The Not-So-Plain Plains: Part 2

It’s blissful being horizontal at last, snug in my sleeping bag. The quiet of the forest is a balm, and as sleep hovers at my door, I turn over in my bag. Suddenly my body is gripped by a series of excruciating cramps. Everywhere from groin to toe spasms, and I can barely keep from screaming. As I writhe about, swallowing my squeals, I think desperately of crawling the 50 metres to Tim and Merran’s tent to seek medical advice! 

Today’s steep, scrubby, off-track walking has caught up with me. Despite taking magnesium – a good prophylactic against cramps – my 70+ year old body is letting me know there’s still a price to pay. I sit up, pull the toes of one leg towards me, and get some relief. When I do the same with the other leg, the cramping worsens. I try relaxing, stretching, sipping water, sitting up, lying down again, breathing slowly: any and everything. But for the next several minutes nothing gives me much relief. Eventually the cramp storm passes, and I lie breathless and uneasy on my left side, not daring to turn over. I just wait, hope and pray for sleep to come.

 

And eventually I do sleep, if a bit fitfully. In the morning I manage to crawl out of the tent and walk to breakfast with relative dignity. As we sip our cuppas and exchange tales of our night, I learn that sleep has eluded others too. Tiredness is no guarantee of sleep. I share my cramping episode, hoping to persuade Tim to keep our ambitions for today’s walk “realistic”. He seems solicitous … but I’ve seen that look before. He has plans, and the best I can hope for is that I won’t be left too far behind.

[Mt Pelion East peaks out behind Tarn of Islands]

Day packs filled, our first order of business is to visit the nearby Tarn of Islands. Merran has struggled to remember its name, and we amplify the confusion by playing with its name. First it's “Lagoon of Rocks”, then “Lake of Hills”, and finally the supremely silly “Pond of Thousand Island Dressing”. The tarn rebukes our folly by being both comely and large. It not only allows glimpses of some of the mountains of the Overland Track, it also (naturally) contains several miniature islands, some topped with small pencil pines. Even its small details are fetching. 

[Small details on the shore of the tarn]

If Tim’s agenda for the day is full, it is also flexible. He first dangles before us the opportunity to visit what he calls “my forest”. He describes a small forest that he’s camped in which has all three species of Athrotaxis pines adjacent to one another. We’re intrigued enough to consent, and we’re soon walking off in its direction. But on the way there’s an unplanned surprise. I catch sight of what I suppose to be a golden, sphagnum-covered rock, maybe 100m away. But as I look more closely, the rock moves! We all stop to watch. Is it a wallaby hunched over grazing? We’ve seen golden wallabies in the highlands before. When it moves to where we have a clearer view, we can see it’s a large golden wombat.

[The large golden wombat]

The day is fine and clear, though there’s a good breeze blowing across the low scrub. Fortunately it’s coming from the wombat towards us, so the animal hasn’t heard or smelled us. For some minutes s/he wombles slowly in our direction, grazing and picking at bits of grass among the coral fern. We watch entranced, photographing, videoing and exchanging quiet expressions of awe. None of us has seen a wombat as blonde as this. Were it a lion, we would undoubtedly describe it as golden. It moves within a few metres of us before I inadvertently knock my camera against its case. The small sound startles the wombat, and it gallops away from us. It’s hard to believe that a 30kg barrel-shaped, low-slung quadruped would be capable of such speed, but they have been clocked at over 40km/h; only a little slower than Usain Bolt! Our quiet bubble burst, we laugh and babble about this amazing sighting.

[Inside Tim's forest]

And now Tim must feel that “his” forest can only be a let-down. It isn’t. Although it’s younger and much smaller that our “home” forest, it is instantly appealing. For a start it has that rare combination of all three pine species – pencil pine, King Billy pine, and laxifolia (a hybrid of the other two) – immediately adjacent to each other. It also has some impressive “Grandma” myrtles, very old Nothofagus cunninghamii that reach high into the forest canopy. They also beautifully exhibit what is known as canopy shyness. Such trees, often of the same species, leave a continuous gap or channel between each other’s outermost leaves. It reminds me of that almost electric shyness I felt when I first wanted to hold a girl’s hand. 

[Canopy shyness in myrtle trees - photo by Libby]

The reasons for this botanical shyness are probably multiple, including to reduce mechanical pruning of each other when wind moves the branches, and to limit the spread of leaf eating invertebrates. But trees are as mysterious as they are remarkable, and the more we study them, the more questions we have.

 

It’s now lunchtime, and we find another reason Tim is so fond of this forest. At its grassy edge we sit in the sun, sheltered from the keen breeze, and look out over the plains. The humps and bumps of the foregeround are covered in scoparia, sphagnum and dozens of other hardy, low-growing plant species. We know the weather is not always as benign as it is today. In the distance, in the lee of small hills, we see pockets of gum trees and pencil pines. Tim spreads his arms towards the wide horizon, and assures us he’s never seen another soul out here. We tease back: “Not even one of the 0.5%?”

