Thanks to Peter Cai for all photos
January is a hot month for walking. In Sydney on Friday the 18th 2013, the
mercury had hit 45.8 *C, the hottest day on record. The following day, much
cooler, I met up with a group of walkers at a coffee shop in Lithgow. We were
going to walk in the interface between
the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, and state forests, coal mines, power stations, and
national parks including one named
the “Gardens of Stone”. Yuri Bolotin was our guide for a day’s off-track
walking in the Ben Bullen State Forest.
Underneath the ‘stony gardens’ in which we were going
to walk, is a vast coal seam. Long, long ago, great forests of ancient trees grew, fell over, and rotted
in swamps. They were buried beneath layers of sediment and then compacted. As
they were heated by the oven of the earth they slowly changed over millions of
years into coal. Long ago, above this, ancient rivers flowed to the coast and
carried gravel, sand, silt and clay which formed a vast alluvial plain. Compaction then formed this into a
sandstone and claystone layer. Another aeon went by; they were uplifted and
warped to form a high plateau. The soft grainy stone eroded as streams and
rivers sliced through it. Canyons formed, which is what the Blue Mountains
really are, but Blue Canyons does not have such a ring to it! On the Newnes
Plateau north of Lithgow, the eroding actions of rain and wind have formed a
fantastical array of pagodas,
ridges, cliffs, keyholes, and slot canyons. It is a wonderful place to see
pagoda daisies, which root in the shallow basins around pagodas, and waratahs
blooming bright red in spring.
We were a mixed bunch, partaking of coffee and cake. I
chatted to a young American woman who told me how Hurricane Sandy impacted on
New Yorkers in December 2012. After three days, she said, they all became quite
fretful, without the electricity on which life there is so dependent. The
coffee was gorgeous, organic - but eventually we dragged ourselves away. We
drove up to the starting place in the forest, and when we’d gathered together,
Yuri said, “I’m going to show you what could be lost.“
He led us off the fire-trail out to a bare sandstone
lookout. It faced west, and we viewed the dramatic cliffs, the three valleys
which we were going to bush-bash through, farmland further out, and the snug
town of Portland. Yuri pointed out a small coal mine on the edge of the
bushland. It was a naked scar with
a blotch of dark green next to it. Rows and rows of the same acacia species had
been planted on the slag to
rehabilitate the mine. This contrasted with the colour and variety of
the old growth in the forest below us. “There is another small mine quite a
long way to the north of this one, owned by the same company, Coalpac,” said
Yuri. “Their plan is to mine everything between the two - in their application
they call this consolidation.”
Having absorbed an eagle’s eye view of the landscape,
we dropped down the side of the lookout.
He lead us around the flutings of the headland where grasses with
seedheads grew in the cavities. We made our way underneath the rockline to a
cave. It had been an occupation cave of the local tribal group, he said. This area, right
on the Great Dividing Range, is significant to the Wiradgeri, the Gundungurra, and the
Darkinjing peoples. Perhaps it was one of those ‘negotiated’ areas that are
found in the borders between tribes. I have seen many shelters in my quest to
understand who lived in the Blue Mountains before my (Caucasian) people, and
this one was magnificent. It was the size of a ballroom with a flat floor.
Yuri and a local Aboriginal man had done some
investigations of the cave and found stone tools, and art at another site
nearby. I scoured the sandy floor for stone flakes but could find nothing
except old charcoal remains. I could imagine the daily life of children running
about, cooking, food and tool preparation, people sleeping with a fire’s warmth
reflected from the curved stone walls.
Yuri then led us on, through bushes, over fallen logs,
and along unstable slopes covered in litter. Something flitted above the bushes ahead.
A swordgrass butterfly
orange-banded tenant
of a coalmine lease
Tisiphone abeona lays its eggs in swordgrass, Gahnia sieberiana. The Gahnia species of
grasses were useful as both medicine and food to Aboriginal people.
Yuri led us to a narrow entrance between giant slabs.
Here was a bit of fun and a challenge! Most of us took it up: to squeeze
between the cool damp rocks, and then climb up a narrow slot. The group was
made up of bushwalkers from walking clubs around Sydney, so there was plenty of
experience of the sandpaper grip going up.
After morning tea we continued walking along under the
cliff-line and around into the next valley. I found a lyrebird feather and offered it to the New Yorker,
explaining what a fabulous mimic this bird is. She thought I’d said “ liarbird”
–and that’s true, in a sense. All the way along we were crunching through
masses of dead and dried bark,
twigs, and leaf litter. Hearing
giants coming, a wallaby dashed off into the distance.
Not many things were flowering, other than geebung, Persoonia linearis, with its yellow flowers.
This plant is useful. Aboriginal people used the bark, which is quite flaky and
can be peeled off easily, as an
antiseptic bandaid on cuts and abrasions.
Yuri took us to up a magnificent rock outlook for
lunch. We were in a narrow valley, surrounded by cliff faces. High on a cliff
were splotches of white, like toothpaste dribbled down a ledge - eagles had
been nesting there, well away from any danger.
By now we’d figured out that the group was from many
nations on the planet - and that
only five of the party had been born in Australia. We were rather impressed
with the young New Yorker, who had never been in the Australian bush before.
She got scratched, wobbled, confronted by scary spiders, bumped, knocked and
perhaps bruised, though not burnt, thankfully.
After lunch came my scary moment. We had a choice :
either clamber around a steep rockface, or drop down and bash through a valley
with ferns. I felt confident given my slot endeavours , so began to carefully
make my way around a ledge with quite a drop-off. As it narrowed my
concentration increased. When the foothold disappeared and I had to climb
across a gap, I knew that I had to keep going, for otherwise fear would
marshall its forces and create an abominable abyss into which I would surely
plunge! I well remember the terror of the eight-year old I once was. In my
childhood in New Zealand we climbed trees a lot, but one afternoon I got stuck.
I couldn’t move forward or backward – and then it began to rain, and I began to
cry! My friend’s mother had to coax me down. So I asked David, from China, to
wait and put out his hand for me, to steady me as I stepped across thin air.
Further on, we gathered around an imposing slot. Some
of the group pondered, could you shimmy up there? It began to rain. My skin
felt as though it came alive - a
few drops fell on the back of my neck. In the quiet of afternoon a bird somewhere
called with its clear repetitive bell.
A treecreeper
in the overburden
sings of trees
“It’s interesting and weird,” said Yuri, “that in the
miners’ terminology, they call everything above the ground ‘overburden’. ”
Coalpac’s method of mining is open-cut: they would
scrape all the living things and their habitats into a big heap and dig for
coal.
“It will
never be possible to recreate this”, said Yuri.
There is a legacy of mining which future generations
must deal with. Already, Australia has 50,000 ‘legacy’ mines - holes in the
ground, or collapsed tunnels, perhaps with a monoculture of some rehabilitating
tree growing on the slag heap.
I live in the overburden. You live in the overburden.
The overburden is like the cream on the black forest cake. Lyrebirds which love
to nest in pagodas, belong to the overburden. So do snakes, turtles, the
Wollemi pine, the Callitrus which we saw on our way
out, streams, coffee shops, cakes, art – eagles may soar above it, but their
prey lives there, they raise eaglets there. I think these things are blessings on the planet, not
burdens. Maybe another day Yuri will lead a walk into what is underneath,
canyons with their cool waters. This water - very clean, sieved by sandstone – flows over and indeed
under the ‘overburden’.
If you’d like to know more about the approval process
for Coalpac, go to:
*a haibun is a mixture of haiku ( short poems) and
prose
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