Wild Nature: Walking Australia's South East Forests

Index

South East Australia

National Parks of South East Australia

Proposal for a national park in East Gippsland to link up with the South East Forests National Park in New South Wales.

Prologue: Fire trails

2 January 2020

In Eden this afternoon it’s gone red. You can’t see without a light inside. Outside, the dead grass of the lawn is glowing crimson. The sky is a dark, deep orangey red, as if it’s on fire. You can’t do anything energetic the air is so pungent and smoky. All activity is reduced to a minimum. And with this mad sou’-wester it’s cold. Yesterday it was hot but now there’s a deep chill in the sticky atmosphere.

Places have burned we thought could never burn. There used to be fires. They’d burn here and there. But now it’s one big fire coming from many directions that’s burning everything and leaving no refuges.

Maybe afterwards we’ll reflect back and say this is when everything changed.

My rare privilege, some would call it madness, is to have experienced the great native forests of the south east region of Australia intimately, up close and personal you could say, over a period of very many years. These are outstanding on a world scale. National parks here protect a fantastic array of wildlife, and yet they are within a day’s drive from Australia’s three major capital cities and 80 per cent of its population. It seemed to me these protected areas should be appreciated, that I needed to put them in context and realise their natural beauty while I explored their value to civilisation in a world that’s putting more and more weight on turning a profit while nature goes up in smoke.

Maybe it’s nature that I’m talking about because the forests are part of nature just as we are, and everything else. One problem is that nature can get out of balance, not that fires are at fault. Maybe they’re a consequence. But they’re at the back of my mind while I’m out in the bush. There are reminders everywhere that help you read the countryside and its fire history as you walk. It’s only natural. Fires have their own beauty. They can inspire us with fear and dread.

Then

Notes in my journals reveal me planning,

thinking of the south east forest trails even though there are no trails in the parts where I want to go. It’s like the joke my dreaming plays on my waking self. I really need to go there, I tell Jacqueline. But where exactly do you want to go? she asks. You go to Cuttagee often enough, don’t you? Maybe I should have kept it as our little joke and let it be. The places I want to go are not easy places, I say. It’s the great escarpment where the divide between the tablelands and the coast is braided into wild gorges and cliffs. It’s hard to find a way through north to south because there’s no clear route. It’s deep and it’s dark, all mixed up and rugged. A few tracks go east to west but I have to go north to south. What do you expect to find? she asks. I can only shrug. What if in the end there’s nothing there? It will inspire us with its beauty, I promise. And it’s different. If it’s so wild, surely we’ll be lost? she says. Suddenly it comes clear to me. We can map whatever we find and tell the story of the great escarpment forests. She wonders if it matters and I say that this is undervalued natural country. It’s where the forest wars were fought. These places found protection because enough people thought they needed protection and demanded it and the story of their progress towards protection is chequered. But there must be trails, not just fire trails but real ones, maybe animal pads, maybe older ways. We can find the truth. Her forehead wrinkles in confusion. If we can make ourselves a mobile base camp we can live there in the forests for a year or so to find what they’re all about. She thinks deeply. Isn’t it contradictory to speak of trails and unfettered nature at the same time? But trails take many forms. Some lead you into nature. It’s important we reconcile our thoughts if the project is to come to pass. Some are like smoke trails and others are like history that tell you how things came to be the way they are. Some trails, for example, might show the way to fabled things like the waratahs of the Coolangubra …? Wouldn’t you like to experience them? Her excitement at the possibilities of going there rises. Imagine us becoming as one with the forests … We could visit the headwaters of the Brogo River as a trial run, I suggest. Check out its amazing wilderness.

We go there the very next week. It’s an extreme walk, and difficult, but she’s hooked by it and at last gets my mad passion. Some of its special plants must persist along the coastal ranges to the south, in the gorges and tucks and folds of the range above the pastoral granite country of the Bega Valley. Is the Brogo wattle, for example, also to be found southwards? I need to go there on foot and look closely.

A kind of compulsion presses me to continue the in-country searches I’d described in my Back Country book. Life will be incomplete if I don’t do it. Receiving a history research grant puts the matter beyond question. We will go together. A way takes shape.

My sketchy notes reveal the thrill of preparing for a very long journey. The south east forests fit into a fuzzy box at the south east corner of Australia, running from the spotted gums of Batemans Bay in the north, westerly to Canberra, and then down through the highest parts of the continent to the Gippsland coast in the south. My special interest lies with the national parks and what some call the Great Escarpment, a complicated edge where the Monaro tablelands fall away steeply to the coastal valleys: tall trees, a rich but secretive wildlife, trails that criss-cross, and their mysteries. I wonder if it’s possible to go beyond the limits of our civilisation and its fire trails to bring back news of wild nature.

