The Woman on the Mountain (8 page)

I heard him continuing the carry-on further up the hill. Not that the adult call is at all musical, but at least it’s more varied.

Perhaps the different species are checking out the playpen for next season, since, also for the first time, I had a visit from a Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoo mother and child. I get groups of these big cockatoos in damp weather, but this time there were just two of them, sitting in the branches of the big stringy-bark uphill from the toilet.

Set amongst the rocks at the foot of this stringy-bark I keep an upturned triple-decker old ceramic insulator full of water, so thirsty birds often provide a little entertainment and aid contemplation. The toilet deliberately has no door; it is open on its eastern face, as little weather comes from that direction, and the morning sun is pleasant on bare knees in winter.

The two cockatoos didn’t look much different from each other, dark brownish-black, with lemon cheek patches and tail bands, but I recognised that forward lean of the body, that whining tone. One of them was a young one, and it sounded like he was sawing down the tree without taking a breath.

I’ve just realised that I keep assuming these demanding young birds are masculine. Funny, that.

While the baby boom lasts, the oft-given comment of how peaceful it must be up here in the bush is met with a short and bitter laugh. ‘Huh!’ I say, quoll spots passing before my eyes, and outside the juveniles start again, ‘Hah, hah, hah, hah...’

Even when the babies have grown up and been shooed off to find their own territories, it’s never silent here. At night the orchestrated cacophony of frog voices, high and low, long and short, in the small dam down the front, merely provides a continuous background chorus for the hoarse, prolonged gruntings of koalas and the boomings and mournful calls of night birds.

When we first put this dam in, to have ‘water views’ from the verandah as much as for bushfires, my then partner decided to bring some tadpoles over from the big dam, which is out of sight. And earshot.

The following summer we thought we had a flock of demented sheep out front. It was, almost. Bleating Tree Frogs. The frog book notes that ‘Large numbers of this frog can produce a deafening noise.’ Indeed they can—my partner thought he’d go crazy, that he’d have to drain the new dam. Yet he got used to the noise, same as city dwellers don’t notice four lanes of traffic roaring past below their unit balconies, or jumbo jets skimming their rooftops. Now I’d go crazy with that!

But once summer’s over, the frogs calm down and the wild-child rearing should be done for the year. Right at the end of summer, I was thrilled to spot eight White-headed Pigeons fly up from the rainforest gully and land just outside my gate. I’d seen one or two before, but this was a rare sighting. Through the binoculars, one of them seemed more grey than white. As I noted the event on the calendar, I heard a noise at the low window. I turned. There on the sill was the greyish pigeon. A young one? I checked the yard. Yep, all the grown-ups were gone. The word about the playpen had spread to the rainforest.

I can only hope that the Brush Turkeys don’t hear of it by next summer.

On the farm where I grew up, the only ‘wild’ place left on it was a small patch by the creek, flood-prone, so not worth clearing. That patch of gums and wattles was for me the heart of our place, and pushing through its privet edges marked my entry into the real world. I had a small swept dirt clearing in there that I called my cubby, and from it I’d peep out to the open paddock, feeling somehow safer. I can’t remember worrying about snakes, despite always being on the lookout for them on the farm itself.

I knew that when I grew up I wanted to live somewhere that had more bush, and less land shaped by people.

I found it here. Partly cleared years before, only moderately logged and grazed, although burnt many times, most of it was regenerating well. Best of all, it bordered virgin rainforest, admittedly state forest and perhaps at risk, but the house site we’d chosen faced higher mountains into whose pristine forests I knew there was not even a track.

After I moved back, just before Christmas one year a bulldozer began carving a road in towards those old-growth forests. It took six days of damage before our conservationist friend, Barrie Griffiths, could obtain an injunction to stop the work until the Forestry Commission completed a lawful environmental impact study (EIS).

The conclusions of their EIS were unsurprising: no significant ill effects would be caused by logging; rather, it would be beneficial! We submitted long objections, and went out to the old-growth forest to make a video in readiness for a publicity campaign if need be. It was awesomely different from the 50-year-old overly dense regrowth with which we were familiar. Strangely human-friendly to walk in—parklike, with well-spaced and truly massive eucalypts towering over tussock grasses, strappy clumps of dianella and lomandra, and ferns and ground orchids; no understorey except in the run-off gullies. It felt ancient. Some of the big trees looked vulnerable, with hollows burnt right through their bases over the years.

The EIS was rejected and, in the end, that old-growth forest was saved as a wilderness area and a new national park created to protect wherever else up here had been state forest. That ought to mean forever, but the New South Wales state government has now changed laws to better suit corporate plans, although it is of course also done ‘in the best interests of the people’. Projects like coalmines are deemed to be of state significance, fast-tracked around the nuisances of hard-won protective legislation like an EIS, while also ‘of course’ having to meet ‘strict environmental guidelines’. Why am I not comforted?

