Pic*: Radford monument on Radford’s Track … Pic: Rob Walls, http://robertwalls.wordpress.com/

The “Respect the Mountain” forum ( here, here, and here ) at the Hobart Town Hall earlier this year 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. All Don’s Mother Mountain columns – and much more by this superb writer – can be found under the Category, Don Knowler, here

The then-Opposition Leader in the Tasmanian Parliamant, Will Hodgman, hit the headlines with the news that he would immediately amend legislation to allow development on Mt Wellington if he won the upcoming election.

Mr Hodgman said one of his government’s first acts would be to remove the power of veto that the Mount Wellington Management Trust had on development.

He made the pledge a day after the trust had issued a draft report, on May 7, 2013, which outlined the trust’s response to increasing demand for decisions regarding development.

Trust chairwoman Christine Mucha, however, said development would need to satisfy standards that included the cultural, recreational, tourist and natural values of the mountain.

The review had involved extensive community consultation, including the release of an issues discussion paper in November 2011 and the release of a draft management plan in August 2012.

In the same Mercury report – which carried a picture of Mr Hodgman posing on the summit with his wife Nicky – cable car proponent Adrian Bold said the trust’s draft report brought his group a step closer to getting a cable car running.

Cable cars and political debate about what was good for the mountain seemed far away as I set out to walk the Lenah Valley Track, the oldest and most famous of the trails, before continuing along the Radford Track on the other side of the peak. It covers about five kilometres of hard climbing from a road in the suburb of Lenah Valley on the mountain’s northern side to the south, before descending for a further couple of kilometres into Fern Tree to the south. For much of the walk the track follows the cascading New Town Creek, before crossing the base of the New Town Falls. From then, the track heads for the Junction Cabin, before taking a more gentle route below the Organ Pipes, to Sphinx Rock and its destination, the Springs.

The day was fine and sunny, and strong-billed honeyeaters were calling at the official start of the track, a set of stone steps guarded on one side by a chain suspended on posts above the New Town Rivulet.

I paused to watch the honeyeaters, a party of about five or six merrily stripping away at the bark of a stringybark. They were fairly low in the tree and I did not need my binoculars to view them; I could clearly see the white band at the back of the black head which separates them in plumage from the closely-related black-headed honeyeaters.

I generally find the strong-bills in wetter habitat and this area suited them perfectly. The forest here, mainly stringybark mixed with silver wattles that favour wet soils, had a rich understorey of other wet forest plants, namely blanket bush and dogwood.

The start of the walk is in a steep gully that catches and holds the rain but the trail soon turned eastwards and on one bend I noticed that the forest had suddenly become very dry in appearance. The blanket bush had vanished and now prickly mosses took over as understorey. White peppermint gums had replaced the stringybarks and in these I could hear black-headed honeyeaters calling.

I hit a rich seam of birds about half an hour into the hike. Yellow-throated honeyeaters called above me and at one point engaged in a duet with a grey shrike-thrush.

The skulkers and lurkers of the first floor were all about me, Tasmanian scrubwrens, fairy-wrens and, a little higher in the understorey, brown thornbills.

I paused at a point where there was a clearing in the thick forest, so I could see to the north, down to Lenah Valley and the upper Derwent beyond, scanning the trail I had so far traversed.

Deep in the valley a party of yellow-tailed black cockatoos called. The sun shone hard but in sheltered places I could feel the chill of autumn and the approach of winter. Was the cockatoos call, echoing through the valley, a lament to summer, a keen to days gone by?

I thought not of the cockies but of the elderly hiker who now seemed keen to talk of days gone by, to introduce himself and impart his knowledge of both the peak and the wider world.

The snow melt from recent snows had cleared the mountain, filling the creeks in the lowlands closer to the Derwent, and the New Town Falls were without a substantial body of water. It made crossing the rock base of the falls easier – no wet feet – but I still wished they were coursing with tumbling water. I rarely got up this far and I wanted to compare their rushing beauty with that of the Silver and O’Grady’s Falls more familiar with me. But on the evidence of height and trees washed down from up far, I speculated these were far bigger and would represent a far greater spectacle when in full flood.

Pressing on, I hit dry woodland again, and heard my first crescent honeyeaters of the day, still coming down the mountain for winter. Eastern spinebills were also calling, the two totally different honeyeater species, travelling together, and then grey currawongs called from afar. I was yet to hear the endemic black currawongs, which seem to favour wetter and higher forest.

I had travelled both ends of the Lenah Valley Trail in the past, but had never reached its most familiar feature, the Junction Cabin.

