Non-fiction – paperback; Thames & Hudson; 304 pages; 2023. Review copy.
Once upon a time, when studying landscape architecture at university, I had to learn to identify more than 100 species of eucalyptus trees and spell their common and scientific names. I can’t remember any now, but I do know that because I studied on the east coast of Australia, we did not learn any eucalyptus species from the west coast (where I now live).
And yet, having now read Viki Cramer’s excellent and engaging book, The Memory of Trees, Western Australia (WA) is botanically “the richest corner of the continent” with 8,379 plant taxa recorded, more than the rainforests of the north and east coasts of Australia. (A handy appendix lists the 112 eucalyptus species mentioned in the text.)
This book, which was shortlisted for Book of the Year at the 2024 WA Premier’s Literary Awards, is essentially a love letter to trees. And if you know me, you will know this is *exactly* my kind of subject matter.
A celebration of trees
In the opening chapter, Cramer explains that she has trouble identifying tree species, particularly those in the Proteaceae family, but is better with eucalypts.
Well, I had a chance with the most widespread species: jarrah, marri, tuart, karri, wandoo, York gum, salmon gum and gimlet, perhaps even some of the mysterious mallets. They are the trees, in the words of author Murray Bail [1], that compose the landscape. The colour and texture of their bark, the pattern of their branching, the way they held their leaves and how they glinted in the sun or absorbed the light, the shape of their flower capsules and spent gum nuts: these things I could recognise. (page 5)
Cramer wears her research lightly, yet the book covers everything you would ever want to know about gum trees in their native environment — and then some.
She writes in an engaging style that marries personal experience with science and takes us on a journey of exploration as she interviews various experts and unearths astonishing facts along the way.
As she states right up front, this is not a “literary rhapsody about nice forests, or about nice times in nice forests” (page 17): it’s a look at their history, both exploitative (via “saw and axe, the bulldozer and the chain”) and well managed (via Australia’s First Peoples).
Themed chapters
There are 10 chapters in total and each one explores an issue relating to “the future of eucalypts and our home among them” (which is also the book’s subtitle).
Cramer argues that “most Australians see their world through eucalypts, even if they don’t pay heed to the texture of their bark or the sheen of their leaves” (page 8).
As a nation we may have a romance with the red dirt of the outback, where spinifex and mulga mingle across vast sandy plains, but, as the song [2] goes, most of us make our home among the gum trees. (page 9)
Cramer constructs her narrative to show how the stewardship of the land since colonisation — through logging, land clearing, mining and prescribed burns — has changed the diversity of species and the size of forests. Now, together with the combination of droughts and climate change, our forests are at risk like never before.
In the year leading up to the 2019-20 summer, more trees died from drought than they did from the fires that burnt over 17 million hectares of land. A group of plant physiologists – scientists who study the inner workings of trees, much like medical researchers who study the systems within the human body – compared these trees with corals: both are slow-growing, long-lived and fixed in one place. Corals, they wrote, are struggling to adapt to swift rises in sea surface temperatures. Could trees be just as vulnerable to a rapidly heating and drying atmosphere? They included an image, taken from high above Kains Flat in central New South Wales, of a small island of Christmas-tree-green cypress pines surrounded by an ocean of bleached-brown eucalypts. (page 15)
While Cramer admits the situation for WA’s eucalypt forests is grim, she offers seeds of hope in the form of collaborations between Western science and First Nations knowledge.
Threatened future
I came away from the book feeling less positive than Cramer, probably because I am shocked by how often Fremantle, where I live, is enveloped in bushfire smoke from prescribed burns hundreds of kilometres away. This happens because these burns sometimes “go wrong” [3] and are managed using a 60-year-old quantitative system that doesn’t account for changed ecological circumstances.
That system says 8 per cent of forests (roughly 200,000 hectares) need to be burnt each year “to be effective in reducing both the size of wildfires and their impact on communities and the environment” (page 118).
I also feel like I have been hoodwinked by WA politicians and the media into believing that old-growth forests — those that are complex habitats with trees more than 150 years old — are now safe from logging [4].
But, as Cramer explains, the definitions are slippery, and what the public views as “old growth” may not be the same as the government’s views. It’s even more anger-inducing when you realise “that the primary use for the logs taken from the jarrah and karri forests is just burning them or turning them into photocopy paper” (page 87).
I could go on… but instead, I’d urge you to pick up this book and read it for yourself. Not only is The Memory of Trees a clarion call to protect and preserve our eucalypt forests for future generations, but it is also a compelling look at the relationship between humans and trees.
– – – –
1. Murray Bail’s novel Eucalyptus (published in 1988) is one of my favourites, read before I started blogging, hence no review.
2. ‘Home Among the Gum Trees’ by John Williamson (YouTube)
3. Cramer points out that in November 2011, a prescribed burn in the Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park escaped containment lines and burnt down 32 houses, 9 chalets and 5 sheds near Margaret River (page 103). She lists many similar examples, most of which never make the news.
4. The WA Government committed to ending native forest logging by 2024 (link to government announcement)
– – – –
Viki Cramer is a writer and ecologist who lives on Noongar Country in the south-west of Western Australia. I read these books as part of my #FocusOnWestAustralianWriters. You can find out more about this reading project, along with a list of Western Australian books already reviewed on the site, here.
Reading Matters 
Despite being a tree fan, I probably shan’t read this. Clearly eucalyptus are not a ‘thing’ here, and the other trees you mention by name are totally unknown to me. So I’ll wait for her to write the companion volume to European trees.
