0811 Local Time
Halliday Bay, Queensland, Australia
Wynne Hedlesky
My experience on the islands of French Polynesia and New Caledonia was so eye-opening and affected me in such profound ways, I naturally figured that it would be difficult to top. I have been pleasantly surprised by Australia. Luckily, this is not a competition, and I need not directly compare the experiences, or the countries, or the peoples, since they have affected me in such different ways.
I sum up the differences between my experience in Polynesia and my experience here in Australia in a useful, if a bit oversimplified, way: In French Polynesia and New Caledonia, it was all about the people; here in Australia, it’s been all about nature. That isn’t to say that Polynesia was lacking in natural beauty, or that I haven’t enjoyed spending time with Australians. But in French Polynesia, Kristian and I were struggling with a language and culture more foreign than anything we had so far encountered. Here, what stand out are the diverse, exotic, and incredibly delicate ecosystems that exist in Australia, and, in many cases, nowhere else on earth. I am deeply indebted to Australia’s national park system. Through reflecting on the information I read in the brochures and informative signs throughout a dozen national parks, and by seeing the wonders that are preserved in them, my attitude toward the natural world has profoundly changed.
Rather than post one extremely long description of the insights the Australian bush inspired, I have decided to write a little series, with each piece describing a different natural marvel, or a new development in my thinking, as Kristian and I explored different parks on our Queensland campervan adventure, spanning everything from riotous green rainforests, to dramatic coastlines, to arid eucalyptus woodlands.
Part 1: Lamington National Park and Carnarvon Gorge National Park
Let’s go north…No, south… Kristian and I picked up our camper van in Brisbane with not much of a plan, except that we had three weeks to get to Cairns, about 1,600 kilometers to the north. After driving north for an afternoon, we decided we’d made a mistake by heading away from Lamington National Park, an alleged must-see about 100 kilometers south of Brisbane. We turned around and headed for Binna Burra, one of two main access points for the 16,000 hectare park.
We spent two days exploring the parks rainforests and eucalyptus woodlands, going on two moderately strenuous day-long hikes and camping (perhaps not exactly legally) in a parking lot high on the fog-shrouded crater rim of a gigantic ancient volcano. It was our first exposure to Australian wilderness, and our senses were overwhelmed. Everything was new and fascinating. Some of the plants, animals, and environments we saw there became more familiar as we traveled in other parts of Australia, and others are unique to that park.
For those who love observing nature, this first encounter with the plants and animals of a completely new continent is like being a kid tossed into the proverbial candy store. Kristian and I marveled at the green-tangled rainforest riotous with the calls of unfamiliar birds, the wallabies darting through the undergrowth, and the indecipherable moth-trails on the scribbly gums. We watched huge, sky-bluecrayfish, endemic to the wet valleys of that particular region, as they scooted along the beds of pristine mountain streams. We gaped at the old growth trees whose trunks half a dozen outstretched adult human wingspans could hardly encompass. We even caught our first glimpse of one of Australia’s many poisonous snakes, a red-bellied black snake.
Our wonder and curiosity was not only about particular plants and animals, but about certain novelties of Australian climate and ecosystems on a larger scale. On the first day, in the very same hike, we passed from under deafeningly green-tangled rainforest canopies to dry, crisp-smelling eucalyptus woodland. At the time, the starkness of this contrast surprised me, but later I realized that the juxtaposition of these two types of forest is quite typical in many parts of Australia.
Australia is a land of climatic extremes. On the roadside, signs informing the driver that the bushfire risk today is “very high” are often seen a few meters from signs warning the driver that this area is a floodway, and that, in the case of a flash flood, the depth of the water can be seen by looking at the giant, upright meter stick planted firmly in the arid ground for that purpose. Many of these depth measuring sticks go up to two meters. Droughts, floods, cyclones, bushfires, violent thunder storms—name an extreme meteorological event, and Australia has it. Frequently.
The climate in Australia varies drastically not just over time, but geographically as well. Within a few square kilometers there may be many microclimates, each one with its own distinctive plant and animal communities. On the dry, upwind side of a ridge, arid eucalyptus forest may dominate, with evidence of frequent bushfires in the form of scorched bark on the lower three or four meters of many trees. Up and over the other side of the ridge, in a valley protected from wind and sun, is a damp tangle of lawyer cane, palm, and other moisture-loving plants.
