Story Feb 2026 | The Track Through the Scribbly Gums
Short story by Roger Chao. Roger is a writer, activist and VNPA supporter.
The first thing the scribbly gums taught me was that even trees have diaries.
You see it the moment you step onto the track – pale trunks covered in looping lines, as if someone has taken a pencil to the bark and let their hand wander while thinking about something else. The marks look like graffiti until you get close. Then you realise it’s the work of insects, writing their long, hungry sentences under the skin of the tree. The scribbles are the record of a life lived in layers – growth, damage, healing, repetition. The tree stands there anyway, upright, patient, carrying its history in plain sight.
That morning, I was walking through them with the kind of exhaustion that doesn’t show on the face but makes the bones feel heavy. The kind of tired that comes from too many days in a row of being mentally present for other people and not present for yourself. Burnout is a strange illness because it isn’t an injury you can point to, rather it’s like your internal wiring has frayed and the smallest electrical demand makes it spark.
I had come to the park for silence. Not romantic silence, not the kind advertised on wellness posters, but a practical kind – silence as a circuit breaker. I had stopped sleeping properly. My thoughts had become sticky, looping. My body felt as if it was always braced for something. I was carrying my phone like a detonator. Even in my own kitchen I couldn’t get my nervous system to stand down.
So, I drove out early, before the day had the chance to fill up with tasks. I parked at a trailhead with a faded sign and a map full of names I half-recognised. A single ranger’s ute sat in the lot, dust on the sides, suggesting someone else was here doing the invisible work of making the place survivable. Beyond the car park the bush began almost abruptly, as if you could step from the world of schedules and headlines into a different tempo.
The first few minutes of walking I was still in suburbia. Not physically, but internally. My mind kept reaching for its usual habits – replaying conversations, drafting paragraphs, rehearsing arguments, tallying what I hadn’t done. I was looking at trees and thinking about emails. I was hearing birds and thinking about deadlines.
Then the track narrowed and dipped, and the scribbly gums gathered around me like a small congregation. The air shifted. It smelled faintly of eucalyptus oil and damp earth. A breeze moved through the canopy, not strong enough to be dramatic, just enough to make the leaves shiver. Somewhere above me, a bird scolded another bird in sharp, efficient syllables.
And slowly, so slowly I almost missed it, my mind began to loosen.
This is what good public land does. It doesn’t fix you with a revelation. It just gives you enough space, enough non-demanding presence, that the body remembers how to breathe without being told.
I walked for a while without trying to make meaning. That was the gift – not having to turn everything into a lesson. The track wound past granite outcrops and fallen branches. There were grass trees with blackened skirts from some old fire. There were ferns in the gullies, improbably soft. There were those scribbly gums again and again, their pale trunks catching the light in flashes.
At one point I stopped and pressed my palm against a trunk. The bark felt cool, faintly powdery. I could feel the hardness beneath the thin outer layer, the slow stubborn life. For reasons I can’t fully explain, I felt a wave of gratitude so strong it had the edge of grief.
Because this place was here. Because it was not behind a gate. Because I hadn’t had to pay someone for the privilege of being quiet among trees.
That’s not a small thing. It’s the kind of thing you don’t notice until you imagine its absence.
We often talk about national parks as if they’re just pretty scenery, or a recreational option, or a nice weekend away. We treat them like leisure, like a luxury product we happen to own as a nation. But as I walked that morning, tired and wordless, I kept thinking – this is infrastructure.
Not roads and pipes and power lines, but something older and more subtle – the infrastructure of sanity.
A society that keeps land public, accessible, protected from total extraction, is doing more than conserving biodiversity. It is building a refuge for the human mind. It is acknowledging, without saying it out loud, that we are animals who can’t live indefinitely in boxes of concrete and glass without something in us breaking.
And it is making that refuge available not only to the wealthy who can afford private retreats, but to anyone with a bus fare or a tank of petrol and enough time to walk a track.
That availability is what makes it a public institution. It’s the difference between “nature” as a commodity and Country as a shared inheritance.
I have memories of this inheritance from childhood, long before I had the language to describe it.
My teenage years and early adulthood were not filled with wealth and luxury. Holidays were not flights and resorts. They were, more often, camping trips – a cheap tent, a gas stove that always seemed to sputter, sausages wrapped in bread, and a stack of damp towels. National parks were where I went when I wanted a holiday that didn’t require money.
