Straddling the border of New South Wales and Victoria, the Barmah–Millewa Forest is home to Australia’s largest stand of River Red Gum and forms one of two regions that CSIRO ecologist Matthew J. Colloff examines in Flooded Forest and Desert Creek, his engaging study of Eucalyptus camaldulensis. The other is Alice Springs, where the River Red Gum lines the ephemeral creeks of the continent’s red centre. As these two extremes suggest, the River Red Gum is the most widespread species of eucalypt in Australia. For Colloff, this nation-wide distribution makes the tree the ‘quintessential Australian’, a tree for all seasons and for all Australians that ‘connects across time, place and people, land and water, desert and forest’. Drawing on a life’s work, Colloff shares the little-known cultures and ecologies of the River Red Gum, and how these have changed over time.

Colloff traces the evolution of the River Red Gum and its ecologies into deep time, as he explores how the climatic fluctuations of the past hundred thousand years have shaped the Australian continent. Just as this eucalypt has evolved over time, so too have the ways in which Western science has understood the species. Misunderstood might be the better word: in 2008, CSIRO ecologists found a specimen from the nineteenth-century garden of a Neapolitan nobleman, long considered the archetypal E. camaldulensis, to be anything but. As this case of mistaken identity suggests, the diversity of this widespread species has made its analysis a tricky and ongoing task for botanists.

Cormorants and darters in River Red Gums, War Plain, Barmah Forest, December 2011. Vertical series of cormorant nests in young trees. (photograph by Keith Ward).

‘For Colloff, this nation-wide distribution makes the tree the ‘‘quintessential Australian’’, a tree for all seasons and for all Australians that ‘‘connects across time, place and people, land and water, desert and forest’’’

What is similarly unclear, according to Colloff, is the extent to which Aboriginal burning practices shaped vegetation patterns across the continent. Although the concept of ‘fire-stick farming’ has been generally accepted and widely acknowledged for some time, Colloff argues that historian Bill Gammage overstates the historical evidence of burning in riverine floodplain forests in his award-winning book The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (2011). The archaeological evidence suggests that sites such as Willandra Lakes and Cuddie Springs were clearly important to Aboriginal peoples, but as an ecologist, Colloff is ‘wary of generalisations across landscapes, across vegetation communities and across time’.

An Aboriginal marker tree at Chowilla Floodplain, South Australia, November 2011. The flexible branches of the young tree were deliberately intertwined so they would grow in a distorted, readily noticeable fashion. Such trees were signposts, signifying tribal boundaries, waterholes, or other important landscape features (photograph by Gavin Rees)

Alert to the political implications of his position, Colloff encourages the consideration of a broader range of natural and human interventions in the hydrologies and ecologies of the River Red Gum to better understand environmental change over time. For Colloff, it is water and floods, not fire, that ‘drive the forests’. From the nineteenth century, hooves too have left their mark. The introduction of cattle, camels, sheep, and other ungulates have transformed the vegetation and soils of the Barmah and the Alice. The hunger for timber in colonial Victoria drew the River Red Gum itself into the settler economy as it proved well suited to construction and the development of rail infrastructure both in Australia and abroad. But with the decline of timber harvesting, it is water, or a lack thereof, that will shape the ecologies of the River Red Gum in the future.

The River Red Gum is no stranger to the boom and bust cycles of droughts and floods in the desert and the floodplain. Since the nineteenth century, however, the waterways of these regions have been subjected to engineering efforts to control and divert the flow of waterways for navigation, irrigation, flood control, and mining, which have had significant and lasting environmental consequences. As literary, artistic and popular representations of the River Red Gum came under the influence of the post-war conservation movement, the wider impacts of these hydrological interventions became the subject of growing public concern. Such concerns manifested in the listing of the Barmah Forest as an internationally significant Ramsar wetland in the early 1980s, and more recently, in the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, which seeks to ensure sufficient flows for the people and the ecologies that depend on the rivers.

In contrast to the exploitative relationships that settler Australians shared with the River Red Gum, this tree has long been an important symbol of water and life to Aboriginal peoples from the desert to the floodplain. In the red centre, for instance, certain trees are sacred and are central to Dreamtime stories of creation. For the Yorta Yorta people of the Murray-Goulburn region, the creation of the River Murray and the River Red Gum by their ancestors links them ‘inseparably and eternally to Country’. For many settler Australians, the recognition and appreciation of such an ‘intergenerational legacy aspect of landscape, characterised by shared respect and tradition’ has been slow to develop into an ethos of conservation and heritage that will protect the River Red Gum for the future.

Colloff’s study joins CSIRO Publishing’s growing stable of Australian environmental histories that synthesise and share interdisciplinary understandings of a continent of extremes. These handsomely designed publications combine photographs, illustrations, and maps to support narratives of how indigenous and settler Australians have understood, shaped, and been shaped by this ancient land over tens of thousands of years. Combining historical and scientific sources, Colloff traverses not only time and space, but also the two cultures, the humanities and the sciences, to compose a detailed environmental history that demands from its reader a greater engagement with the ecological challenges of the twenty-first century.

Rather than a declensionist narrative of doom and gloom, however, Colloff’s stories of the ongoing cultural and ecological significance of the River Red Gum offer hope in the face of great uncertainties. As such, this is a study of importance not just to environmental managers, ecologists, policy-makers, conservationists, or historians, but to all Australians who are connected or who are seeking a connection to a particular landscape – who ‘always have a River Red Gum somewhere’. As we come to terms with the dramatic environmental changes of the past, present, and future, what better time for stories about a tree that ‘stands for life, endurance and persistence through harsh times’.