Overland Track Day 4: Pelion Rainforest

23 August 2017, Overland Track (Pelion Plains to Kia Ora Hut), Tasmania

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The conditions had eased from the previous three days and there was less far to walk so I was able to pause more frequently to take photographs. Consequently, this is the first of two posts for this day.
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This is Douglas Creek Cascade, a short walk off the track. There’s a lot of water flowing through.

What impressed me more, though, was the view up a side channel, with this magnificent boulder in the middle.

We walked through a grove with many pandani.

Pandani (richea pandanifolia) are an endemic Tasmanian semi-alpine plant, unrelated to the similar-looking Pandanus of the tropical Pacific and South-East Asia.

So they look tropical but they’re a cold climate plant.

Apparently they can grow as high as 12 metres.

It takes a consistently wet environment for the trees to be covered in moss and lichen.

This tree is a natural hybrid between a King Billy Pine and a Pencil Pine. The two are both ancient slow-growing Tasmanian trees in their own genus but related to junipers and the Californian redwood. Some suggest the hybrid is actually a separate species.

The one on the left is I think a King Billy Pine and the other the hybrid.

I had assumed King Billy was a reference to William IV (1830-1837) but it is to William Lanne, who died in 1869. He was Truganini’s third husband and purportedly the last “full-blooded” male Tasmanian aborigine. After he died, his skull was stolen by surgeon William Crowther (who later became Premier of Tasmania) and may have ended up in Edinburgh. The scandal led to the Anatomy Act of 1869 which established that any “medical experiments” required prior permission of the deceased person or permission from their relatives.

A family of Pandani.

Rainforest with snow.

The Overland Track is part of the Tasmanian Wilderness area, that stretches from Cradle Mountain down to the south coast and the Maatsuyker Group. It is a World Heritage area and has been since 1982. One thousand and seven World Heritage sites are listed worldwide and nineteen in Australia. There are ten criteria for World Heritage listing, six cultural and four natural. The Tasmanian Wilderness satisfies seven of the ten criteria for listing. At the time of its listing, it was the only one with so many qualifying categories. Now there is one other with seven, Mount Taishan in China, which satisfies all six cultural criteria and one natural, whereas the Tasmanian Wilderness satisfies three cultural and all four natural.

The cultural criteria for the Tasmanian Wilderness’s World Heritage listing relate to Tasmanian Aboriginal activity in the area over at least thirty five thousand years (until about 1831). This includes caves in areas south of the Overland track with tools made from stone, bone and Darwin glass (formed in the heat of meteorite impact). There are separate caves with red ochre stencils, some areas with rock incisions and many middens on the coast. There are remains of beehive-shaped huts on the west coast and one open campsite has been found. They didn’t always live in caves or huts but campsites in what is now rainforest are understandably elusive.

There were (at least) three or four different migrations to Tasmania, all when it was connected to the mainland. At that time, there was a vast plain in what is now Bass Strait and a large lake in the middle. 14,000 years ago, rising sea levels caused the submersion of the land bridge (and around the same time, New Guinea would have separated from Queensland). This was part of a process of withdrawal from the ice age and also led to the Alpine vegetation area over much of what is now Tasmania being replaced by rainforest. The primary food source of the Aborigines was Bennett’s Wallaby. They congregated in grasslands which in turn may have been partly created by aboriginal firestick farming. They were scarce in rainforest and not easy to hunt and the Aborigines were unable to turn the rainforest back to alpine grassland. Consequently, the Aborigines withdrew from the Tasmanian Wilderness area 12,000 years ago and did not start to reoccupy it until 4,000 years ago, initially from the coast.

While Bennett’s Wallaby was the main food source, groups living in areas with more rainforest would also hunt other game such as pademelon (a kind of wallaby), possums and platypus. Those on the coast also hunted fur seals, elephant seals, various bird species, crayfish and shellfish. It was thought that they abandoned eating scaled fish many thousands of years ago, from a tentative finding in 1963 and perhaps a misquote from Captain Cook. This is now thought unlikely though fish was always but a small part of their diet.

The Tasmanian Wilderness area was also World Heritage listed for all four criteria. It is an area of “exceptional natural beauty and aesthetic importance” as I hopefully demonstrate in the images in these posts. It has outstanding examples of the geological history of the planet. It provides outstanding examples of the development of ecosystems: Here we are in this post walking through ancient rainforests that go back to the time of Gondwanaland. And it is a haven for rare and threatened wildlife: I showed a picture of a Bennett’s Wallaby earlier, other examples include Tasmanian devils, eastern quolls and the Tasmanian wedgetail eagle.