Mother Mountain: The Symphony of Birdsong (24)

*Pic: Old photograph of the Cascades’ Female Factory Hobart, Tasmania, November 1892. The photographer was J.W. Beattie

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

Black cockatoos – their mournful cry carrying far and wide – intruded on a day which should have been free of birds, and the mountain.

My project to study Kunanyi for a year was just into its third month but I promised myself a time-out occasionally, and an early opportunity had presented itself with a chance to immerse myself for a day in Tasmania’s Victorian history.

I was in the middle of a tourist presentation called Louisa’s Walk, a stroll into Tasmania’s convict past that embraces the Cascades Gardens in South Hobart and the nearby site of the Cascades Female Factory, when the yellow-tailed black cockatoos paid our small party a call.

The life of Irish convict Louisa is recreated by a group of actors in an award-winning historical experience and I was so engrossed in Louisa’s true story that my interest in wildlife was in some kind of suspended state in my consciousness, as was place and time. It wasn’t June 7, 2012, but 1840, and I was standing in the public gallery of the court in London watching Louisa being sentenced for the crime of stealing a loaf of bread to feed her young family, who had newly arrived in the British capital to escape poverty and hunger in Ireland.

Birds soon brought me back to the present, however. And the mountain was to form a backdrop to the day. First it was Tasmanian currawongs flying from the direction of Mount Wellington followed by forest ravens, green rosellas and then the yellow-tailed black cockatoos. Far from distracting me, they strangely added to the performance as “extras”.

By coincidence Judith Cornish, who runs the Louisa’s Walk tours along with her husband, Chris, had mentioned birds when I had first decided to take the tour and sought more details about it.

Cornish had said in passing that superb fairy-wrens were often to be seen in the grounds of the female prison during performances and on one memorable occasion a scarlet robin had perched on her head when she, too, was in full flight, “in character” as Louisa. The robin had as big a shock as the audience to find where it had landed, before fluttering to the high wall of the prison to watch the rest of the performance from there.

The story of Louisa was one of unfathomable misery and cruelty as her fellow, modern-day travellers took the journey with her from London, on the convict ship Rajah, to the horror of life in the prison factory and then abuse at the hands of the man who had secured her services as a servant.

And all the while birds crossed the skies, calling as they went, drawing irresistible metaphors about freedom from incarceration and chains.

In my retirement the mountain had come to represent a different kind of freedom, one from routine and drudgery. It was my great escape, but for the prisoners in the Cascades complex – at times more than 1000 of them – the mountain towering above their heads loomed as though it was part of the prison wall itself. “In the shadow of death”, that’s how they described the prison, and the mountain must have threatened to swallow them up. There was no escape from the prison and no escape from the mountain’s malevolent presence, even within the prison’s sandstone walls. On wild winds, Mount Wellington sent down storms of ice and snow, and rain, to magnify the terror in this foreign and hostile place at the ends of the earth, Van Diemen’s Land.

As I studied a washing tub, the soft sandstone on one side worn away by years of human toil, I heard the black cockies and looked up to see them passing the factory on slow, lazy flaps of the wings.

Their cry has been described as a lament but Louisa would no doubt have used another word for it derived from Gaelic – a keen. And she might even have used the Gaelic word itself, a caoine, for her own lament for a life lost.

Snow lingered on the mountain in the first week of August but the bright yellow, delicate flowers of the silver wattles were thrusting forth from the acacia’s equally delicate, lattice-work foliage to herald a now not-too-distant spring. The acacias displaying fountains of flowers marked out the course of rivulets coursing from the mountain, lining the banks that caught the most sun.

It was too early for summer migrants coming to the mountain but my phone rang hot with sightings of swamp harriers, the first migratory birds to arrive in Tasmania. Friends at Ouse in the Derwent Valley and on the South Arm across the Derwent from the mountain reported sightings and now, instead of looking for whales far out on the ocean, I scanned the mountain’s foothills in the hope of seeing harriers travelling south on broad, splayed wings.

The harriers – the only Tasmanian birds of prey to migrate across Bass Strait – arrive early to surprise an early nester, the masked lapwing.

Spring was definitely in the air as far as the lapwings were concerned. I had seen them in mating rituals in previous weeks on a fire trail that crosses the Finger Post Track below Sphinx Rock and now I saw forest ravens and black currawongs paying close attention to the rough grasslands spanning each side of the wide, rutted trail, on the look-out for lapwing eggs.

The lapwings, in turn, appeared more tetchy than usual, quick to rise into the air and screech noisily at anyone or anything invading their patch. Like the crows and currawongs, I speculated they had laid eggs already.

As the wattles exploded into colour, on sunny days there was also an explosion of birdsong. And singing birds made bird-watching so much easier. I did not have to track the birds down in thick forest and I logged black-headed, strong-billed and yellow-throated honeyeaters, grey fantails, grey-strike thrush, scrubwrens and thornbills and scarlet and pink robins.

Male birds were either proclaiming territories with robust songs from high perches or engaged in fierce territorial battles. On the Finger Post Track two fairy-wrens, in shimmering bright-blue plumage ready for the spring, sparred in front of me, more interested in the battle than my approaching footsteps. I paused to allow them to continue their fight, before the more aggressive of the pair saw off his adversary.

The birds might have been in full spring song, and the wattles in early flower, but cars were still coming down from the mountain with snowmen on their bonnets.