Narcissus and the Fire-Dragon

[Fungi and lichen on a sassafras trunk] 

Every trip has its backstory. They just don’t usually feel as earth-turning as this one. Normally it’s where to go; who can come; whether we’re fit enough; and who’s providing transport. This summer all that was deeply overshadowed, quite literally, by bushfires.

They began in late December 2018, when dry lightning strikes ignited several fires in the Tasmanian highlands. In what is starting to look like the new normal, thousands more lightning strikes occurred on January 16 and 29. I watched a simulation of the lightning storms as they crossed from north-west to south-east. It was as though a vast and merciless dragon was swooping and swerving across our island, breathing deadly fire, now to the left, now to the right. The fires started by the dry storms continued burning for weeks, along a vast front. By early February 2019, over 40 fires had burnt around 200,000 ha, almost 3% of Tasmania.

There’s a more personal slant to the story. By January 4 the Gell River fire in the central south-west had grown into a monster. As it roared down the Vale of Rasselas, a vast smoke plume spread westward, piling high into the sky behind kunanyi/Mt Wellington. An eerily murky pall settled over the city of Hobart for days. Nobody could breathe easy in any sense.

[Smoke 'erupts' behind kunanyi/Mt Wellington] 

All day long we had the radio on, listening for updates, wondering if the fires would reach Hobart. We hastily worked out our fire plan, with southern Tasmania’s disastrous 1967 fires firmly in mind. That calamity claimed 64 lives, injured around a thousand, and razed 1300 buildings. If fire struck here again our plan was simple: get out early. Twice we packed overnight bags and precious items. We photographed parts of the house interior, in case we’d need to remember what was replaceable. The irreplaceable would be just that.

If that wasn’t unsettling enough, we were deeply troubled that the fires were burning through the heart of Tasmania’s Wilderness World Heritage Area. They tore through wet highland forest and lapped up to the achingly beautiful Lake Rhona. All the while the weather stayed relentlessly hot and dry, the usually wet westerlies tight-buttoned and sober.

Fire sped east and south, igniting the ridges leading towards Mt Anne and its irreplaceable King Billy pine forests. They raged across buttongrass plains and up the slopes of the iconic Western Arthur Range. They menaced the majestic Gondwanan forest on the flanks of Mt Bobs, with half an eye on Federation Peak itself. They crawled across the Central Plateau near Great Lake, taking out some pencil pines, cushion plants and cider gums.

[A map of some of the 2019 fires, courtesy https://firecentre.org.au/] 

These are just some of the places I know personally. Hundreds of other precious wild places were burning at the same time, not to mention the forest and scrub fires that were threatening – and already destroying – homes and properties in the Huon Valley to the south-east. Up to 700 firefighting staff and hundreds more volunteers employed firebombers; helicopters; temporary irrigation systems; chemical fire retardants and just plain elbow grease to try and limit the damage.

It was in this context that I chatted with a couple of friends who are both senior fire managers. After talking about all that was being done to try and douse the fires, one simply added “Pray for rain!” I said I would, adding that if it helped I would even do a rain dance. (Not a pretty sight, we agreed!)

Gallows humour aside, I was deeply despondent, but also angry. It felt as though my heart country, those wild and wet places that are refuge for the wonderfully strange vegetation of old Gondwana, was under brutal assault. At the same time it seemed our political leaders were actively refusing to acknowledge that this – and the mass fish kill in the Murray-Darling; and the unprecedented bleaching of coral in the Barrier Reef; and the newly minted record hot/dry January all over Australia – resulted from climate change. And not the slow and incremental change we might have expected, but sharp and damaging change.

I did pray for rain, and I also planned to get out there – somewhere, anywhere – to feel the wilderness beneath my feet; the clear air in my lungs; and just perhaps to hear the whisper of Gondwana again.

With many of the usual tracks closed because of fire risk, we ummed and arred in the lead up days to our walk, trying to settle on somewhere we could still go. And then, of course, it began raining: beautiful, long, soaking wet rain. Where we live we had around 40mm overnight, with the promise of more to come. We could hardly complain, but the wet forecast further restricted our options. Be careful what you pray for!

[Our group shelters on the Narcissus Hut verandah] 

So, on a wet and windy Saturday, five of us finally found ourselves on the ferry trip up leeawuleena/Lake St Clair. Our far-from-adventurous destination was Narcissus Hut, just a few hundred metres from the ferry jetty. It’s not exactly the heart of the wilderness, but as we lugged our packs from the jetty to the hut, it felt good to hear the currawongs call, and the dollops of rain on the roof, and the whoosh and scratch of wind in the trees.

Narcissus Hut is the poor relation of Overland Track Huts. Most who reach it are intent on going somewhere else: either home via the Lakeside Track or ferry, or up to Pine Valley Hut for more exploration of the national park. We – and plenty of freshly arriving Overland Track walkers – soon learned that the route to Pine Valley was shut. So quite a few walkers hastily re-arranged their plans; tried to change their ferry booking; or simply decided to stay a night or two at Narcissus Hut with us.

[Pademelon and mother near Narcissus] 

With the exception of Jim, who loves a hut, we’d set up tents on the nearby platforms. Still, it rained a lot, and Narcissus is a small hut. So with everyone cooking inside, we cooked and ate in shifts. It’s always interesting to hear what walkers have thought of their Overland Track trip, and we had a fine social time conversing with walkers from places as far away as Macau, Venezuela, Alaska, Taiwan, Canada and France. But it wasn’t quite the wilderness time we were hoping for.

So on Day 2, regardless of the wet forecast, we filled our day packs with all the necessary gear, donned our waterproofs, and headed off towards Byron Gap. Less than 10 minutes into the walk I could already feel the wildness doing me good. After 20 minutes on flat boarded track, we reached a track junction in wet forest, and turned towards the Gap. Starting from an altitude of around 700m, we knew we had a nearly 300m climb to reach there. But the narrow, winding track through tall forest beckoned.