Meanwhile I could do something about my own place. The vendor reckoned it had so much tree cover because he’d left lots of ‘mother trees’ for seed. As these were invariably low branching, most unsuitable as saw logs, we doubted his motives, but the result was welcome. The block runs along a ridge, falling away in a series of gentle shelves to a rocky escarpment, and beyond. I hardly ever go below the escarpment, but it acts as a privacy barrier from the next valley.

There were only a few clearings where the trees hadn’t grown back, and one of them is where I live—a north-facing grassy bowl, rimmed by trees, protected from bad weather from the south by the ridge above, and from the west by the tree rim. Our old bushman had warned us not to build on the ridge, but to tuck ourselves down lower, and he was right. It can be blowing a very audible gale ‘up top’, and the trees on my western rim will be bent near double by its force as it roars up the escarpment, but it is usually merely a breeze on my verandah.

There’s a chip in the forested rim of my bowl, which gives my verandah those mountain views to the north. Each year I look up to the far-off copper flush of new growth in the Antarctic Beech forests on the mountains of the wilderness area, and I take comfort in knowing that this unique density of life is protected.

Then I look down the spring gully by my house and delight in my hundreds of pale-green tree guards, hoping that such gullies will one day again be the rainforests they were, teeming with quite a different life from that of my ridges and shelves, a life taken from them by cattle and annual burning. All that was left down there were stinging nettles and moss, the odd clump of rock orchids or staghorns, and a few spindly unknown trees with glossy leaves—rainforest remnants. They hadn’t come back by themselves as the eucalypt forests were doing.

I don’t know why I didn’t set about helping them sooner, when I was younger and fitter. Too busy coping with life, I suppose, and too unsure of what lay ahead to commit to such a project. I know better now than to wait for guarantees.

About five years ago, I heard of grants under the
Native Vegetation Conservation Act,
via the then Department of Land and Water Conservation (DLWC). I applied, and after sixteen months of inspections and paperwork, I received a grant for fencing off my gullies and my lagoon area from the horses.

In return I’d propagate, plant and tend the appropriate indigenous plants for those areas, curtail all other activities within them and perhaps allow educational access later. This Property Agreement was registered on my deeds and remains in effect forever. Other people make Conservation Agreements with National Parks and Wildlife to achieve the same end.

Since I’m a cynic, I feel that such privately protected areas have more secure futures than state-owned ones, where conservation values can be removed simply by re-naming. After all, from a ministerial desk in Macquarie Street, if you look at an area only on paper, for example on an application from a large mining company, green areas can be greyish.

On my piece of damaged Eden, I did the lagoon area first, as it was the easiest project. These lagoons are actually ‘perched’, or ‘hanging’, swamps; they only occur at higher altitudes and their water comes from springs. Reed-filled or edged, they provide habitats for many species, especially frogs, and drinking water for all. The damp sedgelike vegetation of their associated descending chain of smaller lagoons is habitat for others, including endangered small mammals. Mine was the only one on this ridge but I’d seen several out in the old-growth forest, and each one was surrounded by a ring of tall paperbark trees, which are found nowhere else at these levels. Specific settings for precious jewels, ecologically.

My lagoon had no such paperbark trees, which wasn’t surprising given the relentless burning regime of its previous owner. It did have several hugely broad and ancient
Angophora floribundas,
or Apple Gums, blackened but undamaged by bushfires. The biggest grows almost horizontally, leaning out over the water like a great dark monster, its upper branches splayed out like antennae. It has incredible presence, as does the whole lagoon area. My story ‘Traces of Life’, which won the Alan Marshall Award, was inspired by this strange place.

With permission, I collected seed capsules from those old-growth lagoons—Prickly Paperbarks,
Melaleuca stypheloides.
The seeds themselves were minute brown specks, hard to sow separately, and they came up in thick clumps in their pots, with the saucers beneath kept full of water to mimic the swamp. I potted them on into milk cartons and soon hundreds of them were reaching for the greenhouse roof—a paperbark forest under glass. But the fencing around the lagoon hadn’t been completed and I began to worry about the delay in getting these keen little trees into the ground where they belonged.

It was a difficult fencing job, as where the terrain wasn’t rocky it was boggy, but the young contractor did his best and finally I was able to plant them out. I did this nervously, as snakes like frogs, and frogs like these wet areas. Since the horses had been fenced out, the tussocks had grown tall; visibility was nil for that flash of glossy black. As it had always been rare to come here and not see a Red-bellied Black Snake, it was probably due to that lack of visibility rather than a lack of their presence that I didn’t see any as I squelched my way around the edges, safe to the knees at least in my long gumboots.

Because the paperbark leaves were prickly even when young, I assumed no possum or wallaby would eat them. Nor did they for the first few months, when I was checking often. The trees were doing well, liking having their roots so wet, but I ought to have remembered the complacency factor.

Next time I went there they were all eaten to some extent. I bought extra strong wire netting and collared a male friend to cut it up for me. I made tall cylindrical lidded guards, and fixed them to the ground with spikes. Do your worst, possums!