Biamanga

Seagulls are everywhere, flying, standing, looking out to sea, and yet the headland at Cuttagee gives us a good view of how forests run inland from horizon to horizon. You can see across the picturesque lake entrance and its little white-painted wooden bridge to the tall spotted gums of UmbiGumbi, with Mumbulla Mountain, our first destination, some 30 or so kilometres beyond it as the crow flies to the south west. A couple of old friends come to wave us goodbye. We joke around and take a few snaps. The strange thing about our proposed journey, I guess, is that we have no destination other than to trace the south east forests along the escarpment and hopefully to end up back here, where we began.

A chequerboard of landholdings along the coast road masks the fact that the region grows some of the most wonderful forests in the world. Overall there is more forest than freehold, the trees continue uninterrupted all the way, as far as you can see, from the ocean to beyond the coastal ranges. Patches of the original grasslands some 10 or 20 kilometres inland are decreed by the geology and soils. I have my old haunts in the forests, but now it’s time to explore them in one fell swoop, check how everything fits together and the puzzle of how some parts came to be protected. The view from this headland is breathtaking. The sandy crescent of Baragoot Beach stretches northwards, almost to the horizon. Closer to the coast, the trees are mostly coastal mahogany and wattle, further back, the spotted gum. Tinted bluer along the northern horizon, the bowl of lowland is hemmed by a line of peaks. The three to the north have the Koori names of Gulaga, Najanuga and Barranguba, which are much more engaging than the ungainly whitefella names of Mount Dromedary, Little Dromedary and Montague Island.

We buckle on our backpacks and are soon scrambling down a rough track from the headland to the beach, a golden arc without a single footprint. This is one of those rarities. No parking areas. No roads. No steps down. No weeds or man-made intrusions. It is simply a natural beach. As we drop out of sight, on the roughest section of the track, I take Jacqueline’s hand. We look at each other and I exhale deeply, so relieved am I to be on our way at last. The joy of finally being alone together on our quest into the heart of the forests is palpable.

But trudging with a heavy backpack on soft sand takes its toll soon enough and after a kilometre or so we turn and climb the dunes into the thick coastal vegetation. It’s our first departure from an overall plan, but why not? We’re free now. We can go wherever the wind takes us. Here, due to the burning, salty sea winds, the plantlife is heavily pruned. Between the hot beach brilliance and the shadowy gloom of the tree line, we find a maze of tunnels through the low grasses. These are little hollows or trails made by swamprats, rat runs where the small native animals maintain arteries for travel beyond the sight of predators. Further in, beyond the dunes, the swamp mahoganies grow large, twisted and gnarled but not tall, to form a wide, windblown canopy. The trees only become taller as we move inland. Natural clearings under the closed canopy in sandy depressions form lagoons at times of plentiful rainfall, and, as our eyes adjust, wildflowers aplenty, white and scarlet. Jacqueline exhales in wonder. ‘Jonno, it’s like a church,’ she says. I enjoy that she can see things freshly and respond. She’s like a butterfly that randomly, somehow, finds the flowers it needs.

‘But there are secrets,’ I say, and explain how, the multitude of wildflowers apart, this area has some special inhabitants. Once, when I lived overlooking Cuttagee Lake and its headland, the local priest, an Irishman, came to me deeply shaken. He required a glass of brandy before he could find words. ‘Please, tell me I’m not seeing things … I think I’ve just witnessed an apparition, a kangaroo, impossibly tiny, without doubt the smallest one ever,’ he said, deeply disturbed, his hands still shaking. He looked up at me pleadingly. ‘Beside the road at Baragoot. I couldn’t be hallucinating, could I?’

His mystery apparition helps explain a local landholding, the Bermaguee Nature Reserve, which lies inland of a few small freehold properties behind the Baragoot Lake. For years I couldn’t find out whether it had a special purpose, until a longtime resident of Baragoot, Les St Hill, born in 1892, told me in 1975 about the animals that were here in abundance when he was young. Not kangaroos, but the smaller hopping animals like wallabies and pademelons, and ‘kangaroo rats. They’re something like a bandicoot, only bigger, a bit bigger than a bandicoot.’¹

