A Rite of Spring

When you live on an island that straddles the Roaring Forties, you know that spring weather is going to be “interesting”.

There are complex meteorological reasons for this, but let’s simplify. When the huge land mass to our north is warming far faster than the vast oceans that totally surround us, that differential is going to mean volatile weather. At the whim of those two geographical bullies, our spring isobars tighten, as though tensing themselves for a pounding from the wind, snow, rain and sun.

[Good weather for sitting by the hut fire] 

And so it proved again for this year’s Show Day weekend. With cold fronts and cloud bands lining up for their turn, we wisely included a hut in our “boys’” Cradle Mountain bushwalking plans. It’s not that we object to a bit of whooshing weather; we know it helps make the place what it is. It’s more that we enjoy retreating to a hut after we’ve braved those elements: somewhere to warm up, dry off, sag down, have a few drinks. The perfect setting to remind ourselves how courageous and adventurous we’ve been going into the mountains in such conditions!

That was the theory at least, and it fed our email banter in the days before the trip. As we drove into Cradle Valley it was snowing and blowing, and the short walk to the hut was through six inch deep snow. But we dismissed the scene as merely “atmospheric”, especially when the wood heater was cranked up, and the first wine and cheese were liberated.

Ah but there’s always cabin fever. Reading, eating, snoozing, talking are all very well, but they need to be broken up by a little physical activity. And somehow the “12 Minute Indoor Physical Fitness” program that Tim O had thoughtfully printed out for us was never going to be a total success. No … come Saturday we were well and truly ready for some actual bushwalking.

When the weather was looking vaguely less threatening, Tim D suggested a 2 to 2 1/2 hour walk via some seldom-walked tracks and routes that he knew. With naïve trust in our friend, and a “what-could-possibly-go-wrong?” attitude, we kitted up and headed off.

[What lay ahead for us on the Cradle Plateau] 

The plan was to climb up to Cradle Plateau gradually – a kind of long sneak attack by way of Riggs Pass – before looping back towards the hut via the Horse Track. We’d be back for lunch.

Two hours later the fun really began – and we weren’t even on the plateau yet. We’d left a well-marked but unmaintained track and joined an occasionally-marked but overgrown route. As we climbed higher, tripping and slipping through ankle-tapping scrub, the weather wavered a little. Was it going to offer us some views or would the rain and snow grow worse? Frankly we expected both.

We weren’t disappointed, although it wasn’t until we reached the highest parts that the snow and wind really kicked in. Horizontal snow and sleet lashed us, biting into the exposed parts of our faces, relenting only when we found rock outcrops to shelter behind. Yet any stop quickly chilled us, regardless of the quality of our wet/cold weather gear.

[A chilly stop on the Cradle Plateau] 

We walked on, despite the Antarctic conditions, finally cresting the plateau. Visibility was poor, route markers very sparse. Tim D tried to look confident – and occasionally failed – as he searched for the cryptic route. It should be intersecting with the Horse Track, a well-marked alternative section of the highway-like Overland Track, somewhere up ahead.

Nearly four hours after starting our walk, we at last spotted the markers of the Horse Track. A couple of us whooped; Tim D looked relieved. A surprisingly high cornice of snow separated us from the track, so in a close simulation of youthful exuberance, we body-tobogganed our way down to the track.

[The Horse Track at last, with Crater Peak behind] 

An hour later we were back in our warm hut and pouring some wine. But then, as if to make us question what the fuss and fear had been about, two things happened simultaneously. The sun shone, and a wedding party turned up at our hut for a photo shoot. All dressed in the usual gear, they had made only one concession to the conditions. The bride wore floral gumboots. Ah spring!

[And the bride wore gumboots!]

When a Tree Falls in the Forest …

It is visually shocking, for sure. But that is lessened by anticipation. After all, I have come looking for a massive fallen tree in a tall forest. Something that has stood 60 metres on the vertical axis, and weighs thousands of tonnes, is always going to make a mess heading to the horizontal.

[The splintered ruin of a forest giant]

It’s the smell that surprises me most. Alongside the strong florist shop notes, and the fresh sawdust tang, there’s an odd smell, one I can’t quite place. Raw earth meets hospital perhaps? Some say you can smell death. Does botanical catastrophe also carry its own odour?

The scene is calamitous. Myriad torn leaves, still green, intermingle with masses of other twisted vegetation, frayed limbs, shredded bark, flowers, twigs, whole trees. We scramble up and over the mess, squelching, slipping on muddy earth or freshly-exposed tree cambium, scratching and smirching ourselves.

It was Wednesday of last week, after soaking rains and gale force winds, that a swamp gum (Eucalyptus regnans) lost its grip on the slopes of a hillside in Tasmania’s Mount Field National Park. It happens all the time, in the larger scheme of things. Fast growing, shallow rooted and enormously heavy, these tall trees all eventually succumb to the push of the Roaring Forties and the pull of gravity. We may not even have known about this one, but for the fact that it fell across the Lake Dobson Road.

