Читать книгу Along The Track - Robert Henderson Croll - Страница 5

Table of Contents

"The Swag and the Billy again—

Here's how!"

—Kipling.

"One thing," remarked the surveyor, "you'll get plenty of crayfish at Cape Conran." He mouthed Brady's lines:

"Come south'ard where the lobster spawns

In cool Cape Conran's weed."

"You can pull them out with your hands," he declared.

None of us had heard of Conran till he pointed on the map to where its blunt projection breaks the sweep of the Ninety Mile Beach extension. It was Cape Everard we were after, the Everard that was Captain Cook's "Point Hicks" up to the time when a generation that cared nothing for tradition renamed it in honour of some local celebrity. A lighthouse stands guard there now, the last before you come to Cape Howe and turn the corner for Sydney. An ex-keeper of that light had extolled the charms of the spot, its isolation and its beauty, until we were keen to pay it a visit. He knew no better place anywhere. "Push a quarter of a mile inland and you'd swear you were the first man to get there. It's the loneliest shore light on the Victorian coast. Ships keep too far out for signals, and it's nearly a hundred miles to the nearest telegraph wire. If a wreck happened we'd have had to ride the old horse thirty miles to the Cann River and another fifty to Orbost before Melbourne could know. Yes, it was quiet all right!...If you want to see animals in their native state, take a walk there. Dingoes? Any number!...And snakes," he added, thoughtfully, "the place is crawling with them!"

Snakes are no particular draw, but the rest was attractive. So we sought the surveyor. He knew exactly how to go and how to return, as did an astonishing number of other people, we discovered. Eventually we found ourselves setting out from Cunninghame one evening on foot, each with a sleeping bag and a load of food, and the leader armed with a map marked by the surveyor with such useful directions as "water here," "tucker here," and "turn-off to the palms." It was "a wonderful clear night of stars," but under the tall green timber the darkness lay so dense upon the land that the road became a thing of touch only and not of sight. Bungah Creek, spreading across the track, brought a halt till the abbreviated footbridge, both ends overlapped by the waters, was reached by wading and left by the same means. Then from a rise we looked suddenly on to stars beneath us—we had reached Lake Tyers and it was midnight.

Sand makes a bed that induces sound sleep even though the resident fox come and blow in your ear to find out if you are as dead as you look. He chose the botanist for his experiment and there is no evidence that the scared beast is not still running.

Orbost and its Snowy River flats, wealthy with pigs and maize, were the reward of the next day's march along the forest road—Orbost on Christmas eve, alive with people filling stockings in the name of Santa Claus. They're a kindly folk in this capital of the east. We learnt a new way to "the palms," and gathered much that was fresh concerning our route. "Don't miss Cape Conran on your way back," was insisted on. "That is, if you care for crayfish." The Cape, it appeared, is Orbost's picnic spot, a land of all delights where even oysters grow, and crayfish are the commonplace. "One party brought home twenty dozen last Christmas," we heard. Carrying a roast leg of mutton (described in retrospect as "large as veal and tender as lamb ") and many other appropriate gifts and purchases, we made for some good trees out of the township, dug hip-holes in the tough soil, and soon slept the sleep of the tired. Presently a bird began to sing, and then another. That was how the botanist described it to the scared camp, but there was some difference of opinion. To most of the listeners the sounds suggested a musical evening in the final summer resort of the wicked. Mr. Donald Macdonald has published many notes from bush folk inquiring the origin of these very noises, and he has sheeted the offence home to Ninox Strenua—the Eagle Owl. The terrifying duet came from directly overhead—harsh grating groans that seemed to tear the soul in their passage, shrieks of torture, screams of deadly fear, moans as of a passing spirit. With the sun shining, some of that may be discounted, but as truth lies not in exactitude of detail so much as in correctness of impression, it will serve. One of the more widely travelled of the party made it clear that the song of Ninox Strenua could not possibly be mistaken for that of the nightingale.

Gippsland ends at Orbost, despite the geographies. Thereafter, eastward, it is Croajingolong, familiarly shortened to 'Jingolong (the first 'g' as in bring). The only palms that grow "wild" in Victoria are in 'Jingolong, and they are all in one patch on Cabbage Tree Creek. They are the Illawarra or Cabbage Tree Palm so common over the border. Patriotic Victorians have been known to speculate as to how so many specimens could have reached New South Wales. Scientists (with less parochial leanings) confess themselves puzzled to account for this Victorian community, completely isolated as it is from all its relatives. That brave old botanist, Baron von Mueller, who was better entitled to the name of explorer than many of the more widely advertised claimants to the title, made two trips to Cabbage Tree Creek as far back as 1854. Blacks drove him out the first time, but he was back twelve months later. When we reached the spot, as a side excursion of six miles, no natives could have been visible even if they had still held possession, for after a wrong turning and adventures with a swamp, we arrived in the velvet gloom of a cloudy night. Nothing was distinguishable; it was as pitchy dark as the Chaos of Hans Sachs, where even the cats ran against each other. Morning showed a tropical tangle on the banks of a blackfish creek, out of which rose the graceful stems of the palms with their feathery tops. Several looked about one hundred feet high. They stand in what is now a Government reserve, and are guarded by a tribe of the most pointed mosquitoes in the State.

