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
One afternoon, after a long pre-Christmas lunch and too many beers with journalist colleagues on the Salamanca strip in Hobart, I finally set off for the long and slow walk home. The mountain as I headed south along Macquarie Street towered over me and I looked for the contours containing the tracks I had walked the day previously.
I couldn’t make them out, of course, the mountain was a blur of colour and shapes, although I could see the dominant route up the peak, the Pinnacle Road, for part of its course. The “blur” I might add could well have had something to do with the bottles of fine red and Cascade Pale Ales I had shared with my friends on the Tasmanian Times, although my overall perspective was clear enough. As I looked up at the mountain I saw a passenger aircraft flying high overhead and wondered how the mountain would look to passengers peering out of the windows. From above it would merely present that same blur, a tangle of shapes, a mix of colours, shadows and contours. Apparently lifeless.
Every time I take a flight – especially the trans-continental journeys like the one from Australia to Europe – I look down at that abstract blur representing the terrain I am passing and think of what is down there and what it is doing. I don’t think of people as such but animals and birds and whole environments, habitats containing rainforests and dry woodland, marshes and grassland.
Land masses and what they contain can be difficult to gauge and identify from high in the air, unlike seas and deserts. But even over endless ocean and the rippled contours of desert I ask myself what lies under or within? Is there a blue whale down there in that great ocean? Or a desert fox sliding down a dune, an oryx at an oasis.
I grow excited at the thought of it, what’s down there, going about its business, hunting and feeding and mating and rearing young.
I was thinking of these things when I looked up at the mountain on a slow walk from Salamanca, the best part of a bottle of shiraz inside me. What lies within? Only this time I knew. There’d be a platypus in a stream somewhere, and in winter a randy antechinus looking for sex, and in summer a grey shrike-thrush hunting for robin eggs, or young, along Dunns Creek.
Next day I saw the Dunns Creek robins, a happy family travelling to and fro. The young were fully grown and not using the nest at all. They perched, and roosted, with their parents on the dogwood holding the nest. When the parents moved to a lower perch and then plunged to the leaf litter and undergrowth in search of insects the young followed them. The parents had shown them how to feed.
Not only was the weather growing exceedingly hot into the second half of December, but humid on most days. The air hung hot and sticky, infused with the sweet smell of the surrounding blooms. On the drier slopes of the mountain, always within site and feel of the sun’s summer rays, tree groundswell and common fireweed scented the air.
When the wind blew the humidity from the slopes, and the hot sun bore down on the forest, the aroma of flowers was suppressed by the overpowering smell of eucalyptus oil.
The wallabies and pademelons hid deep within the wet and dry forests on the hottest, most humid days, but could be seen in the early evening emerging and looking for fresh grasslands. I surprised a pademelon on the circuit track off Shoebridge Bend. It stopped to look, flicking ears, twitching nose. Seeing I wasn’t a threat, it made off in slow hops. The days were lengthening towards the summer solstice and hunger forced the pademelon and wallabies to break cover before the sun had set in the evenings.
Native-hens had proved elusive during the year, preferring the wet paddocks and marshes at the very edge of the mountain’s boundaries but along the banks of the New Town Rivulet one morning, when I had gone in search of a strong-billed honeyeater’s nest I had been told about, I saw native-hens with sooty black young. There were three sets of chicks of various ages, from the very tiny struggling to see above grass already cropped by wallabies, to young the size of a blackbird, to older birds two-thirds the size of their parents. All clothed in black. They were the young of several families all seeking safety in number. I walked up close and a female let out the staccato warning call, like the sound of someone making a click with their tongue on the inside of their cheek. All the young gathered in a circle, before making off following one adult, while the other adults brought up the rear.
Lapwings across the lower slopes of the mountain, manning the same habitat of wet grassland inhabited as that claimed by the native-hens, had fully grown young, with prominent lapwing markings. Only the scaly and scalloped light brown feathers on their backs when they were retreating marked them out as the young of this summer.
Clearly, the lapwing breeding season was over and it looked like a good crop to begin the process when the next breeding season came around. The lapwing scene was a tranquil one at last, with the angry adult birds not taking to the wing immediately they sensed danger when the eggs and very small young were about, and swooping at passers-by.
The mountain’s resident boobok and masked owls were also on my list of birds to spot during the year and on several nights I lingered after the sun had set in the hope of at least hearing them, but without success. Instead I was treated to an exceptionally bright Jupiter hanging low in the sky to the north
The days were marked by light showers during the afternoon, on several occasions spreading rainbows over the Waterworks Valley so that they framed the mountain.
One evening I caught the last of the sun’s rays spreading fingers of light across the lower hills below the Organ Pipes, the highest slopes already in shadow. Forest ravens going to their roosts crossed the rolling forests, which were coated in hazy, diffused yellow light.
Golden rosemary, a plant to catch the sun’s rays and throw them back into the air like the buttercups I knew from the meadows of Britain in my youth, were now out of flower, the flower heads brown, withered and dry. The signs were there that although we were only three weeks into summer, it would not last and would soon die like the multi-coloured blooms it had brought forth. The yellow flowers of blanket bush were long gone, the seed pods hanging in an untidy straggle from stems and leaves also showing the rigours of exposure to the heat.
Flame and pink robins and fantails making progress, their courtship and mating rituals complete before they started to rear a second brood. It was time to check on the pair of birds I had neglected, the Bassian thrushes nesting below the Springs on the Radford track. I couldn’t find them at first and after about 15 minutes began to fear fate in the shape of the tallons of the goshawk, or the claws of the eastern quoll, had befallen them. I finally found them, however, in wet forest some distance from the nest, three young and their parents fossicking and ferreting in the wet undergrowth.
I was confident they would return to the nest for a second brood, once their current youngsters had learned to feed themselves totally without support from the parents.
Pursuing the Bassian thrushes off a beaten track I heard a continuous movement in the dry leaf little bordering a wet section favoured by the thrushes. I froze, listening. The movement continued and I knew it was not the scurrying, jerky movement of scrubwrens in the loose leaves. It had to be a snake, and I saw a carpet of leaves, shifting and fidgeting. A moving and meandering, leaves rising and falling like ocean waves, and suddenly the head of a tiger snake rose from the leaf litter, and swung around to pierce me with a cold stare.
I have a fear of snakes, like most people, and I have tried to conquer it. I have handled snakes, been out with professional snake catchers in the African bush, but still the fear – I’d describe it as terror – returns when I stumble on them unexpectedly in the bush.
Being able to see them helps, I’m in control, but when they vanish I’m overcome by panic. And this is what happened on this occasion. The snake, instead of travelling on its way in a faster fashion, simply lowered its head, froze and vanished into the undergrowth. I backed off gently, turned and then broke into a trot.
There’s something in us all that inspires fear of snakes. It dates back to pre-humans days, something buried deep within our DNA, pre-dating no doubt language and song.
I didn’t see my first snake until I was about nine years old. Britain’s only poisonous serpent, the adder, send me scurrying down a cliff face while on holiday on the South Coast – a manoeuvre far more dangerous than a confrontation with what is considered a mildly poisonous snake.
My latest mountain snake encounter coincided with the arrival of the summer solstice, the sun’s track across the Australian sky reaching its highest point. Sunrise 5.28am, sunset 9.49pm, the longest hours of daylight during the year.
On balmy and mellow, light-lingering summer evenings the cuckoos had stopped singing relentlessly, their anti-social work largely done. And I was glad I had not seen it in action.
