The sandalwood tree

00:00 Eliza Herbert: Bush Heritage acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the places in which this podcast was recorded and in which we live, work and play. We recognise the enduring relationships they have with their land and waters and pay our deepest respects to elders past and present.

00:16 Richard McLellan: I guess the smell of Sandalwood, you know, you might think it is a smell that you might get in perfumes or soaps, but really it's the smell of the earth. It's the smell of the natural world.

00:28 Clinton Farmer: It's sweet. I love that. I'll never get sick of it. You know, growing up, smelling it, and it’s my own special tree.

00:36 Richard McLellan: You smell a bit of Sandalwood that is freshly broken off. A piece of trunk or something, or some deadwood lying in the ground. It might have been laying in the ground for years. It'll still have this amazing smell from the earth that really puts you in contact with the natural world, with the wild, and there is just nothing else like it.

00:53 Clinton Farmer: It's been part of our culture for generations. I look at myself as a custodian for it. When we harvest it, it’s done in a sustainable way.

01:05 Eliza Herbert: I have to confess that before this episode, I didn't know that much about Sandalwood. I recognised the smell from incenses and perfumes, but as a tree, what was its history? What would it mean if it was lost? What I learned was that the Australian Sandalwood tree, with its scrambling canopy and shrubby leaves, holds more meaning than I ever could have imagined. 

You're listening to Big Sky Country, a podcast by Bush Heritage Australia. I'm your host, Elisa Herbert. Today we take you to the Birriliburu Indigenous Protected Area in Western Australia to ask what is the ecological and cultural value of Sandalwood? How is it going in the wild, and what makes this tree so worthy of protection?

02:08 Clinton Farmer: My name is Clinton Farmer. I'm Martu and I am Mandildjara from the Gibson Desert area. That's my tribe, Mandildjara tribe. Now my dad got his license to harvest when I was born in 1977, he wanted our people, our families, to continue to stay connected to country. He wanted to create employment. And being on country is healing for us. You know, being back on country just gives me inspiration to keep on going. You know, just remembering the old people there. How it was in living the desert nomadic lifestyle. You know they've  done it harder and they survived, you know, because they had that strong relationship with the land and it was a two-way relationship. That we had a spiritual connection to it. And we looked after it and the land knew its people and the land in turn looked after us, you know.

02:59 Eliza Herbert: Clinton's country makes up part of the Birriliburu Indigenous Protected Area, which stands over 6.6 million hectares in WA's central deserts.

03:08 Clinton Farmer: For Martu culture, it's part of our culture. It's a special tree to us, like all plants and animals, Sandalwood is special to our culture, it's their medicine. When the old people used to burn it on the fire, it calmed the mind, you know. And they had a special song when there was rain coming. Because the old people living in nomadic lifestyle, they didn't have no clothes and they didn't like the rain. So, they used to use the Sandalwood to burn, to make the clouds go away. The seed, they would usually crush it up and use it to make medicine. If there's a cut or spear wound, any sort of infection, they used the seed to crush it up, grind it on the grinding stone and put it on the wound. You know, it's very special to our culture.

03:57 Eliza Herbert: Further west, another man has a strong connection to Sandalwood. Richard McClellan has been researching how Sandalwood is bearing in the wild as part of his PhD with Charles Sturt University.

04:12 Richard McLellan: My first steps in this research was I just wanted to read and read and read as much as I could about Sandalwood, and because my impressions when I, certainly when I went to the Bush Heritage reserves and started looking at the populations of. Sandalwood, you know, suddenly realising I'm not seeing any young trees. I'm only seeing old trees. And so, I thought, what's going on here?

04:31 Eliza Herbert: One of the things you should know about Australian Sandalwood is that it is the most commercially valuable tree in Australia can sell for more than $17,000 a tonne and has become a booming pillar of the Western Australian forestry industry since settlers arrived and realized the plant had similar qualities to Indian Sandalwood which had been used in Asia for centuries.

04:52 Richard McLellan: Probably in the last 175 years, there's been over half a million tonnes of Sandalwood that has been harvested and exported, mostly for incense, but now also for perfumes and cosmetic products and some pharmaceuticals. And that amounts to millions of trees where people have gone into the bush and just looked for the Sandalwood trees and nothing else. And they just pulled those Sandalwood trees out of the ground and taken them away to market.

05:18 Eliza Herbert: So, Richard began monitoring the Sandalwood trees at Bush Heritage’s Charles Darwin, Hamlin station and Eurardy reserves in WA's western rangelands to find out what its role was in the ecosystem.

05:29 Richard McLellan: I've had camera traps out for a couple of years. I've had a couple of years of doing timed observations where I just sit and watch a tree for an hour or four hours or something and just see who comes and goes and what they're doing. 