By no means rodents, although once known as kangaroo rats, long-nosed potoroos weigh not much more than a kilogram. They look to be about one quarter the size of a small black wallaby and, as macropods, belong to the same family as the kangaroo. Their numbers grew smaller over the years, and they might have become locally extinct were it not for their secretive habits, their preference for places like the thick tangles of spiky vegetation that survive near the freshwater lagoons around Baragoot, and the declaration of the Bermaguee Nature Reserve in 1954.² After the establishment of the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) in 1967, and well before any national parks in the region, it was reclassified to cover the remaining public lands of the catchment of Baragoot Lake. Its aim was to conserve samples of open forest, rainforest and estuarine wetland which provide habitat for a diverse range of native animal species, most notably the threatened long-nosed potoroo and koala.³

In contrast, the beachfront Baragoot Reserve was gazetted as a bird and animal sanctuary in 1928, probably after lobbying by the teacher at nearby Cuttagee Public School, established in 1898. Regular sightings suggested potoroos used the corridor between the two reserves and in the late 1970s I wrote submissions on behalf of the local environment group, asking for the whole Baragoot Reserve to be added to the Bermaguee Nature Reserve, connected by the corridor of vacant Crown land along the Head of Cuttagee Road. As a long-time member and chair of a committee of the local council that had management responsibility for this remarkable swathe of wild beachfront, I took a personal interest.

Further submissions were given weight as management became more difficult, with new pressures each passing year. The growing popularity of four-wheel drive vehicles meant some drivers wanted to make their own track through the bush, or drive onto the sand, regardless of nesting shorebirds and the damage they might do to the dune system. Some fishermen wanted to drive ever closer to the last few places where they could still catch fish, while others were cutting firewood. Some mined sand there. There were campers who left their rubbish behind. Visitors would light fires and not extinguish them properly. Feral dogs and feral cats were common near the more settled areas along the coast despite sporadic attempts by some locals and the agencies to control their numbers. As a natural area it suffered the pressures of increasing population. As a result of concerted local action, the beach and its hind dunes survived in a good, natural condition. It’s an example of how beaches and their vegetation used to be. The main coast road bypassed this pocket of nature, following a contour above the low sandy country that has elsewhere typically been developed into housing estates that link up to form the development ribbons lining so much of Australia’s eastern coastline.

What Jacqueline has found tucked in behind the dunes are wildflowers aplenty, in extraordinary variety: crimson heath, white wedding bush, golden guinea flower, stinkwood zieria, coast wattle, and then the purple masses of patersonia flags. For her, it is a place of delight to begin our walk. As well as potoroos, other residents we don’t see today include bandicoots, brushtail possums, ringtail possums, feathertail gliders, wallabies and grey kangaroos, not to mention the antechinus, bush rats, swamprats and so forth. The birdlife is even richer. But more than anything else, I enjoy the best wildflower display that I know of. Dozens jostle for position: red, white, blue, yellow and other shades of the rainbow. Jacqueline has to stop awhile to inspect the biggest old man banksia she’s ever seen, as wrinkled and folded and full of character as its human counterpart. ‘I love forests,’ she says, looking up in a kind of awe at its magnificence. It has become like a mantra for her. Jacqueline is a French-Australian who loves the forests. Loves them dearly in her very own way. Her interest in exploration is essentially spiritual; for her the forests are real enough in themselves and yet endowed with a spirit that is manifested in the music of the wind as much as the colours of wildflowers and the flight of birds.

The question of how places are reserved for nature and protected has always fascinated me. It seems there are things that many see as having special qualities. Perhaps an animal or a bird or a plant, a landscape even, and you can’t simply isolate one or two species: things need locality, space around them to survive. And there’s a human factor. Where one person sees the value, others are likely to agree, and where officialdom also recognises the value, then the locality is likely to be protected. That ‘value’ or magical ingredient must be one of the great mysteries of nature. Even foresters will sometimes see the unique qualities of certain trees, and they will be preserved from logging.

After my efforts, many times and in various ways, there were other submissions to see Baragoot Reserve brought into the national parks system and cared for properly. We never heard back. The whole proposal seemed like a pipe dream. But that little tract deserved the consistent expertise and quality of management and authority that would only come from the NPWS. Then all of a sudden, in 2005, there beside the old patch of coastal forest stood a sign designating it as part of Biamanga National Park. This coastal delight would now be connected to Mumbulla Mountain. It was one of the happiest days of my life.

The bloodwoods are in full flower. Their thick eucalypt incense hangs in the air while the sound of bees is just as intense. As we walk our conversation with the countryside flows. There might be thousands of kilometres ahead of us.

We cross the main coast road and walk the Head of Cuttagee Forestry road along the boundary between the nature reserve and the national park. These coastal forests were worked intensely by hungry sleeper cutters and millers, especially during the Great Depression. Few trees of any size escaped their eagle gaze, until times changed and railways no longer required such a quantity of A-grade hardwood sleepers. Sawmills closed as Forestry turned its eyes from selective to more industrial logging in the form of clearfelling.

