Two decades ago, Clarence Slockee pivoted and twisted in an Indigenous dance troupe. Today, he’s ducking and diving as the questions come thicker than a forest of burrawangs – and all from a gaggle of girls by turns precocious and cute.
The Gardening Australia presenter is conducting a bush tucker guided walk through Wollongong Botanic Garden on a sunny Sunday morning, and the young ladies, despite their shushing mums, have picked up on our guest’s casual, relaxed manner and willingness to have a chat on the run. They keep up a running commentary on spiders, BandAids and May Gibbs’ banksia men.
Our group is 20-strong, and demand is such that the event is oversubscribed, but our visiting TV star is only too happy to agree to another tour.
It’s fitting that a fuss is being made of the garden’s Towri Bush Tucker Garden as Naidoc Week nears – it’s been nine years since it opened in Naidoc Week 2012. Tucked away in a northern corner (closest to Northfields Ave), Towri was named by traditional custodians. It means “learning place surrounded by trees and flowers”.
Having seen a few bee species sip breakfast from nasturtiums, we set off from beneath a towering stringybark, the younger element balanced by a more mature set all too ready to chip in with the correct genus name of a turpentine or bottle tree.
Clarence, from the Bundjalong nation (NSW-Queensland border), gives us a quick and impressive lesson in Indigenous languages, including a chanted greeting in the Illawarra’s own Wodi Wodi. Under his jacket is a T-shirt bearing his daughter’s drawing of a goanna – in his tongue known as “jiwah”, his totem animal and the name of his landscaping company.
Slockee’s path has had plenty of turns since his own childhood, when he and friends would match the right tide with the right moon phase to pick up crabs from a creek near the Tweed River. Jiwah, his company, landscapes rooftop gardens on city buildings with native plants. Twenty years ago, he starred in a documentary about Indigenous dancing, something that helped him take his culture to other parts of Australia and the world.
First stop today is a eucalypt, where we learn that Australia has about 800 types, of which koalas will eat leaves from up to 50 but prefer to stick to a dozen. So far, so informative. The entertainment kicks in courtesy of jokes about a nearby “bum tree”, or bottle tree. Clarence mentions that its roots are edible, and that its cousin is the Illawarra flame tree, Brachychiton acerifolius.
The second stop brings us to a paperbark, and a mention of how powder in its bark layers can be used as an antiseptic. Clarence says the sap from the spider fig behind him is a coagulant that might be handy for stemming bleeding but might cause a rash, and there’s a handy reminder not to use sandpaper fig leaves as toilet paper.
“All native figs have fruit, which are maybe not so palatable, but edible,” he says.
Stop three is among plants that enjoy drier conditions, such as saltbush, and Clarence alerts us to the threat of myrtle rust – an airborne fungus that can kill bottle-brush, tea-tree and eucalypts.
Before we can make the fourth stop, a creature emerges … gnome-like, bearded, not overly burdened with height. We realise it’s the commonly spotted Costa Georgiadis, host of Gardening Australia himself. Wearing a knitted hat given to him that morning by a fan who spent three hours making it, Costa is wielding a mobile on a selfie stick and apologises for the interruption as he asks Clarence what he’s doing in Wollongong.
The occasion is, his colleague reminds him, the botanic garden’s 50th birthday, and our walk is one of many events plant lovers have flocked to on the weekend of May 29-30.
We barely make the bush tucker area itself, so distracted is Clarence by plants and all their stories on the way to the Towri area. The astringent qualities of kangaroo apple, the measures taken by Indigenous people (“the women – because the women are the smartest!”) to render toxic seeds edible, and how “calendar” plants reminded ancestors of natural movements, such as whale migration, get brief mentions before we depart.
After further amusement from the younger set (mandarin being misheard as mandrake) and a final warning to watch for myrtle rust, our guest must take his next group, surely conscious that when it comes to loving plants and banter and engagement on the topic, this region’s junior gardeners are as sharp as secateurs.