photographer BERT SPINKS
A few days back I drove south as a storm brewed above the mountains. A flock of no fewer than 30 black cockatoos self-evacuated from higher ground: these are famous harbingers of foreboding weather, though I didn’t need to read the signs of birds to see that rain was coming.
Below the pack of leaden cloud, however, wattles blossomed, oblivious to temperature or mood. These are brave and boisterous trees. They’re in bloom when few other plants are willing to offer flowers to the world. The Tasmanian winter can be cruel and, we must remember, a great deal of energy goes into the production of flowers, which often have such fragile parts. But Acacia dealbata, the silver wattle, chooses to blossom profusely just as the weather gets grim.
I see this an act of generosity, an encouragement that the darkness will eventually be pushed back.
It was September 1, which some celebrate as Wattle Day. It was invented to pay homage to the golden wattle, Acacia pycnantha. But these don’t grow in the forests around my northern Tasmanian parts.
. . .
Anyway, the silver wattles were just beginning to produce their colourful little baubles when I returned from overseas in mid-July and, in my neck of the woods, each day has brought a new burst of bright neon.
Stationed on a rural property for the month of August, I watched as each tree decided to follow its neighbour’s lead and don the yellow robe that is their seasonal costume. Returning to my own dwelling, I looked back at the farm where I had been staying, and saw it was surrounded by a halo of glowing gold.
On dim, discouraging days, I look up at the exuberant wattle blossoms and think of this excerpt of a poem by James Wright:
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
into blossom.
On September 18 nearly 200 years ago, the colonist George Augustus Robinson, who assiduously kept a journal of his travels here, took note of a custom belonging to the Aboriginal people of the island’s south. The locals gathered wattle blossoms and stuck them inside their tents, believing that the flowers had “the property of causing sleep”.
However, flowers provoke raucous behaviour. Around me are a variety of trees whose blossoms produce an oversupply of sweet treats, their nectaries constantly refilling as the plant works overtime to lure in pollinators. I frequently see feuds around flowers, the branches quivering with bird combat as individuals stake a claim over fonts of sugar.
House-sitting at the farm, I watched these battles take place in a bush planted by the kitchen window. It was an ornamental, originally from elsewhere, so I didn’t immediately recognise it. It was eventually identified for me as red flowering currant, Ribes sanguineum, a bush native to the west coast of Canada. There, the flowers attract pollinators like the rufous hummingbird. Standing at the kitchen window, I watched an Australian species whose gestures and behaviours often remind observers of hummingbirds. The eastern spinebill is an elegant bird, adorned with gorgeous cinnamon-coloured plumage – along with a white scarf that makes it stand out in thick bush.
More often at this time of year, I see spinebills at my own address getting stuck into the bell-shaped flowers of Epacris impressa, the common heath. It is hard to think of a more perfect match between anatomy and botany. The sharp, curved beak is two or three centimetres long, about one-fifth of the bird’s size. With this, it dexterously reaches the deposit of nectar deep within the flower’s petals.
The spinebill was good enough to announce his presence whenever he descended upon the currant blossoms; I kept my camera at hand and waited for his sweet piping call. Sometimes, a different bird, the crescent honeyeater, would take its shift in the bush. The honeyeater patrolled the branches with what seemed to be a stern manner, showing no great pleasure in its snack. But the gestures of birds are easily misunderstood.
I have read that the Saanich people of western Canada hold a belief that plucking the red currant flowers would bring rain. But I was sharing the farmhouse with a horticulturist: sprigs would inevitably end up installed in beautiful bouquets. Data about local rainfall suggests there was bugger all for August. Perhaps more currant blossoms are needed.
There was one full day of rain, which made the river rise in the nearby town of Deloraine. Along it, too, a lovely avenue of cherry blossoms slowly begins to flower. As far as I’m aware, it’s the best place in Tasmania for the cherry blossom viewing, an occasion known in Japan as hanami.
Every spring see Japanese visitors, and other aficionados of Japanese culture, pull up to the river and admire the flowering trees. For more than a millennium, the hanami has been celebrated with have picnics under the flowering bowers, with poetry and dance incorporated into the excursion. A sweet haiku by 19th century the poet Kobayashi Issa sums up the occasion like this:
Under the cherry blossoms
strangers are not
really strangers.
Perhaps it was this sentiment that led a Japanese businessman to donate the trees to Deloraine in the 1990s. A riverside plaque reports that Richiiro Shiratori, a mill owner who bought the locals’ buckwheat, made the considered gesture, thinking of how the trees would blossom here while the crop he’d imported was getting processed in Japan.
With a few mates, I had a crack at replicating this at Deloraine. It was a miserable spring afternoon. On a camping stove, we warmed up saké (actually, it was a Korean rice spirit, but did the trick). One of our party pulled out a traditional Japanese bamboo flute called a shakuhachi and blew a few wavering notes. I read some haikus. Then we retired to the warmth of a pub.
Undaunted, we intend to do it again soon. Perhaps the weather will be better. Or maybe we did our ceremony the wrong order. The legendary haiku writer Basho had his own cheeky verse about the hanami:
a hangover:
but while the cherries bloom,
what of it?
It’s easy to read a mix of overlapping feelings in Japan’s cherry blossom poems. The most obvious is the sense of how quickly beauty fades. Those fragile flowers don’t last long; they’re subject to the vicissitudes of spring weather. The other day someone told me how a cherry blossom in their garden on Tasmania’s north-west coast was once stripped bare by a single gale. In the aftermath, every single petal was plastered to their shed – a very haiku-like image, albeit regionally adapted.
. . .
Many Japanese people are proud of the distinctness of the four seasons in their country. Perhaps here, the seasons develop more incrementally. I personally carry countless seasonal markers in my mind, ticking them off as the days unravel. The sight of skinks the other day made me I feel close to the edge of the summer months. There is a joy in seeing them, like catching up with old friends.
I find comfort in the smooth motions of seasonal change. Perhaps it’s because so little else in modern life has such a consistent narrative of renewal – there is so little of nature’s order or reason in human affairs. Of course, there is a different sheen of meaning to our seasons now too. I am not the only one checking for rainfall data or looking at forecasts for the summer. Research in Japan shows how different cherry species are flowering earlier, and less prolifically, than in the past.
Now other acacia species have also begun to put out flowers. It suddenly looks like my dark forest has been sprinkled with chicken salt. The prickly moses (Acacia verticillata), a wiry tree with thorny leaves, gives out fluffy blossoms that look like glow-in-the-dark pipe-cleaners. What is offered up by the blackwood tree (Acacia melaxylon), are more like pom-poms.
The blackwoods especially remind me of how ephemera are embedded in everyday life – how the big picture of our lives, in fact, is one big quickly-passing occasion. It’s a while back now, but for a few Septembers in a row I found myself at funerals for people who’d died too soon, in the saddest of circumstances. On my way to one of these, I plucked a sprig of blackwood that was flowering in a park; it stayed in my pocket for most of the month.
. . .
The procession of blossoms continues. With it comes a host of other changes to life in the bush. The birds get busier and noisier; they are joined by the traveller species who make a staggered return across the course of this month.
Surrounded in the midst of so many budding trees, I flex my muscles and shut my eyes. It’s not exactly in keeping with the mood I’ve been carrying with me throughout this transit of seasons, but I still hope to burst into blossom too.