I remember the first time I camped in a park where the toilets were those basic drop-toilet blocks, concrete floors, metal doors, the smell of disinfectant trying its best. I remember complaining about it, because I used complain about everything, and a friend saying – “You don’t come here for the toilets.”
What I didn’t understand then was that even those toilets, basic as they were, were evidence of something profound. They were evidence that someone had decided this place should be usable by the public, and that usability requires infrastructure – tracks maintained, bins emptied, toilets cleaned, signage updated, fire pits managed, weeds controlled, rangers employed, rules enforced.
Public land is land you actively care for so it can hold visitors without collapsing under them.
As a child, I thought parks were just “there.” Like the sky. Like rain. I didn’t see the institutional scaffolding. I didn’t understand that “national park” is a political decision, defended every year by budgets and policy and people in uniforms who spend their days doing unglamorous work.
You understand it later, when you return as an adult and see the signs more clearly – the warning about fire danger ratings, the notice about feral animal control, the closed track because a storm has taken out a bridge, the scar of a controlled burn, the new boardwalk built to stop erosion, the ranger’s note asking people not to feed the wildlife, the phone number for emergency services in a place with patchy reception.
You begin to see that parks are not wilderness. They are managed Country. And management is never neutral.
That’s where, as an adult, another truth began to press on me – to live in Australia is to walk on land that has never been empty, and has never been merely “resource.”
I can’t walk a track through scribbly gums now without thinking about the layers of custodianship under my feet. The word “Country” has become, thankfully, more visible in our public vocabulary, not as a sentimental flourish, but as an acknowledgement that land in Australia is law, story, responsibility, kinship. It is alive with meaning that predates the nation state by tens of thousands of years.
On the way into this particular park, I’d passed the sign acknowledging Traditional Owners. It named the people whose Country I was on. The sign was official, neatly printed, fixed to a post. It was, in one sense, a small thing. In another sense, it was the state admitting what it long denied – that this land had been governed, cared for, understood, and held in relationship long before the institution called “national park” existed.
I have learned, slowly, imperfectly, to treat those acknowledgements not as decorations but as invitations into responsibility. They’re a reminder that the public land system, as Australians now experience it, is built on dispossession. The fact that I can park a car and walk a track in a national park is inseparable from the history that made that arrangement possible.
That doesn’t mean the park should not exist. It means the park should not pretend. It means our public land institutions have a duty not only to conserve trees and animals, but to participate in truth-telling – to acknowledge ongoing custodianship, to support cultural practices, to return decision-making power where it belongs.
In some places, that’s happening through joint management and partnerships, arrangements where Traditional Owners have real authority, not just ceremonial consultation. When it works, it changes the moral atmosphere of a park. Country is no longer treated as a museum exhibit. It is treated as a living relationship, with cultural obligations and ecological knowledge that Western conservation is only beginning to fully respect.
Because the truth is – “national parks” in Australia often protect landscapes that remained intact precisely because Aboriginal people managed them for millennia. Fire regimes, food cultivation, seasonal movement, careful harvesting, forms of stewardship that produced abundance and resilience. When colonisation disrupted those practices, landscapes changed. Fires became hotter, more catastrophic. Ecologies shifted. The myth of “untouched wilderness” turns out to be a misunderstanding. Much of what we cherish as “nature” in Australia is, in fact, Country shaped by long custodianship.
Walking through the scribbly gums that morning, I found myself thinking about fire, because you can’t really think about Australian bushland anymore without thinking about fire. The blackened skirts of grass trees were reminders of past burns. The undergrowth had that patchy look of regrowth after disturbance. The very existence of the track, cleared and edged, was part of the park’s fire management, access for crews, containment lines, places to move people out.
It made me think of Black Summer, like it does for so many of us now. Those months when the country felt like it was burning at the edges of civilisation. The orange skies, the ash falling like dirty snow, the news of towns evacuated, the grief of wildlife lost in numbers we still struggle to comprehend. If you lived through that, you carry it in your body. You can smell smoke now and feel your pulse quicken without asking permission.
And it made me think about the rangers, the people most visitors barely notice, unless they’re issuing a fine for an illegal campfire. People sometimes treat rangers as authority figures, as rule enforcers. But the longer I live, the more I see them as a kind of frontline public service – ecological firefighters, educators, rescue coordinators, caretakers of places that the market would happily carve up.