[Ascending towards Byron Gap] 

I won’t say it was easy: it took over 2 hours to get to Byron Gap. But I must say it was sublime. No one in the group had been on the walk, and I’d talked it up with phrases like “brilliant rainforest” and “superbly uber-green, mossy and beautiful.” My apprehension at having over-sold the area quickly dissolved, and the sighs and soft words of appreciation told me it was working on the others too. Never mind that it was raining, it was a rainforest!! Better still it was a glad, green and growing one. And for now at least, it was safe from the fires that we prayed were being taught wet lessons from this stern and insistent rain.

[An ancient giant in the rainforest near Byron Gap] 

I wonder sometimes whether my love for these Gondwanan forests verges on the mystical. The sassafras, myrtle beech, King Billy pine, celery-top pine, fern and leatherwood of these forests are plants with links back to the supercontinent of Gondwana. They’re kin to plants found in other former Gondwanan places like New Zealand’s South Island and Patagonia. They are also completely unlike anything I grew up with. Yet before I’d met them I used to draw forests just like these: with green mossy tree trunks, bright glossy leaves, ferns and a carpet of fallen leaves everywhere. And always there were waterfalls … and probably fairies too.

[Libby soaks in the green wonders of the rainforest] 

This childhood dream was dampened by sweat, rain and some blood-sucking reality by the time we stopped at the un-forested top of the Gap. After more than a month of heat, drought, and a lack of victims, a legion leeches warmly welcomed us to their world. Between showers and glimpses of nearby Mt Byron, we had a restless and rapid lunch. After plucking off as many leeches as we could find, we turned around and descended back to where we’d come from.

If tiredness and a slight itchy paranoia took some of the gloss from the wonders, it was still as marvellous descending through the forest as it had been going up. That green glow stayed with us back at the hut, and well beyond.

[Rainbow reflections from Narcissus Hut]

Narcissus and reflections: I suppose they go together. After a month under the dire spell of a this 2019 fire dragon, my mind wandered into the territory of myth. Perhaps I was hoping for a brave St George to slay this dragon. Instead, among our political leaders at least, I could find only a weak and witless Narcissus. 

[Narcissus prefers his own reflection to the beauty of Echo: artist Solomon J. Solomon] 

In the original myth a beautiful nymph named Echo fell in love with Narcissus. But he did not return her love. Instead he became so enamoured of his own reflection in a pool of water that he gazed at it day and night, eventually dying for lack of food and sleep. And Echo, broken-hearted, wandered into the mountains, where she pined away until only her melodious voice remained.

I know it’s not just our leaders who are focussed on themselves. So many of us are enchanted by how fine we look reflected in the glow of the things we’ve created. But it's not just about us. While we're busy admiring ourselves, and pretending we are masters of all, the world of nature, like Echo – and perhaps also Gondwana – retreats into the mountains and begins to fade away.

A Tasmanian Catastrophe

Have you ever stepped into one of those pubs? I mean the dingy, seedy, noisy type of establishment, where most of the patrons love nothing better than a loud, aggressive argument, and a fist fight is just a misplaced word away? I feel as though I’ve been in one of those pubs for much of the last week.

It’s not been an actual pub of course, but the internet. And these days the web joins the pub and the media as one of the major courts of public opinion. The arguments and potential fisticuffs have been about the bushfires that are still burning in the wilder parts of Tasmania. I’ve been arguing that these fires are catastrophic, and require urgent action. But I've been met with a dismaying array of counter arguments and even indifference.

[Burned scene with cushion plants, near Lake Mackenzie, 2016. (Photo courtesy Rob Blakers)] 

  

Let’s start with some bare facts that should be beyond argument.

• 2015 was one of the driest and warmest years on record in Tasmania
• Spring 2015 was the driest ever recorded in Tasmania
• On January 13, 2016, and again on January 27, thunderstorms crossed our island state
• Lightning strikes not accompanied by significant rain (commonly known as dry lightning) ignited more than 70 fires
• Most fires started in remote, uninhabited areas, including the Central Plateau, part of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area (TWWHA), and the Tarkine region in the state’s far north-west
• As of the time of writing, many thousands of hectares - some 2% of the Wilderness World Heritage Area - have been burned
• As of the time of writing, no human lives have been lost, and no houses have burned down

[Recently burned pine, Central Plateau (Photo courtesy Rob Blakers)]

For what follows, I want to concentrate on the fires in the Central Plateau, and most particularly those burning in its rare high-altitude plant communities. I will start by looking at, and responding to, some of the dismaying, misleading or just plain wrong ideas about the fires in those alpine areas.

“Fire is a natural part of the Australian environment: always has been, always will be.”

It’s true that in many places across much of Australia, fire shapes our vegetation. But there are some very notable exceptions. Plant communities which have developed in the absence of fire include rainforests and the relict Gondwanan vegetation of Tasmania. That includes pencil pines, King Billy pines and deciduous beech, and the complex, waterlogged peat soil communities in which they thrive.

These plant communities, some of which date back 65 million years, are so special and so rare anywhere in the world, that they were one of the main reasons the Tasmanian wilderness was declared to be of World Heritage significance by UNESCO. But these plant communities are not at all fire-adapted. Pencil pines, for instance, regenerate via the shedding of cones, which occurs only every five or six years. They can also spread vegetatively via suckering. Neither method allows them to spread far from the parent tree, which is one reason we see them growing in stands. One hot, local fire will kill both the trees and their seeds, leading to local extinction.

Fire is NOT a natural part of the highest and wettest parts of the Tasmanian highlands. Fire ecologists tells us that natural fires have been either totally absent, or extremely rare, over much of this country for millions of years.

[No regrowth for this dead giant (Photo courtesy Rob Blakers)]

“These fires were caused by lightning, so they were totally natural. Surely this is what has always happened.”

While these fires were caused by lightning, this has not always happened in Tasmania. Dry lightning was once very rare, but is now happening with greater frequency. This was predicted to be one of the results of climate change, as warmer, longer dry periods, and more frequent extreme events (including thunderstorms in Tasmania) occur. Dry lightning fires have now been regularly recorded most years since 2003, and some consider this to be the “new normal”.

