I drag my finger along one glinting drip line and bring it to my lips, the breeze whisking away delicate threads of syrup, catching sunlight. The liquid tastes clean and fresh, gently sweet, bright, lemony. Delicious. Startling. Not a hint of the eucalyptus flavour you might expect to be weeping from a gum tree. I try another, darker trail of syrup, and it tastes different. Woody, herbal, the viscous liquid has taken on the character of the tree as it makes its way down the trunk. And a third, a trickle that looks like it has been flowing for a while: transformed over time, it tastes like a tart, mildly alcoholic cider.
The frost plain is as wide and open as a large suburban park. There are quite a few of these unusual trees standing around the perimeter. Some have very little of the syrup seeping from their trunks, others have more. Some of them are young, some are hundreds of years old. With damp moss below and branches gangly and twisted above, it feels peaceful standing under these trees, like I’m in a grotto or spirit glade. And then, at the foot of one of them, I see a few flat stones, overgrown with moss and grass. They look like they have been placed there to cover a hollow in the trunk where the liquid pools.
For a moment, it feels as though the people who put these stones here, who stood under this tree and enjoyed the wispy fermented cider syrup that flows from it, have only just left, and might return any second.
In late November 1831, English settler and government-appointed conciliator George Augustus Robinson travelled through this part of Tasmania, the Central Highlands, with a search party, looking for Aboriginal people, hoping to convince them to join others who had come under his ‘protection’ – which, in reality, meant transportation to Flinders Island and separation from their traditional lands. Senior tribal men were Robinson’s guides on this trip, and they led him to an extensive frost plain. In his journal, Robinson wrote that the plain was skirted by numerous ‘mellifluent’ trees that had ‘planted themselves in the foreground of the forest’:
Most of the trees had been tapped by the natives. This they had effected by perforating a hole in the tree a short distance above the ground by means of sharp stone and then making a hole at the bottom of the tree into which the liquid is conveyed and from which they extract it, sometimes if the hole is small by sucking it through a reed or twisted bark. In some of these holes I observed upwards of a quart of this juice and which my people greedily partook of. It is exceedingly sweet and well flavoured and in this respect resembles the flavour of cider … The natives are very fond of the juice and I am told it frequently makes them drunk.
A few days later, Robinson was shown more cider trees on the fringe of another marsh, and he described how the ‘natives … have made incisions in the tree and dug [a] hole at the bottom for the liquid to drain into’. And a few miles away, he saw trees growing ‘most luxuriantly, some of them twelve feet [3.6 metres] in diameter, and the liquid was oozing out in tolerable quantities. Holes at the bottom of the trees had been made to receive the juice and which served the purpose of a tank … It was amusing to see the natives run from tree to tree to suck this juice, of which they are very fond.’
In 1843 the South African–born botanist Ronald Gunn visited a stand of cider trees in the Tasmanian highlands near Miena, not far from the trees I saw, and wrote a detailed report on the species that was published the following year in the London Journal of Botany. The cider gum tree subsequently received its botanical name of Eucalyptus gunnii.
In his report, Gunn also observed firsthand the cider-gum sugar’s propensity to spontaneously change into alcohol: ‘I brought a bottle of it with me,’ he wrote, ‘but two or three days after reaching home it fermented, blew out the cork and a large portion of it was lost.’
Another early account of Aboriginal people tapping the trees is found in botanist Daniel Bunce’s Australasiatic Reminiscences, a memoir of his travels across Tasmania and the mainland in the 1840s, published in 1857. As Bunce described it, the Tasmanian ‘natives had … a method, at the proper season, of grinding holes in the tree, from which the sweet juice flowed plentifully, and was collected in a hole at the bottom, near the root of the tree. These holes were kept covered over with a flat stone, apparently for the purpose of preventing birds and animals coming to drink it. When allowed to remain any length of time, it ferments and settles into a coarse sort of wine or cider, rather intoxicating if drank to excess.’
As with Robinson’s account, what’s notable about Bunce’s description is the act of deliberate collection followed by delayed consumption. It’s not just the sugary liquid that Aboriginal people wanted to enjoy: they also protected the sap from birds and animals for long enough to allow the yeasts naturally present in the environment to ferment it, resulting in a different kind of drink altogether.
There is a name for this fermented drink. In his two-volume work on Indigenous practices in Victoria and Tasmania, The Aborigines of Victoria, published in 1878, chairman of the Board for the Protection of Aborigines and recorder of Indigenous culture Robert Brough Smyth listed many Tasmanian Aboriginal words, including the word for what he described as the ‘saccharine sap of Eucalyptus Gunnii (turning soon into a kind of cider)’.
Its name is way-a-linah.
Mick Quilliam has drunk way-a-linah, and his evocative paintings of cider gum trees have helped him become recognised as one of Tasmania’s best-known Aboriginal artists. One square canvas in particular is striking: a bird’s-eye view of the spreading branches of the way-a-linah tree, represented by a honey-yellow spiral, surrounded by a wide circle made up of dozens and dozens of footsteps.
‘The painting tells the story of people gathering once a year when the trees flow, in early summer, for ceremony,’ Mick tells me. ‘They’d have their weddings and things up there, in the good weather, when it’s just getting nice and warm, when there’s lots of kangaroo around.’
Mick hasn’t been to the lake country to see the trees or taste the way-a-linah for a while – too busy with his painting – but he says he used to go up with a local Elder, who’d know which trees to visit. He has seen very old trees that still bear the scars of where they’ve been tapped with a tomahawk. Others that show signs of early European settlers copying the Aboriginal practice and collecting the cider-gum syrup in a billy can. And he’s seen trees where the earth is worn away in a groove around the base, from countless footsteps and ceremonies.
‘But then you also see the dead trees,’ says Mick. ‘A lot of them are dying.’
Eucalyptus gunnii is very sensitive to climate. It grows in country that is just that little bit too frost-prone for other species. That’s why it can survive where it does, apart from the rest of the forest, braving the cold of the bog. But the climate is changing. What was once very cold country is less cold now – not a lot, but just enough to threaten these trees. And as Mick points out, they can’t just uproot themselves and move to frostier ground. They’re stuck, destined to succumb to imperceptible but deadly change.
The healthy trees I visited on the edge of the frost plain are in a place called trawtha makuminya (the name means ‘tracks through Big River country’) – 6878 hectares of land adjoining the state’s Wilderness World Heritage Area, bought in 2012 by the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania. This part of the Central Highlands is high enough and cold enough for the trees to still prosper. But on the way up here, driving through the tiny town of Miena by Great Lake, a popular tourist and fishing spot, I saw plenty of dead cider gums stark against the grey sky, leafless branches wet from drizzle, victims of a changing world, of more extreme frosts in winter, and warmer, drier summers.
‘I lived and worked around here in the 1980s,’ said Steve Cronin, the trawtha makuminya ranger, as we drove past. ‘All these trees were alive back then. Not sure exactly why they’ve died. But they live on the