Some years ago, two historians found themselves transfixed by the nacreous cement that binds the sandstone blocks of the nineteenth-century building in which they teach. Faced with such a startling confrontation of two world systems, they began to explore the cultural meaning of natural elements within the colonial time of the Sydney Basin. Their journey took them far from what they knew, and they became aware of their own trespass.

Casuarina glauca/guman in Farm Cove

There is a clump of pre-1788 Casuarina glauca in the lower part of the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney’s Farm Cove. The trees mark the cove’s original high tide line, which had been obscured by the reclaiming of land from the harbour to create the Garden one hundred and seventy years ago. Further up the bank are more C. glauca, likewise suckered from rootstock that was there before the Garden. The trees indicate that the ecology of the cove remains partly intact, albeit under the surface of its present-day appearance.

C. glauca is called guman in the Sydney Language.¹ It is a particularly storied plant within Country, a cypher of meaning that flows from one to another place and thing.² The Sydney language, of which only a fragment remains, is agglutinative, and the root of guman - gu -  may denote care: gurung, for example, means child, while guman also means grandfather. The Dreamtime stories of Sydney are largely unrecorded, but for the D’harawal, whose coastal lands overlapped Sydney to the south, Casuarina were once old women who made twine.³ As the women talked, children would gather to listen, and ‘pieces of the fibers fell to the ground, forming a soft mat on which the children loved to sit ... mothers would instruct their children if they became lost they were to listen to the chatter of the old women and go to them for safety’. When the women died the Creator Spirit turned them into trees, which had ‘leaves like no other, leaves that looked like the pieces of string the women dropped when they work’. Ever since, ‘mothers teach their children that if they should become lost they should seek out the {Casuarina} and remain there until they are found’.⁴ For this reason, Casuarina are known to people of the Sydney basin as the nursery trees.⁵

Casuarina glauca was among the first plants encountered by colonists when they arrived in Sydney Harbour. It was named straightaway, first as fir, then as pine, and eventually as oak, variously prefixed as she, black, or swamp.⁶ In 1826 the Austrian botanist Franz Sieber identified the tree as a species within the Casuarina genus, which Carl Linnaeus had established in 1760, thinking its weeping habit resembled the feathers of the Cassowary bird (from the Malay, kasuari), native to northern Australia and south-east Asia. Sieber described the needles as branches and the small scales as leaves, while bestowing the species name glauca for the grey colour of its bark.⁷

C. glauca is the presiding tree of an ecological community, called Swamp Oak Forest, that flourished within harbour inlets, including Farm Cove.⁸ Salt-tolerant, its roots form a wall between land and water, securing the shore at the edge of the inter-tidal zone. The landside of this community would have consisted of reeds, vines, and xanthorrhoea, with larger trees such as Forest Red Gum (Eucalyptus tereticornis) and Sydney Red Gum (Angophera costata), poking above the wispy canopy. These trees eventually dominated as the Swamp Oak Forest transitioned to Dry Sclerophyll Forest on the substrate of sandstone surrounding the Cove. C. glauca supported an array of fauna: bats and possum were housed in their branches; red-browed finch ate their seeds; fairy wren and other small birds nested in the protection of spiky grasses that grew underneath. Below ground, C. glauca roots enriched the soil via symbiosis with the nitrogen-fixing bacteria, Frankia. By stabilising the soil and improving its fertility, C. glauca preserved the land, allowing more delicate plants to regrow after fire, flood and storm.⁹

However, the colonists immediately stripped the trees from the shores. On 31 January 1788, saws, splitting wedges, forge and bellows were taken from the ships: according to eyewitnesses, it felt like the new community began in the common purpose of tree clearing. Three months later there were fourteen saw pits at work in the area; within a year the valleys were open and demarcated by fences.¹⁰ Colonists intended Farm Cove to be the communal farm. But the crops failed in the acidic soil and the livestock that had accompanied the fleet floundered; only cattle did well, although their hooves trampled the penned earth. Farming was relocated to Rose Hill and David Collins in 1790 compared the desperation of Sydney convicts to the peaceable nature of those to the west, where there were ‘vegetables in abundance’.¹¹ Farm Cove languished until 1816, when it was turned into a botanic garden, bordering on the similarly cleared Governor’s domain. Without Casuarina, the shoreline eroded and the soil salinized.¹² Denaturing was completed with the construction (1841-71) of a wall at the edge of low tide.¹³ The dynamic inter-tidal zone was replaced by a solid line, and the mud and rocks left exposed were filled-in to make a garden. It is here that we see the C. glauca trees referred to at the start, stray markers of the vanished shore.

