The Tree Without A Shadow

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 142, 18 June 1938, Page 3 (Supplement)

The Tree Without A Shadow

By--Edward Samuel

IN all the big department stores and stationers in Australia, on all the liners that ply across the seas, in London salons, and in little shops in our own suburbs, the poorest, the commonest and the shabbiest desert shrub in Australia so slight and starved that it cannot throw a shadow—is earning thousands of pounds for Australia. Long live the mulga, Cinderella of the bush. Biscuit barrels, ink wells, egg cups, ash trays, hand mirrors, vases, jewel boxes, a thousand delights of home, and the most engaging and lasting tokens of affection —the highly polished mulga shows the beauty of its grain colours that deepen from the pale yellow of sandalwood to the deep glow of red cedar. Nature's inlay, delicate yet vivid as a sea shell, as an ornamental wood it has eclipsed all others in public favour. The man who first turned it discovered a little gold mine. The whole centre of the continent is a mist of it. On the rim cf the coastal ranges, where the rich farm lands peter out in sand, the mulga begins—acacia aneura. the black sheep of the fa mil v. For the first century we knew onlv the virtue of those spikv, needle leaves —an unfailing fodder for hundreds of thousands of cattle and sheep and,

(•<•1 Juris when and where there is nothing i'lse for thein t<> eat. The blacks found it a good friend the wry little mulga apples were their favourite fruit, and, hard as nails and strong as steel, it made by far the best boomerangs and spears and coolainons that became family heirlooms everlasting. But the white man could find little promise there beyond the promise of gold, for the mulga grows on the rim of hell, and that is where gold is found. 1 he timber as such was looked upon as commercially worthless. Of no use to build boats: it was so heavy that it sank. Of no use to burn: it 'blackened in the fire. As stumps for a bough shade covered with spinifex, it was a standby, but it never moved out of its own country, and mulga was a byword—until •Jane Walker threw away her wooden leg. Jane Walker was the last old lubra of the Adelaide tribe, begging her way from house to house in the outer suburbs jears ago. A sound sleeper in her youth, her leg had been burned off below trie knee at the camp fire. One day a kindly woodturner —now one of the biggest manufacturers of mulga nniament>--t'>11 her to brinj in a log of wood and he would carve her

a leg. Jane brought along a solid block of mulga and the leg was duly delivered. It proved to be far too hard and rough for comfortabe wearing. She brought it back. Another was made of red gum, and that was a happier choice. A year or two passed. Jane's leg lay forgotten in the corner. The woodturner had taken up clerical work in the city. One day a Salvation Army captain living nearby lost the mouthpiece of his trombone. The woodturner proffered another. All he could find to fashion it from was Jane's old mulga leg. The beauty of the grain, the brilliant polish and the perfect curve of the mouthpiece gave him food foi thought. He turned an egg cup on his lathe—it was immediately snapped up hv a souveniring friend. He offered half a dozen to a city store. They were .-.ld in a twinkling. Then he gave up hi« city work and, to the bu«hman's amazement, sent a wood-cutting gang a thousand miles up into the centre of the Australian continent for a truckload of — mulga! To-day in a vast workshop, with the lathes whirring overtime, he makes 100 varieties of ornaments. His output alone runs into many thousands of pounds worth in the year, and five bi;r Adelaide firms have followed him into the mult:a trade, with their agents all over the centre of Australia and their markets all over the world. The despised mulpa has made him a well-to-do man. and now he raise- a : '•rateful glass "to Jane Walker's wooden leg." i