“I have no proof of this – only my intuition, imagination and the internal certainty of my feelings that there is an ancient presence here. It is not scientific, it cannot be captured by film or put on Instagram, but it is there, unquantifiable, like love or pain. Although invisible, it powerfully exists.”
photographer DON DEFENDERFER
Landscapes tell stories. Some say landscapes even remember their stories, how they were created, moulded and modified over time. It is all there to understand – written in the fabric of the mountains and forests, in the songs of the birds and the wind, in the whisper of the drifting shards of ancient human voices that linger there. We just have to learn how to read it, how to listen and decipher what nature is all too willing to share.
So, I went out for a walk to try to learn first-hand what was the landscape story of this region, particularly some of the mysterious rock engravings, the sentinels and petroglyphs that can be found in the Blue Tier mountains of north-east Tasmania.
I walked there on a simple quest, to try to understand the language and voices of this particular wild landscape of mountain plateaus, diverse forest and impressive granite slabs. It seemed a simple enough thing to do, to go for a hike and see it for one’s self, but simplicity doesn’t always come easily and the hike unfolded in ways no one could have predicted.
With the approval and guidance of an Aboriginal elder we visited in St Helens, six of us set out to find some of the petroglyphs and art rock engravings in nalewalkener/the Blue Tier. We were particularly interested in seeing a group of large, oval-shaped granite rocks that have repeated indentations, aligned cupules. In archeology, cupules are circular man-made hollows on the surface of a large rock or a rock slab, which straddle it. Our goal was to see the incisions in the rocks, possibly rock art motifs, that have been metaphorically called “emu tracks”.
Reports indicate that these “tracks” were likely created by the first inhabitants and date back to the second half of the Holocene – about 5,000 years ago. Over the past 50 years there has been considered debate that maybe the engravings were made by geologic processes (eg, roots and boles of trees), or possibly by 19th century miners (prospector drill markings), but as more rock petroglyph sites are being discovered in the area, their creation by local clans has emerged as the accepted story for this landscape, although who knows for sure?
I like things that are not “for sure”. I think of them as unfacts. I like myth and mythology. There are too many facts in the world. There is too much certainty about things that, in reality, are really quite uncertain, and are malleable and theoretical.
I like the idea that the engravings have been called emu tracks.
So we sought the emu tracks and a chance to form our own speculations on how these cupules were created.
. . .
In high spirits and with much group chatter about the beauty of the woods we were entering, we set off with youthful zeal. It was a sunny spring day after days of rain and we all felt exuberant to be outside, to be walking with friends in a wild place.
We started with the Goblin Forest Walk (acknowledged as one of Tasmania’s great short walks) and then looped around and onto the Wellington Creek and Australia Hill Circuit walks toward our destination. The well-named Goblin Forest walk takes one into The Lord of the Rings world of Tasmania’s rainforest – here recovering remarkably well after the ravages of tin mining over the past 150 years. On this little trot, one can see the remnants of old drainage channels, boarded sluices fed by dams, providing water for daily work at alluvial mine sites used by early miners.
As I looked at the sluices, I thought, this area is isolated now, but what was it like for the early tin miners to journey here and live in this wilderness in the 1870s? They would have been tough and determined men and women. It always amazes me what lengths humans will go to to make money – to come to a faraway island and distant mountains, and then to live in the unforgiving wilds to dig holes in the ground with primitive equipment in pursuit of particular rocks.
We present-day walkers are softies in comparison with these pioneers. And what of the original people here who preceded the miners, people who may have been here for more than 20,000 years, living off the land – we are just tourists from another planet in terms of trying to understand how deeply they knew about this place and how they thought and lived.
As tourists, we walked on into the dark woods, onto the slippery main path, into denser rainforest forest. Here we were quickly ensconced in the Hobbit world of ferns, lichens and sphagnum mosses, of wet eucalypt forest, surrounded by an ancient-feeling world of celery-top pines, gangly myrtles, shining sassafras and native peppers. The plants, I read later, are “remnants of an ancient past” linking with Gondwana. A wonderful place to walk.
In places, the ground was thickly covered in brightly-coloured green and blue mosses, lichens and liverworts, creating soft carpets in the woods. One area, where lamb-white mosses dominated, looked like the forest floor was covered in a recent fluff of snow.
We passed more relics of the mining days: mining pits dug into the earth at regular intervals in search of tin; and remnants of the miners’ lives here, such as bottles, leather shoe casings, broken pottery, rusted plates, silverware and cooking pots.
Much of the area is recovering from not only mining but logging too. Along the path one can see old mill sites and stumps of massive trees that were hundreds of years old when they were cut. The celery-top pines harvested here were used for boat building in St Helens, and the huge myrtle beech tree logs were cut into thick beams, then sent to England and used in, of all things, pubs. “Here’s to Tasmania,” they may have cheered in 1895 as they lifted their glasses and toasted to the pub’s Blue Tier rafters.
There is a storybook amount of colonial settler history here to tell, unexpected and a delight to find, and definitely part of the landscape story of this area, but we were in pursuit of an older history, of emu tracks, so we kept moving on our mission.
. . .
The track was at times covered in wetlands of water from the recent sodden rains and was not easy to navigate. More than once we took off our boots to cross through cold, flooded areas, and the slick mud and moss under the surface was slippery as ice.