C. glauca were cleared, but they did not go to waste. Apart from building frames, it was discovered that the timber was cleavable and therefore suited for roof shingles.¹⁴ This immediately accelerated the felling of the tree: during the governorship of Philip King (1800-06) some 4000 shingles per week were produced for government buildings.¹⁵ Over the next fifty years, most of Sydney was roofed with Casuarina shingles, and most of the main harbour was stripped of the tree. Slate would later eclipse timber as the preferred roofing material, but a photograph from the 1870s shows a small shingling party still at work in Middle Harbour.¹⁶ Beside the shingle bundles the distinctive suckers of C. glauca can be seen, springing from roots at the water’s edge.

The empty valley of Farm Cove was a distinctive feature of the early colony, contrasting with the ever-increasing urban development of Sydney Cove and Wooloomooloo on either side. Charles von Hügel recorded the view in 1834 from the deck of a ship anchored beside Pinchgut Island: ‘you look across the Domain garden and the botanical garden, which … is absolutely treeless’.¹⁷ Yet roots remained and continued to sucker. In a drawing of 1830, Charles Rodius depicted several juvenile C. glauca on the ridge at the top of the valley.¹⁸ Twelve years later these same trees, now around five meters tall, clinched the choice of the location for Sydney’s first bronze monument, dedicated to Governor Richard Bourke.¹⁹ The government architect, Mortimer Lewis, wanted a site that would overlook the harbour, but had feared the statue could drown in open space.²⁰ The stranded stand of C. glauca was exactly what Lewis needed, providing a backdrop to the pedestalled figure and allowing it to be properly apprehended from the water.

Vice versa, the entire ensemble became an agent for the perception of the harbour. Conrad Martens portrayed the monument in such manner a few weeks after it was unveiled.²¹ Bourke appears from behind, gazing into the distance and the future, as if staking a claim for the triumph of colonial England. Beside him, the stand of C. glauca acts like a chorus on the stage. Noteworthy is the exact alignment of the plinth capital with the escarpment of middle head, making Bourke occupy the yellow dawn of the sky.²² The same position is assumed by the canopy of the trees, a promise of the culture to come. By dint of association with a glorious ruler, C. glauca had become side actors in the theatre of colonial space and the imposition of civilisational time.

The statue and C. glauca stood together for eighty years. They even managed to survive the 1882 fire that consumed the enormous Garden Palace, built only a few years before. When the burnt remains of the Botanic Gardens were later reconstructed as an ornamented parkland, Bourke and C. glauca were tasked with heralding its gated entrance on Bent Street. Eventually the trees were removed for the sake of the Shakespeare Memorial (Bertrand MacKennall, 1923), with Bourke pushed back to the façade of the State Library.

Returning to where we began in the Lower Garden, the group of C. glauca that sprang between the paving stones laid down over what was once the high tide line of the harbour declare the physical and cultural transformation of place, from ecological community to specimen garden, from Eora country to English colonial domain.

