When HMS Resolution and Discovery approached the south coast of Tasmania in 1777, the ships, on James Cook's third voyage to the South Pacific, had run many leagues east of Cape of Good Hope in the icy 60 degrees of latitude. At a known - or guessed at - point of longitude, they sailed north and approached the wooded southern shores of Bruny Island. On steep slopes running from vertical shoreline cliffs, eucalypts rose 40 to 60 metres with trunks as true as a ship's mast. The botanist aboard, David Nelson, went ashore to investigate.

Leaf, bud and calyx specimens were collected and eventually returned with the ships to England. The distinction of describing the species for the taxonomic record fell to a French naturalist, L'Heritier de Brutelle. The peculiar basal asymmetry of leaf and stem inspired the name Eucalyptus Obliqua - the first of the genera named. This was the tree which came to be known as messmate by later colonists. 

This free exchange of science between naturalists in England and France – belying political tensions on the continent in the American Revolutionary era - may not have lasted. In some quarters, the discovery of eucalypt forests spawned a hope that Australia would become a source of masts and spars for the massive industry of shipbuilding for war purposes. Two thousand oaks and many pines were required to build a single frigate. Worse - the dark arts of war required that timbers and yards available to the enemy, be pillaged and burnt on continental Europe at the same rate trees were harvested in England and the Baltic. Waste doubled by a bloody purpose.

Ultimately, the Australian experience was a disappointment to the Royal Navy. The new colony had failed to become a supplier of timber by the end of the Napoleonic era. Timber-getting, in the years following colonisation, maintained a short reach and supplied a rural and local market. 

The first written record of the word 'messmate' used in reference to a eucalypt is found in Bush Wanderings (1861) to 'a species of bastard gum - or messmate, as we call it'. Here is early development of a nomenclature that is both bush-based and a shared wisdom. The word 'bastard' - which re-occurs in the nomenclature - has the alternative meaning of being alike in appearance but perhaps not in essence or substance. J.H. Maiden in Forest Flora (1904), explains that a tree is known as messmate

'..because it is a mess-mate of, or associated with, other rough-barked trees'.

Regrowth stands of messmate, Central Highlands, Victoria

Messmate is an appellation that was applied to recognisable trees with minor leaf, bark and tonal variations not fully delineated, whereas key species - distinctly barked and foliaged trees in a forest group - had been identified and described. Bush pioneers drew on the purely male experience of the Royal Navy in understanding. The forest was a ship's mess. It housed, at first glance, a common rabble. Individuals becoming more defined with acquaintance but differences still a blur of unfamiliarity. To regard the bush in this way is to give life to the very idea of the forest as a community and underscore key elements of eucalypt forests - the symbiosis of species, their patterns of occurrence, relation to terrain. 

The word messmate helps us understand other common names as the result of observation and familiarity – minus a given or developed taxonomy. Blackbutt, Woollybutt and Bastard Tallowwood are not as hard to decipher as we take on board this purely bush language of botany. Nor for that matter, Black Sallee and Tingle – or the hint of bloat in the humorously named Dead Rat tree (boab).

It reminds us what first impressions the bush must have first made on new arrivals. The very untidiness of it. Seasonal shredding of bark - fluted ribbons of the stuff piling around the butt or exploding from the trunk in curled fragments; burnt basal bark after a fire; single-species stands in sentinel formation; orphaned minor species fragmenting the edges of the stands. Dominant canopy species - the 'Royalty' - rising tall from the gully floor. Breaking the quiet, a strange soundtrack - Whipbirds, magpies, echoes of axe and call. A world of complete disconnectedness.

It were a blokey place back then, the bush. Independent by necessity and bent on forging its own determination of a new world without the Latin order of a Royal Society. This was an era that follows Linnaeus and is contemporaneous with Mendel and Darwin - but in geography and science - isolated, disconnected, suspended in time and place.

In years to come, the taxonomy - particularly the eucalyptus genus - was more complete, many older common names, like messmate, survived. Commercial kiln drying, which began around 1928, allowed mills to produce seasoned flooring and furniture timbers to an urban market, but the moniker 'messmate' was spurned in favour of a new brand name. The family of ashes - mountain ash, alpine ash and messmate were supplied as a mixed species board under the name Tasmanian Oak, due to an acceptable resemblance to European hardwood in a quartersawn board.

The very name had a respectability messmate could never equal. It established, you could argue, a disconnection of the urban marketplace with the bush industry that fed it. The market set standards for sawmilling that the industry found difficult to profitably meet and equally, sawmilling never found its own voice in a city boardroom. For sixty years, the word 'messmate' was never used for flooring or furniture board. Only in the backwoods were the qualities of messmate fence posts briefly discussed over a Champion ready-rubbed or a mug of tea.

Conscious of increased distinction in outlook and language, or playing on these points of difference from the city, the bush developed its own quaint conceit as we see in this quote from 1939s Pioneers on Parade

You townies don't look too sensible to us when you can't tell … a messmate from a brittle jack.

When did the urban culture embrace the word messmate and use it to describe appearance grade timbers? Flooring and furniture. Sometime in the 1980s, I suppose, when we began to abandon our fascination with the imported timbers of our colonial past. When we found in an earlier cultural cringe, the cause or occasion to rediscover a native pride in a bush vocabulary. When we saw furniture crafted from the low-value or waste products of mills - boards with hobnail and pencil-streak, wavy-grain and epicormic features - and decided the older imposed order of the marketplace was wrong. Not just misdirected, but wasteful of a valuable resource. And all of this was due to individuals who stood up and spoke up for native hardwoods and their natural appeal. Timber lovers, fellow travellers, messmates. 

 

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