Last day in Melbourne

Tags

Aboriginal art, buildings, Melbourne Botanical Gardens, rainforest, sculpture, Seven Seeds

This post is to say thank you to Desley who met me for breakfast in the middle of a monumentally busy schedule. For once “the best coffeee in …” lived up to the hype, and we chatted over two cups and a classy Melbourne breakfast.

My date with Desley nearly came unstuck because I can’t read maps, paper or Google. Nor can I follow g-map verbal instructions. But I can ask a man in a hard-hat, at least in Australia, and that’s how I found Seven Seeds, pretty well spot on time, although I almost walked right past it. The buzz of conversation behind an anonymous door prevented that disaster.

Breakfast set me up for a day of walking, beginning at the war memorial. 

After its grandiloquence it was a relief to reach the Botanical Gardens and more humble buildings built to suit their more practical functions: an observatory, a small building for the study of magnetism, and a house whose purpose I have forgotten.

After days absorbed by the city, it is a relief to walk on soft green grass and be towered over by trees. I follow the camellia walk and then venture via rainforest into the Chinese plantings, passing two special trees on the way. I suspect I’m not a city person at heart. I felt at home particularly amongst tree ferns, buttress roots, splotchy bark, and the sound of gurgling water. I’ve been a long time out of rainforest. 

I leave the gardens at Gate H, and head back towards the city along the lunchtime jogging trail bordered by shapely plants chosen for sturdiness, accompanied by the smell of sweat and spurts of dust as joggers pant past.

I’m heading towards the Australian section of the National Gallery of Victoria for a quick look at their Aboriginal gallery, but first there’s a sculptural treat in the parkland leading to Federation Square.

The gallery taunts me with far too many possibilities for the short time left. I certainly can’t resist the corrugated iron (Rosalie Gascoigne created the horizontals; Victor Meertens the verticals; time the materials) …

… but I’m really here for something else, which turns out to be bark paintings, weaving and basket work by women artists. The natural colours of country affect me the same way rainforest does. Again, I feel at home.

The Aboriginal artists are Nonggirrnga Marawili (bark paintings);  Linda Ganyila Guyula (woman’s string hat); Mary Muyungu (string bag with shells); Margaret Robyn Djunginy (suite of woven bottles); Delissa Walker (baskets with shells); Yalakupu 1 (string bag with feathers); Mary Mutumurruwuy (fish net); Elizabeth Djutarra (woven floor mat).

That’s not the end of my day. There’s still Australia Opera’s performance of “Carmen” to come.

Marrja boardwalk

Tags

mangrove forest, Marrja boardwalk, rainforest

For Rosemary and her mother, who once walked through Daintree mangroves together

 

The road to Cape Tribulation is punctuated by boardwalks that penetrate the Daintree. The Marrja one is billed as botanical, which of course draws my particular attention. It's one of the few places where you can find plants representing all stages of the evolution of land plants over the last 400 million years, including cycads that cohabited with dinosaurs. Some of the species tucked away here are very localised: some such as the ribbonwood, suddenly reappeared from presumed extinction, rediscovered when they poisoned cattle in the 1970s.

The walk begins in rainforest country, beloved, but familiar. Or so I think till I see the heavy wooden tracery of twisty trunk, or zebra stripes of shadow, or fan palms, beautiful in all their stages.

Then I move amongst the mangroves: perfectly strange territory. I'm in a mangrove forest, a place such as I've never seen before: buttresses, reflections, spiracles, basket ferns, like something from a fairytale. I ramble, enchanted, every place I look spectacular.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Jindalba boardwalk

Tags

cassowaries, Jindalba boardwalk, rainforest

WARNING

If you've had a surfeit of rainforest, palms, leaves and buttresses, read no further. I don't expect everyone to share my excesses!

 

After a couple of nights in Mossman, I head north towards Cape Tribulation, named so by Captain Cook “because there began all our troubles” that culminated when the Endeavour ran aground on a reef. I breeze across the Daintrree River ferry, and enter serious cassowary country. The road is designated for sightseeing and the low speed limits suit me perfectly. I pootle along under arching trees, keeping a hopeful eye open for a cassowary. The lookout shows me an expanse of coastline and waterways and I turn off past the Discovery Centre to the Jindalba boardwalk in Kuku Yalanji country.

I'm early, and the only car there is the ranger's car. Forest sounds are swallowed up in the wail of a leaf blower. A leafblower? In the forest? The young woman wielding it tells me it's a public safety issue. Damp and rotting leaves make the boardwalk slippery. It still seems incongruous, like a butterfly behind bars, and I'm certain she hasn't blown the whole boardwalk, which winds its way through all the pleasures of the rainforest, beginning with a spectacular blaze of red. The boardwalk makes way for saplings, probably not allowing them quite enough room to grow, and I'm amongst the irresistible elegance of buttresses, the occasional splat of water from high in the canopy, a flurry of creamy fungi, splotched tree trunks, an abundance of leaf shape, and a rushing creek.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Rainforest discovery centre

Tags

canopy tower, green, rainforest, wompoo pigeon

Today's the day I face one of my fears – an irrational dread of the Daintree River ferry. I don't quite know what I fear. Not the river, which would be reasonable, but the getting on and off. I think I'm remembering car ferries from fifty years ago, and a tenuous connection between land and water. As mostly with fears, it is a $24 piece of cake. Just a pity I can't get out of the monster to photograph.

