be sympathetic, and acknowledge that the pigeon’s fate in the city is not of its own making. These aerial bag people, or rats with wings, as they are sometimes called, do not have a choice when it comes to inhabiting this urban world of concrete and glass, to live at its sometimes squalid heart. Their destiny was to be fashioned as a tool of man.  Humans, on the other hand, must take responsibility for the world they have created. How can one species, supposedly superior to the “brute creation’’, have succeeded in largely destroying its own environment and taken others down with it? Not even creatures considered at the other extreme of the intelligence spectrum, white ants spring to mind, have done that.  

The human species seems to have conspired against its environment, and the creatures within it. A pigeon relative, the dodo, was hunted to extinction on the island of Mauritius and is now an icon for species lost from the time Homo sapiens rose to become the most dominant creature in the history of the planet. 

The feral pigeon is an icon of something else – a creature fashioned to live in a world, man’s world, at odds with its own. The pigeon forces humans who love the world of nature to ask the question: what have we done to this bird and what have we done to ourselves? 

I see in pigeons a metaphor for the human condition, and I see a metaphor for my own urban existence. In my case it’s compounded by my adopting a foreign land as my own. Like the pigeon far from home, perhaps I can be considered a feral myself, especially as an Anglo-Saxon from Britain I represent not just one race of my own species, but a mixture of many others originating in Northern Europe.   

The feral pigeon is descended from the rock pigeon of Europe and when I have my pigeon paranoia out on the city streets I try to think of the pigeon’s ancestral homeland, of cliffs washed by ocean spray or misty moorland, in my nativeBritain.  Lie back and think of England, I say to myself, but the spectre of the pigeon, the ghost of what was once beautiful and serene, will not go away.

I have seen the real pigeon, the original one, in the flesh. Its plumage is mainly grey-blue, the colour of slate. To me the pigeon’s feathers carry the hue of the North Sea  that swirls below their fastness. The plumage is the changing colour of wild seas under blue and then grey skies, infused with a faint sheen that in certain lights can be the green ocean in its darkest moments in winter, or a rainbow in spring. 

The rock pigeon, as its name suggests, is a bird of cliff and rock faces, it doesn’t belong in man’s creation, the reshaped environment, particularly the environment of the city, even if the city high-rises might resemble canyons and cliffs. It also doesn’t deserve to have been selectively bred to produce a range of colours and shapes so at odds with its original self; the Jacobin breed with a hood of feathers one extreme, the little white dove the other. 

Serendipity and coincidence have conspired, however, to give pigeons a role in man’s world and a habitat far from their home. From an original base in northernEurasiathey now roam the world, or the urban cities of the world, for that is their lot. The same can be said for the ancestors of those who first trained them.

Those who say pigeons are a friend of man labour under a misapprehension. The friendship in the pigeon’s case is not mutual. I don’t think the pigeon elected to be embraced by people. I detect a resentment there when I view pigeons in the city, and see them in my nightmares. And I see resentment in pigeon lofts and the dove cotes, and even when white doves are released at weddings and events commemorating peace.

“Whose peace?” I ask myself and hear the doves coo for once in response.

“Friend” is definitely a misnomer, although over hundreds, possibly thousands of years, they certainly have become friends to many people. A companion animal of sorts, one that flies free to return when it is summoned with a handful of oats tossed into the air. 

The pigeon has remarkable, mystical powers of navigation, and has entered human folklore for this, especially in times of war when its mastery of flight has been harnessed as part of man’s war machine. 

We must look beyond folklore, however, to discover how the pigeon snuck into mankind’s consciousness. Pigeons, plump and fat, make good eating and I suppose it was for this reason they first attracted attention. From the earliest times in northernEurope, every barn had a pigeon loft where pigeons were killed and plucked for eating, much in the same way the chicken was discovered as a food source in Asian pre-history.

Later, discovery of the pigeon’s dexterity in flight, its navigational skills and its ability to fight adverse weather and return home against all the odds, gave it another kind of status. Other birds to be tamed and domesticated, the chicken and the duck, did not have great powers of flight, or at least powers that could be utilised,  and so their  fate was to became purely a source of food. The pigeon charted and followed a different route, but the outcome was not always to its benefit. Although it escaped the chicken farm, and imprisonment in dark and cruel places, the pigeon ended up on the streets.

This is where I encounter them, and feel disquiet in their presence. Out of necessity,  I’ve always lived and  worked in cities but it is an  environment I have resisted all the same, an environment I struggle to come to terms with. The city, all cities, unnerve me because they do not take into account the needs of nature, and paradoxically, the needs of people.

ven in the relatively small city ofHobart trees and green open space is hard to find in the central business district. Why do concrete tower blocks have to come right down to the pavement, often without even shops to blunt their hard edges? Why does the motor car have to be master, given wide and open boulevards when mere people are forced into the straitjacket of narrow pavement? Why is it that more often than not pedestrians have to stop for cars, not the other way round? 

If the pigeons I see in the streets, resentful and sometimes menacing, could talk they would no doubt ask the same questions. Then again they probably wouldn’t. Pigeons, like all urban-dwellers, accept what they are given and make the most of it. The pigeons I see on the streets have made use of the concrete towers of a vertical environment that is not so very different to their ancestral one, the familiar one buried in the core of their ancient memory.

I didn’t give pigeons a second glance for years. That was before I became fascinated not by their comings and goings at the fringe of my own existence, their place at the corner of my eye along with all the other peripheral movement in the city, but by a tramp who fed them daily. I saw the bag lady most days and learned her name was Gracie, although I never learned of the circumstances that saw her spending her days, and sometimes her nights, on the streets with the pigeons.

Gracie had an affinity with what she described as her  pigeons, not in an ownership sense, but in one of friendship borne of circumstance.

There was a symmetry between the lives of Gracie and her pigeons, and I saw in Gracie and the bag-lady pigeons something that was perhaps the root of my disquiet when pigeons were about. We humans live fast-paced, frenetic and tense lives in the city, lives far removed from whence we came. In our evolution from tree and cave, community sustained us but community is something that we seem to have left behind in the cities we have created for ourselves, and in that thing that is the city’s extension, the suburb.

In this dog-eat-dog tense world, how easy it is to fail, to not keep up with the pace of the flock; physically, emotionally, mentally. How easy it is to fall off the perch. 

It’s far-fetched, I know, to equate the state of the town pigeon with the fate of a fallen human being but I can’t escape from it. Like the pigeon transported far from the loft on racing days, I return to it. 

The people of the streets, bagmen and bag ladies and the  homeless, inspire the same sort of mixed reaction in onlookers as the pigeon. They either feel a revulsion or are sympathetic and caring. The sympathetic will ask how the destitute and adrift and bereft could ever have reached that state; what event – or condition of the mind – drove them that away. 

Pigeons also inspire conflicting emotions, as evidenced by a tale of two cities,New YorkandHobart, and a tale of two birds, the pigeon and the peregrine falcon.  

They have both been used by man in different ways and seen their world change forever, as the human race has striven to reshape it. Like the rock pigeon, the peregrine’s power of flight was recognised in pre-history and the falcon was used not as a messenger but as a hunter in man’s service. 

The hunting prowess of the peregrine was seen as an ideal solution when feral pigeon populations in cities spun out of control. 

In the New York of the 1980s, Mayor Ed Koch declared war on the pigeon after pigeons and their droppings were blamed for corroding cables on the city’s Brooklyn Bridge. A cable snapped, killing a Japanese tourist who happened to be crossing the bridge at the time. 

The mayor looked to the peregrine falcon, a relentless hunter of pigeons, to help rid the city of what he described as Public Enemy Number One. The peregrine had been making a comeback after declining in the 1950s as a result of poisoning by chemical pesticides in New York State. The peregrine – the fastest creature on earth whose swoop, or stoop, has been timed at 300 kilometres an hour – was a worthy symbol for the war on pigeons although no one believed it would be effective. Peregrine numbers were put at a handful and the pigeon in possibly the hundreds of thousands, but the falcon proved its value in propaganda terms and spurred other pigeon eradication measures. 

InHobart, there is a different scenario. Although the peregrine is a delight to watch streaking across the Hobart skyline there are those who plot its death. A group of pigeon fanciers illegally persecute the peregrine and destroy birds, eggs and young when they can find nests. 

The wildlife authorities keep the location of peregrine nests – about 12 in the Hobart area – secret but the pigeon fanciers use other means. Rangers investigated a report some years back of an air-conditioning engineer spreading poisoned chicken carcasses on the roofs of office blocks known to be peregrine roosts. The engineer owned a pigeon loft and blamed peregrines for killing his pedigreed racers. 

It is not so much on the city streets but in the war zone that mankind’s relationship with two extreme birds touches on the improbable, and the bizarre. 

The pigeon’s remarkable navigational abilities have seen it used as a messenger in war over the ages. In the First and Second World Wars, where propaganda became an important weapon, the propagandists of the time homed in on the humble pigeon to sell a message of courage and bravery, and stoicism, under fire.

Pigeons may have for centuries been used to carry messages but now their exploits were recorded and broadcast. Pigeons were not only brave in the face of flak and shellfire, they displayed remarkable intelligence by being taught to fly at night, something they did not do normally. 

At a time when the pigeon was being hailed as a hero, the peregrine  was painted as an enemy. It attacked pigeons carrying messages although a programme to kill peregrines around the British coast in WWII backfired. It was discovered the peregrines were killing more German pigeons than allied ones. 

After the war, in Hobart, the pigeon fanciers declared a propaganda war of their own, a war that continues to this day. They spread the word that the peregrines were actually released from Japanese submarines to disrupt communication and subsequently established a breeding population. It is a fact that flies in the face of carbon dating of peregrine nest locations  in Tasmania, usually cliff ledges,  that gives some nesting sites a 12,000-year history. 

When I escape the city on bird-watching forays I’m grateful I do not see pigeons in open countryside and forest, at least not in sufficient number to bring them up close.  In paddock and wood and forest I feel at ease, and reaffirm once more why I decided to make a new life inAustralia. A big factor, if not the biggest, was the wildlife, especially the birds. I longed to see sulphur-crested cockatoos flying free instead of being caged in pet shops, and I was not disappointed.

Britain’s rock pigeon, wood pigeon and turtle dove might have a subtle beauty, but to my eye their plumage does not  match the shimmering hues of the brush bronze-wing that I sometimes see in my garden just a few kilometres from theHobarttown clock. 

Forget the rock pigeon’s rainbow sheen. When I view my garden visitors I see them cast in bronze, brass and copper, buffed by sunshine, polished by rain. The brush bronze-wings always appear to come after showers and I see them in dappled glades between the wattles. Sometimes the rays of the sun catch raindrops still hugging the leaves, and shower the shadows with droplets of white light. And from the leaf litter on the ground, bronze feathers inlaid on  a carpet of brown put on a light show of their own. 

It is in my garden at such times that I can finally be free of the town pigeon. Bird of peace, bird of propaganda, bird of war; the rock pigeon flies in psychedelic skies, schizophrenic, the colours of the rainbow painting it different shades of truth. No wonder if disturbs me, troubles me, gives me sleepless nights.

