So I did. And that’s how we came to fall in with Neil, the tax accountant, and meet Humpy the croc-wrestler, and find an Arab-Israeli war underway on the banks of the Fitzroy River.

5 Umpie Bong

Five
 
Umpie Bong

‘Now that,’ I said, the moment I clapped eyes on my first ever specimen of Boab, ‘is what you call a friendly tree.’

I don’t think I meant much more than that I was elated to find a tree at last that I could recognize without help, and would, I was sure, on pain of death be able to recognize again. But it’s also possible that some profound botanical intuition had worked within me or that there’d been a deep and silent telepathy between plant and man, because I found out later that agreeableness even to benevolence was indeed the crowning virtue of the Boab. It was Ernestine Hill’s The Great Australian Loneliness which provided the corroborative, if somewhat florid, account:

A Caliban of a tree, a grizzled, distorted old goblin with a girth of a giant, the hide of a rhinocerous, twiggy fingers clutching at empty air, and the disposition of a guardian angel – such is Kimberley’s baobab, friendly ogre of the great North-west. Food for his hunger, water for his thirst, a house to live in, fibre to clothe him, fodder for his flocks, a pot of beer, a rope to hang him, and a tombstone when he is dead – these are the provisions of the baobab for man. In all nature there is no ally so kindly, with the possible exception of the coconut palm.

(No – in Queensland we had to dodge the coconut palm, in terror of its bounty. Short of sunbathing in a crash helmet, how do you lie on a Queensland beach and ‘Beware the falling coconuts’?)

Andansonia gregorii, first cousin to the African monkey-bred, the ‘boab’, as it is familiarly known, belongs to a zone of 1,000 square miles skirting the coast between Broome and the Victoria River. Magnificent specimens are to be seen in the streets of Derby, and along the banks of the Fitzroy and the Ord, and between those rivers and the sea it grows in profusion, the dominant personality of the bush . . .