FURTHER BOOKS

Clive gave me a copy of Along these Lines: from Trowenna to Tasmania, an anthology edited by C.A. Cranston, first published in 2000. The writings in it travel through time and across space, via prose (fiction and nonfiction) and poetry; the gathering itself is put together according to a strategy that both exemplifies and examines narrative, as outlined in the editor’s introduction. Its intention is to offer something of the complex texture of Tasmania. Perhaps it’s analogous to that forest texture that I’m so struck by.

Here’s a fine quote about the experience of being here, from the introduction: “It’s not for nothing that Tasmania gets left off the maps. Its geography insists that there are no seamless narratives here; that it does not share the same narratives as the mainland, that the break in the journey to get here requires a shift in perspective.”

I’ll note also that I’m struck by the title’s echo of Along Prairie Lines, the anthology published by Turnstone Press in 1989 that first focused on the long prairie poem and, I think, (from this distance in time and space) made a case for the long poem (and often long line) as a reflection of the prairie landscape. Cranston comments on the highways and grids that provide ways of arriving and framing both place and writing: “The title Along These Lines signals the structure: an anthology patterned on visible and invisible lines that traverse the city and countryside, both of which have prompted or inspired the lines reproduced here by poets and prose writers.”

Now the more about Birds on Farms, subtitled “A glovebox guide to birds and habitat restoration and management in NW Tasmania”, published in 2005 by the North-West Environment Centre. The book arose from a project, “Restoring birds to Northwest Tasmania for healthy sustainable landscapes”, coordinated by the centre, and including field research on farms across the area to teach bird identification and habitat management. The beginning sections of the book describe the project, which encouraged collaborative and community responses to create larger patches of habitat as well as offering suggestions for combining farm production and bird conservation.

Most of the book consists of the guide to specific birds, Each gets a full page with an illustration and comments on behaviour, foraging habits, breeding, habitat, range and status, as well as a description. At the bottom of each page is a description of the bird’s key habitat. The end material includes lists of resources, programs, and scientific names as well as strategies for monitoring birds on your farm.

The project and book are fine examples of locally-based initiatives that address an environmental situation or concern, and also aim to build community. It must have been exhilarating to be involved with it.

BOOKS ON THE ROAD

I resolved to travel light on my tour of the north. I packed my computer (not needed) and the bird book and Paul Muldoon’s The End of the Poem for a shared-reading group I’d been invited to join for an evening, plus one book for reading on the road. I can’t read in a moving car, and besides, why would I read when I could be staring out at the ever-changing surround? The book I took for reading was Ashley Hay’s Gum, a copy from the Hobart Library that Irene borrowed for me. There’s a subtitle on the cover, but the barcode is over it, and the titlepage itself says only Gum. The book is about Eucalyptus, the dominant tree here. “Tree” I say, but it exists in hundreds of species, no certain count known even yet. Though DNA research seems to indicate that trees quite various from each other might turn out to be members of the same species.

The book opens with an aboriginal legend about the eucalyptus, and then goes on to track European—and Australian—awareness of them. Hay notes various explorers’ records of them, and the first attempts to collect and classify them. Joseph Banks, who sailed with Captain Cook, began collecting, and returned to England with an enormous number of specimens, but never got around to publishing descriptions of them or naming them. The early white inhabitants of the continent found the trees generally too hard to be useful for timber products, and besides they wanted clear land to farm. Forests in North America were also not what settlers wanted, but at least the trees there bore some resemblances to—or in fact were—trees already known in England and on the continent. Eucalypts were regarded as not good for much, and far from beautiful for a long time.

Hay traces the growing knowledge and understanding of the eucalyptus through time, and the slowly changing attitudes towards it, as white Australians grew more attuned to the land here. Though John Glover had painted it accurately very early, in general early painters made the forests here look more like English woods until late in the 19th century. Hay also outlines the 20th century development of the woodchip industry and of forestry, the period in which trees were seen as a useful crop to be harvested, and then the slow growth of conservation ideas that challenged those utilitarian notions. She writes, too, about its relationship to fire.

