Willows are a blight on Australia’s waterways but represent a curious connection to European history. Photo: Wagga Wagga City Council.
The European willow is one of South Eastern Australia’s most invasive environmental weeds and, according to legend, its arrival in the colony of NSW in the 19th century is linked to Europe’s most successful general.
Where Napoleon Bonaparte famously stormed the ancient capitals of Europe, his willows took root in the colonies as a quiet tribute to the late Emperor before steadily conquering our regional waterways.
New research into these living memorials has added a fresh Aussie twist to the Emperor’s final days, and suggests things could have turned out very differently.
An article in the Wagga Wagga Advertiser in August 1903 lays out some of the local mythology.
“We regret to learn that the original willow tree at Kenmore Homestead near Goulburn is succumbing to old age,” it begins.
“This tree was planted by Mr Balcombe, who was custodian of Napoleon at St Helena, and was grown from a cutting taken by him from Napoleon’s grave.
“The historic old tree was the stock from which all the willows on the Wollondilly, Murray and Murrumbidgee rivers and their tributaries were propagated.”
William Balcombe was a colonial administrator with the East India Company and served as the first treasurer of the colony of New South Wales.
Before migrating to Australia, he had served on the remote South Atlantic island of St Helena where Napoleon Bonaparte spent the final years of his life in exile after his defeat at Waterloo.
The family hosted the former ‘Emperor of the French’ in their home for several months, where the general famously befriended their daughter Betsy.
When Napoleon died in 1821, he was buried beside a spring beneath a grove of weeping willows. The legend goes that this was his favourite spot on the island and he was particularly fond of these trees.
In the years after his death, the island became something of a tourism hotspot with visitors from around the world eagerly collecting cuttings from the graveside as living souvenirs of the visit.
Large populations of willows in parts of South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia are said to originate from Napoleon’s tomb.
Napoleon’s tomb on the island of St Helena by Augustus Earle. Photo: NLA Collection.
Researchers Ekaterina Heath and Emma Gleadhill have been taking a closer look at the stories surrounding these historic trees and in their paper, Roots of the myth: Napoleon’s willows, memory and empire, they have highlighted another Australian connection that brings the legend full circle.
Shortly after Napoleon’s death, medical officer Dr Thomas Shortt wrote that he had “desired to be buried in Europe, but should his request be denied, he had fixed on a spot that is now preparing to receive his earthly remains, under some Botany Bay willows”.
Several sources agree that Napoleon’s favourite tree had been a Botany Bay willow, better known as the Australian wattle!
His former wife Josephine was known to collect Australian flora and fauna and among the wattles and gum trees at the Chateau de Malmaison outside Paris, she kept a kangaroo and even managed to successfully breed black swans.
Heath and Gleadhill point to the writings of another doctor, Francois Antommarchi, to explain why Napoleon’s dying wish was altered in the wake of a huge storm.
“The willow under which Napoleon usually sat to enjoy the fresh air had yielded to the tempest; our plantations were torn up by the roots, and lay scattered about,” Antommarchi wrote.
“A single gum-tree still resisted, when a whirlwind seized it, tore it up, and laid it prostrate in the mud. It seemed as if none of the things the Emperor had valued were to survive him.”
So instead, Napoleon was laid under the weeping willows that are also a traditional European symbol of mourning and lament for a fallen hero.
How different things could have been if the yellow-flowered Australian acacia had become the source of the thousands of living souvenirs that were transported across the world!
In 1932, the original graveside trees on St Helena were in such bad shape that cuttings from along the Wollondilly River in NSW, that had originated from William Balcombe’s tree at Goulburn, were sent back to repopulate the grove.
In one final ecological twist of fate, in the same way that the European willow has left a destructive legacy on the Australian landscape, the Botany Bay wattle is now a notorious environmental weed on St Helena.
Touché!
Original Article published by Chris Roe on Region Riverina.
