On Thursday morning, as I was walking on Ferndale Road, a beautiful wooded track in the Strzeleckis, I came across evidence of vandalism. A tall, ancient tree fem standing in a tropical setting on a bend in the road had been stripped of all its large fronds, cut off at the base and stolen.
That fern has been standing there for 16 generations. I have been walking the road for 16 years and have delighted in the changes as it goes through the seasons: the unfurling of its great fronds - one layer each year, the change in colour from light to heavy green, the way old fronds give way to new. Others who have lived on this road for two and three generations will have noticed the extraordinary plant much longer than I have.
I am not shocked by one tree fem disappearing and possibly being destroyed, for we have others growing in various sheltered places on properties in the area, but I am shocked by the reason for it.
Greed - for such a tree fern is worth money - is the motivator for this act of vandalism. It also symbolises a kind of human arrogance and self-centredness, a terrible ignorance and inability to see beyond our own gratification. That we humans have not, by now, outgrown these Primal responses bodes ill for our future on this earth.
Perhaps it is not outrage I feel at the disappearance of this surviving representative of an ancient forest that existed long -before humans trod the earth, but despair.