 “Surely Aboriginal people burned all of Tasmania over many thousands of years.”

Yes they did, but with two big provisos. Firstly their use of fire was usually small scale rather than landscape wide. And it occurred during the cooler months. Their so called “mosaic burns” promoted patches of regrowth, but left adjacent areas as unburned refuges for the mammals they were hunting. Secondly, waterlogged and peat areas, including pine stands, would have mostly been untouched by such fires, as they contained little grazing grass and didn’t burn well in the cooler seasons.

[A stand of healthy pencil pine, Central Plateau]

“It’s an El Nino year. We always get hot, dry weather in Tasmania during an El Nino pattern. This is no different.”

Actually it is different. While this is an El Nino summer, the extreme conditions in such years – including the occurrence of dry lightning – are becoming accentuated as a result of climate change. As Professor David Bowman of the University of Tasmania says, “We are in a new place. We just have to accept that we’ve crossed a threshold, I suspect. This is what climate change looks like.”

“Fire regenerates the bush. There have been big fires in the highlands before, and the bush recovers.”

Fire does not regenerate all species. As we saw above, pencil pines are killed outright by hot fires. Other species, and the peat soils on which they depend, are also killed by fire.

[Recovery? 50 years after a fire at Great Pine Tier: click to enlarge] 

As for the fires that previously ravaged the plateau, such as the deliberately lit fires of 1960-61, it’s very clear that the bush did not recover (see photo above). Thousands of dead pencil pines, and peat soils burned down to bedrock, stand as witness to their local extinction. Other species slowly take over, but the unique Gondwanan coniferous heathland is gone forever.

* * *

As I step out of “pub”, I realise that we’re never going to resolve this dispute through argument alone. If I had my way I would far prefer taking some of the “pub’s patrons” with me into these pine-dotted landscapes to experience them for themselves.

I’d want them to share the unique light, to breathe that strangely ancient air, to feel the timelessness of these ancient stands. I try to imagine them joining me just a month ago when, as a tired bushwalker looking for a safe place to put my tent, I took refuge in a stand of pencil pines close by a lake. Putting my tent up beside their stout trunks, I lay back on a bed of pine needles and watched as stars wheeled overhead, filtered through the foliage. If they’d been there they too might have known the comfort, shade and shelter, and the indefinable, muted peacefulness that these pines give.

[The comfort of pines: Central Plateau] 

And what if we’d been there together on the night of those storms, as vast clouds loomed and darkened, and lightning slashed from the sky, but rain refused to fall? Then in the growing dark, as flames from the lightning-lit fires became visible, would they have remained indifferent then? Or if they’d joined my friends Dan Broun and Rob Blakers, who walked through the charred landscapes to record this catastrophe just days after the fires started, what would their argument have been then? Having experienced these unique places, wouldn’t they have wanted to do anything to prevent this sort of catastrophe ever happening?

Any parent who loves a child, any person who loves another, will know how fiercely you want to protect what you love. It’s time more of us loved these ancient treasures before it’s too late. They’re in need of our protection now.

* * *

I would like to acknowledge the fire crews from many Tasmanian and interstate agencies, plus remote area fire fighters from as far away as New Zealand, who have been working incredibly hard to quell these fires. It is a very complex task in rugged terrain, with difficult access in sometimes extreme weather conditions. Low cloud and rain have sometimes made it difficult to get to the fires and to assess their condition, as this is mostly done via helicopter. It still remains to be seen whether they were given sufficient resources, at an early enough stage, to adequately deal with this catastrophe.

Freycinet Experiences 2: Rambling Along the Rift

Geology isn’t sexy, or so we’ve been told. Yet show anyone a pure sand beach and a sapphire sea, and you’ve got them, whether or not they recognise the geology behind the appeal.

[Great Oyster Bay from Hazards Beach] 

Our second day on the Freycinet Peninsula doesn’t start like a geology excursion. But as we journey south by boat, I admit to pondering the origins of the great misshapen rectangle that is Great Oyster Bay. And I wonder too why we’re occasionally seeing dolerite. I think of this peninsula as dominated by granite. Why are two rocks of such different origins rubbing up against one another here?

There are more immediate questions first. Today we have a choice: to take the high road or the low road. The former climbs from the northern end of Cooks Beach over 579m Mt Graham, then winds back to Wineglass Bay. The latter starts south of Cooks Beach, and follows the western coastline of the peninsula to Hazards Beach. From there it’s over the low-level Isthmus Track to Wineglass Bay. Jodi and four others take the high road; Eric, Lynne and I take the low road. And yes, we’ll be in Wineglass ‘afore them!

[On the low road, with the high road in the background] 

The swell is rising as we drop the “high roaders” at the beach. There are some sand-churningly anxious moments before “Shep” extricates the boat from the beach. Minutes later he deposits us in a sea-weedy bay a bit further south, and we start our foot journey north.

Above us to the east are the wooded hills that rise to the granite peaks of Mts Freycinet and Graham. To our west are the dancing blue waters of Great Oyster Bay, and at our feet there’s dolerite – as well as questions that require a geological answer.

It turns out that today we’re walking the eastern rim of a graben. This is a kind of mini rift valley which has dropped relative to the higher blocks (horst) on either side. In the case of Great Oyster Bay, the graben has been inundated by the sea, which now separates one higher block (the Freycinet Peninsula) from another (the hills above Swansea). The rift was a late consequence of the long, complicated pulling apart of the super-continent of Gondwana. This began around 200 million years ago, and precipitated the injection of huge quantities of dolerite beneath what is now Tasmania. The graben probably formed closer to the period in which Tasmania finally tore away from Antarctica, around 65 million years ago.

[She-oak woodland, Freycinet Peninsula] 

As well as pulling blocks apart, these earth movements rotated and twisted the pre-existing rocks. Older granites, which had formed a huge sub-surface bubble around 400 million years ago, were brought to the surface here. The tearing apart also caught up some younger dolerite on the Freycinet side of the rift.

What remains today is a predominantly granite peninsula – albeit with dolerite and sedimentary remnants – separated from a predominantly dolerite eastern Tasmania.

