The photo essay comprises a series of images with accompanying text in the form of explanatory captions, the combination helping to build a multispecies story. Here, the intention is to highlight how the photo essay can be effective in allowing for more-than-human subjectivity and agency. All human cultures rely on language to communicate, but to engage beyond the human it is necessary to pay attention to cues beyond language and, therefore, not to rely on written text alone. The focus on individual eucalypt trees within this photo essay, is an extension of my connection with individual trees and is a part of my ongoing creative expression of sensorial and multispecies entanglements with significant others (see Fijn and Kavesh, 2023).

During the coronavirus pandemic, when the state government imposed a lockdown in September-October 2021, residents in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) were allocated one hour of outdoor exercise per day. I used this time to walk in local reserves or explore new places through a form of multisensorial auto-ethnography. My photographic series featuring individual trees was partly inspired by an exhibition at the State Library of Australia that I had been to over a decade prior. The series by photographer Jon Rhodes, ‘Cages of Ghosts’ (2007), featured large-format images of scar trees bounded within cages (or as protection from vandalism). 

During 2021 I was also a participant in the Bundian Way Arts Exchange programme, run by the School of Art and Design at the Australian National University. Members of the Canberra arts community signed up for the programme to learn from local Indigenous knowledge holders and arts practitioners in the region with the aim for the connections to contribute toward some form of individual artistic output. Usually the course is fieldbased, but, due to travel restrictions during the pandemic, we were limited to Zoom meetings alone. One of the speakers was Paul House, a proud Ngambri man. He talked about his family’s intergenerational presence in the Canberra region, including during significant political moments in Australia’s history. He continues the carving of Aboriginal designs on individual eucalypts as an important ceremonial act. (1) 

The concept of one’s homeland is perhaps universal to all mammals. In Aboriginal Australia one’s clan land and the totemic beings that are part of this land are referred to as being on Country. In Mongolia, the term nutag is important on multiple scales, as the homeland that herding families and their herds migrate within, but also encompassing one’s homeland on a national level. Having not been born on Australian soil, this time of travel restrictions was a means for me to explore Canberra as a place. Unable to travel to my own homeland of Aotearoa/New Zealand, or to travel into the field in Mongolia, it meant that connecting with these significant, large eucalyptus trees helped to deepen my connection to Australia as a place. I do not view where I live in Canberra as my homeland or as my connection to Country, but it is my current home. I have developed a newfound respect for individual eucalypts where I live. 

Although the eucalypt, or gum tree, is iconically Australian, many Australians do not revere these trees but instead have an overriding fear of them and prefer that they are planted nowhere near buildings. Eucalypts are prone to kill people by dropping large limbs and were thus referred to as ‘widow makers’ in the past. After a severe weather event, such as a storm, or if under stress during drought, their adaptive strategy is to drop a limb as a means of survival. I admire this trait in them, just as I do the skink’s ability to leave a tail behind and regrow a new one. I am mindful of the threat of dropping limbs from above while camping, just as I have to be mindful to avoid standing on a venomous snake when walking through long grass in Australia. Eucalypts are remarkable at regrowing after being burnt by fire, as new stems and branches sprout up from what looks like an old, dead stump. Large Eucalypts can be around 300-400 years old, while mallees have been recorded as being up to 900 years old. When the top of the mallee tree is burnt, the old roots can produce new shoots. (2)

Historian Bill Gammage and writer Bruce Pascoe have successfully made the wider Australian public aware that before settlement the land was carefully managed by Aboriginal peoples across the Australian continent, including through the method of seasonal cultural burning (Gammage and Pascoe, 2021). Before settlement there were already large tracts of grassland that First Australians would walk through unimpeded, with scattered prominent eucalypts. 

Prospectors searching for land came to the Canberra region only around 200 years ago, whereas communities of Aboriginal people, the Ngunnuwal (or Ngambri), had been living in the area continuously for more than 20,000 years. In 1817 Oxley described the following scene: ‘[T]he country was broken in irregular low hills thinly studded with small timber, and covered with grass: the whole landscape within the compass of our view was clear and open, resembling diversified pleasure grounds irregularly laid out and planted…’ (Oxley, 1817, cited in Gammage, 2011: 44). When surveyor Robert Hoddle later travelled to the broad Monaro Plains in 1832, he witnessed open grassland and fine trees of Blakeley’s Red Gum, Ribbon Gum, Apple Box, and Yellow Box trees on lighter soils with native kangaroo grass beneath (Gammage, 2011). Ngunnawal, therefore, had been actively promoting the scattered stands of large eucalypt trees. Some of the reserves that I walked through in 2021 still resembled these descriptions. To me, large ‘paddock trees’ are a sign of a lasting presence: they were already there when Ngunnuwal were walking past, utilising their bark to make into various objects and to perform ceremonies, forming what are now known as ‘scar trees’. 

Anthropologist Francesca Merlan writes how the Manggarrayi of the Roper River Region in the Northern Territory linked specific individual trees to people, or ancestors: ‘it is meaningful for a member of the [Mangarrayi] society to talk about links between trees and persons, even to the extent of saying that a certain tree “is” a certain person’… ‘Only certain trees of any species represent people; these are inevitably older ones that have not grown visibly during a human lifetime’ (Merlan, 1982: 162). 

The cultural attitude toward eucalypts by settler Australians, however, was and still is quite different. Large tracts of land were cleared of vegetation to make way for introduced grasses and allow for the grazing of sheep and cattle, replacing whole grassy-woodland ecosystems. The easiest way for farmers to get rid of trees when clearing the land was to ringbark them, which involved cutting a deep wound right around the trunk, resulting in the tree slowly dying while still standing; while forests of eucalypts were sawed down as timber for building the nation’s capital. With very few grassy-woodlands with yellow and apple box eucalypts left across the wheat-belt of eastern Australia, farmers are now realising the importance of conserving the last remaining paddock trees, as important shade for livestock during the heat of summer, but also as important nest habitat for native birds and marsupials (Fijn et al., 2019). 

The series of images forming the photo essay above are in black-and-white as a means of tapping into this window on the past. The intention of the contrast is also to draw out the silhouette and unique structure of each individual tree. When walking through the Belconnen Woodlands Corridor, one can envisage the presence of the First Australians who may have walked past these same trees, living a different way of life by hunting and gathering on the land; followed by farmers with the introduction of strange new species and the grazing of sheep; to now, where these same trees are now being conserved as rare stands within reserves, or have been spared as the few remaining sentinels surrounded by rapidly encroaching residential development to accommodate a burgeoning human population in the nation’s capital. The two sections within the photo essay are not meant to be in opposition to one another, as both are interconnected through being a part of Ngunnuwal/Ngambri Country. There is a need to recognise that reserves and encroaching urban development were originally part of the same grassy-woodland ecosystem.