Beside a desolate stretch of outback road, a gum tree is covered in bras.
A few hours south, another is draped with old pairs of shoes. To the west, on banks of the Murray Darling River, hundreds of pairs of thongs are nailed to sawn-off tree trunks. Locals call them “thong trees”.
And more than 1,000km north-east, at end of a gravel road a few hours west of Brisbane, five rusty push bikes and two pairs of shoes hang in an old gum tree. A sign nailed to the trunk calls it the “Onya Tree” – short for “goodonya”, or “good on you”.
“Some can be explained, others cannot,” says the Canberra historian and author Nichole Overall, who investigated the origins of hundreds of teddy bears nailed to trees along a highway outside Australia’s capital.
After years of wading through urban legends behind the bears origins, Overall settled on a roadside memorial with a teddy bear following a 1987 road death as the most likely cause.
“But then it goes to, why? Why did they suddenly proliferate and for so long?” she says. “It remains an unexplained phenomenon.”
But not all decorated trees are shrouded in mystery. The “bra tree” was established to commemorate a local deputy school principal that died of cancer in 2011. The “shoe tree” is a tribute to Nichole Print’s mother-in-law, who had collected more than 3,000 porcelain shoes.
“When she passed away we decided to do it in her honour,” Print says. “[We] found the perfect tree on the way from Mildura to Adelaide and put all the shoes she wore [on it], plus all our old shoes as well.”
The “Onya Tree” is reportedly the creation a man who used to live close by. But the concept appears to have outlasted its creator. “Well worth a visit, make sure you take an old bike,” says one Google Maps review.
Overall describes the trees as “something of a cultural phenomenon,” that can evolve beyond their original meaning.
“It’s something that just catches on … [the teddy bears] have been going on for almost four decades, people wouldn’t know why or what significance is, but it’s like, ‘well, this seems like a good idea’,” Overall says.
In regional South Australia there are cooking pots dangling from a tree. Other sightings include trees covered in mugs, Elmo plushies, hats and plastic unicorns.
“They seem to me like Banksy or the Big Banana, someone trying to express something artistically,” says John Malouff, an associate professor from the University of New England’s school of psychology.
“I like them, especially the teddy bears and the hats … It’s public art in a way.”
But Felicity Fenner, an associate professor and the chair of City of Sydney’s public art advisory panel, disagrees.
“I would not classify these as art,” she says. “The point [of art] is to convey narratives or articulate particular issues in innovative ways that are specific to that cohort or place.
“In the case of this current fad for soft toys and other items in trees, they seem to mimic each other and are popping up everywhere, in seemingly unrelated areas.”
“I do not subscribe to the theory that ‘everyone is an artist’. Are these being done by actual artists? I doubt it.”
A spokesperson from the Department of Environment say the Australian government “does not have any jurisdiction regarding the decoration of individual trees around Australia,” but said that many state and local governments require permits for defacing or altering trees.
