Today it feels like spring: the breeze is balmy, the sun shines warm and welcoming, birds cheep and flutter in the bountiful hedges, and the sap rises audibly in tree, plant and weed.
It’s amazing how much of a psychological lift you get when all is blissful and blithe and new life is popping out all over the place. At Corner Cottage, the doors and windows were all flung wide to usher forth the musty winter fug and we set about the place with vacuum cleaner and mop. What do you know – we were doing real spring cleaning!
Then we took off to a little farm outside town to pick up pinecones, which make excellent eco-friendly fire starters and are, of course, free.
While there, I fell to wondering about the large, rusty relics of old machinery that lie about the place. They look like they’ve been there a while, and as they slowly settle into the landscape, they have the look of ossified dinosaur remains, returning to the swamp by infinitesimal degrees until transmogrifying over the aeons into oil.
And oil, in fact, is what they’re all about. They’re the vestiges of an industry that once thrived hereabouts, and has its roots, quite literally, in the very soil of the region – eucalyptus oil.
This continent’s ancient aboriginal inhabitants made great use of the essential oils available in the flora they came to know so intimately over the millennia, and the numerous powers of eucalyptus – it’s antiseptic, an expectorant, and analgesic, for a start – made it a central part of their pharmacopeia.
And the pale-skinned convicts and settlers who arrived in the late 18th Century no doubt appreciated its ability to soothe sunburn. In fact, the principal surgeon of the First Fleet which arrived in 1788, John White, seized on the potential of the pungent plant, distilling a phial or two (well, a quarter of a pint, or 142.0653 ml) which he sent back to England with rave reviews.
With encouragement from Baron Sir Ferdinand Jacob Heinrich von Mueller, KCMG — government botanist for Victoria — commercial distillation started in Dandenong, in 1852 and, after the gold rush subsided, eucalyptus oil production took hold in the 1870s. It received a huge boost after 1909 when the phellandrene fraction was discovered to be efficacious in refining mineral ores – further driving demand as the mining industry grabbed all they could.
During the first world war, Aussie soldiers carried eucalyptus oil as part of their first aid kits, and during the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1919, global demand soared. By the mid-‘30s, Kangaroo Island off the coast of Victoria had 48 stills employing over 600 people, with much of the production going to the mining industry. Today, Australia is a net importer of the oil – a certain irony give its origins here.
Now, for someone who failed the most basic level of schoolboy chemistry, the deeper technicalities of all this are perceived as through a glass, darkly – but what I can relate is that eucalyptus oils are a blend of terpenes, which I believe are the aromatic compounds particularly present in plants like cannabis, lavender and orange peel. A number of different tree species can contain the oils we now call eucalyptus, as well as many other oils of the same family – think tea tree, for example.
Research reveals that eucalyptus oil can combat dandruff, cure halitosis, soothe insect stings and repel rodents. And Terpinene-4-ol, which is found in eucalyptus, can be used to create modern miracle material graphene.
Be that as it may, this is all mere background to those fascinating iron hulks on the farm. While it’s true that Victoria was the centre of production, New South Wales also had a pretty good go. And for this region (Queanbeyan-Palerang), an interesting report outlines the state of the industry in 1951.
Interestingly, at the time “many of the distillers were post-war migrants from central Europe, who found the independence of the industry attractive.” And we know from local history that the original developer of our particular farm was indeed of central European origin, who spent his last cent on securing the land.
Many of the stills hereabouts were small, basic ones, including the remains you see here. They needed to be close to a billabong (getting into the lingo, folks) and with a ready supply of leaf. But this crude production method was very labour-intensive and seasonal in that the water supply would dry up in rainless summers – and the quality of the resulting oil was low, requiring extra purification, which drove up the cost.
Around this time it became clear that the industry was unsustainable, as demand for the land for other, more profitable uses – like sheep- or cattle-raising or forestry for timber – grew. The few stills that survive work essentially as a side-gig to forestry.
We could get maudlin about a once-thriving industry that has pretty much passed into history, but that would be sentimental and naive. In fact, the work was back-breaking and not very profitable, and while the product is still as useful and versatile as ever, it’s cheaper to bring it in from China.
There’s talk that eucalyptus could provide the basis for a new generation of jet fuel, which is a tantalising thought – commercial aircraft free of dandruff and stiff joints? Sign me up! Until then, there’s no better fragrance for the spring-cleaned cottage than the sharp, leafy aroma of Aussie eucalyptus — even if it’s imported from China.