Behind the Blue Fence: Further Adventures With The Green Pharisee

What is it about walking to work? And cars! This time I am completely in iPod World, blocking out three lanes of Macquarie Street traffic noise. As I approach the city, my peripheral vision catches a cat “doing dohies” in the middle of the road. So wrong! I suddenly realise that the white and ginger tortoiseshell has been struck by a car while trying to cross the road.

I am no friend of cats. I have owned them, and despite their furry, purry charms, I am troubled by what they do to wildlife. Our meek “Miffy”, a small and rather lovely black cat, had assassinated everything from a rabbit and a bandicoot to birds and rodents and reptiles of almost any size. This despite two bells and a locked-in, night-time curfew. If only we’d been able to train her to discriminate, I might have tolerated her killing ways. Rats, mice, rabbits – and maybe starlings? Go for it ... but leave the rest alone! But no. So once Miffy died, the rest of the family didn’t need much persuasion for us to go catless from then on.

Back in Macquarie Street the pretty young cat swerves erratically in broad circles. The traffic has slowed. Somewhere behind the glass and steel, the engine noise and morning radio there are humans. Do we all fancy the cat is gradually winning its way to my side of the road? I will it to make it. But its radar is failing, and it keeps circling back to the centre of the road.

I turn, judge the traffic to have more or less stopped, and step onto the road where the cat is now turning its sick circles more slowly, a wind-up toy running down. I reach down, grasp it around its shoulders and chest, firmly keeping its claws as far out of reach as possible. I carry it back to my side of the road, noticing its pretty markings and wide, scared eyes, and place it gently behind a blue fence. If it can still flee, it might do so safely from there.

But it lies there twitching and trembling in what I take to be a terminal manner. A car horn beeps, and I look back to see my iPod lying in the middle of the road where I have dropped it. I acknowledge the woman driver’s thoughtfulness, and retrieve my device.

Back where pedestrians should be, I look once more towards the cat, judge I can do no more, and turn to walk away. About 50 metres down the road, I see a worried-looking woman coming back up the other side of the road, searching – I guess – for the cat. She mouths across three lanes “Where is it?” Not the owner, I’m guessing, perhaps the guilty driver. I call back “behind the blue fence” and point up the road.

Once again I start to walk on, but not before being joined by a man in early middle age, who says “well done mate. I wish I’d been able to do that.” We walk the rest of the way to town talking about pets and life in general. I hear about his ex-cats and ex-dogs, even his ex-wife.

For a short time we are joined in a strange bubble of male intimacy. And then he turns and crosses the road to go to work, saying a quick good-bye. His final words are “And thanks again”. I’m not sure I’ve done much, but at least this time I haven’t walked by on the other side.

Walking With Ada 2 - Great Pine Tears

[Photo: some of the dead pencil pines on Great Pine Tier, Tasmania]

[part 2 of reflections on a recent bushwalk]

In a country with a dearth of conifers, the Tasmanian highlands boast several species, most notably the two in the Athrotaxis genus: pencil pine and King Billy pine. These relicts of Gondwana have closer relatives in New Zealand and South America than they do in mainland Australia. Of the two only pencil pine will grow in virtually pure stands, especially in parts of the Walls of Jerusalem National Park.

To walk into a pencil pine stand is to change climate; change light levels; even to feel you have changed hemispheres. There is a cool, dimly-lit quiet, aided by the thick foliage and the soft carpet of needles. Time itself seems to take on a different quality, as though picking up on the pencil pines’ slow-growing, long-lived nature.

As gymnosperms, they mainly regenerate via the shedding of cones, although even this is an unusually unhurried affair, occurring only every five or six years. In peat they also appear to spread vegetatively via suckering. Neither method allows them to spread far from the parent tree. Given their slow growth – they average 40 years to reach just one metre, and can live to well over 1 000 years – they don’t appear to do anything hastily. I find it hard to resist ascribing entish characteristics to these lovely conifers.

Their tactic in the conditions they seem to find themselves in – a drying part of a dry continent – is to wait out bad times and take advantage of good times. That climatic good times may be in long-term decline is just one problem for them. Another issue since European take-over is the spread of herbivores such as rabbits, sheep and cattle. All of these find pencil pine seedlings more palatable than do our native species. In historic times this has created further pressure.

But one bad time factor far outweighs all others. Fire is the deadly enemy of the pencil pine. Having evolved in wet or even water-logged conditions, where fire is a rarity, pencil pines have few defences against bushfire. Recovery is via slow spread from surviving trees. In a drying, fire-prone future this is a high risk strategy.