If I seem to have strayed a little too far from white sands and blue seas, let me return to them. The beaches and the sea we’re walking beside simply wouldn’t be that colour without the slowly eroding pure quartz that’s derived from the granite. Other rock types usually contain fine-grained (ie muddy) elements. This granite has very few impurities to cloud the water, resulting in a rare, translucent clarity. And of course the beaches couldn’t be here without a graben deep enough to allow ocean inundation.

[Approaching Hazards Beach] 

Knowledge of these geological coincidences may not add to every walker’s enjoyment of this place, but it does enlarge my appreciation of a superb day in a rare landscape. So too does the fact that we can amble, knowing we have ample time to make our Wineglass Bay rendezvous with the other group. We pause for coffee, take way too many photographs, enjoy a swim (in my case a very brief one) and take the time to exchange bits of our life story. We also ponder millennia of Aboriginal presence along this coast as we come across some of the many shell middens that dot the area.

[An Aboriginal shell midden, Freycinet Peninsula] 

Despite our leisurely pace, we reach Wineglass in time for a long and restful lunch. After the almost deserted western side, the bay is very busy. Groups, couples, individuals spread out and take up their own little bit of this paradise.

[The "high roaders" return along Wineglass Bay] 

Lynne and I find a driftwood log in the sun, and settle down to wait for the “high roaders”. When they get back we gather ‘round each other like a happy pack of dogs, keen to share news of the day. But there’s rain forecast, and Gil and his bus are waiting for us back at the carpark, so Jodi gently urges us to talk while we walk. After a day like this, try to stop us!

 

[Just beating the rain back to the carpark] 

The Wild Wet West

[Scenes from Tasmania’s West Coast]

[Roaring Forties waves pound the shore at Granville Harbour, Tasmania]  

It is an effort to get to Tasmania’s west coast – its actual coast. Even when you’ve reached the unofficial capital, Queenstown, the nearest accessible salt water is still 40km away by road. And what a road!

Tasmania’s road builders were reputedly paid by the curve, not by the mile. The joke is very close to the truth for the road between Queenstown and Strahan. In the 1930s, the Commonwealth government appeared keen to evade its obligation to pay for a road between the two towns. They thought that they would succeed by agreeing to only fund the construction of the road surface, but not any bridges or culverts.

I can picture the Australian government advisor poring over the map; looking at the rumpled topography; considering the drainage patterns; raising an eyebrow at the huge rainfall. Surely the impoverished State government, he eventually suggests, would never be able to cover the considerable expense of bridging such a route.

He hadn't reckoned on the engineering skills of a workforce used to constructing mine access roads in the wild and hilly west. Today the road is a testament to the cunning of the locals: a triumph of the "little" people over the big city sophisticates.

But the triumph comes at a cost for any road traveller prone to motion sickness. The notoriously winding road follows the contours and somehow evades all of the many creeks. We arrive at dusk, a little green, and mightily relieved.

The next day we explore the shores of Macquarie Harbour by mountain bike. Showers scud by, mud flies up from the wheels, and muscles unaccustomed to the work are stretched. We rest in the rainforest around Hogarth Falls. A deep still green pervades the place. Vivid lime green ferns, both terrestrial and epiphytic, are the highlights contrasting with the regal green of myrtle beech and blackwood, and the whisky hues of the creek water.  

[Forest scenes from western Tasmania] 

I have been in Fiordland, New Zealand, at the same time of the year. There similar forests are watered by similar clouds heaved onto the land by the same roaring forties. In Patagonia I’m told I could experience the same weather, see sibling forests also dominated by southern beech trees of the Nothofagus genus.

Gondwana may have separated nearly 100 million years back, but some of the genes are remarkably and recognisably persistent in these now geographically scattered forests.

A few nights later we sleep in a cabin in Corinna’s Gondwanan forest. The night is still, and remarkably silent. It’s the kind of quiet you can hear. Or perhaps that’s the sound of your blood pulsing. And then the rain comes, first tapping, then drumming, then thrashing and lashing and deluging on the roof just metres above us.

We’re in a rainforest: it’s what you would expect. But this is not ordinary rain. It’s borne by heavily pregnant clouds, which have sprawled down and broken their waters directly over us. The thundering gush makes conversation impossible, even if I wasn’t determined to try and stay asleep.

Here the water cycle is vivid and concise. Just a few kilometres downstream from Corinna, the Pieman River will swiftly return this newborn water to the ocean, although it will meet resistance from the incoming rush of gale-blown swells at the Pieman Heads. And the same winds will bring more clouds, low, fat and ragged, to dump yet more rain and hail on the already sodden land.

But in the morning the birds sing the silence awake, and the sun returns. In the forest, rising vapour interfingers with the growing sunlight, and all seems right with the world.

[Morning, Tarkine rainforest, western Tasmania] 

Another Side of ANZAC

[Pandani surrounded by fagus that's begun to turn: Crater Lake, Tasmania]

[Some sideways thoughts on ANZAC Day, with a natural twist, of course]

It last happened in the year 2000, and it’s going to happen again next year: two “sacred” times for Australians will coalesce. I’m talking about Easter occurring around the same date as ANZAC Day.

While both occasions mean many different things to different people, for obsessive bushwalkers it’s a ripe time for extended bushwalking. So back in autumn 2000 I grabbed the chance for a long ramble in Tasmania’s Central Plateau. The area has been dubbed, without exaggeration, the land of a thousand lakes. I have written before about this part of Tassie at http://auntyscuttle.blogspot.com/2010/01/walking-with-ada-pt-1-not-lacking-in.html

What is less well-known about the Central Plateau is that it also contains vast stands of Tasmania’s only winter-deciduous tree, Nothofagus gunnii, better known as fagus. On that April walk we found this wonderland at the peak of the fagus’s autumn colouring. We were in a heaven of gently undulating rocky slopes dotted with lakes and covered with golden fagus. It was like a vast deciduous forest in bonsai form.

