Dreamwalking

Grounded: (adjective) sensible and down-to-earth; having one's feet on the ground; (verb) to confine (a child) to the house as a punishment. (Collins Dictionary)

For the past 6 weeks I’ve been grounded. In the aftermath of our Mt Anne “epic”, and the ankle injury I sustained there, I’ve had to be very sensible about how I put my feet on the ground. And it has involved enough confinement to make it feel like a punishment.

[Let me outa here! I need to walk!] 

The backstory can be found here Mt Anne Epic Part 2. But to put it simply, politely, I badly sprained my ankle. According to the physiotherapist I probably tore my soleus muscle. This lurks somewhere beneath the Achilles tendon, near quite a few other equally unpronounceable bits and bobs. And I didn’t confine the damage to that muscle. The harm from the initial twist spread to quite a few other unnamed parts, thanks to the steep, rough and hot 10 hour hobble back to the car. It all hurt, and I could barely walk for two days after getting home.

So while the summer variously sizzles and fizzles itself out, I’ve been slowly recuperating. It has involved more “thou shalt nots” than “thou shalts”. I can do some simple (and boring) physio exercises and I can wear an ankle support brace. But I can’t run, and I can’t walk anywhere too rough. Nor can I walk very far or carry much weight on my back. And that has meant no overnight bushwalks since early January.

So what does a passionate walker do, at the height of the walking season, when that activity is curtailed? For a start I dream of walking. I pore over maps, plotting and planning walks that I WILL DO when … I also walk vicariously, listening to friends talking about their trips, reading others’ accounts of their walks.

My dreamwalking is always being fed by books. But during my recent confinement, Tom Carment and Michael Wee’s “Seven Walks: Cape Leeuwin To Bundeena” has happily filled a void. As well as its beautiful and artful presentation, I am enjoying its spare, wry observations about bushwalking in Australia. I laughed, for instance, at Carment likening the randomly gathered walkers on the Overland Track to “the cast of their own six-day play.”

English poet Simon Armitage’s “Walking Home” is a delightful take on the long distance Pennine Way. Armitage walks from the Scottish border to his Yorkshire home, giving poetry readings each evening in return for his bed and board. It’s probably only the English weather that creates any semblance of adventure here. But this book is more about the characters and places Armitage meets along the way than it is about the walk itself.

“Tramping: A New Zealand History” by Shaun Barnett and Chris Maclean is a monumental – and beautifully illustrated – account of tramping in New Zealand. This is a book to dip into endlessly, whether to learn the origins of the word “tramp”; to hear of the unique place of huts in NZ walking; or to admire the feats of pioneers crossing the Southern Alps. I managed to bring the book back from New Zealand late last year as “hand luggage”. If you want to try the same, I’d suggest you do some arm strengthening exercises. This wonderful book weighs in at almost 2kg!

Despite this wealth of indirect experience, I've concluded that it’s only actual walking that is properly good for your body and soul. So last weekend I donned my boots – and my ankle brace - and fought off my growing cabin fever via an exploratory walk on the mountain. It involved some steep, rough slopes (don’t tell my physio!), but the reward was the discovery of two mountain huts I’d never been to. I survived the walk well enough to imagine that my next book just might be a bushwalker's log book!

[Log book in a hut on kunanyi/Mt Wellington] 

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.

Never Truly Lost: Part 2

Off-track: Traversing a boulder field on kunanyi/Mt Wellington (Tasmania)

We are creatures of the grid. It’s written in the landscapes we make; the rectilinear neatness of our footpaths, roads and railways; the cubed containment of our buildings; the maps we use to describe them all. Even our minds, as the digital age bites deeper, seem more and more inclined toward binary ways of thinking.

It’s enough to make you want to go off-grid from time to time, to seek some of the rounded, fecund chaos of the natural world. For me that not only means ‘going bush’, but making the extra effort to occasionally go off-track.

As I stand on the edge of the track, the safe, cairned or posted route, and scan the scrub, I am a sailor staring out to sea. Though I admire the view, and tell all who will listen that I love the ocean, until I push the boat out into the tide, I’m just another land lubber.

When I take that first few steps off the beaten path, I will notice an immediate difference. I will now feel the resistance of untrodden bushes, and will have to scan the ground for secure footing. I’ll notice the pungent waft of plant/earth/water/air; hear the crackle and scratch of undergrowth, the chip and chatter of bush birds.

