Free White Beech: The Rainforest Years by Germaine Greer Page B

part of a plant community. It has no competitors and supports no suite of invertebrates or fungi or whatever. Its growth and reproduction are not limited by natural factors, so the willow can overwhelm all the niche plants growing in local ecosystems. Like lots of our worst tree weeds, it originally grew from cuttings imported by homesick settlers.’
    ‘They probably needed cricket bats,’ said Leon. ‘Without those willows we’d never have won the Ashes.’
    ‘Bat willow is a variety of Salix alba . It seems more likely to me that the early settlers thought they would need osiers, for baskets, and brought cuttings of S. fragilis . The worst willow in the Australian situation is S. nigra . It’s beyond belief that S. nigra was imported from America as late as 1962, as part of the effort to combat erosion.
    ‘The willows’ve been hybridising across the clones for a couple of hundred years. In their native habitats this kind of interbreeding would have been prevented by natural factors, geographic distance, different flowering times, and genetic incompatibility. In Australia bastard willows can breed with any other willow growing within a kilometre radius. And the hybrids can tolerate a vast range of cultural conditions. When they take over an area they obliterate biodiversity and flourish as a hugely prolific monoculture. Within a very few years of their introduction into Australia willows had spread through the south-eastern river systems, changing their patterns of flow.’
    ‘Can they be controlled?’ asked Leon.
    ‘Not easily. Any frond breaking off and falling into the river will root downstream. Fronds washed onto a bank will get a foothold in the mud. Seeds too are carried downstream, as well as on the wind. In huge quantities. Even if we ripped out or poisoned all the willows on the lower Towamba, within a year or two the willow population would be back close to maximum density. Eventually willows would immobilise the sandbanks and obstruct the course of floodwater when the river is in spate, increasing erosion.’
    ‘You made the willow problem seem insoluble,’ said Jane, as we undressed for bed.
    ‘I didn’t tell him the half of it. I didn’t talk about loss of habitat for native species, or what happens when billions of leaves are dumped in watercourses when willows deciduate, or about the loss of subterranean water in drought seasons. Anyhow, Leon wasn’t listening. He thinks it enough that he doesn’t turn the property into a golf course or a marina.’
    ‘I feel like going out there right now and setting fire to the Manna Gums with the Bell Miners in them,’ said Jane.
    ‘You wouldn’t dare.’
    ‘You’re right,’ said Jane and turned out the light.
    Leon even liked the Bell Miners. One thing he was sure about: no wild creatures would be shot or poisoned on his watch. No fox. Not even a rabbit. His property had been cleared more than a hundred years ago. It was more than he could do to unclear it now. So he ran a few sheep, brought friends down from Sydney for restful weekends and did a little fishing at the mouth of the shimmering Towamba, where oysters grew on the rocks. If the wedgetails took his newborn lambs he blessed them. When I clicked my teeth because the only wildflowers in the pasture were Yellow Sorrel and Capeweed from South Africa, he accused me of rabid nationalism.
    ‘I’m an exotic,’ he said, ‘Purebred from Bialystok. And you’re a hybrid from everywhere but here. You might as well say we’ve got no right to be here.’
    ‘I have said that.’
    ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Leon.
    The next day we went downstream in the tinny for a look at a parcel of land that Leon was willing to sell. This was unimproved old-growth forest, opposite Boydtown, one of the few sites on the south coast of New South Wales that Aboriginal people have been able to repossess. The site, overlooking the mouth of the Towamba, was bordered with rocks encrusted with delicious oysters that I