The Feel of a Word: forest

The English word forest comes to us from French and is a short form of the medieval Latin forestem silvam which translates as ‘the outside  wood’ – silva is a wood, forestem means ‘outside’.  That is to say, it is the wood outside the walls of the park, the enclosed area of open space and woodland used by the lord of the manor to maintain animals, such as deer and other game, for hunting. The park was recreational land maintained for the private use of the rich and powerful.  The forest outside was wild.

The forest in Australian English is in very general terms a large stand of trees. It can be open forest in which the trees are spaced apart with open terrain between them, or dense forest in which they are close together with thick underbrush between them, the most extreme form of this being rainforest. Whatever it is, for farming purposes it has always needed to be cleared.

Frank Dalby Davidson gives us an insight into a character in his novel The Wells of Beersheba in this way:

“He’ll have a fine place some day – if he ever gets the land cleared.” That’s what people said of him, practical people who had selected in open forest country, or, at most, had selections that were part forest and part scrub.

Forest was always more friendly than ‘the bush’, more manageable, more civilised. It could be admired from afar. You could ride through it on horseback if it was open forest. And it wasn’t too difficult to clear it for agriculture and other productive pursuits.

As with bush, we have some very early expressions of regret that the forest is disappearing.  Charles Thomspon wrote in 1826 in his biography Wild Notes from the Lyre of a Native Minstrel:

When I was a pupil at Castlereagh Seminary, the extensive valley, spreading from the foot of the hill to the Nepean river, was robed in its native beauty, and covered with forest; but since the formation of clearing gangs, that forest has been cut down.

The general term forest most commonly occurs with the type of tree that is characteristic of the forest specified, as in cedar forest, mulga forest, mangrove forest, paperbark forest, etc., and our expectation of forest trees is that they are tall or stately or lofty, or at least big.

But of course a pine forest or state forest conjures up an entirely different picture of non-native trees in serried ranks with a dead carpet of pine needles between them.

The word forest also operates as an item of poetic language in which case it is often dark or gloomy, and is something that exists in our imaginations where it has continuity with an inherited English aesthetic.  It is the word of choice for Henry Kendall who wrote:

And I long, in this city, for woodland and grove,

And the peace of a wild forest home.

Here again we have the familiar image in Australian culture of the city slicker dreaming of life in the bush.  Because it is poetry the dream image is of a ‘wild forest home’.

But workaday reality for Australians lies in the plain prose of the bush.