I will find that I’m no longer merely traversing the terrain, I’m immersing myself in it. It is thrilling, and just a little chilling: an amalgam of newness and danger; freedom and risk.

Out in this sea of scrub, I start to see that tracks and maps and compasses and digital devices give us only an illusory mastery of the landscape. They can help, but I must equally rely on my senses. Wits, weather, maps, companions and dumb luck are all part of the mix when you’re off-track. Losing your way and then losing your head are a short-cut to losing your life.

Tasmania’s south-west wilderness provides many useful examples. The Frankland Range, for instance, has only vague routes and pads, rather than recognised tracks. Walkers tend to rely very much on visual cues and wobbles in topography that vary from the subtle to the gargantuan.

During one trip there, low cloud and phantom walker pads found us having to set up camp in the middle of some low alpine scrub. Only a few hundred metres from a known mountain, we thought that going on into the gloom would be too risky. It was a good decision, as we found out when the cloud lifted late the next morning.

Poor visibility and a series of minor navigational errors – despite proper use of map and compass - had compounded to take us onto a false spur. If we’d continued we’d have gone further in the wrong direction, and deeper into the unknown.

It’s not only cloud that can confound us in high places. The Southwest Cape Range, in the bottom left corner of Tasmania, is another largely trackless area. But here we found the trick was to tell the difference between pads formed by bushwalkers, and those formed by wombats or wallabies. The latter can make very fine routes, although they have limitations. Often a wombat pad continues as a low tunnel through thick scrub, leaving the walker to find their own way around – or through – the same scrub band.

It’s not necessary to be in the wilderness to get this “off-grid” feeling. I’ve discovered the same effect on the boulder streams of kunanyi/Mt Wellington. Although only a few hundred metres from the Pinnacle Road, we were free to choose to clamber over any and every dolerite boulder we wanted to, all the while wending our wonderfully wiggly way towards our destination.

Tenuiramis woodland, South Hobart, Tasmania

Still closer to home I might choose to wander off-path in South Hobart's tenuiramis woodlands, or wade and dally in the Domain's themeda grasslands. And I’ll discover much the same exhilaratioin about wandering off-track there as I will anywhere. It's not so much what our old maps used to warn us: 'Here be dragons'. It feels more like 'Here be fierce peace!'

Winter Glimpses

"Do I look like I'm laughing?" A young kookaburra contemplates a winter's morning in Hobart.

Easterly

Sweet, soft, all enveloping: a gently persistent rain tips from ragged easterly clouds. When it rains like this, a few hours can feel like forever. And a day, with a fat and tattered grey curtain drawn across the face of Kunanyi/Mt Wellington, can have me wondering whether the mountain exists anymore.

It is the first decent rain of the winter, possibly the whole year. The gutters, clogged with eucalypt droppings, have overflowed all night, plashing and gurgling, disturbing the dark so sweetly it is hard to complain.

Not Laughing

Kookaburras don’t belong here. That’s what I tell a visiting Norwegian naturalist. They see things differently in Europe, where borders and allegiances shift – as much for wildlife as for people – and concepts like wild, native and endemic are relative.

So when the car we’re travelling in bumps a flying kookaburra, and I fail to stop and enquire after its health, my Norse passenger is horrified. I tell him not to worry, that in Tasmania kookaburras are introduced, and therefore feral pests. His outrage grows further, and the rest of the drive is awkwardly quiet.

All life, of course, has an intrinsic value. Had I stopped, sought and found that kookaburra, and looked it in the eye, I could not have disregarded its welfare so easily. When we are face-to-face, it is harder to dismiss care.

Like the kookaburra we come across in a frosty hollow one winter’s morning. It is young, its plumage yet to settle from punk to prime. And it appears injured, not flying but flopping and half-heartedly hopping away, one wing trailing. I am trying out a new camera and keen for a close-up, I creep closer. It stays put, so I move even closer. The kooka barely blinks, just occasionally raising its hackles or looking sideways for emergency exits.

We are eye-to-eye for several minutes. The young bird looks exquisitely healthy: plump, dazzling of eye, immaculate of plumage. Has it crash-landed on a maiden flight, and been genuinely injured? Or is it just cold and faking it? Whatever its story, it is certainly not laughing.

