All good things come to an end and after 5 welcome wet years & a cracking 2025 grain crop, the seasons are turning. The predictions of a wet harvest proved unreliable and the Nth West NSW brought in a massive undamaged grain crop which helped offset the deficiencies in the south of the state. Swings & roundabouts as they say but all the winter rain has led extreme fire risk as the country dries out. We have had 2 stubble fires about a week apart burning about 400 ha (almost 1000 acres) in total. The first was caused by lightning hitting the wheat stubble less than a k from the house. The 2nd fire was ignited by a SxS mustering in a farming paddock with the stubble accumulating around the exhaust. Both fires were extinguished with the grader/ loader/ farm water trucks & the local firies from Walgett, Collarenebri & the Cumborah RFS
Ive been here nearly 40 years and this is the 1st time Ive seen a bush fire. Ive seen small burnt patches in paddocks where presumably the rain has put the lightning ignited fire out. By the time I had moved the livestock from the burning paddock & the next paddock across the road the wind had changed direction & the fire headed south. The firies were fantastic – coordinated by Walgett local Barry Henry who came out twice more in the next couple of days as the wind kept fanning the coals inside burnt trees & reigniting the dead rape/ turnip veg near the road. We also had our exceptional crew of backpackers & regular Gingie employees who put themselves at some risk to stop the fire spreading. The songline trees along the road were collateral damage as the stubble fire spread into the uncultivated strip. Ive made a collage below of the scars/ mods lost but the majority were on dead trees that were ringbarked or poisoned years ago. Surprisingly some in the middle of the fireground survived. Dead eucalypts cannot heal so there is little regrowth reducing the scar size & changing its shape. This is what made them good reference points – dead trees don’t lie.
Its not only fire that takes out our CMTs, guests like this wilga in old box TinT below appears to have died of old age. Guests don’t have to be big to be old because of their unorthodox living conditions. Bumble guests are also attacked by some furry fungal trunk coating that may be caused by the Caper butterfly? Ive put some old insecticide on the one below but haven’t been back to see if it has survived. The bumble TinT that Allan Tighe saved by cutting a fallen neighbour off with a chainsaw, has also been badly damaged. Still given the extreme fire risk early December we were lucky to lose so few few CMTs. The backpackers wanted to know if there was a worse fire category than “catastrophic” & I said ‘yes, its called “YOU ARE ALL GOING TO DIE” A fire along the paleo channel would be disastrous for these lovely but surprisingly unloved heritage trees. The last pic is of the wild limes now in season. Gayn.gayn is the name here for the Native lime which are delicious squeezed into your water bottle. Loaded with Vit. C & similar to cumquats in taste.
The window of opportunity for seeing the amazing range of TinTs here is closing. This time next year I wont be here and while the CMTs & the local Aboriginal community will be, there will be no one to bring the 2 together. After 10 years hosting the scartree website & 5 years of showing the TinTs on it, Ive come to realise that the 99.9% of Australians are not interested in these centuries’ old native trees or the culture displayed on them. Despite having the best of the best in the CMT field visit – Gammage, Pascoe, Hopper – this didnt motivate academics or Indigenous tourists. Even having published or being involved with 4 journal articles/ papers on the TinTs in the last few years, nobody who actually read them cared enough to want to see any. The most advanced arboreal achievements of anybody’s ancestors anywhere in the world are ignored in favour of repetitive ‘welcome to country’ monologues. Face paint & feathers are not a reflection of traditional Kamilaroi expertise. Smoking ceremonies are more of a mockery now – even Allo had to resort to adding diesel to get his leaves to smoulder. Local cultural “custodians” should speak now or forever hold your peace. Hopefully you will come up before the Christian god not Biame, who is rumoured to be less forgiving.
For the fence sitters, hand wringers & culturally over-cautious you need to realise that there is no historical knowledge/ traditional information about TinTs – except that provided by Allan Tighe. If other Aboriginal Elders remembered being told about TinTs he would have found out. If there were TinTs at the Narran lakes or any other land controlled/ owned by the local land councils or visited by Dharriwaa around here, he would have found them. The trauma inflicted by colonisation and homeland dispossession meant people were focused on survival not ritual. Keeping body & soul together outweighed ceremony in the near total societal collapse. Our colonial history puts the trauma of the Bondi bloodbath this week into perspective. Rather than a simple ‘Christmas’ message, I’ll leave you with this quote from a story online at “Mamamia” by Catie Powers.
Lying in a pile of bodies Jessica Chapnik Kahn says this to her daughter who she is shielding underneath – “Shemi, listen to mama. Go into your heart. It’s where the love is. Go there, my love.'”
