Curiosity Rocks, Lake Jindabyne

The Rocks have not looked like this since Lake Jindabyne started filling in 1967, it shows the impact of the current drought cycle that began in 1996 compare. The dam was at below 50% capacity when this was taken with a 19-35 mm lens and polarising filter. With only average snow falls this year, the inflow will have little impact after draw down for hydro power, irrigation and environmental flow for the Snowy River below the dam. more

Those snags in the water are festooned with line and lures, some of which are now part of my angling history display in the den. Some of the old classic lures which haven't seen the light of day for 20-30 years were cleaned up and given a swim with new hooks and still worked well.

I guess the Rocks looked much like this before the dam when the valley was a pioneer grazing community, home of The Man from Snowy River, and even before then when the Ngarigo people roamed here and visited the high country each summer for the bogong moth feasts.

As the weather heats up in October, the moths, Agrotis infusa, more migrate to the cooler mountains to aestivate, the reverse of hibernation, in their thousands, up to 17,000 per square metre, in the cool dark cracks and crevices in the great boulders and scree slopes. They were easily smothered with smoke and scraped off the rocks into nets and skins then carried back to camp, roasted and eaten whole or pounded to a paste, made into flat cakes and cooked on hot stones. High in protein and fat, their taste was described as rich and sweet and similar to roasted walnuts.

This abundance of food encouraged great inter-tribal gatherings for trade and exchange, feasting, ceremonies and dispute settlement. Early European observers commented on the people going up onto the mountains looking gaunt and miserable from the winter and returning after a few months sleek and fat, even the dogs were fat! Not forgetting that the mountain pigmy possum, Burramys, is also partial to a feed of bogongs.

Recently however it has emerged that the moths may contain traces of arsenic probably from insecticide absorbed by the larvae which feed on the roots of pasture plants, so recipes for bogong moth omelette should be treated with caution.

Spencers Creek, Rainbow Lake and Snow gums & granite at Charlotte Pass

No trip to the high country is complete without the pilgrimage up to Charlotte Pass; from our camp at Lake Jindabyne the road climbs up to the snow line and then through alpine tussock meadows, over Spencers Creek which is usually worth a stop for a few casts and lunch, past the track to Rainbow Lake, built by the early gold miners as a water supply, where the half hour walk is rewarded with a lovely fishing spot, past the parking bays where the skiers stop to put on snow chains, the road side guide posts change from white to orange and are two metres high for visibility in the snow, up to the highest point accessible by road. A boardwalk skirts these ancient gums and rocks leading to a small lookout with a view of Mt Kosciusko and the glacial tarn, Blue Lake, what a view.

The area around Charlotte pass is one of the last haunts of the Mountain pigmy-possum, Burramys parvus, once thought to be the rarest animal in the world, until it reappeared after 60 years of "extinction" with several populations found living within Kosiusko national park. It is the only specialised alpine and sub-alpine Australian mammal, although often sharing its habitat with the more widespread broad-toothed rat and antechinus. Burramys is the largest of the pigmy possums with an average weight rising from 40 grams to 70 grams as it fattens for winter, and grows to 28 cm including a prehensile tail of about 16 cm. more

The Dingo Tree and other dog tales

My son and I were returning from a long day's fly fishing to a remote Snowy Mountains stream when a massive gum tree loomed out of the darkness, its branches festooned with the bodies of dingoes shot by the local farmer to protect his stock. This folklore practice of hanging vermin as trophies and to deter their ilk probably dates from neolithic times when animals and crops were first being domesticated. Some dogs and pups had been hanging so long only the paws wrapped in fencing wire remain.

They appear to be alpine dingoes from the white colouration of those that still have any fur; further inland they tend red-ginger to sandy-yellow to match their environment, while black and grey also occur, possibly as a result of inter-breeding with domestic dogs.

Anyone who has experienced their long echoing howling often in chorus "where the air is cold as crystal and the white stars fairly blaze, at midnight in the cold and frosty air" while camped alone by a high country stream, will never forget it.

The dingo was brought to Australia in prehistoric times by Aboriginal people who used it to hunt game and as a blanket on cold nights, hence the saying 'three dog night' for a particularly cool evening.

In fact sleeping with dogs is recorded as early as the Natufian culture around 12,000 years ago at the origins of canine domestication. My old archaeology professor, Iain Davidson, notes that in the earliest sites of domestic animals in Palestine, Pakistan and the eastern Mediterranean, you get burials of people with dogs. And sleeping with pets is probably now more widespread than ever. More intimate relations have also been recorded.

