by Wyverne
She is a very mysterious tree. A eucalypt which
offers commercial quantities of eucalyptus oil for medicine, flavouring
and hygiene, she readily survives the constant harvesting of her
leaves because she’s used to periodic razing by bushfire,
and is rejuvenated and invigorated by the rebirth that ensues.
In inland and riverland languages her name is related
to the word mala or marla, which means ‘woman’, according
to an Aranta friend. But mala is not just any woman. Within her
culture she is an educated woman of virtue, power and responsibility;
a good wife, mother and member of the community, embodying the ideals
of womanhood; and she carries the laws, traditions and histories
of her and her husband’s cultures. Marla or Mala is used by
modern Koories in South Australia as a girl’s name, because
it represents this ideal of being strongly in the culture. It is
also the name of a marsupial mole, and also a town in north-eastern
South Australia. This suggests that the Aborigines regard them all
as the same Dreaming, carrying resonances of a single spirituality
incorporating the motifs, however obscure to the uninitiated, of
a single sublime cosmic narrative: that of the motherly woman in
her prime.
Maybe it’s this aromatic medicine that brings
you under her spell. You breathe it as you breathe the air about
you and it rises from the cracklingly dry leaf and bark litter under
your feet as you move towards her.
Those gesturing branches have the curves, modelling
and shapes of human arms, with skin-like wrinkling between the ‘fingers’
of her twiggy ‘hands’. Her tree-flesh feels cool, strong
and young, like a healthy woman in perhaps her thirties –
still supple, but past the exuberance of youth. It might take maybe
three or four years to fully realise this, schooled as we are in
the need to be very careful not to impose on other beings our expectations
that they’ll resemble humans, deluding ourselves that we see
human characteristics when we only wish we did. Acknowledging the
mallee’s anthropomorphisms effects a shift in perception,
and the eucalyptus smell changes subtly, as a smile might subtly
change the expression in someone’s eyes.
There is beauty enough in those arms and waving
handsful of perfumed leaves, but there’s that untidy bark,
twig and leaf litter underfoot. The mallee sheds her bark and after
clattering and rattling it and turning it edge on to the wind till
it roars softly like a distant bullroarer, she drops it in a sort
of tantrum-dance with the wind. In accord with some ancient promise
to the Aborigine people, she also sheds the occasional branch for
the campfire.
Hers is good, smoke-free firewood. She gives of
herself with a friendly goodwill. Aborigine campfires are open on
all sides, so there’s no need to cut the wood, and whole branches
are fed on, thin end first, until consumed. Because the mallee sheds
whole green branches, it’s possible, after allowing them to
dry, to use the leaves to start the flame in, the tiny twigs that
held them to feed the flame as it begins to grow, the bigger sticks
to establish it and bigger ones still to build it up until it can
start work on the main part of the branch. One good branch is enough
most days for a whole family. And if there’s no one to gather
it it’s habitat for a fantastic array of geckoes, little snakes,
echidnas, skinks and small dragon lizards and the myriad tiny wild
creatures of this small-scale ecology.
As your eye becomes accustomed to detail, and the
view below your feet changes from a scrambly, harsh-looking, untidy
mess to a readable history written in patterns and textures of earth
and wood and leaf, shadow and stone, paw print and snake track,
you experience another shift, more subtle still, and for the first
time you see a dozen or so small grey birds that glide so stealthily
you can’t remember ever having seen them before, so magically
do they appear. A small, grey dragon lifts a tentative foot, partly
erects its spiky frill, Suddenly there’s a mopoke, still as
the stump of a dead limb, looking mildly down from a high branch.
Slowly you begin to notice the glides of light and shifts of shadow
and texture that reveal a whole new range of tiny beings, moths
that run among the bark, spiders and scorpions that move flat to
the limb of the tree, and a silvery grey, all but invisible, long-legged
earth-lover that scuttles over the root of the tree. And the tenor
of the aroma deepens until it brings you closer to the wavelengths
of echidnas, brown snakes, wombats, dunnarts, emus, grey and red
kangaroos, foxes, goannas and whatever else has contributed to this
moment’s text-rich tapestry of smells. You can feel them responding
to you. You can feel their strategies for dealing with you: a lizard’s
change of direction, a bird’s sudden stillness, a beetle’s
threat.
The leaves twirl and give now their edges, now
their bellies to the light, occasional breeze, The bull-roarer bark
rattles and roars, softly as a chainsaw in the distance. The shapes
and textures of the mulch strike their patterns in the sounds and
movements of whirring insects, gliding birds, shifting shadows and
scuttling lizards, Suddenly the mallee shakes a handful of leaves,
a shiver runs through her, and she dances in a small, joyous willie
willie whirlwind all of her own making for a full minute, before
it dies away, and you know that she is responding to you too.
