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Gum: The Story of Ecualypts and their Champions
Gum The Story of Ecualypts and their Champions Author:Ashley Hay Wherever you look in Australia you'll see a gum tree: they have help define the continent for thousands of years and still shape our imagination. Since Europeans came to Australia we have struggled to classify and comprehend eucalypts and the country they belong to. This is the story of that struggle, told you the lives of seven people whose... more » lives were changed by their passion for Australia's greatest tree. They include Sir Joseph Banks at Botany Bay in 1770, May Gibbs and her humbug characters, and the firefighters caught in bushfires today. The eucalypt has meant different things to botanists like Ferdinand Mueller, explorers like Sir Thomas Mitchell, to foresters, farmers and conservationists. Writers and painters have struggled to assimilate the gum into their ideas of what it is to live on this continent. People have believed gum trees would cure malaria, solve the drainage problems that defeated the Roman emperors, fill the Sahara with forest and reveal the presence of gold. There are over 700 species of eucalypt and they keep hybridizing into new varieties. They are, as Ashley Hay shows in this compelling account, "adaptable, diverse, tenacious, interactive, opportunistic, unique". A bit like the people who live with them.« less