CMM remembers an Australian novelist once writing that settler society, at least of the Anglo-European kind, did not grasp the gum tree, that oak (unless it was pine) dreaming was in its genes. It was nonsense then, that it is nonsense now, demonstrated by the lovely new addition to Marnie Hughes Warrington’s chronicle of the rebuilding of ANU.

The university DVC writes about what makes the Australian National University, so Australian – the thousands of native trees that adorn the campus, present and future.

One tree in particular anchors ANU in eternal Australia, a Yellow Box, “on the edge of my carpark”, which indigenous Australians long past scarred to record its role in their lives on what is now the campus. “We can touch a tree, craft a tree, and it will tell the story of our connection long after we are gone. Trees are not just connected to us in the past; they are important markers for the future,” she writes.