Bruce the botanist from Borneo
Googles the ginkgo leaf.
Does the ginkgo tree grow in Gondwanaland?
“Most likley”, says he.
Fossils of Ginko leaves have en found in layers of Antarctic ice.
A single nearly complete leaf and several fragments in Paleogene sediments from southern Tasmania confirm the Cenozoic presence of Ginkgo L. in Australia. The specimens, assigned to G. australis McCoy, add to our knowledge of probable deciduous forms in the southern Australian Paleogene, when winter darkness at the prevailing high latitudes made this strategy competitive.
Raymond J. Carpenter and Robert S. Hill, 1999, Ginkgo Leaves from Paleogene Sediments in Tasmania, Australian Journal of Botany 47(5) 717 – 724
When I first visited the Antarctic expeditioner, Jack Ward, I had found a Ginko leaf outside his house in Melbourne.
***
Today I find that the man who lived with my grandmother in 1968 as a boarder, was, as I suspected, a glaciologist. He telephoned today and we reflected on the conversations we had at her table, about glaciers in Antarctica. I remember him as having stars in his eyes as he described the ice, after returning from a year in Antarctica. I am now, as those memories return. He asked after my father, who, he told me, had helped relay his messages from Antarctica, to his family in Australia.
.
I am unearthing layers of my past.