[An intact section of wet forest, Mt Field National Park] 

Park rangers and road crew, with heavy machinery and chain saws, had worked for hours in heavy rain to clear the road. With their permission we’ve come to see for ourselves; to photograph and to tell a little of this giant’s story.

As we clamber up slope towards the base of the stricken tree, a pair of sulphur-crested cockatoos gossip in the tree-tops. Occasionally they wheel around, as though to catch the scene from a better angle. Is this rift in the forest news to them, even calamity, if their nest hollow was in one of these trees?

After a few minutes we reach the crater that used to be the tree’s roothold. It is vast, perhaps 12 metres across, and deeper than a standing human. It is half-filled with water, the same water that probably lubricated the tree’s former hold on rock and earth, that made this uprooting possible.

[Inside the crater (photo Lynne Grant)] 

As I stand on the crater’s edge, the fallen tree’s root base towers above me. Slabs of rock, some far larger than me, have been torn out of the earth with the tree roots. They give off a percussed whiff that mingles with a moist earthy aroma. The resulting smell is quite distinct from that of a dug garden.

Yet the upshot of this massive tree fall may not be that far from a thoroughly dug garden. Soil has been bared that was formerly covered; seeds have tumbled down along with all the other herbage; some formerly struggling saplings have narrowly escaped the crush. With light now flooding the space that was once shaded by the dead giant, new growth will soon flourish here.

[Among the still-standing giants, Mt Field NP] 

And the giant itself? It will continue to play horizontal host and home to all manner of fungi and mosses; vertebrates and invertebrates. Its long-gathered nutrients will gradually leak back into the soil: a slow, thorough recycling.

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] 

Coasting

[a piece about a trip into the remote south-west of Tasmania]

Parts of Tasmania’s coast are almost grammatical in their punctuations, indents and bracketed views. It makes them hard for even the most literate sailor to read. Southwest Cape is one such place: a remote exclamation mark on a rugged coast, an outpost of granite standing abrupt at the bottom left corner of the state. It is the end of the south coast, and the start of the west coast; the two wildest parts of Tasmania joined at the one point; the alpha and omega of the south-west wilderness.

On foot, reaching it is no simple task. From Melaleuca or Cox Bight - the nearest you will get even by light aircraft - it is still two days of ruggedly beautiful undulations away. All the while you are walking towards Tasmania's weather quarter; preparing to beard the lion in his den. When there's rain nowhere else, the far south-west still has it. "Showers in the far south-west; fine elsewhere."

My first view of the Cape had been from the nearby Ironbound Range some years before. While light clouds scudded over that range, they gathered dark and drear around the Cape. On that occasion I was glad not to be headed there. This time, by some perverse choice, it is my destination. There will be no “elsewhere".

The relatively bare granite of the promontory covers only its last kilometre or so. The rest of the way is barred by scrub. There is only a thin pad to mark the way, and that easily lost in the rain and mist. The arrow-shaped promontory slants south-west towards Antarctica, the narrower the further you go, until it tapers to nothing. The seas pounding this coast have not touched land since South America. They mean to be noticed.

Around our campsite, only salt-tolerant plants will grow because of the insistent salt-laden winds. Though we are at least 100 metres above sea level, a few days without rain has turned the creek water brackish, naturally polluted by the salt winds. The water flavours all our cooking, and is barely drinkable. It is strange to feel such thirst in a place so shaped by water.

There are other thirsts that can be more easily satisfied here, though. Unless you're a sailor, seeing an Australian sunset over the sea is largely the privilege of Western Australians. But the geography of this place allows me to share this wonder.

and every day you gaze upon the sunset
with such love and intensity
it's almost...it's almost as if
if you could only crack the code
then you'd finally understand what this all means. *

We recline on the rough-grained, rounded granite slabs, awaiting that marvellous plunge of sun into sea. The suck and surge of waves speaks the language of patience. The sea has no need for haste - but it will wear down this battlement.

The next day is windy - that at least was predictable, here in the path of the “Roaring Forties”. More surprisingly, it is also fine. We've planned to go to the very end of the cape, but discover that our rope is too short to allow a descent to that last rock. Instead we sit back for a while to watch, listen, feel this special place.

After a time the wind brings odd sounds with it. At first I dismiss it as the sucking sound of waves beneath the rocks. But then I see its source. There on the rocks, about 50 metres diagonally below us, is a haul-out of seals. They are probably New Zealand fur seals - glad to be out of the surging Southern Ocean for a while - lolling about in the lee of the cape.

We watch for an hour or more - far more fascinating to me than climbing. We even begin, with the aid of binoculars, to discern some of the personalities of the group. There's an old and intolerant bull, which bellows at any pups disturbing his sunny reverie. The pups are the embodiment of hyperactivity, chasing and nipping each other, practising with sinuous ease their aquatic skills in and out of the wash and swash of the shore.

All previous human generations would have seen these seals with different eyes. Watching would have been only for the purpose of ensuring greater surprise at the attack. There are different ways of seeing wildlife, but these days it is harder to justify or understand the exploitative ways.

* from Jane Siberry’s song “Calling All Angels”