The Prehistoric Bush: Notes on a Solitary Ramble
Robert Louis Stevenson, who was a prince of ramblers as well as a prince of stylists, once wrote that, despite much cant, there was no better way of seeing the countryside than from the window of a railway train. To-day, despite the same cant, there is no better way of enjoying fine scenery than from a slow-moving motor-car. But there is no better way of washing away workaday thoughts than the solitary ramble. Here are some notes of several impressions gained on an extended rumble lasting three days, from Launching Place to Toolangi, by way of Donna Buang and the Acheron Valley.
Twilight spread vast wings over the tumbled mountains as the sun sank farther below the horizon. There filtered out of the clouds which obscured the sky a grey, tenuous light—a sinister light, in which the gnarled summit of Donna Buang, the spidery network of the steel lookout tower, and the iron shelter hut below, became as unreal as the objects of a dream. The trees nodded and darkened, and seemed to crowd together as if meditating some incredible rush on the steel tower. They were old, older than the first dim ape men, as old as the first mammals, more primitive than any other flora on earth. Before in the bush at twilight I had felt the uncanny oppression of the aeons which lie between the evolutionary development of the Australian bush and the flora of other lands, but I had never experienced it as intensely as on that ancient slump of a volcano 4,000ft. above the waters of Port Phillip Bay and the familiar world of men. It is this tremendous antiquity which causes many migrants and visitors from overseas to label the Australian bush drab and monotonous. No one who has seen the sun dance on young gums on a bright morning, the delicate pastel tints of eucalypt trunks, the symmetry and splendour of the mountain ash, the cloistered beauty of fern gullies, or the infinite blue and brown harmony of sunburnt plains—no one who has seen these things can honestly affirm that Australia is not a land of beauty. But it is not the beauty of the 20th century.
The sight of a mammoth or a woolly rhinoceros in an English wood would shock my sense of reality as much as if the sun stopped in its course; but if I saw a diprotodon, a huge rhinoceros-like monster or a marsupial lion, which lived about 250,000 years ago, crashing through the Australian bush at twilight, I should wonder only how they had escaped detection so long. Subconscious fear lies at the root of the dislike of the stranger for the Australian bush—the primitive fear, descended through the ages, of the ape man, who went in gibbering dread of his environment, and warred with nightmare monsters.
Sunrise on Donna Buang
Of the sights which lie splendid in my memory, never to be forgotten, few surpass the magnificence of sunrise on Donna Buang. Intense indigo shadows hid the turmoil of the mountain ridges; but around the horizon, sharp and clear, were expanses of light green-blue sky, so transparent that one seemed to see to the uttermost depths of space. In the eastern sky the red-hot edge of the sun pushed above the purple mountains. Gradually the sea of indigo changed to a sea of blood, rolling and eddying: mountain tops appeared like tufted islands. Suddenly a cloudlet passed from the face of the sun, and morning seemed to leap into the sky; bird song rose from the snow gums; the sea of clouds sundered and writhed away in trailing wisps, leaving a diaphanous haze of intense green, through which the bottoms of the valleys appeared faintly at immense depths. No words can describe the grandeur of that tumult of mountains beneath the morning sun. Range after range, sometimes in slowly ascending steps, sometimes in sheer ramparts, in splendid domes and acute peaks, in shapes grotesque and beautiful, shadowy and fragile, huge and ponderous, the mountains rolled to the blue horizon—and beyond rolled on for miles to the edge of the Pacific.
Far beneath lay the green and brown patchwork of the Yarra valley, with the Dandenongs, rising like toy mountains on the edge of the haze which shrouded the far distance. The climax of an Olympian morning came when, a few hundred yards below the summit, two lyre-birds strutted unconcernedly across the track. One scuttled along a fallen log into dense scrub, but the other, in open brush, only 10 yards from the track, broke into a marvellous strain of mimicry. The swish and crack of the coach whipbird were imitated so truly that it was almost impossible to distinguish them from the actual call of a whipbird near by. The chopping of an axe followed, and then the calls of many birds. Several times the splendid tail was spread out, and the bird occasionally darted backward and forward in a kind of dance, gradually withdrawing farther and farther into the bush. Finally scrub and fallen tree trunks hid it.
Night Prowlers
Many more animals are afoot in the bush at night than in the day. In the 30 miles of road and track between Launching Place and Somers Park in the Acheron Valley, I saw, besides birds, two rabbits, and the tail of a snake. At Somers Park a chill wind, laden with fine rain, was sweeping down the valley as I reached the hut, where I had intended staying the night, but I found it locked so securely that entrance was impossible. Apart from the cold, the drifting rain made sleeping on the verandah difficult. Soon the rain lashed across the verandah in fierce gusts, leaving me no choice but to tramp the additional eight miles to St. Fillan, a hamlet on the Marysville road. The twilight had changed to a watery blackness, but the faint white of the winding road served as a guide, and later the half-moon came out through rents in the clouds. The rain settled down into a drenching downpour, but the discomfort was repaid by a new impression of the bush.
Everywhere in the sodden undergrowth hidden animals were crashing and slithering. Some appeared to be more than 100 yards from the road, but others could not have been more than a few yards away. Some of the noises were loud enough to have been made by a kangaroo or a wallaby; others were soft and stealthy, like those of a stalking fox; others were sharp and violent, like the crackling of the rush of a wombat. The noises were most frequent near the Acheron River, and as the road turned away and the rushing of the river died away into the darkness they occurred less and less frequently. In the first six miles of the track, in which I heard the sounds of at least 40 or 50 different animals, I exhausted a box of matches in efforts to obtain a glimpse of the prowlers near the road, but the feeble glimmers illuminated only the nearest bushes. There was almost unbroken silence during the last two miles before I came to the lights of St. Fillan—and a hot meal and a bed. Next day, after a “lift” over the Blacks’ Spur in a passing motor-car, the ramble ended at Toolangi.
