The casuarina forest
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 2: Dreams of Land
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Matthew Condon
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Matthew Condon's biography and other articles by this writer
The she-oak (casuarina) is a melancholy kind of tree, with feathery leaves that hang in fringes from short stems... [it] whispers and murmurs in the wind, making noises that early settlers compared
to a harp.
At the very northern tip of the 36-kilometre strip of beach and headland and high-rise buildings that constitute the Gold Coast, where the sand ends abruptly at the boulders of the sea wall, is a casuarina forest.
I found it by chance. I had returned to live on the Gold Coast after 25 years. I settled at Main Beach. I no longer recognised it.
When I was young, it was nothing more than an afterthought of a suburb in the shadows of Surfers Paradise. Hardly a suburb. Just the final outpost before the wilds of The Spit. It was the coast's last patrolled beach, full of low-level fibro and brick houses, populated by surfies and nurses. There were drugs there, so they said. And an abandoned hospital, with nothing between it and the dunes, where they say the deranged once stayed to get better.
A friend of mine lived in the hospital. He and his mother were the caretakers. I remember walking through its cold and empty corridors and being transfixed by the operating room, which still had its central table and empty shelves on the walls. From the dark room we could hear the surf.
Now, it is a place strafed with shadows from towering apartment buildings. The shadows move in unison throughout the day, like the shadows of giant sundials.
One morning in the late spring of my return I noticed a strange archway of casuarina trees at the northern end of the Main Beach surfside car park. Beyond the music of the poker machines drifting out of the wide windows of the surf club, and the lifesaver's tower, and the old bathing pavilion, the gnarled trunks of the casuarinas on either side of the archway were tall and interlocked.
I stood beneath the archway and when the wind came in off the ocean the trunks grated against each other and creaked and groaned like a ship's rigging, and the thin pine needle-like leaves gave up their sad music. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I had heard this music before.
For almost two months, trying to settle into a place where I now felt a stranger, I thought about the entrance to the forest. Day after day the sundial shadows continued to shift around me. A few hundred metres away, beyond the trendy strip of bars and restaurants in Tedder Avenue, and the million-dollar villas that looked like they belonged in Malaga or Malibu or Miami, great tides were also shifting and moving the sandbanks of the Broadwater.
And it was how I felt. That my past had shifted. That everything I had known about this place had at some point moved from beneath me, like the sandbanks.
I understood very little of this landscape I had once called home. Until I entered the casuarina forest.
Though urban growth has destroyed huge numbers of she-oak, they are still relatively common around the ... southern Queensland coast.
IN THE 1960s YOU KNEW YOU HAD ARRIVED at the Gold Coast when the small clutch of palm trees came into view.
We lived in Brisbane and as children must have seen palm trees before, scattered around our subtropical city. They may have been eclipsed by the great crowns of Moreton Bay figs and jacarandas, and the poincianas with their canoe-like pods. But there were small and lonely stands of them across the city, the seeds of which had somehow arrived on the winds that coursed across town and were dropped in unexpected places – suburban backyards, the edges of creeks, beside the greening statues of lions and Queen Victoria right in the middle of the CBD.
The palms at the coast, however, exactly where the highway struck a T-junction at the Broadwater, bent like brackets, were ragged of head, and meant the start of summer holidays. When you saw the palm trees you wound down the windows of the old Holden station wagon and gave a small cheer. The cabin of the car would become infused with the smell of salt and mud from the mangrove islands. It was a world away from Brisbane.
We camped. Straight after Christmas through to the end of January. At Tallebudgera. North, over the Burleigh Bluff, my grandparents camped too, in their caravan in Rudd Park. They had the same small concrete apron every year for decades, just as they had the same house in Brisbane all their lives. It was the way it was. And we, beyond the heavily wooded whale-like bulk of Burleigh reserve, camped in a tent alongside other tents in microcosmic but identical cartographic positioning from them as we did in Brisbane. Families shifted together even on holiday, like clusters of stars, fixed forever in the universe.
In the cool of the evenings we would all walk through the dunes at Burleigh Heads beach, on the way back from the cinema or the lucky wheel on the driveway of the ambulance station, and my grandfather would talk about how the light-horsemen trained here for the war. For years, on those walks, I always thought I could see the horses in the distant darkness, a part of the dark, their manes finer than the dune grass.
On those vacations the days were long and just like at home they developed their own routine. They might begin with the trip to the Miami Ice Factory, where you would wait excitedly at the bottom of a wooden ramp for the large blocks of ice to come splintering down to you. The blocks would sit on the back seat of the station wagon, wrapped in old hessian.
Later, in the heat, you'd find a spot under the feathery casuarinas where you would drift in and out of sleep, and the shade of the needle-like leaves of the trees was always pale grey and the perimeters of the shade was so fine it was itself like the edge of sleep. Under the towel you'd feel the tiny casuarina cones pressing gently into your skin.
When a breeze pushed up the mouth of Tallebudgera Creek and flumed over the bridge and strafed the back of the caravan park where you swam and slept all day, the trees would talk to you.
This was the '60s. In between the glamour spots of Surfers Paradise and Coolangatta, thousands of ordinary families lived for a single month with nothing but sheets of canvas between them and the world. While the young and well-to-do had supper in exotic dance clubs or drank cocktails around the pool at the Pink Poodle Motel or the Sands, we huddled in the dull yellow lights of lanterns, and great plumes of kerosene smoke lifted into the air.