These mighty trees have also been absorbed into the social and cultural worlds of Indigenous Australians. They grew beside the Murray River when it was a wide, cold, fast-flowing stream they witnessed its transformation in the late Pleistocene into a narrow, sinuous, seasonal river and they have remained, over the past 13,000 years, as the water has slowed and warmed, forming swamps, low sand dunes and small lakes along the channel, and seasonal wetlands in the wider riverine plain. River red gums were a part of Australia’s environment long before people arrived here. “And if you have that conversation about deep time in this country”, says Damien, “you have to talk about Indigenous people and this continent as an occupied and cultural space, not just a physical place”.įriday essay: when did Australia’s human history begin? When you look at something like the Murray-Darling system from the perspective of a grand old red gum, you see the fragility and inter-connectedness of the waterway, and how rapidly it has degraded with recent human interventions. To work with wood is to think beyond a human lifespan. Murray cod lay their eggs in drowned red gums. And as it decomposes over centuries it becomes a home for new life. A river red gum may grow for anywhere between 400 and 1,000 years before it falls. Fred Krohįor Damien, wood is a way of thinking about place and time - even deep time. Damien Wright, left, and miller Kelvin Barton with the slab that became Food Bowl, Wodonga, 2017.
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