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.
The company planning to build a cable car on Mount Wellington attempted to capture the high ground in its campaign when it claimed the new name for the peak, Kunanyi, as its own.
Just days after a dual-naming ceremony on the summit on March 13, 2013, the Mount Wellington Cable Car Company announced that it had registered Kunanyi as an internet domain name.
Sure enough, when I keyed “Kunanyi” into the Google search engine, the cable car company’s website came up, with a picture of the snow-covered peak framed in eucalypts viewed from the Springs.
There was outrage in the Aboriginal community, whose leaders oppose the cable car, and one of the Greens ministers in the coalition government, Cassy O’Connor, described the move as “disrespectful”.
The cable car’s proponent, Adrian Bold, was unrepentant, pointing out the mountain had been known by many names from before and after the arrival of Europeans, and no one had sole possession of any of them.
“That’s not to say differing indigenous cultures had a universal name either,” he said on the website. “It appears Unghbanyahletta and Poorawetter were the more commonly used names, but a combination of clever policy has one Aboriginal culture claiming it as its mountain and this has been favoured by recent governments.
“Whilst being based on a somewhat subjective background, we like the name Kunanyi because it’s relatively easier and fairly palatable for global tongues to pronounce correctly. This is good news for its tourism appeal.”
A “south-westerly sit” had descended on Mount Wellington next day. The “sit” is what mariners used to call the layer of low cloud that rests on the summit, like the “table cloth” that on many a morning can be found laid out on Table Mountain at the far tip of the African continent.
The Hobart “sit” is driven by south-westerly winds and with the mountain cold and misty, it would not have been a day to take a cable car to the summit, or even to drive there. I went anyway. From South Hobart I could see the peak was obscured but the lower slopes of the mountain were bathed in soft sunlight, including my favourite track from the Springs to Sphinx Rock.
I soon realised I had made a miscalculation in reading the weather, and reading Mother Mountain’s mind and mood.
Barely past Fern Tree on Pillinger Drive at the start of the climb, the blanket of mist had descended, thin at first so I could just make out the shapes of birds. It rapidly thickened so that by the Shoebridge Bend just below the zigzag leading to the Springs I had to turn on my headlights.
Roadside trees painted in greys and whites turned pastel-yellow in the Jeep’s beam. At the Springs I could just make out the shape of birds descending to lower slopes as the mist swirled thicker and thicker, finally blotting out their winged shape and muting their cries.
Southern Tasmanian folklore says yellow-tailed black cockatoos coming off the high ground signal snow on Mount Wellington, and cold winds and rain for the whole region over which she not so much stands guard, but has authority.
There’s no doubt black cockies and black currawongs leave the mountain in such weather and I once had my own theory for this movement. I thought snow and freezing mist possibly caused burrowing grubs – a vital winter food source for black cockies and other forest birds – to go deeper in trunk and bark, making them more difficult to prise out.
My observations on the mountain over the year, in all weathers, would inform me differently.
The birds do not fear snow. I saw black cockies, currawongs and forest ravens fossicking across snow-coated bough and branch all the time. It’s the mist they fear and a slow walk to Sphinx Rock this day demonstrated why.
The mountain slopes are littered with the skeletal remains of gums destroyed in the 1967 bushfires that swept not just the mountain but southern Tasmania, with enormous loss of life. The area just below Sphinx Rock is in fact called the tree graveyard and in the mist ghostly shapes loomed like tree stickmen, pointing and poking their arms into the cold air. These were the ones I could see. More trees were hidden, hundreds possibly thousands across the mountain, and in low visibility these areas were not places to fly on fragile wings.
The bigger birds, that announce their presence with far-carrying cries, may have been silenced and banished by the mists but smaller species stayed put, sheltering in the dense foliage of mountain needle-bush or flying short, wary distances from tree to tree. With winter closing in, I could hear the last of the striated pardalotes before they headed north.
The nightly spectacle – when the skies are clear – of the sun setting behind Mount Wellington was occurring earlier and earlier each evening as the nights drew in with the approach of winter. Suddenly the autumn equinox – when days are of equal length to nights – was upon the mountain and the event was marked by a sunset more stunning than most.
A line of high, white clouds dotted across the sky shone clear and pristine as powerful as the stars that were waiting to emerge, but they were back-lit by the sun that was lost from view from the ground. The edges of the clouds were painted furnace yellow, then orange and finally the muted red of embers. The layered clouds, slowly moving against a backdrop that turned from blue, to purple to maroon were embossed in the colour of copper and brass before being absorbed into the night sky.
Hoary-headed grebes, already in winter plumage when their white frosted heads are replaced by subtle brown feathers, had arrived on the main reservoirs of the Waterworks Reserve below the mountain, from breeding grounds on the Derwent and Huon Rivers. Out of the breeding season, they would spend the winter in the Waterworks Valley.
The footprint of summer, though, was yet to be totally erased. At the end of the third week of autumn, a storm typical of the summer months arrived: thunder shook the gums of the mountain, and lightning streaked across its foothills.
The birds would not move in this – they would wait for another phenomenon, that of the rainbow.
Rainbows are so common across Hobart, I call it rainbow city. And no doubt the next rainbow, formed of slanted rain driven by winds from the south and a warm welcoming sunshine crossing the sky to the north, would send the travellers on their way.
