Mushroom tours
“You’re lucky to be on the tour this week. We’ve had some heavy rains recently so they’ve been shooting up all over the place. It takes a few weeks for them to reach maturity, the warm spell on top of the rain means we should come across some huge specimens”
“You would have seen a few on your drive in, at the edges of fields or the odd abandoned farm house. The great thing about these tours is that we go deeper into the bush, so you can get up close to the giants. The areas we’re going to today are some of my favourite places to view them as they tower over some of the gum trees.”
“Sorry, yes, you have a question?”
“It’s ok to laugh. They’re mostly harmless. You won’t get high or turned into a zombie, but it’s probably best you don’t touch them too much. Just make sure to wash you boots and clothes thoroughly before going back home.”
We spent the day sandbagging as much as we could. This wasn’t our first and we knew what needed to be done. In the end, the house wasn’t ruined. Not like the floods from a few years back. At worst it got up to our ankles. Ruined the carpets. Bit of a pain. House was back to normal a week later.
We thought we got lucky.
The first time it looked like mould. Just a few brown spots at the back of the hallway linen cupboard. Wiped it down with bleach and forgot about it.
Scrolled past the odd photo on whiny neighbourhood facebook groups but didn’t really register. After a while they started to pop up in the odd group chat. Then more and more of these weird mushrooms every time I looked at my phone.
By the time I remembered to check the cupboard it was too late. The nice tablecloths, the ones I got from nan, were gone. Feedstock for the fungus. Eating it’s way up through the cupboard, through the actual shelving. I finally had some good photos to share.
Other than the creepy factor everywhere you look, it’s the smell that takes over. This damp rot that eats memories, eats the places you grew up in. This quiet stench of decomposing homes that we couldn’t escape. This smell trapped inside the home that made sleep unbearable. The network had been spreading under our feet since the floods and we didn’t realise it. Not until they got big enough to take over the town.
“If you don’t know what you’re looking for, it’s hard to understand what’s happening to the ecosystem. To see the role they’ve taken up. The niches they’ve filled, and the new niches and relationships they’re providing.”
“Just make sure you don’t slip in these muddy parts, it’s slippery than you think”
“Deep down in the soil, the mycelium network has now been supercharged by this new species. The hyphae are really quite incredible in how they’ve adapted in the wild. In exchange for photosynthesised sugars, it ensures that the tree roots are drinking water that has been cleaned from the toxins. This river would have been completely contaminated were it not for the fungus. Further, because of their size they’re providing shelter for small animals, filling in holes where some trees used to be. They don’t grow in the traditional sense, not like a tree. Their cells absorb water, expanding upwards at speed.”
“By ensuring that the water is retained in the soil, the trees that do remain are now able to grow larger. Ensuring that the trunks and branches are engorged on water, so they crack and split and break off during the hot and dry years. Instead of flammable tinder being littered everywhere, the mycelium slowly digests the dead branches”
Their water pits were built to withstand a 1 in 100 year flood. Their modelling never considered they’d happen every few years. The waste fluids from fracking is nasty stuff I’m told. Nasty enough that having it wash over flood plains is more than a catastrophe.
Once they were aware of what was happening - which of course they didn’t properly report - they said they had no choice but to seed the entire wetlands with their spores, to protect the entire basin before it filtered down into it.
They announced that it was a regrettable error, as was the decision to not announce the issue. There was no time to ‘engage locally with landowners and stakeholders’, yet they also didn’t feel like make any ‘public disclosures’. Bastards.
They also didn’t anticipate that their proprietary fungal sponges would act the way they did due to the flood. The multiple variants wasn’t something they considered during their ‘limited testing phase’.
They only admitted to their mistakes after it was linked to multiple methane seeps in the area. Videos of rivers bubbling from deep underground gas leaks surrounded by a ring of towering mushrooms makes for great whatsapp chats.
They took my home, my town, and many others like them. Them and their gas lobby made sure nothing ever came of it. No Royal Commission, a measly penalty, and no retributions or forced rebuilding costs. So here we are. Doing what we can.
“These specimens here are a lovely example of the Santos Skyscrapers living up to their name. Now we mentioned at the start that we do these tours with no government subsidies. While it’s not mandatory, I’m going to pass around this QR code if you’d like to provide a small tip for all of us tour guides”