I was the man on the mountain, standing on a rocky outcrop as the snows of a blizzard swirled around me. Seduced as I often am by the mountain’s beauty, I had driven to the Springs for a walk to Sphinx Rock. The sun had shone strong and hard on the Organ Pipes when I set out and, as so often happens, the weather changed during the 20-minute drive from Hobart to the Springs.

First cloud, then freezing rain  and within minutes a raging blizzard. By this time I had reached Sphinx Rock, without a rain or snow-poof coat but I wasn’t complaining.

I just stood there – not too close to the precipice because the wind was at my back – and watched the snow rolling in waves before me, blotting out the distant city and casting the nearer eucalypts in dark outlines. The dead ones, killed during Black Tuesday bushfires of 1967, stood stark and tall, like sinister stickmen.

I was the man on the mountain for an hour or so, defying the snow, as I so often defy the mist and rain. If I see cloud sitting on the pinnacle, foaming down the sides of the peak like a poorly-poured Cascade pale ale flows down the sides of a glass, I go anyway, and take my chances.

The stark dead trees – ghosts lingering from the fires – might appear malevolent but they don’t speak for the mountain. The mountain is generally friendly and benign, its harshest voice the notes spoken by black currawongs.

I love this place and have found myself, after giving up full employment, drawn to it on virtually a daily basis. I was drawn to it, too, before I retired but I then had to resist the urge to drop everything and go and explore its gullies and trails. The job and my mortgage came first.

I was the man on the mountain, in a blizzard that painted out the city far down below. To my left the bulk of the mountain resting atop the Organ Pipes was traced in a charcoal outline. The cold eventually drove me to my car, and drove me home, but in my warm study the mountain loomed again. When I logged into my computer and called up the Tasmaniantimes website, there was a picture of me, or a mountain man who resembled me,  standing atop a rocky outcrop, looking to the far horizon. Only the season was different, the sky coloured in soothing pastel shades – yellow, ochre and purple – of a summer evening after the sun has set. The picture, in the travel poster style of the 1930s, announced a campaign to re-affirm the natural values of Mount Wellington, called “Respect the mountain”.

I love the mountain, it’s become a friend and I have tried to give it a name of my own. Anthropomorphism holds its dangers for those who write of nature, and indeed mountains, but I find it irresistible. I see birds and animals, even fish, as people and I feel their emotions as my own. I’ve dubbed a raven “Roger” and a heron “Henry. The official name of Mount Wellington always seems so formal for such a stately, imposing hulk of beauty, and the Aboriginal names given  for it, Unghbanyahletta, Poorawetter or more recently Kawanya, somehow lack poetry to ears that seek the languages of ancient Europe,  although perhaps in the long-lost, obliterated Tasmanian Aboriginal tongue these names call to even deeper  roots.

We talk of “mother nature” and so perhaps we should refer to “mother mountain”. It is she who lays a protective cloak over Hobart, or should I say puts up a protective barrier that shields the city from the worst of the rain – and snow-laden storms – blowing in from the Southern Ocean and the south-western highlands.

The towering, 1,271-metre mountain calls to me and I answer. I can’t resist her beauty and since the day I first visited Hobart, 16 years ago now, she has held me in her spell. At first I stayed with my mother-in-law on the Eastern Shore and I would go out onto her deck at night and watch the cars climbing and descending the Pinnacle Road in the far distance, their lights cutting the night sky with flickering shafts of yellow light.

When I came to live permanently in Hobart with my family, we lived closer to the mountain, on the mountain-side of the Derwent and I could see her silent beauty in more detail. I say silent because in those days, before I actually visited the mountain, she lay brooding in the distance. Close-up I discovered she came alive with all her components, the mountain was not a single entity but a living form, as vibrant and vital and complex as a coral reef. 

She has a voice that is carried not only by the winds that blow through the gums and wattles clothing the lower part of her body, or across her bare breast of rounded dolerite near her summit, but by the chattering songs of the birds that attend her, like ladies in waiting. 

That voice, in fact, extends to all those that draw sustenance from her, in material or spiritual forms. We all speak for the mountain, or those at least who love her.

Returning from Sphinx Rock, and seeing “me” in that poster, the man on the mountain, I was heartened that others had banded together to speak for her.  

There are other voices out there, however; conflicting voices. There are not only those who want to retain and preserve the mountain’s natural beauty, but those who want developments of various kinds on her slopes, some with the noble aim of making her beauty more accessible, others with profit in mind.

Unlike the majority of cities across the globe, Hobart comprises two worlds, those of man and those of nature.

These worlds collide not just at the city’s suburban fringe, at South and  West Hobart, or at LenahValley further north,  but virtually on every street within the city and without.

We cannot turn our heads without seeing the mountain standing over us, and our eyes are drawn to it irresistibly. It not only tells us there is a wild, untamed world out there beyond the safety and security of the city, our cocoon of glass, brick and concrete, but the peak is also  used to determine what the weather will be on any given day.

Cloud and mist signals rain, snow signals that Hobart’s citizens will need an extra jumper, or to put on a winter coat when they venture outside, even at the start of summer.

“There’s snow on the mountain,” is a Hobart mantra, and when yellow-tailed black cockatoos are seen in the city we look to see what Mount Wellington holds because every Hobartian will  tell you that the sight of black cockies in town means bad weather to come. It’s Hobart’s take on the farmer’s saying inEurope, “red at dawn, shepherds warn”.

I so longed to be the man on the mountain when I worked in journalism full-time, as a refuge from all the strain and pressures that went with the job. On my way to work I’d look up at the peak from Macquarie Street in South Hobart and want to be up there, in rain or snow.

Now retired, I can go when I want to and on many a day  I have looked down on the city morning  and afternoon and seen all the strain and pressure from afar, manifesting itself in the  busy traffic on the distant streets,  the neon signs that I can read through my binoculars and the blinking of traffic lights. From my eyrie on Sphinx Rock, I see green Metro buses directly below me, winding along Strickland Avenue and the Huon Road, slowly towards town, as though reluctant to go there.

I’ve become so moved by the mountain that I have started to compile a diary, to record not so much what happens to her but happens to me in her embrace. Part bar-room philosophy, part nature notes, the diary has forced me to look closely at myself and my place in a new-found environment, a habitat removed from my usual one in the suburbs.  I’m part of a greater whole, I now have a connection with Hobart that’s bigger than the city itself and the people who live there. My diary records sharing a track with a dusky antechinus and the banks of a montain stream with a duck-billed platypus. I’ve whistled the tune of the Tasmanian thornbill, the pink robin and the scrubtit.   

“Because it’s there,” were the famous words spoken by legendary mountaineer George Mallory in 1924 when he was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, and I often think of them when I sit on Sphinx Rock and look down on the busy city.

The words  have a resonance today in a slightly different context.  I ask “Why don’t we leave Mount Wellington as it is, simply because it’s there in its largely natural state”.

The mountain in the raw provides a contrast to the city, and this is one of the qualities that makes Hobart so different from other cities.

Strangely,  Mount Wellington stands apart but at the same time is linked to Hobart, is part of its vital fabric.

Development, especially of a cable car, would somehow create a bridge in more than a metaphorical sense between mountain and city and they would somehow become one. The notion of wildness would be lost. A cable car and possibly other developments like a five-star hotel at the summit would somehow serve to tame the mountain and take away its wildness. The existing radio tower is enough to remind us of the hand of man, and the hand of “progress”.

Beware the dangers of anthropomorphism, as I have said, and the dangers of giving the mountain a human character, a Christian name, a gender and voice. The man on the mountain  falls into the trap and, worse, makes conversation with the peak  on gusty mornings, shouting above the wind. He asks  the mountain what does she  think, does she really want a cable car climbing across her face? The man on the mountain has done this before in another context, talking to strong-billed honeyeaters and asking them if they mind their forests being cleared and pulped, has anyone asked them for their opinions or wanted to hear their voice?

And now the man on the mountain asks “mother mountain” whether she wants development, whether she is open for the human notion of business, and the wind moaning through the scree and eucalypt canopy answers “No”. 

Don Bentley sprawled out under the spreading boughs of a stringybark gum. He had a bottle of Barking Owl shiraz and a ham and cheese sandwich and was seeking a quiet moment to himself on his day off from work: a spot of lunch and a few glasses of good red, the birds singing around him, spring in the air. It had been an impossibly hard week at the Chronicle newspaper and he needed to chill out.

Bentley didn’t even take a book or a newspaper up to the Waterworks Reserve in Hobart to read. He just wanted to sit there, looking at the trees bursting into spring flower. The golden wattles dripped with yellow blooms and honeyeaters buzzed around them. A golden whistler sang from the top of the stringybark where Bentley rested and he felt a euphoria that wasn’t entirely to do with the coming of spring, that time when people respond to strange impulses coursing through their bodies, a time when humans realise they are animals after all, lizards even, searching for sunny spots at the end of winter to warm their blood and bones.

In his days spent as a correspondent in South Africa, Bentley had been warned about sleeping under certain trees that were reputed to permeate the air with hallucinogenic substances. He looked up at the finger-like leaves of the stringybark, and its course bark, and sniffed the air for eucalyptus scent. The stringybark was not a tree to put someone on cloud nine, Bentley reasoned.  It was just a eucalypt to lift the spirits at the start of spring, to make you feel glad to be alive.

The euphoria appeared to have another source and, after a second glass of Barking Owl, Bentley put his good spirits down to a fineshirazon an empty stomach because he had not yet munched into his fresh ham and cheese sandwich.

Bentley lay back in the grass, gazing up at the tangled green-blue leaves and very soon drifted into sleep.

* * * * *

Bentley awoke with a start. He had felt something pressed against his nose; wet, moist, tickly. A dark, round shape obscured his view. Bentley could feel his eyelids fluttering like butterflies; his eyes were watery and glazed from sleep, making it difficult to focus for a few seconds. Then the image before him took shape. Bentley recoiled in shock. There was the pointed, furry face of a fox, staring at Bentley right between the eyes. The fox had moved back momentarily as Bentley jerked his head in surprise but it now sat motionless, not a metre from Bentley’s nose. It fixed Bentley with a stare, not a menacing stare but the sort of countenance that has words, the stare that asks questions, a stare that says it wants to be your friend. Bentley was speechless. He wanted to say something, something silly like “here boy”, the sort of thing you say to a golden retriever or a poodle you meet on the street, but the words would not come.

Bentley didn’t need to be told it was a fox staring at him. He knew foxes from his youth growing up in Britain. They were common in rural Surrey and at night he would delight in picking them up in his headlights on country lanes when he was out and about as a cub reporter. Foxes never became roadkill, they were too smart for that.

When he first arrived to start a new life in Australia, Bentley had been horrified to discover that foxes had been introduced fromEuropeand were a pest, a scourge of farmland and bush.Tasmania, however, had remained fox free until a spate of recent sightings.