Jacqueline is especially interested in the fact that koalas still survive in the tract we are entering. We keep an eye out for them, scanning treetops and the ground. In fact, to spot koalas you keep your eyes not so much towards the branches where they live, but on the ground below in search of their scats: little rounded pellets twice the size of rabbit or sheep droppings. The giveaway is that they smell strongly of eucalyptus. I know of one regular colony overlooking Cuttagee Creek that favoured the woolly butt trees. There are rumours of more. Since about 1900, as old Les St Hill had told me, koalas in this region have been few and far between. Although there were a lot of them when he was a kid, the last of them disappeared by the turn of the century.⁴

Grey kangaroo numbers increase as koalas fade away. Park scientists have maintained a search for koalas over the years, but how many remain? Where are they? ‘Te Whare’ was the pseudonym of Henry Vassal Edwards, a Bega solicitor who regularly published local nature observations under various noms de plume. Born on the Monaro at his father’s Maharatta Station between Bombala and the Coolangubra in the 1860s, he enjoyed nothing more than observing the forests’ flora and fauna.⁵ Confirming Les St Hill’s observations, in 1921 he described the state of the vanishing koala on the Monaro, ‘for instance, where years ago the writer has spotted as many as four bears on one large white-gum, the somnolescent koala has passed out, stricken by a kind of paralysis, which left him unable to move more than a few feet up the butt of a tree.’⁶

Our forest koalas, although sometimes still subject to the disabling chlamydia disease, can move to a new location at the drop of a hat, literally, for they spook easily. I’ll see them at one place and next day they’ve gone. They seem to have a regular way of travelling, a kind of koala trail they follow from near the foot of Gulaga, beside Wallaga Lake, up Narira Creek inland of Bermagui, and then through this area some 20 kilometres south to the Murrah catchment and Tanja. Soon, still along the border between the Bermaguee Nature Reserve to the north and Biamanga National Park southwards, there are bloodwoods, then stringybarks, before we come into the majestic spotted gums with their much-patterned bark. A few woolly butts. And so we walk, eyes mostly to the ground, searching for koalas and potoroos. Pencil cedars tower over a jungle gully, then the first, but definitely not the last, wombat scat of our journey. Wombats were once a rarity near the coast. Only in recent years have their numbers grown.

As we turn downhill along a ridgeline and come closer to the creek, I point out the gullies where I had spent the dawn month after month recording early morning calls of the lyrebird, the most remarkable songbird on earth. It has dialects that vary from district to district, and in one of Cuttagee’s most remote, hardscrabble gullies I recorded one lyrebird that in an early morning oratorio mimicked over 42 species of birds I could identify. Included in this were details like mimicking the beginning of an eight-kookaburra chorus that ended mid-note to sweep into the tones of a whistling kite. We would cross the trails of many such chroniclers during our walking.

Bright-eyed and enthusiastic still, we arrive on Cuttagee Creek about 3 pm and soon find a flat spot on the sandy bank overlooking the stream. We see no option but to make camp here and now. Riotous colours of golden-tip, indigofera and the purple amplitude that is hardenbergia brighten the banks in either direction along the creek while the river peppermint is also in full bloom, spilling its pale eucalypt flowerings to carpet the shaly river stone. The flow of water in the creek is good and sweet, but seldom deep. It has been a good day. We have a fire burning in no time. As the light fades we hear the lyrebird further away. The whipbird gives its last whip crack as the frogs begin creaking and plonking all around. We can just make out the tinkling of water. This is so exciting. We are on our way. After so many months of preparation, we are actually and finally on our way.

Sitting by the campfire as darkness spills through the forest we talk about how much the forest has changed over the years. It’s not easy to tell the difference, but there are more trees, generally smaller than they were. All this catchment was logged in an orderly way for railway sleepers and mine props. The workplaces included mounds of sawdust that soon grew great numbers of native orchids. I tell Jacqueline of my meetings here in the mid-1970s with the district forester and how we discoursed on the consequences of their logging. He patiently recounted how the old selective logging and sleeper-getting had impoverished the forest by taking the finest types of mature trees, said clearfelling now would bring back the original distribution. I noted how the coastal lagoons like Cuttagee Lake once had sandy bottoms. When sunlight hit the sand they’d glow. Clearing and logging were the main factors in the erosion that had filled them with mud, to the detriment of oysters and mussels and cockles and such that are seldom found here nowadays but make up the majority of shells in the old Aboriginal middens nearby. Cores taken in Cuttagee Lake showed massive siltation since settlement began in the 1880s. The forester argued that this soil type from the local Ordovician mudstones is not as erodible as that from the granites of the forests closer to the Bega Valley, and therefore not considered a risk. I subsequently checked their silt traps and saw they had failed as soon as the slope was steeper than 14 degrees.

