Until recently, a big old river red gum greeted people on the road that runs along the banks of the Murray River near the Walker Flat ferry crossing in South Australia.
"I looked at it every time I came off the punt," says Fiona Giles, spokesperson for the River Murray and Mallee Aboriginal Corporation.
The whitened trunk of the tree, which has been dead for some time, bore scars from slabs of bark that had been cut away and shaped into canoes by Fiona's ancestors.
