When I was growing up in York, an ancient salmon gum standing across the road from my bedroom window was the most steadfast of my childhood companions. Night and day, rain or shine, there it was: a perpetual, comforting presence. Some decades later, I returned to York to find it gone. But its memory remains.
Of Viki Cramer’s somewhat elegiac account of the life and times of the ubiquitous eucalypt, Inga Simpson writes: “This brilliant ecological history of south-west Western Australia is a testament to the area’s beauty and diversity, as well as a calling to account of the sustained failures in stewardship since white colonisation.”
It is also, however, a deeply personal book. For the “memory” in the title refers not just the trees’: it is Cramer’s. And ours. “I have walked among these trees for so many years now that their life stories are intertwined with my own,” she writes in the introduction.
There are more than 900 species of eucalypts in Australia, including those Cramer considers the best-known: “jarrah, marri, tuart, karri, wandoo, York gum, salmon gum and gimlet.” They are everywhere: in our forests, in our parks, by our roadsides, in our yards. And yet they are imperilled, not least by logging and climate change.
Thus Cramer’s timely book, which examines the past, present and future of this magnificent, essential tree, specifically in our south-west, as well as their enemies and their guardians. And while Cramer arms us with the facts and figures needed to become eucalypt allies, her prose is always light, intimate, even poetic.