JOIN USWhite Beech: The Rainforest Years
Germaine Greer
Bloomsbury
2015, pp 370
399
The White Beech is a powerful and inspirational story of Germaine Greer’s efforts to restore a rainforest in Australia. After spending much of her life in London and later in rural Essex, where she planted a forest, Germaine, in 2001, decides to buy land in Australia and converts it into a thriving rainforest.
At the age of 62, Germaine, a well-known feminist, drawn by a passion to remedy centuries of devastation of land in Australia by logging and clearing, attempts cattle rearing and adoption of European farming. As she writes, “Everywhere I had ever travelled across its vast expanse I had seen devastation, denuded hills, eroded slopes, weeds from all over the world, feral animals, open-cut mines as big as cities, salt rivers, abandoned townships and whole beaches made of beer cans. Give me just a chance to clean something up, sort something out, make it right, I thought, and I will take it.”
After searching for two years, she zeroes in on an abandoned 60-hectare degraded scrub land in South Western Queensland, and restoring this land becomes the central theme of the book. She calls her land the Cave Creek Rainforest Rehabilitation Scheme (CCRRS), instead of referring to it as property. The land that she buys had been stripped of its trees, ground dug up repeatedly over time and also poisoned with Agent Orange, a deadly chemical that was used by the Americans in their war against Vietnam.
Germaine goes to extraordinary length to remove non-native trees and to plant and reintroduce indigenous flora so that her land can be restored to its original condition. By doing so she makes a point that it’s entirely possible to rebuild degraded habitats, and conveys her deep joy that rebuilding nature can bring. With forests disappearing at an alarming rate globally, her mission is to provide inspiration for others to do similar efforts. She proves that one can restore a forest to its full glory — teeming with life insects, mammals, reptiles and birds.
Germaine’s story reminded me of a similar experiment in Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh where a couple named Bablu Ganguly and Mary transformed 32 acres of arid land into a lush green forest over 20 years.
She weaves her story of habitat restoration with stories of the fauna and flora that she encounters, the history of people who have previously lived on the land, and most importantly, the ugly stories of Australia’s past.
Germaine’s book provides a heavy dose of historical research on the cultural and natural history of Australia, which is informative. Some readers might get discouraged, though, on the use of too much of Botany, even though Germaine does a good job in making it simple. She dislikes the way botanists who had never visited Australia imposed binomial Latin names on its flora. Her narration of the lifestyle of various plants and animals, biographies of explorers, scientists and exploiters, is fascinating to read.
She is especially pained by the devastation wreaked by the European settlers in Australia. In Queensland, by 1930, 27 million kangaroos, wallaroos, wallabies, pademelons and kangaroo rats and thousands of bats had been killed. Likewise, thousands of aborigines, the original inhabitants of Australia, were either shot or poisoned to death by the settlers. She laments that the native vegetation of Australia was overtaken by weeds that were brought by the settlers from all over the world.
Are you wondering what ‘White Beech’ in the book title refers to? It refers to Gmelina leichhardtii, a tree that is neither white nor a beech! This is a large tree that grows to 40 metres in height and is prized for its timber. One of her concerns is to restore these ancient trees that are available at CCRRS. It was one of the first subtropical rainforest tree species to be logged out in extinction.
The book is brilliantly written. It is partly a travelogue, partly history and a memoir all bundled into one. I loved reading the book even though I found it difficult to read it at once. The book reminds most of us of our own desire to escape from the urban maddening civilisation into the wilderness to do something useful.