Ellie Fisher
They die by inches, giving up the ghost as silently and gently as young nuns in prayer. Sometimes it takes a year, other times one simple, searing week; but the perishing game continues its noiseless rounds.
Humans hurry by for the most part in a frenzy of oppressed fear and stress or facile jubilation. Many of them never notice the subtle signs of browning leaves, or read, in the delicate web of cracks, the narrative of death. How can you miss something you never noticed, or mourn something you never loved? The skulls of banksias have become the new memento mori of our age. It is not the remembrance of your death that it foretells, but that of living creatures far wiser and more ancient than us.
Many of you might never discern the warning signs, or detect them far too late. That’s why I’m telling you my story of these beautifully diverse and delicate beings, in the hope that, by sharing why I love them, you might fall in love with them too.
I vividly remember the pivotal moment that sparked my love of the natural world. It came when I was six. I was living near the Serpentine River wetlands in Mandurah, when one day while walking, I discovered a banksia. It was crouching against the opalescent blue of the sky, its flowers an iridescent crimson enfolded by a golden ruff.
I eventually found out that it was a firewood banksia, Banksia menziesii. It was only years later, passing a small urban park in Albany that used to bear his name, that I understood who Archibald Menzies was, and made a connection between my first banksia identification and the name it was given by the Europeans.
I now live in Albany. The south-west region is the native land of almost nine-tenths of all banksia species. I am surrounded by a familiar extended family of them.
It is only here that the scarlet banksia, Banksia coccinea, is indigenous. It was first gathered for scientific collection by the Scottish botanist Robert Brown at King George Sound in December 1801. This is another serendipitous connection: Brown was invited by Sir Joseph Banks to go on that turn of the century expedition and Banks is, of course, the man after whom banksias are named.
A small huddle of scarlet banksias live on my street. When they bloom during the second half of the year their waxy, bright red loops of flowers catch my eye and add another chime to the yearly rhythm that roots me in this space and time.
A family of woolly banksias live further along my road. I can never resist stroking their soft, grey-orange flowers when I pass them on a walk. They were named by Brown as Banksia baueri in honour of a pair of botanical artist brothers.
Then there’s the coast banksia growing in my back garden. Banksia integrifolia is a migrant from the eastern states. It always enthrals me when I see the entire tree standing majestically over the garden with roosting lime-green flowers in every stage of life peppering its boughs.
Around the block, a Banksia blechnifolia is choked with buffalo grass but still manages to breathe, waving its curved, fern-like leaves high above its cerise-flushed new flowers. I have a special nook in my heart for ground banksias, aside from all the others.
Amid all this vibrant beauty, the bull banksia on my front garden is dying the slow way, branch by branch. Limbs stand out from the trunk, alternatively grey or green. It’s a cadaverous, macabre candelabrum of a half-living and half-dead tree. Every time I look at it, it grieves me that I can’t save it. I think it’s a drop in the water table. Fissures run vertically through its trunk side by side with tiny shoots of leaves, a sure sign of stress and oncoming death. These banksias live up to their Latin synonym, Banksia grandis; their massive cones almost upstaging their younger siblings on the same tree.
Out of the ashes of destruction banksias spring, the phoenixes of the Australian bush. They are a metaphor for this land. However, the meaning of their skulls is evolving, as banksias, both the urban and the untamed are starting to skeletonise, unremarked.
My response to this death and my grief is to observe – and to write. I want to give nature a voice through my writing; to let it susurrate and speak and shout, and, if needs be, scream. It is a declaration of life that I dictate. It is certainly no obituary.
For me, writing to change the world is simple: I want you to open your eyes so you can develop the longest-lasting and most beautiful relationship of your life. If you can truly see nature, you will care for it. If you care for it, you will notice the absence and the loss and the death, and the grief that we share will spur us together to protect and repair what our species has done. But first of all, you have to be able to see.
‘Death,’ wrote the Portuguese poet, writer and thinker Fernando Pessoa, ‘is our being subject to something outside us, and we, at each moment of our lives, are but a reflection and consequence of what surrounds us.’
It rests on the edge of the ineffable. What are humans without nature? How do we truly live when one day we walk out our doors and only realise, in the absence, how much is missing? I can’t live in that world. Without nature, my soul is dead.
What I have been trying to tell you today, as passionately as I can through these words, is this: if the natural world is destroyed and dies and is transformed into a wasteland, we die with it.
Remember that the next time you catch sight of the skull of a banksia gazing down at you from its skeletal perch.
