55 Wombalano; worthless scrub

The sheep were gone, the chestnuts were continuing to be a waste of time and the taxman had given me the choice of having an in-depth desk audit of my farm affairs or of giving up my status as a primary producer, no questions asked. I accepted the tax offer gratefully but now had to further accept that my farm wasn’t. It was certainly doing nicely in producing jam but not at a level that could be considered a business; rather it was more a lowly enterprise. But how could we refer to the farm now? Could it be our country residence which sounds rather grand, our lifestyle property, or just that jam place? None of these seemed right. It had to be referred to by name, by ‘Wombalano’ that supposed aboriginal name dredged from somewhere by Torsten and Victoria.

On top of our business demise, she decided to stop being a lawyer. It was clearly not a health-giving activity. I was extremely jealous of this new idleness. Why should I work when she wasn’t? I gave up working as well; at last leaving the place I had dropped my DNA skin particles for over 30 years. We paid off the debts on our farm, now lifestyle property, and on our Canberra dwelling. We were almost free. I had some problems initially retraining my car which went to work occasionally when I wasn’t concentrating. But we became really free quite soon as a learner driver ran into us at traffic lights on a wet Sydney afternoon; the car was written off and replaced with one that didn’t know the way to my old work.

The useless scrub on Wombalano and by the adjoining river continued to deliver delights in the form of tiny flowers of many species and associated photo opportunities. Her book of flower corpses and photos became two and then three. The walls of the yurt displayed the spill over flower photos and the many fungi that popped up in wet autumns. And the Hakea transects came up with some interesting information.

I discovered that I could hypnotise anybody into a deep trance or sleep by telling them about the Hakeas so I wrote up the findings and put them on the web. The site was visited by a handful of people, all lost in cyberspace. The conclusions, which you can read if you are wearing pyjamas and lying comfortably somewhere nice and warm, went something like this:

1. The basalt rock outcrops were usually around 900 metres above sea level
2. Plants growing in or near rock outcrops didn’t often get frosted because the rocks carry enough heat over into the night from the previous day
3. The temperature under the tree canopy seldom gets to freezing. Where trees were absent at the same location temperatures dropped well below freezing
4. Night temperatures increased at higher altitudes in our valley, this was largely because the slopes drained the cold air down onto the valley floor and higher areas were more windy
5. The coldest places at night were where people lived down near the river. These places got the temperature inversion, were not sheltered under trees and had no rocks to store heat
6. During the years of records, the Hakeas didn’t get frosted because they knew where to live
7. 900 masl wasn’t special. Hakeas on Bull Mountain slopes at 1100 masl survived very well. However, they generally lived amongst rocks and not in areas of temperature inversion and consequently didn’t get frosted.
8. Mature Hakeas that were exposed to frosts by Forestry clearing the canopy grew very well
9. I have no idea what any of this means but guess that seedling Hakeas are killed by frost and also guess that once cleared of canopy, the understory can never recover to its previous species abundance and diversity

52 Walking

The weakness of becoming a photographer of botanical things is that you have to find the plants in the wild and that means lots of walking. Some botanical photographers cheat by hanging around their local Botanic Gardens so they can drop into the cafe for a coffee between photo shots. The other tricky thing is that you can never be sure when the chosen specimen is going to flower so you have to keep going back to the same places to check. Her grid system became quite useful, though I admit my GPS with all the little plants marked and jumping up on the screen as I walked was better.

Instead of cycling, I started walking to work through the Canberra Black Mountain Reserve to check on the plants there during the week to complement observations on the farm at the weekends. There were plenty of species in common despite the locations being 200 km apart. With it being warmer, the Black Mountain plants tended to flower a week to two months ahead of those at the farm. Annoyingly, wildflowers had started to play a large part in our lives.

Lots of interesting questions crystallised out of the air during all this walking, competing for time with my chattering brain spirits. For example, I had noticed that clumps of the native Tree Hakea Hakea eriantha always seemed to be around 900 m above sea level at the farm. I strayed off the farm onto all properties in the Creewah area and this seemed a fair general conclusion. So what was special about 900m?

Looking for tree hakeas was useful in that I found that the distribution of superficially similar trees like Black Wattle Acacia melanoxylon and River Lomatia Lomatia myricoides, had no relationship with elevation; they could be anywhere.

The web couldn’t help solve my question so I decided to do an experiment. This experiment was an excuse to buy some technology and to do even more walking. I argued to myself and the ether that Tree Hakeas were in some way limited in distribution by temperature. The only way to check that would be to put temperature sensors with their associated loggers at places where Tree Hakeas grew and places where they didn’t. I chose three slopes in the area that included Tree Hakeas and placed temperature loggers at and above and below them in a simple transect. One transect was on someone else’s place so the farm had finally burst its borders. Hakeas didn’t respect borders. The owners didn’t know so wouldn’t worry. I had already discovered that nobody walked in the local bush except me and Magoo, and Magoo was usually with me. He was the neighbour’s dog.

I downloaded the hourly temperatures from the loggers in situ onto my portable computer every six weeks for three years and so amassed millions of lovely data points, perfect for transforming into complex graphs. I collected photographs of wildflowers while I roamed between sites. I was gradually becoming familiar with the area and its ecology.

It was getting familiar with me too; the kangaroos and wallabies didn’t run away till I was close, the lyre birds sang on almost unconcerned by my nearness and the Granite Tors became less menacing. That’s what was in my imagination, but that’s all it was. One day I had forgotten my GPS and a heavy mist came down. I was lost not 5 km from home. I thought I knew ever creek, every rock, every tree in the area. In the absence of the sun and its direction objects all took on a sameness and I had no idea which way to go. When the mist started to lift I had been heading in exactly the wrong direction. I concluded the area didn’t care about me one bit. When the Chinese shot down all the GPS satellites, I would stay home.