I think of my father hand-feeding kookaburras in parts of Australia to which they’re native. They would fly to him, but to no-one else, sometimes landing on his hand to receive a morsel. After Dad’s death, our family made kookaburras a talisman to his memory.

So feral or not, as I leave this Tasmanian ring-in, I wish it well.

First Steps

[draft introduction to forthcoming book about walking]

Photo: Resting on Mt Oakleigh, Tasmania

I have no memory of my first steps. But my first recollection of childhood has me walking in a garden. I amble between rows of gladioli, their flowers towering above me like wonky trumpets. There is a rich organic smell from my father’s home-made compost. I cannot have been much more than 2 years old.

Anyone who has witnessed a child on the verge of walking will appreciate what a perilous act it is. What skill and will is required to prevent our pumpkin-weighted, top-heavy heads from bringing us smashing back to earth. Two-footed walking is the constant prevention of toppling by the placing of one foot in front of the other. Only familiarity and continual practice disguise its wonder: that and the fact that most of us have more or less mastered the art to a basic degree. Few primates and even fewer other mammals can boast as much.

I was born in the afterglow of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s successful ascent of Mt Everest. Common or garden walking – the same sort by which I had negotiated my way through the gladioli – had taken them to the top of the highest mountain on our planet. As a child of that time, it meant that anything seemed possible, if only I kept at it.

But there were other events, both global and familial, that meant I didn’t take for granted that my legs would always work. The same year Hillary and Tenzing reached the top of the world, around 10 000 people in Australia contracted Poliomyelitis. The disease killed more than a hundred of those, and left thousands unable to walk. My great uncle Gwesyn was one of them.

For many years his presence, metaphorically more than physically, was a powerful and fearful one for me. On Sundays our family would sometimes visit Gwesyn and his sisters, my fraternal grandmother and my great aunt. But we would seldom see any more hint of great uncle Gwesyn than a wheelchair or discarded walking cane in the darkened hallway.

On rare occasions we would hear his voice from the end room. It added a frisson of excitement to the atmosphere of drawn curtains, whispered conversation, doilies and polite cups of tea at Grandma’s. For some reason, it could have been fear or shame, but was more probably a misguided desire to “protect” us from his suffering, it was many years before we properly met Uncle Gwesyn.

Whispered conversations seemed a standard part of our family life, especially when it came to health and money. I knew the meaning of sotto voce before I wore long trousers. There was secrecy about my mother’s kidney disease and my father’s pleurisy, both potentially life-threatening. Being unable to discuss such things openly, we developed an unhealthy fascination with health matters. My older sister dabbled in hypochondria, faking her own appendicitis so expertly that she had the perfectly healthy appendix removed.

In my own case I developed what was apparently known as hysterical paralysis. For a day or two my legs simply refused to work, locking up and causing me to stay in bed until our doctor friend – in a whispered aside – told my parents it was nothing to be worried about. A few promises of treats and a bit of jollying along soon got me walking again. But to this day I wonder whether it was a phantom paralysis brought on by a morbid fear of Uncle Gwesyn’s polio. Though he became so much more, during those formative years he was a powerful reminder to me that walking was a gift to be cherished.

And if I could walk, I desired to walk among mountains. From my childhood home in Sydney’s inner north we looked across bush towards the distant Blue Mountains. On clear days, with a westerly wind sweeping haze from the air, the plateau formed a blue margin between bush and sky. The bulk of Mt Tomah – how important it always seemed to know a mountain’s name – would sometimes be enhanced by an afternoon build up of white storm clouds. If I squinted the clouds became snow-capped peaks above the blue foothills of a Himalayan range. Starved of true mountains, these were the mountains of my mind.

One Sunday afternoon I had my first chance to ascend this squinty mountain range. Even aged seven or so I understood that a picnic with your family, including a grandmother and a couple of elderly aunts, was not the standard build-up to a climb. But armed with my father’s word that “the Blue Mountains proper begin when you cross the Nepean River”, I knew what I had to do.

While the elaborate picnic lunch on the Nepean’s banks was being packed up, I quietly slipped away. Avoiding stinging nettles and cow pats, I waded into the shallow sandy waters of the river, gasping slightly at its sudden cold. I was sensible enough to remove my sandals for the crossing, buckling them back on once I was on the far side. Then with gritty wet feet and a thumping heart, I climbed the steep bank and began my ascent of the Blue Mountains.

