The terrorising Haberfield fig tree

“Do you know what these trees do?”

Image Credit: Aidan Elwig-Pollock

I am thoroughly a child of Haberfield: the long, carefree days of my pre-school youth were spent driving matchbox cars along the rounded rocky outcrops of Algie Park. Other days would involve a short walk down to Hawthorne Canal, where we would clamber over the frankly dangerous metal plane climbing frame, or watch toadfish silently run their errands between rusty shopping trolleys and twisted bicycle wheels in the shallow brown water.

But there is one bit of Haberfield greenspace into which I wouldn’t dare venture. Between Marion Street and Parramatta Road hides a particularly gloomy stretch of the ill-fated greenway. A tangled jungle of lantana rumbles down the sloped side of the light-rail track. Whistling boughs of stunted casuarinas fall beneath the eerie shadow cast upon the whole boulevard by a long, gnarled maw made of coiled fig trees.

These trees were the object of my terror until I was significantly older than you might expect. They are the reason that I felt my stomach tugging at my chest, meekly murmuring, “Hey, I’m not so sure this is a great idea Aidan.” To this day, I remember a sunny stroll along this path with a childhood friend whose name has been apparated from my mind by the shade of time. This other small child — him being a year older granting him an aura of wisdom he almost certainly didn’t deserve — turned to me with the wide-eyed expression of a pre-double-digit bullshit artist who believes his own dubious facts.

“Do you know what these trees do?” he asked. At this point I was still smiling, perhaps hoping for a train to rumble past. I shook my head, absent-mindedly.

“You can never, ever come here at night — or by yourself…” 

This got my attention. 

“Why?,” I asked with gaping eyes of false confidence, betrayed by a quivering lip.

“You see those trees? They eat people.” 

The combination of his authoritative seniority, coupled with the gaping eye-like holes and slithering tendrils of the fig trees, leant his assertion immense weight. I felt a cold, tickling whisper of air tread across my up-ended peachfuzz neck hair. And so began the reign of terror that this strip of cracked pavement held upon my innocent young mind.

It made so much sense. If a tree falls in a forest with no one to hear it, does it really make a sound? If a tree eats someone, and there are no survivors to tell the tale, who’s to say we’re not walking through a murderous forest?