Her book is very readable in part because of her choice to structure the information around various individuals who were engaged with or by the tree, so the reader gets a series of portraits of people as well as of the trees. She writes clearly and the story is interesting enough that I found myself settling with it compulsively before bed each night on the trip.

Though I only took one book with me, I’ve brought 3 or 4 more home to Hobart. On that first day on the road we stopped at The Shop in the Bush, on the Tasman Highway between St. Helen’s and Scottsdale. The shop bills itself as “Tasmania’s Top Bric-a-Brac Shop” and it does indeed have all sorts of stuff in it, but I only trolled through a few shelves of books. I came away with two finds: a book on books, Australian-born John Baxter’s A Pound of Paper about his adventures as a collector and writer (a good read, I’m half-way through it now) and a lovely little bird book published in 1956, illustrated with watercolour drawings: Some Common Australian Birds by Alan and Shirley Bell. Each bird gets a full page of text (sometimes with generous bottom margin) and a full-page drawing. The very first bird in the book is my companionable Blue Wren (Malurus cyaneus), and here’s a lovely sentence about this tiny creature: “Often one of these atoms of polished elegance, as he hunts the undergrowth and runs down insects, is shepherded by three or four soberly-feathered brown wrens—a concourse of wives, it has been suggested, but more probably the current brood, a family of females and young males.” Atom of polished elegance—very nice!

I also bought a glovebox-sized, spiral-bound handbook of birds on farms, a landcare project more about that later—and Clive bought for me a pamphlet about Highfield House. So the collection grows—

TOURING THE NORTH AND NORTHWEST

It’s an overcast and slightly rainy morning in Hobart, and I’m trying to sort out the welter and wonders of the past several days. Starting last Friday I was treated to a driving tour of the north and northwest areas of the state—courtesy of Clive and Roz Tilsley. Our drive began by heading to Launceston, via the east coast, not the standard route. The day was brilliantly warm and sunny, like everyone’s dream of summer. It’s hard for me to credit that it’s really November. Christmas flyers arrived in this morning’s paper … but I seem to be floating outside of time with nothing to indicate days of the week or what season it is.

That first day I glimpsed Maria Island, a lovely shape floating between blue sea and blue sky. It’s moving to see the whole shape of a piece of land, as if it can be grasped in its totality. We stopped frequently—at Mayfield Bay Conservation Area for a brief walk along a sandy beach where we saw a 3-arch bridge foundation dated 1854; at the Spiky Bridge, convict-built, from local stone if the surrounding terrain is any indication; alongside Great Oyster Bay overlooking a huge sweep of sea and mountains (Freycinet Peninsula and Park), and the Moulting Lagoon wetland; and at several beaches, any of which could feature in splendid tourism ads, especially under the sunshine and blue sky we enjoyed. I took photographs at every stop and wrote down names of places so I can identify them.

At Swansea we found a takeout lunch, hamburgers that we carried to the beach and ate while perched on large chunks of rock soaking up sun and the noise of the sea. There were brilliant pink and pale yellow flowers growing on the way to the sand and rock. In the slightly dozy aftermath of food and afternoon sun I remember large sweeps of road winding up and down through forests where sun fell between trees, high walls of ferns and trees on one side of the car and a view through trees to country beyond on the other. The forest full of textures so unlike the ones at home, and a blue light in the air.

At one beach Clive spied a black-cockatoo in the distance. We walked towards it as he tried to show me where it was and finally I could see something black in the green of a large tree. When we got a little closer three cockatoos suddenly took wing and I was astonished at their size. They are more fully named Yellow-tailed Black-cockatoo, and their outer tail feathers are yellow. Though they were still some distance from us when they flew I could see those yellow tails.