Bentley thought he knew all about foxes, their wariness, their cunning, their independence, and here was one, not a metre away, a beautiful red fox staring him straight in the eyes, with a look that said the fox was trying to speak to him.

“Fuck,” Bentley muttered softly. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The fox appeared to cock its head to one side, then lowered its long snout so Bentley could see the glistening nose, the same moist nose that had been pressed into Bentley’s face as he slept.

“Fuck,” Bentley said again, louder now, trying to get some response from the fox. He wondered if anyone would ever believe him when he told the tale later.  The fox cast its gaze round him, looking at the encircling eucalypts and then raised its head to look towards the distant Mount Wellington towering over the reserve at the point where Hobart’s suburbia meets bush. The fox then fixed Bentley with its alert, brown eyes again and to Bentley’s astonishment moved forward and lay at Bentley’s side, pushing its warm body against Bentley’s legs.

“Fuck,” Bentley said to himself, without uttering the words now. He slowly raised his hand and started to stroke the fox’s silky fur. The fox rolled over, raising its head so it rested on Bentley’s thigh. Bentley expected the fox to make a sound, a purr, a yelp, a bark but it just lay there without saying a fox word.

“Fuck”, Bentley sighed.

Bentley had always subscribed to the theory that individual foxes had arrived inTasmaniaon cargo boats, or had been deliberately released in the state by malcontents seeking another species to hunt. They represented a potentially catastrophic threat to Tasmanian wildlife, because the state was the last refuge for several species extinct on the mainland, extinct because of the predations of first dingoes and then introduced foxes and cats.

Bentley knew that a common and much-loved bird of the Waterworks Reserve where he spent so much time, the Tasmanian native-hen, could be the first ofTasmania’s unique creatures to go if the fox ever took hold in the island state. The native-hen was flightless and would be no match for the cunning fox which could swim and even climb trees. The fox, as Bentley often pointed out, was a hybrid combining the powers of a dog and cat.

So here was Bentley, a foe of the fox inAustralia, lying down with the creature called Reynard in European folklore and fable,  sleeping with the enemy.  The irony was not lost on Bentley. He should be reaching for a stout stick and whacking the sleeping fox across the head, but how could Bentley do that to a creature of the wild determined to be his friend?

As Bentley lay there, the silky fox felt warm against him and he could feel its body heave and subside with the rhythm of its gentle breathing. Bentley felt strangely at one with the fox, as though the fox was Bentley’s soul-mate. It was the feeling he got when a cat sat on his lap, purring with every stroke of the hand. Bentley loved cats but could never bring himself to own one because he also loved birds, and Bentley loved foxes but, growing up in the English countryside, always knew that any contact with Reynard would always have to be at arm’s length: until today.

The foxes of Australia might be labelled a cur and pest, vermin, but Bentley on this day could not feel any sense of dread or revulsion. Was the status of this fox, asleep by his side at the Waterworks Reserve, any different to that of Bentley; they were both foreigners in a strange land. The thought had never occurred to Bentley before but strange thoughts can come to you after a half bottle of Barking Owl shiraz drunk under the first warm sun of spring, with eucalyptus scent in the air, with a fox sleeping at your side.

Bentley was now thinking of the people who had gone before him, across the land what was now the Waterworks Reserve. The Nuenonne aborigines had walked this reserve and its surrounding hills for thousands of years before they were driven to extinction. What would the Nuenonne people have made of it all, of suburbia whose glass and concrete lapped at the foothills ofMountWellington, of the fox that had taken the place of a fellow hunter, the thylacine? As Bentley drifted into a deep sleep again, he was wondering whether the Nuenonne had had a sense of irony, or of the absurd. And did a thylacine ever lay down beside a sleeping aboriginal, and share an aboriginal dream?

* * * * *

Bentley awoke startled again. A Tasmanian native-hen was calling close to him, a loud rhythmic screech that Bentley always likened to a couple making love on a squeaking bed. He looked about him and the fox was not at his side.  It had gone.

Bentley walked home slowly, slower than usual, taking in every sight and sound on the half-kilometre journey. Far off a fan-tailed cuckoo trilled in its descending song, the notes trickling through the wet forest on the north side of theWaterworksValley.

“So what do I tell the wife?” Bentley asked himself. The sense of euphoria was still with him, a curious excitement. What a story he had to tell, but who would believe him, certainly not Mrs Bentley who had seen him leave earlier with a bottle of  shirazand a cheese and ham sandwich wrapped in brown paper tucked under his arm. At least he was not taking he car, she said as he left.

“Now listen carefully,” Bentley said to his wife when he got home.  “Firstly, I’m not pissed.” And Bentley held up the bottle ofshirazand Susan Bentley could see it was still half full.

“Listen closely,’’ Bentley continued, “and you got to believe me when I tell you, but what do I tell everyone else?”

Bentley then recounted the story of the fox, and how it had pressed its wet nose against his, and how it had fallen asleep at his side.

“Fuck,” said Susan Bentley. She didn’t doubt Bentley for a minute, for it was not the sort of story Bentley would make up.

Bentley was now confronted with a dilemma. He might have been able to tell his wife of this improbable encounter but how could be possibly tell anyone else, especially his colleagues at the Chronicle who would no doubt accuse him of drinking too much down at the Waterworks Reserve. Worse, if they believed him, there would be a news story in it: the first fox sighting within theHobart municipal boundary. He would have to inform the state government fox eradication unit and they would take him down to the Waterworks Reserve so he could show them the exact spot where the fox appeared, and they would go looking for evidence. If Bentley went into the full details of what happened they would no doubt want his clothes for DNA evidence of fox fur. Bentley had already looked at his shirt and not found any hair. And then there was the question of eventually seeing the fox killed. Bentley was not sure now that he wanted that outcome. The fox had become his companion and friend after all, if only for a brief time at the Waterworks Reserve.

Just a few days previously Bentley would have been hot on the scent of the fox, advocating its demise, and now he was in emotional crisis, although commonsense, over his heart, ruled that the fox would have to be killed. It crossed Bentley’s mind to perhaps advocate the fox’s capture and its return toBritainfor release. Perhaps the powerful anti-hunting lobby inBritain, the people that had successfully campaigned to have fox hunting banned, would put up some money for the fox’s return, in a gesture of solidarity with the fox. Perhaps an airline like Qantas would give the fox free passage. Should Bentley mount a campaign? No, it would be ridiculous. Who would want to save a single fox. It was not as though the fox was an endangered species. It was better to divert such resources to saving tigers and cheetah, or even the golden marmoset.

Bentley left it for a day or two, to give himself time to make up his mind about what action to take. He also knew, although he would not admit it to himself, that a time lapse would enable the fox possibly to escape. Bentley had now convinced himself it was a lonesome and lonely fox without a mate, destined to die a lonely death inTasmaniaso there was no danger of it breeding. There was the reality, though, that a single fox would still take  native-hens and other native bird and animal species and on that basis Bentley eventually decided to inform the authorities.

Bentley’s colleagues at the Chronicle saw the funny side, as he suspected they would. He was teased in the office and more than one person raised the possibility that Bentley might have had too much to drink on the day of the fox sighting. When Bentley entered the editorial floor of the Chronicle each day there were fox-hunting cries of “tallyho”.  Bentley took it all in good heart which was more than could be said for the probing and questioning from officials of the fox eradication task force.

They took his clothing away to test for fox DNA evidence, without success. Bentley feared they might not believe him, suspect he had made up the story to obtain a newspaper scoop.

The attitude of the fox eradication officials suggested otherwise.  He had let it slip that he had allowed a few days to pass before he informed them of the sighting and they were not impressed.

“Trail’s gone cold, and it’s down you. What’s with you Poms and foxes?” said the task force manager.

“Sorry,” Bentley said meekly in reply.

* * * * *

It was some weeks before Bentley returned to the Waterworks Reserve. He had been busy in his duties as a sub-editor on the Chronicle because it was holiday season and he had to work longer shifts to cover for colleagues on leave.

One  morning, however, he made time for a time-out at the reserve, taking not only a bottle ofshirazand a cheese and tomato sandwich but  a book, a collection of short stories by a South African writer, Herman Charles Bosman, he had discovered when he lived in Africa.

Bentley wanted to stay awake and not doze off. He secretly hoped the fox would re-appear and if that happened he would not  report any further sightings. He had been ridiculed and accused of aiding and abetting a possible fox infestation of Tasmania and that was enough for him to maintain a silence about the fox in future and have a clear conscience.

Bentley spread out under his favourite stringybark, poured himself a glass of wine and opened his book. The sun was strong and hot again and Bentley felt himself drifting into sleep. He resisted at first, getting up to walk in a circle to clear his head. The wine soon took hold, however, and before long Bentley dozed off.

After a while he awoke with a start, and there at his feet lay the fox.  Bentley remained motionless for a moment and then stretched out his arm to stroke the fox’s silky, rufous fur. The fox did not move. It was cold and rigid and Bentley leaned forward.  He could now see two neat bullet holes in the fox’s head.

AMID life, John Simmonds was thinking of death.

If he believed the television screen in the corner of his room, life was all smiles and blue skies. It was vibrant, and action-packed and fast-paced with happy endings. And here he was in a wheelchair, a paraplegic.

John Simmonds, tired of television, would look out of his window at the birdbath positioned in the centre of the garden lawn.  Over the years he increasingly looked to the birdbath, looked away from the television set that was a constant symbol of what life was supposed to be, a life he couldn’t share. The manifestation of life at the birdbath should have also caused Simmonds pain because it was robest and free-flying and without the strait-jacket that was his existence, but he felt no distress when he looked at it, felt no bitterness or self-pity. The birds and their actions, in fact, eased his creeping loneliness, his creeping despair.

After his accident, he had never been short of company to help him through the day. It seemed that someone always wanted to call, chat and joke and bring a bottle of wine. He had no need for the spectacle of the birdbath then, its pleasant distraction from the reality of what his life had become. His friends kept his mind off his private agony, too. Although he couldn’t walk, couldn’t visit the office they once all shared, the gossip they brought about the people there and the wider world made him feel a part of things, part of the bigger picture. Life hadn’t forgotten him, hadn’t passed him by.

There were even outings to restaurants. They still laughed about the incident on the night they all went out to a cheap Italian restaurant staffed by students. After the meal Simmonds had placed a white wine bottle he had used as his urine incontinence drain on the table, intending to take it with him as he always did. A waiter had swept it up, thinking it was wine left over, and one of Simmonds friends had to snatch it back; the student was about to put it in the fridge and take it to a party. The waiters and waitresses had to be told . . . 

The story of the bottle of urine kept Simmonds and his friends amused for weeks and when they had left, and he was on his own with only the television programmes for company, he would ponder how little it took to raise his weak spirits, and raise a weak laugh.

Over time the stream of colleagues and friends, and the bottles of wine they brought, had gradually dried up, as did the excursions to restaurants. Did anyone really want to have dinner with a person in a wheelchair, with a wine bottle at their feet? And who could blame them for not coming to his home? They must have felt they had exhausted all the stories, all the gossip. They had also exhausted their capacity to display sympathy. The laughter about goings-on in the office had become forced smiles now, genuine sympathy had become pity. Who could blame them for not coming, or at least not coming so often?

