From Burls to Blockades: Artistic Interpretations of Karri Trees and Forests

Abstract

Karri trees and forests have captivated photographers, painters, and other visual artists and writers since the colonial beginnings of Western Australia. The natural charisma of 'Eucalyptus diversicolor'-its remarkable size, striking verticality, trunk textures, color patterns-continues to inspire and challenge today's artists attempting to devise vocabularies for translating their pereceptions of karris to a creative medium. Whereas historical commentators have been inclined to dismiss the aesthetic virtues of jarrahs and marris, with their wild asymmetries and strange exudations, karris have been extolled in more consistent terms for having classically beautiful qualities: smoothness, sleekness, gracefulness, grandeur, sublimity (see also chapters 3 and 4). As one of the tallest eucalypt species in the world, second only to Victoria and Tasmania's mountain ash ('Eucalyptus regnans') (Boland et al. 2006, 286), the karri tree-as evident in its earliest written and visual representations-feeds a public environmental imagination that longs for solitude, serenity, and a glimpse of the divine in nature. In stark contrast to the appreciation of karris as inspirational tree-beings, however, late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century photographs of surveying and logging activities convey a much different story. The perspective on karris, instead, reflects ideas of utilitarianism where massive old-growth trees are resources to be exploited or behemoths to be overcome for the sake of settler progress (Crawford and Crawford 2003; Hutton and Connors 1999, 193-4).