writer and photographer JAMES PARKER
Down here on the peninsula, it’s been cold but the jonquils bloomed just days after the winter solstice. The snow drops had been out for a while. While the jonquils are blooming, the silver birch trees have barely shed their leaves. This is not, I thought, what you would expect in an English winter. Down Under, it’s different, and delightful in its difference.
It never ceases to amaze me how early our exotic “spring” bulbs bloom and how silly our ideas of the seasons in Tasmania are, especially in terms of exotic species. I should add, that where I live, on an old convict probation station, exotic bulbs have gone feral. Come July and August whole fields and hillsides are covered in jonquils and daffodils: it’s rather lovely, as Wordsworth thought in a poem that proved even great artists can write badly.
And around then, the native acacias start to bloom, followed by the silver wattles and then the black wattles (I think I’ve got that the right way round), and finally the blackwoods. At that time of the year, there is an avenue of trees covered in gold and yellow and cream all the way up the Eaglehawk Neck Hill, and colour all the way to Hobart. Who said the Australian bush was drab?
Yet we cleave to this idea, that winter is June to August, spring September to November, and so on.
Our resident plovers (proper name masked lapwing), whom we call Ethel and Murgatroyd, seem to be exhibiting mating behaviour in what we call winter. They start to react when I drive the car past them, and taking the garbage bins down is very much a worry for the poor old dears. I say “old dears” because I am sure that the same pair of plovers have been here since we moved in more than 20 years ago. Now I don’t pretend to be an expert on plovers, but this pair must be getting on (they live to as much as 40, and are completely monogamous) and they don’t always succeed in bringing up a chick. Ethyl and Murgatroyd hadn’t for a few years, but last year they did.
We were thrilled.
I suppose we in Tasmania have, unlike some parts of Australia, four seasons. In a median year we have warm weather in December, and sometimes hot weather. We have a summer with warm to hot weather from January to (sometimes) early March, but always with the odd Antarctic blast to ruin your camping trip. But sometimes (once or twice a decade?) it just doesn’t happen – you just don’t get a summer at all till late February, and, as a native Tasmanian, and a water baby, it is very trying.
Look out for snakes, of course, if we do get a warm summer. Some years ago, one lovely summer’s day, Trish and I were lunching on barbequed flathead under the grapevine in the courtyard (please don’t envy me, the whole area is a complete ruin at the moment and is going to take me months to repair) before I had to head to work at Port Arthur. Our little luncheon idyll was interrupted when I saw a large snake’s head, complete with flicking forked tongue, emerge from the shrubbery about two metres behind Trish, slowly followed by what turned out to be about 2.5 metres of black snake body. “Patricia,” I said, “just get up very quietly, and don’t look around. And go inside very slowly and quietly.”
There must have been some gravitas in my voice, because she did exactly as I said, which is a most unusual occurrence. The very long black menace slid out all the way; I sat very still, and it went on its way – but it was a moment.
So that’s summer.
Then there is our – usually – lovely autumn with calm weather and crisp evenings followed by pleasant days. And this is usually reliable but, again, doesn’t faithfully follow English patterns. And do look out for echidnas on the road at this time of the year as the usually solitary males move about cherchez la femme.
If I may be allowed a digression (well this article is a series of digressions, so why not), several male echidnas may converge on one female at the same time. Then follows an extraordinary contest, where two males line up either side of the female and dig “rutting trenches”. The one that digs quickest sees her roll over onto her back into his trench. We will draw a delicate veil over the rest of the proceedings, but I think it is a quite unusual process in terms of evolution. Often, evolution is not “the survival of the fittest” but the survival of the sexiest. Think of the peacock’s tail. That is not an asset in terms of survival – very awkward to manage in a fight and when defending oneself – but when he spreads that magnificent fan out, the pea-hen thinks, “Oh isn’t he gorgeous.”
The rutting contest of the echidnas actually reflects the comparative survival advantages of the contestants. Digging is their great survival technique, as anyone who has ever seen one attacked by a dog will know. The quicker they can get into the ground and anchored with those formidable curved claws, and only leave their spines above ground, the more likely they are to survive. Thus the rutting trench contest actually selects the best genes to be passed on. Though I doubt Mademoiselle Echinda is aware of this – or cares. I fear she seems to be passive in the process.
Winter, of course, is a problem, especially if you live in the Central Highlands. An friend once confided to me that she was jealous of my situation in the south-east because she couldn’t possibly grow geraniums on her beautiful old colonial property – it was just too cold. I lived on a property in the Central Highlands called Nant for a year in 1958 (yes, dear reader, I am very old) and in summer it was hot – we had a rope rigged up on a willow tree so that we could swing out and drop into a backwater of the Clyde River which ran through the place, just at the bottom of the house. But that was summer. Winter was very different.
The school bus used to come through Nant to pick up all the schoolkids who lived on the property – eight, as I remember, and I used to have to sing on the bus. I remember having to sing “the Purple People Eater” and “James, James hold the ladder steady” because, at age seven, I could. Once my voice broke, I couldn’t – but that’s another story.
Come winter, sometimes we were snowed in and the school bus couldn’t get through. What a shame! We could build snowmen and have snow fights and generally have fun! It was truly magnificent.
In spring, of course, everything goes mad, and those of us with a garden of mainly exotic plants despair at the amount of weeding that has to be done to free our exotic plants from their exotic weeds. It’s crazy I know, but who’d be without a rose? Trish and I have – with help from friends and Landcare – planted about 750 natives on the property on which we live, but we’ve also planted an avenue and a grove of silver birch. I think that there is a good case to be made for deciduous trees in Tasmania – shade in summer, light in winter.
We are also involved with a group turning three hectares of this property into a community gardens. It is hard work, but the idea of these gardens is to show the layers of human occupation of this property, and of the Tasman Peninsula generally. Very much to include the successive land use on the Tasman Peninsula. Which, of course, can be seen as an exemplar of the occupation of Tasmania generally.
That’s what we hope to show. How people have occupied this land from time immemorial to the present day. A huge ambition, but worth the try.
James Parker is a Tasmanian historian (but with deep connections to Sydney), who writes and talks on mainly colonial subjects – especially convicts, women and the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.