We drove on through St. Helen’s to Pyengana and the cheese store there. It smelled like my great uncle’s farm where I spent summers as a child, and the coffee in the café was delicious. Was it called the Holy Cow Café? Perhaps. I’d stopped writing things down by then, but I did take a photograph. Clive bought a huge cheese which we sampled at dinner that evening—also delicious!

The next morning we set off for Stanley, driving alongside Bass Strait from Penguin west, past wonderful flower plantings by the railway tracks. Another day blazing with sun and light bouncing from the sea. Rich agricultural land rises behind the towns. The soil was sometimes almost black and at others a rich red-black. Bright new green rows of seedlings poked through. The hills looked raked or combed, lines of soil alternating with lines of green.

Before going into Stanley we visited Highfield House—more about that in another post. We checked into the Stanley Hotel, put on our walking shoes, and walked the Nut, a large lava plug that rises behind the town. The trail up is at a killingly steep angle. Clive bounded ahead while Roz and I took our time, stopping every now and then to catch our breath. On the top there’s a trail you can follow around the height, through heathy growth, a walk unlike any I’d done here before.

When we came down from our good walk we went to the pub for a beer before heading to Xander’s restaurant, just up the street, for a lovely view to the west and dinner. I ordered the beef salad for starters—we were in cattle country, after all—and the ravioli main. The salad was thin slices of beef with assorted vegetables, including beets (beetroot here), red onions and rocket, and the ravioli was feta and spinach, served with a pumpkin sauce. Everything was full of flavour. We ate and talked as the sun sank slowly and the hill we could see through the window grew dark.

And the further adventures of the tour will have to wait for another posting.

BEDLAM WALLS WALK

Last Friday I went on a walk at Bedlam Walls with Susanna van Essen. She drove us to the east side of the Derwent and north to a trail that runs along Geilstone Bay and then along the Derwent to Shag Bay. On the drive I caught sight of a white-faced heron fishing. The trail is a soft track, not stony like most of what I’ve walked here, and follows the shore quite closely, so you can look out at the water—and across to the Oil Depot and the Zinc Factory, which are not exactly scenic highlights.

The path takes you past a stairway that leads down the face of the cliff into some caves which were used by Aborigines for a long time. The entrance to the stairs is blocked by a fallen tree that the Parks Dept. has announced it can’t afford to move, but the stairs themselves are in good shape, and it’s easy to slide under the railing at the top and get onto them if you want to see the caves. The caves themselves aren’t deep. They contain—or did—middens that yielded mussel and oyster shells when excavated.

The interpretive signs along the trail and at the site have been scrawled over and badly scratched—I assume Parks also can’t afford to clean or replace them—so it’s not possible to read them completely. However, one interesting fact I could make out was that it was unusual to find middens with evidence of only two foodstuffs in them. It seems no one really knows why the remains are so limited—the ease of harvesting the shellfish there is one possibility.

The stairway down to the caves and the walk about it are lined by large and very beautiful sheoaks, members of the Casuarinaceae. They have leaves that look like long needles (“fused to slender, erect branchlets, arranged in whorls” it says on the Tree-Flip chart). Their colour has a hint of blue in the green, perhaps, and their foliage is unlike any tree at home. Perhaps it’s their shape or something delicate about the foliage, but they make a mournful note at this place, very near the site at which an Aboriginal band hunting kangaroos was mistaken by whites for attackers and massacred.

Susanna and I went on to the near side of Shag Bay. On the way I nearly stepped on a small lizard, a lovely grey colour with whitish diamond-shaped markings. It matched the weathered sticks it stood on, and so stayed still for me to photograph it. Susanna thought it was called a dragon of some sort. I hope to be able to identify it eventually. We perched on some rocks near the water and opened the thermoses. The shore on the other side went up steeply, a rock face with trees on top, their canopy ragged and open.

