Just One Tree
What difference can it make?
The bulldozers are so close that the whole house shakes. They are higher up the slope, so the rumble of engines sounds like the rescue helicopter on its all too frequent flights between the mountains and Cairns Base Hospital. The noise reverberates across the valley.
Work has been going on for weeks. The paddock is being dissected into house plots and the bulldozers have been scraping out an access road. There isn’t much vegetation — mostly pasture and weeds — but growing in the middle is a tall and perfect tree that once gave shade to cattle and sheltered them from the rain.
It is a survivor from a time long before the ground around its base was cleared and turned to grass. Its long branches end in tightly bunched leaves. The Pied Currawongs gather in it, their songs rolling from its height. Rainbow Lorikeets settle there too, joined by the Scaly-breasted Lorikeets. In cooler weather, Australian King-parrots visit. When I look across the corrugated iron roofs to the building site, a bird is always perched in the tree’s branches.
But now the foliage has changed colour. At first, I thought it was a burst of new growth, but the colour is not the copper of young leaves. It is the hard and empty brown of decay. The tree that is so welcoming to the birds is now itself unwelcome. It is inconvenient…
