Poles and Placemats
Picture this: Little Nikki, plaits and bows in their usual afternoon disarray, chattering away to her mum about the adventures of her school day. She is completely oblivious to the beautiful surroundings as they meander slowly along the forest path. All of a sudden her mum stops and Nikki looks up.
They are in an unexpected clearing. Everything is silent. There is not a breath of a breeze or the chirp of a bird. The surrounding trees are reverently still. Even the tended grass stands to attention. A feeling of unease begins to creep into Nikki’s heart.
Then she sees them.
Poles. Short telegraph poles inexplicably growing out of the ground. There must be about 100 of them, in various states of decay. Nikki’s uneasiness grows to alarm and she grips her mum’s hand tightly.
They stand at the edge of the clearing for several minutes as her mum explains the scene. But Nikki hears nothing. She just wishes to leave and never return to this unnerving place.
Several years later Nikki is setting the dinner table in preparation for some guests. She’s thrilled to be using her mum’s new set of place mats for the first time. They display prints of some paintings by one of Nikki’s favourite artists. As she draws the placemats from the box, she wonders if there is an etiquette regarding placing them with their matching coasters. All of a sudden she stops, and a chill shivers down her spine.
There it is on the placemat. The mysterious clearing from years before. Except now is has a few stacks of split logs. There is a man swinging an axe, another leaning against a wood pile as he drinks from a bottle. A third man is partially hidden behind another stack of logs. There are no telegraph poles, but there may as well be for all the unease that Nikki is reliving.
Later, her mum explains again the story of the poles. But over the years Nikki finds it difficult to remember it as foreboding is always her first memory of the place.
The name of the clearing though, would remain in her mind. It had one letter more than an infamous former foreign dictator. Perhaps Nikki’s childhood mind unconsciously brought the two names together, to forever at the site’s mention, summon a familiar dread.
The story of Sherbrooke Forest’s Pole Plot is quite interesting.
The plot is believed to have been established by the Post Master General (PMG) Department in the 1930s. About 160 hardwood poles of various species were planted in the clearing to be observed in the elements over time. The poles had different treatments, including creosote and charring.
At the time that my lovely mum and I discovered the site, it was occasionally being maintained. However, many of the poles were rotting and several were slowly leaning to their demise. I understand that the site has now almost entirely been reclaimed by the forest. However, I am a little too scared to visit it to ascertain the truth of that statement!
The painting that reminds me of Pole Plot was created 40 or so years prior to the planting of the poles. Tom Roberts painted it in 1886 and gave it the title of “Wood Splitters” but it was later renamed “Charcoal Burners”. Roberts derived the painting from sketches that he had made of his camp site in Box Hill.
The painting had a rather scary adventure of its own! In 1978 it was stolen from the Ballarat art gallery. Thankfully, a few months later it was retrieved from a park in Sydney after an unknown ransom was paid.
Despite their differences in time and location, Pole Plot and Tom Roberts do share a connection. The painter spent the final years of his life living just a few kilometres from the site and died only a year after the planting of the poles.
Nikki
