Deny King Memorial Hide is a surprisingly large wooden building in the middle of the bushes; it must be over fifteen square metres in size. One of its walls is half made of glass, and beneath the observation wall someone has built a shelf of some sort, a work surface where people can set up tripods and other bird-watching paraphernalia. On the other wall there’s a slanting shelf bearing the observation log, and the walls themselves are covered with aged photographs of different birds and their names. I look around for a photograph of the orange-arsed parrot — I wouldn’t know what it looked like otherwise. Neophema chrysogaster. It’s a spectacular looking creature with splashes of pure turquoise on its beak and wings. Then, true enough, right between its legs is a rusty, orange blob, as though the bird, too, was having its period.
Jyrki is, of course, watching the feeding spot like a hawk. Now that we’re here I drop hints that it’s really important for him to see one of these chicks.
He protests, saying a shack like this isn’t the real way to spot rare birds. They must be being fed, if not overtly then in secret. Jyrki probably thinks that if you pamper a threatened winged creature too much, sooner or later it’ll rise up against its keepers, and before you know it all local species of parrot will gather on the roofs of Melaleuca and start attacking unsuspecting hikers’ rice cakes in some great Hitchcockian scene.
As Jyrki presses his nose up against the glass I notice a small space, separated off from the rest of the shack, with a screen and containing a table and a couple of chairs, presumably a place where people can eat their sandwiches while waiting their turn or having a break from staring into the camera finder.
Hang on a minute. A space to have lunch.
There’s one particular item in the room that I allow to take shape in my consciousness, something that’s almost too familiar to notice, except when it’s something you haven’t seen for a while. For weeks. Ages.
‘Bloody hell. Bloody hell!’ I hear Jyrki hissing. ‘That’s it!’
I look at his hand as he scoops the air, come over here, quickly, and I just about manage to tear my eyes away from something far more interesting.
To hell with the orange arses.
NATIONAL HISTORY DIGEST, MARCH 2006
‘Kea: The Open-Programme Bird’
by Jiselle Ruby and Anthony Verloc
During the time of the Gondwana continent, over eighty million years ago, New Zealand was part of a mainland whose closest neighbours were Eastern Australia and part of what is now the Antarctic. When Gondwana split up through the forces of continental drift, many entire ecosystems of trees and animals moved with the sailing landmasses. Certain forest types common in New Zealand have also been found in Chile and Tasmania. To this day, despite the considerable distance, Australia and New Zealand share around 80 per cent of their most highly evolved flora.
SOUTH COAST TRACK, TASMANIA
Melaleuca
Sunday, March 2007
Jyrki
It’s odd waking up in Melaleuca — no whispering or murmuring of the trees around us, no waves lapping against the shore in the background as though they were keeping count of our heartbeats.
At night you could hear the drone of the mosquitoes. We never had any trouble with them in the tent, as long as you remembered to open the mosquito net only when absolutely necessary. Here it only takes your hut-mates to pop out for a slash in the night. Especially coming back into the hut, once the mosquitoes have picked up the scent of their victim, the opening and closing of the door brings in a legion of bloodsuckers every time.
The leg ahead of us will only take a few measly hours. It feels strange and wrong. We’ve got used to waking up before sunrise, drinking tea as day breaks and being on the road by seven o’clock. We’ve woken up to the sound of birdsong and the gradually strengthening light filtering in through the tent wall.
It’s half past seven. I stretch and laze in my sleeping-bag. The bunk is harder than the ground, usually softened with layers of eucalyptus leaves. My sides ache despite the sleeping-bag and the mat.
Wow, she’s awake. She’s already taken the breakfast stuff out and is now boiling up some water. Not using our gas cylinder, of course, but one of those left on the shelf. She’s learning.
My nostrils are filled with the smell of instant coffee. Coffee! Again, she hasn’t even bothered asking me.
She walks up to the bunk with her coffee cup in one hand and our gas cylinder in the other hand. She holds it out towards me and asks whether we should pack one of the leftover cylinders from the shelf as well, just in case.
I shake the cylinder and weigh it in my hand. It feels like it’s still half full.
We’re not going to start lugging another two hundred grams of metal around just for fifty grams of liquid gas, I tell her. She nods and slurps her coffee, happy as a lark.
Heidi
‘Go and fill up the water bottles. I’m going to pop back there one last time.’
We’ve carried our rucksacks out to the fork in the path near the bird- watching shack. I point in that direction.
‘What for?’
‘Just want to see whether there have been any more sightings of the orange arses.’
Jyrki’s brow sets in a furrow, but he can’t say anything. He was so chuffed and excited about our two-second sighting of the orange bums that I’m sure he’d be pleased to know that nobody else has seen them since. Besides, filling the water bottles takes time, and you don’t need two people to do it.
The observatory is quiet. Nobody around at the moment. Good. On the other hand, I would have done this no matter who else had been around.
I got everything ready back at the hut while Jyrki was checking whether the tent was dry. It’s a good job my shorts have such large cargo pockets.
In the corner of the observatory shack there is a real bona fide rubbish bin.