After our breeak we went back to the car, and drove to see the remnants of the barque Otago, at Otago Bay. That ship was the first that Joseph Conrad captained. How it ended up here, or just what happened to it, I don’t know. The wreck looks as if there were two ships—two largish chunks of broken ribs lie at the shore. Or perhaps it was double-hulled.

DAFFY DUCKS

Further to the black swans, I didn’t note that Liz and I caught sight of an oddly-shaped bird on the river that we couldn’t see clearly because it was backlit and not close to shore. Larger than most ducks, and with a long low silhouette, its head seemed to be pulled into its back. Its profile didn’t resemble any bird I could think of. Paging through the bird books a few days ago I came across the Musk Duck (Biziura lobata) and suspect that’s what we were watching swim quite swiftly downriver. Watts mentions Musk ducks can be seen on the Derwent at Bridgewater, which was more or less where we were, and that they frequently sit low in the water.

Later that Sunday Irene and Kevin drove me to Kingston, on the Derwent some distance south of Hobart, where there’s a beautiful beach. We followed the road that hugs the coast, a wonderful road to drive if you like driving since it’s an (often tight) succession of bends and curves and hills. If you’re inclined to car-sickness, however, it wouldn’t be such fun. I found myself thinking as we swooped and shifted directions that the drive might be the closest I’d ever get to experiencing the fractal nature of coastlines.

Stretches of that road afford lovely views of the river growing wider and wider, as well as hills on the far side; at other times you see houses set in fine gardens. The weather had grown overcast since the morning with rain threatening and occasionally falling. When we reached Kingston we stopped at a park alongside a small river to see the ducks. Gulls perched on the fence and a crowd of mallards was hunkered down on the grass—though I had trouble deciding if in fact some of them were mallards. Several had white or beige heads and white scattered through their plumage—perhaps good examples of what at home we call “daffy ducks,” mallard-domestic duck crosses.

Mixed in with the mallards were some further anomalies: several lovely ducks with plumage much like the mallard female’s, but they had a dark eye-stripe with paler stripes above and below it. Checking the bird books at home we realized we’d seen Black ducks. And a smaller duck with an elegant profile, richly brown head, and grey body with speckles on its chest turned out to be an Australian wood duck.

From the park we made our way along the beach road. It had started to rain and the gorgeous stretch of sand was empty except for a few gulls. Waves were rolling in. Out the other window of the car we could see lovely seafront houses in pretty yards—perfect places for a beach holiday, though perhaps slightly out of season would be the best time to be there. To get back to Hobart we drove the highway—much faster, but not nearly as interesting or pretty.

THE BLACK SWAN

On Sunday morning Liz McQuilkin collected me and we drove up the Derwent River to Bridgewater to see the black swans. Liz is working on a poem about the black swan, part of her ekphrastic responsibilities for the reading at the Salamanca Gallery in December, and wanted to see actual birds as well as the painted one(s).

It was a gorgeous morning, sunny, and we had no trouble finding the swans. Mostly they were floating serenely towards the middle of the river, which is very wide, but we were able to find a few near shore where grass or reeds grew out into the water. In fact, we spied two elegant swan heads in the reeds not far from where we stood, presumably sitting on nests.

We watched a family of 6 fluffy grey cygnets and two parents feeding and drifting for quite a while. The adults are smaller than swans in Canada, and perhaps a little more delicate. They have a lovely curve to their necks and the feathers towards their tail seem to stick up like a series of ruffles. Black swans moult following breeding—and can’t fly for about a month—so I thought the ruffle effect might be because of the moulting. But the drawing in Simpson and Day shows the ruffle, so I guess it’s simply how their plumage sits. The backs of both the adults appeared to be more or less bare.

The young ones were fun to watch and very sweet. As the parents bent those elegant necks into the water and fed, the cygnets clustered about them, dipping their bills, perhaps scooping up food, paddling back and forth around the adults. Then they began to tip themselves up, heads under water and little blunt tails to the sky, like dabbling ducks, as they discovered things to eat.