‘Maybe when we wake in the morning we’ll hear the same lyrebird I recorded all those years ago.’

She leans forwards into the firelight, her eyes ablaze. ‘Will he make the same calls?’

‘It’s more likely to be his descendants, but playing the same tunes, I guess.’

It’s not only us, the frogs are in carnival spirits as well and party all night. If they were neighbours we’d call the police.

Another warm day. We begin our explorations upstream for an hour before a deep pool demands a swim. Jacqueline resists temptation at first but I am compelled to plunge right in. Redtailed glossy black cockatoos graze on the casuarina fruit. All the way the stunning displays of indigofera and golden-tip continue. The combination of colours varies in its intensity and hue. Where else have I seen this quality? I wonder. But I haven’t, not before, even though I’m familiar with both plants. Some places are memorable and unique, whereas others remain familiar or typical.

It’s been another stimulating day when we stop for the evening. The bank behind our campsite is thick brown earth some 3 metres deep. Elsewhere in the catchment there is very little soil. All the way along the creek the stone in the high banks and steep hillsides is the upended Ordovician shale that yields river stone in flat round-ended slabs. We have come out of the spotted gum and now see tall mahogany, river oak, river peppermint, blue box and in the shadier places grey myrtle, sandpaper figs, pencil cedar and tall treeferns. During the night we hear another species of frog and the somehow reassuring cries of the mopoke.

Come morning, the frogs are still calling as the bellbirds commence. Checking my pack at breakfast I find bush rats have been active. One chewed an unnecessarily large hole in order to get at the fresh coconut I’d brought as a treat. My pack sidepouch now has a gaping hole and Jacqueline is not pleased with this reminder of forest rat-life, not at all. I had long battled the bush rats of this catchment, not to mention its ticks, with no success. ‘Maybe we’ve found ourselves a rat trail and it’s time to move on to the next catchment,’ I suggest. ‘How about we cross the ridge into the Dry River?’

She is more than happy.

An hour later as we come out of the park and up the ridge into state forest it’s not as pleasant walking as we’d found along the creek. We pass through a silvertop ash coupe that was logged a few years ago. It’s dry. The vegetation is sparse and dull. The signs of logging and bulldozers are everywhere.

The trails that interest me have not been used by motor vehicles. They can be as insignificant as an infrequently used kangaroo or wombat pad, or a route through difficult country used by all the people and animals who go that way from A to B, leaving a significant groove that is easily followed by all passers-by. But here, there’s no sign of any track. All have been wiped clean by the heavy machinery used in logging operations. This forest has been much used; its bare soils look hungry. On the top of the ridge we cross another Forestry track before we again enter the national park to find views of Mumbulla Mountain. From here it looks craggy and impassable, as stunning as it is frightening, and certainly awesome.

I move ahead through a small clearing and suddenly without reason fall over, flat on my face. It’s a painful experience with the heavy backpack. ‘Are you all right?’ Jacqueline asks. I’m blocking her progress.

Before I can get up I notice directly ahead of me, looking for all the world like a stick in the dappled sunlight, a very large tiger snake: highly venomous but only aggressive at certain times of the year. I can’t remember which season is the worst. ‘Stay behind,’ I say to her in a deliberately calm voice. ‘There’s a tiger snake right in front of me. And we take no risks with tigers.’

It lies there, and slowly a realisation comes to me. Eye to eye. We have a bond. As we search each other’s intensity I see I am in brotherhood with it, as if something has changed drastically in my relationship with the earth. I’d been brought down to its level, found its viewpoint and might never again see things in exactly the same way. It watches me amiably for some time before Jacqueline breaks the silence, asking whether I had fallen over because I’d seen it.

I rack my mind, deciding I definitely didn’t see it beforehand. Not even out of the corner of my eye.

‘You must have, Jonno. You would have stepped on it otherwise. And that would have been the finish of you, wouldn’t it?’

‘Maybe. But I didn’t know it was there, not until I actually saw it, after I hit the ground. That was when the shock hit me.’

As we stare out towards the silhouette of Mumbulla, I prepare to get to my feet while the snake lazily gathers itself and ever so slowly moves into the undergrowth. From this point on I have a connection with snakes that I don’t understand, for which there is no rational explanation. Any time I come into the presence of a snake I hadn’t noticed beforehand, I fall over. I never hurt myself. I don’t trip or stumble, but rather fall gracefully on my