Darkling I listen ...

Owed to a lyrebird

There was curiosity for a moment, but quickly timidity won out. The lyrebird folded his tail to a long dart and moved with quiet haste from this little performance clearing into the thicker bush.

I’d been too greedy. Not content just to stand in the path and listen, I’d climbed a few steps up toward his torrent of song.

The clarity of lyrebird calls always astounds me, the volume, the now-still, easy flit between currawong, kookaburra, scrub wren and whip bird had been somehow hyper-real.

I’d remembered them from this low section of the track to the Mt Stirling summit, tall ash forest that today dripped wet and lost the tips of itself in low cloud. My last time here, also winter, lyrebirds had bracketed this lovely little day walk, 11 or so kilometres to the summit and return from the carpark, on an easy looping gradient.

That crystal welter of song a delightful interlude on the way up, a marker of closure on the way back down.

I think this time there were three, singing loud and clear in bursts that spanned minutes and included a small convocation of birds. What performers. You’d have to have ears of stone not to be mesmerised and buoyed by delight.

The snow got solid at about 1400m, then slowly softer and fresh as I walked higher, going for snowshoes and crunching my way to the top.

Before the snowgums, the alpine ash stood stern and serried against a misty backdrop. The upper bark had stripped and fallen, leaving a darker, older crust on the lower trunk. It was quiet. Majestic.

And there was a sense of a sudden deeper peace. These trees had been protected—a national park—but just down the slope swathes had been designated for felling, a ruthless clearing of wood and its residents that would have also had a profound effect on the forest above.

I stood in the snow, breathed that winter forest scent of life and death wetly mingled, and felt a welling sense of happy gratitude. That logging had been stopped. Such a moment of decision. Since settlement the impulse had been to clear this country. To harvest this timber, at first through a brave effort of muscle and will, more recently through lazy mechanics. And for what? For chips and packing pallets, all of it subsidised hugely at taxpayer expense. The combination was an obscenity driven by nostalgic habit, anxiety over hundreds of jobs and the lingering mystique of timber getting. We could do better. Perhaps we will.

These trees were safe. All the others too ... a disruption of a cycle of commodified nature, of an impulse to open forest to a greedy sky.

Big questions follow of course. This place was tweaked minutely for millennia by the Taungarung people. I wonder if that carefully maintained equilibrium can be restored ... how that ancient knowledge can be re-applied when the old people have been disconnected from their day to day intimacy with this Country. Which is the bigger destruction here of course, the separation of caring humans from place.

Its beauty endures. A place suddenly full of possibility. The lyrebirds sing. The trees rise mistily. The snow softly settles. I walk here as a smitten stranger. But it’s a place now calling for a familiar, knowing touch.