A Squiz on the Sugarloaf

You can hardly tell that there’s a pad there. The bush closes over, a welter of green fronds, blades and canes. Cross-hatched brambles, spine-bearing tree branches. The long and multitudinous arms of cutting-grass grab you around the waist and will not let you go – it’s like wearing a harness that always resists your movement away from its source. Every time I go that way, the plants draw blood. A droplet of red forms, not unlike the fruit on the prickly currant shrubs – and they may be the cause of those cuts as much as anything else.

Behind a little train carriage shack in rural Tasmania – a space in which I’ve been fortunate enough to squat for a fair while now (if you’d like to know more about it, you could listen to the slow-motion meditative yarns I record from my ‘home studio’) – there is a minor ridgeline that is, as far as I can tell, part of the same property on which I’ve been allowed to stay at intervals over these past years.

It’s part of a landmass that is marked on maps as a ‘sugarloaf’. In fact, there are a number of these in the area and probably more than 30 in Tasmania. It’s a picturesque toponym, although it also has a very particular colonial bent. The name refers to the mounds in which sugar was packed for transport – from Caribbean plantations worked by slaves and sent to Van Diemen’s Land, where the labourers were convicts. In this context, you might agree that the word ‘sugarloaf’ has a sombre feeling to it.

Being a fair bit higher than my little shack – the pinnacle (to which I’ve never been) is 650 metres in elevation – the ecology of the sugarloaf varies a bit. It has also seen a fair bit less human use over the last forty years, which is as far back as I’ve heard anything about the property’s history. At some point it was used for stock; there’s a wire fence, mostly in ruins by now, half-buried in shrubs and bracken. But it’s so shrouded in vegetation that I manage to trip over it basically every time I go up there.

Some of the older trees also have charcoal marks around the base – I was recently told the story of a small fire lit by the block’s occupants a while back, which somewhat got away. But it hasn’t been kept clear in recent years and hasn’t been burned again. I like its rugged, dishevelled look. Shaggy with scrub, there’s plenty up there that needs a keen eye to see.

Once upon a time, we were asked not to leave our neighbourhood – not to leave our yard, if possible. I was one of not so many people who relished such instruction, largely because there I had a lot of open space to use. I had trees and rocks, gullies and ponds. I was confident that I could amuse myself for ages, just poking about in the bush behind me.

At the time, the area was also fairly new to me. I knew the surrounding country more broadly; I’d seen it from the slopes of the local mountains, the tracks up which were the main temptation for moving out here. But the sugarloaf and the adjacent woodlands – most of which is classed as private property – would provide no end of entertainment for the amateur ecologist.

This was in autumn, five years ago. It was a time of abundant fungi – I was pretty much tripping over mushrooms, many of which I’d never seen before. There were birds too, busy and noisy, and even though their allotted season was winding down, I still encountered a range of insects that caught my eye, especially moths. In the bush around me, there was no shortage of drama. Sometimes I thought I was in the midst of an ecological soap opera – when, for instance, a pair of marsupials hopped before me and mated before my eyes.

There are more spectacular places around: rushing rivers, shadowy rainforest and precipitous crags. It’s habitat for a huge range of species and, on top of that, much of it is exceedingly beautiful. The ridge is not so photogenic. I say this not unkindly. For in contrast, I think that as an ecosystem it demands a closer look. Never have I regretted going for a squiz on the sugarloaf.

There are impressively tall eucalypts up there, Eucalyptus delegatensis and ovata for those who care to know; I have found some fairly hefty silver banksias too, burly and with timber like biscuit. There’s a small grove of blanketleafs, which sometimes strike me as tropical-looking with their long, wide leaves – their little glade is like the enclave of an exotic garden. There are species of moss, which I cherish and adore, and lichens, and there are spiderwebs and I have even found orchids up there.

