Welcome to Forest Leaves

Left: My Aunt Dorrie and Uncle John, perfectly attired for tennis in the 1930s At my first meeting as a newly elected committee member of...

If there is one thing nobody likes, it is an unexpected phone call in the middle of the night. They never seem to bring good news. I...

Inspired by the rescue of the schoolboy soccer team from a flooded cave in Thailand in 2018, I decided to re-read The Entombed Miner by...

It is surprising how few people you meet over the course of the years who are universally liked. Even the most popular men and women seem...

Like most young people of my generation, I grew up knowing about war. I was born in 1941, the darkest year of the Second World War, and...

I have been privileged to work with, and to observe a lot of highly skilled bushmen in my time. Men who could shear a sheep, put up a...

In a paper written earlier this year in the wake of the 2009 Victorian bushfire disaster, I drew a pointed analogy. The failed and...

The days have been very hot at Gwambygine recently, and after a morning in the orchard or slashing weeds or pruning my trees, I usually...

I worked as a forester and lived in Northcliffe and Pemberton, deep in the karri country, for many years between 1962 and 1975. It was a...

The bush crowea (Crowea angustifolia) is one of my favourite wildflowers. It comes away in an abundance in the karri forest after a...

There was one amusing incident in the otherwise ghastly affair of the 2016 Yarloop bushfire (in which a whole town was burned). A crew of...

In my book about the 1978 Cyclone Alby storm and bushfire crisis, there is a story about Albany trees. I like the story because it...

I have mentioned before in these chronicles those little episodes in my life when I brushed up against a famous scientist, author or...

On the long flight home from Kununurra recently, I was thinking about the recently departed Barry Wilson with whom I had worked closely...

“Who’d want to work in the bush?” a young bloke said to me the other day, “it’s too boring.” The young bloke was involved in something to...

The recent death of York identity Walter King brought to my mind a fascinating story told to me by Walter many years ago. I knew Walter...