Here you have a choice: you can choose not to believe
in the magical generation of willie willies by sentient trees, or
you can believe what you see. Spend a quiet hour or so every few
weeks for a couple of years in communion with a selected mallee
tree, either in ritual or just with an open mind, and see if it
isn’t true, because if you open that door on belief, you begin
to be configured for healing, and it is time to attune. It is time
to cat your circle, or just lie down, sit cross-legged or in a yoga
posture, according to your tradition, or if you have no tradition,
to address yourself respectfully and receptively to the mallee,
to register, in effect, your willingness to go under her spell and
be healed.
The healing is psychological, mother-love healing.
She heals wounds, whether physical, psychological or emotional,
seeking out the causes of maladies and banishing them with a rattle
of her bark and a shivery shaking of her shaman leaves. Physical
wounds respond well to antiseptic eucalyptus oil used in their dressings,
Psychological wounds respond to aroma therapy, and to the scent
of fresh eucalyptus leaves, and also dry ones, included in well-balanced
pot-pourris, sleep pillows and sachets along with mallee flowers,
gumnut clusters and freshly shed bark. Emotional wounds heal better
if you suck the leaves, or jubes and lozenges containing the oil.
Spiritual healing is her ultimate gift, when the pure spiritual
essence which no one yet knows how to distil shall finally be obtained
through the labours of the alchemists of the far future, along with
elixirs of youth and life and other magical essences.
She’s old, very old, earth-mother wisdom.
Her roots are configured to accord magically with the southern hemisphere
of the earth, and her branches are for the northern hemisphere.
That’s why her trunk is no trunk at all, just a spheroid of
convoluted, bulbous living wood from which roots below the ground
and arm-like limbs above radiate outwards. Her bole is the icon
for the earth-witch presence of the worlds below. She’s of
no culture, but configured to aboriginal culture, and rapidly configuring
to ours, while building with us the bridges between our two cultures,
as well as the bridges between her own plant kingdom and our animalian
one.
Mallee is the mother comforting the child, righting
wrongs, and mending things on every level. She’s kind, but
political and she’s got a life of her own, which makes her
rich in spiritual and experiential texture. She offers special nourishment
for the mind and soul, and increases our subliminal enjoyment of
life through enhanced symbol-literacy and penetration of meaning.
Sometimes she talks in dot pictures, like those done by Aborigine
artists, but moving, flowing, dynamic, and full of suddenly accessible
meaning.
Anyone can find peace, rest from anxiety, strength
to convalesce after disease, bereavement or failure under the mallee,
with greater personal insight developing over the weeks and months
following - especially if you take the time to bond with her. Communion
like that will initiate healing, conversation and attunement with
this planet’s and our galaxy’s metaphysical centres,
If you study the dreamtime theology, she’ll illuminate the
mysteries of the dreaming for you too.
You’ve been under her spell, for a few minutes,
perhaps thinking over your problems, berating yourself for not meditating
deeply enough, or even praying, Now you look up and find yourself
looking at the lower portions of her branches, and you see that
her arms are clothed in a rich chocolate brown and mahogany barky
covering that looks like some exotic dress fabric against those
pale, supple arms, and then with a shock you see the sculpture –
here’s a woman’s face modelled round the curve of the
bole, two full matronly breasts below them, and below the muscular
curve of her belly, a deep crease suggests a yoni, She seems to
be looking at you. You look away and then back, and she’s
still there, and even after you’ve looked unbelievingly from
several directions, it’s still there, still looking at you.
And then you see three more smaller heads among the gnarlings of
the roots, and then you see that the thickest trunk is a woman’s
torso, and you follow its arm and find it has a near perfect human
thumb just below a scramble of eight or nine leafy fingers, and
it’s thrilling!
But let’s take a reality check. Why would
a tree be so human? What would be her ecological advantage in investing
so much in capturing human attention? Looking again at the humanlike
faces and forms in the gnarling of the bole and lower branches,
it’s plain that the mallee is an artist, and that humans are
not her only inspiration. Emus, cockatoos, echidnas, examples of
these and other animal forms are almost as common as human forms.
Obviously, we’re not the only earthly species she communes
with. She gives us visual images, but in what idiom or via what
media does she commune with other species, intra and extraterrestrial?
She humbles us, rather, seeing the whole of every small beetle or
lizard’s cosmic dreaming soul and not finding it less than
any human one.
But that initiation is a liberation. It enables
us to understand not the paltriness of humanity but the cosmic splendour
and dreamtime grandeur of all beings, on earth, in the sky and within
the depths of our planet. The mallee tree will be among your willing
guides if you undertake consciously to try to understand Aboriginal
wisdom, whether through reading, visiting sacred sites or by whatever
method you choose.
Taking up a twigful of the hard woody gumnuts,
or a branch for a wand, you take leave of the tree – but perhaps,
scarcely a dozen paces away, something might make you glance back,
and just for a second a mere flash of dark colour might shift in
the air, but you make no mistake, your eyes connect with the deep,
black, timeless eyes of the Mallee Spirit Woman, and you’re
aware of her happiness to be breaking through to you.
And over the years the conversation deepens...
