The Australian bush is at risk of vanishing these days, of becoming a mortuary of up-rooted tree trunks, a pyre of blazing branches; a place of residents summarily ejected, birds given notice, shade expelled, lizards evicted.
Attila the Hun can be an avenging tractor, razing the cover to the ground.
Farms, they say, must breathe. Fire hazards must be eliminated, land made productive.
Yet there are compromises. My country cousins like to sow and reap but they like a balance too. So their bit of bush is part of their pattern of things. They firebreak it and fence it but, inside, it is their wilderness,
They played in it as children and now their children play there. They call it simply The Scrub.
It is a pavilion for parrots, choir stalls for magpies and crawling space for sleepy lizards.
It even provides a breathing space for slow, heavy visitors from the city.
Some people may not see much to it. The trees are untidy and twisted, mostly low but with one ancient isolated gum that broods in a corner like the oldest inhabitant in a pub, waiting for someone to come and yarn and to pay for the drinks.
Yet the scrub is full of windsong. Its trees anchor the slope which is inclined to erode and their leaves are green sails, their branches spars and their trunks masts and they bend to the breeze and make their music.
My country cousins have never thought of clearing the scrub because it’s too much a part of them
It has its moods. On a hot day it can be perfectly motionless, a frieze of foliage on the ridge.
One can sit on a log in the scrub’s shade and watch the heat haze distort farms and fields, sheds and implements until the plains seem in habited by quivering dinosaurs and strange reservoirs of mirage.
I enjoy the scrub. I have never been very primitive except with a hamburger.
Yet, having failed at agriculture, I make honest attempts to understand conservation, wind erosion, contour ploughing and all the other niceties which my country cousins explain to me over black tea and white scones.
Picnics in the scrub are not as fashionable as they once were, but the bull ants are only too happy to share their formic acid with visitors and the bush flies are always abuzz for company.
The children who often escort me say there’s a brown snake in residence. This snake, a defender of the environment, can smell a townie a kilometre away (the children say) and starts recharging its venom glands at the drop of a Coke can.
It’s a very efficient biter, gets the fangs in deep and lets you have the lot.
You’d be stiffer than frozen yoghurt within the hour.
So the children tell me.
Once the sly movement of a stick in the grass sent me leaping into the fork of the nearest tree which is now called Fatchen’s Leap and shown to visitors.
I like being in the scrub on a moonlit evening On my own; when the country children are at their homework; the snake resting somewhere recharging its venom glands, the ants topping up their formic acid for tomorrow.
The scrub in the moon light is beyond the heat of day and much into mystery.
It murmurs of old times far back and old things forgotten.
The moon swings itself from branch to branch and one should be whispering to one’s girl, although I know she’s down there in the farmhouse and telling bedtime stories about me.
The plain stretches below and the farmhouse lights are portholes the night and the eyes of the cars shine on distant roads and their sounds are faint disturbances of gasoline.
The air is warm in the scrub and pungent with eucalyptus for I have crushed leaves in my hand and, somehow, inhaling then brings old pictures…paintings by Tom Roberts and drovers with dogs and flocks, and stooked hay and selectors huts.
The scent of eucalyptus.
“Hey, you up there in the scrub. Supper time.”
Voices and laughter from the farmhouse.
“So you like the old scrub,” say my country cousins, pleased as we sip tea and eat macaroon squares.
“He likes macaroon squares better,” says my wife.
But when I go to bed and the moonlit trees stand tranquil on their ridge, I can’t help thinking that in these hectic times, we all need our bit of scrub somewhere.
Max Fatchen