Mother Mountain: The Symphony of Birdsong (16)

*Rob Walls Pic ( http://robertwalls.wordpress.com/ ): Don Knowler, left, and mate Mike Ward on the Myrtle Gully track …

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

Myrtle Gully, Saturday. Adding a dateline whenever I wrote of strange and exotic places was a habit I picked up from working as a journalist for half a century. After I retired I found old habits died hard.

The cold words of a dateline, however, have never been able to convey the experience, the events that have occurred and it is the words that follow that put flesh on bone, adjective on the noun-and-verb skeleton of a sentence.

Stunning. Mind-blowing. Sensational. Magnificent. No words, I soon decided, could describe the events of the day I climbed the Myrtle Gully Track for the first time, on the second day of winter, 2012.

I still have the notebook with hastily scrawled descriptions of hand and stone-crafted bridges, of the tumbling Guy Fawkes Rivulet, of mossy logs, of fungi and fern.

The notebook just gives bare fact, without elaboration. The ink, though, was smudged on the lined page by dew dripping from the wet eucalypts; the pages also stained by blood left by a leech that had attacked my leg. It added a nuance – colour, as we would say in the journalism trade – to the inadequacies of the English language, or my command of it, to properly describe the scene.

But here goes. The day to remember started at the Cascades Brewery in South Hobart where I stepped out on the relatively new Cascades Track, the last link in walking trail free of roads that leads 12.7 kilometres from Hobart City to the peak of Mount Wellington. I planned to do a fraction of this distance, climbing only about half way up the peak, before returning for a few pints at the Cascades Hotel.

The objective of the exercise was to compile a checklist of birds spotted during a full year and within metres I had my first bird of the day, if not the first for the project started a day earlier. As with on the first day of winter, it was a species appropriately found only in Tasmania, the green rosella. Others soon followed amid stringybark and dogwood, a calling yellow-throated honeyeater and a grey currawong, before I reached a much-publicised feature on the trail, the stone bridge commemorating Peter Degraves, founder of the Cascades Brewery, Australia’s oldest, in 1832.

The track was only opened in 2011 and was designed by noted track builder, John “Snapper” Hughes. It is the Rolls-Royce of tracks, if a metaphor relating to motor vehicles is appropriate. The trail along sections of its 2.2 kilometres is paved with flat sandstone, and glides across shallow embankments hemmed by moss and lichen- covered rocks.

A female golden whistler, and then a party of silvereyes were spotted, before the track joined the old route up the mountain from South Hobart, the rough and steep Old Farm Road.

On Mother Mountain, Myrtle Gully is the mother of all tracks. A look at a map gives warning that it is incredibly steep, the contours close together and writhing like a basket of snakes.

The track follows the course of the Guy Fawkes Rivulet, criss-crossing the waterway three times. At one point an impressive waterfall loomed above the bridge crossing the rivulet. The track climbed alongside the waterfall, finally giving a view from above the crashing waters, framed by a rainbow. Turning around, the Organ Pipes towered high above me.

The trail is formed by a series of stone steps for lengthy sections and fallen, ancient trees lie across it in many places, the trees cut to provide narrow passageways between them. At one giant fallen tree, a fine male Bassian thrush emerged and followed me for about 50 metres, hopping along rocks in the rivulet as I went. It was a notable addition to my checklist.

When it came to ferns and glades and fallen logs and moss and lichen, I thought that the popular Fern Glade Track out of Fern Tree took some beating. That was until I discovered Myrtle Gully. It appears how a wet forest track, hugging a mountain stream, should be. It’s perfect, a publicist’s dream – I’m sure that all the advertising material promoting Tasmania’s rainforest derives from this track. If Myrtle Gully had not existed, Tasmanians, and especially promoters of the mountain, would have had to invent it.

I revelled in its beauty, not wanting the experience to end. After about an hour, with stops and starts to view birds and jot down notes in my notebook, the track began to level out. I noted that the Guy Fawkes Rivulet had curved wildly to the left and it was soon lost to sight and sound.

Fern and moss also gave way to dry eucalypt forest and the trail widened to join the Farm House Track a hundred metres or so from the open space of Junction Cabin.

The cabin had inhabitants, smoke curled from its chimney but I wanted company of not humans but the birds of the wet forest, and I returned the way I had come in the hope of bonding with a friendly Bassian thrush again.