I couldn’t help wondering how many Tasmanians, let alone other Australians, knew we’d had this marvel on display here for the last 50 million autumns. Here in Dorothea Mackellar’s  wide brown land, clothed mostly in evergreen eucalypts, Tasmania had hidden this lingering connection with old Gondwana. On that long dismembered super-continent, deciduousness once ruled. Now only this faint seldom-seen echo remains.

It felt like finding a fragment of our connectedness with the northern hemisphere “main stream”. Had a lifetime of enculturation into the beauty myth of fall/autumn in that hemisphere led me to seek out a worthy expression of it here in the highlands of Tasmania? I wondered whether it was the same kind of desire to be recognised as part of the “club” that took young Australians and New Zealanders to Gallipoli in 1915. A disastrous battle on a Turkish Peninsula, as far from home as most Aussies and Kiwis had ever been, was to become a symbol of adulthood for the two young nations. And ANZAC Day – April 25^th – has been celebrated by Australians and New Zealanders ever since.

As I thought about this desire to be part of the northern hemisphere action, it occurred to me that Gondwana and its forerunner, Pangaea, actually turned some of that thinking on its head. There was a time when all of the world’s now-most-populous continents were together here in the southern hemisphere. It is Europe and North America who have moved northwards, not we who have drifted south.

But regardless of the origins of my response to it, no amount of peak-bagging could compare with that Easter’s transcendent tramp through the fagus. And an ANZAC Day will rarely go by without me wanting to visit and pay homage to a botanical marvel that long pre-dates our recent attempts to show our worth to the world.

Roger Deakin – An Appreciation

[a piece written following the death of Roger Deakin, the great English nature/place writer. September 2006]

[Roger Deakin in The Labyrinth, Tasmania - prior to an obligatory swim!]

While Roger Deakin was a staunch parochialist, and a champion of the particular, the ripples of his life and death will nonetheless reach far beyond Suffolk and England. As they have reached me here in Tasmania, Australia's wild island, the former van Diemen's Land of convict infamy. It was here that I met Roger while he was researching "Wildwood". Tasmania fascinated him both as a place where apples are synonymous with the island - many still call it "the Apple Isle" - and as a place where wild forests are under dire threat from human action.

I took Roger into the wilds of the Tasmanian highlands, to a place called Pine Valley. It was wonderful to share this special wild place with someone so passionate about and attuned to the natural world. I recall his sense of wonder as we walked out of typical Australian eucalypt forest into an altogether more ancient forest. "Like walking through a door into old Gondwana" I explained as we exulted in the mossy green darkness of a rare coniferous rainforest whose nearest relations are in Patagonia and Fiordland. After we reached the basic hut that was to be our base for the next few days, Roger made it his duty to keep the coal-fired stove alight. He excelled to the extent that the little iron stove glowed red-hot, and fellow lodgers had to peel layers or exit sleeping bags to prevent overheating.

The next day we went higher into the mountains, to the lake-studded 1400m high plateau known as The Labyrinth. There we ambled between tarns, at one stage sitting at a viewing point high above some of the remotest wilderness in Tasmania. Our 360 degree view took in everything for many miles around. Yet there was not one single road; no cleared land; no man-made structures; no smoke, town, city or building: nothing but wild lands for mile after mile. He was amazed that such wildness still existed in the "civilized" world. I sensed he may have even struggled with the concept that the management of this place has as much to do with leaving it be as it does with "improving" it. That English urge came out in his occasional farmerly suggestions about track maintenance or tree pruning. We had a good natured debate about that human desire to intervene in nature.

But what a privilege for me, as a then unpublished nature writer, to have had such a companion for 3 uninterrupted days. Roger spoke wisely and helpfully about writing, and encouragingly about my efforts at it. His enthusiasm and generosity continued as we kept in touch via email. He provided me with some wonderful suggestions in the nature writing field, and in turn took up a few suggestions I passed his way. As a huge fan of "Waterlog" - a book I had read before I knew Roger - it is his final watery exploits in Tasmania that will remain in my memory. On a cool spring day, with melting snow still lying around on The Labyrinth, Roger couldn't resist the urge to plunge into one of the highland tarns and swim an icy lap. He emerged grinning, refreshed and ready for more mischief. So at the end of our walk, as we waited for the ferry to return us to our car, he repeated the dose in beautiful Lake St Clair. Although we were at a much lower altitude, the lake is Australia's deepest, and it can scarcely have been any warmer. (And for the record, at the former he was informal, at the latter he wore his swimming suit!)

Later, as the ferry brought us into the jetty, I pointed out a snow-clad peak named Mt Rufus. Roger's eyes lit up, and he asked if I could take a photograph of it in honour of his son Rufus. That tiny glimpse of fatherly tenderness made me esteem even more a man, a writer and an activist about whom there was already so much to admire. And now I will return to Roger's work with a sorrow-tinged enthusiasm, just as I will join the queue of those longing to read his last book as soon as it is published.

[PS - "Wildwood" and "Notes from Walnut Farm" were both published after Roger's death, and are currently available. His previous book "Waterlog" is also still available.]

Across the Ditch

[excerpt from a forthcoming book]

Photo: on the Routeburn Track, NZ

For a Tasmanian, walking into a New Zealand beech forest is like finding a previously unknown relative. There is something so familiar about the colour, the feel, the look of the trees; the shape of the leaves, the damp tang, the fungi on the trunks, the texture of the forest floor, the glow of the mosses. Even some of the bird calls hook the heart toward home. These are surely some of the old trees of Gondwana, just like those I’d find if I crossed Cephissus Creek and walked up that ever so familiar track towards Pine Valley Hut in central Tasmania. Just like those I’d find in whole swathes of Tasmanian forest which continue to resist the almost irresistible advance of the eucalypt.

And of course the resemblance is a family resemblance. The various species of Nothofagus (literally “false beech”) are found in New Zealand, Australia, South America, New Guinea and New Caledonia. Its distribution was one of the keys to the theory of continental drift. Because Nothofagus seeds aren’t dispersed by birds and other animals, and don’t spread far in water or wind, it seemed highly unlikely that the current distribution happened across the oceans. Rather, it is now accepted, these landmasses were conjoined until their diaspora began around 80 million years ago. By that time the ancestors of the beech genus were established, and when Gondwana split, each part carried with it a botanical, invertebrate, mycological and microbial cargo that has continued to evolve and adapt to new conditions, and to the addition of other new species.

