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Branching Out : People

Photo: Carmen Núñez Durán (left) and Anitra Nelson (right)

When I first asked my Chilean friend Carmen what eucalypts meant to her, she told me how they made her feel at home when she first came to the Blue Mountains. That is because she saw lots of eucalypts in Chile and always thought it was an Indigenous plant of her country!

It made me reflect on how eucalypts dominate the Australian landscape. Most of the hundreds of varieties are Indigenous to Australia, with only a few others found nearby e.g in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. Some varieties were taken to South America late in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for plantation growth. In Chile, native plants are threatened by their substitution with some of the largest radiata pine forests of the world and by eucalypt plantations. So forest conservationists are fighting to restore native forests where introduced eucalypts now stand. Also, a few years ago, Chilean scientists announced their development of a drought-resistant strain of eucalypts. I wonder, does this make it Chilean?

Anitra Nelson

Evocation (a memory from another place)

This is a simple story. It refers to Eucalyptus in Australia and Chile.

One day in Sydney, noticing them, perceiving their aroma and seeing their fruits scattered on the soil (like beautiful little domes, sprinkled with icing sugar) it triggered in my mind memories of my childhood. My mother, my brother and I promenading along Santa Lucía Hill’s gardens. (This rocky hill is a place visited on weekends; it has a fortress, built when the city of Santiago was founded in the year 1541.) Mother, sitting down on a long seat reading and us collecting eucalyptus fruit from the ground plus leaves and playing with them.

When leaving the garden, our pockets full with the little ‘domes’ and leaves we were so happy with our treasures. The eucalyptus leaves were taken to grandmother who was very pleased; she used to boil them and its aroma filled every corner of the house, helping to relieve unpleasant colds.

Eucalyptus in Australia… this land is not a foreign landscape.

Eucalyptus in Chile are printed in my mind and its memories.

By Carmen Núñez Durán

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