My goal is the Rainforest Discovery Centre, winner of a UN environment award, and my certificate of excellence for information overload. A helpful staff member tells me that two American women put in an 8 hour day on ten consecutive days. By the end of a few hours, I can see that this is totally possible.

My first encounter is with three pythons in a glass case. The snake woman tells me the green one changed to her glorious clear spring-green self over a few days, not shedding, but greening slowly along her length. The diamond python is not much bigger than a sizeable worm: “not thriving” says my informant. I know what a thriving python looks like: our kitchen resident is thriving.

I carry a booklet with numbered stations, and headphones with ditto. If I press # after listening to informative commentary, I have an Aboriginal perspective in an Aboriginal voice. As I juggle all these sources, I'm somehow missing the delight of noticing for myself as I walk along the aerial walkway, and slowly rise through the canopy up the 23 metre canopy tower (which is, for your information, cyclone rated.)

However I do see a wompoo pigeon, maybe because it doesn't have a number attached. I watch it feasting on berries, and catch flashes of yellow and purple as it moves from tree to tree. It's oblivious to my presence. I also see plenty of green: leaves, ferns, vines, palms.

I head back across the ferry for a low-tide crocodile cruise (really to indulge my passion for mangroves) but I'm the only taker and it doesn't run. However I have a long conversation with the woman at the desk – who used to work for Eurobodalla Council.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Heading north

Tags

fungi, Pamela Salt, rainforest

It's time to leave my cabin and collect a new home. This time it's a campervan, and the thought of it daunts me. After all, my normal vehicle is a Yaris. Our first moments alone together aren't auspicious: I can't seem to engage first gear, which is a disadvantage in a city of traffic lights and roundabouts.

However, our relationship improves, and I head north to Mossman in the forests of the Daintree, a world heritage area. The road is windy, but there's not much traffic, and the speed limit hovers between 60 and 80. The road is beautiful: put my hand out the window one way and I touch deeply forested hills: put it out the other and it dangles in the Coral Sea. I have to recalibrate my thinking about distance here. Sixty kilometres takes a couple of hours, and that's not only because I dawdle and sightsee. My campsite is by the Mossman River. I manage to reverse and plug into electricity, but I don't manage to realise that the campervan table does double duty as bed base and for two nights I huddle on a very narrow mattress.

I'm off early the next morning to shop for supplies: I love being able to put them straight in the refrigerator. And then to the real business of this journey north. I make my way to Mossman Gorge, and set off on the path less travelled, away from the rest of the shuttle bus passengers. I can hear a river roaring and soon I'm beside it, looking down at boulders and rushing water through the trunks of trees. The boardwalk is actually made from recycled plastic, which provides a non-slip surface, requires less maintenance and doesn't rot.

The track, dirt now, soon moves to the rainforest, and rain falls in sheets. People pass wearing towels and raincoats, or more suitably clad merely in rain. I have an umbrella, but it's not much use. I love the rain. It draws unexpectedly rich colour from bark and fungi. When it stops, drops still fall, moving leaves and making me suspect the presence of scurrying animals, never quite seen. This rainforest is bigger in every way than the patches I'm used to on the south coast. The buttresses are immense and elegantly curved, collecting moss and leaves and ferns in their swirls.

Back at the information centre, I prowl around the shop looking for a gift for my daughter's Polish mother-in-law. I'm drawn to wallet with a design of a dilly bag, white threads on green, and as I'm buying it I meet the artist, Pamela Salt. She was named after her great grandmother, Wawu Jirray, which means spirit-plenty, good-hearted, a lot to give. Kuku Yulanji women have woven dilly bags from the black palm for thousands of years. She lets me take her photo, in front of the painting, and in front of the palm that provides the fibre for the weaving the painting represents. The fibre comes from the trunk, between the top ring and the black. This is a gift that fits: Ola is spirit plenty, good hearted and has a lot to give, and when she visited Australia palms were the thing that most caught her attention – palms at the airport and then burrawangs at Potato Point.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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White beech: the rainforest years

Tags

botany, Numinbah Valley, rainforest

A chance encounter with Professor Germaine Greer via a paging announcement at Sydney Airport has led me to totally unexpected reading pleasure. As I was searching for the exact titles of books of hers I’d read, I came across “White beech”, which I’d never even heard of. It’s a fat hardback, 340 pages, about her rainforest property in the Gold Coast hinterland: its history, its ecology, and her attempts to rehabilitate it.

