The Feel of a Word: mallee

Mallee is a term used for any of various eucalypts which have a distinctive habit of growth – the branches all shoot from close to the ground springing from a common base called a lignotuber. It is as if the tree keeps its trunk underground where it swells, forming a supply of starch to the foliage above ground. This is thought to be an adaptation to fire. The lignotuber is known as the ‘mallee root’ and presented a huge obstacle to settlers wishing to farm mallee land because of the difficulty of digging it out.

The first mention of mallee comes from Victoria where the immense area stretching from Victoria into South Australia and covered with this kind of vegetation was identified in the Mallee Pastoral Leases Act of 1883 as ‘the mallee country'. It was also known as the Great Mallee Scrub or Country or Region or Desert. The word mallee is thought to have been borrowed from the language Wembawemba spoken in western Victoria. The particular tree growing in this region was Eucalyptus dumosa, or white mallee.

Before its official recognition settlers had become aware of the mallee as a feature of the landscape. Properties were advertised as having the Mallee as one boundary. People feared being lost in it  because, as one writer said, ‘there can be few more terrifying experiences than losing one’s way in this kind of country’.  Thomas Wood Cobbers, 1934.

In Robbery Under Arms Captain Starlight plans his escape route through the mallee: There are tracks through the endless mallee scrub, only known to the tribes in the neighbourhood … Sir Ferdinand and his troopers might just as well hunt for a stray Arab in the deserts of the Euphrates.’

It was also known to the settlers that Aboriginals knew how to get water from the lignotubers. The explorer Ernest Giles described this in his account of his journeys into the bush (1889), commenting that white men had no idea which tree to pick but an Aboriginal, having seemingly not given a glance to the scrub, would suddenly pick out a particular tree and uncover a root which might be ten metres long. ‘He breaks the root into sections about a foot long, ties them into bundles, and stands them up on end in a receptacle, when they drain out a quantity of beautifully sweet, pure water.’

The mallee root was much prized as firewood, giving out an intense heat with very little sparks or wastage. William Dick in A Bunch of Ratbags (1965) tells the story of a boyhood triumph in snagging some mallee roots from a passing train to give his family firewood:

You bloody beauty! The hook dragged off a very large mallee root and brought two others crashing down on to the tracks with it. I quickly dragged in my hook with a bit of difficulty, and dropped it to the ground to hide it from the guard in the guard’s van at the end of the train.

The guard’s van came into view and the guard waved to me and I smiled and waved back. He hadn’t seen the mallee roots, Wacker, I thought.

After the train had gone, I climbed over the fence and rolled the three mallee roots into the gutter near our house. I had no hope of getting them over the fence so I had to undo the rope and hook and hide them, and sit guard over the mallee roots until my old man came home. Then I called out, “hi, Pa, come and see what fell off one of the railway trucks this arvo!”

The mallee was hard going for stock and horses, and animals which took off into the mallee were rarely recovered.  A mallee bull differed from its placid and overfed cousin grazing on settled pastures by being lean and fit, surviving on the thin grass available to it.  Thus we acquired the phrase fit or strong as a mallee bull.  You had to be tough to survive in the mallee.

So while the mallee broke your heart and broke your back, people had, and still have, a respect for it. Life in the mallee is a story of survival. The terrain is an obstacle and a danger, but it also has a strange beauty.