There they fly, happily, carefree, straight into the pale-green plastic bucket lined with a black bin-liner. In go the thin plastic fruit bag stuffed with the empty remnants of a sachet of noodles, the used teabags, the plastic processed- cheese wrappers, tin foil that had once contained tuna, packets of instant mash, tissues (used to clean plates and knives) that we couldn’t reuse in the pit toilets, even the greasy plastic wrapper from the missing pepperoni sausage. And in goes the resealable bag with three used tampons lying next to one another like dark, fat, carmine red caterpillars, and alongside them a couple of brown-stained panty liners complete with their backing papers rolled into tight little spirals.
Goodbye, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, adieu to the muesli-bar wrappers floating at the bottom of my pocket, the chewing-gum wrappers, the remains of a couple of plasters, their protective papers and bits pulled off my skin. The cotton wool bandage and the skin tape from the back of my knee.
This is a magic receptacle where rubbish disappears by itself and travels far out into a distant universe.
I feel a hundred times lighter as I all but dance out on to the path alongside the runway.
Jyrki
This airport terminal is just a shack, completely open on one side and with a couple of wooden benches — nothing but a glorified bus shelter. There’s a guy with a dark beard in his thirties sitting there with a rucksack waiting for the day’s plane. Tied to the side of the rucksack is a robust-looking tripod. Next to him on the ground is a large aluminium camera case.
I say hello. The guy starts chatting straight away. A clear case of extreme social deprivation, so clear that I can’t help smiling. Even without all the photography equipment, his chubby, tidy appearance reveals he’s not one of our hiking colleagues.
The guy is from the USA, out here on a research grant to photograph birds in the wild for a book. He excitedly tells me how, in his whole life in the States, he’s spotted about three hundred different species, and in five weeks in Australia he’s spotted the same number again. Tasmania is his final stop before flying home.
I ask him whether he’s seen the orange-bellied
parrot. He claims he has, at the observatory of course. But he seems far more excited about a different sighting altogether. A nocturnal species, one he hasn’t yet been able to identify. It’s not the Pezoporus occidentalis, apparently, which is only found in mainland Australia. But it can’t be the Pezoporus wallicus either, which is a local species that moves around during the day. I remember my friend Juha Lehtinen, the most enthusiastic amateur ornithologist I know, mentioning that one. The ground parrot is an especially rare bird, and it’s name states the obvious about its nesting habits. This means these birds are directly affected by bush fires, too. I can’t recall whether they suffer because of them or benefit from them. There was plenty of information on Australian parrot species on the internet. I couldn’t avoid it when I was looking for the Finnish name for the orange bellies. Just to make sure. Now I’ve seen one I can drop it into a conversation with Juha and tell him in passing that there are barely two hundred of them in the world.
I hear the crunch of footsteps. I look behind me. She’s coming out of the observatory and raises her hand in an exaggerated wave to our photographer friend. Without saying a word she starts stuffing the newly filled water bottles into her rucksack pockets.
The photographer carries on with his incessant chit-chat. There are still lots of deserted areas of Australia and Tasmania, and it wouldn’t be surprising if there were still some species that hadn’t been discovered and identified.
Apparently there are some migratory species that fly over from the mainland and nest here for the summer. There might be species that only live in areas so remote that they have never been identified by science, let alone documented. There are species with only small populations, ones that ornithologists have simply never come across.
To interrupt his flow of consciousness for a moment, I mention the keas of New Zealand. At that he becomes even more excited and explains that research has shown that many species of parrot can reach the cognitive level of a five-year-old.
Sounds like a bit of an exaggeration to me. Lots of five-year-olds can read. Or at least operate the video recorder. Birds are primitive animals, only slightly more evolved than reptiles.
I say that any researcher that comes to that conclusion must have pretty interesting children themselves.
The guy doesn’t get the joke.
We haul our rucksacks on to our backs. He says he hopes we have a nice day, as if we were going off for a picnic. Doughnut Boy hasn’t got the faintest idea where we’re headed. He can’t put things in any order of importance.
NATIONAL HISTORY DIGEST, MARCH 2006
‘Kea: The Open-Programme Bird’
by Jiselle Ruby and Anthony Verloc
Over the last few decades the kea has demonstrated a clear determination to move closer to human settlements. This is down in part to an attempt to find sustenance but is also linked to these birds’ need to explore and affect their surrounding environment.
In the national park at Arthur’s Pass, keas destroyed a total of fourteen tents during a single summer season. At the car park in the same area of the park, the fabric roof of a jeep was torn to pieces, the upholstery on the seats was ripped open and all the wires within the dashboard were pulled apart in the space of only five days. In addition, windscreen wipers, the seals around windows, antennae and even tyres are all at risk. Some cases have been recorded in which the kea has succeeded in deflating the tyres by correcdy opening the valves. With the help of its beak and talons it can easily manipulate objects and devices that normally demand human dexterity.
Some theorists consider this behaviour an example of social facilitation, which teaches younger individuals constantly to acquire new skills and to adapt their behaviour to an ever-changing environment.