 Mulubinba in a Collector’s Chest

About 170 kilometers north of Farm Cove, abundant stands of Toona ciliata (Australian Red Cedar) once graced the lush forests, river flats, and gullies of Mulubinba/Newcastle.²³ Located where the Hunter River estuary meets the sandstone cliffs—layered with tuff and coal and shaped by the surging Pacific Ocean—the undulating terrain of Mulubinba is Awabakal Country. For millennia, Awabakal have lived alongside these giant ancestors they call Kolai, the towering crowns and buttressed trunks of which provided shelter and succour for a host of birds, marsupials, insects, and plants. Prized for its soft texture and rich colour, T. ciliata/Kolai was logged to the point of commercial extinction by the Newcastle timber industry. Such resource extraction, the bedrock of colonial enterprise, not only altered the landscape, but also inflicted acute stress on Awabakal People and their custodianship of this place.²⁴

Crafted from T. ciliata/Kolai and locally harvested Dysoxylum fraserianum (Australian Rosewood), a compact collector’s chest (c. 1818) in the collection of the State Library of New South Wales offers a material remnant of Mulubinba from this inaugural juncture of Country and colonisation.²⁵ Commissioned by Captain James Wallis, Commandant of the Newcastle penal settlement from 1816 to 1818, as a gift of patronage for Lachlan Macquarie, the fifth Governor of NSW, the chest showcases the natural wealth of the colony, its burgeoning convict-driven industry, and its nascent artistic achievements. The lids of its cedar-veneered, rosewood carcass—fashioned by Patrick Riley and William Temple, cabinetmakers  incarcerated in Newcastle under Wallis’ command—open to reveal a kaleidoscopic array of preserved birds, insects, and shells endemic to the Sydney Basin, likely procured with the aid of the Awabakal community.²⁶ Arranged in a series of glazed drawers and removable trays, this natural history collection is contextualised through a suite of oil paintings on the interior paneling by convict artist Joseph Lycett: a bounty of glistening, freshly-caught fish lie toppled on the sand; a pair of Eastern Grey Kangaroos/Moane stand poised, ears cocked; and an aviary of coastal birds dive, paddle, and preen in identifiable landscapes around Newcastle and Lake Macquarie.

Lycett’s paintings operate in tandem with the specimens. Through object-image dialogues generated by the chest’s tactile interface, activated by the manipulation of drawers and panels, they conjoin to form an environmental assemblage of the colony. This constructed vision, however, is beholden to the enclosing principles of the box and the frame. Much is excluded or obfuscated. Through this compartmental aesthetic, the chest replicates in miniature the display tactics of nineteenth-century museums and exhibitions that distilled colonies into discrete object narratives.  

Examining the chest from an ecocritical perspective offers a way to unbox its contents, to contest its compartmental framework.²⁷ As Shane Frost—an Awabakal Elder whose ancestor Burigon was an important interlocuter for Wallis—has demonstrated, the chest is not only a receptacle of Awabakal Knowledge, but also a portal to Mulubinba.²⁸ Tracing the extraction and fabrication of materials employed in its creation reveals the embedded cultural and natural ecologies that traverse its compartments. A brief analysis of the waterbirds in the chest illuminates this approach. If we look beyond the frame, these birds continue to nest in their homeland.

Given the extensive wetlands in and around Mulubinba, several waterfowl are represented, including a pair of Cygnus atratus (Black Swans), a Tadorna tadornoides (Australian Shelduck) and a Nettapus coromandelianus (Cotton Pygmy-Goose), the latter in both preserved and painted form. A small surface-feeding duck, the male of which has plumage distinguished by a glossy greenish-black crown and wings streaked with white, the Cotton Pygmy-Goose favours shallow, freshwater habitats filled with Kong-ka/reeds, waterlilies and other floating and submerged aquatic plants, which offer it food and protection.²⁹ Roosting and breeding in the cavities of trees located close to the water or in the dense vegetation near the margins, it builds its Kun-ta/nest from such plant material, lining it with down feathers from its own body to insulate its eggs.³⁰ Although once found from north Queensland to the Hunter River, the Cotton Pygmy-Goose is now an endangered species in NSW; its habitat is threatened through drainage for farmland or urban development and through the diversion of water to irrigate inland crops, which have diminished breeding sites.³¹

The lower tray of ornithological specimens inside the main carcass of the chest features a taxidermied Cotton Pygmy-Goose, preserved through the application of mercuric chloride to its epidermidis.³² Along with this toxic compound, an ingredient in colonial medicine chests, the resinous, insect-repellant rosewood tray housing the specimens impeded decay, contributing to their astonishing vibrancy. Nestled beak to tail alongside tightly packed rows of other specimens—with legs bound and numerically labelled to correspond to a list of identification—the Cotton Pygmy-Goose, number 39, conveys the inert materiality of the bird, but provides little insight into its behaviour or habitat.

