CONSERVATION ACROSS GENERATIONS
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his is a story about five generations, many hands and a common goal. It’s a story about commitment and family. But most of all it’s a story about stories – the stories that we each pass on, from one generation to the next, the tales that run through us to our children and their children, and carry forward into the future. It’s about kids growing up into a world where the story of humans, plants and wild creatures can weave together sustainably and happily. Today’s tale, like Trees For Life, began with an organisation called Men of the Trees. The year was 1985. Trees For Life had, just been started by a group of South Australian nature lovers. They were inspired by South African conservation group, Watu wa Miti (Men of the Trees). One active member of Men of the Trees back in South Africa was Charles Samuel, a South Australian expat. Uncle Samuel had a young great-nephew, David Muirhead, then a self-described “budding greenie”. At the urging of Uncle Samuel, David joined the young South Australian environmental organisation, Trees For Life. David recalls the insistent urging of his great-uncle.
I particularly enjoyed being a grower for some years, and those few years gave me the skills and confidence to more or less ‘go it alone’.
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“He was of course, like most of that generation, quite a gentleman … he spoke softly. He was already about eighty or something, possibly older, and it was the only time I can remember him getting really animated in a conversation with me. He targeted me. It must have been 30 people, cousins and relations in the front room of the house we were living in … and he sort of hunted me down and I was very thrilled to talk to him because I was already a passionate conservationist. It was a really important connection. I probably would have joined at some later time, but it hadn’t occurred to me. I didn’t even know a local group would be starting, and it was him that told me. Uncle Charles Samuel. He was too old to be planting trees by that stage but he wanted to pass it on. It was a generational thing”. David’s enthusiasm for nature had been nurtured by his own parents from a young age. His mother, who came to Australia from Switzerland, shared her own amazement for her new home. “My mother couldn’t believe how beautiful most of the nature – birds, animals, plants – just around Adelaide and South Australia were“, he recalls. “We saw some of what would have been the last surviving populations of azure kingfishers in the gorge near here, down at Lady Bay … up until I was about age 15 we used to spot them diving off low branches to pull tiny little fish out of the river. They’re one of the many birds to become extinct
