We walked along the path, over the rocks and past the dried up billabong and there it was. Standing impassively.

For centuries the floodwaters came to refresh the roots and revitalize it’s entire being.

Why did it die? Was it old age?

Was it a summer that lasted just too long?

Was it a frenzied attack by insects boring through its very core?

It is still strong and resolute, determined to stay no matter what happens.

Its surface is wrinkled with a thousand past times embedded in every one. I want to know its secrets, I wish there was a way to tap into its inner being.

People must have passed it before a thousand times. First, it would have been the local people who came, the Aboriginal people, moving about the land. People who’s spirits inhabited the rocks, the plants, the waters, the underground caves and even the skies. People whose history goes back almost as far as the trees’ does.

The next groups of people to pass the tree would have been “Explorers” then “Landowners”. What impertinence! How can they claim as their own, something that existed without them for millions of years? But while looking for stock a Landowner rediscovered an entrance to a Lava Tube so now it’s the tourists who walk past the tree. Are they sympathetic to the soul of the land? They only hear the Guides’ version of history based on hypothesis and scientific reasoning, not the unbroken history of generation after generation linked by venerated Story Tellers. I hope other visitors can appreciate the ambience and inhale the essence of this aged place.

Even though we can’t know what’s happened to the tree in its lifetime or since its death, its ancestors must have felt the ground tremble as the molten lava spewed underground burning tunnels as it passed, so fast that it left the empty tubes behind as the lava set. Did the tree’s steadfastness comfort Aboriginal people as the ground shuddered? Did they come after the lava flowed? Was the ground really too brittle for their feet? I don’t believe so. But the tree knows, it was here.

What animals passed the tree? Possibly in ancestral times a Thylacoleo , the marsupial lion, or a Diprotodontid, a sheep-sized browsing marsupial. With the new Millenium came the first Bufo Marinus or Cane Toad. Maybe it walked past this very tree on it’s way to the cool seclusion of the Lava Tubes, showing it as much disregard as the native animals it destroys.

I love this tree.

It’s older than me

Drier than me

More knarled than me

More wrinkled than me

But it’s magnificent.

Next time I want to be a tree.

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