Take a peak into silent splendour
IWAS hit by a moment of deja vu while reading Don Knowler’s magical book
The Shy Mountain this week. Knowler was explaining why he is loves kunanyi/Mt Wellington.
“I flee to the mountain to escape the human world but often, once up there, I crave company, especially in an eerie mist or a snowy landscape that does not offer sound but absorbs it so completely you feel you have gone deaf,” Knowler writes.
“The mind and senses, searching for sound, the faintest rustle to analyse and inform, reveals the connection we all have to the world around us, and our unease at any disconnection.”
It is a beautiful description of something I too had experienced on the mountain’s trails.
Intriguingly, it also echoes the sentiments of a visiting aristocrat almost 200 years ago. Austrian army officer and diplomat Carl von Hugel wrote a journal account of a 16-hour trek he made up the mountain in the 1830s.
“This is a new world for the wanderer,” von Hugel wrote.
“Here in this virgin forest, where no one has walked, creation shows the secrets of nature.
“Here are quiet and solitude that cannot be described. One has the feeling, as though put under a bell-jar, of being separated from the outer world, for no sound can enter this silence.”
I wonder how many have heard this strange silence that von Hugel describes as being “put under a bell-jar” and Knowler as “going deaf”.
To me this silence is like when you ascend or descend in an aircraft or while driving up or down a mountain and there is a pressure on your ear drum that you have to pop.
I wonder whether there could be subtle pressure variations in certain places on the mountain in certain conditions that add that numbing stillness to the quiet.
Von Hugel, who fled to Tasmania after a failed romance, rode a horse as far as possible up the mountain before walking.
“I found the most exquisite water that I ever tasted, except in the Lebanon and the Nilgherry Hills [India],” he writes.
Von Hugel marvels at the gums: “I prefer not to guess at the height of the trees, as I would be accused of exaggeration.”
“I will never forget the beautiful green of the ferns and the sun peeping through the tall trees falling on these as we sat beneath them.”
Fifty years after von Hugel’s reverie, a Tasmanian guide book describes that same effect.
“The base of Mount Wellington is also known for its lovely fern-tree gullies,” says the guide book, believed written by Tasmanian journalist Garnet Walch in about 1880.
“Here rise the interlacing fern fronds, tier on tier, almost shutting out the sunshine which here and there forces through, flecking the surface of the tiny stream, and splashing the moss-grown stems with gouts of gold; or a film of mist caught from a passing cloud may hang awhile, like a gossamer veil, amongst the ferns, and frost their fronds with diamonddust. All round is verdant life or soft decay — a harmony in russet-brown and green, a picture fresh from the Artist Nature’s hand.”
Naturalist Geoffrey Smith also raved about the ferns after walking up kunanyi just before World War I to study a rare Tasmanian mountain shrimp.
Hobart’s mountain has inspired countless authors, but Knowler’s recently published book could prove the most significant.
His poetic prose has a delicacy and modesty that is almost Zen in the way his gems of wisdom are always peripheral to what he purports to be observing.
He creates a delightful image of a playful meeting with a pair of homemaking honeyeaters.
Observing the male bird, Knowler feels a pain at the back of his head. It was the female honeyeater stealing a strand of his hair for her nest.
Knowler then stands perfectly still.
“After I had kept my hands to my sides for a few minutes, the female honeyeater flew down towards me, fluttering to the back of my head again, and I felt her land, her claws digging into my scalp. Next a sharp tug, and the sensation of hair, just a few strands, being tugged up by the roots. It was not painful really, more a tickle, and I struggled not to break out in laughter …”
The scene is reminiscent of Disney’s 1937 animated feature Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs when the fair maiden sings and dances with birds flying about her ears.
But Knowler is no princess. He is a bear of a man, who stands close to 190cm, with hands like clubs, a strong jaw and a mop of hair the envy of many men half his age.
I once recorded his infectious, sonorous laugh to use as a ring tone for my phone. Oh, to have had a secret viewing platform in the mountain bush and to have watched this giggling giant present his housewarming gift to his tiny feathered friends!