The “Respect the Mountain” forum ( here, here, and here ) at the Hobart Town Hall last month prompted Don Knowler to return to a diary he compiled after daily rambles on Mt Wellington during the previous year. In what promises to be a momentous year in the modern history of Kunanyi, the weekly diary gives the mountain and its wildlife its own voice.
Mount Wellington is merely referred to as “the mountain” by the people who live in her shadow but in the second week of the autumn of 2013 the peak assumed a dual name, Kunanyi.
As I tramped the lower slopes, Tasmanian Premier Lara Giddings and members of the Aboriginal community were holding a naming ceremony at the summit to honour the mountain’s place in the history and culture of the first Tasmanians. Unghbanyahletta and Poorawetter had been the previous recorded Aboriginal names, before the first Europeans came up with Table Hill, Le Plateau, Skiddaw and Table Mountain. Then they named the mountain after the Duke of Wellington in 1822, the victor at the battle of Trafalgar. Now the Aboriginal community had settled on their own name, Kunanyi.
Mount Wellington, or Kunanyi, had been on her best behaviour for the event. She had not drummed up the ferocious, hot winds of previous days, which had followed clinging impenetrable mists. She laid on a perfect day to welcome the visitors, with scattered cloud painting the lower slopes in a patchwork of gentle colours.
In dappled glades, the sun vanished and then emerged again, like light being turned on and off. As I trod the Upper Lenah Valley track from the Springs to Sphinx Rock skinks scurried out of my way and I walked warily, aware tiger snakes could also be on the track soaking up the sun.
Before returning home I took a detour to the Fern Glade Track in the hope of finding a bird that eluded me for much of the year, the scrubtit. After driving down to the car park that gives access to the track at Fern Tree a television cameramen was filming the Mount Wellington sign at the junction of Pillinger Drive and the Huon Road for that night’s news.
“Kunanyi. Seems a long way from Mount Wellington,” he said as I passed.
Tree martins hawking insects high in the skies over the next few days pointed to a summer refusing to die. The martins – which fly higher than welcome swallows so the two species do not compete for food sources – were soon joined by dusky woodswallows. The swallows had already departed and the woodswallows flew in the zone that they usually claimed as their own.
The Indian summer brought a hot, tortuous sun which burned leaves and grass again. I came across a grey shrike-thrush, its beak open gasping for breath. A green rosella refused to fly as I approached, exhausted by the heat. In thicker, wet bush retaining dew from the morning, an eastern spinebill with a long feather-tongue designed for extracting pollen and nectar from bottlebrushes, licked droplets of water off leaves.
The temperatures soared, rising to 36.6C the day before the dual-naming ceremony. Strong winds from the north brought a furnace blast from the outback beyond Bass Strait and I could understand why so many migrant species were staying put, and not moving on. For three days in a row I saw tree martins, woodswallows, summerbirds and cuckoos.
The Mercury warned again of high fire danger. As I read the paper at the Springs it was ripped from my hands by a fierce wind, swirling hot air around the peaks. The smell of eucalypt oil was in the air, as though the gums were inviting fire.
I find such times on the mountain frightening, more so than blizzard carried on southern winds in winter. Retreating to the air-conditioned comfort of my car doesn’t help and I tend to stick it out; panting, sweating and swatting flies like a wallaby looking for a cool and shady spot among the yellow gums.
It might have been hot by day but the night air was chillier, not hot and humid as it had been in the last weeks of summer and the first week of autumn. Winter was definitely in the air. To confirm it the ABC weather report forecast snow on higher ground and a wildlife carer I know who lives within sight of the mountain to the south in Kettering phoned me the next morning to say the black cockatoos had come down from the peak. She was considering lighting a fire.
I was on the mountain again next day, the wind plucking and blowing the thin, lattice-leaves of silver wattles through the air so they carpeted the tracks. Tree martins and woodswallows were still about, the woodswallows catching insects in mid air and returning with their catch to a bare-branch perch. Butterfly lace-wings fell to ground as the birds crunched the insects in their bills above my head. A tree martin tried to land on a woodswallow’s favourite branch and was sent on its way with an angry peck.
I had been tramping the mountain virtually everyday for nine months and on my travels I had come across an elderly man walking longer trails than I had been. Winter, spring, summer, I now saw him again, at the start of autumn. He was making for the Pinnacle Track to the summit out of the Springs and our paths were crossing, symbolically, to complete each season of the mountain’s calendar year.
With purposeful stride, quick-paced with just the occasional halt to take in a new vista, it was clear walking was serious business, kilometres and peaks to be eaten up on his daily meanderings. It was far from my casual strolls. I could never work out where the walker had started or where his hike ended. I tried to gauge his age, mid-seventies, or even older, and he carried a backpack from another age, another generation. It was fashioned from hard kharki canvass, with leather straps. His rugged, brown leather boots were of the same vintage. The Kathmandu outdoor adventure store was no doubt as foreign to the hiker as the place that gives the chain its name. Indeed the word hiker seemed misplaced. This elderly gentleman was a rambler, a term far more befitting of the age and direction from which he had come.
I saw the rambler perhaps a dozen times and we never spoke. We just passed each other, giving a nod of the head. There was no need for words. On the mountain we spoke the same language.
Tasmanian thornbill, yellow whistler, yellow-throated honeyeater, grey shrike-thrush and grey fantail went into my notebook on my travels on the tracks radiating from Sphinx Rock, the north and south Lenah Valley trails and the Upper and Lower Sawmill tracks. Then the call of a flame robin led me back towards the Springs.
I could not find the robin. Instead I discovered a juvenile fan-tailed cuckoo perched in a yellow gum, looking about it, with sharp, abrupt swings of the head.
It was the same location where I had studied a pair of hapless flame robins acting as surrogate parents for a fan-tailed cuckoo during the summer months. The cuckoo nestling ousted the flame robin’s own chicks and as it grew, the neat, tightly woven nest in the fork of a low tree bulged around it. While still being fed in the nest it clearly dwarfed its “parents” and it grew even bigger once it was flying and following them around, demanding food.
Was this the same young bird perched on the branch, now learning to feed itself, with no need of the robins?
I waited to see if the robins turned up. After a while the cuckoo dropped from the branch and speared a juicy caterpillar on the ground. The cuckoo – in bedraggled, scruffy juvenile plumage – had learned to take care of itself, had no need for surrogate parents. It would soon face its next challenge, following the path of its true kin on the journey across Bass Strait.
• Pic from Don Knowler’s website, here. The image is by Tim Squires, here