Bush hotels have an unenviable reputation. Half a day beyond the Cabbage Tree a little hostelry gives the lie to the general belief. Its very name is attractive "The Bell Bird," and as it nestled in a curve of the road with for background the mass of vegetation that hides the creek, it looked what it was: the comfortable house of kindly people. Oddly, this was one of the few creeks where there was no sound of the bell-bird, that charming olive-green creature whose prosaic and sole occupation appeared to be the picking of a white scale off the gum leaves, with pauses for the utterance of the single note, "tink!" which is his contribution to the family chorus. We soon learnt that one might find water without a bell-bird, but never a bell-bird without water.

The great enveloping forests of hardwood are relieved at every creek by growths of Lilli Pilli and Kanooka, and some glorious trees of the Victorian Waratah, twenty feet high, flourish at the Bell Bird. Who shall say that the scientist is not also, at times, poet? Who ever named the Waratah Telopea ("seen afar off") and added Oreades to distinguish the Victorian variety, was no dry-as-dust. Milton's nymphs of the mountains, the Oreads, are fittingly associated with these lovely shrubs. Almost as beautiful as the gleaming red of the waratah blooms were here the young leaves of the gums. "Silver-top" the settlers call the prevailing rough-barked eucalypt; aptly, for its higher branches show white and clean. Whole hillsides burned with the glory of its leafage as with "woodland altar flames." 'Jingolong's one highway cuts through the green growth; little else has been done by man to destroy Nature's work. Only an occasional clearing was seen before the Bemm River crossed the track.

Not so many years ago one of the rare settlers then beyond the Bemm River met with an accident. The few neighbours started out with him for Bairnsdale—a ninety mile ride. The Bemm barred the way, dark and forbidding, and at that time deep. Such an obstacle might have turned townsmen, but not the resourceful bush folk. Giant trees tower above the stream, one of these was felled to reach the opposite bank, adzed flat for foothold, and the helpless man was safely carried across. The makeshift still stands, near the site of the bridge that now conducts the main Genoa Road over the stream. This is a new well-graded track that cost many thousands of pounds. The pity is there are not more cleared ways for the men and women who, lionhearted, are hewing a living out of the wilderness.

Further down the Bemm is a ford, mostly usable. It was a bitter winter morning when one of the keepers from Everard had his first experience of crossing here. He had spent the night at a house near by, but had made no inquiries regarding the river. All the others he had had to swim: this he took for granted. The white frost crackled underfoot as he rode to the bank. Black and threatening ran the water and it was only by noting the tracks that he could be sure of the crossing place. Shivering, he stripped to the buff, remounted, and drove the horse in. "It pains a man at times to miss his pain" so the poet sings; the rider's emotions were badly mixed when he found the water nowhere more than a couple of feet deep! And as he dressed in haste he was aware of the joy of his host of the night before, who had witnessed the sight from afar.

Our camp was pitched in a snaky clearing of the sword-grass. Overhead the solemn eucalypts swayed together whispering and watching, and a lovelorn boobook, lured by the botanist, moaned us to sleep.

"Croajingolong" is synonymous with "forest." Nowhere was the great procession of the trees better than at this point. After a week of bush walking one felt he was a spectator at an unending march of giants holding aloft green banners. How many kinds of timbers were present only the botanist knew, but all were aware that at the Cann River another was added to the list in the blue gum (globulus).

While the Bemm is a morose-looking stream, sullen and dark, its neighbour the Cann, sixteen miles away, is sandy-bottomed and bright. But the Cann can be as cruel as the Bemm looks. Floods made the rich flats that now produce the golden crops of maize, and a river, like a man, is hard to break of old habits. In the winter the whole country is often awash. The lighthouse keeper on one occasion had a horse drowned as he rode for the mail. When the waters went down the carcass was found high and dry on a tree, and the man had a stiff climb to recover his mackintosh still on the animal's neck.