They are the public face of a public commitment – that some land will not be reduced to profit.
That commitment is contested every year. There are always pressures – mining interests, logging debates, tourism development, budget cuts, the creeping privatisation of services. There is always an argument, somewhere, that public land should “pay for itself,” that parks should be run more like businesses, that access should be monetised, that conservation should be balanced against “economic opportunity.”
Walking that track in my exhausted state, I felt the stakes of that shift with unusual clarity. If this place had been private, I might not have been here. If it required a costly fee, I might have stayed home and kept spiralling. If it was turned into a high-end eco-tourism destination, it would become something you consume rather than something you belong to.
Belonging matters. Public land does something subtle to the psyche – it tells you there are still places you can go without proving you deserve to be there.
This is the reason parks are so important as mental health infrastructure, especially in contemporary Australia.
We are not, as a society, getting calmer. Our lives are crowded with stimuli and precarity. Work has seeped into every corner of life through devices that vibrate with obligation. Housing stress makes people live in constant background anxiety. Social fragmentation leaves many people isolated. Climate disasters add a low-level dread that can flare into panic. Mental health services are overwhelmed, and even those with resources often find therapy is not enough when the environment itself is grinding you down.
In that context, parks do something no app can do – they give you a nervous system reset that is physical, sensory, unmediated.
You walk. You breathe air that isn’t recycled through office vents. You listen to birds that don’t care about your status. You see horizons. You feel your body in motion rather than in a chair. You remember, without needing to intellectualise it, that you are part of a living world larger than your inbox.
This is not a substitute for clinical care when clinical care is needed. But it is a preventative measure we undervalue – the daily, weekly access to non-commercial, non-demanding natural spaces that keep people from tipping into crisis.
And because parks are public, they can do this for people who cannot afford private wellness. A wealthy person can book a retreat. They can fly to a rainforest lodge. They can hire guides. A person on a low income cannot. But they can, if the system is designed well, take a bus to a national park, walk a track, sit by water, and feel themselves rejoin their own life.
Access is not evenly distributed. That’s the politics of access, the part of the story we prefer to ignore because it complicates the romance.
As I walked deeper into the park, the track rose slightly and the scribbly gums thinned. I came to a small clearing with a log bench and a view across a gully. I sat down and drank water. My phone had no reception. The absence of signal felt, paradoxically, like relief. No one could reach me. The world could not demand anything of me for a while.
From the clearing I could see the city’s haze in the far distance, a faint grey line on the horizon. The city looked small from here, not on account of it being small, but because distance makes it lose its power. It becomes just another shape in the landscape rather than the centre of reality.
I sat and let my thoughts drift, and without intending to, I found myself back in another time – a post-breakup walk, years earlier, on a different track in a different park.
Breakups have their own geography. There are streets you can’t walk without remembering. Cafés you avoid. Songs you can’t hear without flinching. After one particularly brutal ending, I had driven out to a coastal park and walked along a cliff track through banksia and tea tree, the ocean loud below. I remember walking too fast at first, as if speed could outrun grief. I remember my chest aching in that peculiar way heartbreak makes the body feel physically bruised.
At some point on that walk, a gust of wind off the ocean hit me so hard I had to stop. It was cold and salt-heavy. It filled my lungs like a slap. And suddenly I started laughing, not happy laughter, not quite, but the laugh of someone surprised to still be alive. Because the ocean did not care. The banksias did not care. The track did not care. The world was enormous and indifferent and continuing. It made my personal catastrophe feel, not trivial, but survivable.
Back in the scribbly gums, years later, I realised I had come to the park for the same reason, even though the pain now was not romantic but systemic – I needed to be returned to scale.
I began walking again. The track descended into a damp gully where ferns grew thickly. The temperature dropped. I could hear water somewhere, not a river exactly, more like a seep, trickling over rocks. The air smelled green.
I passed a sign explaining some ecological restoration work – weed control, regeneration, protection of habitat. It listed partner organisations, volunteers, Traditional Owner groups. It was one of those signs most people glance at and then ignore. But I stood and read it carefully, because it was another small reminder that this place does not maintain itself. Public land survives because people choose, again and again, to care.