As we walked that day through beech forest towards Rob Roy Glacier, I noticed more than just the similarities. There were also differences; some obvious and easy to spot, some more subtle and profound. Tasmania’s beech forests are not abounding in obvious wildlife. Much of it is cryptic and/or crepuscular (most active at dawn and dusk), and so not always visible when bushwalkers are out and about. But the evidence is always there if you know where to look. It might be a whiteish, fur-filled scat giving away the scavenging diet of a Tasmanian devil. It may be a tunnel-shaped runway through the understorey betraying the presence of potoroos. Or perhaps a fur mass showing where possums have had a territorial scrap. And where the margins of the forest meet buttongrass plains or heath, the comically practical cuboid scats of a wombat are rather more obvious, deftly deposited on logs or rocks or tracks for other wombats to read.

In this New Zealand beech forest, the first thing I noticed was the lack of these signs, and thus the lack of mammals. Of course I knew that New Zealand didn’t have any native land mammals, and that this was another Gondwana-related matter. Although ancestral marsupial mammals had been in Gondwana before New Zealand broke away, none had survived in modern New Zealand (no-one knows why). So I expected no scats, no runways, no fur scraps. But it was still more than strange to think of a forest without native mammals, even at night.

Then a most remarkable creature began to turn my thoughts around. In the middle of the beech forest we quite abruptly came upon our first kea. Thinking it would be shy and soon fly off, we cautiously took out our cameras. Keeping a respectful distance, we took some photographs, the large sickle-beaked parrot patiently posing for us. But as we put our cameras away and continued our walk, the kea hopped nonchalantly onto the path and began to follow us.

Photo: Kea near Rob Roy Glacier, NZ

For a good hundred and fifty metres, we were tailed by this lord of the forest, hopping along the track like a green ghost of Long John Silver’s parrot. When we stopped, the kea stopped; when we moved on, so did the kea. It was as comfortable and confident as any Alaskan brown bear would have been in the forests of Baranof Island, where we’d walked just a year before. But I’d have to say I was a lot more comfortable being followed by a giant parrot than a giant bear!

In a strange way the comparison is not completely odious. In the absence of terrestrial mammals, the New Zealand food-chain is topped by birds and reptiles. In a real sense the kea is one of the kings of the bush in New Zealand – so much so that a bounty was once put on their heads because of the mayhem they can create among remote sheep herds. They will eat meat, especially seeking the kind of high-energy fat that will keep them going through the winter. The bounty system, which saw perhaps 150 000 keas destroyed, was ended in 1971, but the species was only legally protected as late as 1986. Today its range is far more restricted than it once was – largely due to human persecution. However its presence, perhaps even its place of honour, in the South Island’s high country forests, seems secure.

This ecological niche-shifting – at least in comparison with the hierarchies I’m familiar with – was further illustrated as we walked along the West Matukituki River. Pied oystercatchers (Haemotopus ostralegus) are common in Tasmania, as they are in many parts of the world. At home they are almost entirely coastal birds, partially living up to their name by feeding on molluscs, crustaceans, worms and other seaside treasures found on beaches. They breed along those same beaches. But in New Zealand, perhaps because mammalian competition and predation is minimal, these oystercatchers mostly breed along the braided rivers of the South Island. The changeable but fast-flowing inland rivers must create similar conditions to saltwater tides, stirring up sediments, creating water and air movements that encourage edible invertebrate life. Certainly the equally incongruous presence of terns and gulls along these rivers points in that direction.

Regardless, hearing the oystercatcher’s startled wik wik cry, so familiar from my Tasmanian coastal walking, still caused a double-take here by the Matukituki. It was like hearing a rooster in a restaurant: a normal enough sound in an altogether unexpected place. The restaurant analogy was once sadly apt, as these New Zealand oystercatchers were hunted as gamebirds until protected in 1940. Apparently no-one told Tasmanians, as I’ve not heard of them being eaten in my home state. But this particular day, along the beautiful Matukituki, they seemed perfectly at home, foraging by the river or prodding sods for a morsel. It’s good to hear that their numbers are increasing now that hunting has ceased.

Taking the long view, it’s harder to be optimistic about the many other kinds of change that human action continues to bring into all of the world’s ecosystems. We may no longer hunt down keas, oystercatchers and Tasmanian devils, but they – and we – are slowly being hunted down by that 21st century scourge – climate change. In Tasmania, for instance, the advance of the eucalypt, so brilliantly adapted to drought and fire, will sooner or later displace the old Gondwanan brigade.

This was poignantly illustrated while we were tramping in the wet New Zealand spring/early summer of 2006/7. As we slopped through a very wet final day on the Routeburn Track, Tasmania and much of eastern Australia was having an early and severe bushfire season. Projected long term, for Tasmania at least, there must be concerns for the long-term survival of drought and fire-intolerant species such as many of the Gondwanan species.

Climate change predictions for Tasmania and New Zealand’s South Island may drive the former Gondwanan mates further apart. Species such as the devil, already threatened by a cancer-like plague that has seen them officially declared endangered, look far from secure in the very long-term.

In New Zealand the ongoing mayhem caused by feral animals is considerable, and no case is worse than that of the possum. The deliberate release of Australia’s much-loved brush-tailed possum (Trichosorus vulpecula) in the mid 19th century for the fur trade has had disastrous results. There are now estimated to be up to 100 million of them in New Zealand, and they’re found in virtually every part of the country. I have a vicarious sense of shame in the fact that they are dubbed “Tassie blacks” because of their fur colour and their state of origin. There is only a slight easing of that feeling when you find you can purchase gloves, thermal and fashion clothing that uses possum fur to add warmth and weather-resistance to wool. With typical Kiwi flair it’s referred to as “merino mink” – a neat marketing tag that combines wool of Spanish provenance and fur with Tasmanian origins, adds an allusion to a now-rare European fur, and somehow makes it sound 100% pure New Zealand.