One morning I found a eucalyptus trunk that was rotting out, perhaps picked apart by black cockatoos. The mulched-up woodchips had subsequently become the spawning grounds for a brood of craneflies, fine, long-legged and elegant insects who jigged themselves on the spot like teabags. I thought: there will never be a shortage of new things to see. You could watch something like that for hours, entranced.

I thought: you could return to that small patch of bush over the course of many seasons and better understand how so many lives entwine up there.

The ridgeline is interestingly occupied mostly by larger birds. The black cockies are certainly a common species; it is also popular with currawongs and ravens. It’s not unusual to catch a glimpse of wedge-tailed eagles through the canopy and when I spot a white goshawk soaring over the forest, it’s often heading in the direction of the sugarloaf.

In summer I tend to leave the ridge alone, citing the presence of snakes. All that pushing through the waist-deep scrub unable to see your feet, can give you the yips. Not that I’m at all an ophidiophobe. Like any Tassie mountain guide, I can tell you how often I’ve nearly stomped on tiger snakes and lived to tell the tale - I suppose if you do that often enough, to one of the most venomous species on Earth, you lose your fear. But I don’t often go up to the ridge in summer and I sometimes say, superstitiously, that I’m leaving it for the snakes.

In truth, I’ve never seen a snake up there, and most summers I’ll see a beautiful copperhead around the train carriage (very rarely a tiger). Perhaps we have an understanding. I am happy to share the yard by the shack and I’m even more content to give over the whole sugarloaf to them in the warmer months.

In general, the ridge is, for me, a nicer place to be in the autumn and winter. There’s not a lot of shade and on sunny day in autumn, the shallow light creates interesting effects, richer texture in tree bark and leaves, deeper shadows between the rocks.

It also fungi habitat up there, although I must say the past couple of autumns have seen a tragic paucity of mushrooms on this property – the summers are too dry, I think. But in previous years, particularly that first autumn I spent here, I’d wander up to the ridge with a fungi field guide in hand and spend hours perusing the leaf litter and fallen wood. There were mycenas, psilocybes, boletes, polypores. It was here that I reunited with a childhood from fungi, Tremella fuciformis, which I then called ‘alien jelly’. (I made this species the hero of a recent article I wrote for the journal of Keep Tassie Wild.)

I’ve gone up to the ridge a few times in the past weeks. A gang of ravens, perhaps ten of them, noisily and with some mysterious organisation moved throughout the treetops. A few wood-inhabiting mushrooms were evident. An ugly scat, fresh from the clacker of a carnivorous marsupial, was left on a large log that I sometimes like to climb upon for a reading session.

There’s abundant pinkberry in fruit. It’s not the only splash of pink to be found up there – along the ridge’s north-facing edge, the common heath (Epacris impressa) has decided that it’s already spring and hangs out its tubular flowers like flags too.

I think of the sugarloaf fondly, especially now, when I’m about to go away from it for a while.

Five years ago. I expected to be bound to this island for a long while, perhaps never to travel overseas so blithely and light-heartedly ever again. It was a scenario that didn’t worry me much. I would miss, I thought, the museums and galleries, the sound of so many other languages, the eye-catching buildings and chaotic traffic. I would regret not having the chance to ceaselessly meet strangers en masse. But I would get to know every square inch of the land around me exceedingly well. I would see the plants in all seasons, observe the stages of insects’ and lizards’ and amphibians’ lives.

It all transpired a bit differently and in the last years I have been away as much as ever. It has been a period of some adventure, a little bit of romance, and certainly of literary inspiration. It’s intriguing to imagine what might be different if the freedom of movement had been taken from me for longer – and how it would be if such limitations were set for me once again, for whatever reason.

One thing I can say with confidence: my writing about other places has been made better by the time in which I could only be within cooee of home. Learning to look closely, in order to see connections with an ecosystem, is a skill that surely improves the work any thinker or observer.

I bush-bash up for one last squiz on the sugarloaf and bid farewell, for now, to the shrubs and mushies and moss.