‘Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It’s coal’.
Scott Morrison brandishing a lump of coal: question time, 9 Feb 2017
With windows open to the warm spring sunshine, I cruise slowly over the bumps, potholes, corrugations, washaways and erosions that some frustrated poet in the District Council had named Native Pine Road. Erica, broome, xanthoria, stringybarks, deprived looking banksia and almost every other conceivable version of roadside scrub except native pine crowd both sides of the 'road'. Two wheel tracks flank a hard, central ridge which, building up over the years, has now attained just the height that will most effectively rip the sump out of the average, injudiciously handled family car. No trouble, however, for my battered one-ton truck which, though it gives a rigid, bone-shuddering ride even on the best roads, takes a lot of stopping.
The advertisement in the local paper that had moved me to explore Native Pine Road was curt, almost as if it would rather not have been there at all: ‘Strainer posts. Red gum, blue gum, mountain gum’. And a phone number. I needed a couple of hefty posts for a planned gateway, so I gave it a shot. My first call is answered by a softly spoken woman who sounds elderly and disenchanted: no she doesn’t know how big the posts are or what they cost or if there are some left and in any case they’re ‘up at the other place’. My second attempt connects me with the world of the ‘woodman’ — Bob Johnson.
‘Well,’ he says in amiable tobacco-rich tones, ‘down in the scrub here there’s y’blue gum, y’white gum, y’red gum and y’mountain gum’. He then adds an ironic, expletive-laden summation of each type of wood in which the white gum is seen to be the least impressive because it ‘only lasts about thirty years’. With a brief anecdote, he dramatises for me, his audience at the other end of the phone, someone whose three hundred white gum posts have begun to rot in their thirtieth year: ‘I’m goin’ straight back to the bugger that sold me these and get replacements. Nothin’ worse than a fence that only lasts thirty [adjective] years, eh!’ In the end I chose red gum and so began my decades of intermittent association with this splendid wood.
All that was many years ago. I haven’t been back to Native Pine Road which, I hear