| Three Pictures Not long back, a mother and father with their baby son and his grandparents enjoyed a picnic sitting on an old hollow log lying in a paddock on a farm on the Riverine Plain. Grandmother took a photo of the occasion.  About thirty-five years earlier the mother had been photographed enjoying a picnic beside the same log, sitting on her father’s knee with her brother and sister close by. Her mother took that photo too. The log is smaller now, reduced by fire and termites down the years. The old tree had been ringbarked about ninety years earlier, to allow more grass to grow for the sheep, and fell only a year or two before the first picnic. While it was standing, its hollow branches would have provided nesting sites for parrots or rosellas, perhaps a home for a colony of bats or a possum. When it was a living tree, it might have have had a nesting hollow for a pair of galahs or its high branches might have carried the untidy sprawl of the sticks of a wedge-tailed eagle’s nest. Once fallen to the ground its hollows would have become shelter for the plague of wild rabbits, the farmer’s mortal enemy. The background to the scene is green grass (Oh happy days!) and a clump of native pines which are at least a hundred and fifty years old. No seedling pines survived the teeth of sheep and rabbits after that time. Beyond them is an area which used to be flooded from the Tuppal Creek, a branch of the Murray River. The line of flooding is marked by the growth of lignum bushes, a wiry, almost leafless, thicket growing to a height of two metres, with an odd red gum and black box tree joining the scene. Many small birds such as blue wrens, white-winged wrens, yellow-rumped thornbills, red-capped robins, jacky winters and willy wagtails make their homes here, as well as small animals such as the mouse-like antechinus, reptiles from tiny lizards to large goannas, frogs and, of course, many kangaroos. Behind the camera is a large group of very beautiful old yellow box trees on a sandy ridge left behind by a bigger flood in the distant wetter past, perhaps ten thousand years ago. These are often visited by the elegant, brilliant green, fast-flying but unmusical Superb Parrot in groups of up to fifty, but unhappily threatened with extinction unless their breeding and feeding areas are carefully preserved.  Near by is a disused aboriginal kitchen midden, a small mound of grey ash and burnt clay pebbles. Over many thousands of years this midden has probably seen many happy gatherings of the local tribal group. They may have rested in the shade of our tree while it grew ever taller. The lignum bushes would give good cover for hunting kangaroo, and wombats were not far away. In flood times the shallow water would attract feeding ducks, swans and other water birds which might be caught, and occasional fish could be trapped. When dry weather came, the group would move to more permanent water supplies. Who will take a photo of our picnic spot in another hundred years? Will it be our grandson’s grandson, or somebody from another land? Will it be more beautiful than today or a desolate drought-stricken wasteland? Is it our choice? |
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John and Jane Edwards,
©2003 (John Edwards and his family have lived between Tocumal and Deniliquin since 1920. He and Jane run sheep and cattle on their farm called 'Caromar'.) |
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