For the last few weeks I’ve been watching and hearing about the dying of the trees. Today I really noticed it most obviously after a few days being inside with illness. The dry time has continued into this season of first rains. And some trees haven’t made it. I hear of others, further from the city, but even here I’ve seen many peppermints—wanil—dry and baked and dead; many tuarts by the lake, other eucalypts. There are smaller shrubs by the river, acacias maybe (or were they cockie’s tongues?) that also haven’t made it, in addition to the dead casuarina’s poisoned for million dollar views. 

And then at the lake today I thought, and surely it couldn’t be for the first time, of the dead tree stumps in the middle of the lake, dry and grey. They have been there as long as I’ve been visiting—a seemingly permanent fixture in the up-and-down movements of the water and birds from year to year. But for such trees to have once been here—eucalypts I guess, maleleucas maybe—this place would have once been much drier, for it’s in the centre of the lake that their skeletons rest. And they rest next to the straight edge of a fence line, protruding from the bed not quite as high. In the northern part of the lake the dead remains stand even higher, serving most recently as perch for the black shouldered kite. The northern ground is higher, dries out first, is covered in greener grass earlier, so it makes sense the trees were higher there—but even at the southern end they must not have been tiny; the ground must have been much drier, for no tree or bush grows there now, between the deepest centre, and the highest water periphery; only the back-and-forward movement of grasses breathing in the seasons, the rushes and reeds at the edges, then ground cover, going out to some shrubs and sedges and, on dryer land, eventually trees.