The character of the country changes as the main road is left at the Cann for the track that turns off for Everard. It twists through the gums and banksias, gradually getting fainter until sharp eyes are required to follow it. Reedy Creek is five miles out, and, at nine miles, dainty little Dinner Creek intersects the way. Surely there is no smaller creek in active operation! Two feet wide by as many deep, it is crossed in a stride and might easily be passed unnoticed. But its tiny bed was full of sweet, cool, sparkling water—particularly welcome on that hot day, and gratefully remembered as the best water of a journey on which water was often the scarcest of essentials. It was the last, too, before the lighthouse, a sweltering stretch of twenty miles to, and along, the beach. Grass-tree flats, swamps, wooded hillocks, and a steady increase in the number of coastal growths marked the approach to the ocean. A final climb over steep hummocks showed a sea as empty as the sky, a desolate beach relieved only by a huge dead seal, and, seven miles away, the top of the lighthouse tower.

Cape Everard would hardly be dignified by a name elsewhere than on that great stretch of sand that edges smoothly almost the whole of the eastern coast from Port Albert to Mallacoota. It is imposing only on the principle that amongst the blind the one-eyed is king. The light stands well above the triangle of reef on which the Southern Ocean beats unceasingly. Towards the sunrise lies an endless line of baylets broken by low headlands, amongst them the "remarkable point" mentioned in Cook's Journal of April 19th, 1770, "which rises to a round hillock very much like the Ramhead going into Plymouth Sound, on which account I called it by the same name." Westward the sandy beaches extend for long miles without interruption. Stone quarters shelter the lightkeepers and their households—three families in all—and stone walls keep back the greedy sand that is ever on the move where the native shrubs and grasses have been destroyed. The hummocks further back are crowned with growths of pittosporum and banksia, the latter a carnival of "blue mountain" lorikeets in the flowering time. Some nice soil, enriched by goat droppings, and kept moist by a spring, maintains a vegetable garden that is amazingly prolific. Two hundred goats leave the near-by enclosure each morning to wander miles in search of choice feeding, making tiny pads through the scrub, dinting the beaches with their sharp hooves, and returning at night to the protection of the fold. They mean milk, butter, fresh meat, mats, and numberless other things to their owners.

It is truly a lonely place. The nearest settlement is thirty miles away; only twice a year does the Government steamer look in with provisions. Snakes crawl out of the undergrowth, warm themselves on the walls, and drink at the drip of the pump. Dingoes wail in the bush or prowl on the beach for ancient fish and other toothsome morsels. Yet the station is popular with the staff. The traffic passes afar off, wrecks are unlikely, officialdom, in the absence of a wire, cannot worry often, and living is cheap and good. As at all far-out lights and remote places, a stranger is given the welcome of a prodigal son. The fatted kid is killed, and everything done to make him sorry to leave.

This was our turning point. Five miles further are "the two rivers" (the Thurra and the Mueller) to which a flying visit was paid. They deserve an article to themselves. We saw the New Year in with our kindly hosts to the jangle of kerosene tins and cowbells strung from the lighthouse tower, and six hours later the level sun was projecting our shadows before us as we headed westward on the return journey.

As a foil to the shadowed week in the forest it was to be a beach walk all the way back, a scheme which looked not only possible but easy. There appeared to be no particular obstacles, and the vital question of water seemed answered by the fairly frequent creeks that are marked on the map. Here let it be said, however, that this is one of the worst beaches on the Victorian coast for the walker. The sand is soft and breaks at every step, and there is hardly a level piece in a hundred miles. For a few miles the angle is not uncomfortable, but a day's march leaves the feeling that one leg is longer than the other. It is a dangerous looking beach; the sea makes fierce snatching rushes up and down its slopes; instead of a comfort the rivers are a menace. If they are running into the sea, they may be uncrossable, and if they are bar-bound, they are salt. In that event fresh water must be hunted for, and sometimes carried a whole day.

A head wind sprang up early on that first of January. It rose rapidly to a gale and then to a hurricane which never slackened for twenty-four hours. At face level the air was full of the stinging particles or fine sand which form the surface of the beach; our legs took the ceaseless fusillade of the heavier grains. Under this sandblast the blackened billies renewed their youth and by afternoon shone as new. The living weight of the wind, the want of water, the shelving beach, and, worst of all, the breaking sand, made the day's journey a sixteen miles to remember. Tamboon Inlet, the first of the rivers, came as a relief halfway with its shelter from the wind, but there was no fresh water and a long return trip had to be made to the last spring noticed. Bar-bound, it formed a fine lake and there was abundance of fish. The river-mouths generally were very attractive to an angler and their seclusion should keep them so for many years.