As we walked further into the bush and saw an assortment of granite outcrops, we all quieted down as we began to search for markings and petroglyphs. While lagging behind and walking silently, I began to feel the Aboriginal presence in the area. It was nothing tangible or concrete – just a feeling that the spirit of the island people, the trouwunna, who had lived here for a very long time, was still stitched into the landscape.
I imagined people sitting by fires at night, below the stars, drumming, singing, babies crying out, ceremonies being performed. There were thousands of years of story lines out here in this area, drifting in the bush and still part of the landscape today. I have no proof of this – only my intuition, imagination and the internal certainty of my feelings that there is an ancient presence here. It is not scientific, it cannot be captured by film or put on Instagram, but it is there, unquantifiable, like love or pain. Although invisible, it powerfully exists.
We walked on, quietly, in respect of what was and what lingers.
. . .
We walked through an area where we could see granite rock formations in unusual, haunting shapes (there are trouwunna stories which tell of ancestors who were transformed into stone monoliths and guardians). We looked for signs of motifs, of markings, of patterns carved in the rocks, but our untrained eyes found nothing.
After a few hours of hiking and searching we stopped for lunch on top of the granite ridge of Australia Hill (ironically named given the rich Aboriginal history here) and we gazed across from there, the tiers of nalewalkener, to the valleys below, towards Pyengana, Weldborough and Derby and more blue-green mountain peaks framing the horizon.
We took off our packs and the view was uplifting as the fresh air filled our lungs and spring was in the air. It felt good to be alive and healthy and full of energy with best friends in such an inspiring place.
Just as we were scanning the horizon, we heard one of our fellow hikers cry out and fall heavily.
She had wandered a short way from us, enthusiastically seeking out signs of rock markings. We ran over to her and realised immediately that she was in shock – she had slipped on some muddy moss that thinly covered a smooth sheet of hard granite. She was lying there in pain and said she had heard and felt something break or snap around her ankle. She was unable to walk.
We called 000 from the edge of the mountain and a helicopter was organised to fly from Hobart so they could assess her. While waiting for the helicopter, the group split up, with three of us heading back to the cars to meet an ambulance that might be needed if the helicopter couldn’t pick her up.
Clouds came in and with them a cold wind. Our easy-going, sunny day exuberance had now become very sober.
. . .
While walking as quickly as we safely could on the slimy granite paths back to meet the ambulance, we figured we had time to try to find the rocks with the emu markings. Off the main track, we followed narrow wallaby tracks (careful not to slip!) and a confusion of diverging old paths, and soon, by good fortune, we stumbled upon the miniature uluru of granite that we were seeking. There it was, with a long row of impressive markings across it, of repeated round incisions in the rocks. Here were the “emu tracks” to analyse and speculate about.
They didn’t look at all miner-made or geologically created to me. They were there to communicate something.
We stopped in silence and, again, we collectively felt that presence of ancient people around us. The presence seemed to be heightened by the adrenalin we felt from the accident. The rock markings were part of a story that was breathing all around us. We breathed it in with respect.
It is possible, and has been suggested, that the area was a ceremonial place, possibly a mountain sanctuary for rock art motifs and ritual, unique to Tasmania. For some, the authorship of the imprints could be that they were made by ancestral beings. However, what their origin or meaning is, is not clear.
In our brief time wandering there, we saw other incisions or cupules, other natural or created patterns in the rocks. There were stories here and we wished we had more time to learn about them, but we had to rush back; reality was calling, pulling us away from past stories to our own present ones.
What were the markings trying to tell us? What is the local story of these rocks and markings that is part of the wider landscape story, and does the story of our hiking mishap now fit in somewhere? Had we done the wrong thing by being here snooping around – was her fall bad karma or simply a misstep? What was the collective meaning of our afternoon adventure and seeking? I have no concise answers and am still pondering it.
But what I do know, there is a feeling there, in those tiers, and that there are many stories to find meaning to, whether anthropomorphic, natural history or fiction. There is mystery and questions there that we have only glimpsed.
We shall return again, to nalewalkener, to try to learn to read the landscape there. And we shall tread carefully.
Further reading:
Cameron, P., Grease and Ochre, 2016.
Bednarik, R.G., G. Andrews, S. Cameron, E. Bednarik, Petroglyphs of Meenamatta, The Blue Tier Mountains. Tasmania, Rock Art Research, Vol 24 Number 2, 2007.
Bednarik, R.G., et al, The Elusive Meenamatta Petroglyphs, Tasmania. Australian Archaeology, No 70, June 2010.
Don Defenderfer is a native of San Francisco who once went on a holiday to Alaska where he met an Australian who told him to visit Tasmania. So he did, and while here he met a woman. That was 40 years ago. He was state coordinator for Landcare for many years, a job that allowed him to be inspired by not only the beauty of the Tasmanian landscape but by the many people that are trying to repair and renew it. He has a Masters Degree in Social Ecology and a Bachelor of Environmental Studies with a minor in writing. He has published three volumes of poetry, and his work has appeared in newspapers and periodicals, including The New York Times and The Australian. Two volumes of collected essays and poems, "Tasmania: An island dream" Parts 1 and 2, can be bought through the Forty South Bookshop.
