Free White Beech: The Rainforest Years by Germaine Greer

apart with her nails. ‘Wallaby Grass! The hardest thing about reinstating native grasses is finding the seed. There’s none in commerce, as far as I know, and here it is.’ She waved the flower spike and the seed lifted off like smoke.
    Jane’s Wallaby Grass lawn is famous. Every year she collects the seed with a vacuum cleaner and sows a new area. I love Wallaby Grass because, even without macropods keeping it down, it never needs mowing. Lawn-mowing was the bane of my suburban childhood.
    ‘It would make headway only if you extirpated the exotic grasses. See this’ – she snapped off a tall frond, and pulled back a blade to show the ligule – ‘this is African Lovegrass, Eragrostis curvula . It’s virtually annihilated its less vigorous Australian cousin, E. leptostachya .’ As we walked she showed me Serrated Tussock ( Nassella trichotoma ), Pampas Grass, Chilean Needle Grass and Rat’s Tail grasses.
    ‘These are all scheduled as weeds because they degrade pasture. Half the native grasses are classed as weeds for the same reason. If you wanted to do serious conservation here, you’d have to deal with both exotic weed grasses and pasture grasses. And the exotics would be continually reseeding from the adjoining properties. Hopeless really.’
    At first I had quite liked the Bell Miners’ incessant tinkling, but as we drew nearer the stand of devastated gums it seemed to bounce off the morning sky and fall on our ears like lead shot.
    ‘God,’ said Jane, ‘the bloody Anvil Chorus.’
    The eucalypts were so defoliated that there was no way of identifying them for certain. Though the trees looked different from the Manna Gums that grow on the Mornington Peninsula, Jane thought they were probably the same species, Eucalyptus viminalis (and she was right). When we came under their ragged canopy, we could smell the Bell Miner colony. A sticky debris of leaves and twigs lay about our feet. The noise had become deafening.
    ‘Tell me about Bell Miners.’
    ‘Miners are related to honeyeaters; they’ve got the same sort of tongue, with a brush-tip, but they have a more complex social structure. They live in large groups, and mate promiscuously, and their young are fed indiscriminately by all adults, I think, certainly by other members of the colony besides their parents. They’re very aggressive in the defence of their territory and drive off all other species that try to share their food source. It seems that males far outnumber females in the colony. Which figures.’
    ‘Do they live on nectar?’
    ‘No. That’s the problem. Bell Miners eat lerps.’
    ‘Lerps?’
    ‘Lerps are the sugary coats that the nymphs of sap-sucking psyllids build for themselves. Pardalotes and other insectivorous birds pull the nymph out from under the lerp and eat that. If Bell Miners move in to eat the lerps the other birds leave behind, they drive away the insectivores and prevent them from finishing the job. Some people think the Bell Miners actually farm the lerps to get their sugar fix.’
    ‘Surely they’ve always done that. Why has it become such a problem now?’
    ‘Nobody knows for sure. In 1999 Bell Miners were removed from an area of infestation; there was an immediate influx of insectivorous birds who brought the population of psyllids down, but after ten months the trees showed no sign of recovery. The scientists involved in the experiment concluded that the real cause of the trees’ death was probably the destruction of their vascular system by guess what?’
    I groaned. ‘Cinnamon Fungus.’
    This was so depressing a thought that we were both silent as we walked on down to the river, where the eternal clangour of the birds followed us, echoing off the water. When we sat down in the warm sand Jane told me more about Bell Miner Associated Dieback.
    ‘BMAD is a huge problem, and getting worse. It’s official now that in northern New South Wales more than 20,000 hectares of sclerophyll forest are affected by