SOUTH COAST TRACK, TASMANIA
Melaleuca to Farrell Point
Sunday, March 2007
Heidi
It’s sunny, and there’s a gentle breeze, dry as tinder.
We’ve left the sludgy, boggy land and reached a plain slightly higher up. Dotted with clumps of grass, scrub and stunted bushes, the brown-green terrain is an undulating, rocky moorland — with no shade in sight. It’s only now that I remember the suncrean, and we stop to put some on. The path beneath our feet reveals how thin the layer of humus really is. Our hiking boots have scuffed it and broken it, like a layer of dry epidermis, making it crack and reveal the rough chalk-white gravel beneath. The path is like a thin, white ribbon stretching out in front of us, winding its way across the low-lying hills before veering off to the west.
The start of Old Port Davey Track feels good under foot — wonderful, rolling terrain. Melaleuca disappears behind us in less than an hour. The path roughly follows the Melaleuca lagoon inlet, which is nothing but a narrow sound that looks more like a river. Every now and then we catch a glimpse of the waters between the hills to our right.
There is nobody out here. Not a soul.
Although Southy felt wild and untamed, you could always sense the presence of other people. You knew you would meet other hikers at the campsites or see people overtaking you or walking in the opposite direction.
There were duckboards and fallen tree trunks made into bridges.
From the sheer scrawniness of this path, you can tell that walkers here are few and far between. In places it's almost entirely overgrown as it presses its way through the dense thicket. As you step on the path, rough twigs and small sharp leaves scratch at your calves. You can’t see your feet; you think about snakes. Whenever we come across a slightly damper dip in the path, there is no trace of the muddy, boggy areas extended metres in both directions as trekkers prefer to walk around them, thus trampling the tussocks to a mush in ever increasing circles, a phenomenon we had seen back at Southy. Here you can see that the last time someone walked along here must have been last week some time. Or maybe last month. Or last year.
‘Does anyone ever come out here?’ I ask as, for the thousandth time, I’m yanking my hiking pole out of a thorny heather-like bush that has stretched its limbs across the path.
‘This path isn’t all that dramatic. It hasn’t got features like Ironbound. And maybe this is too far away, too cut off. The guidebook only mentions this track in passing. Good job the map gives us timed legs for each day.'
Only in passing?’
‘Yes, it doesn’t really go into much detail.’
Jyrki doesn’t seem to understand that there’s always a reason why particular treks become popular. The mere fact that a path exists is not the reason.
We continue like ants through a terrain that makes me feel smaller than at any other point until now.
This is like something straight out of Conrad.
The sun was low; and, leaning forward side by side, they seemed to be tugging painfully uphill their two ridiculous shadows of unequal length that trailed behind them slowly over the tall grass without lending a single blade.
Jyrki
Joan Point is noble.
The raised isthmus reaches out into Bathurst Channel like an outstretched finger: Go north, young man.
The treetops edge the beaches and the coves with a greenish foam. Other than that, the terrain is open. Resilient plants cover the hills like a coarse, grey- green layer of roughcast. Across the sound you can see Farrell Point low on the horizon and Lindsay Hill rising up behind it. Nothing but desolation as far as the eye can see. We’re so high above sea level before descending towards the beach that, even from this distance, I can make out the next night’s campsite. It’s situated on the western side of Farrell, and there are trees there. Shade, protection from the wind.
I’d like to have seen this place when it was still covered with impenetrable pine forests. But it’s still beautiful. It’s not hard to see why this whole region is a World Heritage Site.
We’re here together.
Just the two of us — and Tasmania.
Crossing Bathurst Narrows gives me the tingling sensation of traversing a strange final front
ier. Like crossing the deathly quiet Styx, basking in the glowing afternoon light.
Heidi
Bathurst Harbour is an enormous bay, a basin the size of a huge lake only separated from the sea by a narrow sound. It’s partially sheltered by its steep shores and features a number of gentle, even peninsulas reaching out into the water.
I’ve never seen a place that would suit a hotel or a chalet complex better. That hillside over there is positively crying out to be terraced and fitted with rows of tidy holiday bungalows. Tourists could take boat trips to those islands over there. Cruise ships would chug out here all the way from Cockle Creek and lower their anchors at Bathurst Harbour Marina. Fair enough, there aren’t any sandy beaches around here, but small yachts could quickly drive out towards the sea where there are dozens of small pristine golden beaches just waiting to welcome sun-worshippers. Mainland Australians would flood out here to cool off and breathe the purest air in the world; the innumerable secluded coves would provide prime locations for luxury villas.
There would be a road running along the even, eastern shore of Melaleuca Inlet, a road along which four-wheel-drive vehicles would shuttle holidaymakers to the serene shores of Fulton Cove.
It goes without saying that I’d get commission for all of this.
Jyrki
It can’t be more than four o’clock by the time we’ve got the tent up, the beds made, collected water and gone for a wash.
Imagine what we could have achieved today if we’d carried on from Melaleuca and arrived here yesterday. This timetable has deteriorated so much that there’s absolutely nothing to write home about any more.