TREE WEEK

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Today begins a new series of posts – Tree Week – that hopefully you will find entertaining and interesting. Send me your comments.

First up, a poem by Henry Lawson harking back to bygone days.

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Preliminary comment:

A stringybark can be any of the many Eucalyptus species of tree which have thick, fibrous bark. Some stringybark species can be very large, reaching over 80 metres in height, but more typically, stringybarks are medium-sized trees in the 10 to 40 metre range.

Early European colonists often used the bark for roofing and walls of huts.

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Some pics:

Memorial Plaque at Stringybark Creek, near Archerton Victoria, honouring the police officers killed by the Kelly Gang: Sergeant Michael Kennedy; Constable Michael Scanlon, Constable Thomas Lonigan.

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Poem:

The Stringy-Bark Tree

- Henry Lawson

There’s the whitebox and pine on the ridges afar,

Where the iron-bark, blue-gum, and peppermint are;

There is many another, but dearest to me,

And the king of them all was the stringy-bark tree.

Then of stringy-bark slabs were the walls of the hut,

And from stringy-bark saplings the rafters were cut;

And the roof that long sheltered my brothers and me

Was of broad sheets of bark from the stringy-bark tree.

And when sawn-timber homes were built out in the West,

Then for walls and for ceilings its wood was the best;

And for shingles and palings to last while men be,

There was nothing on earth like the stringy-bark tree.

Far up the long gullies the timber-trucks went,

Over tracks that seemed hopeless, by bark hut and tent;

And the gaunt timber-finder, who rode at his ease,

Led them on to a gully of stringy-bark trees.

Now still from the ridges, by ways that are dark,

Come the shingles and palings they call stringy-bark;

Though you ride through long gullies a twelve months you’ll see

But the old whitened stumps of the stringy-bark tree.