John Simmonds had been one of them once, part of that vibrant thing called life. He had lived and loved as if there was no tomorrow and he could laugh at it all during his better moments, laugh at the phrase he had coined of those happy times, “taking excess to extremes”. When he had first said it, with former colleagues gathered around his bed, they had all laughed out loud and said Simmonds had not lost his touch for words, he was a wordsmith through and through. What they did not say, did not add, was there was no outlet now for his trade.

Simmonds had been a journalist, a fine one, working in his later years as a sub-editor and ace headline writer.  He had also been a drinker, and driver, and one night he had set out with too much drink aboard to drive home. He lived on the outskirts of town, in the country, and on the way home he had realised his headlights were not working properly. When he switched them on full beam, the lights faded. Some motorists might have slowed so they could drive within the dipped beam. Not Simmonds, with drink on board, and the desire to live life at full speed, to live life “in the fast lane” as he would have written in a headline about his own fate.

Simmons was seeing if he could drive by moonlight. The journalist had pressed his foot to the accelerator,  confident he would be able to spot any danger in good time, be able to apply the brake in an instant, even try a handbrake turn if the situation demanded it. It was not to be. The junction that marked the end of the road he was driving on, a road he thought he knew backwards, had come too quickly. Before his brakes took hold, a wall on the far side of the T-junction rushed towards him. They say in a crash you see everything in slow motion but you can’t act. Simmonds didn’t see a thing, only the brick wall one minute and then a white hospital wall and ceiling the next.

He learned later the car had hit the wall, pivoted on its nose and Simmonds had gone through the windscreen and been thrown into the road. Miraculously he did not have a mark on his face, no cuts, no bruises. The car, though, had rolled over him and broken his back. Simmonds would never walk again, would have no control and feeling in his body below his hips.

Simmonds now compared his predicament with the five stages of dying – denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Simmonds had read about them in a book once, in the days when he could walk, and now he complained they all applied to him. He might disagree with the acceptance part, though. He was in a wheelchair, unable to walk, and he wasn’t prepared to accept it. He wanted out, not from the wheelchair, which was an impossibility. He wanted out of life. 

For the time being at least he had a mental release; the birdbath and the antics of the birds attending it on sunny days when the spray from their dunking and diving and dipping filled the air with droplets of sun-lit water pearls. This was a life removed from the television set in the corner of his room, a life without exaggeration or gloss, that Simmonds thought somehow mirrowed his own. A life with good days and with bad, with joy mixed with misery and pain when, for the birds at least,  the goshawk came to call.

All this joy and pain, but did the birds at the birdbath know hope?

He had once known hope, and the loss of this most indefinable of human conditions was what dropped him into despair, and made him think that death was better than this thing that posed as life.

Hope came immediately after the car accident that had crushed his spine. He had faced his tragedy with resolve, he had become a cliche of the indomitable human spirit, he had put on a brave face, he was a battler, a man of courage. The real test was to come, however, when he realised he would never walk again, despite all the talk of miracles and advances in medical science. He now confronted his own mortality, planning to be the instrument of death itself. It had not become a question of courage, it was in fact the easy way out, but it was the mechanics and logistics of arranging his own death, and the red tape involving death, that was proving most difficult.

John Simmonds had drawn up a plan for a sympathetic friend to wheel him to a cliff-face, leaving the paraplegic there to release the hand-brake of his wheelchair. The friend had chickened out on the day. Then there were the sleeping pills stored over the years, but his doctors reduced his supply. And then there was Dr Death and his suicide kit, but it needed someone to administer it, and no one would come forward.

It was while John Simmonds considered his options, tired of all those people diving and swimming and running and making love on satellite television, that he had looked anew at the birds coming to the birdbath.

As the seasons changed in his Hobart backyard, so did the birds that came to visit, part of a bird migration that ebbed and flowed through the garden, in the way John Simmonds hoped life would ebb and flow through his legs. He had become so interested in the birds that he augmented the birdbath with a bird table and his housekeeper supplied this with a small pot of honey, fruit and seeds each day, when she replenished the birdbath with water.

The honeyeaters, unlike the birds that came and went with the seasons, remained all year, sometimes chasing off new arrivals. At the same time one of their small flock provided a look-out for the goshawks, emitting a far-carrying alarm cry when one appeared that birds of all species knew, and all birds were warned.

John Simmonds learned from watching his avian friends that the essence of a bird’s existence was one of struggle and survival; the rigours of a single day had to be endured whatever the cost to greet a new day. Anything beyond – like a thimble of honey placed on a bird table as a treat – was a bonus.

Television had been John Simmond’s contact with the human species beyond his friends’ company at weekends, but he now knew that it distorted life, threw up extremes, the extremes that had fuelled his own life before his accident. The television said life had to be lived to the full, but it was a life of exaggeration. He used to dream immediately after his accident that if he could use his legs again he would be a jogger, using motion to the extreme like everyone seemed to do on television. But he had changed is mind since discovering the daily bird spectacle. John Simmonds now told his friends he would merely walk and observe all about him. He would take his time and take in all that he had missed before.

Watching the birds at the feeding table, John Simmonds observed there was a pecking order of sorts, but it was benign without bullying by bigger birds, an order of priorities rather than status or greed,  like in the human species.  A good life at the human bird table would be one with a secure, steady source of income to provide food and shelter for the family. A good working day would be one without hassles, after which you retired to a big, comfortable chair in the evening, with a loving partner and children who were healthy and strong and intelligent enough to listen to the lessons of life you passed on to them.

Lessons of life were important for both birds and people, and John Simmonds had delighted in the honeyeaters teaching their offspring to fly, to seek out nectar and pollen in the bottlebrushes, and to sing. That was real life, and that was the life the birds at the bird table and birdbath lived.

John Simmonds had given so much thought to committing suicide, and the elaborate plans to achieve his objective,  that he had sometimes lost sight of the objective itself. It had become a game, a selfish one because it drew in his remaining friends who did not want to play.  His friends finally backed off from aiding his suicide attempt in any way when he suggeted a suicide bomb inspired by what he saw on the television news. No one was foolish enough to buy the chemicals with which to make an explosive.

After this deranged idea, John Simmonds did not go back to the drawing board of death. He went back to the birdbath and took a refuge there. Watching the birds one morning he remembered a honeyeater he had hit once in his car before his own accident, a bird with broken and limp wings that had struggled in his hands, a bird that refused to die, a bird that refused to accept its fate.

Perhaps the honeyater had hope, a desire to see what tomorrow would bring and it was better to wait and see than to die.

The bird gave John Simmonds strength, not in body but in mind, to carry on. Life was about surviving, getting by and it was no less of a life for it.

HENRY the heron came strolling down our street and there was rejoicing in the neighbourhood. He hadn’t been seen all year but we knew he would be back. He always arrived with the first hot weather of spring to patrol the streets of our Hobart suburb, looking for a tasty meal of skinks.

Zoologists say we should not anthropomorphise birds and animals, however some creatures of the wild, like penguins and herons, cry out to be given human characteristics. They appear to mirror human form and behaviour to such a degree that the comparisons become irresistible. A white-faced heron wandering our street in spring is not Egretta novaehollandiae, he’s Henry.

Perhaps by seeing  ourselves  in wild creatures we can better understand them. We can see that their daily struggle for survival is not so very different from our own. Their place in the great scheme of things is our place.

The arrival of Henry is traditionally such an event that residents of my street go out onto the pavement to welcome him. Neighbours knock on doors to say “Henry is back” and we all marvel at his stately gait and aristocratic air, and at how tame he is and how he lets us get close to him to admire his fine plumage,  mixing different shades of blue-grey with a wash of magenta on the neck.

The spear of a beak looks a little fearsome but all the neighbours know it’s not meant for them. It’s for the fish in the rivulet and the metallic skinks hiding in the rock gardens or between the cracks in the pavements.

Henry brings that place we call “the wild”’ to our suburb. Henry is the lush-green pasture in spring, the saltmarsh, the tumbling stream where it meets ocean. Henry is the smell of the sea, of salt and seaweed, penetrating a city street near the docks, Henry is a winged wonder that lifts our spirits, urges us to fly with him, distracts us on our way to the office, tells us that there is another world out there, beyond the window, beyond the pressures that rule our daily lives.

Henry must have pressures, too, but somehow he does show them. There’s no stress clinging to his languid body, no look of worry that you see worn by people standing at the suburban bus stop, or in  the parking lot.

Today the heron of the suburb might be symbolic of that world beyond the picket fence, the hedgerow and car port but in other ages, on other continents, he has carried a different symbolism on his wings.

In China the heron represents strength, purity and long life. In Native American tradition the heron is associated with wisdom because it is noted as having superior judgment skills. In Egypt the heron is a symbol of creation while in Africa and Greece the heron is a messenger of the gods.

In some Australian Aboriginal cultures, the outline of the heron is written in the stars, as is the shape of the wedge-tailed eagle.

Henry the white-faced heron has a little routine in our street. He patrols the pavements until lunch time, snapping at skinks as he goes. When the sun rises high above his head at midday and the pavements become hot enough to give off a shimmering heat haze, Henry retreats to shaded drives and gardens, including my own, to hunt skinks there.

Many a summer day I have hidden behind the curtains to witness Henry’s deadly craft without distracting him from his business.  A favourite hunting place is a rockery covered in a rosemary bush. He also chases insects across our lawn and he sometimes does this, wings outstretched, in a display of bird ballet, bouncing on lanky yellow legs, pirouetting as the crickets and spiders get between his long, scaly toes.

White-faced herons, common across Australia, are the members of the heron, egret and bittern family most likely to be encountered in Tasmania, particularly in the suburbs, where they have become quite tame for a naturally timid species. A popular name for the heron in Tasmania is the blue crane.

By mid-afternoon Henry tires of skinks and the great skink hunt and flies on his broad wings, almost in slow motion, down to the rivulet at the end of our garden, where he takes a drink and then wades in the cool waters tumbling over the rocks.

I’m relieved to see Henry down by the stream. He always appears exposed and vulnerable out on the wide sweep of tarmac and concrete pavement and, although the residents of our street watch out for him, passing motorists have in the past shown little respect for our wildlife, with Bennett’s wallaby deaths commonplace.

*****

Henry had one last season in him before the season of herons came to an end.

A few days after Henry reappeared after winter, my nearest neighbour banged on the door to say that Henry had been in his backyard for a full hour, sleeping with his head in his feathers and showing little interest in skinks.

We watched Henry closely and it soon became apparent why he did not look his normal self. When he finally moved, startled by a passing car, it was clear one of his legs was injured, possibly broken. With protective glasses to shield our eyes from that dagger beak, we set out to catch the heron but succeeded only in putting him to flight, where a dangling leg indicated it was broken. A little later my neighbour tried again, using a bedsheet,  and was successful.

