From City to Summit 3: The Cascade Connection

[Cascade Brewery and Mount Wellington by Haughton Forrest
ca 1890, Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts.] 

Despite the absence of Jorgensen’s “impervious growth”, our progress up the Rivulet Track wasn’t exactly swift. There were thickets of history and memory to be caught up in too.

At the Cascades Female Factory, for instance, we were reminded that Sally had written about the place a few years ago. She’d entered into the imagined life of a Female Factory inmate named Sarah. Transported to Van Diemen’s Land for stealing a loaf of bread, Sarah found herself in the Female Factory, where she lamented:

We weren’t people any more but thieves and twisted wretches who needed reform…

When we slipped into that valley, under the shadow of that mountain, I felt two things. Beauty and terror. What a beautiful place. What a terrifying space.

This was my new forced-upon-me home. If they had given me a nice cottage and a family and a little garden and a pot for stew and said, ‘Have a happy life, Sarah’ I might have made a go of feeling the beauty better. They gave me a cell and a filthy bed and a hundred rough women to fight against and no hope and then they told me - work the long days, learn the long nights and do it for seven years - keep quiet - don’t make trouble and look to God. I didn’t know where to look.

And the mountain loomed over me as though it might swallow me up or maybe just make me disappear into its shaggy, rocky sides*.

[Sally gets re-aquainted with the Female Factory] 

It was hard to walk past that place without feeling the weight of misery that had led to it being called the valley of the shadow of death, a reference to Psalm 23. But a couple of tourists arrived at the gate of the now historic attraction, so we took our rod and our staff and moved on.

We stuck with the Cascade theme however, with the Cascade Gardens and the Cascade Brewery just a short distance upstream. The Gardens were build around the boulder dam and trash trap that were part of the flood-fighting efforts dating back to the 1960s. Destructive flows were the downside of the reliable water that saw this area dotted with mills from the early 19^th century onwards.

[Cascade Gardens across the boulder dam] 

In 1824 an English engineer named Peter Degraves built a timber mill here. The plentiful blue gums up the valley were ideal for building the boats used in the thriving whaling and sealing industry. But debt problems had pursued him from England, and Degraves was soon sent to gaol. Not fazed, he used his time in prison to plan a brewery. On his release in 1831 he put his plans into action, and by 1832 the Cascade Brewery opened.

It’s amusing to us as locals to see what a shrine the brewery has become. Buses have made it a compulsory stop, brewery tours are well patronised, and some tourists risk life and limb standing in the middle of the busy road to get the perfect photo of the brewery’s façade. We Aussies love our beer!

[The facade of the Cascade Brewery, South Hobart] 

We took our own photos of the confected façade and continued our walk on the other side of the brewery, joining the new Cascade Track. The well-constructed track took us away from the Hobart Rivulet and up the ridge between it and the Guy Fawkes Rivulet. The brewery, volunteers and professional track designers all contributed to the 2.2km track. 

[On the new Cascade Track, South Hobart] 

The professional work includes a signature John “Snapper” Hughes stone-arch bridge across a side creek. Fittingly the bridge is named after Peter Degraves: one more Cascade connection. 

[Degraves Bridge on the Cascade Track] 

For us this was where the walking proper began. At the brewery we were scarcely above 100m in altitude. The new track would take us to around 270m. Then there would be only 1000m more to go.

[*Thanks to my daughter Sally Oakley for allowing me to include excerpts from her unpublished work “Mountain Moves”.]

Walking Like Water

[a new and experimental piece, potentially for my walking book]

It is my habit, practice perhaps, to walk the five and a half kilometres from home to work every day.

The first few times it felt a very long way. It was months before I did it more than a couple of days a week, and then only in fine weather. I’ve now been at it for over a decade, and tend to walk it every week day, whatever the weather. I find that on the days I don’t walk, I feel sluggish all morning.

Walking gets my blood flowing, starts my brain ticking over, helps shift mental roadblocks. It has become a kind of meditation for me – a great steadier, a creator of perspective, a moving still-point in a sometimes complex life.

Each week day I walk away from the mountain – often with a germ of regret that I’m not walking the other way – and with the flow of the Hobart Rivulet towards town. This is Australia, where creeks and even rivers often fail to flow, yet in 23 years of living in this catchment, I have never seen the flow stop. It’s why the earliest white settlement of southern Tasmania shifted from the drier eastern shore of the Derwent to this wetter western shore. The waters flowing from the cloud-rich mountain are plentiful and reliable.

The Hobart Rivulet is a narrow, brief, rushing thing, literally cobbled together from dolerite boulders torn off the crumbling flanks of the mountain. Steep-banked, scrubby-sided, pocked and youthful, it is a duckling with few prospects of a serene swanhood. We get along companionably.

One morning, walking alongside Cascade Gardens, I glance left towards the Rivulet where its usually cobbled course is smoothed and funnelled into a concrete race that plunges into a broad concrete pond. The pond has a large metal grate on the townward side which jags boulders and logs, reducing the risk of flooding downstream.

But this particular morning, as the jouncy, glistening water courses over the elevated race towards the pond, what catches my eye is that I am moving at the same tempo as the water: both of us flowing from mountain to sea at the speed of water.

The phrase “at the speed of water” makes me smile. I’m aware that the speed of light is fixed and known, but what of the speed of water? I walk on, the thought coming with me. Maybe I haven’t just walked like water this particular morning. Perhaps I am always walking like water.

When I’m exhausted, slowed to a trickle like ooze through the peat of the south-west; boulder hopping with glee down a dolerite scree; making plain progress through duck-boarded buttongrass; trudging and huffing towards yet another false summit; resting still as a pool during a welcome pause from walking; all my movements and thoughts, inward, upward, downward, sideward, outward, sometimes vapour thin, sometimes glacially solid and slow, have something of the fluid about them.

At a purely physiological level, I recognize that there’s plenty of water within me. The human body is made up of between 60% and 70% water. In fact a new-born baby is 78% water: amazing and fancified water, but H20 nonetheless.

And like water, I am restless even in rest. I find whispers of the eternal in the water cycle: evaporation bearing rumours of resurrection; freezing and thawing mumbling of metamorphosis.