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Ive been thinking a lot about these cohabitating trees lately and how they have managed to avoid detection for so long. People want proof to accept anything this outrageous but because of the nature of TinTs, proof is impossible. The host trees are almost always eucalypts and hollow so there is no way to age […]
Im reading an intriguing novel by Richard Powers called “The Overstory” about remnant old growth forest in the US & the people involved in trying to save it. Im only halfway through but have come across some fascinating research into how trees communicate both above & below ground. Although the tree species are different over […]
Some trees will, some trees won’t. Some trees need a lot of water and some trees don’t ….
I had a very interesting email from my friend & rangeland ecologist, Jen Silcock last week. Jen found these black wattle TinTs on the Dunkeld Golf Course south of Mitchell on the Maranoa in southern Qld. She writes “Both guests were Acacia salicina, both really large (one about 30cm diameter, the other much bigger but […]
The Gomeroi altered trees here in ways that are hard to understand now. They seemed to like circles & curves but I don’t think that was just for the aesthetic/ ornamental appearance of the trees. We know Aboriginal people navigated by the stars at night but how did they find their way by day? Im […]
Just because Aborigines used stone tools & weapons does not make them ‘stone age’ people. Just as hunter gatherers aren’t ‘cavemen’. This ongoing debate about whether pre 1788 Australians were nomadic or settled misses the point. Some people may have lived in villages and ‘farmed’ eels or fish & some may have grown native grasses […]
“The perception that Indigenous Australians were primitive hunters and gatherers who lived in a nomadic ‘Stone Age’ culture resonates through most narratives found on Indigenous people in pre-colonial times. This narrative is better placed in the realm of myth; I contest claims that the life expectancy of Indigenous Australians was only forty years in pre-colonial […]
As the lockdown wears on its not all doom & gloom out here. Walgett has made great progress re vaccination rates & the cases you hear on the news are Dubbo people with Walgett addresses. Progress hasn’t been so good with my quest to have the state library of NSW preserve this website in perpetuity […]
Yaama to all visitors to this site – yaama being the Gomeroi word for hello. For those who’ve only just googled their way here in NAIDOC week, I hope you like the thousands of CMTs you can see. Culturally Modified Tree is the term used now for trees whose bark has been removed or trunks/branches […]
An accidental epiphyte is a plant that normally grows terrestrially (in the ground) but that occasionally grows to maturity in a tree crown, usually in terrestrial-like microsites such as the crotches of branches (www.sciencedirect.com) A tree crotch is that small pocket where the branches join the trunk or the base of multi trunked trees […]
The long anticipated visit of Qld ecologists Jen Silcock & Russell Fairfax took place on Easter Monday & they had a week recording TinTs and viewing other CMTs here. I hadn’t met Russell before but was surprised by how much their son Rowan & his vocabulary had grown in 7 months. The mosquitos were […]