Another resident of our street arranged for Henry to be seen by a vet, and our worst fears were confirmed: the leg was indeed broken and beyond repair. The reasons for the injury were unclear, but we could only surmise Henry was hit by a car. He was clearly in considerable pain and distress, so there was nothing for it but to euthanase him.

That whole summer, although Henry had gone, I still found myself watching out for him when I reversed from our drive. Then I remembered Henry lie buried at the bottom of my garden, under a petal-strewn mound on the bank of the stream he so loved to fish.

And on Sunday afternoons, when the whipper-snippers and the lawnmowers and the garden shears came out, grown men in our street were seen to have a tear in their eye.

 

I heard it first before its giant shadow fell across me. Not the whoosh of wings you’d think an eagle would make, as it strikes for the kill, dagger talons outstretched. This was more a rustle of feathers, like the whisper of a gentle breeze brushing the grass of a paddock, or the canopy of the rainforest. With slow, deliberate flaps of its wings, the eagle bent its head to observe my every move, not more than 10 metres above me. Its eyes were firmly fixed on mine.

I felt that I could reach out and touch it.

Two metres of wingspan and a ferocious beak just above my head: I was unnerved. I ducked and felt the urge to run, but I stood my ground, gazing up at this giant bird, a combination of fear and awe rooting me to the spot.

As the eagle passed above me I expected it to merely fly on but, rising slightly, it splayed its wings, the outer long, delicate feathers trembling in the wind. It had angled into the breeze coming in off the Southern Ocean to the west; hovering above me, seemingly motionless, swaying and pitching to keep in balance.

A few days earlier I had headed to Tasmania’s wild north-west to get up close and personal to nature, but this was a little too close, and a little too personal. It was one of those moments when, despite a shelf-load of birding field guides back home, you realise that at heart you are an urban animal. Your habitat is the cosiness of the suburb.

It was lonely out there. I was three kilometres from the nearest road and at least 10 from the nearest human home but I had felt someone, something, watching me. I scanned the spiky, untidy coastal heathland for eyes, or ears. A wallaby, perhaps, or possum or pademelon.

All the while, high above and hidden in the glare of the sun, a wedge-tailed eagle followed. The male eagle had picked me out, stalked me and now snuck up behind me, from the direction I had come.

A bird from the past.

The sighting of an eagle had not entered my thoughts when I set out to walk the trail south from Marrawah towards theArthurRiver. Tasmanian devils had been my focus and I was in the north-west to spend time on a farm where it is possible to watch devils at war and peace at night.

Something planned and expected, though, is not the same as something coming, literally, out of the blue. Not that “wedgies’’ are new to me, a new bird for my checklist of birds spotted. I see them frequently crossing theHobartsuburb where I live. There I gaze in wonder without a tinge of nervousness. On broad wings they cross the sky between the two valleys framing my home, untroubled by angry forest ravens that rise to send them on their way.

The wedgie brings that place we call “the wild’’ to our suburb. The eagle is the lush-green pasture in spring, the snow-capped peak in winter, the mountain scree coated with early-morning frost. The eagle is the swaying swamp gum, a tumbling stream in the rainforest. The eagle is a winged wonder that lifts our spirits, urges us to fly with it, it distracts us on our way to the office, to tell us that life exists beyond the computer screen, beyond the pressures that rule the human daily life.

Today the eagle may be symbolic of that world beyond the picket fence, the hedgerow and car port but in other ages it has carried a different kind of symbolism on its broad wings.

When Aborigines and eagles shared these lands, the silhouette of the eagle was etched into every horizon. In some Aboriginal cultures, the eagle was written into the night sky, the stars of the Southern Cross depicting a talon or the eagle itself.

The Aborigines who walked this track before me had known the eagle. It would have followed them, too, casting them in its shadow. It had been a witness to Aboriginal history for more than 40,000 years; fraternity and unity in a hard place by the sea. It would have followed them on their journeys south to trade for the hard rock to make their tools and weapons, and their migration inland when the fish weren’t running, or seals to be hunted had not come.

Before the eagle appeared on my walk I had seen evidence of Aboriginal settlement all around me. There were deep depressions in banks of sea-polished stones where Aboriginal hunters had lain in wait to ambush seals. There were hut hollows on raised ground just above the beach where the first Australians anchored shelters of bent tea-tree branches and kangaroo hides. The vantage point gave them a sweeping view of rock pool and beach, so they could watch over their children playing in the ocean, or watch for enemies.

The eagle witnessed modern human history, too; the arrival of the first European explorers, and pioneers and settlers. George Augustus Robinson, charged with rounding up the last of the Aborigines for transhipment to islands inBass Strait, passed this way, as did his fellow traveller, Truganini, believed to be the last full-blood Tasmanian Aborigine.

I had spent a restless night at Kings Run near Marrawah, a former cattle property that is now a tourism venture operated by Geoff King who introduces visitors to not only the world of the endangered Tasmanian devil but the wider, beautiful environment in which they live in this part of the world.

The 214ha property of coastal heathland, tussock grass and sedge is washed on one side by wild ocean and after watching devils most of the night, and then being kept awake by their fighting under the hut in which I was sleeping, I had risen at dawn to go in search of birds.

I had in mind white-fronted chats combing the seashore for food, sooty oystercatchers on the rocks and, in the coastal heath, tawny-crowned honeyeaters. An eagle was not on my radar.

The wedgie had stayed with me for 20 minutes, before appearing to lose interest. At last it allowed the sea breeze to lift it higher, the eagle veering out over the wild ocean, then banking to come around in a wide sweep, a silhouette against the sun, and in a blink it was gone.

The thought occurred to me that Geoff King feeds roadkill to eagles, as he does devils on the nights be operates his Kings Run devil viewing spectacle, and a little later when he came to pick me up in his ute I mentioned the eagle sighting, still excited by it.

He doesn’t feed eagles and described his own encounters with them when he drove cattle on horseback. They would follow him for hours. No doubt the rumble of hundreds of cattle on the move, the pounding of horse shoes in the dry earth, would have flushed wallabies and pademelons, and smaller marsupials for the eagles to swoop on.

The King family who settled these lands in the late 19th century introduced cattle, and later drove the herds 300 kilometres south to the booming mining settlement of Queenstown. Geoff King remembers the cattle runs in their later stages, when the distances were not so vast, trains taking the cattle to the miners from railheads in the north. As if drawn back to these times, by talk of eagles and horses, he tells me to “mount up’’ when it’s time to climb into his ute to leave.

Before the cattle runs, Aboriginal hunters would have also disturbed and flushed animals and provided an added bonus for the eagles: discarded carcasses of skin and bone for the eagles to scavenge. Certainly Geoff King has encountered problems with eagles stealing the roadkill he has put aside for the devil “restaurant “ at night.

I wanted to believe the eagle encounter was spiritual, we were fellow travellers meeting on a mysterious, magical journey. It was something of a letdown to discover I was merely a meal ticket. There was a bond, though; a fraternity. The meeting of eagle and man had started 40,000 years ago and over the millennia the knowledge that man could provide food directly and indirectly had been planted and locked in the eagle’s DNA. In that time the eagle had learned humans were not a threat, they were not to be feared.

A bond that had survived for eons, that had pre-dated the last ice age, had been broken in the past 200 years when settlers fromEuropecame to these lands. Suddenly the eagle was seen as an enemy and paid the price. It was hunted mercilessly, and killed in its thousands, across the entire continent.

The eagle had gotten a bad press and a price was on its head in bounty payments for the harm it did, supposedly, to the sheep industry.

Tales of eagle slaughter and carnage are commonplace, and horrific. I remember seeing an ABC documentary on sheep barons in Queensland, lamenting the break-up of their vast properties on government directive. The footage had scenes of the graziers enjoying the good times in the 1950s, barbeques and country horse race meetings. It also showed an eagle cull: farmers beating eagles to death with baseball bats. The eagles had been ensnared in foot traps as carcass bait. In Tasmaniapoisoning was the preferred method of eagle control. The latter method was also used to kill Tasmanian devils.
 
Many farmers maintain to this day that eagles take live lambs in great number, although research does not bear this out. The fact that eagles are frequently seen on sheep carcasses does not prove they were the actual instruments of death for these farm animals. Because there are no vultures on the Australian continent, the wedge-tail eagle, together with being a skilful and powerful hunter, fills the niche of scavenger.

The Tasmanian sub-species of wedge-tailed eagle is Australia’s biggest with a wingspan that can reach 2.5 metres but it is endangered, with only between 200 and 230 breeding pairs left in the wild. At present the mortality rate from accidents is outstripping the reproduction rate, putting the eagles in peril in the near term.

Eagles bring out the best and worst in people, especially so in the modernAustralia.

Tasmanian eagles meeting turbulence in man’s world, either maimed on farms or on roads, once found themselves receiving a little tender, loving care at Risdon Prison from some of the state’s most hardened criminals.

An irresistible metaphor took flight when the Parks and Wildlife Service set up a raptor rehabilitation centre within the grounds of the prison: the raptors behind bars longing for the open skies, to fly free without restriction. Release for rehabilitated eagles came much quicker for the raptors than for most of their carers.

When the prison aviary was closed a few years back, to allow redevelopment and expansion of the jail, an individual who loves birds of prey provided the eagles with a new home, building a set of the biggest aviaries in the southern hemisphere with discarded fish-farm nets, to give injured eagles a fighting chance.

Rehabilitated wedge-tailed and sea eagles are now released, with the aid of a band of volunteers, at the rate of about six a year.

Today in a more enlightened age the eagle is not so misunderstood and maligned. More people now want to see it crossing their skies than see it killed.

Evidence of shooting and poisoning, and acts of vandalism to nests, are becoming less frequent but as one threat dies another emerges. Eagles fall victim to increasing traffic on Tasmanian roads, and die flying into powerlines. The emergence of wind-farms poses a new threat, with eagles increasingly coming to grief in the wind-farm turbines.
 

* * * * *

On the drive back to Hobart from Marrawah I notice a sign I didn’t see on the outward journey, a plea to drivers to watch out for eagles feeding on roadkill along a stretch of road near Smithton.  And as soon as I have parked the car in the car port of my home, I look for eagles in the sky. In the garden I establish a lesser connection with the wild, lesser in size if not significance. As I walk, scattering leaves that have fallen on the lawn, a grey fantail seeks me out and follows me. He hunts the insects disturbed by my plodding feet, his long, fanned tail in a shuttlecock. Then a male fairy-wren flits in to join the fantail in a merry dance as they scamper across the lawn in chase of insects, rising and swooping in a theatrical dive on gnats and mosquitos. In the sunlight filtered through the overhanging wattles, it is a glorious sight.

My thoughts, however, remain in Marrawah. They are with the lone eagle and my fleeting, symbiotic connection with it, a connection that I still believe is not of science and circumstance but of the soul. I recall in fine detail each of the precious minutes the eagle stayed with me, before it drifted to the east, rising higher, until it was suddenly gone.

It had come from the past and was, hopefully, flying into the future.

 

WILDLIFE documentary-maker David Attenborough was once asked what was his favourite bird out of all the thousands of species he had seen on his travels worldwide.

