23 Jan 2014 02:51:41
Germaine Greer is known for her outspoken, often combative views on gender politics and Australian identity. White Beech, a passionate account of her recent project to reclaim part of the continent's ancient rainforest, puts a new slant on her engagement with issues of self-individuation and belonging that is all the more compelling for being universal. When Greer first stumbled across it in 2001, the forest in question consisted of "60 hectares of steep rocky country, most of it impenetrable scrub", part of a farm at Cave Creek in the Numinbah Valley in south-east Queensland. For years she had been shocked at the devastation visible in the landscape of her birth: "open-cut mines as big as cities, salt rivers, salt earth, abandoned townships, whole beaches made of beer cans". Persuaded that the government had failed in its conservation aims, she was looking for a piece of land to buy, with a view to returning it to its natural state. On an impulse, she sank her savings of $500,000 (£268,000) into the property, which had previously been run as a dairy farm, banana plantation and a source of timber, and set about restoring it with the aid of a dedicated task force.
Greer writes about her new-found role as an eco-warrior with the same fierce grace that she once brought to the liberation of the female body. Working to rebuild her patch of land freed her from feminine self-consciousness and doubt: for the 10 years in which she owned the freehold, "my horizons flew away, my notion of time expanded and deepened, and my self disappeared". In the course of this freeing-up, the idea of ownership itself became irrelevant – at the end of the decade the Cave Creek Rainforest Rehabilitation Scheme was "given back to itself" and turned into a charity (it now operates as Friends of Gondwana Rainforest).
Greer is as enraptured and as protective as a lover when describing the richness of the rainforest. Her memoir is called White Beech after a rare type of tree, Gmelina leichhardtii, which was almost logged to extinction in the 19th century and has been revived at Cave Creek, but it could as easily have been named after any one of a dozen other species, all of which are rendered with brilliant specificity. She is lyrical about the beauty of the giant stinger, with its "foot-long heart-shaped leaves of apple-green silk-velvet, each accurately pinked around the margin", and the virtues of spinifex, a tough native grass that shelters the world's richest lizard fauna and whose seeds have long been used by Indigenous Australians to make bread: "The rhythm of spinifex hummocks growing up and over sandhills or carpeting the plains is the heartbeat of Australia." She rails against the dangers to biodiversity of Parkinsonia, mesquite and prickly acacia (they are all aggressively thicket-forming and will restrict the carrying capacity of the land). She takes a hard line on ruby dock, the castor oil plant and the camphor tree (eradicate them: they're weeds), and is ardent in her defence of Wahlenbergias, indigo, smoke bushes, satiny bluebushes, milkmaids, parrot peas, sea heaths and smooth spider bush (preserve them at all costs: they're niche plants).
At the start of the project, though, Greer knew almost nothing about conservation. Characteristically, this did not put her off. Armed with a copy of the "Red Book", the definitive guide to the trees of the region, and having enlisted her no less formidable botanist sister, Jane, to help her, she sets out to learn what is needed. "To restore your forest would take about 800 years," snorts Jane. "I'd better not die then," Greer replies.
White Beech traces the stages of Greer's education in exuberant detail. There are chapters on the fauna, flora and cultivation of the area, interspersed with accounts of the philology of place names, plant taxonomy and the history of settlement in the country at large. The first white arrivals at Cave Creek assumed that they were taking over virgin land, but the open grassed forest they appropriated was an artefact, made and managed for generations by Indigenous Australian clans as part of their hunting economy. When trying to trace the traditional owners of her plot, however, Greer encounters something of a mystery. Her inquiries at the Aboriginal Cultural Centre are rebuffed, and she loses count of the number of Indigenous Australians who never get back to her after saying they'll ask their grandparents about it. Her sleuthing leads her to suspect that one of the striking natural features of the spot, a rock arch flanking a waterfall and a cave, was once a sacred site: "a place of serious women's business, even of pilgrimage in time of special need. Infertility. Unwanted pregnancy. Maybe even infanticide." Intriguingly, this seems to be borne out by an Indigenous Australian legend that Cave Creek is the home of a corpse-eating ghoul.
European pioneers were not deterred by such traditions, and pursued an aggressive campaign of shaping the terrain to their needs. British and German botanists set about renaming the indigenous plants and animals, often after themselves, thereby stamping their own spectral presence on the place forever: "The Cave Creek rainforest is haunted by the ghosts of a vanished tribe of European naturalists," laments Greer. In the emerging story of the battle for control of the forest, man and nature turn out to be equally predatory and tenacious. Initially the philosophy behind husbandry in Australia seemed to be to transplant the cultivars of other countries as far as possible, rooting out local species and using the continent as a vast nursery for exotics. The earliest explorers sowed cherry stones and peach pips wherever they went; apples, pears, mulberries, apricots and plums soon followed, and promptly failed or turned feral. Giant red cedars were felled. Irish dairy cattle were introduced and koalas shot. Later, pesticides were introduced with staggering recklessness. Greer is appalled to discover that leftover consignments of Agent Orange, the chemical used by the US in Vietnam as a weapon of war, were routinely sprayed around the Numinbah Valley in the early 1970s to control weed infestation and thin hardwood.
The local fauna and flora responded in kind. The European milk cows that were offloaded in Queensland had no defences against the array of local ticks and pests. Grey-headed flying foxes stripped the cossetted peach trees. The common names of the forest's vegetation are eloquently suggestive of the difficulties they posed for men on a civilising mission: green panic, stinking roger, strangler fig, lawyer vine. Indeed, one of the most appealing features of White Beech is its hard-nosed appreciation of the fact that nature is a bitch. Even in its reclaimed state, the "much-vaunted equilibrium" of the rainforest is, as Greer admits, "actually a state of constant war". The creatures she cherishes and to which her project gives shelter – raptors such as the goshawk, kite and kestrel; the antechinus mouse, the female of which eats its own young; carnivorous marsupials such as the spotted-tailed quoll; pythons, lace monitor lizards, toads, frogs and an assortment of moths and larvae – are not a cuddly lot. Nevertheless, in the Gondwana Rainforest they are allowed to pursue their own agendas. As Greer rightly observes, where conserving these species is concerned, ecotourism is not the answer. All they ask is to be left alone. After chronicling the disastrous past attempts to impose order on the teeming life at Cave Creek, Greer concludes, persuasively, that if we are to exercise proper stewardship of the Earth we must be prepared, at times, to embrace the possibility of a loss of human control.
