Scarred Trees and Ancient Knowledge
What Aboriginal trees can tell us about environmental preservation
Different trees used to flank the pathways connecting neighboring Aboriginal groups across southern and eastern Australia.
Gum trees. Bark trees. Stringybark. Swamp she-oak. Bangalay. Trees with thick fibrous bark and large trunks.
The first settlers and explorers to walk down those pathways (their descendants would soon appropriate them and turn them into roads) noticed trees that looked unlike the others.
They looked different.
There were gashes on their bark — elongated, precise, and regular in shape, with rounded ends and parallel sides, as if someone had carefully and methodically removed some of its layers, without, however, wanting to damage the tree. Gashes usually stopped above ground level. Some were small, others huge, up to three meters long.
The sapwood on the trunk was exposed. To the untrained European eye, they looked scarred.
They were scarred.
The process