It is, however, revivified through paint in one of the chest’s landscape panels. Located to the right of the ornithological trays when the lids of the chest are open, this panel depicts a male duck in the Hunter River ecosystem in which it once lived. Wings spread, it hovers above the surface of a body of water near a reeded bank in the shadows of what is possibly an iron bark tree—distinguished by its coarse, brown-black protruding bark—while an Australian Shelduck paddles nearby.³³ For artist Danie Mellor, whose forebears hail from the Mamu, Ngagen and Ngajan peoples of Queensland’s Atherton Tablelands, this landscape and Lycett’s other painted panels trump the chest’s zoological remains through their vitality,

They image an experience, and privilege an artist’s human encounter in life with country, as opposed to our encounter as contemporary viewers through other parts of the chest with death and the feather.³⁴

An examination of colonial artworks and manuscripts contemporary to the chest further unveils this ‘human encounter with life in country.’ Joseph Lycett’s watercolours of Mulubinba confirm the significance of waterfowl as a regular food source for Awabakal communities who kept tracks to the water open and scrub cleared on the banks to access reeds where the birds nested.³⁵ In a hunting scene in the collection of the National Library of Australia (c. 1817), Lycett vividly portrays Awabakal men in what is possibly the Hexham Swamp area of Newcastle, beating, as Frost describes, ‘the reeds with forked sticks to flush out Black Swans’ and ‘pinning their necks in the fork’ to capture them alive.³⁶ Minutely observed by Lycett, these sticks, slightly bent and with protruding twigs, are from robust branches picked up off the ground or broken off from trees in the vicinity like the feathery Karakun (C. glauca) bordering the water in several of the chest’s landscapes.³⁷

Captain Wallis, in his recollections of his time in Newcastle, comments on the graceful and expeditious athleticism of such Awabakal hunters, remarking that ‘Jack {Burigon} dived like a waterfowl’.³⁸ Birds were cooked fresh over an open fire, a process the Commandant witnessed and described, 

Thrown on the fire the feathers were quickly scorched; to rub them off, tear open the body take out the entrails, give it another cast for a few moments… and then devour it, was all quickly performed.³⁹ 

These encounters, latent in the colonial archive, bring to life the cotton pygmy-goose dispossessed from Country through its collection and display in the chest.

Beyond this archival repossession, the waterbird is ensconced in a dialogue with its habitat of origin on a material level. During a restoration of the chest undertaken in the 1990s, ornithologist Bill Middleton observed that the specimens in the smaller bird and shell drawers were cushioned not on a form of cotton wool, as was generally used in collector’s chests from the era, but rather on the greyish-white down feathers of waterbirds, distinguished by their airy, reticulated structure. Middleton also discovered that this down rests upon a layer of grass-like seed heads from the Phragmites australis (Common Reed), a wetlands plant ubiquitous in the Sydney Basin.⁴⁰ Several specimens in the chest are ‘nested’ in down feathers plucked by waterfowl such as the Cotton Pygmy-Goose and Black Swan to regulate the temperature of their eggs.⁴¹ This down intermingles with reeds cut from the waterways on which these birds lived and sheltered. Even the rosewood carcass and cedar veneering of the chest enclosing its specimens evoke the cavities of dead trees along these very lakes and rivers, streams and marshes, where such waterbirds would roost.

An ecological foray into the collector’s chest elides into a form of environmental rehabilitation. As a colonial artefect, the chest maps the topography and mines the resources of Newcastle through its specimens and landscapes for the colonial administration. Its representation of the verdant riverbanks of the Hunter River and its tributaries, its demonstration of the manufacturing potential of Australian cedar and rosewood, and its plethora of avian, insect, and marine life, speak to the largesse of a land primed for cultivation. And yet, it remains a tangible encounter with Mulubinba.