We then drove a road that follows the river, stopping by a railway station (no trains running at the moment, Liz thought, and no passenger traffic here in any case) and were able to see a larger group of swans further from the bank, some in pairs, feeding, some just a gaggle, to adopt terminology from a cousin. While we were there a very large bird flew over and I was able to get it in my binoculars—a white-bellied sea eagle, not in full adult plumage yet.

An additional pleasure of the morning was the near-stillness of the river. Clouds and patches of blue sky were reflected in it, and occasionally the swans themselves, the double curve of their necks quite beautiful and a little surreal.

Black swans are native to Australia, but not found anywhere in Europe. In fact, they were long a metaphor there for something that didn’t exist. In current online economic conversations there are references to black swans in connection with the events of the last year. The term was defined in the Huffington Post (without citation) as “high-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare events beyond the realm of normal expectations.” So the metaphor hasn’t entirely collapsed, in spite of its inaccuracy.

I first encountered black swans about 30 years ago now, at the Kortwright Waterfowl Centre near Toronto. We were driving home after an early morning foray to the Mennonite Central Committee’s fair and quilt show in New Hamburg and stopped in to see the birds and found black swans.

OBSERVATORY OPEN NIGHT

I’m so far behind with this blog I may never get caught up! Time flies when you’re having fun. And, when you’re writing. I’ve been working on a short essay, hoping to get it into shape to submit to the CBC contest, since they’ll take online entries. That’s used up my writing focus for the past several days.

But I don’t want to let the blog dribble into nothing. So I’ll just plunge in and write about last Saturday’s open night at the Canopis Observatory here in Hobart. It was a Galileo night. This year marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s discoveries, and I suppose almost the beginnings of astronomy as we know it. Certainly what he say when he held that telescope to his eye completely altered the European understanding if the Earth and its relationship to the rest of the heavens.

Galileo’s text was called Sidereus Nuncius or Starry Messenger—a lovely title for a deep change in perception and understanding.

The Observatory is small, and its own telescopes are not the kind you can look through to see the stars. They operate digitally, collecting data and feeding it back to computers I think. The larger one was shown to us, its mirrors and the track that light takes through them pointed out. Outside the observatory buildings several amateur astronomers and sky-watchers had set up their own telescopes and were offering views of the moon (somewhat less than half-full) and of Jupiter. To see the moon’s surface clearly the scope was aimed at what the man called the terminator—that’s the line where the bright side meets the dark. The surface looked a pale grey and was as pock-marked as you’d expect. Why am I always so startled and thrilled when things turn out to look like their photographs? Jupiter was a little blurry—I found myself wondering if that was because of the speed at which it turns, but more likely it was distance and/or slight cloud. It was indeed striped with colours, a couple of dark bands interspersed with pale yellows, sandstone-like. There were four moons visible, three in a line to the right of the planet, and one to the left. Apparently Jupiter has over 50 moons, though some of them are only the size of small rocks.

The Observatory is involved in interesting and important international research projects. We heard a presentation on it, principally on the search for new planets or exo-planets. (I meant to look that term up, but haven’t.) Three methods of discovering planets exist: the Doppler Wobble (best name!), transit, and microlensing. The last, microlensing, is the method of the Canopus project. It involves, if I understood correctly, the recording and measuring of light emitted by a star from directly behind another star. The position is important because the light bends around either side of the front star, an d creates a curve. If there’s a spike in the curve the light has been interrupted and a planet is the interruption.

Apparently this method is the one most likely to yield planets or systems of planets that are most like our own Solar System. It reveals planets that are 1-10 times the mass of Earth and a half to three times our Sun-Earth distance from their own star/sun. Quite a few planets have been found that fit within these numbers, though the research is relatively new.

The event was a slightly dizzying combination of facts and numbers and diagrams which provided interesting if sometimes hard to follow information, and the astonishing experience of staring at the grey surface of the moon and the round colours of Jupiter trailing its moons as tiny dots of light.