Notes From a Small Patch of Bush

[A preface to an occasional series about my local bush]

How do I – how does anyone – put words around a landscape? First I’d probably want to narrow down my definition of landscape. I would start with a “small patch of bush”, a walkable chunk of my local landscape.

[A grassy paddock marks one boundary of "the patch"] 

That “small patch” would be roughly framed by a few South Hobart roads; a vagrant bit of bush that has avoided being developed. I could add that the Hobart Rivulet runs through most of it; that the Cascade Brewery owns or leases the bulk of it; that it falls some 200m – steeply at times – from the lower foothills of the mountain, and towards the Rivulet and the Derwent.

I could go on to talk about its particular shape and dimensions. Picture it as a misshapen rectangle roughly 3km long by 500m wide, giving it an area of around 150 hectares or 370 acres. But to my mind such measures, and all of the descriptors above, are like IQ scores: they give only the roughest idea of one measure of something-that-might-mean-nothing-at-all. Once I lived on a flattish 1300 acre rural property. Describing its relatively featureless terrain wouldn’t have troubled anyone’s vocabulary. It certainly didn’t fire my imagination.

[Hobart city beneath the wintry summit of kunanyi/Mt Wellington] 

Not so these 370 acres. Here imagination bursts out of any arbitrary frame I might try to put around the “patch”. Because beyond our bush there is more bush, serious bush. It’s possible to walk through that bush – as I have done in the past – all the way from my home to the 1270m summit of kunanyi/Mt Wellington. And I needn’t stop there. I could go on over the mountain and keep walking into the remote south-west wilderness. I would need to cross only a handful of roads, most of them dirt tracks or fire-trails.

From where I write I look out on that bush and that mountain, and can plot just such a walk. It’s imagination, and not just personal history, that powers our sense of a place. And this place, this patch, with its actual connection into the wild, is one that has held my imagination, and given me a strong sense of place, for the 30 years I’ve lived here.

[A dragonfly: the bush is home to numerous such invertebrates] 

Still, so far I’ve said nothing that actually paints a picture of this bush: its plants, animals, history, geology, geomorphology. And all those “-ologies” do seriously contribute to our understanding of a place, a landscape. I have written, and will write more, about those aspects of the patch. But for this preface to further writings from my small patch of bush, I want to enter it imaginatively via one recent episode, and ask: what does the bush mean to my 20 month old granddaughter?

[Two of my granddaughters on the Christmas tree hunt: photo by Sally Oakley] 

A few of us are on a pre-Christmas excursion, hunting for some Christmas trees. It’s been raining, so our small granddaughter has her rain suit and gumboots on. They give her an added degree of determination, as if she had any need of that. Before long she shakes off any guiding hands, stomps along the track – straight through any puddles – and stops only when there’s something interesting to pick up and examine. That means about every 10 metres or so. It is a long excursion.

Only for the steepest bit of track does her aunty hoist her up for a while. When we reach the feral Pinus radiata trees, she’s down again, watching while we select a few. Things like land tenure, weed trees, Christmas, bow saws, even time itself are probably lost on her. 

[Our 20 month old granddaughter carries her Christmas prize: photo by Sally Oakley] 

But she carries one of the smaller prizes for a while, and I wonder. Will she remember the whiff of freshly cut pine; the soft swish of needles on her face; the feel of warm hands; the laughter and sense of occasion; the raucous cockatoos? And will she associate that with the bush, our bush, any bush? I suspect that’s how our imaginations start to be fired. And why we want to put words around our place.

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”.]

From City to Summit 2: Not Easily Tamed

[Hobart Town Rivulet and Mount Wellington by John Skinner Prout (1847) Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office: Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts]

It was going to be such a simple exercise. Walk from Hobart city upstream, close to the line of the Hobart Rivulet, until I got to the summit of kunanyi/Mt Wellington. Yes, I did expect a few complications with transport, especially once the walking group included three generations of family. But I hadn’t counted on the vast number of diverting stories I would uncover along the way.

Take, for a start, the convict “king”: Jorgen Jorgensen. It would be hard to invent a story more colourful than his. Born in Denmark in chaotic times, he grew up with a thirst for adventure. In 1809 he sailed to Iceland to trade, and while there he overthrew the Danish Governor and declared himself “Protector” of the Danish colony. Just two months later his “reign” ended with his arrest and imprisonment.

[Portrait of Jorgen Jorgensen by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg
(Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons]

Although released a couple of years later, he continued to find himself on the wrong side of the law. He was eventually convicted of theft by the British and was transported to Van Diemen’s Land, arriving here in 1826.

