Time Travel Without a TARDIS

A little curiosity is a good thing, despite what they say it does to cats. Similarly a little knowledge is probably not as dangerous as they say, so long as we recognise that we have to add to it.

[An outcrop of Permian mudstone, South Hobart] 

For the past 28 years I have lived with the Permian era, or at least on top of land that is underlain by – and derived from – Permian rocks. It has taken me that long to become fully curious about what that really means. Yes, I have always known that our Permian mudstone is very inclined to turn back into mud; that it does not yield rich soils; that the vegetation it supports is seldom lush.

I was also aware of an abundance of fossils in those Permian rocks: some of them literally just out our back door. But it took a visit from our three grandchildren to motivate a little more fieldwork and some more solid background research. They, like many of their peers, have their imaginations fired by dinosaurs and fossils and everything to do with the annals of the former world, as John McPhee called geology. For them it is time travel without a TARDIS.

So, one hot summer's day, we find ourselves on an intergenerational fossil hunt. Attention spans are scarcely troubled. Two minutes up our bush track we are literally tripping over fossils. Spoiled for choice, we are picking up dozens of rocks, discarding most, breaking open a few.

One lump cleaves neatly and the perfect, darkened imprint of a marine bryozoan - its neat lines like a child's drawing of rain - comes to light for the first time in around 270 million years. It is a sunlight brighter than this Fenestella or any living thing would have seen in the Permian. It was an era that was largely cold, often glacial in this part of the world.

[One of my granddaughters holding a Bryozoan fossil] 

It was also an era that saw one of the worst mass extinction events of all time. 90% of all marine species didn’t make it from the Permian into the Triassic. Tectonic plates collided, Pangaea – the all-in-one land mass that preceded supercontinents and continents – was formed. And oceans, seas, and the currents that moved around and between them, were so greatly disrupted that huge pressure was placed on most species. That included shallow-water marine creatures such as the bryozoans and brachiopods we’re finding.

[Fossiliferous mudstone on site in our bush] 

On a quiet Sunday afternoon, wandering through a sunny woodland, it’s hard to imagine such world-changing events. Yet those very environmental changes may be the reason for the abundance of fossils here. Fossils are, after all, the remains of what once lived, and an abundance of them makes you at least wonder about causes.

[Impoverished beauty: woodland on Permian mudstone] 

In the case of the bivalve brachiopods, the process of fossilisation is very plain to see. As I crack open one rock, two sides of a bivalve remain together, like hands still joined in prayer. The shell itself is long gone, but the mud that infiltrated the shell in place of the creature, has preserved the shape of the shell’s interior perfectly.

[A Brachiopod fossil] 

Soon the children depart, along with their little bag of rocks. I turn to identifying the fossilized creatures and some more of the geological backstory. And there, in February 1836, I find Charles Darwin, wandering about our local hills, mountains and shores, collecting the self same fossils. Whether it’s 178 years, or 270 million years, it seems you don’t need a TARDIS to wander through time and space.

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.