He did not have to cup his hand to his chin in classic pose to think about it. He had an instant answer, all the while looking wistfully out of the window of his suburbanLondon home, to the garden beyond.

 The bird wasn’t the wandering albatross that circumnavigates the globe on wings with a span 3.5 metres, the longest of any bird. It wasn’t the world’s heaviest flying bird, the great bustard, or the world’s smallest, the bee hummingbird ofCuba.

The bird Attenborough chose as his favourite was the humble redpoll, a nondescript finch that he often saw feeding on the seeds of silver birch trees in his garden in Kew.
Attenborough said he loved to see the redpolls in his garden because it made him feel connected to nature, made him realise he was part of “the bigger picture’‘, as he put it.

It’s a simple philosophy but one that I share when I look out of my own window and see the new holland honeyeaters going about their daily business. Like Attenborough and his redpolls, I have a special affinity with the new holland honeyeaters. I watch them throughout the seasons and sympathise with them when they are fluffing up their feathers in the cold of mid-winter or panting with beaks wide open in the heat of January.

I feel their anguish when the brown goshawk comes to call. Summoned by their alarm calls, I dash into the garden and break all the conventions of bird-watching to chase the goshawk off.

I gave up being a twitcher – those who chase rare birds merely for a life-list or annual record of birds spotted – long ago when I discovered the simple pleasure of owning a garden and creating an environment for birds of many species.
That’s not to say I eschew wild, exciting and romantic places and their wildlife in favour of the suburban, urban idyll. I have ambitions to see Kakadu, the outback atAlice Springs and the tropical rainforest of Cooktown. Also, I spent many years inAfrica and have plans to revisit some of my old haunts in the not-too-distant future.

The problem though with the Serengeti inTanzania, theOkavangoSwampsinBotswanaand even Kakadu, you are always a tourist and an outsider. You do not establish a bond with the creatures you see there, you do not share their environment on a daily basis. With birds, you don’t see the courting rituals, followed by nest building, and then delight in seeing a new batch of fledglings being fed by their parents.

They could be members of your own family, and indeed in a sense they are. Because the families of birds and animals and humans that share a specific environment, like a garden inHobart’sWaterworksValley, cut across the zoological division of class and order.

They represent a clan, a mob, in which, say, the forest raven is just as integral a part as a bennett’s wallaby, a barred bandicoot and a journalist who has the power to record the trials and tribulations of this remarkable community.

The lives of all entwine. We all share the relentless march of the clock which determines parts of the day when we are busier and more frantic than others, we travel on both long and short journeys to gain the things that sustain us, we share the rhythm of the seasons.

In early summer we find a sunny spot in the garden to replenish our strength after winter, and in winter itself we huddle around a warm log fire, either in the lounge or around the stove pipe on the roof: in the possum’s case, singeing our tails.

There is a convention in zoology that frowns on anthropomorphism. In the same way I intervene when the goshawk calls, and feed garden birds when I’m told I shouldn’t, I see my garden birds as people and I give them people names. There’s Reg the forest raven, Billy the butcherbird and a green rosella I call grace. Beyond my own family, the residents of my garden may comprise birds and animals, and frogs and skinks, but they display the same individual traits that make human life so complex, diverse and exciting.

So I see birds and mammals, from my observations in the garden, as individuals not merely members of a species. Giving them an individual name reinforces this process and the only names I know happen to be human ones.
I often wonder, in their calls, if birds have individual names for each other. We all know about the gentle cooing of doves in love but do garden birds also have insults for each other. Is the problem neighbour, the one in an adjoining territory who has designs on your own, a jackass. That’s a name humans inTasmania have given to the butcherbird, but I could hear the word being spat out by a butcherbird that for a brief spell made my garden his home and repelled a butcherbird neighbour in an acrimonious boundary dispute that would have done justice to a sitting of the Hobart City Councils planning committee. And then there’s music, the songs of birds that so often mirror those of humans in their phrasing and tone.

Song, were told in the bird books, is merely a device to proclaim territory, to advertise for a mate, and to give warning of danger.

I’m convinced that a blackbird singing lustily is deriving as much pleasure from the sheer act of singing, as I am when I dance around the living room with my air guitar listening to Eric Clapton. It’s not just about territory and broadcasting for a mate.

As is the case with science, in environmental writing there is a modern trend of discouraging anything that’s anthropomorphic. No Beatrice Potter here.

I’m not supposed to refer to Reg the raven in the column I write on bird-watching for the Mercury. So I won’t mention Reg or his mate Reginaare frequently my dinner guests on the balcony.  And I won’t mention my conversations with Reg when I asked him to confirm my suspicions that he compares my behaviour with that of the tear-away juvenile ravens closer to town. What’s raven speak, those familiar caws of different length and pitch, for ageing rocker who never grew up?
What’s a little chiding among friends, and friends my garden birds certainly are. 
Sometimes, after a glass of red wine or two, sitting on a wooden bench in the garden, a thought comes to me that birds and animals might see themselves at times mirrowed in human behaviour.

 The strutting, confident noisy miner might see himself as russell crowe in his Gladiator role. The dashing, ruthless white goshawk thinks he’s the new James Bond, Daniel Craig, with a licence to kill. And now doubt there’s a wise owl, with heavy frown, lecturing the other birds at night on the dangers of anthropomorphism, or the avian term for such.

I love my garden and sometimes, especially in spring, I think there is no place I would rather be. As with anthropomorphism, the suburban environment itself is frowned on in some quarters. Many birdwatchers are cynical about garden birdwatching, describing our urban and semi-urban spaces as a false and harmful environment for wildlife. But I see the potential there for giving the people of the towns and cities a unique connection with animals and birds. A garden might be a man-made environment but all species can share it all the same, as I have said.

That is why these little patches of greenery that we see dotted about the suburbs, in and out of formal designated gardens and parks, are so important.

I live along the Sandy Bay Rivulet, this precious ribbon of greenery that snakes into the lower slopes of Mt Wellington.  On a map it’s not much to look at really. It’s not the Serengeti that is crossed by millions of wildebeest on migration each each. It’s notAntarcticawhere hundreds of thousands of penguins huddle together. But I believe, as a microcosm of what has been, is and could be, it is just as important.

I’ve seen about 60 bird species in or above my garden. Bennett’s wallabies chew my lawn by night, and a barred bandicoot or two dig holes in it.  My garden is important.

The first naturalists looked to gardens for their inspiration. Many of the early nature lovers were English clergymen and they looked to the village churchyard, a habitat so important for the study of British birds to this day that a book has been written about it.

My own hero is the Reverend Gilbert White, who spent virtually his whole life studying the wildlife of thevillageofSelbournein Hampshire, not so far from where I spent my childhood in neighbouringSurrey.

The opinion at the time, the mid to late 1700s, said swallows hibernated in mud during the winter but Gilbert White had his doubts. He instructed his gardener to dig up the banks of a muddy stream near his home to look for them. They, of course, drew a blank. With no evidence of hibernation, White went out into the fields at the end of summer to study swallows travelling south. Where did they go? he asked himself.

Opinion at the time said the warbler that made a liquid descending call was the same as the one that went “chiffchaff’‘. White cut a footpath through a beech wood at the end of his garden so he could study the warbler more closely. He separated what was to become known as the chiffchaff from the willow warbler. The breakthrough came by way of simple observation on his home turf, an observation that comes from sharing your environment, and life, with the creatures of the neighbourhood.

The naturalists of the backyard are too numerous to mention. But their published observations, like Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selbourne, are the backbone of environmental writing and environmental science.

What would the evolving environment moment in theUnited Stateshave been without David Henry Thoreau and hisWalden Pond. From an earlier time, I might even mention William Shakespeare who no doubt learned in his Stratford Upon Avon garden that “Thrice sings the thrush“ (the song thrush has three notes that it repeats after a brief pause).

The roots of natural history go back to Aristotle and other ancient philosophers who analysed the diversity of the natural world. From the ancient Greeks until the work of Carolus Linnaeus and other 18th century naturalists, the central concept tying together the various domains of natural history was the scala naturae or Great Chain of Being, which arranged minerals, vegetables, more primitive or “lower’’ forms of animals, and more advanced or “higher’’ forms of life on a linear scale of increasing “perfection’‘, culminating in our species.

I have another, more modern definition of the great chain of being; it’s a chain that links everything that moves in my garden.

BEFORE  I retired from the Mercury newspaper, my colleagues used to joke that they always knew when I’d been on duty by the number of bird stories that appeared in the newspaper.

Writing and looking for bird news, especially when compiling and editing the world pages, was  a welcome distraction from all the man-made turmoil and mayhem in the world.

One night on my usual journalistic bird hunt, or bird trawl through the new agency reports coming across the wires, I was disappointed not to find any items on either birds, animals, pets or  even the environment in general. There wasn’t even an item on bird flu. Instead there was more killing in the name of the Islamic jihad and, from the other side of the world in theUnited States, a southern Baptist minister burning the Koran. Ironically, he was warning Christian fundamentalists and radicals that Islam was on the march.

Contemplating a raft of bad news, all this animosity, without pleasant distractions, it occurred to me that there was actually one thing the Muslim and Christian fundamentalists agree on — and that is birds and birdsong. Ancient tracts from both religions maintain that birdsong is a manifestation of God.

Through the development and evolution of  religion, birdsong has been a constant. Indeed, it predates religion as we know it today — birdsong was there not only during an age of pagan worship, then the rise of civilisation, but at the dawn of Homo sapiens as a species. It’s been with us since mankind evolved, telling humans when to hunt, and later when to sow and reap.

It is little wonder that it is so planted in the human sub-conscious. It’s part of our soul.

As far as the written record is concerned, it was the clerics who first drew attention of the wonders of birdsong. In this regard, I was thumbing through a copy of an 18th century English natural history book the other week, an illustrated version of the Natural History of Selbourne  by the Reverend Gilbert White but it was not the pictures of Selbourne village and its famous beech hanger that stirred my memories of the place. It was the call of the English robin that I imaged I could hear amid the pages. Such is the power of birdsong and the power of books.

As most lovers of natural history know — at least inBritain— the book’s author is generally consideredBritain’s first ecologist. I mention Gilbert White because every time I see a British television program on the ABC, or on the commercial channels for that matter, I hear British birdsong, mainly the blackbird and the robin which are common garden birds inBritain. The robin song especially takes me to Selbourne parish church, with an ancient yew tree shading the church’s oak door and the simple grave of Gilbert White tucked away in the churchyard.

I have spent many a time in the churchyard, standing over the grave of Gilbert White, the last occasion being about 10 years ago when I bought the book to which I refer. The countryside around thevillageofSelbourneis not how Gilbert White would recognise it, although his beloved beech hanger, overhanging the village on a steep hill, is still there. Many of the small, patchwork fields and paddocks have given way to industrial agriculture that demand prairie-type fields and once common birds like the yellowhammer and chaffinch or now not so common.

