Wallace Hut and Environs
... Which is what clouds were doing the next morning,
of course, here in Oz as anywhere.
Make coffee,
humming a take of the 'Mist Covered Mountains':
make sure you wear wool and pack waterproofs.
We drove up to Wallace Hut car-park and toddled
the well-graveled trail through the die-back event
of the Snow Gums among the moorland, spread
from New South Wales to Victoria in a year, blamed
on drought or a wood-infesting beetle.
Climate change.
Root-robust they wisely self-coppice,
so, though from a distance all to be seen
on the mountain slope is old grey-hair's stubble,
up close, by nearly every silent psycho shriek
of bleached bone bole and wind-tuned
twisted bough, young trunks grow unaffected.
No shortage of firewood, for certain.
The hut,
patched up with overlapping tin scales was
an old cattleman's shelter for end-of-summer
day by day hillside-scouring, rounding up cows and calves,
branding the 'clean-skins', castrating young males,
droving with horse and dog the whole herd slowly
down to winter paddocks on the Gippsland plains.
Some distance from the hut, Shrek's dunny, to the T
though not a throne I'd want to park my arse upon.
Down-slope we ease our way to a little bridge
and watercourse cut by the track .
Aquaducting
riddles these hills to fill a reservoir
for hydro power - and yet thronged with brown trout,
dark shadows darting .
It's so silent here, sheltered,
breeze can hardly dither paper-daisy heads: -
all in my ears is my own tinnitus; and yet
the odd quirk of a distant bird, micro-viols
of black grasshoppers who sit stupid on the path,
or those odd black beetles, half torpid in the cold...
then trickling liquor of a falling stream,
the zubbuzz of a grass-exploring bee,
the contenting hum-hubbub of a bee-nest
somewhere off among the snow-gum
and the moorland scrub.