In the second park we visited, Carnarvon Gorge National Park, we saw such a striking example of the role of microclimates that it brought tears to my eyes. Carnarvon Gorge is located in an arid region of Queensland called the “sandstone belt.” Ancient creeks have eroded through several distinct layers of rock—volcanic basalt, and several types of sandstone up to 200 million years old—to expose the dramatic white cliffs of the 200 meter deep gorge. The geology of the place is fascinating, and of great importance for life forms in the region, both ancient and modern.
The porous sandstone in this area acts like a giant sponge, absorbing and storing much of the rainwater that falls in this arid region. As described in an informational pamphlet on the geology of the gorge provided by the national park, “This formation is one of the chief water bearing sandstones for the great Artesian Basin (Australia’s largest body of underground water)…some of Australia’s major river systems have their headwaters here.” Of great importance to the plants, animals, and human beings that live in and around the gorge, Carnarvon Creek, also feeds by “countless springs throughout the gorge system,” provides a year-round water source.
This fact has made the gorge a refuge for life in an otherwise arid countryside. The ten kilometer hike along Carnarvon Creek is ideally designed to showcase the interaction between geology and living organisms, plant, animal, and human. Hiking through the gorge is like visiting a gigantic outdoor museum. Every couple kilometers, there is a short side trail which leads to a sort of natural exhibit—a “moss garden,” where delicate liverworts and mosses cover sandstone slowly oozing moisture; “the amphitheatre,” an enormous cylindrical pit fifteen meters across and sixty meters deep that was formed by the erosion of a column of soft sandstone over millions of years, and is accessible only through a narrow fissure in the sandstone cliff; an overhanging cliff wall covered in the ochre hand prints of the human residents of the gorge hundreds of years ago. Every “exhibit” had me scraping my jaw off the ground. But one more than all the others.
Ward’s Canyon, one of the many small side gorges whose creeks flow into Carnarvon Creek, was once the occasional shelter of a pair of possum-hunting Australian brothers whose name it now bears. For thousands of years before that, its protective overhanging walls and source of permanent water attracted aboriginal people, whose presence is still evident in grooves on the canyon’s boulders used for grinding plant material. Long before that, and, miraculously, even in the present day, Ward’s Canyon was home to the majestic Angiopteris evecta, or king fern.
Millions of years ago, much of Australia was covered in rainforest. As the climate changed and the continent became hotter and drier and fires became more frequent, other species of plants and animals gradually came to dominate the continent, some of them even evolved to take advantage of the bushfires. Rainforest ecosystems now exist only in patches on the east coast of the continent, such as Lamington National Park. But a faint echo of these vast, wet forests remains even in Carnarvon Gorge.
As we entered Ward’s Canyon, the dry, crisp smell of eucalyptus was overcome by the cool smell of water and vegetation. A tiny, crystal stream bubbled along between a steep, orange cliff on the left, and a sheltering overhang of the same orange sandstone on the right. As we continued, the floor of the canyon became narrower and narrower, and greener and greener, and there, at the very back, was something you don’t expect to see in central Queensland—giant, water-loving king ferns, with fronds five meters long stretching almost all the way across the canyon floor.
Thanks to the porous, sponge-like sandstone of Carnarvon Gorge and the protection from the sun provided by this tiny side canyon, this community of a dozen or so king ferns has survived in an unbroken lineage for millions of years, making spores, slowly growing and maturing, spreading their massive fronds over their tiny kingdom. All around them, Australia has become semi-desert, but they continue on, indifferent to the fact that their nearest kin are now several hundred kilometers away in the coastal rainforests.
Standing in Ward’s Canyon, I was baffled thinking about what twists of climatic and geological fortune permitted this beautiful anomaly, and moved by the simultaneous power and delicacy of the life in front of me. In the millions of years of their residence there, how many close calls they must have had, how many prolonged droughts, how many potentially destructive human and animal visitors, how many fires must have raged just over their heads on the arid tablelands. Yet, serenely and majestically as befits their name, they continued to carry out their duty, which is the natural activity of all life—to create more life. The miraculous continuity of this process is now a path that we can take back millions of years in order to get a glimpse of a vastly different Australia.
I felt fortunate that I was able to see them, to admire them. How much longer will they be able to persist? How much longer will the sandstone’s trapped moisture be enough to keep up a favorable climate in that tiny gorge? This was not the last time that the diversity and seemingly improbable tenacity of life on this fickle continent would leave me at a loss for words. It soon occurred to me that, in a country such as this, with violent, destructive forces such as flood, drought, fire, and storms ever-present, life clings to the land creatively, tenaciously, but delicately—and human beings must become aware of how easily we can upset that delicate relationship.