 

After lunch we continue our slow wander back, though Tim being our leader, there’s a diversion first. He takes us further west to where he had earlier found what he thought was the original boundary marker of the Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park. We find a large rock cairn on a knoll overlooking the Forth River valley, some 600m below us. We pause and salute those who surveyed and ultimately protected this wild country.

[Tim and the boundary marker]

[Lake Rosa]

And then we actually start walking homeward, first via Lake Rosa, a shallow lake dotted with water lillies, then down a long, wide valley through knee-high scrub to the unnamed lake we’d paused at on our outward journey. Ultimately we complete a nearly 12km long figure 8, and return to our forest camp early in the afternoon. It has been a marvellous day of off-track walking, but I’m not ashamed to say that the lure of an afternoon nap soon takes me tentward.

Walking With Ada 2 - Great Pine Tears

[Photo: some of the dead pencil pines on Great Pine Tier, Tasmania]

[part 2 of reflections on a recent bushwalk]

In a country with a dearth of conifers, the Tasmanian highlands boast several species, most notably the two in the Athrotaxis genus: pencil pine and King Billy pine. These relicts of Gondwana have closer relatives in New Zealand and South America than they do in mainland Australia. Of the two only pencil pine will grow in virtually pure stands, especially in parts of the Walls of Jerusalem National Park.

To walk into a pencil pine stand is to change climate; change light levels; even to feel you have changed hemispheres. There is a cool, dimly-lit quiet, aided by the thick foliage and the soft carpet of needles. Time itself seems to take on a different quality, as though picking up on the pencil pines’ slow-growing, long-lived nature.

As gymnosperms, they mainly regenerate via the shedding of cones, although even this is an unusually unhurried affair, occurring only every five or six years. In peat they also appear to spread vegetatively via suckering. Neither method allows them to spread far from the parent tree. Given their slow growth – they average 40 years to reach just one metre, and can live to well over 1 000 years – they don’t appear to do anything hastily. I find it hard to resist ascribing entish characteristics to these lovely conifers.

Their tactic in the conditions they seem to find themselves in – a drying part of a dry continent – is to wait out bad times and take advantage of good times. That climatic good times may be in long-term decline is just one problem for them. Another issue since European take-over is the spread of herbivores such as rabbits, sheep and cattle. All of these find pencil pine seedlings more palatable than do our native species. In historic times this has created further pressure.

But one bad time factor far outweighs all others. Fire is the deadly enemy of the pencil pine. Having evolved in wet or even water-logged conditions, where fire is a rarity, pencil pines have few defences against bushfire. Recovery is via slow spread from surviving trees. In a drying, fire-prone future this is a high risk strategy.

This January a walk with the Ada map took me to Great Pine Tier, an upland only modestly higher than the surrounding plateau. But the tier distinguished itself, and was so named, because of the prodigious stands of pencil pine that historically stood there. That was until 1960. Between October of that year and February of the next, a series of catastrophic, deliberately-lit fires in the area burned through an estimated 1300 square kilometres of alpine vegetation. Geographically that took in much of Ada and many of the neighbouring map sheets. A significant proportion of the area incinerated contained pencil pine, deciduous beech (or fagus) and ancient peat.

Without knowing the full story of this fire, my friends and I were meandering between the myriad lakes around Great Pine Tier. But when we reached the epicentre of the fire we could hardly have mistaken that we were late witnesses to an ecological catastrophe. Half a century after the event the area still looks like a war zone. With gallows humour we remarked on how easy the walking was thanks to the fire. In truth we were aghast.

For miles around us we could see pencil pine stags, literally by the thousand. Their vertical persistence in death is owed to their tightly-packed, borer-resistant, resinous wood. Bleached white by the icy winds, they stand like a vast wartime graveyard, a ghostly reminder of the glory that once was.

In patches, particularly on the western rim of the tier, small stands of pine forest persist. Walking into one of these felt like walking through a door to another country. Everything was different, the contrast heightening the helpless and hopeless sense of what has been lost.

Beyond such patches, the slowly burgeoning new growth is dominated by other species. There is a changing of the guard, with fire tolerant eucalypts and other flowering plants now taking over. It’s fair to say that pencil pines have been made locally extinct as a result of that single fire event.

You would therefore think that such an event would be burned into the Tasmanian psyche, much as the Hobart area’s 1967 bushfires are. Yet most of us have no clue that this tragedy occurred. So I recall with a chill my recent discovery of a fresh fire ring butted up against a living pencil pine near the West Wall. Some cold or heedless walker has ignored that they were in an area where only fuel stoves are allowed.

If these last stands, and especially that around Dixons Kingdom, succumb to such stupidity, there may be generations of Australians who never have the chance to see the glory of these gracious old Gonwanan forests.