Basically, we're finding that it's a host plant to a whole range of species. We've found heaps of birds, about 80 species of birds. We've found reptiles. We've found mammals that like to use it for one reason or another, for shelter or for food or something along those lines. And really, it's a key part of the ecosystem. You know, a Splendid Fairywren might come in, and it might be a female, and then suddenly there'll be a male there and two other juveniles, and they'll all be scurrying around looking for stuff. Or it might be a family of white-browed babblers, and they'll be coming in and they're just so active and so busy and so enthralled about trying to scratch the litter around and see what they can find in the litter. Some insects or spiders or grasshoppers or something.

06:33 Eliza Herbert: The Sandalwood tree in question is Australian Sandalwood, or Santalum spicatum, as it is known by its scientific name and it is a hemi parasite. That means it derives some of its nutrients from other plants, such as surrounding trees called host trees. It also produces a huge amount of high-quality litter, which explains all the insects and grubs that are making use of the nutrients which then attracts lots of birds, reptiles and even mammals. But among this hive of activity, Richard found two very important animals were missing.

07:05 Richard McLellan: Boodies and Woylies, they're both Burrowing Bettongs. They've both been pretty much exterminated across the range of Sandalwood and they used to go and collect the fruit from underneath the trees and take them away and bury them. And in that sort of caching sort of activity, a bit like a squirrel, some of those seeds wouldn't get rediscovered by the Boodies and the Woylies and they would germinate alongside a host plant but the Boodies and Woylies got wiped out about 100 years ago, 80 years ago, partly by a bounty on the Boodies, but also partly by introduction of cats and foxes and land clearing and a whole range of other factors. And so, they disappeared. And so, no one's been picking the fruit up from underneath the tree and taking away and burying it alongside a host plant so that one action alone has stopped the Sandalwood from recruiting.

7:56 Eliza Herbert: The result? A domino effect of species decline.

08:00 Richard McLellan: You lose the Boodies and Woylies, then you start losing the Sandalwood. And if you lose the Sandalwood, you'll start losing all these critters that are coming into the Sandalwood communities to get the nectar when they're flowering or to get the fruit when they're dropping fruit. With that, we'll be seeing the Sandalwood go. We'll be seeing other things starting to go as well that might have other roles that they are pollinating other plants or whatever at the same time. So, it's a classic death by a thousand cuts.

08:35 Eliza Herbert: But the absence of Boodies and Woylies is just one part of the problem plaguing Sandalwood trees, while many Sandalwood populations are flowering and producing seeds, that's not enough. When it does germinate, it's often eaten by animals such as goats, sheep, cows, rabbits and kangaroos, and its decline is further influenced by the impacts of climate change. Without sufficient rainfall, Sandalwood doesn't grow. With all these factors combined, Richard is yet to see regeneration of young plants. That's why he's made a significant call. He believes Sandalwood is going extinct in the wild.

09:11 Richard McLellan: I think the biggest thing is when you walk into a patch of bush where there are Sandalwood, all the Sandalwood trees are old, you know, they're all. It's like walking into an aged people's home and some of them look, you know, as if they haven't got lot, not much longer to live. And so that's how it feels when you walk into a Sandalwood population. There are no young people in there. There are no young trees. There are no saplings and there are no seedlings and they've been no seedlings and saplings produced for 80 or 100 years. So, it's an old trees’ home full of very old trees.

09:47 Eliza Herbert: And the oldest Sandalwood trees of all estimated to be between 250 and 300 years old, are found on Clinton's country. This is how Richard and Clinton came to meet. Keen to ground truth his research across a broader range, Richard said off on what he's named the Great Sandalwood transect. Over seven weeks he and his supervisor, Professor David Watson surveyed Sandalwood at 12 sites across a 1500 km arc from the Gibson Desert to Shark Bay. The first stop, the Birriliburu IPA.

10:19 Stella Shipway: As you're going along the Gunbarrel highway, you're kind of weaving in and out of the Birriliburu IPA.

10:25 Eliza Herbert: That was Stella Shipway, Bush Heritage’s Healthy Country Manager for the western deserts and the link that brought Richard and Clinton together.
10:33 Stella Shipway: Yeah, it's beautiful. There's lots of like big sand plain, spinifex country. As you're going through you also hit what people call the MCG, which is this big Oval that people used to play a lot of footy on and it's also an area where they used to have an old Sandalwood camp.

10:51 Eliza Herbert: After a conversation with Richard about Sandalwood, Stella took Richard's plight to both Clinton and the Mungarlu Ngurrarankatja Rirraunkaja Aboriginal Corporation, and they invited him to go out and have a look at the Sandalwood that was going out near Mungilli on Martu country.

11:05 Clinton Farmer: And Mungilli, it's a really special place. Its land belonged to my grandmother on my mum's side. You just go past the last station, which is Carnagie, and then you enter into our homeland and then and now I'm getting close here.