This January a walk with the Ada map took me to Great Pine Tier, an upland only modestly higher than the surrounding plateau. But the tier distinguished itself, and was so named, because of the prodigious stands of pencil pine that historically stood there. That was until 1960. Between October of that year and February of the next, a series of catastrophic, deliberately-lit fires in the area burned through an estimated 1300 square kilometres of alpine vegetation. Geographically that took in much of Ada and many of the neighbouring map sheets. A significant proportion of the area incinerated contained pencil pine, deciduous beech (or fagus) and ancient peat.

Without knowing the full story of this fire, my friends and I were meandering between the myriad lakes around Great Pine Tier. But when we reached the epicentre of the fire we could hardly have mistaken that we were late witnesses to an ecological catastrophe. Half a century after the event the area still looks like a war zone. With gallows humour we remarked on how easy the walking was thanks to the fire. In truth we were aghast.

For miles around us we could see pencil pine stags, literally by the thousand. Their vertical persistence in death is owed to their tightly-packed, borer-resistant, resinous wood. Bleached white by the icy winds, they stand like a vast wartime graveyard, a ghostly reminder of the glory that once was.

In patches, particularly on the western rim of the tier, small stands of pine forest persist. Walking into one of these felt like walking through a door to another country. Everything was different, the contrast heightening the helpless and hopeless sense of what has been lost.

Beyond such patches, the slowly burgeoning new growth is dominated by other species. There is a changing of the guard, with fire tolerant eucalypts and other flowering plants now taking over. It’s fair to say that pencil pines have been made locally extinct as a result of that single fire event.

You would therefore think that such an event would be burned into the Tasmanian psyche, much as the Hobart area’s 1967 bushfires are. Yet most of us have no clue that this tragedy occurred. So I recall with a chill my recent discovery of a fresh fire ring butted up against a living pencil pine near the West Wall. Some cold or heedless walker has ignored that they were in an area where only fuel stoves are allowed.

If these last stands, and especially that around Dixons Kingdom, succumb to such stupidity, there may be generations of Australians who never have the chance to see the glory of these gracious old Gonwanan forests.

Walking With Ada 1 - No Lack of Lakes

[Photo: A few thousand lakes as viewed from Mt Jerusalem, Tasmania]

[A new piece inspired by a recent bushwalk]

I love walking with Ada. Ada takes me to parts of Tasmania that are high, wild and remote, even if they lack the cachet of some of our better known wilderness areas. If I want to wander off-track Ada, the Tasmap 1:25 000 map, will take me there.

The map extends westward from Lakes Ada and Augusta to Lakes Ball and Toorah. To the north it stretches from the centre of the spectacular Walls of Jerusalem National Park to places like Pillans Lake in the lake-dotted Central Plateau Conservation Area. Its southern margin reaches to the Little Pine and Pine Rivers, while the whole is diagonally bisected by Great Pine Tier.

It is 200 square kilometres of quintessential Central Plateau country, all of it in excess of 1 000m in altitude. Yet eyes trained to expect the drama of Cradle Mountain or the jagged peaks of the south-west, may find it flattish, bleakish and somewhat parched, despite its high rainfall.

Once imprisoned by a glacial ice sheet hundreds of metres thick, the plateau appears to have greeted liberation with restraint rather than exuberance, at least in terms of vegetation cover. For the most part the rainforest and thick scrub found in other parts of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area are lacking here. Heavy frosts, snow, strong winds and shallow soils favour straggly grey-green eucalypt forest or low-growing alpine heath over more luxuriant vegetation. And generally the understorey is less tangled than its south-west counterpart.

The one legacy of ice that is unrestrained here is the sheer number of lakes. The slowly moving ice sheet, which departed around 10 000 years ago, has scraped a phenomenal number of hollows, depressions, grooves and gouges out of the mostly doleritic bedrock.

I once started the eye-watering job of trying to count the number of lakes on the Ada map. I gave up after counting 350 in one typical 10 sq km strip. Given there were 19 such strips still to count, I think it’d be fair to estimate between 5 000 and 7 000 lakes on the Ada map alone.

And there are literally thousands more in the neighbouring high country. You could walk here for a lifetime and still have no chance of seeing them all. It is one of the factors that makes walking with Ada so endlessly fascinating. That and the chance to see some of the last large stands of Tasmania’s pencil pine (Athrotaxis cupressoides).

[Part 2 coming soon]