(REFLECTIVE MUSIC)
AUTHOR: No matter what I set out to write about,
I find I always come back to nature.
Being outside in the weather,
in the sun, in the rain,
with trees around me.
I wouldn't even say that it is my inspiration
so much as like oxygen - I can't really function without it.
My name's Sophie Cunningham
and I have written nine books now, to my surprise.
I've written kids books and novels
and a book of essays
and some histories.
And a lot of my books have
kind of a memoir or personal component in them as well.
My office is at the Abbotsford Convent,
which sits on the Yarra River, or Birrarung,
which actually means that I'm standing here
on Wurundjeri land.
And one of the reasons I love working at the convent
is these beautiful heritage trees.
This oak does have a special place in my heart.
It has that quality
that attracted me to... to other trees.
You look at certain trees and you feel a connection
and this is one of those trees for me.
In 1851,
Victoria became a separate state from New South Wales,
and this tree became known as the 'Separation Oak'.
It hasn't been trimmed,
so it hangs like an umbrella.
It sort of rests on its boughs.
And when it's in full leaf,
it's like this big green cave.
It's just really extraordinary.
But even when it's just kind of the bones underneath,
it's...you feel embraced by the tree.
"Writers mark the page, but walkers mark the earth
"and the earth in turn marks us.
"I feel increasingly compelled to walk to random places,
"to know them through the soles of my feet."
I lived in America for a few years
and that's when I started walking everywhere,
and realised it was the way I could come to know a place
and connect to a place.
And then, when I moved back to Melbourne,
I wanted to bring that eye,
that sort of outsider's eye, that fresh eye,
to the place I'd lived in my entire life,
and then I sort of developed this habit
of just going around and around and over the same places.
Just like you get to know a friend,
by meeting them regularly and, you know, having a drink,
walking and just being in a place
is really the best way to get a real sense of its history.
The lion's head tree is not a particularly magnificent tree.
It's got lots of burls.
Its crown, its canopy, is thinning.
It's quite short, which probably means
that it lost bits of itself in storms over the years.
"In the presence of the river red gums,
"you find yourself thinking about time differently.
"You wonder about the age of a particular tree,
"then suddenly you're contemplating
"what the landscape would have looked like a million years ago."
I wrote that after meeting the river red gum.
When I was standing near that tree,
I started to contemplate all these things
and I realised in a way
it felt as if the tree was communicating to me and saying,
"You need to ask these questions."
One of the reasons why there are,
to my knowledge, four, but it could be more,
significant red gums
in this section of the botanic gardens
is because the Yarra River used to come in to the bottom of the gardens.
They were effectively wetlands.
And over the first 50 or so years of Melbourne settlement,
the river was dredged, straightened,
and moved further away from the bottom of the gardens,
and so while the lion's head tree now grows by a lake,
that lake is actually a remnant
of the wetland system that originally existed here.
After Melbourne was settled in 1835,
it became one of the most rapidly growing cities in the world.
We lost millions of red gums.
We lost God knows how many other trees and plants.
Deforestation does lots of things.
One of the things that was commented on
by Wurundjeri people very early on,
1830s, 1840s,
was that it wasn't raining as much,
so the settler people of Melbourne
changed the landscape unimaginably within a couple of decades.
It's always a bit of a balance
to celebrate the natural world
at the same time as sounding some alarms
that I think need to be sounded.
I've always been concerned about climate change,
but in the last few years,
the urgency with which I've felt the need
to understand what's going on,
to communicate what is going on,
has become quite intense.
And really, I think it's almost the only subject left.
It's the only subject for me.
I think the situation we're in really demands attention and focus.
One of the reasons why these things have started to take over my work,
it crept up on me,
but the bushfires of 2019/2020 really just...
..they sort of...
..I want to say they broke something in me.
Well, they broke something open in me.
The loss was so profound.
It... I felt it in my body.
I found myself thinking,
"What can I do that will make a difference?"
I thought I need to take my skills
and do something constructive with them.
And the fact that what I happened to do was writing,
I've chosen to use writing as my weapon, if you like, or as my tool.
I started writing 'Tippy and Jellybean:
'The True Story of a Brave Koala
'Who Saved her Baby from a Bushfire',
and that was illustrated by Anil Tortop,
and Anil also illustrated my next kids book,
about little penguins.
Just because rapid climate change creates lots of challenges
doesn't mean that you have to give up doing the thing that you love,
possibly,
and for me, what I love to do is writing.
And it's almost brought me back to my writing in some ways.
It's given me a reason.
Like, why does one write?
Is it just self-indulgent?
And if you manage to write in a way that is not just self-indulgent
but is bearing witness and giving people hope, inspiring,
all the things that I might hope that I do,
well, that feels like a pretty amazing thing
to at least try to do.
(RAIN PATTERS SOFTLY)
"I see it this way:
"trees need strategic thinking in difficult times
"and they also need friends."
It was in the spirit of both friendship and activism
that I went to visit the largest tree in Victoria.
Her name is Ada, and she's a mountain ash,
one of the tallest flowering plants on Earth.
"She is a Queen, an empress, a goddess of trees."
"To find her, I drove through patches of clear-felled forest,
"past the shattered, dismembered corpses of trees lying in the mud."
(MAJESTIC MUSIC)
"Ada rises above me.
"The wind rustles through her
"and the frogs croak in her, giving her voice.
"She holds a Leadbeater's possum in her hollow like an orb.
"She brandishes her branches as a sceptre, as a sword.
"'I honour you,' I say.
"'I pledge my allegiance to you,
"'to this city,
"'to our planet of trees.'"