Big Tree at Wayatinah
(for Sophie and Kepi)

What did I feel
Standing there amongst the tress
Surrounded by the silence?
But not silence really.
There was a breeze
Fanning the leaves.
And there was the regular scrape of one branch on another
I heard it somewhere behind us.
But there were no man-made sounds.

There were just the three of us
Held quietly in the gray
Morning, staring up
To leaves and branches against
The wide sky, on display
The trunk magnificent
Thrusting from the earth solid and seemingly permanent.
It was as if nothing
Nothing could ever damage it.

She spoke then.
"What are we waiting for, Grandpa?" she said.
"Yes, why are we waiting?" said the other.
For what?
They left me then and sped
Swiftly over to the tree
Touched it, slapped it with their palms and turned
Faces alight and eager
"Where are we going now?" they called to me.

They think this tree is ordinary.
They don't yet know
That trees like this - taller, bigger, older
Once were commonplace.
They didn't see the final blow
Which felled the Derwent Valley Giant
In 1942, twenty metres around the base. They didn't know
Two expert axemen
Had cut it down.

It took these men
Two days and more
To cut the scarf two metres deep
Into the butt,
With axe and cross-cut saw
They finished off the job.
Hardened bushmen from all around stood there to watch.
They downed their tools in silent
Homage as the monarch fell.

How could these children know
That that great tree
Was born three hundred years before
The first white man
Arrived. How could it be
When forty years before
Their birth two hundred cubic metres of the giant trunk
Had all been pulped
For newsprint.

I watched the children
Playing around the base
Of one, as yet, a survivor.
I sensed their trust
That we should not efface
The ancient forests left;
That we should not continue to destruct for transitory gain
The real that carries in its wake
The loss, the pain.

Look to the tree
Children of my child.
Protect it always
For the children yet to be.
See that this lovely bush is not defiled
Eternally.
There is one truth we have yet to understand, trees have
Perceptions, passions, reasons. They are
The true protectors of our land.

Barney Roberts (from Forest Echoes, The Wilderness Society, 1988)