Mallee history — The Mallee Institute

The mallee forests hold their secrets. Animals and birds come and go, often silently and fleetingly. One steps over a fallen mallee trunk, then notices something distinctive about its surface - inscriptions which may be decades old. These are the marks left by the Longicorn borers. They are ancient creatures, and they have probably been in the mallee since it became a distinct part of the Australian vegetation, many thousands of years ago.

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The various mallee species are multi-trunked, stemming from ancient rootstock. Inevitably one of these trunks becomes weakened and lies on the forest floor. Longicorn beetles lay their eggs under the bark of theser recently fallen trunks. As the infant borers eat their way along the trunk’s surface, protected by the bark, their tracks soon expand, reaching up to 3 centimetres in width. These tracks artfully avoid others, resulting in an intriguing variety of paths and tracks.

The human eye is naturally drawn to these trails and tracks, partly because we humans are also track-makers and users, and have been so for countless millennia. Many of our highways and roads are formed from the ancient tracks of animals or our own human predecessors, across the world. The mallee itself is criss-crossed by the tracks of ants, wombats, kangaroos and goats, and was certainly traversed by Aboriginal people who knew it intimately.

You could say that the Longicorn borers have engraved these trunks with their own records of travel, encounters, avoidance, growth and finally, their exit as adult beetles, into the mallee forest…

After locating the engraved trunks, my first step is to make a graphite rubbing of the best and most interesting designs. I use a graphite pencil and paper which is flexible enough to wrap around the trunk. It may take several attempts before I have captured a design with sufficient detail….

Some graphite rubbings, showing the range of designs and tracks….

Making the art:

The graphite rubbings reveal a labyrinth of patterns and figures, often confusing enough. The challenge is firstly to discern the ‘figure in the carpet’, and then to add colour to the designs and patterns I perceive.

The next step is to make watercolour inks. These are all ‘brewed’ from mallee vegetation - initially by boiling over a mallee fire for a couple of hours, then reducing until its optimum colour is reached. The ink from each species has its own particular shade and bonds to the paper in different ways.

A painting can involve as many as 15 or 20 inks, often with a background wash. The result is both a record of the meanderings of the borers, and a meditative excursion into an imaginary realm of tracks and traces which we all explore on occasion…

Gallery - some completed works

These are just a few of the smaller works, ranging from 30-60cm in length. I have completed a number of much longer works from engraved trunks up to 3 metres in length. If any works appeal, feel free to contact me on philip.jones543@gmail.com I’ll add more to the gallery from time to time.