The last time I stood at Gilbert White’s grave I contemplated a world in which Gilbert White existed so different to ours. It was a world without electricity, without the internal combustion engine, even the steam engine. What would he have made of television, the internet and the CD player? At that moment a robin struck up in song, followed by a blackbird and then a song thrush. And it occurred to me that, 200 years on from Gilbert White’s death and a long-lost time, there was a connection between now and then, made possible by birds.

Gilbert White would not have recognised the drone of a jumbo jet overhead, or the distant rumble of a train on a commuter line toWaterloostation inLondon. But the birdsong would have been familiar and, without even opening his eyes, Gilbert White would have been able to tell you what season of the year it was and possibly what time of the day. Birds and bird-song cross time. In a fast-changing human world, birds and birdsong remain a constant, as I have said.

We often associate music with a place and time. It is the same with birdsong.Hobartto me is represented by the call of the yellow wattlebird,Melbournethe tinny, strained song of the magpie lark, and I will forever associateSydneywith the song of the pied currawong. It is the same with foreign cities I have visited or lived in. In coming months, you won’t have to tell me the cricket Test match on the TV, betweenSouth AfricaandAustralia, is being played at the Wanderers inJohannesburg. The call of the hadeda ibis will tell me that. InDurbanit will be the pied crow and inCape Townthe crowned lapwing.

Many birdwatchers have a TV and film checklist of birds spotted or heard. Westerns always feature the swainson’s or the red-tailed hawk but birdsong can also betray location. I was watching a scene from the film Sophie’s Choice some years back, with is supposed to be set in a concentration camp inPoland, and I heard the familiar call of the blue jay from my days of living inNew York. For me, incidentally, the city bird call that most reminds me ofAmericais not a diurnal sound at all, but that of the nighthawk, which I’ve heard during late-night jazz-clubbing sprees fromManhattantoChicago.

Beyond place, the bird song we hear is a constant, insistent reminder that we humans cannot escape our connection with the natural world, although that seems to be the aim of so much human endeavour.

Humans have always had a connection with birds, more so than other wildlife, and this can largely be attributed to birdsong, which so often mirrors that indefinable thing we humans call music.

Whereas insects churr, reptiles and amphibians hiss and croak, and mammals scream and grunt, the bird — or many of them — make tunes that humans can call their own, and some composers often do.

The bird as a motif and symbol, largely of power and fertility, has its place in both ancient and modern culture but birdsong also has been a great influence in music and dance from the earliest of times.

Not all birdsong is sweet to the human ear, of course, and some of the harsher calls and songs raise the question:  Are humans correct in ascribing anthropomorphic qualities to birdsong? Indeed, are the noises made by birds “songs’’ in a human sense at all, an art form to convey joy and sorrow, or both.

This subject I will return to later but first some of the bird sounds which, if we talk in human terms, are the equivalent of noise emanating from a ghetto blaster, or a reversing Ford 10-tonne truck, or a lawnmower at six o’clock in the morning.

A striated pardalote drove me mad last summer with its incessant singing in my car port. The pardalote had a tunnel nest in the embankment of a path in the neighbouring property but it chose a perch just under the roof of my carport to proclaim its territory with a monotonous, repetitive song that seemed to go on for hours.

It was with some relief this summer that the pardalote family did not return to their old nest but the enjoyment of the blackbirds’ and silvereyes’ sweet and melodious songs was short-lived. Brush bronzewing pigeons took up station on the forested hill overlooking my home and all summer long I have been subjected to what must be the most unusual, and monotonous, song of any Australian bird. The “song’‘, without exaggeration, sounds like the warning bleeps of a reversing commercial vehicle and it can go on for hours at a time, always there in the background when I am out in the garden, and on hot summer days can even be heard from inside the house if one or two windows are open.

Some bird songs actually sound like man’s machines simply because they are derived from these. I talk here of species that mimic sounds they hear from non-bird sources. Species like the lyrebird are well-known or this, together with, of course, parrots. The reason for mimicry has been the subject of much research and it was at first thought to be a device to aid safety and the defence of territories, in which birds learned the calls of birds of prey which would keep foes away.

There might to a little truth to this but it is now generally believed that birds mimic sounds to increase their own repertoire. The bigger the repertoire of song, sung lustily to demonstrate power and good health, the more likely a male bird will attract a female. A bit like avian karaoke, really, although I have yet to hear “My way’’ added to the repertoire of the lyrebird, the sulphur-crested cockatoo or the even the starling, among mimics.

Despite some intrusive sounds, thankfully none resembling motorbikes and chainsaws, I still keep at least one window open in the upper part our house, because I delight in the birdsongs that cascades into our home during the spring and early summer months when birdsong is at its height.

As an Englishman, I must say I have a bias towards European birdsong, especially that of the thrush family of which my favourite songster, the blackbird, is a member. There are Australian birds that are fine singers like the magpie and butcherbird — with flute-like songs without parallel anywhere else in the world — but I still hold up the blackbird song as how a birdsong should be.

What I am saying, in fact, is the blackbird song is almost a human sound, or how humans make music. It is of perfect pitch each time it is repeated, and the male blackbird sings in phrases; but at the same time maintaining a constant rhythm. It sings as a great opera singer would sing.

The bird reputed to be the greatest singer of all, the “bird of a thousand songs’‘, as the ancient Persians called it, is the nightingale, which just so happens also to be a member of the thrush family, as is the blackbird.

The nightingale might not be an Australian bird but it has a unique connection with not just the people ofAustraliabut modern mankind. The nightingale was the subject of the first live outside radio broadcast, an experiment that paved the way for new applications for the miracle of radio and then television transmissions bringing great art and sport, to say nothing of politics and war, to our living rooms.

In the 1920s, the great British cellist Beatrice Harrison moved to theSurreycountryside and began practising outdoors in spring. Nightingales began to join her in music-making, matching her arpeggios with carefully-timed trills.

After a time they would burst into song every time she started to play and she suggested to the BBC that a performance of cello with nightingales in the garden would be the perfect subject for the first outdoor broadcast in radio history.

Every year the BBC continued to broadcast the nightingale song live from the Surrey countryside but on the last occasion in 1942 the broadcast was abruptly cut short when Allied bombers at the beginning of the “thousand bombers’’ raid on Mannheim in Germany intruded. The BBC was worried that the live broadcast might cause alarm among the British public, and even alert the Germans to the raid.

The nightingale, because of its clear and beautiful song which is heard at night without competition from other birds, has been a major influence on human music and poetry over the millennia.

In religion, too, the song has been given divine spiritual significance with both Muslims and Christians describing it as a song in praise of God. The Muslims of ancientPersiawere particularly impressed with not so much the song of the nightingale, but its rhythms that they perceived to be not too far from the rhythmic prayers in praise of Allah. The Persians described the nightingale as the bird of a thousand songs because it never appeared to repeat itself, but always come up with new names for their god.

Christians also have a special respect for the nightingale. A reader recently sent me a cutting of a “thought for the week’’ from a mainland newspaper which drew attention to Biblical references to “God making birdsong the purest music on earth’‘. The article said the nightingale had a repertoire of 700 songs.

The Reverend Gilbert White also recognised the importance of birdsong not only for its spiritual quality but its aid in bird identification. At a time when naturalists shot birds for study, White preferred to observe them and thus discovered “one’’ green species of old world warbler was in fact three: the wood warbler, the chiffchaff and the willow warbler, all with virtually identical plumage but with diverse songs.

Not everyone, however, gives birdsong spiritual connotations. Some people, dare I saw cynics, maintain that the beautiful songs of birds are merely a means of proclaiming territory and finding a mate, which indeed they are. When the nightingale starts singing in response to human music, as in the BBC cello instance, it might be that the bird is merely trying to “jam’’ the human music, mistaking it for the song of a rival.

It could be that birdsong has no human significance whatsoever, and is merely a coincidence. Humans wish to hear music when a bird sings, when all there is functional sound.

Hearing the blackbirds singing in my garden, often to the accompaniment of my beloved blues from the guitar of Eric Clapton, I cannot subscribe to the latter theory. My resident blackbird carries on singing, with obvious joy, long after he has silenced the opposition on the other side of the valley.

It can be fanciful to draw too many connections between humans and birds and avian music, but we are all still bound by the same kinds of cycles — birth, experience and travel, love, mating, and death. I’m sure these stages on the great journey of life sometimes have to be expressed by raw emotion in both birds and humans.

Our delight at hearing a golden whistler singing in the spring — and our compulsion to sing or hum along with it — may be an unconscious recognition that birdsong reveals a profound bond between man and birds.

When I play my Eric Clapton CDs so that they boom from the balcony leading from our lounge over the garden, the blackbirds and honeyeaters and butcherbirds prick up their ears to listen.

The treefrogs and the metallic skinks merely go about their business.

 

 

Don Bentley and his silver birch had much in common. It had not become apparent at first but over the years Bentley had discovered a symmetry between their lives. They were soul-mates.

 Bentley had happened on the tree walking to work one morning. At the start of spring he always took a detour through St David’s Park in the heart of Hobart. He found the dappled glades in spring sunshine, and the songs of the birds, calming before the turmoil of the working day.

 The park represented an arboretum of European tree species, in the tradition of the Victorian colonial park from the time it was designed, constructed and planted. English-born Bentley had lived inAustraliafor a decade but he was still drawn to European flora, its changing spring and autumn foliage, its austerity in winter, which gave shape to the seasons.

 There was only one native tree in St David’s Park, a blue gum, and on spring days when Bentley’s heart was pulled towardsEnglandhe thought that was just about right.

And that silver birch. Bentley was fromSurrey, the county of the birch and pine which thrived on the sandy soils dumped there by glaciers in pre-history. Bentley recognised the tree immediately, of course, as being from his home county. He thought its situation, standing on its own well away from the other trees, was appropriate because it allowed the features of the tree  – its drooping aspect, silver bark and small, triangular leaves in various shades of green – to stand out among the richer and fuller-leafed foliage of the other deciduous species. 

You could say the specimen in St David’s Park was solitary, lonely, in its spacious situation but Bentley would say independent. Much like himself. 

When the sun shone strong and hard at the start of the day Don Bentley would set out for work early, to give himself 10 minutes or so to sit in the park. He chose the same seat on these mornings, a wooden, slatted bench that faced south so the early-morning sun cut through the park from the east and set a yellow light on trunks and branches, the full grandeur of the trees rising from their night slumber. On these days the rising sun gave the bark of the birch a pastel-yellow hue, and darkened the clusters of leaves so they looked the bottle green of the bottles of Bentley’s favourite brew, Boag’s. 

The great trees of the world – the biggest oaks, elms, chestnuts and, inAustralia, eucalypts among them – have been described as nature’s cathedrals. Indeed, the sweeping boughs of the elm are thought to have inspired the Gothic style of architecture. Bentley, though, looked more to fine art. Trees, he would say, set out a stunning array of shapes and colour and beauty on a canvas that was forever changing.  

On days when Bentley’s spirits soared to the upper branches of his works of art, trees became not merely decorative art, they were nature’s installations, reaching out to the viewer. They were tactile and asked to be caressed and hugged. They interacted with those that came within their embrace. 

