The Mudlark: Looking At A Country To Love

Looking At A Country To Love

I am looking at the country to love. The normal old sticks. The country that needs people, not tourists. Needs that old need - patriotism, the useful <> love of its people. For who comes here to love?

Take any road you like that leads into a forest not on the tourist maps. I am taking you down one. The Mudlark is a forestry road in the northern annex of the Wombat State Forest in the Western uplands of Central Victoria. Most of the northern annex of the Wombat Forest is catchment for the headwaters of the Loddon River. But this area, through which the Mudlark road traverses, is on the Coliban River side, to the east. Still, the topography of the Mudlark is typical of the northern Wombat.

Once this country was not governed by a petty substorey of scrub; but then in use as camp and hearth, where grand stories were told, where the need of the land and its denizens was noticed, and it, managed as a treed open range. It was tended then by the firebrand grazier, an aboriginal hunter, who trimmed it with careful avenues of flame to be a productive park and generational homeland. In the spirit of them, my countrymen and all hunters, I have brought my eyes and longings with my crossbow, in the hope of bagging a feral goat for a festive openfire spit in our local and family feast. As the natives speared sheep and cattle when their game was displaced by rapine and animal greed. For I live at home in this part of the world, travelling backroads in the backwoods of these inner Australian spaces.

Now Mudlark road crosses four valleys in the Kangaroo Creek catchment; the four are Chinaman's Creek, Mudlark Creek, Doctor's Creek and the Kangaroo Creek itself. The road winds around ridges where logging tracks bearing the same names as the creeks give access to the forest.

Then Swaby Lane goes off to the north towards Remeasure Track and south towards Happy Valley Track, where, as the tales of the old generations tell it, was a town with children running and daily people at their spadework lives. So, even then in our people’s time, when the nineteenth century gold seeking town of Happy Valley was in there, people loved this country as home, a homeland they needed to survive. As a homeland Happy Valley has now been completely wiped off the face of the map; off the land! Indeed, near wiped out of knowledge, but for tales of old farmers and woodcutters in the wooden houses on the volcanic soiltops of the old and new settlements at Trentham and Little Hampton above.

Mudlark road goes up and down over the poorer ridges and gullies. The surface of the road is shaly mudstones and sandstone, scattered with quartz; the same material as the rocky ridges. The road goes about five Ks like no crow track, a grounded being crazed with the logic of its own demented will.

These rivers, the creeks and streams, they are the true, the eternal paths. Kangaroo Creek flows northeast out of the Wombat through a streamside reserve below pastures and farms, down into the Malmsbury Reservoir. The Malmsbury is the lowest of three reservoirs in the Coliban System which provides raced-off water to the cities of Castlemaine and Bendigo as well as the Irrigation area of the Harcourt valley where apples are grown, and many of the towns to the north as well as nearby Kyneton.

In loving a locality, I need to say that this Kangaroo Creek is not to be confused with another Kangaroo Creek in the north Wombat which is tributary of the Loddon River, rising in Bullarto South to fill the Bullarto Reservoir, (a part of Daylesford’s water supply) flowing northwest through the Wombat and out into farmland at Wheatsheaf, passing in a curve west of Gooches Hill to merge as equals with the stream of the Loddon below Porcupine Ridge to the north of the town of Glenlyon. No. This Kangaroo Creek is cut off by water before its old junction with the upper Coliban River. It has become a backwash mooching into the manmade floodwaters of the Coliban, in the Kangaroo Arm of Malmsbury Reservoir.

So Mudlark road goes west from Spring Hill across the rising Kangaroo. If that sentence sounds like a description of an undrawn Australian flag it is because a motif unfurls out of such country, out of such naming. This heraldry is the very heart and soul of our land. Yes, I say such land as this is our epitome. Its image; unfurled, backward. Yet it is in ordinary life and land we find ourselves a culture.

The forest is regrowth. Step-cut stumps among wattles are typical understorey. Fallen logs are diced by a chainsaw surgery, cut off in mid-stem. Few logs are left by firewood cutters to shelter marsupials or ferals. Scrub and weedy trees make the country a waste. An Aboriginal hunter would despair of finding stalking paths, or adequate quarry, to be able to live here. Anyway, his spear’d break.

I saw a vixen with her four cubs. The area is thick with foxes. Gorse bitter-pea and other egg-and-bacon lowbush covers some patches. Orange slime-algae grows on the wood of a dead messmate stringybark. The same orange is on the bark of some narrowleaf peppermints. The grey trunks are topped with khaki leaves. The orange brightens the drab forest. The slimes in gloss colour and viscid light are rack-magazine-beautiful where all else is a prostituted sacredness and capital unloveliness.

Big regrowth messmates, candlebarks and peppermints line the road at the Spring Hill end. These trees are true, but endangered with the true conformation of a sawmills’ parallel bed. The tall trees seem to aspire to the sky, lifting my eyes and drawing at last the spirits up. On the ridge along from Chinamans Creek the trees have more individuality. Each one leans or twists, or branches out in such a way as to make it unique. The traveller in a vehicle as I then was gets the impression of randomness and variety even though only the same three species of eucalypts make up the forest. The car traveller cannot take it all in. Walking about is more touching.