Dingo remains appear in the archaeological record from around 3,500 years ago along with a new stone tool technology named the small tool tradition.

Dingo motifs occur widely in Aboriginal art and the dingo is a common character in Aboriginal mythology. In the Blue Mountains it is recorded as a food item after being cooked in a pit oven.

Dingoes soon spread across the continent, except Tasmania, and are are a major feral pest and threat to native animals and livestock, probably accounting for the extinction of the Thylacine, known as the marsupial wolf, on the mainland. The dingo never reached Tasmania because the land bridge over Bass Straight was flooded soon after 10,000 years B.P. as sea levels stabilised.

The species Canis lupus dingo evolved from the Indian wolf about 6,000 years ago and is genetically related to the wild dogs of Indonesia and the singing dogs of New Guinea. New genetic evidence continues to throw light on dingo origins.

the Dingo Tree

Breamar Bay, Lake Eucumbene

This is a silver lake fish flat line trolled on a still overcast day at Breamar Bay. These fatten and grow quickly on yabbies and smelt, cruise the depths in great schools and compete to spawn up the creeks and rivers in Autumn.

Snowy trips tend to be full on: predawn coffee with a shot of single malt to aid the circulation, dawn fly fishing from the bank or trolling from the boat weather permitting with a thermos of fortifying hot coffee, back to camp for breakfast and a warming coffee, out for more fishing, back for second breakfast and a fresh coffee, there might be a hatch on as the day warms so maybe try the dry fly, afternoon snack and a cooling lager to combat dehydration, try some down-rigging or a wet fly from the boat or maybe take a lunch pack and a cooler with a bottle of wine and check out the streams, back to camp in the late afternoon for tackle tinkering and liquid refreshment, a nap then a snack accompanied by a cleansing ale, fish the evening rise, open a bottle of red to have with dinner and relax at the camp discussing the day's events and planning the morrow, try a few casts from the bank while sipping on a glass of single malt, return to camp after a few hours and rug up for night fly fishing with torches, waders, tackle and a thermos of warming coffee, return about midnight, clean the catch and add them to the fish freezer, grab a few hours sleep and tackle up again for the dawn activity peak; with little time or inclination for personal grooming, a certain air of crustiness sets in, but the fish don't seem to mind.

I am reminded of the words of that great brother of the angle (although we know that does include sisters also) Isaac Walton from the Compleat Angler, 1653, who was well aware of the need for a fortifying breakfast and that a fellow's drink bottle should always be kept near to hand:

My honest scholar, it is now past five of the clock, we will fish till nine, and then go to breakfast. Go you to yon sycamore-tree and hide your bottle of drink under the hollow root of it; for about that time, and in that place, we will make a brave breakfast with a piece of powdered beef, and a radish or two that I have in my fish-bag; we shall, I warrant you, make a good, honest, wholesome, hungry breakfast, and I will then give you direction for the making and using of your flies; and in the meantime there is your rod, and line, and my advice is, that you fish as you see me do, and let's try which can catch the first fish.

So you see how little has changed in 350 years.

Quinkan Country - Kuku Yalangi

Australia provides the only example where the hunting-and-gathering way of life has dominated an entire continent up to modern times. This way of life continues to play a significant role in the occupation of the continent, particularly in its northern and central sections.

Australian archaeological sites provide a unique and important record of human occupation over a range of environments spanning at least 40,000 years. Such sites are particularly significant in documenting the special ways in which Aboriginal people adapted to changing climates, as well as to the wide range of environmental situations in different parts of the continent.

The Quinkan region, near Laura, in the south-east part of Cape York, contains many galleries of well-documented rock paintings in shelters associated with the cliffs and river valleys that dissect the sandstone plateaux. One of the sites, the so-called "Early Man" site, contains one of the oldest securely-dated rock art sites in Australia. The artwork at this site consists of pecked and engraved motifs, including animal tracks, sealed by an archaeological deposit dated by radiocarbon dating to over 15,000 years before present.

My son photographed this location on his recent solo expedition to Cape York.

