Pete McCurley honours the cyclical life of a sacred River Redgum tree in Guilford, whose salvaged timber now provides a powerful material for communal healing and remembrance.
A tree’s body is the body of time.
Standing like an arboreal meridian marker, an anomalous old red gum calls her name on the wind.
Biyal.
I am.
The Guildford big tree. That much loved River Redgum.
Eucalyptus camaldulensis.
Famous.
Huge.
The 22nd of February 2024. In the heat and high winds of that day, a large part of the tree failed. A myriad housing complex for the animals.
To Djaara it’s a very significant culturally modified ring graft tree.
To the broader community, it’s also hallowed ground. Her broad, unbroken branches hold as many people’s stores as there are leaves.
The cause of the damage that day? Lots and lots of birth. Germination days will be the main part. The increasingly volatile cycles of dry and wet will be in there. There’s extensive rot and mats of active fungal mycelium in the break. The old tree is deeply hollow. Whilst she is now well into senescence, she could yet live on, increasingly craggy for generations. The old tree will be lonely for the connections of healthy country.
Red gums are good at being weird and old. It’s their thing. Still, there’s a vulnerability that we have to sit with. Death always hovers that way, somewhere away, just out of our peripheral vision. Close but aloof. Until it’s all too real. The trees remaining large branches made ever more precarious to wind throw now the crown is opened out. The strongest part of the canopy is the cultural ring graft, where branches grown into others form a continuous brace.
Djaara Timbers, on behalf of Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation, have salvaged the fallen parts of the tree to honour the gift of her timber through its best use. Some will be carved, some returned for habitat, for sculpture, for memorials. That material is being distributed through community. We have been meeting, carving and sharing. The old tree is bringing community together as ever. An exhibition of the work and our process will launch in NAIDOC week at Castlemaine Art Museum.
Craft practice is for Dja Dja Wurrung, as indeed for all people, a way of navigating by tradition. Tools, techniques, trade. Country embodied in the materials of our work. For settlers in this place sitting with the loneliness for cultural country connection there is a beautiful lead in here. Everyone can pick up the craft practices of their ancestry. Of course, such is the genius of Garland magazine’s offering.
You’ll hear mob say that story can never be lost because it lives in country. Story is country. Craft can offer a little glimpse at understanding this for anyone. The mind alone doesn’t have what’s needed. It can know about something but can’t know something. The body is needed to know something. It’s by relationship. By Feeling. Craft by its nature always responsive to the materials by which it’s made. It’s more of a collaboration with those material essences. Industry and art endlessly bend material to our will.
Whichever material of making you choose will have propensities to be attentive to. It will have a way. It’s for something. A gift of country to meet our human need. And an opportunity for our tending in kind.
In some not so hypothetical post apocalyptic world, how long would it take for people to remember to fashion a garment from fur? To tan leather? To carve wood? While we can’t help but look over that civilisational collapse precipice, we, in this place, are not quite there yet. You could pick up a knapping stone like flint or tachylite and even if only applying the best information that Google could offer, that stone, by attentiveness and curiosity will show you how to find the blade. The knowledge lives in the stone. Of course, if someone has that generational knowledge, you’ll get there quicker. And there’ll be a whole bunch less non-consensual stone smashing.
When we are crafting well, our hands work as for our ancestors.
That little practical lead in opens out in so many ways. When we are crafting well, our hands work as for our ancestors. We are sitting in their place. The patterns of mind that come of the work is where it can get really interesting. That should not be described, though. It’s a knowledge earned.
Let’s not be naive that this craft cultural commons lead in has anything touching the depth time, place based commune of Aboriginal people and country. It is a glimpse or maybe a stepping stone.
A little story snippet of my morning, the day after the tree failed.
I got there a half hour before mob and then council showed up to make a plan for what was to be done. A moment for me to just sit with the old Biyal and get a feel for what had happened. In that half hour, multiple others did their own version of the same. An impromptu ceremony of sorts. They come to sit with the tree. Some were private with their tears, their grief. Some wanted, even needed to tell stories of their trees’ place in their lives. Stories spanning generations. In my work at the tree in the days and weeks following, that pattern of people coming to sit repeated over and again. A quiet attentiveness in common.
Words like sacred are hollowed out now. Over- and misused to the point where the very real meaning hides from sight.
The concept itself is shy of too much attention.
Yes, the human propensity for reverence remains.
The Guildford tree is hallowed ground yet.
Objects made from Biyal will be displayed in an exhibition at Castlemaine Art Museum in 2026.
About Pete McCurley
Pete McCurley is a craftsperson of Ngarabul-Gumbaynggirr / Gaelic heritage who lives in Dja Dja Wurrung country (Daylesford), Victoria, Australia. He runs a small custom timber mill called Curly Timbers, where he processes high-quality Australian timber, primarily sourced through salvage: storm-felled trees, council removals, and farm burn piles. His work goes beyond traditional woodworking by treating materials as sentient gifts, reflecting the deep, continuous relationship between his people and the environment. He frames his carving and making as a collaborative process, offering a pathway for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to understand better the embodied knowledge held within the landscape. Follow @curlytimbers