Of course change will always happen, whatever effort we might make to forestall it. And there will be some winners as well as losers in the natural environment. But as I walk in these delightfully wild areas, it’s hard not to feel the sense of an old order passing.

Absolutely Worth Saving: Finding a Place For Nature Writing

When I was young, and had newly learned that most stars were actually suns, I lay on my back one night staring up at a single star. I tried to imagine that this tiny prick of light was as large as the sun. Then I would shunt it backwards through space, pondering how long the imaginary “pipe” of space would be before it became star-sized again. As I looked down this tunnel a peculiar form of vertigo would overtake me. Even though I lay well-supported by solid earth, I grew dizzy with the vastness of space.

A different version of this psychic giddiness can be induced when contemplating geological time. For geology too shows us that solid earth is really an oxymoron. Take any place in southern or eastern Tasmania – say the Port Esperance area. Beneath your feet in such a place you’ll find evidence of just how fluid the earth can be. The rocks below carry tales of a break-up of monumental proportions: the bitter, long and literally earth-shattering bust-up that saw Pangaea torn apart some 200 million years ago. From our particular vantage point the agony of this break-up was largely kept below the surface. There were no volcanic eruptions; no glowing flows of molten material. Nevertheless the massive volume of dolerite which welled up below the surface – estimated at a staggering 15 000 cubic kilometres – would undoubtedly have been accompanied by a stark increase in earthquake activity. It would eventually leave its mark on nearly half the state. Today, from our Port Esperance vantage point, it is beneath our feet still. And it is also 1226 metres above us atop the pyramidal Adamsons Peak, as it is on so many of the mountains of Tasmania's eastern half. At Adamsons Pk, a mesa with a misleadingly volcano-like resistant cap, the constituent dolerite overlies the rocks that it long ago intruded upon: sedimentary rocks up to twice its age.

Those sedimentary rocks tell us that earlier still this area was a large marine gulf. Known as the Tasmania Basin, it collected sediment and run off from the now eroded uplands that pre-existed the present highlands. Up there, back then stood a whole unimagined, unexplored landscape; crisscrossed by rivers, crowded with unfamiliar life forms that doubtless never paused to consider themselves temporary. And now this landscape is known only from its reconstituted detritus.

Over more than 100 million years, taking in the Carboniferous, Permian and Triassic periods, this upland was brought down through patient cycles of erosion. In places the resulting sediment layers approach 1000m in thickness. Towards the end of this period, around 200 million years ago, the gulf dried out, became land-locked, and developed into a plain dotted with lakes. What was marine became freshwater. Fossils in these sediments have left a record of the life-forms that lived in this often cool time and place. These include shellfish, fish, reptiles, insects and ferns, but no flowering plants, birds or mammals, as these has not yet developed. While Pangaea was still intact, the relative stability that encouraged the development of the dinosaurs as well as these beds of sediment, was soon to end. That change came during the Jurassic period, and locally it was these vast sediment beds that would be violated, shattered and whelmed both over and under by the dolerite that accompanied the change.

It is curious to consider that geological changes are so ponderous by human chronology that most are out of our realm of experience. You might as well ask a bush fly to compare one cold snap with the next. Its life is so fleeting that the first cold snap is its last.

Yet geologists believe that the upheavals that accompanied Tasmania's part in Gondwana’s break-up – especially the massive upwelling of sub-surface dolerite – may have been so sudden as to be noticed by humans, had any existed at that time. Our proto-humans, living at sea-level in this region, may have found their surroundings elevated by as much as 400m over a period of years, perhaps even months. We can only conjecture what seismological and meteorological ructions would have accompanied such earthly turbulence and heat. And as to what our proto-humans would have made of it, assuming they were not overwhelmed by the sulphurous reek, we could as usefully turn to Dante or St John as to any science text.

When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and there came a great earthquake; the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree drops its winter fruit when shaken by a gale. The sky vanished like a scroll rolling itself up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. Then the kings of the earth and the magnates and the generals and the rich and the powerful, slave and free, hid in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling on the mountains and rocks, "Fall on us and hide us from the face of the one seated on the throne."
In less apocalyptic times, a more neighbourly calling on the mountain we name Adamsons Peak requires you to traverse hundreds of millions of years. It is a long, mostly steep day's walk to the summit. But beyond the plateau's edge and its rind of sandstone, there is a respite, a near-level area of ground underlain by the sedimentary strata of the old Tasmania Basin. Novice walkers, exhausted by the steep initial climb, rejoice in the easier incline between the plateau's rim and the final cone of the peak. But every geology hides its secrets and, following a well-earned rest at the plateau’s edge, the walker enters a slough of boggy ground, its thigh-deep mud enough to bring back despond. It is only by travelling upward through both bog and time, and reaching again the solid dolerite of its higher ridges, that the walker is again on solid ground - at least during our current eye-blink in this geological age.

But what goes up must come down, in geology as in walking. Climate too has tides of which we are only dimly aware. The cold tides of climate, the ice ages, have bitten deep into the lands of this region, wearing down the vast bulk of material built up in the preceding ages. The jagged ridges and peaks of western and southern Tasmania might mimic volcanoes, but they are so-shaped for almost the opposite reason. Rather than being built up by forces acting from beneath, they have been ripped and torn by gravity and water - in both liquid and frozen form - until resistant remnants and watershed divides are all that remain at altitude.

If that wasn't enough, the white tide also wiped the highlands clean of much of its flora and fauna. The glacial ice became a chrysalis hundreds of metres thick, encasing for millennia many of the old life forms of the island. When the land finally emerged from its icy carapace, a metamorphosis occurred. A new creation was revealed, with completely new species, genuses and even orders emerging to take the place of those that had been overcome by ice.