Towards sunset three men suddenly appeared on the skyline. They were at the edge of Sydenham Inlet, the largest of the Lakes that pit this coast. With its system of marshes it covers an area of about twelve miles by six. It is the home of wild fowl. Ducks, swans, pelicans cormorants and other expert swimmers, cover the waters, and the shallows are alive with waders. The fishing is particularly good. Commanding all is Morgan's comfortable little hotel, on the north bank, near where the Bemm River enters, for this is where the Bemm reaches the sea. The strangers were from Morgan's. They had a yacht on the lake and were waiting for the wind to drop. Billies were filled from the freshwater spring hidden in the hummocks and soon a fire roared in a sheltered hollow and camp was made. From their sleeping bags the walkers admired the philosophic bushmen, who, having no blankets or other night gear, threw together a screen of branches, and lay contented between it and the blaze. Long before daylight it was "all aboard" and the boat was jumping as she headed up the channel.

Twenty-four hours at Sydenham, the final kindness from the Morgans of a ferry across to the west shore of the lake, and a tiny cattle-pad was found that wandered in the right direction through a scrub that was often tea-tree, often banksia, and sometimes pittosporum and gums. Little flocks of the funereal cockatoo made the way noisy. It led to Stockyard Creek, fifty yards long from its source behind the hummocks to its point of disappearance in the sand, an oasis fringed with trees and alive with tits and honeyeaters. Then over the sand-ridge to find the slaty nose of Pearl Point in view and three dingoes coming full-trot down the wind. A sturdy dog led, followed by a half-starved wife and a three-quarter-grown pup. At sixty yards the leader saw us, stiffened for a second, and was in full flight the next. There were oysters on the Point and indications of crayfish that whetted the appetite for Cape Conran, now only a few miles away. Dock Inlet, another of the sea-creeks that hide in the coastal sand, was three miles on, and in four more the high bank of Yerung Creek showed. A lovely sheet of water, to whose placid bosom was given the final touch of peace by the presence of a swan and her cygnet, floating "double, swan and shadow."

Again fresh water was lacking and it was a dry party which set out next morning for Conran, now only four miles away. In addition to crayfish, Cape Conran has a reputation for "plenty of good water." We had pictured a cape with a definite headland and were dismayed to find a sea-front of some two miles of wave-worn granite. One of the tiny springs was at last located and a mid-day breakfast prepared and enjoyed. Then it was hey, for the crayfish! There was a cheer as the leader produced a carefully treasured bottle of vinegar from his swag. "Here's a claw!" said somebody, and all hands scattered to the pleasant task of getting the lobsters. We spent the day at Conran and the result is best summed up in the words of the doctor of science: "It's a splendid place for crayfish; what a pity there's none there!"

Maybe the recent camps, of which there was abundant evidence, accounted for the shortage. Certain it is that every artifice failed to raise a "cray."

It is grass-tree country in to Marlo, a township that must easily hold the Australian record for density of mosquito population. The Snowy is here a wide and handsome river but it, too, often suffers from the common Gippsland ailment of a bar. Still was the sand difficult to walk on, so difficult under a hot sun that the sliding hummocks were climbed and a track found on the land side. Separated from the sea by just the width of the hummocks run the twenty miles of Ewing's Marsh, skirted by clumps of tea-tree and eucalypts. It is at present a pasture for cattle in its drier parts, but surely someday to be drained and dotted with farms. The day was close and drowsy and fresh water hard to find, but the edge of the marsh was firm turf and, stimulated by threat of storm, the party swung along at four miles an hour. Night came and the rain fell in torrents. The road turned to a creek. The swag under the all-enveloping rubber sheeting, gave each walker a ludicrous resemblance to an organ grinder. "Da monk'" was the only essential missing.

Ahead lay Lake Tyers and the completion of our circuit of some two hundred and fifty miles. Civilization was close at hand: happy thought, we would seek a lodging for that evening. Everyone warmed to the idea. The outdoor life had been enjoyed to the full—the "bed in the bush with stars to see," the camp by running creek or restless ocean, the freedom from the conventional—but indoors had its charm on such a night. "Civilized" baths and meals and beds suddenly appealed to all. "A good hot dinner with vegetables" soliloquized someone in pleasurable anticipation. "And a decent pudding!" added another. "What price a pillow!" came joyfully from a walker who had never taken kindly to rock substitutes. A light shone wetly from a window and was reflected in the dancing pools of the roadway. A dog stormed from a kennel. We stamped on to a verandah, full of pleasing expectation. A lady appeared with a lamp. "Good evening," we chorused genially. She looked at us critically and her eye was cold. "We don't serve liquor here!" she remarked, and closed the door again.

Then was it borne home to seven city men that not a University degree, a legal practice, a house in "the lane," nor a post in the Civil Service, is proof against sixteen days of "back to Nature." They realized that they were unshaven, down at heel, travel-stained and tattered; the mark of the tramp was upon them, and they were judged accordingly. It was the price of liberty, and not one of them grudged the payment for such a glorious feast.