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
An elderly woman stood above the Organ Pipes clutching what looked like a vase with both hands. She looked down at the forest and dolerite scree below the summit, and then looked about her.
A couple of Asian tourists, students maybe, were close by on the main viewing platform at the summit and the elderly woman moved away from them, placing the vase in a shopping bag before carefully walking along the raised platform that leads across the rocky outcrop to a secondary platform a little way to the north.
I don’t know why I had her in my sights. She seemed a little lost, out of place on the mountain, rugged up against the cold in a heavy winter coat that was made for the city and not the mountain. It was more Harris Scarfe than Kathmandu.
At the far platform the woman paused and looked about her again. The young Asian visitors had retreated to the enclosed viewing cabin by now and the elderly woman was on her own, cutting a lone figure out on the platform.
She looked about her again, then placed her hands into the bag to retrieve the vase. Dropping the bag to the floor, she clutched the vase firmly with one hand and appeared to twist a lid which I could now see sitting on top of it.
I was worried the woman might see me spying on her, so I tucked my binoculars inside my anorak and kept my distance.
The woman looked out across the vista, looked about her one more time and then clutched the vase with both hands and tossed its contents in the air.
A grey cloud rose from the vase as she jerked it back, and I could see fine ash caught by the wind, swirling for a moment on an updraft and then drifting down towards the city and the distant railyards, swirling and then vanishing as it was absorbed by the wind and cold air.
Was it a loved one consigned to the wind, to Mother Mountain? A husband, a son, a daughter, a lover? I wanted to ask the elderly woman who it might be. And I had another question – why the mountain? – but it was not a time to approach a lone figure, rugged up against the cold, and ask questions, ask if the mountain was central to a life, as it was now central to the ritual of death.
There were dolphins in the Derwent in the last week of May, the last week of autumn. And as night fell the sky played host to a dazzling close encounter between Jupiter, Venus and Mercury in evening twilight.
The starlight spectacle could be viewed over four days and after first witnessing it, I made my way late next afternoon to get a better view from Sphinx Rock. I arrived at about 4pm to see the late afternoon sun setting behind Knocklofty, to the north-east below me, the sun spreading its long shadow over the city. The shadow slowly enveloped the city centre, moving east through the Waterworks Valley, the spreading darkness like a black python snaking through the hills.
I had gone to see stars but the sunset was a prelude. The setting sun loomed golden, red and then the colour of a pink robin’s breast, the different hues picked up by the Derwent on the other side of the mountain, the bay finally washed with magenta.
Birds had been the inspiration and motivation for my diary compiled over a year – nature’s year – but it had morphed into something entirely different, a record of another kind.
I had set out originally to see as many of the mountain’s recorded 69 species as I could, but when I looked at my checklist I had failed miserably, only seeing a total of 59. All the common ones where there, of course, and all the endemics found on the mountain but I had missed out on quite a few others. I had thought I would find Japanese (Latham’s) snipe in summer in the alpine marsh and buttongrass on the summit’s plateau but drew a blank when I searched for it.
And the Australasian pipit, a bird designed for the high country with long claws to grip rock when the winds blew hardest, had also escaped my attention.
When I first arrived in Tasmania from my native Britain I thought that such a mountainous state would have birds exclusive to the alpine zone, like the alpine chough and the wallcreeper of the Swiss and Austrian Alps in Europe or, in New Zealand, the mountain parrot, the kea. I was to be disappointed on that score. The closest we get to birds of the peaks are the black currawong and the green rosella which can also be found at lower elevations. For the record, though, the black currawong is also called the “mountain jay” in Tasmania, and the green rosella the “mountain parrot”.
I’m happy though with what I’ve got and what I’ve seen on the mountain. Three endemics – the scrubtit, the black-headed honeyeater and the Tasmanian thornbill – are largely birds of the high country and can always be found there. And there are the flame robins, which I will forever associate with Mount Wellington after spending many a happy hour watching them on the slopes, and trying to be a part of their magical world.
The problem with diaries is that they force you to look back when perhaps it is more important to look forward. The mountain was forged in the past but it always looks forward, a new day, a new challenge. In the final days of autumn I tried hard to find species that had eluded me to bump up my list of birds spotted during 2012/13 but the search only resulted in me growing increasingly aware of the new year to beckon.
Mountain needlebush sprouted new growth for nature’s new year, with silver buds on bottle-green stems. And scanning the horizon from the mountain’s upper slopes I could see stringybark crowns below topped with yellow-green growth giving a two-tone effect to the darker leaves in the lower canopy.
Fungi along the trails was in full fruit. Dead man’s finger, anemone stinkhorn and flame fungus, the latter as beautiful, delicate and fragile as the flame robin. The fruiting fungi signalled that dead wood was being broken down and returned to the ground as food for plants sprouting in not just this spring, but the years ahead – the trees and under-storey plants, and the grasses that would provide food for insects, and birds and mammals in the future. And the story goes on.
During the course of writing my mountain diary, I returned to a book I had written 30 years previously, about Central Park in New York ( TT here ). A publisher in the United States wanted to include a chapter from my book in an anthology he was compiling on writing about Central Park. I hadn’t read my book since it was written all those years previously and I was forced to return to it. Central Park is New York’s green lung, its great escape from the pressures of the city, in the same way that Mt Wellington is Hobart’s favourite open space.
Worlds apart, a city park and a mountain; all the same the words I wrote in the Falconer of Central Park in 1982 have a resonance today in relation to Mother Mountain.
Central Park is probably the most closely watched and monitored 843 acres on earth. The debate among nature lovers about what is good for the park is only one aspect of a larger, ongoing negotiation between all interested parties and the park authorities. The parties range from roller skaters, to model sail boat enthusiasts, to botanists and birders, to cyclists and joggers. They all want to extract the maximum benefit for themselves and somewhere there must be a compromise, although the birders, in the main, maintain that nature has been compromised enough in the park, in the city, in the state, and in the country.
Central Park was undoubtedly designed for people, but if Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux [the designers] were alive today they might also view the park as a microcosm of the global environmental crisis. They might agree with the birders who see the park as a symbolic last battleground on which man and his natural environment must settle their differences and reach an accommodation with each other that ensures both of survival.
From next week, Don Knowler returns to the start of the diary – the first day of winter 2012 – to make his account of a year on the mountain complete.
