Indi Jennings, where there's smoke
text by Matt Kneller

It's 7am, mid-September and we pass through Djab Wurrung country heading in the direction of Jardwadjali country. We text Len “on our way, might be 5 minutes late”, but we don't get a response. We'd find out why a day or two later, Len had never sent a text message before. It was on the second or third day he announced he'd just sent his first one. His partner Marie-Josée asked him to let her know when he was leaving the orchid survey site to line up their rendezvous back in Halls Gap, so before firing up the engine of his 4WD he fired off the thumbs up emoji for the very first time, and hit the road.

We veer left off the bitumen onto a dirt track and park behind the closest car at 7:58am, we'd managed to get there on time, absolutely unheard of.We're humming with a smugness normally reserved only for Punctual
People. We hop out the '93 Honda Accord, her rusted out muffler gave away our arrival long before we turned the corner. Just as our hiking boots touch down on country Len announces to the group “the last few stragglers have arrived ! ”

There is a phenomenon in the psyche of field naturalists/lovers of the natural world/nerds where an unfortunate event develops into a rare opportunity. One of the more extreme versions of this is with Birders, where a storm, cosmic event or any natural or unnatural circumstance means a member of a migrating species (or even more rarely a stowaway) winds up stranded in a place where it shouldn't naturally occur. Once reported, hundreds of binocular-owners flock to get a glimpse and to tick it off their list. No one in their right-mind crosses their fingers and hopes for bush fires, but orchids and their enthusiasts are rarely in their right mind. For whatever reason a handful of species of terrestrial orchids crave the ethylene gas that only comes with fire, they will rarely flower without it. Orchid People know this and so when a big fire goes through an area like it did in Gariwerd (the grampians) at the end of 2024, we still feel the same devastation at the mass deaths of macropods, marsupials snakes, lizards, bugs plants et al but in light of sending prayers we donate to wildlife rescue and black out a week in our calendar for next orchid season.

So that's why we're here, it’s just after 8am and we're checking out the densest patch of Scented Sundews I've ever seen, laying down on the cold ground to try and get a panorama shot when Noushka from RBGV calls us over to grab a GPS unit, UHF radio and a clipboard. She asks us to line up along the roadside in pairs, 10 meters between each group. She points out the direction we'll be heading, both in the direction of landmarks and the direction of the little arrow on the GPS. We pick our spot, look out ahead and any anxieties about the outcome of this survey trip float away with the morning mist. There's Caladenia grampiana (Grampians Spider Orchid – critically endangered) so close to the starting line we could just about bend forward and touch it. Noushka's voice crackles out of 8 radios “Everyone ok?”, “Yeerp” everyone relays back, a chorus of overlapping frogs in boots.

Along the line we all take a few steps forward, some five or six, some only one or two, and crouch down to get a close-up view of a flower that most people on earth won't see in this lifetime.

Day 2 of 4 comes with new excitement, new anxiety. We're still tracking C. grampiana but we're at this specific site for a new target species. Thelymitra matthewsii (the spiral sun-orchid, you guessed it, critically endangered). We're here at the start of their flowering season – even then the flowers only open up properly on warm sunny days. It's early and it’s not too sunny today, so we've come here to the middle of a sandstone mountain range to squint our eyes at the ground as we walk up a hillside, searching for a plant with a single lime-green leaf that pokes out of the ground like a cork-screw, kinda like how you would draw a cartoon pigs tail but green. RIP Dr Seuss you would have loved Thelymitra matthewseii.

Before we can park the Honda – someone waves us down as we're coming up to the line of parked cars. “Morning, drive down to the end and ask one of them where to park, we've already spotted two Thely's right on the roadside”. We line up in our pairs and start our march up the hillside. Still logging more Caladenias on the way up, the mood drops a little from down at the road. No spirals. It's later in the morning and Noushka points to a flat spot up ahead. The radio's light up “We'll get up around where it flattens out a bit then break for morning tea”. We're halfway between here and there when someone cries out up the line “I've got one here!” followed by “One here!”, “I've got two ! “. No one’s hungry for morning tea anymore, and someones found one, no, two - in flower. We eventually succumb to morning tea but not before we've tagged 40 or more. Our new friends, uni students from LaTrobe are skipping back to the car to collect more markers, flags and mesh-wire-guards. They're going to mark some and protect others to come back and collect seed later in the year, so maybe a few more people will get a chance to see them in their lifetime.

Shout out to all the legends from this trip, the organisers and volunteers. Another flat circle reminder that while this work is necessary and important – it's passionate people that turn chore into adventure, science into a spectator sport, share stories in selected-cinema camp-chair circles and try and try to light a fire under the next generation. where there's fire, where there's smoke, there's ethylene, these glass orchids are proof.


Indi Jennings is a self-taught botanist, sound-artist and sculpturalist living and working on unceded Wurundjeri Biik. Their work is an ongoing invitation to fall-back in love with the living world, to see clearly that your enemies are the people that approve and pay for the clearing of native habitat to make way for an ongoing extractivist-settler colonial project. They are an organising member of Basalt Buddies, a loose collective of grassland advocates with hopes to get enough traction someday to halt some of that destruction. You are invited to join :~)