Between Here and the Sky- Prologue

            Before the invasion, an incandescent flash split a bough from its trunk and sparked a once-in-a-lifetime bushfire. A relentless easterly fanned the ruin of a hundred thousand hectares of dense wilderness and a dozen families, hundreds of people, fled their camps as all but a blessed few succumbed to the rolling smoke and voracious orange flames. Their remains mingled with those of innumerable kangaroos, wallabies, woylies, quokkas, numbats, possums, tiger snakes, dugites, racehorse goannas and ants to phosphorylate the naked earth, as their spirits took flight to haunt the spaces within the blackened trees. The fire raged up and down bauxite gullies, and out across the limestone plains, before satiating its hunger at the western cliffs of the continent; a greyscale tapestry of ash and coal left exposed in its wake.

            After 2 days the trough that brought the storm finally, permanently, crossed the coast and a meek and cleansing rain replaced the suffocating heat to perforate the eerie silence with the tik-plik-clack of cascading droplets amongst the giant charred trunks. It stirred up the ashes and exhausted the embers with strangled fizzes and pops. The parched earth was slowly saturated and the dry crackling flakes of ash transformed into thick tarry mud, which flowed in great glacial sheets as a single semi-solid gloop down from the slopes and into the creek beds and tributaries reaching like knotted tendrils up the valleys from the sea.

            Amid the suffocating smoke, the furnace of flames and the flood of ash, soot and charcoal, life maintained its precarious hold. Long discarded by its ancestor and buried beneath a generation of compost and encased in its baked clay bunker, life shakes a seed awake; the catalyst the intense heat and sweet blue smoke. It quivered and stirred in its cave to send out a single white taproot in search of nourishment and a foothold in the unstable soil. It lapped at the moisture laid down by the drenching rains, seizing the moment to release its stem, guided against gravity, towards the fingers of light streaking towards it through the skeletal limbs of its family. With an agonising effort it pierced the furnace-baked clay above, breaking the surface of the world and flicking its twinleaves over in perfect symmetry to bask in the warm glow of the morning. It sighed and photosynthesised. It took in great gasps of air from above, and great gulps of water from below, with each cycle growing infinitesimally taller, broader, stronger and greener. It took in the metabolising energy and carbon, and breathed out its oxygen and water, transpiring to the sky. It grew on and on.

            While the slow turnover of life minimised the deposition of compost and the constant winter rains leached the soil of nutrients the sprout continued to expand. Its root shot forever down, scouring the depths for food; a pocket here and there; enough to carry on. Millions of years of constant evolution had hardened the seed against an environment not known for its levity but for its disproportionate fits of anger. Life had evolved to withstand the tortures of this ancient land. The sprouts of thousands of species sprang from the black, baked earth, competing to be the one to survive. In a land so depleted, all nourishment was put into effect. With luck the sprout managed to tap into a decaying root and feed on the sustenance contained within its mouldering husk. It outgrew its neighbours, starving, strangling. Still the taproot descended, discovering deeper veins, widening its sphere of influence, warding off any potential usurpers. Its burgeoning arms towered above its peers. It grew on and on.

Those charred and ravaged by fire began their resurrection. Below the scorched surface, their roots remained unscathed, continuing to pump their lifespring. Budding clusters of green waxy leaves sprung out of nooks in the branches like hair between the trunk and arms. Small plants grasping within their sphere starved, withered and died- decomposing- strengthening those they cowed to.

The archaic pillar beside the sapling turned its face to the sky and expired its last, its trunk boiled right through to its core. The roots of the young tree sucked deep of the memories of its ancestor. It breathed, sighed, transpired, photosynthesised; descending, expanding, ascending. It grew on and on.

Green flashed life. Of grasses, flowers, creepers, shrubs, vines, saplings and rejuvenating giants, the scarred wilderness transformed. Animals returned to pick over the remains of their homes and feast on the life emerging from the soot and ash. The sapling spread its lush canopy over the earth - green hairs on a black skin. The animals rested, mated, nursed and built their homes beneath its boughs, safe within its protective arms. The first shreds of multi-toned blue/grey/pink skin stripped away from its ghostly core, and the first tentative buds ripened into white-tentacled flowers to wave at the insects, birds and possums that spread its pollen across the valley. As they withered, the remnant gumnuts were flung from the boughs by over eager cockatoos and spread beyond the shade. Potential life created. It grew on and on.

The Nyoongar returned lured by the creeks, the wildlife and the wails of the ancestral spirits who flitted amongst the trees in search of a final place to rest. They settled and thrived amongst the undergrowth, foraging and hunting and piecing together the fragments of their culture. They buried their dead beneath the luminescent trunks, which drew the bones of the people into the air to wave at their descendants upon the breath of the wind.

The arms reached across to hold the hands of its neighbours- a single patch within a verdant tapestry draping towards the sea. It provided a home for a dozen generations of cockatoos, a launch pad for possums, a resting place for owls, and a hollowed nook left behind by a branch sheared off by the wind that became a nest and home for generations of splendid blue wrens far above the domain of their predators on the floor below. Within the depths of the earth the feet gripped tight to the dirt between their toes. Water rushed through the veins and capillaries of the wood, feeding, cooling, providing. It grew on and on.

Wadjilla brought his culture to the place. He stalked the base of the tree and pressed his hands to its skin and pondered not on its life, but on his own so small against this giant. Roads cut through the undergrowth between the places he built wherever he grew bored and indolent. He laid waste to vast swathes of bush, where he built his walls to block the forest from entering his soul, roofs to prevent the light from blessing his skin, and floors to forget his connection with the earth. He clear-felled the dense forest to make space for his unsuited crops and alien stock. The jungle lay in ruin as he cleared space over which he could squabble for lordship in the name of profit. Wadjilla stalked its base and pressed his hands to its skin and pondered not on its life but his own so slight.

The tree had grown fat on its heart of dirt. Its canopy overlooked the entire region- from the dunes in the south to the limestone in the west. It grew so deep that its taproot, that first glimmer of life shaken from its pod, protruded through the clay, through the ironstone, through the river underground, through the bones of its very first ancestors to the bedrock over which life itself began. Its canopy was a re-creation of thousands of generation of life, each extracted in the inverse order from the strata below. Their blood passed through the channels within the roots, retracing the stages of life on earth as they ascended, to be thrown forth into the atmosphere and continue into infinity. It grew on and on.