Bentley would say his life had a symmetry with the birch but they were also symbiotic. Their lives intertwined on those mornings when he stopped to admire the tree, and took a breath of the cool, scented air that enveloped it. And Bentley would approach the park keepers, to urge them to give his tree extra water on dry days, and a little extra mulch to keep the sun from drying out the moisture around the roots.  

The park keepers took more than a casual interest in Bentley, paying him close attention, even at a distance. Who was this man who stood for 10 minutes or so to admire a single tree, talking to it sometimes and wishing it goodbye when he left? In smart suit and tie, Bentley didn’t look like the usual oddballs who sometimes made the park their home, and talked to the trees. He was harmless enough. 

Some days, if he had time, Bentley would touch the park’s trees, responding to their invitation to engage them, as he did sometimes at installation art events at Hobartart galleries, if exhibits and artists demanded it. The flaky bark of the birch, curling at the ends, like the hair of a curly-haired child; the beech’s smooth, grey bark like that of  tough, rutted elephant skin; the oak and elm, their soft bark the pliable cork of a  good bottle of Shiraz. 

If Bentley had been born a tree he would have liked to have been a silver birch. Bentley had noted in his youth, when flower power and eastern mysticism were all the rage in the 1960s, that some faiths believed humans came back as animals when they died. Bentley didn’t believe it, of course, but if it was true he would specify his ticket back to earth was changed from his favourite animal, the badger, to that of a tree, the birch. 

It was a thought that made him smile some mornings, standing there admiring his tree, once to the disquiet of a female jogger hurrying to complete her run before the beginning of the working day. 

Eccentric. That was the term the park rangers finally ascribed to Bentley, the man who loved trees, or a tree, with such passion it made him late for work each day. Bentley was well aware of the way the world, or the microcosm of the world contained within the confines of St David’s Park, viewed him. Thirty years previously, when he had worked at the heart of the British newspaper industry, Fleet Street, he had known an Australian who spent his rest days in the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew “touching base”, as the Australian journalist put it, with his homeland through its native trees.

The colleague took Bentley there once to admire wattles and gums, sheoaks and paperbark. The Australian had a favourite, a giant blue gum, and, like Bentley with his birch in St David’s Park, he would stand before it for sometimes 30 minutes or more, as if in prayer.

 The Australian might not have known it but he was engaged in a ritual that spanned the history of mankind, and most of its peoples. Two African tribes, the Hereros and the Ovambos of Namibia, regarded the leadwood tree (Combretum imberbe Wawra) as the great ancestor of all animals and people and they never walked past it without paying their respects.

Bentley often thought of the Australian when he viewed the lone blue gum in St David’s Park, the tree alone among the “Poms”. The gum could even be a metaphor for the Australian’s transplanted existence inLondon, as the silver birch was for Bentley’s life inTasmania. Why was it that humans out of their home environment, the comfortable habitat they knew, found it was trees that drew them home in thought? Trees not only shaped a specific environment but called to something ancient in humans, plumbed the sap of their primordial roots.

 In ancient mythology trees were said to link the Earth to the sky. Did ancient people know that trees produced the very air that we breathe? What was obviously known was that trees, along with lesser plants, provided food for not only humans, but the animals humans hunted. Trees had nourished and nurtured the rise of mankind, providing fuel, food, shelter and hiding places.

 Bentley was gratified the world was waking up to the importance of trees and forests, or so it seemed from what he read in the press and saw on the television news. Trees were now deemed precious, not just for their beauty, and their capacity to produce oxygen, but their role as carbon sinks in a climate of global warming.

 He was pleased to note, too, that a movement had started in his nativeBritainto compile a list of truly ancient trees. One, the Fontingall yew inScotland, had been found to be between 3000 and 5000 years of age.

 Ancient trees had been recorded inTasmania, too. A swamp gum in theFlorentineValleyin the state’s south-west – an area being logged – had been carbon-dated by researchers to starting its life when Henry VIII was on the throne inEngland.

 It wasn’t that Bentley did not like Australian trees. They had their own beauty. They might not assume striking autumnal plumage before dropping their leaves each winter but the gum and wattle leaves changed in colour during the year when new growth – often in shades of deep reds and maroon, the colour of autumn in Europe andNorth America- replaced old and worn foliage. And the bark of eucalypt and wattles was as interesting and varied as anything found on European trees. On his rambles in the woodland on the fringe ofHobart, Bentley could see that some bark was shaggy and flaking, some bare and streaked in yellows and pinks, colours that changed when the trunks were washed with rain.

 Bentley had always looked to the shape and form of trees, and not their age. The British ancient tree register confirmed that oaks and elms were truly ancient, but Bentley, when he read it, was interested to learn that his silver birch merely had a lifespan of 70 years, the biblical three score and ten of a human. It was another reason to warm to the birch, to find symmetry and symbiosis with it.

 Bentley had never aspired to be an oak or elm, the leader of the forest, which put other trees in the shade. Bentley had never considered himself  a leader of men. He had worked as a journalist for 40-odd years, as a reporter and sub-editor, but he had never aspired to the top job, that of editor. He left that to others and was happy to operate just under the canopy, to be a lesser tree in the forest, or the human jungle, of journalism.

 Yes, Bentley was a birch. Workman-like and  vital without pretension. The birch was the tree to reclaim recently disturbed land and make its contribution before standing aside for others. In its relatively short life it would provide leaf litter and bark debris to nourish the soil. When dead, its rotting core attracted jays looking to hide acorns and provided shade and shelter for oak seeds forgotten by the birds to grow.

 Sitting on his park bench some mornings, Bentley often thought that if he was Australian born, and had developed a love for Australian trees as he had done for British ones in his youth, he would have looked to the silver wattle for its inspiration, or the blackwood, or in the rainforest, myrtle and sassafras.

 Bentley, on trips to wild, native forest beyond theHobartsuburbs would look up at the towering swamp gums, admire them and acknowledge they were the tallest flowering trees on the planet.  Bentley, though, would still be happy to stand with the sassafras in the shadows.

 The eucalypts of the forest might pre-date European history in Australiabut Bentley’s birch had a history of its own. A modern history. It was a baby boomer tree, born after World War II when European trees in Australiastill had a currency, a value, that they were not given in the 21^st century. What Bentley termed the “tree police” would not allow a non-native tree to be planted today for its own sake.

 And what had the birch seen out there onDavey Street, adjoining the park, and in the park itself? Joyous crowds celebrating the end of war and new-found freedoms, especially for the post-war generation. Rock-and-rollers taking over the bandstand in the centre of the park, hippies with love-ins in the flowerbeds, flower power and pot among the glades. Soldiers marching off to the Korean andVietnamwars, protest over dams and then forests. Bentley’s birch was a repository of modern history, as vital as Bentley’s recollection of it.

 Yes, a babyboomer tree, a hippy tree, Bentley would say to himself some days, in quiet contemplation of the birch. He and the birch were rooted in place and time on the planet. He could not connect in the same way to the oaks and elms, beeches and poplars which had their own place in time, a place that pre-dated the birch and Bentley.

 It so happened in St David’s Park that the elms and oaks were grouped together so their true, sweeping beauty could not be fully appreciated. The park had replaced a pioneer cemetery in the early 1900s and the trees had been planted to line and frame avenues. Conversely, it was the silver birch that stood alone, finding its own space, revealing its own elegance and beauty, so often overlooked in its natural habitat.

 The tree over the years remained rich in symbolism for Bentley and each day it seemed that he developed a new connection with it. One morning, Bentley saw the birch as a metaphor for his life inAustralia, a country he had made his home after marrying a Tasmanian whom he had met inLondon. Bentley had grown to love Australia, and the wide horizons stretching from earth to sky that were impossible to contemplate in over-crowded southern England; a place, geographically and socially, Bentley increasingly found to be flat and boring.

 Bentley had worked worldwide as a foreign correspondent at various times in his career and his wife’s desire to raise their only child in Australia had given him the chance for one last adventure at the tail-end of his career, at the tail-end of the world.

 He still stood alone, however, even after a decade inAustralia. He was an Australian citizen all right, meshed with his colleagues in pub talk of footy and cricket (even if during Ashes test he remained the “Pommie bastard”) , and drank their brew, but it was the environment beyond the office, beyond the city, in which Bentley so often felt adrift. It was in woods and forests that he sometimes longed for a birch or elm and the familiar birds and animals that made them their home. And even on city streets some days he could not escape this feeling of homesickness, the song of the blackbird – lusty, rich and vibrant – taking him back to twilight nights in England, or a dewy dawn where spider webs were painted with translucent cool mist.

Sometimes Bentley believed he didn’t belong. It troubled him and on these mornings he sought solace in his communion with his birch.

 The birch, if he listened to the tree police, did not belong either but Bentley, after studying it for several years, could argue that it did. The birch might not be native but it made its own contribution to the ecology of the city, a false and distorted one anyway because it relied so much on imported flora and fauna.

 The birch, although not as majestic as the hardwoods, still towered a good 20 metres over nearby flowerbeds of rhododendrons, camellias and azaleas and provided a perch some mornings for a hunting grey goshawk. Its layers of leaves were home to insects and in turn attracted grey fantails which danced in its shadow. Catkins brushed with pollen lured new holland and crescent honeyeaters in spring and in autumn dangling lambs’ tail seedpods, the seeds tiny like flakes of ground pepper, provided food for both eastern and green rosellas. The eastern rosellas were a joy to watch and some mornings, when flocks of six or seven birds festooned the tree, the tree itself went unnoticed.

 Bentley was approaching his mid-60s, approaching retirement age, and if the birch could speak it would tell him it was also moving from the autumn to the winter of its life.

When Bentley had first learned of the birch’s limited three score and ten longevity, he had looked closely at the tree. The birch showed signs of its age. The trunk appeared sturdy and strong but the boughs were cracked and frayed. In winds, they swayed and creaked and in deep winter, leafless, the birch looked exposed and vulnerable and in pain. Did a birch feel that chill wind, did its boughs ache in an icy blast as Bentley’s bones and joints did? He believed so. The birch’s upper reaches were no longer full and rounded when in leaf in spring and summer. Dead boughs and twigs protruded through the canopy. Its crown was thinning.

Bentley feared for his precious tree when strong spring winds buffeted the city. After one particularly heavy pounding one night, Bentley hurried to the park next morning. Close to his home a poplar had crashed to the ground, broken and tangled and bringing powerlines down with it.

 Bentley’s pace quickened. A feeling of dread, of impending loss, stalked him downDavey Streeton his route to the park. Hollow. Gut-wrenching. He braced for the worst when he saw a tree-surgeon’s truck inside the park.

 And there was the silver birch, spread out before him across the grass. It had come down in the night and the tree cutters had already dissected its trunk. The outer branches lie like roadkill, a plover or raven spread-eagled across the grass, two sections of canopy forming a blanket of wings.

A breeze whipped up a spray of silver bark flakes and yellow sawdust and Bentley, too, felt the murmur of death, its chill breath rustling his leaves.