As a child, I grew up in a big house on a Welsh hillside, and we had lots of backyard trees where jackdaws built their twiggy nests every spring.
Me and my mate Geraint would climb up and shamefully steal the blue speckled eggs just for schoolyard glory.
Little boys can be horrible little buggers.
Our backyard trees were mostly birch and horse chestnut, which dropped huge spiky seed pods housing shiny brown conkers that we tied with string and used for schoolyard battles and yet more glory.
Sometimes I would hide trinkets among the trees’ grassy roots, then return the next day and pretend I had discovered treasure buried by Havana pirates from the 17th century.
Trees spark all sorts of wild imaginings in the young.
For our elders, they are memory banks of the past and a connection to the continuing present.
For knowledge gatherers, trees contain the records of all the summers and winters they have lived through, and they have now become lighthouses warning of the present changes they are enduring.
People busy whitewater-rafting in the stream of life don’t pay too much attention to grand old trees.
When they do notice the old warriors, they are always standing in the way of another road, another space-hungry community, or another grand real-estate vision.
So they get cut down and chopped up to make way for our grand plans.
Big old trees are now pushed to the edges of our towns to stand like lonely ghosts with deep, unsung memories.
This was happening more than 70 years ago, when early environmental champion Edna Walling called our dwindling roadside trees “the front gardens of the nation” — a phrase resonating with a mixture of quaint pride and quiet desperation.
Which brings me to five magnificent old-growth grey box trees on the GV Hwy just north of the Wanganui Rd intersection.
The whitewater rafters at Melbourne-based developers DM Property have decided these last sentinels of what was once an arboreal ocean stretching across the Murray and Goulburn valleys and beyond, are blocking the entrance to a grand plan for the creation of 250 new residential lots called Uptown.
Of course, an expanding community needs space to build, so the developers, Greater Shepparton City Council and the Victorian Department of Transport must be supported in their plans to turn what is now empty space into somewhere pleasant to live.
But the proposed removal of five old trees to make way for an entrance to the new estate seems a lazy and unthinking approach to the problem of how best to preserve these beautiful trees.
These particular ones have stood for more than two centuries providing shade, food, rest and protection for birds, insects and possums and very probably for people, too — long before white settlement.
By removing them, a precious connection to the deep past will be severed for future children and their families at Uptown.
If new communities cannot offer a sense of belonging, shared stories and a sprinkle of homegrown wild beauty, they become air-conditioned, joyless deserts — a scenario that happens all too often in Australia where history is erased under the juggernaut of real estate.
If we have the science and creativity to build solar-powered and wi-fi-connected homes, surely we have the imagination to redesign a road entrance to preserve five old trees with all the history and beauty they contain.
For many years, our homegrown Goulburn Valley Environment Group has maintained a steadfast and often thankless task in its battle to preserve what is left of our natural landscape.
In 2020, the group saved 249 trees from being cut down in a plan to widen the Midland Hwy — a great victory for our natural landscape.
The community must now get behind the group again in its latest campaign to save these last remnants of a thriving corridor of life and beauty.
You can find Goulburn Valley Environment Group on Facebook.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
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