NOTES TOWARD A LIBRARY OF SUPERLATIVE TREES. A TRANSMISSION FOR EUCALYPTUS REGNANS, commission for Radiohrenia Glasgow

 

NOTES TOWARD A LIBRARY OF SUPERLATIVE TREES. A TRANSMISSION FOR EUCALYPTUS REGNANS
MIDDAY AND 6PM, SUNDAY 26TH MAY

notes toward a library of superlative trees. a transmission for Eucalyptus regnans is a site-specific mini-FM radio programme which conducts radio art as a form of experimental fieldwork. It investigates notions of non-human forest memory, the “endemic,” and the globalisation of species in postcolonial landscapes, through engagement with the audible sounds of the tallest flowering plant in the world, a tree native to Tasmania and Victoria, but now found worldwide.

Orokonui eco-sanctuary in Ōtepoti/Dunedin, Aotearoa/New Zealand, is a biosecure reserve for rare endemic birds. It also contains “New Zealand’s tallest tree”, a specimen found within a small grove of Mountain Ash (Eucalyptus regnans), an introduced Australian eucalypt planted in the 1870s as part of a farmland boundary line. Unusually for a location attuned to the fragile specificity of its own island ecology, this introduced visitor, part of a long prior history of settler culture pragmatic land-use somewhat at odds with the narrative of conservation all around it, has been celebrated, rather than chopped down to provide space for Broad-leafed podocarp forest and other native woody ecosystem types. Currently, the grove of tall E. regnans in Orokonui sanctuary tower above the regenerating native vegetation, and have brought their own communities with them, becoming home to flocks of introduced rosellas, creating a strata of Australian life high above the New Zealand biota in the lower reaches where highly managed populations of endangered endemic birds find their home, creating an odd ecological palimpsest, an intriguing doubling.

In developing this work, the sounds of New Zealand’s Tallest Tree and its surrounding ecological community, collected with open-air and contact microphones, have been flown across the Trans-Tasman border, to be put into conversation with endemic E.regnans from the old growth forests of the Tasmanian Styx State Forest. This dialogue was staged through the creation of a site-specific radio programme which involved the transmission of the collected sound recordings of the audible life processes of the New Zealand trees, as well as additional recordings of other tall Mountain Ash eucalypts in the Styx area, into the hollow belly of an enormous, 400-year-old, Tasmanian E. regnans, a local landmark popularly known as The Chapel Tree. This transmission fieldwork translates one location into another, staging a comparative study of the sounds of the materiality of environment in two different places through the ‘sonic horns’ of two populations of the same species of tree, one located in a place where it is an introduced weed, one under threat in its endemic homeland. It stages a listening-in to two off-grid natural sites, not through repeating the sonic narrativization of romantic myths of ‘wilderness,’ or representing the tall trees as individuals in their spectacular monumentality, but through a small-radius radiophonic recognition of the altered and intertwined nature of landscapes, its subjects appearing close-in through clouds of mosquitoes and flies, washes of detuned electromagnetic noise and the busy knocking and seething of the normally inaudible biotic sounds of insects chewing wood and other processes of movement, life and decay. In considering the life processes and communities of this species of tree in Aotearoa/NZ and lutruwita/Tasmania in the globalised present, it hears two very different contemporary biospheres, each with very different sounds and silences, each with a very different cultural discourse around the subject of nature. This can be noted particularly in the fact that, at approximately only 80 metres in height, the celebrated New Zealand E. regnans would not even make the grade in terms of the minimum height which is set out in the Forestry Tasmania protective register that exempts eucalypts above 85 metres in height from being logged. In Tasmania, the age of these trees predates colonial settlement, In New Zealand they mark the boundary between a reconstructed endemic forest, which is highly managed to provide habitat for extremely rare birds, and farmland. These E. regnans might remember a different story to their old-growth Australian cousins – their own role in being part of the changing of the landscape by settlement.

Elements of this transmission work were developed in 2015 for an exhibition at Constance ARI and Mona Foma, in Hobart, Tasmania.

This temporally linear radio piece, mixed from live multi-receiver transmission recordings, has been newly produced for Radiophrenia in 2019. Permalink here.