The climb was cruelly interrupted when one of my sisters started following me, giving the game away. With so many overly-sensible adults on the look-out, it should have been no surprise to me. But I still felt thwarted, convinced I was within reach of my goal.

Nearly half a century later, I haven’t grown out of this early love. Mountains loom larger and closer than ever. My childhood fascination has drawn me to live almost literally in the shadow of one particular mountain. Kunanyi/Mt Wellington is my muse, my barometer, the visual shelf for my half-formed thoughts. It draws the rain – God’s sprinkler we used to call it – and keeps a dogged doleritic watch over Hobart and the valleys, hills and waterways around it.

From such a base, with more than 40 years of walking behind me, it feels high time to pause and celebrate walking. I want to reflect afresh on the wonder of where feet can take you, and what you can experience along the way. In part this book is an attempt to repay a debt owed to a mountain – a mountain that became my own Everest, and made a difference to how I have faced the rest of my life. It is also an attempt to explain in words an activity undertaken by millions which consistently hovers somewhere between the ordinary and the extraordinary; the pedestrian and the celestial. What follows then is the story of one particular walk as well as an ode to the wonder of walking in general.

Nature Writing Prize - Award Speech

[excerpt from the presentation speech for the 2007 WildCare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize]

Nature is something worth celebrating in Tasmania, even if some of us tend to take it for granted, believing we have “an awful lot of it”. In thinking about how we don’t always appreciate the wonders around us, I thought an analogy might be the dolerite that is so evident here in Hobart. Many of us look out on the columnar dolerite cliffs of Kunanyi/Mt Wellington – the so-called Organ Pipes – every morning over our Weeties … or looking around perhaps gluten-free muesli might be closer to the mark. At any rate, dolerite is just part of the backdrop to our days.

Yet in global terms it is a rare igneous rock. It was first formed during the tearing apart of Pangaea some 200 million years ago. Without resorting to volcanic eruptions or other glowing flows of molten material, a staggering 15 000 cubic kilometres of dolerite welled up below the surface. Once the surface rock was worn away, dolerite would leave its mark on nearly half of Tasmania.

Do we ever stop to ask what dolerite is really like? What kind of neighbour it makes? To walkers and climbers it is friendly and reliable. Feet and hands find it answers their needs with a sureness that can be comforting, at least on casual acquaintance. Our dog might have told a different story after a long day on the Western Tiers. His regular habit of covering the ground three times – out, back to check, out again – combined poorly with the shark-skin roughness of the rock. Towards the end of the day the pads of his paws were abraded so badly that they bled, and he limped wretchedly. Even so he would neither slow his pace nor alter his rule. We finally had to pick him up and carry him the last kilometre back to the car.

So I should have learned. Yet many years later I found myself learning afresh the lessons of dolerite on a high level traverse of the Du Cane Range. The navigational difficulties presented by its enormous boulders forced us to clamber up, over, around and down countless dolerite faces. As I slid face, feet and fingers down my umpteenth rock wall, pressed hard against it by my heavy pack, I gained the kind of intimate acquaintance with this rock that had me feeling like a failed rock-whisperer. If only I could have commanded the rocks to throw themselves into the sea, I might not have ended the walk with raw and bleeding fingertips. Or perhaps I could have worn gloves!

Still such close and painful acquaintance can have its compensations. Who, for instance, could fail to be impressed by the ubiquity of lichen on dolerite? The rock’s often finely pitted surface, its native acidity, the clean air of its favoured haunts all help it to contrive myriad niches for lichen. And who could remain unmoved by the lichen’s amazing variety of colours and textures? What from a few metres away appears a flat grey turns, on closer inspection, into a symphony of subtle tones. There are unnamed shades of grey, green, black, red, orange, yellow, brown and white.

And that is just the clothes the dolerite wears. Let your walking boot dislodge a small boulder and you may literally scratch the surface of this impressive rock. Beneath its surface – providing you and your walking companions survive to inspect it – you will see a hidden masterpiece in grey and blue, with accents supplied by the sparkling faces of crystals coming to the light for the first time in perhaps 150 million years. If you also detect the flinty whiff of freshly concussed rock, you may be thankful that bleeding fingertips is the worst you have.

So next time you look up at the mountain, pause and think your own grateful thoughts toward this foundational part of this beautiful place. Asking us to stop and think such thoughts is one of the key roles of nature writing.