Rebecca Ryall: 30 August - 8 September, 2023

Rebecca Ryall is a PhD student with Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. She lives off-grid in the forest in northern New South Wales on unceded Widjabul/Waiabul lands. Ryall used her residency to work on a journal article drawing on Val's work.

Rebecca Ryall during her residency (Clancy Walker, 2023)

The different ecotones are evident on the drive up the mountain – dry sclerophyll, wet sclerophyll and remnant rainforest. I’ve never seen such fat tree ferns! And the plumwoods themselves, hemi epiphytes like the strangler figs back home, germinate their seeds on the trunk of a tree fern, embracing, holding, smothering, until at some point, the host dies.  These plumwoods stretch tall and, with certain age, throw off their taller growth and continue to grow from below, so they are aged by their girth at the ground.  Always, though, the evidence of their need – the tree fern trunk clasped tightly, or an absence in the aged trunk.

As I approach the 8th anniversary of the death of my first born, I acknowledge the agency of grief, still at work in my body, my mind and psyche. Is it Country drawing this expression from me? Where does the grief reside, when not flowing through me? Eight years on and I still mourn for her painful passage, from tall, beautiful, haughty adolescent to pain wracked, steroid-swollen, unrecognisable young woman. Still, I mourn for my own painful passage, the brutality of watching her cut, poisoned, diminished; the terrible knowing of the inevitable conclusion of this process. Maybe this is the connection, with Country. Maybe this is why these times of forest immersion draw the grief from me. Perhaps, here is that cutting, poisoning, diminishing, made manifest, the body of Country analogous to the body of my beloved child. Can I ever be whole, in this context?

I come to the forest, first and foremost, as a human being, seeking comfort and understanding. Having suffered significant and traumatic losses in my not-so-distant past, the forest presents as a therapy room, where I can work through my grief and gain a sense of perspective. As a scholar, the forest provides a classroom, its many place-beings the teachers. Through them, I come to an embodied understanding of entanglement, a realisation that all is interconnected, that my experiences cannot be understood or integrated as discrete or separate. Surveying a large and established tree, fallen to the forest floor, I wonder, did the tree mourn its passing? Do tree’s neighbours grieve, or the myriad epiphytes who called tree home? It is clear that tree, lying prone now in the leaf litter, possesses continued vitality.  Where the trunk reclines, the processes of decomposition – themselves integral to the life of this place – deconstruct what was ‘tree’ and from this construct ‘soil’, the medium for further growth and nourishment. The fallen members, here at Plumwood Mountain, obscured by a carpet of relentless growth, are barely visible beyond a hump on the ground.  They are being slowly consumed, subsumed, incorporated into the living processes of the complex ecology of this place, from which they cannot be separated. So, can tree be really said to be separate from soil? And what of this designation as ‘dead’?  And how do these questions relate to me, a human?

There’s something here to be learned, about resilience, recovery. This landscape has been scoured by fire, the view now dominated by blackened trees, many dead and yet still reaching, many more sprouting their new growth, weird and misshapen, but growing, nonetheless.  And the birds are not bothered by the black, by the strangeness; regardless, they sing and play, gorging on the midges that hover in clouds, their colours vibrant against the blacks and greys. The 2019 fires which destroyed homes and habitat, eating through the old growth forests, reveal themselves in a different way. Gazing out, through the dead and recovering trees, the view extending all the way to the coast, listening to and watching the birds, I contemplate the destruction. Framed through the eyes of humans who lost their homes and those who cared for the endangered wildlife, the fires were indeed a catastrophe. Despite the visible scars of that catastrophe, life here goes on. The waratahs are blooming, their fleshy bulbs testament to the resilience of this Country in the face of human induced destruction. Thanks to Val and her collaborators – in life and in death – this little patch is punctuated with the vibrancy of the waratahs, daffodils, hydrangeas. The early post-fire colonisers - chickweed and several species of native geranium - creep and climb, forming a spongy carpet underfoot, a soft pillow for the head, softening the sharp contours and obscuring the lay of the land, such that a foot, placed on seemingly solid ground may sink several inches. Fire scarred trees standing ten, or twenty metres high, flex and pose, cracks appearing in the black bark, through which their pale muscularity is glimpsed, Incredible Hulk-like. And those cut down for safety’s sake sprout modest skirts of new growth. The prone trunk of an old tree fern provides shade for the copperhead, with whom I shared the morning sun.

Today, the breeze arrives from the south-east, and last night’s fire smolders, wisps of smoke lazily drifting with the wind. I contemplate what the mountain seems to tell me. Recovery looks how recovery looks and beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder. Nothing ever stays the same, but growth is an imperative. New shoots take one in a direction not possible before the destruction and those friends whose love is true will continue to visit, delighting in the possibilities offered by these new conditions. Despite the scars, the deaths and losses, life’s potential remains, and a new season brings riotous and vibrant bloomings. Essential adaptation softens one, cushioning the hard and sharp ruins. Life continues, unabated, an obligation to interact.

Rebecca picking waratahs from Val's garden (Clancy Walker, 2023)

Rebecca with waratahs (Clancy Walker, 2023)