At the same time Pangaea, and then its child Gondwana, continued to break apart. Finally around 45 million years ago Tasmania farewelled Antarctica. We slowly moved towards the middle latitudes, warming and drying, while Antarctica stayed south, its flora freezing and dying out by around 17 million years ago. For Australia the dramatic changes in climate brought new species, genuses and orders to replace many of the Gondwanan life forms. But not everywhere. The highlands of this island were some of the last places to resist the invasion of one of these newcomers – the eucalypt. The archetypal Australian tree is actually a botanical johnny-come-lately, having only arrived some 25 million years ago. Its phenomenal success, due in part to its ability to cope with drought and fire, is nowhere better illustrated than in the tall old growth forests of southern Tasmania. Yet their success is not absolute. Inland of Port Esperance it is possible to climb out of eucalypt forest and into the woodlands of old Gondwana, where myrtle, tree fern, celery-top and King Billy pine predominate.

If these vast sweeps of geological time and the rising and falling tides of ice and life-forms blur your mind, then scale down the time frame and consider what’s happened at Lake Eyre only recently. In early 2004 Coopers Creek and the Thompson, Barcoo and Diamantina Rivers were all in flow. Their waters journeyed hundreds of kilometres from the rain-soaked interior of Queensland, moving at a steady walking pace. After tireless months they reached and then slowly filled Lake Eyre to its highest level in years. In parts the water was over 1.5m deep, even encouraging the (very) occasional sailors of the Lake Eyre Yacht Club to wet their keels.

But with the in-filling came not only a flood of water, but also a flush of fauna and flora that brought people from around the world just to witness it. For months the lake was alive with invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Plants and seeds that looked dead for decades sprouted, flowered, seeded and regenerated again, in turn bringing birds, insects and all manner of other living things. Mobs of kangaroos; platoons of pelicans and murders of crows travelled hundreds, even thousands of miles to join in the feast.

With the flood came movements of sediment on a massive scale as bare earth was scoured by the rush of floodwaters. On the lake’s new shorelines short-term beaches and dunes even formed as wind and wave did their work. The dunes in turn were colonised by plants and burrowed in by animals. For perhaps three years, depending on follow-up rains, these changes will transform what Charmian Clift once called an "incurable acid-wound" into an oasis of sorts. Alter the time frame by several factors, and it’s analogous to sea level change and glaciation. Just as the micro time-scale event at Lake Eyre brought with it major movements of plants, animals and earth materials; so the macro time-scale events cause enormous environmental shifts across continents, nations and islands like ours.

Whichever time-scale we use, as we come to the present and the future, we must consider one more compelling environmental factor. To all of this layered chronology, we must add human history.

In his 1977 book A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor recalls gazing out over Slovakia before World War 2. He reflects on the human upheavals that have characterised central European history.

The shift of mountains and plains and rivers and the evidence of enormous movements of races gave me the feeling of travelling across a relief map where the initiative lay wholly with the mineral world. It evicted with drought and ice, beckoned with water and grazing, decoyed with mirages and tilted and shifted populations . . . steering languages, breaking them up into tribes and dialects, assembling and confronting kingdoms, grouping civilizations, channelling beliefs, guiding armies and blocking the way to philosophies and styles of art and finally giving them a relenting shove through the steeper passes.

We know little of the tilts and shifts of human populations which occurred here in southern Tasmania before European take-over. We know that caves less than a half-day’s walk from Port Esperance were used by Tasmanian Aboriginals during the last ice age. And we suspect that no humans anywhere else on earth lived this far south at that time. We also know that these same people had a profound effect on the type and occurrence of flora and fauna through their deliberate use of fire. Yet we know so little detail of their history here; of their thoughts and beliefs; their loves and losses, even though theirs is a far longer history than that of Europe. Leaving aside geological vertigo, even the number of generations of Aboriginals dwelling here is dizzying. Perhaps 1500 generations had come and gone, and Bass Strait had closed, opened and closed again, before the English invaded a mere 7 generations ago.

And now what? Listen to a few lines from Pete Hay’s poem 1842: William Lanney at the River.

It is not mine to know -
not mine to know why the last free people,
William Lanney's family,
chose a social death
to the solitary sorrow
of the ghost-fled scrub.
The tracks of the people blur for want of feet,
the ghosts retreat
to still places
in the distant heart of trees,
in the mat of sunken scrubroot.
And all around,
relentless
clamping silence fans to the sea.

The boy from the Black Bull Scrub
grows strong, childless, kindly,
well-fashioned to bear a people's weight.
He dies in the Dog & Partridge;
the local hounds of science
finesse the devil
for the chance to tear him apart.
All make the trick:
Bacon's children gouge and chop
and deem themselves noble
in colonial Hobart -
but I fly to the Black Bull Scrub,
lose myself there,
lean to the salt-laced wind,
wishing, for one omniscient instant,
to touch the lonely edge
of a family
stepped forth
from the hauntless bush.

All here are gone
Gone from the sun
With the wind
As it flows to the east.
Who were the land
Its sap and its kind
Are lost;
In its silence the land is lost.

Yet here we are. We can be no-one else and, for the moment, be nowhere else but here at the sharp end of the 7th generation of Europeans in Australia. We’re part of an Earth generation that has overcome our vertigo and landed humans on one dot in space, and is looking further afield. We’re part of a generation that has renounced its need to attribute earth movements to God, although we may question whether putting ourselves in the deity’s place is such an advance.

Some come to Tasmania from places where human greed and hubris have left their ugly, inescapable bruises on the landscape. Others call Tasmania home. But whatever our origins we can see for ourselves the disproportionate tilts and shifts that result from the exertion of human will, even here in our heart-shaped island. From our nominal vantage point of Port Esperance we cannot help but see the vastly accelerated changes at the species, genus, order and even landscape levels.

And seeing these changes, even in this literal backwater, I pause to consider how we can find ways of keeping this place intact for coming generations. Tasmania has had too long a journey, come through too much geological upheaval, to meet some ugly end at the hands of humans. I seek comfort in remembering that Esperance means hope.

Peter Grant, October 2004

[Published in Island magazine #102, Spring 2005. An earlier form of this essay was prepared for a conference held at Port Esperance near Dover. The geological advice of Mike Pemberton is gratefully acknowledged.]