THE VANISHING WRITERS: The curious tale of the scribbles left behind

Start a blog, I told myself. Then you can write about anything you want.

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The idea was enticing, but the promise of writing about anything led very quickly to indecision and that led rather rapidly to no writing at all.

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Galaxies, immune cells, archaeological digs, neurons, human behaviour, string theory. Where to begin? Specialise, they say, and there is indeed wisdom in that. But part of the fun of this blog is the chance to explore, to tread new ground, to learn new things, to be amazed, puzzled, delighted, and to then share all of that.

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Indecision settled in and grew comfy. I became concerned. Was it really paralysing wonderment? Or was I just chicken?  It’s hard to tell some days, but I suspect it’s a bit of both.

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I went for a walk to figure it out and on my way I saw a tree. I slowed. I stopped. I took a good look at this tree I’d passed many times before without so much as a glance. Standing there, it became quite clear that if you want to explore the entire universe, you can start quite close to home. This tree had a story. It was, quite literally, scribbled all over it. The markings were rough beneath my fingertips, the author nowhere to be seen.

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A tale to decipher.

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A decision made.

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The universe starts here.

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(Actually it does, by the way. The universe starts everywhere, so this is as good a place as any.)

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So this is how the Luminous blog begins: with the story of a tree that took me more than 180 million years into the past.

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Let me explain.

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The eucalypts grow everywhere around here. This is Australia after all. This neighbourhood was carved out of bushland, and farmland that had once been bushland. But the creeks and the catchments were mostly left alone. There’s a path that winds through. It’s a little bit wild in there, a bit dangerous. It’s marshy in some places, dry in others. Trees tower, some leaning precariously, ready to fall. The underbrush is dense and beautiful. Venomous snakes hide in the tall grass and bulbous spiders dangle patiently on expansive webs.

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Some of the wildlife are more benign. There are rainbow lorikeets, kookaburras, and brush turkeys. Recently, I spied a wallaby. It regarded me for a moment then hopped away, almost dismissively. It’s summer now, and the cicadas are singing. They chorus in perfectly synchronised waves, the crests of which are deafening. It thrums in your chest and drowns out the human world. The cicadas are here because they rather like the eucalyptus trees. And the eucalypts, in turn, have brought something else: tiny, elusive writers.

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Australia is home to several hundred species of eucalypt. And it seems a modest variety make their home in this narrow stretch of wilderness. One of the most curious is the Scribbly Gum.

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The name Scribbly Gum actually refers to a cluster of different eucalypt species found on the eastern seaboard of Australia. Their common signature, as it were, are the scribbles all over their pale, smooth-barked trunks.

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These markings have become something of a national icon, weaving their way into Australian folklore and literature.

Australian poet Judith Wright once wrote

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                                                                                          The gum-tree stands by the spring
                                                                                          I peeled its splitting bark
                                                                                          And found the written track
                                                                                          Of a life I could not read.

 

The tiny writers are exquisitely shy, they leave their marks and vanish. They’re the elusive graffiti artists of the natural world. The work of beetles, was a common guess. Then, in 1934 the culprit was identified: a moth, scarcely a few millimetres big. A specimen was sent to England into the care of a school teacher named Edward Meyrick. Meyrick, himself, was a curious entity. An amateur entomologist, he had a remarkable hobby of describing, naming, and cataloguing insect species. Moths were a particular favourite. Over his lifetime, he bestowed carefully thought out scientific names to more than 14,000 of them. And so, with due care, he named this one Ogmograptis Scribula. Literally, the writer of the Ogam script. It’s said that he chose the name because the scribbles bore some resemblance to an ancient Celtic writing form called Ogam. There is also a second layer of meaning. Ogmos is not Celtic, it’s Greek; it means furrow – a groove or a narrow trench. When you look closely at the meandering lines on the scribbly gum, you’ll see that’s exactly what they are. For Meyrick, these strange patterns were unique. For all his expertise, his meticulous cataloguing of thousands of moth species, and his passion for taxonomy, Ogmograptis presented an enigma. Where it fit with all the other families, genera and species of moths, he couldn’t say.

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And so the story of the diminutive creature remained unreadable for many years. This was exacerbated by the fact that they are difficult to capture in the wild. In defiance of the wide reputation of many moths, Ogmograptis is not lured by light. The larvae are equally recalcitrant. They are so dependent on the eucalypt, they’re difficult to rear in captivity.

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In the 1990s, CSIRO entomologist Ted Edwards suggested that the scribbles are formed by the larvae as they mine their way through the bark, feeding as they grow, zigzagging, then doubling back. Still, it was thought there was only one species responsible. Moreover, the scribbles had never been quantified in detail. The math of these moths remained a secret.