In this confusing, loud and increasingly ugly world, thank goodness for wattle.

Like a Beethoven symphony it arrives quietly on time every year, starting with butter soft sprinkles in July before building to a grand crescendo of yellow in late August.

After the gloomy bog tracks and brittle shadows of winter, the wattle flower turns up to remind us the world turns, as everything does eventually, to face the sun.

Twenty-seven years ago when I became an Australian citizen, I was given a wattle seedling in a paper cup along with a certificate grandly embossed with the Australian coat of arms showing a kangaroo and an emu presenting an heraldic shield against a background of flowering wattle.

It looked important but friendly, like one of my great aunt’s fancy watercolour drawings.

I proudly took my seedling home and, with the help of our two young children and a British-born Belgian shepherd, planted it in bushland behind our north Shepparton home.

It looked spindly and fragile among the older gnarly trees and giant rivergums, but I felt a curious attachment to it.

It became a regular walk to visit our struggling little wattle.

We placed a plastic tube over it for protection, and if the ground looked dry, the kids would carry a bucket of water from the billabong for nourishment.

They built a cubby from fallen branches near our seedling, so we had even more reason to make regular visits.

Weeks went by and it outgrew its plastic tube to stand on its own and fight for water and sunlight among its bigger siblings.

One day, a plant person came to visit, and told us our growing sapling was a Cootamundra wattle and not native to this area.

In fact, it was considered a pest, because it competed with other native plants.

I was a bit crushed by this, and curious as to why our council would present me with a pest plant that was not native.

Then I was heartened because I realised that along with so many new faces in our community at the start of the new millennium, our sapling was a migrant and I was its sponsor.

Years went by and our wattle grew into a sturdy tree and flowered every year along with its neighbours.

It flourished in its spot near the billabong and became difficult to distinguish in the busy arboreal curtain around us.

But when it flowered, we could see it like a golden sunlamp from the verandah.

Eventually, houses came over the hill to front our parcel of bushland, so we sold our few acres back to Parks Victoria.

More years went by.

Dogs came and went, the kids left home, and I didn’t visit our wattle tree anymore.

I’ve read the lifespan of a Cootamundra wattle is only about 15 years.

So my citizenship wattle is long gone, but it has undoubtedly populated our small triangle of forest with its children.

It was once a migrant just like me.

Now its offspring are spread through the forest, just like mine.

So it goes.

Nothing stays the same.

Everything changes, including populations of trees and people.

Most wattles are still yellow and gold, but some are white and some pink, and some are even red.

The important point is they are all wattles, they all have a place, and they all belong to this big old colourful place we call home.

John Lewis is a former journalist at The News

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Wednesday, 4th February 2026

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