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The smell of gum trees was one thing I sorely missed while living in the UK. And it’s the best thing about landing at Melbourne Airport: the scent of eucalyptus in the air. The only other places I have experienced that scent “in the wild” is Madeira and the Greek isles. In WA, the scent is generally lemon eucalyptus… I wish I could bottle it!
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I’ve only come across eucalyptus en masse in Portugal, and – um- I didn’t much care for the smell, or for the shade they offered, which I somehow found dark and forbidding, rather than shady and welcoming. Perhaps they were the wrong sort of eucalyptus!
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Haha. Maybe. Or maybe you are like John Glover, a colonial landscape artist from the 18th century, who couldn’t figure out how to paint a eucalpyt because they were unlike anything he’d ever seen before. If you look at his paintings, his gum trees look like strange genetically modified oak trees!
This is a good example of gum trees looking like crazy oaks: https://www.libraryofnature.com/artwork/a-corroboree-of-natives-in-mills-plains-john-glover
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I think I saw The Wrong Sort. They were growing in serried ranks, in plantations.
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Oh, you never see them like that in the wild!
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Have you come across My Forests, Travels with Trees by Janine Burke? I’m not much into nature writing on account of not being much into being outdoors, but I loved that book.
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No… will add to list.
For the record, I’m not a fan of nature writing. It’s generally too cliched and purple-prosed for my liking, and is usually lazy and too focused on navel-gazing. But I love nature… it’s why my undergrad is in environmental planning and why I spent several years (one day a week) volunteering at the ACF Head Office in the early 1990s.
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I used to be a member of the ACF, for years actually. I only gave up my membership when The Ex shot through and I couldn’t afford it.
It probably seems counter-intuitive, but The Offspring is very much an outdoors person, ice-climbing in NZ and hiking the Bogong High Plains and climbing Cradle Mountain and all that. So it always seemed important to me that even though I was never going to do much more than the occasional day bush walk, the environment should be protected and nurtured for those who love it and want to get out there in the wilderness. Not to mention the critters of course, but that’s for a rational reason (i.e. the ecology) not for emotional reasons.
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You have just described a classic case of “existential relief” in that it is satisfying enough for you to know that these wild places exist even though you know you are unlikely to ever visit them. I feel this way about so many of the world’s wild places — the Amazon, Tasmania wilderness, Antarctica etc etc — because it makes me happy to know they are simply there; I don’t need to go and see them, and to be honest, it’s better for the environment if I don’t.
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That’s certainly true about Antarctica. The advent of tourism there is a bad, bad idea…
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This sounds like it was an ideal read for you Kim, I’m as you ded at your learning so many species and to discover they were only east coast species. Are there not eucalypts that can be found on both coasts? Is there a more common species?
Your review reminded me of the tragic reading of Annie Proulx’s Barkskins, a fictional account yes, but something of a history of the destruction of native forest species in the new world. Trees and forests are indeed the lungs of our universe and native species so important to be allowed to thrive.
I do like nature writing, particularly in winter, when they can evoke the feeling of their subject and curiosity at their endeavour. Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea-Wind and Kathleen Jamie’s Findings are probably my favourite and most memorable reading experiences.
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My last name is Forrester, so I think forest management/protection is in my DNA. LOL.
Yes, there’s plenty of eucalyptus species found on both coasts — blue gum and manna gum are prime examples. But WA has dozens of species that are endemic to the south-west and not found anywhere else, which is why it’s so important to save them.
I grew up in an area of Victoria where messmate was the most common gum tree; its endemic there and not found in WA.
Thanks for the reference to Annie Proulx’s Barkskins, it sounds like something I would like.
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was required reading at uni, but I haven’t read Under the Sea-Wind. Will look it up.
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Oh my, I think you’ll appreciate Barkskins, it follows two families whose lives are intrinsically intertwined with the forest but spans the recent history of man (300 years) in relation to the forests of the “new” world.
Under the Sea-Wind was Carson’s personal favourite of her own books, her little known debut and the first in a trilogy of sea books. She was writing an essay for a science publication and told it wouldn’t do – she rewrote the essay but was told to send her first version to The Atlantic. A scientist whose turn of phrase was too literary. 🙂
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Your surname is indeed a sign and a call to action!
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Funny story: when I did my undergrad degree I took a subject on forestry and was assigned a project with two other people whose surnames were Woodland and Westwood respectively 🤣
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That’s fabulous and perhaps not a coincidence. I was born in Woodville and have often wondered about that bilingual name and the irony of ending up living in France. 🙂
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Well, this must surely the right up the alley for Whispering Gums! (I immediately thought of Bail’s Eucalyptus as I read about your learning all those eucalypts in that course, so I love that you mention it at the end.)
Today we drove down to the (our) South Coast (the Shoalhaven area) and the drive took us through big stands of eucalypt forest. I’m pretty sure most were the blue gum, but this region is also famous for the maculata or spotted gum. (I think I have the botanical name right but I think, actually, that it is now classified as a corymbia.)
I like nature writing. I take your point about purple prose but as with any writing I guess, there’s good and the not so good?!
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I had a friend a decade or so ago who had a book of eucalypts and we drove around the south west doing our best to identify what we were seeing. To my great shame that was my only attempt and while I think I can identify a Marri, Tuarts and Jarrah and so on are beyond me.
I will buy this book, and a copy for my daughter whose home is in the forests of the SW corner (and will surely be burnt out sooner or later).
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