His viking spirit was well suited to the needs of the colony, and he soon became an explorer of some of its wildest parts. Back then that even included the Hobart Rivulet, just upstream of the town. Here’s his 1835 description of the area.

An impervious growth of the thickest brushwood, surmounted with some of the largest gum trees that this island can produce, and all along the rivulet as far up as where the old and upper mill now is, was impassable from the denseness of the shrubs and underwood, and huge collections of prostrate trees and dead timber which had been washed down by the stream and were strewn all around.

On a chilly autumn morning, a couple of centuries later, Sally, Tim and I gather in Collins Street in the city. We’d planned to start with a warming coffee, but it’s 9am on a Sunday, and nothing is open. Instead we hoist our day packs and wander up for our first encounter with the Hobart Rivulet. Just downstream from Molle Street it has been tamed and corralled between sandstone and concrete banks, though boulders in its bed are a reminder of its former wildness. A little closer to the city the concrete restrains it still more, giving it the look of a glorified open stormwater drain.

[The imprisoned Rivulet flows toward Barrack Street, Hobart] 

The rivulet hasn’t always cooperated with its imprisonment. It has flooded seriously a few times, most recently in April 1960 when lower Collins and Liverpool Streets had up to a metre of water over them. Jorgensen’s “huge collections of prostrate trees and dead timber” were among the culprits. After 1960 tree and boulder traps and trash racks were constructed upstream of the city to prevent such debris choking the flow in future.

[Tim and Sally on the Rivulet Track] 

We cross Molle Street, enter the Hobart Rivulet Linear Park, and meet the first of these barriers. They stand like derelict factory foundations, rusty and awkward astride the stream. The factory reference is apt. For much of Hobart’s early life the rivulet was not only its main source of drinking water, it also drove the wheels of the mills and factories that supplied the town.

[Tree traps on the Hobart Rivulet]

The 21^st century’s gentrification of the Rivulet, once wild, then industrial, has been ongoing. The old Cuthbertsons’ tannery, which once supplied leather for Blundstone shoes and boots, has recently been demolished. Speculation is that a housing development will take its place. Sally vividly remembers the “fruity” air that used to waft up from the factory to the adjacent South Hobart School, where all three of our children began their schooling.

There were far worse factories than the tannery. A little further upstream we pass the Cascades Female Factory, now a World Heritage Site, though for many years a feared and fearful place. Here convicts and “fallen” women of the early colony were housed – some with infants – for “correction” through hard work and discipline. An 1829 newspaper reported with great optimism:

Farewell now to idleness and impudence, lover-letter writing, throwing of packets &c. over the wall, and all the concomitants of clandestine taking and receiving.

[kunanyi/Mt Wellington above the wall of the Cascades Female Factory] 

A truer report might have mentioned overcrowding, corruption, inadequate nutrition, disease and death. There were even riots among the women in the 1840s. By the 1850s it had become a straight gaol, and it eventually closed altogether in 1877. Today you can be entertained by re-enactments of life in the Female Factory, with actors dressed in period costume. It’s one way of celebrating what is now considered of World Heritage significance. But while we're being entertained, it's as well to remember that Hobart’s past, like its Rivulet, is not easily tamed.

From City to Summit 1: Planning a Pilgrimage

It’s raining at home. Where the mountain should be there’s a ragged cloud, a dishevelled doona pulled up around a chilly summit. Perversely, it has me thinking about walking. Mountains always do that, even when they’re trying to sleep.

[Sunset over the Mountain] 

But today I’m also thinking about history, and Hobart’s history in particular, because kunanyi/Mt Wellington plays a big part in that. After a short-lived and fraught experiment on the eastern shore of the Derwent River, Hobart was founded in 1804 on the opposite shore, near its current town centre. Water reliability was the principal reason for that early move. And that in turn was encouraged by the regularity of the rain – and sometimes snow – that fall on the flanks of the mountain.

[Wild and well-watered: the top of kunanyi/Mt Wellington] 

A good proportion of what falls there ends up in the Hobart Rivulet. At less than 10km it is too short to be called a river. Still it proved a reliable and constant source of fresh water for the port of Hobartown. In my 28 years living alongside it I have never known it to stop flowing.

[Hobart Rivulet in its untamed state]

‘Though its lower reaches are now piped and tunnelled, and outflows from stormwater drains, factories and the city’s tip mingle with mountain-fresh water, the Rivulet’s upper waters are still used in Hobart’s renowned Cascade beverages. “Out of the wilderness” its beer advertisements once spruiked. We locals smiled at the exaggeration, yet were still proud of our city’s proximity to relatively wild places. How many other capital cities have ready access to such wildness?