All of a sudden, rounding a bend where the track is closely lined with peppermint gums, I came across what appeared to be a vast open space in the context of the mountain, a meeting place where tracks converge.

The sight of the hut filled me with a strange excitement, maybe not the physical appearance of the cabin but its position, like the hub of a wheel at the centre of myriad tracks radiating from it.

The new North-South Track designed for mountain bikers might have given rise to the image of a wheel, but sitting on a rock surveying the scene before me another metaphor sprang to mind. I thought about “junction” as in railway lines, and my excitement was fuelled by a love of train travel. As bizarre as the context may sound, I now saw one of the great railway stations of Europe, at the heart of travel and busying people.

The rarefied air, the adrenalin coursing through my body from the steep climb, the excitement of getting this far, and being well on the way to finally ticking off the Lenah Valley Track on my checklist of mountain walks completed: I can’t explain the sensation, the excitement but it was fired in part by the large numbers of people I saw, all gathered here and resting at Junction Cabin.

You don’t see clusters of people on the mountain beyond at the car parks at the Springs and the summit, and this in part represents its beauty. It’s a place to escape the rat-race but all the same it can be lonely for a social animal, especially an animal like myself who has spent his lifetime in busy, noisy newsrooms in a career as a journalist. I like solitude but it has its limits. I love the sound of the honeyeaters, but I also love the sound of human laughter. After a few hours on the mountain I long for the company of people. And at Junction Cabin here they all were, standing, sitting, lying down, chatting and laughing. And they all had one thing in common, a common motive, not so much to see the mountain and its views from the summit, but to walk it, and feel its presence.

I looked about me at all the mountain bikers and hikers, looking for the old man I had seen before, the hiker from a different age. I even poked my head inside the Junction Cabin but could not see him there. This seemed to be the place to find him, resting after one of this walks, before tackling the trails again. He might have other stories to tell, might want to talk.

I didn’t find him and moved on, disappointed.

Tracks radiated north, south, east and west. The two legs of the Lenah Valley track, of course; the North-South track in which a couple of cyclists were paused, consulting a map, not to find direction but to confirm distance travelled. The beautiful Hunter Track heading straight up the mountain, to the Chalet on the Pinnacle Road below the Organ Pipes. Going east, the Myrtle Valley and Breakneck tracks fell away into wet forest. A short way along the Lenah Valley track heading south, a mini track diverged to the Lone Cabin nestling among fallen ancient trees and mossy logs. I took the detour and after a steep climb through wet forest soon found my way back onto the main track to Springs.

Before long I was in familiar territory, the stretches of the Lenah Valley Tack I had walked before, usually in pursuit of olive whistlers and another bird of the deep forests, the endemic scrubtit.

A flame robin, the last I would see that season, was perched close to the Rock Cain on the approach to Sphinx Rock, and looking out across the city, I felt a sense of triumph that to all intents and purposes I had completed the walk.

I was thinking of the old man again, and still looking for him, as I took in the vista from Sphinx Rock. My attention was focused now on the site of the old engine roundhouse. The old man had said a coldstore had been built where it once stood and I could now make out its long white roof, next to the Victorian building on the main highway into Hobart that has “mechanics’ institute” carved into its heavy gothic stonework.

I was so occupied looking for the graveyard of the locomotive depot that I did not at first notice mist gathering high above me, over the summit and the Organ Pipes. A south-westerly wind forced the mist downwards and it swirled to the north, falling and falling until it had obscured the northern city and advanced in a half circle towards the city centre.

The railway yards were lost to sight, and slowly the mist ate up the vista, before I could feel it hitting my face, cold and wet, forcing me back from the edge of the Sphinx Rock precipice. Was the past riding the cold, white cloud? The ghosts of steam locomotives and the men who drove them, of whistles and trams and clanging bells. The commuters scurrying to work and scurrying home. Of human life gone by, vanishing like a train around the Derwent Bay headland to the north, trailing steam. Of joy and tears, and laughter and pain, carried skyward towards the mountain in swirling, cold and silent mist.

Another year, another summer gone and as I drove back to town through South Hobart the leaves of the ginkgo biloba trees lining some of the back streets were beginning to turn, the last of the deciduous, foreign vegetation to do so.

The ancient ginkgos – a living fossil from China with no known relative – had held out for as long as possible, their fan-like leaves retaining rich green livery way beyond the leaves of oak and elm. But then the ginkgo is a survivor, recognisably similar to fossils dating back 270 million years – an age that just about pre-dates Mt Wellington.