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
“Phew. What a scorcher.” The mock headline used to be an in-joke among the journalists in London’s Fleet Street where I honed my trade as a wordsmith. It’s a satire of course, a headline to describe how a hack sub-editor on a tabloid daily might view an exceedingly hot day but it felt appropriate on January 4, 2012, the hottest day ever recorded in Hobart. It was a 41.8 degrees Celsius; I headed to Mount Wellington in search of cool air, and birds.
I was disappointed to find the extreme fire risk had closed the Pinnacle Road and settled instead for a sheltered and moist gully leading up the mountain from Fern Tree. Immediately on leaving my car and climbing up a flight of stone steps at the start of the Fern Glade Track I realised I had made the right decision to leave steaming Hobart behind me. On the way to the mountain I had seen a forest raven panting by the side of the road, its beak wide open as it gasped for air, and the woods lining the Huon Road were eerily silent. Above Fern Tree, however, birdsong filtered through the canopy, carried on the yellow rays of a late-afternoon sun. Like myself, birds were sheltering from the sun and extreme heat. We had taken refuge in a micro-climate, one controlled by the towering man ferns and leafy dogwoods.
In places I caught sight of the upper reaches of the mountain though the trees, the peak covered by a blue eucalypt haze. The sultry air outside the glade reeked with the odour of warm, combustible oils; it was as though a mountain born of molten rock and its gums designed to exploit heat and inferno, to be reborn from ash, were inviting fire to visit. A day of searing heat always reminds us that we take the mountain and its forests on their terms.
In the shadow of the Fern Glade, a pair of green rosellas flew past and then I heard a young Bassian thrush calling to its parents. Mother soon appeared with a wriggling worm, dug up from the leaf litter on the forest floor, and fed the juvenile, downy and scalloped brown, with an afternoon meal.
As I ventured further on, Tasmanian scrubwrens scurried across the footpath and then a grey fantail struck up in song from the lower branches of a silver wattle. Like the Bassian thrush, fantails were still busy feeding fledglings from this year’s crop of new birds.
The sanctuary of the glade could not last forever, and I was soon forced into a warmer area of forest, following a fire trail that leads eventually to the Silver Falls, a kilometre or so south of Fern Tree.
I was hoping that the tributary of the Browns River that feeds the falls would have plenty of water in it and I was pleased to hear it cascading through the steep cutting it occupies as it courses towards the sea.
At the waterfall I had to wait my turn to drink. Two yellow-tailed black cockatoos had reached there before me and were dipping their bills into a rockpool under the cascade of water; throwing back their heads as they drank.
“Phew, what a scorcher,” I said to my wife
The sun had turned a burnt orange, its power blunted by smoke from distant bushfires that I would soon learn were ranging across south-eastern Tasmania. As I left the woods the sun cast a menacing amber light across the patch of ground where I had parked my car.
“Phew, what a scorcher,” I said to my wife when I returned home and it seemed like only yesterday that I was again talking in headlines, at that time joking it had been “Little Siberia” up there on the mountain during October’s late snowstorm.
January 4 was no laughing matter, satirical clichéd headlines or not. Next day the Mercury had a headline of its own, “Hellfire”, reporting more than 100 homes lost in Dunalley in far-distant sight of the mountain. The front page carried a picture of a wool shed ablaze near the Carlton River.
I had a grandstand view of the tragedy next day, even if it was from a distance. Great plumes of grey some rose from Dunalley and surrounding areas. Further south along the Tasman Peninsular an even bigger plume rose from Eagle Hawk Neck on the road to Port Arthur.
Boats of all shapes and sizes taking supplies to Dunalley littered Frederick Henry Bay beyond the Derwent and the South Arm Peninsular. Roads into the area had been closed because of the danger and marine transport had proven an ideal way to deliver goods and water and other essential supplies to townsfolk, local farmers fleeing their farms and stranded tourists sheltering in the Dunalley village hall
I had travelled to my favourite spot on the mountain, Sphinx Rock, to check on the flame robins nesting there, but I was drawn to the precipice and the spectacle of the fires ranging in the distance. All that misery, and fear, and pain and uncertainty masked and obscured by shafts of grey smoke, and falling ash spread out in horizontal layers blotting out the far horizon beyond Port Arthur.
Even on the rock, 40 kilometres from the fires, I could smell wood smoke, and feel it stinging my eyes.
Time to turn my back on the spectacle, the news event of the day, and look for the news event of the natural world. Was it a yellow-throated honeyeater feeding two young high in an urn gum, or a creeping tea-tree bursting into flower. I had searched for the plant, a feature of the mountain, and not been able to identify it. Now its beautiful flower of five white oval petals attached to a disk like a wooden spoked wheel, spoke its name.
The birds appeared oblivious to the fire, an event so important to humans. Why should they care? Fire is a natural part of their world, and they take their chances if it should threaten. Burned nests are merely rebuilt, eggs relaid, fledglings newly on the wing ushered to safety away from the flames. Raging fire only poses a danger for the two or three weeks vulnerable bald or downy young are in the nest, and the nesting season was largely over with young birds having mastered flight.
For mammals it is a different proposition. At least on the mountain, unlike more open, flatter country, there are hiding places in gullies. The man ferns, tall and robust, bear witness to the safe haven the wet gullies provide. Some of the bigger man ferns are more than 1000 years old, even though trees around them remain blackened and scared from the bushfires of 1967.
Crossing a wet gully returning from Sphinx Rock a dusky antechinus dashed across the track and vanished into a cluster of ferns and grass, and a pineapple candleheath in flower. If the summer fires should eventually threaten the mountain, the antechinus could make a retreat to a safe but smoky haven.