Near a pair of rutted wheeltracks which meander off to the north a messmate coppice sapling is wrapped in a half metre of crumpled aluminium building insulation foil. Around the base of the only big old tree a straggle of poor blackberries covers old cans and rusted iron. Flatweed and European sorrel spreads among the old rubbish. The big tree is a gnarled messmate, hollowed with age, with all limbs bar one dead and wind-amputated. Humans are part of this. A feral cat fled across the road about there.

Regimes. On the corner of Mudlark road and Mudlark Track a sign says: Please do not disturb. FIRE EFFECTS RESEARCH AREA. ‘This is one of five areas in the Wombat State Forest set aside for the study of long-term effects of repeated burning. The research is being co-ordinated by the State Forests and Lands Service. Tree growth and defect, understorey plants, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, insects, soil invertebrates, soil fertility and fire behaviour are all studied in these areas. This area is divided into five different fire regimes. One area will be left unburnt; two areas will be burnt as often as possible, one in spring and the other in autumn; and two areas will be burnt every ten years, one in spring and the other in autumn. Results will be used to improve management of these forests which provide wood, water, wildlife and enjoyment for all Victorians.’ ... Etc, etc, and, I add, Have a nice day!

My riposte is for regimes, bossing I would like to fire! Behind the sign the forest is unburnt. The ridge track goes down into dense timber in the fertile gullies. The creek gullies are now old sluicebath gulches eroded by the efforts of alluvial fossickers of last century. Human effort is a sword. Maybe the inhabitants of Happy Valley worked the streams threadbare. The old streambeds went with the gold. Ten metre wide gulches break down the gully slopes, with up to two-metre cliffbanks of gravely earth. Eroded soil from the sluicing has formed swampy creekflats kilometres downstream around Sugarloaf Hill.

Up the sluicegulch in Doctors Creek, old metre-deep races are webbed with deadfallen logs and meshed with bracken and wiregrass. The gulch has deepened and widened the gully to allow a wetter environment vegetation. Holes and shafts are overgrown. Prickly starwort and woodsorrel grow on old mullock heaps. The gulch itself is a microclimate full of wetter vegetation, Senecio, in summer yellow, whose daisies nearly match the beauty of the spice in its scented leaves. The air is composite with spice.

There is even a lone treefern in Doctors gully gulch. Well actually, it has two sporelings growing nearby, but they have no bole height. It is Rough Treefern: Cyathea Australis. The three metre fibrous black bole supports a canopy of fronds five metres in diameter. Dead fronds have fallen crisscross over the walled-garden of the mineshaft in which it grows. Dead fronds have bleached in many dry summers. The treefern is out of place, anomalous, treeferns are odd in the north Wombat. They may never have grown on the northern slopes of the Great Divide’s western uplands until men disturbed the gullies with forged-iron picks and spades. It is probable that the featherlight spore blew into the scarified gulch on high south winds. They are sort of anachronisms, like the name of the forest itself, ‘The Wombat’, when there is not a wombat to be seen in years of searching, with maybe a relic few, dusted like good soil in patches. But this was never the Wombat once, for this is part of the Old Bullarook forest, sectioned to bits as was the one-piece robe of Christ, drawn and quartered apart from Mount Macedon to Ballarat.

Hard waterfern and rough maidenhair grows under the gulch-banks. Above the gulch the bracken falters and the hill rounds up through silver wattles to a plantless mulch of gumleaves about the ridges. By the roadside near an old quarry, hardenbergia spills its poetry in happy wanderings down the dry sandstone rockface. The flowers of prickly coprosma currants have yellow filaments inside masses of fine white starettes. At night the stars here write scrolls of sky with great celebrity. Stuck in the wheelruts heading from the quarry, the red waves enamelled on the side of a Coke can bleach to pale. Gossamer-seeded clematis drapes its vines over a tangle of treeheads which bridge the quarry.

Across Mudlark road a single hazel-pomaderris plant grows in the roadfill near a culvert. The pomaderris is a species strayed from wetter rainforest gullies. It has straight rod stems five metres tall like the ones my father showed me how to use for fishing poles when I was a boy. By the east side of Mudlark Creek gulch is the wreck of HR Holden model number M081625. Like many a car of my so-called peers in youth. The body of the General Motors Holden relic is HR 229MR-13446M. The car was two-tone green. The aqua 585-8566; the racing green insert 040; and the cream roof 585-9562. The body bottoms upright in a steep-sided cutting. Every panel is buckled and the skeletal chassis is wheeless. Fantails feed in the messmate saplings that grow on the cutting and overhang the car. The roof is crumpled, as if a huge tree had fallen across the car. There is no such fallen tree nearby.