11:26 Stella Shipway: The whole aim was to find as many Sandalwood trees as possible and measure them and collect as much data as we could.

11:35 Richard McLellan: We saw trees that we didn't see anywhere else, and we saw the oldest, biggest trees that we saw anywhere, and we also saw the youngest, smallest trees that we saw anywhere. So, it was fantastic that Clinton really reveres these parent trees, these mother trees, that are the biggest and oldest and still producing lots of seed. And he sees them as being, you know, the custodians, the guardians of the future of Sandalwood and they're not to be harvested.

12:07 Stella Shipway: It's amazing to see kind of two sides of the stories and to learn about Sandalwood or learn about country from two different perspectives. So, you know often we'd be looking at things and Clinton and Katrina and Leathan would be, you know, talking about the Martu names and the Martu traditional uses for something and then it would be David and Richard, you know, talking about the scientific name.

12:34 Richard McLellan: So how many of these have you got?

12:35 Clinton Farmer: We got, I got a few all around here, mostly on the West side.

12:37 Richard McLellan: Have you?

12:42 Stella Shipway: Where we are as an Australian society and, you know, scientists and stuff that everybody should be doing work together and it should always be like a collaborative effort. If you call it right-way-science or two-way science or whatever you want to call it, it's yeah, we should always be consulting traditional owners. It's making your science better and it's better for the whole of the natural environment in general to be working together and you're gaining so much more.

13:15 Richard McLellan: I think the most inspiring thing about going out to Martu Country was just seeing and listening, I guess sitting, you know. It wasn't even when we were out looking at Sandalwood. What was most inspiring was often when we were sitting around the campfire and talking and talking about, you know, we talk about his father and where his father had harvested Sandalwood in the past and he would show me some beautiful bits of Sandalwood and talk about, you know, how he feels holding that wood and you know how he feels about what's happening to Sandalwood in terms of its exploitation or over-exploitation and how he's concerned about the future of the species going forward.

14:04 Eliza Herbert: And that's the big question. People like Richard and Clinton are asking. Where to from here?

14:09 Clinton Farmer: I'd like to, you know, have the whole area replanted, to do a lot of regeneration work. So we can, you know, keep the species going strong. Because of it's being over-harvested and there's not a good story with the over-harvesting. And we want to work towards bringing the population back strong, you know, so it's not harvested out, because it's special to us, we want to keep it there for the future generation. Because it's special to us and we could work together on the same vision, you know, make it happen and I think it's a special work and it's good to have people who have the same mindset. To work with them who are really enthusiastic about it, so that you know, we can keep the environment and the land and animals. Keep it special, as you know, as it has been for thousands of years. So that it's there for the future generation.

15:25 Clinton Farmer: I think as we work together, it's going to be a really special and important work that we're going to continue that journey on.

16:37 Richard McLellan: Yeah, in an ideal world, I think Western Australian government, in particular, has earned a lot of money from Sandalwood. They still earn a lot of money from Sandalwood now and I think it's pretty time that they put the money back into Sandalwood and they could do that by supporting Aboriginal ranger teams to collect seed, to plant seed and to nurture young plants through proactive watering and prevention of grazing going forward. And so we'd start seeing Sandalwood come back into the country where we know it's only dying out.

16:13 Eliza Herbert: It might be a complex fate for Sandalwood. But the more that I listen and learn, the more it seems its continued protection is absolutely worth it.

16:21 Richard McLellan: I think to my mind, it's going to take a lot of work and a lot of investment to keep Sandalwood in the will, but it's absolutely going to be worth it. I know that one of the best experiences I had when I was doing the great Sandalwood Transect was when we were leaving Mungilli and leaving Martu country. On the last morning, Clinton called me over and he threw some Sandalwood chips into the fire. And once it started really smoking before it lit up. He, you know, he said get into the smoke and he said it's good for your well-being and it'll clear your head and make you feel good before your journey today, and it'll help you work. And it's good for you. And so, we all got into that smoke and had a good lungful, and I thought this is why we should work hard to protect Sandalwood. It's not just about the ecological value and that plants and animals that have an association with Sandalwood, it's about all of us. It's about people and the planet.

17:30 Eliza Herbert: Big Sky Country is a podcast by Bush Heritage Australia, a conservation not-for-profit, that buys and manages land and partners with Aboriginal people to protect our irreplaceable landscapes forever. To learn more about our work, sign up to our newsletter. 

Special thanks to Clinton Farmer, and our doyen of Sandalwood, Richard McClellan and Charleston University, our Healthy Country manager, Stella Shipway and of course the Birriliburu Rangers and the Mungarlu Ngurrarankatja Rirraunkaja Aboriginal Corporation for sharing their country with us. 

This episode was produced by Kate Thorburn and myself, Eliza Herbert with advice from Liz King. The theme music is “Invertebrate City” by the Orbweavers, and audio was mixed by Mitch Ansell.