Mate, you just don’t bloody get it.

The gum tree has shaped our idea of beauty. We understand its grey green drabness, its loose dishevelled looks. We have learned to love its dappled trunks, its peeling bark, the smell of its leaves in the smoke of our campfires.

I once took an elegant French woman camping (don’t ask) in outback South Australia. We walked in silence through a red-walled sandy gully strewn with awesome twisted eucalypts. Suddenly, she pounced with relief on a tiny blue flower of an invasive weed – wandering jew, I believe. “Oh, so pretty,” she said.

I took a London business colleague for a hike in the Blue Mountains. The valley put on its best show of swirling mists, blue vistas, tall eucalypt forests. Again a silent walk. Then, “Your bush is very untidy isn’t it?” he said.

February 2018