Care is an institution. It is a set of budgets, yes, but also a set of cultural values. A society that values public land will fund rangers, support joint management, invest in access, maintain tracks, control invasives, educate visitors. A society that does not value it will let it degrade and then say, “See? It’s not worth it.”
I’ve watched that degradation happen in small ways – closed tracks left closed for years, campsites with broken toilets, signage faded and unreadable, ranger numbers reduced, the slow encroachment of privatised “experience” operators that turn a shared inheritance into a premium product. None of this happens with one dramatic decision. It happens by a thousand quiet cuts.
And then, when disaster hits, fire, flood, mass visitation under heatwave conditions, the system buckles and people act surprised.
If climate change is teaching us anything, it is that “nature” is a dynamic system we are inside. Parks are not static museums of greenery; they are living places under stress. They need resources. They need knowledgeable management. They need cultural fire practices integrated respectfully. They need decisions made not on election cycles but on ecological time.
As I came closer to the end of the loop track, I heard voices ahead, kids, maybe, and an adult calling out. The sound of other people pulled me gently back into society. A family passed me going the other way – two children with sticks, a parent with a backpack, another adult carrying a toddler. They looked like my own family decades earlier. The kids were arguing about something urgent and ridiculous. The adults looked tired but happy, the way people do when they’ve escaped the inside world for a few hours.
We nodded at each other, that small bush-walker acknowledgement Australians do – a quick “g’day” that contains a whole philosophy of shared space.
And I felt, again, the strange democratic miracle of it – we were all here together, not as customers, not as members of a club, but as members of the public. The track did not care what we earned. The trees did not care what we believed. The view did not require a password.
A national park is, at its core, a refusal of total transaction.
It says – some things will be held in common. Some places will be protected not due to the fact of them generating profit, but because they generate life, ecological life, cultural life, psychological life.
As I reached the car park, my phone buzzed back into reception and immediately lit up with notifications. Messages. Emails. The world returning with its demands. But my body was different. Not cured. Not transformed. Just slightly reset. The nervous system had, for a few hours, remembered another rhythm.
I stood by my car and looked back at the track entrance. A simple gap in the scrub. A sign. A map. A bin. Another small cluster of infrastructure holding the promise of access.
I thought about the responsibility that comes with inheritance.
Public land is paid for by taxpayers, maintained by workers, protected by policy, held together by cultural agreements and ecological labour. It is also paid for historically, in the currencies we don’t like to count – dispossession, conflict, the rearrangement of Country under colonial governance. To inherit something like this is to inherit both the gift and the obligation.
The gift is obvious – refuge, beauty, biodiversity, mental health, community, the sheer pleasure of walking under scribbly gums and feeling yourself return to scale.
The obligation is harder – to fund it, to protect it, to make it accessible, to maintain it with dignity, to honour custodianship, to resist the temptation to treat it merely as a “resource” to be extracted or a product to be sold.
I drove home with the smell of eucalyptus still on my hands.
In the days that followed, the burnout didn’t magically disappear. Life did what life does – deadlines returned, obligations crowded in, the phone kept vibrating. But something had changed. Not in the world, but in my sense of what the world is allowed to be.
Because the track through the scribbly gums reminded me of a truth I keep forgetting until trees force me to remember it – a good society does not only build things that make money. It builds things that make life bearable.
National parks are one of those things. They are not a decoration on the edge of the nation. They are part of the nation’s internal structure, its lungs, its memory, its calm.
Because the whole idea of public land is that it belongs.
It belongs to the teenager with a cheap tent and sausages in bread. It belongs to the burned-out adult who needs silence to reset. It belongs to the grieving person walking off heartbreak on a cliff track. It belongs to people who have no backyard, no air conditioning, no private retreat. It belongs to the ones who would otherwise be trapped entirely within the commercial world.
And, most importantly, it belongs, always, fundamentally, to the Country it is, and to the custodianship that predates the park sign by millennia.
The scribbly gums stand there, writing their slow diaries in insect script. They will go on doing that long after my emails have turned to dust. But their survival, and the survival of the shared public promise that lets a tired person walk among them, depends on choices we make now.
That’s what walking a track can teach you, if you let it – that inheritance is something you actively keep alive.
And that keeping alive, quiet, steady, unglamorous, is the real work of civilisation.