Our Family Tree
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday March 2, 2013

How wonderful to find a fig tree growing wild, the tips of its branches sagging under the weight of dozens of fat purple figs.

Sixty-six years ago my mum discovered a giant fig tree jutting out from the banks of the Swan River. To reach its uppermost branches where the ripest figs were sunning themselves, she would climb barefoot up the rocky cliff and shimmy out along the sturdiest branches. She could only pick as many as she could hold in one hand without falling off her perch. And there she would sit, scarlet juice running down her chin while her brother shouted up from the beach: ‘Drop some down to me Sis! C’mon! It’s not fair!’  (A fear of heights and pianist’s hands meant climbing trees was not his forte.)

My mum likes to think of that particular tree as ‘hers’. It has stood beside three generations of her family, tolerating the multi-million dollar mansions that have sprung up around it. No-one has dared fire up a chainsaw despite that tree hogging the best of waterfront views. Every year my mother makes a pilgrimage, green bucket in hand, to ‘her’ tree. She won’t tell fig-loving friends where it is, and her secrecy has become a running joke: ‘Hey Joanie, have you put the coordinates of that tree in your will yet?’ Most years her clandestine operation is sabotaged, not by informers, but by the dozens of Ringneck parrots that get a toe-hold in the canopy before she does and gorge themselves on the best fruit.

My mother’s lust for wild figs is as curious as her unorthodox manner of eating them. She tears the fig in half and mashes the two pieces together until the red flesh spills over the skin and she eats the resulting mess in raptures. (I don’t understand why either.)  

Every summer I look forward to the day mum calls to say: ‘Time we went down to my tree’, and the kids and I pile into the car: ‘Fig-hunt!’

Expeditions to that secluded bend in the river have become a rite of passage in our family. Members are allocated their responsibilities according to sprightliness and fervour. The little ones are the ‘fig spotters’, the more agile are ‘climbers’ and those who’d rather man the bucket are ‘catchers.’

My normally rebellious 12-year-old revels in the best climbing adventure of the year. He yells down through the branches: ‘Hey Nan, there are loads up here!’ It’s a rare thing for a child born this century to share a slice of his grandmother’s Huck Finn heritage, still there for the taking. Summers have come and gone but the big brown jellyfish still beach themselves on the river’s  edge, and the water in February is always briny and warm. We now carry a plastic bucket instead of a tin pail. The older I get, the more determined I am to keep this ceremony alive. I picture myself as a doting nanna telling my grandkids not to worry when the milky sap from the fig-stalks itches their skin: ‘It’s not poisonous poppet. Have a dip in the river and you’ll be right as rain.’

I want to impress on my children the value of belonging. I want each of them  imprinted with this family ritual for when they need to remember where they came from. I savour that a new generation of sturdy little bodies is just as adept at finding treasure in the tree.

After an hour by the river, mum’s bucket contains enough figs for a dozen jars of jam and chutney but the branches are still laden. She and I like to amuse ourselves by having alibis at the ready for the odd dog-walker who wanders past: ‘Did you see the possum up there?’ Mum looks forward to the day she can stand her ground before an inquisitor and declare: “The tree’s mine. I planted it.” (Exaggeration is a dominate gene in our family.)

Mum’s tree, of course, is everyone’s tree. Like the huge mulberry we found as kids when the house up the road got demolished and the backyard was indecently exposed. On Sunday afternoons, half the neighbourhood kids were stained crimson and we were too full of juice to eat tea. Back then, every house had a loquat or a plum or an almond tree, a passionfruit or a muscatel grape. Harvests were shared around for jams and preserves and came back in re-cycled pickle jars wearing gingham hats cut with pinking shears. Rear laneways were common ground for cricket games and cubbies and family histories intertwined over side fences like the tendrils of vines reaching for new strongholds.

My wish is for my mother’s secret tree to still be there when my children have slyly turned into adults. When their childhoods can be recaptured in an instant by that bark under their feet or the coarse leaves in their hands. The tree won’t look as big to them as it once did. But I hope it will loom large when they reminisce about the innocent adventures of a bunch of kids and their prowess as a clan.