I was drawn into it by a number of familiarities. Her part of south-east Queensland is close to where my son and his family live; a few years ago I spent every weekend dropping over the edge into steep gulleys in search of rainforest patches; I have an ongoing interest in Aboriginal culture and language; and my post-retirement project led me into intermittent research into my south-coast local history. These are all threads in her account of her rainforest years. I’m fascinated by the discoveries made by a practised and dedicated researcher in a new field, and by the survival of her biting certainties into a new sphere. I’m also amused that the cowering student (me) and the towering and intimidating tutor (her) have arrived in a common place after fifty years.

Greer begins hunting for land in desert country near Alice Springs, and on the coast near Eden, motivated by a desire “to clean something up, sort something out, make it right”: she was finally charmed into buying 60 hectares of rainforest buried under lantana by an encounter with a superb bower bird “a sort of crow in fancy dress … clad in a tabard of yellow and a cap of the same with a frosting of red on the crown … He began dancing. Up and down bobbed his gaudy head, in and out went his hips, and all the time he kept a golden eye fixed on my face.” She decided to buy that night.

She spent eleven years rehabilitating her sixty hectares into a patch of Gondwanan rainforest, rich in animals, birds, mosses, grasses and of course trees. She documents her encounters with plants and creatures, many of which are familiar to me: possums, gliders, diamond pythons, red-bellied black snakes, antechinus, echidnas, dingoes, black beans, lawyer vine, stingers, treefrogs, flying foxes, powerful owls, quandongs and quolls, just for a start.

I learnt many things that shocked me. I discover that Poznan Zoo in Poland is breeding feather tail gliders, and supplying them to zoos all over Europe. That possums were classed as vermin from the early days of European settlement in Australia, and a million possum skins were sold to the Queensland fur market in 1921. That 2, 4, 5 – T, one of the two compounds in Agent Orange, was used in forestry and agriculture in south east Queensland in the late 1960s.

Greer mounts a full-scale campaign against Ferdinand Mueller (she refuses him his von), nineteenth century government botanist in Victoria, who not only got a lot wrong, but brown-nosed dignitaries by giving their cumbersome names to species, and planted blackberries wherever he went. Her botanist sister Jane does not agree with Greer’s assessment of von Mueller, nor does the entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, but some contemporaries certainly did. George Bentham, an English botanist, wrote “it grieves me to think that you should have devoted so much of your valuable time to a work which, botanically speaking, is not only absolutely useless but worse than useless.” The chapter devoted to botanists and the virulent ongoing taxonomy wars was one of my favourites.

I also relished and envied her descriptions of plant and animal life. Basket grass has a “complicated inflorescence (that) appears as pale fur hovering over the neat patterning of the woven stolons and their short leaves.” Topknot pigeons “wear a toupee of swept-back ginger plumes and fly in battalions.” Iridescent blue flies have “sizzling gold eyes.” Antechinuses “can flatten themselves until they are no thicker than a credit card with a minute paw at each corner … and limbo dance under a door.”

The day I finished reading “White beech” I ordered a copy to own and spread around: that’s a rare accolade from this stingy book-buyer.

If you want to know more about the ongoing Cave Creek project, you can visit http://gondwanarainforest.org/

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On Tamborine Mountain

Tags

Gallery Walk, rainforest, Tamborine Mountain

Tamborine Mountain is not very far from Queensland’s Gold Coast, but it is a different world: a world of rainforest, waterfalls and national park, including segments called Joalah, Cedar Creek, The Knoll, MacDonald Park, Niche’s Corner, Palm Grove and Witches Falls. The mountain is 525m high and covers 2800ha on a plateau with the steepest roads I’ve ever encountered. That’s where my son and his family live, in a house perched in an ecological corridor that pours down the hill behind them and drops off the escarpment.

WHERE I’M STAYING

Although friends of my family raise their eyebrows because I’m ‘put in a caravan’ at my son’s place, I love it. Outside there’s extensive deck space and a big table where I can read, or sit as comfort for Jenga when the thunder monster roars. I can retreat for an afternoon snooze, and head off to bed early, and spread my travel-mess unobserved. Or I can ramble around the tropical yard.

My caravan guest-room

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GALLERY WALK

Gallery Walk is the tourist trap stretch that sells everything from fudge to cuckoo clocks. I don’t usually walk along here, but I need something to wear to an April wedding in the tropics, and decide that the steamy heat is a good climate to buy it in. I take my granddaughter with me as fashion advisor.

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A RAINFOREST TRACK

The weather is too steamy to invite much walking, but I do venture along a rainforest track near Curtis Falls. I’m in Judith Wright country and  walkway bearing her name heads up the hill beside the road. The track is thick with orange flowers. I pass a fallen giant holding a rock in its roots; scrutinise the spaces between the buttresses of strangler figs; note the twist-marks of vines in in mottled trunks; step carfeully over coiling roots and between mossy rocks.

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