Author Inga Simpson at the Eurobodalla launch of ‘The Book of Australian Trees’ at Mogendoura Farm during 2021 – ” What trees breathe out, we breathe in.”
The Book of Australian Trees
Inga Simpson, Illustrated by Alicia Rogerson
This is Australian writer and local, Inga Simpson’s first kids book. Described as a love song to trees, the book serenades young readers (and much older like his reviewer) with a compendium of facts and a tender homage to 15 of Australia’s iconic trees.
We meet the fattest, tallest, oldest and ‘most lumpy’. Each species is beautifully rendered by illustrator Alicia Rogerson in this large hardback format
“Trees tell stories about places” Simpson says.
We are invited to inhabit their worlds and to listen to what they tell us about the world we share with them.
Those who have read the author’s first book-length piece of nature writing Understory – a memoir of living in a forest chronicling the demise of her relationship and their writers’ retreat during the GFC, will know the pivotal importance of ‘place’ within Simpson’s writing.
It’s no surprise then that a number of Eurobodalla’s most loved Yuin Country species are featured: the Spotted Gum, the Coastal She-Oak. And of course Old Man Banksia.
Red Ironbark makes it into the literary cut too. The book was written at an ironbark table in a house crafted by her father with ironbark and stone, the author shares with us at the book’s sellout launch at Mogendoura Farm.
Infact, iron barks interlink the forested spaces the author grew up in, and the coastal margins she now lives amidst.
Home is now just a stone’s throw from coastal she-oaks that yaw in high winds along a dramatic cliff top. Whilst Old Man Banskia forests stand sentinel just a little further along. Up on a nearby ridge of shaded forest, spotted gums slough their skins in seasonal rhythms. A bit like the red bellies and diamond pythons that live quietly amidst the trees.
Readers learn on page 2 that spotted gums are fiercely unique individuals: they keep their own lumps and distinctive dimples no matter how long they live, or how often they shed their bark.
We also learn about the precious place of spotted gums in the diet of forest dwelling creatures:
‘ Koalas eat spotted gum leaves. Yellow-tailed black cockatoos and pale headed rosellas feast on the seeds inside their gumnuts, and flying foxes, gliders, lorikeets, friarbirds, honeyeaters and bees all come for their cream flowers. ‘
We are introduced to that almost mythic anti-social, counter-cultural, quiet celebrity ‘Old Blotchy’ – an expert in keeping her own counsel. Wisely reclusive and hard to get to – and perhaps the most handsome spotted gum in Murramarang National Park – Blotchy stands 60 metres high and measures over ten metres around the base
As a reassuring post-script, during the Q+A, we learnt that Old Blochy did survive the incendiary catastrophes of Black Summer‘s giga fires that mercilessly ripped through Eurobodalla and Shoalhaven. She lived to keep growing exceptionally tall and wide – and is well. She is close to half a millenium in age now!
Some readers here with longer local knowledge, will also recall that it was a decade of hard work by local group Friends of Durras that saw Old Blotchy finally protected in 2005 with the eventual transfer of a 290- hectare state forest logging compartment to Murramarang National Park under the management of NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service.
Stories of epic trees from places further afield than our own Nature Coast coastline, are featured: the water storing Queensland Bottle Tree, the dizzyingly tall Karri, a tree that boasts roots that stretch fifty metres down into the earth.
The world’ s tallest flowering tree and its second tallest tree, the Mountain Ash, also receives a well deserved cameo. We discover that there are 500 years old Mountain Ash in the cool rainforests of Victoria and Tasmania.
In a moment of deep poignance, Simpson spoke about a phone call she made to a tree expert friend soon after the fires had threatened her own beach home and burnt over 80% of Eurobodalla.
“How many Mountain Ash have been lost in Victoria?” she managed to ask.
A brief and sobering response told Simpson everything she did not want to hear. And tells us much too – now over two years on from the fires.
“Millions of Mountain Ash have been burnt” was the very sad summation.
Yet within this book’s pages, there’s wonder and awe, and a sense of hopeful witnessing too.
A rich poetic tilt and sensibility nurtures like the shade-providing, life-giving blossoms and tree forms that Alice Rogerson renders so winsomely to the page.
And with the author ‘never wanting to speaking down to kids’, and even the publishers to their credit, have not baulked at the book’s frank facing up to climate change.
“What trees breathe out, we breathe in. They are a vital part of the Earth’s ecosystems,” writes Simpson.
Something felt even more viscerally in her own face-to-face reckonings in the wake of the ‘Forever Fires’ .
“What trees breathe out, we breathe in.” It’s a line worth repeating out loud to ourselves. As well as to our kids. Because there’s also much joy and interdependence in its truth…
As we sit beneath the art deco footings of a grand Moreton Bay fig. Or as we seek out the cooling relief of a micro- forest growing near hot paved areas. While we listen to the yips of sugar gliders feeding on acacias by night, just outside our bedroom windows. A copy of The Big Book of Australian Trees, closed gently by the bedside… listening to the quiet inhalations and exhalations.
What trees breathe out, we breathe in.
What trees breathe out, we breathe in.
What trees breathe out, we breathe in….