A beautiful astronomical feature on this earth is that a full moon rises at nearly the exact time the sun sets. Last week, a plan was made; to meet Kate somewhere with a view of this synchronicity; to watch the show then wander back to a campground in the moonlight. This gentle, micro-adventure was one of several happenings in the last week that got me to this point – this point being a tentative return to awildland, to stories, to the website, to the life lived and the one still to come.
Woolpack Rocks in Cathedral Rock National Park (NSW).
Native Dog campground - waking to fog filled forest, spider webs hung with dew, wattle in bright, dense flower. Then, the late afternoon, Kate joined me and we set off for Woolpack Rocks. It’s an easy walk, a good track and has had some major upgrades since the last time I was here. It’s about 4km one way, from Native Dog Campground to the summit and we arrived on the summit about 4:30pm with time to look around and prepare ourselves for the sunset/full moon show.
The view from Woolpack Rocks is, we agreed, better than the view from its more famous neighbour, Cathedral Rock. The huge boulders frame a long view north into the Guy Fawkes River Valley. Eastward, you can see the rugged cliffs of Darkies Point/Ngulongeer in New England National Park. Closer at hand, across a small forested valley, are two unnamed outcrops of enormous granite boulders. They are familiar to me. In 2011, the old awildland team headed off track to explore and camp on those peaks.
But, this close forest immediately surrounding me is not the same forest we saw in 2011.
The ‘Guyra Road’ fire of November 2019 and the survival of Nothofagus
Cathedral Rock National Park was one of many places severely affected by the 2019/2020 bushfires that ravaged much of the east coast of Australia. The ‘Guyra Road’ fire of November 2019 burnt the entirety of the park, including a small remnant of Cool Temperate Rainforest dominated by Nothofagus moorei (Antarctic Beech) which had, until then, survived tucked amongst granite tors in the headwaters of one of the park’s few creeks. The Nothofagus moorei rainforest site occurs at 1,560 m altitude and near the regional western limit of Nothofagus. It is the highest known occurrence of the species and, at the time of the fire, the population comprised only 52 individuals. Mean annual rainfall at the site is 1,150 mm, making the site one of the driest and coldest where N. moorei is known to occur. The ‘Guyra Road’ fire caused catastrophic damage to the rainforest, including complete canopy loss for all trees, all woody stems scorched or charred, combustion of most of the litter layer, charring of roots and peaty soil up to 10 cm depth, soil loss following subsequent rain and imbalance of population structure (Bale/Fawcett Nov 2024).
Last year, just a few weeks after Craig died, an email landed in our inbox from researchers who were working with the NSW Parks and Wildlife Service monitoring and assisting the recovery of these trees, post-fire. They were chasing any photos we might have, pre-fire, which illustrated the rainforest. I wanted to help. But it took this whole 12 months until I had the capacity to respond. I wanted to find exactly what they were after, so I scoured Craig’s vast photo library. But rainforest lives in gullies and photographers live on high points. Despite our many walks in Cathedral Rock National Park we managed to miss this unique community of Antarctic Beech. I had no inkling that such iconic rainforest trees had a foothold in this rocky, shallow soiled, drought-prone landscape. Amazing and lovely, that they are there. And, that they survived!
A preliminary research paper, detailing the post-fire recovery rates of the nothofagus, makes for a short and interesting read and I highly recommend it to everyone interested in this surprising landscape. It is an inspiring testament to the incredible resilience of living things. The nothofagus have survived and regenerated. With our help these little troopers can live on. I feel like now is our chance to undo so much of the damage we have wrought. Given the slightest encouragement nature comes back with such force and desire. We can all play a part in that. People are out there already, quietly doing the good work.
Looking across the top of the forest today it appears intact, the scars are barely visible. The canopy is as complete as I remember, the trees as tall, the birdlife and wildflowers as profuse. So is this forest recovering or is it recovered? Is there a moment when an ecosystem moves from one to the other? When a vast, devastating fire sweeps through life is anything ever the same again?
While waiting for sunset, I clambered around rocks south of the summit. Then round some more rocks, then round one last enormous boulder and there it was. Our old bivvy site. Craig and I brought Kate here 16 years ago. The three of us slept out. A roaring, fierce southerly whipped up in the night. Now the site looks ludicrous - how did three of us fit there? How did Craig even find this spot, tucked away around so many improbable boulders? Now, I can find no photos from that trip. How is that possible? It was before I started carrying a journal to write up trip notes. No record of any of it, just memories. And there’s a poem in that.
Of memory and poetry. Another thing happened in the last week to bring me back to awildland’s public sphere.
Two of my poems have been published this week in StylusLit, an Australian, bi-annual online literary journal. You can find the poems here: https://styluslit.com/poetry/two-poems-11/. In one of those many serendipities of life, a lot of the poems in this issue touch on memory and loss. Lines from [Un]Clocked by Lisa Collyer resonated strongly with me.
…two generations congregate in nostalgia’s house…there’s a whimsy in wandering through memory’s corridors…a conversation that never happened is the elephant in every room…
That last line is particularly resonant. A lot of the poems also explore the tactile world of nature and how it can be a ‘museum of the senses’. All of them worth a read and even if poetry is not your thing I urge you to have a quick click through, just ignore the line breaks. The poem Mount Pierce by John Gray ventures into Woolpack-esque terrain with observations on granite, fire burnt landscapes, and how nature affects our senses…
Trees stand, some charred, some spared…Dead ones scatter like thoughts half‑forgotten
which returns us here, full circle, to Cathedral Rock National Park and its recovery.
The future
After sunset and moonrise, on the silver-lit walk back to camp, Kate and I met an enormous grey kangaroo and also stopped to listen to southern boobooks calling incessantly from the treetops. The living future of note is that Craig’s daughter Kate has her father’s talent for composition and colour. Her photos from our little adventure have a different aesthetic but they are good. Really good. You can check out her images on her Tumblr page or find her on Instagram and Substack.
To pay tribute to Craig’s archival photographic record of this park I have used his photos in this story (only the four photos below are from this most recent trip) and shared some old pics on the BLOG page and a small gallery of images on the PHOTOS page.
And, while the view from Woolpack Rocks this trip may look much the same as our pictures from 2011 there is this to consider from the researchers: “All trees were defoliated by the fire and there was substantial stem-death. Nevertheless, each species demonstrated basal and aerial resprouting.” But… “none of the trees produced a full canopy after the fire. Nevertheless, several trees resprouted partial canopies.”
A human programming fault is the desire for a point of resolution, a point where something (or someone) is better, healed. Not an ongoing process of recovery but a stable state of ‘recovered’. There is a metaphor here, of course.
Undoubtedly, Cathedral Rock National Park is irrevocably changed by the 2019 fire and so the next question, of course, is what to make of change? The other human programming truth is our ability to find beauty even in damaged things.