Rock engravings, Carnarvon Gorge

Hidden in the rugged ranges of Queensland’s central highlands, Carnarvon Gorge features towering sandstone cliffs, vibrantly coloured side gorges, diverse flora and fauna and Aboriginal rock art. This is a powerful womens' fertility site - I'm not sure the word erotic even applies - ultimately it's the fertility of the earth that we are seeing here; note also the engraved net motif which occurs elsewhere within this massive art complex as a white painted image among red hand stencils.

Mt Banks walk, September 2007

The main view is from the walking track on the western approach to Mount Banks. In 1804 George Caley and his party approached from the eastern side, suffering from hunger and exhaustion they could continue no further and struggled back to Sydney. The Blue Mountains were to remain impenetrable to the colonists until 1813 when Gregory Blaxland, William Charles Wentworth and William Lawson followed the ridges not the valleys and found a route to the fertile inland west of the great dividing range.

The vegetation changes as you approach the mount from Montane heath on the exposed Narrabeen sandstone dominated by Eucalytpus stricta, allocasurina nana, Leptospermum attenuatum, Patersonia sericea (see flower pic above); to Moist basalt cap forest on the slopes, dominated by E. fastigata, we found a rich deep soil with wombat warrens and active birdlife.

The flesh of the common wombat (Vombatus ursinus) is described as tasting like ham and was a prized traditional food; children would be sent down the burrow feet first and would call and beat on the tunnel when they located an animal which was then dug out; they would also be night stalked and speared.

It is interesting that the word for wombat in the Dharug language of the lower Blue Mountains is wombat, although in Gundungurra, which was used in the upper mountains around Katoomba and in the high valleys, it is goolung. The inland Dharug language is related to the coastal language used around Sydney Cove in 1788, whose speakers, the Eora, acted as informants to the colonists and provided much of the local nomenclature, hence the animal's common name as we know it. If the settlers had asked the mountain people their name for the animal instead, we might now be calling them goolungs not wombats; not quite the same ring to it though...

Axe grinding grooves

Look closely and you can see the axe grinding grooves in the sandstone bedrock in one of the many dried out rain water pools adjacent to Mt Banks in the Blue Mountains National Park. Almost every depression contains multiple grooves which have been revealed by the continuing drought.

Water in the pools was used to whet the grinding process to polish and shape the axe blank and a man could sit for many hours sharpening a fine axe. Each groove represents the manufacture of a single stone axe head which was then hafted to a wooden handle. The earliest grooves may date from around 14,000 years before present. Stone axes continued to be made until soon after white settlement in 1788 when they were swiftly replaced by steel hatchets.

Mt Banks was named by the explorer George Caley in 1804 to honour his patron Sir Joseph Banks the noted English botanist, and marks the furthest westward point of his futile attempt to cross the Blue Mountains.

Prehistoric rock engraving

I rediscovered this hand sized circle engraved into the sandstone under a layer of rotting leaves on the cliff edge at Katoomba. After trying some ordinary shots for about half an hour, the late afternoon sun slanted through the cloud for a few seconds and revealed it in relief. The second photo shows the view from the cliff edge with the engraving in the foreground in front of the rocky spire. You can stand on top of the spire, carefully, and look out over the vast space to the cliffs on the other side of the valley at Sublime Point - breathtaking.

The Gundungurra people occupied this part of the Blue Mountains in the recent past and it may date from that period of more intense use beginning around 3-4,000 year ago, or from the end of the last ice age around 10,000 years before present when regular seasonal use appears in the archaelogical record or even from a period of earlier intermitent occupation around 22,000 years BP.

Engravings like this one were made with stone tools by first pecking a series of holes and then abraiding the connecting walls, you can see a small remaining section of the left. It is one of only two known circular stone engravings in the Blue Mountains and like many religious objects its simple form belies its deeply sacred nature.

Thredbo river fish

Thredbo River

The Thredbo is fed by snow melt from the Australian alps within Kosciusko National Park and is now a major spawning stream for fish from Lake Jindabyne, one may fish up and down the river all day and never see another human being, which is the way I like it.

I made this 7' 2 piece split Tonkin cane rod from an old 12' 3 piece rod my father brought out from England in the 1920s, the reel is a Hardy Princess from the 1950s, the floating line a traditional double taper Hardy, the fly a 14#red tag tied parachute style, the fish was released.

This trout is a dark river fish, insect fed, mature and muscular from a life in fast water; quite different from its fat, shiny silver cousins downstream in the lake that gorge on yabbies and cruise the thermocline, feeding open mouthed like whale sharks in the gloom, through clouds of plankton.