There is a basin in the crumpled roof where the fantails, thornbills and honeyeaters come to drink, or take a birdbath. The car is now a topographic feature with its own microclimate. The empty headlight sockets look like eyeholes in a skull. A line of moss grows in leafmulch collected and ratted along the dash. A rusting Carlton United Breweries Fosters brand tinny nestles in the empty engine oven. A Victoria Bitter stubby catches the sun in the roadside gutter. A big tussock of silvertop-wallaby grass flowers up from a wheelwell. A dented rusty exhaust pipe, the inner masonite of a sunvisor stripped of its vinyl, frazzled chrome trims, buckled air-intake grills, and greasy engine mounts are strewn about the car in amongst wild ivy-leaf violets. The beauty of each creation speaks the truth about its creator. So does, I believe, the author of everything within this country need to be acknowledged in its love.

The road passes down the flank of Doctors ridge to Kangaroo Creek. The creek was dry last summer, as normal. Only the creekflats were green. After the trees by Kangaroo Creek there is now no forest to the north. For a square kilometre the forest was felled and only select seed trees were left to stick up like slim giants in a land of the slaughtered and dismembered by State Government policy and planning. Both commonsense intelligence, - and the tree headwaste in the leaf, twig and branch - was ignited in the autumn for a textbook cool burn, (as if in memory of those firebrand farmers who once cared for the land). But this high-tech fire became most uncool. Techno is the watchword now and techno is the easy answer, the quick retreat, a virtual-watch of a textbook set of and in which we must all watch out. I saw the helicopters taking off from a local football oval with their swags of napalm. No humans put a watchful finger to a single match on the selected ground. Smoke went up like a nuclear mushroom. The fire was out of control again and again over days.

Now the square kilometre is bare except for blackened headlogs, stumps and ash. The head-logs are too black and carbonised to be chainsawed. The firewood is useless. The land is cooked. The overheated ash will produce a seedstrike of saplings to grow up permanently anorexic, to be immature trees in a marketable conformity, all in a fit growing at once, fighting up to the light in a factory school classroom of a forest, like the survival of an outdated theory of evolution among ivory towers.

As I made this pilgrimage I entered into a primitive outlook, seeing what it must have meant lived by folk who think of land in three dimensions; Aborigines, Overlanders, Settlers, Farmers. I surveyed our valleys as with my countrymen and women. More and more our civilised population think of their owned plots as yards, with a front and a back. Surveyors mark boundaries for these fences to be built. People dress their frontyards like our civic facades and our tourist beauty spots, with perfection! then throw the babreque to a neglect that’s hidden round the back. This backyard-frontyard mentality is now being applied to the broad land itself. The country itself is in three dimensions, but we remake it cut in two. One side frontage; the other blind backyard, and backward. Nearby here, famous Hanging Rock of the popular film fiction, is groomed like a theatre with a fee for entry. While Mudlark road is bushed, a vast unloved country backyard.

I go in grief to visit this place again only after giving it and myself time. Six months later the HR Holden is still there. The silver wattles began to bloom in August. But during the winter, permit logging took out the eastern border of the Wombat on the Spring Hill side. Grounded green gum leaves and skun spongy messmate bark covers up the packmud. The metal shine is still in the indents where the crawler track of logsniggers and dozers ploughed through.

The public land north of Mudlark road has been described by the Land Conservation Council of Victoria, like teaser-love, as ‘Uncommitted’. The Wombat is a Hardwood Production Park. Timber mostly goes for pallets, for pulp, or to frame up new houses on the northwestern fringe of Melbourne..

And it is people from that area who drive up here for a few open miles of so-called freedom. Mostly they go to a mowed picnic spot. But they might take a drive in the lawnless back country so close to home. If they do, they need to watch for wallabies like those on Mudlark Road. They feed on the verges where runoff from the vehicle packed surface irrigates the vegetation. We do need to get on a mud road for a lark. The challenge is better than any virtual drive taken; this is a game for the game. When bureaucrats have gone feral, as bylawyers breed out of the urban wastes, when paper shifters on word processors have gone green around the gills in the security of planning this, their rootlessness and alienation becomes ours. Power would have us go about in a kerbed and will-less malpatriotism, full of the deadly earnestness of their right-stuffed conceits and deceits, while the country goes to emptiness.

Before I grow horns I need to bag some bush tucker. I saw wild sheep along the way! Flocks of goats have been in the northern Wombat for seasons. I found goat scat. Farm animals get through the fences of hobby farms and the absentee investors in land, for the northern Wombat is hemmed in by the big backyards of subdivided pastureland. But this no place for the hunter now.

I went looking for goats but all I found is what I have depicted. I did not bag a thing, but, opposite the bare ‘forest’ kilometre, I also found a white woven-plastic Baristoc 'Quality Animal Feed’ bag thrown over a heap of roughly offgraded soil and gumroots. The bag bulged suspiciously. I upended it and shook out the contents. Ah, watch it! the first thing that rolled out was the severed head of a sheep. A two-month-shorn sheepskin with the beasts trotters still attached tumbled out after the head. For a moment I thrilled to think I had found relics of a truly native hunt of feral sheep, but then I realised that a shorn sheep was the old jumbuck, a tame farm animal and not a wild one.

Copywright 1991 © Wayne David Knoll