Next visit many of these guards were squashed, by the big kangaroos, I imagined. I straightened them out, but had to wait until my son could come to bang in tomato stakes with a mallet. Do your worst, kangaroos!

The guards stayed vertical; the paperbark trees grew on, uneaten.

The second stage of my regeneration plan was for the rainforest gullies, most of which have a spring at their head, which, while not always flowing above ground, has created a deeply incised and rocky watercourse.

In the first autumn of my solo life here I collected fruit and seed and cuttings from the national park, with their permission. I didn’t know what ought to be collected as I didn’t know what had once been here. No advice was available from DLWC, nor could National Parks tell me anything, but they did arrange a community rainforest identification day.

We stumbled behind the botanist through a patch of rainforest, listened and looked, ooh-ed and aah-ed and asked informed questions, like ‘What’s that?’ Back at camp we peered at our collected cuttings and pored over the ID bible, by Williams, Harden and McDonald, to learn how to use their system.

As blueprint and donor, I chose a slope in the national park that was similarly oriented to mine, and spent much time poking about in its lower brushy gullies, my eyes becoming attuned to colours and shapes denoting fruit or seed amongst the leaves, or amidst the humus of the forest floor. I was nervous going in there on my own at first, as I’m neither a ‘seasoned bushwalker’ nor a solitary one. Like most new things, starting was the hard part. Very soon, as my involvement grew, so did my familiarity and confidence, and the thrill of finding new plants overrode my fears.

Whenever I drove through the rainforest on my trip to town, I’d go slow, peering into the roadside brush. That’s how I found the mother tree for my young Red Cedars,
Toona australis.
A tall, straight, eminently millable cedar grows right beside the road, inexplicably spared by the axe in the past. A cluster of seed pods had fallen and caught in the branches of an accessible small gum below, just waiting for me to find them, I felt. I took it as a gift, a sign of approval for what I was doing.

Not far from where that cedar grows is where I think the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt must have camped, in a hollow tree, all by himself, for three weeks in 1843. I’ve read his letters about what he saw then, and empathised with his raptures about solitude, the rich vegetation, the stars. In fact, I was inspired to write back, in ‘Leichhardt and I—a Conversation Across Time’, intended for radio. I feel differently about that part of the mountains since I have ‘seen’ Leichhardt there. I also see how, just a few years later, he could have lost himself and his party forever when trying to cross northern Australia; he was keen, but he was no bushman.

On my two main collecting expeditions, I had help from two young volunteer botanists, Tasman Willis and Alaina Casey, and then from my ‘green’ friend, Marg McLean, far more knowledgeable than I, so most of what we found was identified and given its proper name, for the record. Some they knew by sight, but many had to be put through the ID system of elimination. It was as thrilling as detective work, narrowing down the options—do the leaves grow alternate or opposite? Are they simple or compound? Lobed or not?—working our way through the many subgroups to the final decisive factor: do the leaves have oil dots or not? For me this step was the dither factor as I could rarely see oil dots.

My greenhouse was soon full of foam boxes of the prescribed light seed-raising mix, fostering hundreds of baby Sandpaper Figs, Red Cedars, Lillipillies, and many others whose common names I don’t know The greenhouse would wear its summer shadecloth coat all year round now I installed an automatic timer on a spray watering system, which allows me to go away without worrying about their welfare. It’s wonderful—cheap, easy even for me to put together, and the timer runs on two AA batteries for more than a year. I love it. So do the trees.

As they grew, I potted them into recycled milk cartons. I was using paddle-pop sticks as labels, but I can dispense with them now—which is just as well, as they turn black and illegible after about a year with all the watering—for I’m on first name terms with young
Acmena, Omalanthus, Neolitsea, Toona, Citriobatus, Pyschotria, Melicope, Pittosporum, Hedycarya, Ehretia, Ficus, Eupomatia, Pimelia, Cryptocarya, Dysoxylum
and their varied siblings.

Said aloud, many of these ring like the names of nymphs or goddesses, or the daughters of old-fashioned intelligentsia. Just imagine the scene in the manor drawing room, as young Miss Melicope Dalrymple and her friend Miss Acmena Pemberton are introduced to a newcomer to the county, Miss Eupomatia Braithwaite, whose reputation as a bluestocking has preceded her...

Soon I ran out of space in the glasshouse. To make more room, I fashioned a rough shadehouse from star posts and shadecloth, hanging it off the western side of the greenhouse. The seedlings go out there to acclimatise before I plant them out. There are still many seedlings, overcrowded and impatient in their nursery boxes, that I haven’t had room to pot on. I will, I promise them—hang in there, your turn will come. They look surprisingly healthy given their cramped conditions and inadequate nourishment.

Relatives and friends faithfully rinse and save their milk cartons for me, present me with garbage bags and boxes full when we meet at long intervals. They are the godparents to my fledgling rainforest. The cartons last about a year under the constant watering, when it’s time to plant them out anyway, and instead of having to winkle the tree out of a pot, I just rip the soggy carton open.