The Tree in Changing Light

by Roger McDonald

A beautiful and bestelling meditation on trees

Because a tree bloomed seasonally we felt its body like our own. A tree stood still and yet suffered change. A tree growing old grew down into itself. Trees could not heal wounds, only cover them up. Trees were magnificent survivors. Trees got used. Trees behaved erratically under stress. Trees strove to fulfill an ideal shape but were twisted out of it by pressures of existence.

In The Tree In Changing Light, Roger McDonald meditates on our unique landscape and its rich tapestry of native and introduced trees, which 'give language to our existence'. His most intimate and personal book to date, it also celebrates country men like his grandfather Chester Bucknall, a forester and pine-planter, of whom he writes, 'I believe him to have been a dreamer about trees'; Wilf Crane, Roger McDonald's mentor with trees who flew planes across country on solo planting raids and whose death while flying inspired this book; and Tom Wyatt, a bush gardener whose dedicated hands made trees bloom in Queensland towns.

Here too are historical vignettes of a landscape husbanded for many centuries by Australian Aboriginals, yet swiftly and irrevocably changed by European settlement; encounters with poets and painters inspired by trees; tales of ordinary people for whom trees are talismanic; and interwoven throughout are autobiographical sketches, slices of family history and episodes from Roger McDonald's own life as a writer and sometime planter of trees.

An unusual and beautiful book, The Tree In Changing Light,is the moving and personal statement of a writer about his relationship with the land, with language, with memory and with Australia's cultural and literary heritage.

Genres: Environment, Nonfiction

177 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is so much to love about this book.  The first essay 'Planting Out' is an homage in poetic prose to the hopeful tree-planters among us, which reminded me of excursions with the Year 5 & 6 classes, placing seedling tubes in furrows on Landcare projects:

...the planter dropping to the knee, or to both knees in a quick unconscious plea for life backed by a dirty finger-nailed routine of plastic casing off, naked root shaft palmed this way or that, then into the ground, a  bit rough, planting out was all like that. (p.3)

But 'Where the Fire Has Been' begins with a shocking image:

At the back of childhood, long before I was born, my mother ran alongside a paling fence with wet potato sacks, beating out flames that rushed through the grass towards her parents' farmhouse.  Her mother was ill inside the house and her father was away fighting the fire on another front where it was expected to be worse. Overhead the sky was a dense, scrolled blue, with ash and cinders raining down. Across the eucalypts at the far end of the paddocks orange sheets of flame shot up and exploded into leaf-heads of volatile oil in a crown fire.  It had leapt the Glenelg River and only my mother was there to save the house. (p.11)

McDonald goes on to write about his grandfather Charles Bucknall, a forester who became a parson.  McDonald became a forester too, when as a young man he didn't quite know what he wanted to be.  A school counsellor tried to set him straight, telling him that forestry being science-based meant that being a forester had nothing to do with a love of dank earth, long shadows, banks of trees on a river bend, nor or deep, dark recesses of stillness and peace where I could take my adolescent longings and sink into oblivion. 

His aptitudes as we now know, lay elsewhere... with words.

I became the first person on my father's side of the family to go to university, became a teacher, worked in broadcasting.  I worked as a book editor.  Nothing felt settled until I started writing novels and found myself living back in the country again. (p.20-21)

We fortunate readers are the beneficiary of that decision.

There are wonderful pen portraits of men McDonald has known, such as Tom Wyatt in 'Bush Gardener'. Tom was a pioneer in organic weed control and responsible for planting thousands of trees in Rockhampton, and there is a poignant homage to a dying friend in 'the Park'.  His essay 'Trees without Names' about the painter Tom Carment sent me to his website where I could see the truth of what McDonald had written:

Tom never cared about the names of trees, never minded how trees were otherwise  defined, what their botanical names were, or why they grew where they grew, or how.  He remembered Krishnamurti's guiding idea from the age of eighteen, when he first read it: 'When you name something you think you've seen it.' The light around the trees he painted had an emotional content, he said, and that was what it was for him.

It was interesting.  He could no more give a name to that emotional content than he could give a name to the trees. (p.66)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/06/25/t...

[Neale · Rating 4 out of 5]

There doesn't seem to be much of a tradition of Australian 'nature writing' in prose. I was delighted to find this book, quite by chance, by an author whose fiction has struck me as admirable but a little underwhelming.

It's an exemplary exercise in evocation: part scientific treatise, part unsentimental landscape painting (like a Heysen, without the golden glow), part family history and personal memoir and farmer's diary. The patchwork form is ideal, if maybe a little overextended. It's an essay in the true sense, trying out lots of different approaches to its subject. And the title is perfect...

[Helen O'Toole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetical & lyrical naturalistic writing. A deeply felt homage to the beauty, majesty & necessity of trees especially in Australia. Also many interesting discussions such as respect for the indigenous practices that used fire to keep the undergrowth under control plus the stories of his own return to the land & his love of writing. Read in my hometown of Williamstown where the majestic trees along the beachfront and the gardens must be over 100 years old. A genuine treasure of a book and the wood engravings by Rosalind Atkinson are exquisite.