Boundary Trees
Created: 2020-10-05 (12:00:00) — Modified: 2025-06-14 (08:15:46)Status: abandoned
For years, I intended to start a project documenting Canberra’s colonial history by way of its trees. Specifically, the great, gnarled, centuries-old remnant trees which used to mark the boundaries of settlers’ properties before the city itself was founded.
European explorers who arrived in Canberra in the early nineteenth century described a landscape of open plains alternating with hills, “furninshing the necessary timber for the construction of huts and sheep yards of magnitude” (Alan Cunningham, quoted in Sarah Ryan’s History of Canberra Nature Park). They settled the area over subsequent decades. Many land grants were for agriculture and timber felling, which very quickly degraded and denuded the landscape. One photo from the end of this period shows Black Mountain almost completely deforested.
Throughout, one particular kind of tree had a higher chance of being spared: those that marked the boundaries of settlers’ alotments. These trees served as reference points for surveyors, and were often scarred or marked with numbers in some way to indicate where one property ended and another began.
The landscape of Canberra today is again dense and green after a century’s worth of reforestation efforts, and direct action against further encroachments. Despite this the history of colonisation is still inscribed across the landscape, in the form of rotting fence posts, lengths of tangled wire, and erosion gullies, and boundary trees.
Pre-pandemic, I made some early progress in mapping out and visiting the remaining boundary trees. By this point several years later, the project can be considered decidedly abandoned.
References
- Ryan, Sarah, 2011, History of Canberra Nature Park, Office of the Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment
Endmatter
Tags: @abandoned @mapping @real-spaces
Return to: Ormulum