Bloomin' Green

Robin Hardiman

The scenery resembled a minimalist painting. Above the horizon line all was blue, intense cerulean blue. Below the line there was green, Kelly green, a wild Irish green, a green so green it hurt my eyes. A milky line stretched across the green like an unrolled bolt of fluttering white silk. It was the Tablelands Highway under inches of fast moving water. This was just a few years ago.
That first drive I made across the Barkly was unforgettable. Those startling colours, the colloidal water stained with ultramicroscopic particles of grey (the infamous bulldust of the Dry) and the absence of anything else, no trees, no shrubs ... though now I come to think of it, there were so many grass eating insects that the windscreen was coated with a thick yellow paste of them.
Blue, green, white and yellow, colours of the Barkly in the Wet.
Not this year. Not after this year's rain and fire and flood.
I've driven the same stretch of the Stuart Highway week after week this year, from Tennant Creek north to Newcastle Waters and back. It was on a trip late in February that I first registered a flash of green, a particular clean lime green which caught on the edge of my curiosity and made me check my position with a quick calculation on the odometer. Driving southwards homeward bound, I watched for that burst of colour, hoping I might find it.
So many times I've heard people decry their impressions of the Aussie bush, boring, they cry, monotonous. I feel sorry for them, I do; sorry for those blinkered imaginations, for the blindness to the beauty of the bush. Granted, there is a lot of green this year but try this modest experiment next time you pass. See how many shades of green you can count. See how many words you can find to differentiate the green. You'll give the game away in a moment. There is such infinite variety, such fascination in the variation that I for one become bewildered when I hear those charges of monotony. But back to my tale of green.
My earlier calculation had revealed that I was thirty-seven clicks south of Elliott when I saw the flash of lime. And suddenly there it was again. Now, I'm no botanical expert. I can recognise the 'big four', the eucalypts and hakeas, melaleucas and grevilleas and also the callistemon, a plant unique to our island continent. When I picked my way gingerly through the spinifex towards the thing that had caught my eye earlier that morning, I was confronted by a small gnarled cream barked shrub with olive coloured leathery leaves and brilliant lime-green bottlebrush flowers.
Lovers of the bush will shrug at my elation. I was amazed. I thought I'd stumbled on something rare and wonderful. When I got home I rang a friend who is knowledgeable about these things and he made me tell my story slowly. A bottlebrush, I said. A callistemon, he corrected and then he paused and said there weren't callistemons this far up the continent. Rarely in the Centre and never in the Barkly. Describe the bark again, he said and then he laughed, reminding me that I'd just claimed to be able to recognise the major species. It was a paperbark, he said, a melaleuca.
Melaleuca viridiflora: green flowers! On subsequent trips up the bitumen, I became aware of how little I see, and perhaps it's just as well as I'm doing the driving. Between Tennant and Elliott there are many patches of this swamp paperbark, most with cream blooms and some with that intense lime colour of the true viridiflora. A week after that first sighting, my eye attuned to the shape and colour of the blooms, I was just a litle bit embarrassed to realise how many patches of the paperbarks there were and how showily they bloom. It's taken me four years to notice. So much for observation.
Since that first sighting I've become a bit obsessed with flowers. On another trip I found a grevillea dryandra, a small delicate wonder of the genus, its flower spike deep purple, the flower itself pale pink merging into red. The turkey bush (calytrix exstipulata) to the north of Elliott was in indecent bloom at that time with its "prolific display of showy pink-purple star-like flowers" which is the way the reference book explains it. On yet another day I found a gastrolobium ... but then the fires came to blacken the blooming Barkly.
Just when it seemed that smoke and flames had finally encircled us, along came the storms. With a wham and a bam and shazzam the sky lit up, dogs howled and my cats cringed and the thunder was really thrilling. And then there was that rain, nearly three inches of it in an hour early one Monday morning.
Trips up and down the bitumen are a flower lover's feast again. The mown verges resemble cultivated gardens, all neat and showy. There are tall and graceful chalk white lillies (Crinum augustifolium) dotting the blackened bush south of town and the Territory's floral emblem, Sturt's Desert Rose is just a stunner. It's been quite a year for flowers.
No doubt about it, the Barkly's bloomin' beautiful.