Most work days I walk down that valley, close by the rivulet, “out of the wilderness” and into the city. Truth be told, I often yearn to be going the other way, towards the wild. So one day I decide to do just that. I will start from the comforts of a favourite Hobart café, and walk upstream to kunanyi’s windswept 1271m summit.

[Sunrise and moonset over kunanyi/Mt Wellington] 

While it’s hardly an expedition – there are tracks all the way, and it’ll be done in a day – it does require that I gain more than 1200m in altitude. So there will be sweat and effort required. But the more I plan, the more I come to see how much of that effort will be mental. Because the walk will involve transecting a slice of Hobart’s natural and social story, I will need to be alert not only to what IS, but also to what WAS. That makes it a symbolic journey: a kind of local pilgrimage to places with significant stories, human and non-human, past and present.

I want this to be a series not because it is a long walk, but more because it promises to be an involved walk. It won't be just an A to B bushwalk. Perhaps no bushwalk ever should be.

The Urban Platypus

The world is astonishing every day. We, on the other hand, are seldom ready to be astonished.

Most weekday mornings I walk down a track beside the Hobart Rivulet on my way to work. I like to think I am observant. I feel the cooler air that drains off the mountain, down our narrow valley. I notice the variations in the water flow: sometimes a racing torrent, sometimes an ambling companion. I discern the changes in the weather, the seasons, the flowerings and fallings.

Yet this is my daily exercise, and I am on the way to work. So I do not dawdle. Most times I am listening to my iPod: sometimes music, sometimes a podcast. It is good brain fodder, but a distraction nonetheless. There’s a lot I must be missing.

[Hobart Rivulet flows from a cloud-shrouded kunanyi/Mt Wellington] 

One bright Saturday morning, I am taking my time. There's no hurry to get anywhere, I'm not counting this walk as exercise. Today I am really looking because … well, is it because I care to really look? Or is it because I have taken my camera, so I can take some photographs? On this occasion the two merge, and I am twice surprised – greatly surprised – by what I see as I walk.

First up is a tiger snake, the palest I have ever seen. It has an unusual light green hue, and a burnished blush amidships. There are clear cream coloured “stripes” hooping up to a back that never darkens beyond business-suit-grey. It’s the stripes that gave these snakes their name, although many – perhaps most – are not noticeably striped.

This one is a decent size, at least a metre and half long, and it’s moving quickly. I’ve been creeping along the rivulet bank looking for photo angles and must have startled it. That surprise is mutual, yet although the snake is only a couple of metres away, and heading in my direction, my desire to photograph it is stronger than any thought of retreat. The reptile makes the “photo or flight” debate academic. It finds a hollow in the stream-side rubble so quickly that my camera doesn’t even make it to eye level.

[A bright autumn morning by the Rivulet] 

I tell Lynne, who is up at track level, and she suggests, rather strongly, that I join her there NOW. She has been startled by a snake once before in this vicinity, while cycling down the multi-use track. She tells me that “her” snake was a decidedly darker individual than the one I have described. Given the ample bush and fresh water along the rivulet, it shouldn’t surprise us that snakes would favour such a place. As with so much of our wildlife, we see far less than is actually there.

As though to prove that point, surprise number two happens just minutes up the track. A man and a woman are standing stream-side, engrossed in watching something. As we join them one quietly says “platypus”, pointing to what could well be an animated stone in the water. The remarkable creature is maintaining its position by swimming against the flow. As we watch it dabbles and ducks beneath the water, intent on finding the invertebrates that are its staple diet.

[Which is rock, which is platypus? Click on the image to expand.] 

How startling it must have been for the first Europeans to come across this monotreme. Surprising enough that a mammal should have a duck-like bill, webbed feet, a beaver-like tail, a venomous spur; how much more surprising when they discovered that it also laid eggs and yet suckled its young? It broke so many “rules” of natural history, that a sample sent to England was at first dismissed as a hoax. Scientists pored over its ill-preserved body looking for the join marks.

[A full-grown platypus, around 50cm from bill-tip to tail]

We stare, photograph and ogle for fully twenty minutes more, hardly less engrossed than any early explorer, or than the first time we saw a platypus. Here, only a couple of kilometres from the centre of Hobart, is a phenomenon of the natural world, an evolutionary rarity, insouciantly going about its business. Astonishingly it’s probably here or hereabouts every time I walk by; every time any amazing creature walks, jogs, rides, flies, hops or slithers by.

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.