Ancestral Memories and a Gothic gully

A chilly Saturday morning, with snow on the mountain, frost on the garden and the Bridgewater Jerry winding its way down the river. I tossed a bucket of water over my car to clear ice from the windscreen and went to meet the rest of the group for a walk on private land on the approaches to Spring Hill. We parked beside the Colebrook Rd and headed off into the paddocks.

frost on the ferns

shadows on the frost

The first part of the walk followed the appropriately-named Serpentine Valley Creek.

We became very familiar with this creek as it wound its way back and forth across our path and we hopped, scrambled and splashed across it. There were also plenty of fences to climb.

the weathered sandstone hills closed in on each side

the valley floor remains in shadow, but sunlight catches the higher rocks

big rocks

 Really big rocks

more big rocks

past mid-day - and there's still frost in the shadows

Although this was generally a fairly level walk, the energetically inclined scrambled up hills to inspect particularly interesting caves

we stopped for lunch on a sunny hillside

The trouble with living alone is nobody else will make your lunch. Today I invented a new game - Schroedinger's Lunchbox. While I didn't look in it, my lunchbox contained roast fowl, venison pastries, delicate salads, charlotte russe and a small bottle of white wine. Alas, when I opened it I found this:

compulsory food shot 

Life is full of these little disappointments, but I wasn't going to let it spoil a lovely day.

Coffee in hand I followed several other people along a sheep track to a delightfully bijou cavelet a little higher up the hill.

I did remember to pick up my coffee mug

view from the cave

lone Blackwood

as if I don't have enough photographs of rocks and trees

FAQ of the day "Do we really have to cross it here, or can we get around on this side?" 

some cows wonder what we're doing in their paddock

the end of the valley in sight

At the end of the valley we joined the route of the convict-built coach road from Kempton to Lovely Banks. This runs through another rocky gorge called Murderers Gully, ostensibly where bushrangers held up the odd coach. It is certainly an isolated, unfriendly place to have to travel through and a great place for an ambush. In the 1820s Major Bell changed the route to somewhere near the present line of the Midlands Highway, through more open country, but some people still seem to have used the Serpentine Valley road.

entering Murderers Gully

we looked in vain for convict remains but alas, there is barely even a trace of the old road left

In Highway in Van Diemens Land, G. Hawley Stancombe wrote "Nearby and to the east lies the curious Serpentine Valley . . . It rejoined the Main Road at the foot of Spring Hill, but was too narrow for carts, being a narrow defile between steep cliffs."

Robert Knopwood travelled to the Tamar in 1814. He described Stony, or Serpentine Valley, as "a beautiful valley but should you meet with the natives you must inevitably loose [sic] your life the hills of each pass so high that they would kill you with stones."

Governor Macquarie went this way when he travelled on horseback from Hobart-Town to Port Dalrymple in 1811. With a  cavalcade of officials and a military escort to accompany them, they would have had little fear of attack.

up another optional  hill

a magnificent cave at the top

and the den of a Tasmanian Devil

One of my forebears was the District Police officer at Kempton (then Green Ponds) in the 1830s; he would have been familiar with the road through this dark valley.  Another hired out his bullock team to Governor Macquarie for his second trip to Port Dalrymple in 1821.

Many of my ancestors lived at Ross, Oatlands, Jericho and Parattah and some travelled frequently to Hobart.

I tried to imagine my great-great-great-great grandmother here in a small horse-drawn conveyance late on a winter afternoon; what warm clothing would she be wearing? Would she have a soft possum-skin rug to wrap around her knees? And would she and her companion be urging their pony to trot faster, fearing that at any moment some rough character or a group of aborigines would leap down upon them from the enclosing hills?

We had no such things to bother us. We encountered nothing more terrifying than a large black bull who was not too sure whether we should be in his territory, but did no more than snort and paw the ground as we passed.

there is some evidence of roadworks here

the bull didn't seem exactly overjoyed to see us

the end of the gully must have been a welcome sight for coachmen

looking back up Murderers Gully from the safety of open country

the moon in the early afternoon

The Falls in Winter

Winter in Tasmania is THE BEST time to go walking; the days are short, but the sun shines and the sky is blue. There is a crispness in the air that makes you want to get out and stretch your legs.

Today's stroll from Bennetts Road to Kermandie Falls along the old Hartz Track certainly stretched everything.

Here is the walk description from the Hobart Walking Club circular:
This is the middle section of the historic Kermandie Track which goes from Geeveston to Hartz Peak. Damaged forestry roads have been a problem so our approach to this middle section ending at Kermandie Falls will be from Bennetts Road going downhill to the falls. When we are feeling weary, we will return uphill to the cars. The track goes through magnificent forest with mosses, fungi and even lyrebirds. The final kilometre of the track has a number of fallen trees to negotiate but the forests and the falls make it all worthwhile.

Every word of it is true, right down to the lyrebirds - not only spotted crossing the road as we drove into the forest, but keeping us entertained with a rich variety of melodious calls.

plunging into the forest from Bennetts Road

Many of the logs we encountered had been cut nicely - but many more had not. For some reason every photograph I took of people climbing over logs had a bad case of camera wobble, so you'll just have to believe me when I tell you much of the walk consisted of crawling under or scrambling over fallen logs of varying degrees of slipperiness and complexity.

A stretch of cutting grass and mud

Some very soggy button grass

there's still ice on the water . . .

and frost on the button grass where the sun has only just reached it

We are back in the forest

out of the creek and over a log

late in the season, but a bit of Climbing Heath (Prionotes Cerenthoides) is still hanging in there

morning tea

I believe there was once a tramway for hauling logs through here

Here and there a huge stump still shows a scarf cut by early twentieth century loggers

this stump has built itself a palisade

for the fungi lovers

Leaving the main track, we plunge off down a steep slope to the falls. Lots of tree roots to slip on, plenty of things to scramble over, under and through.


Towards the bottom an even steeper, slippery track along the side of a deep, dark gully brings us to our destination.

lunch at Kermandie Falls

tangled logs at the foot of the falls

Terrifying to imagine the force that swept these logs into the valley.


Having lunched, we retraced our steps. Up the hills, over and under the logs, across the creeks, through the mud . . .

emerging from the forest - afternoon sun on the button grass

Hartz Peak

It was a welcome sight - our cars waiting for us at the end of the track. And the afternoon sun showed traces of snow still lingering on Hartz Peak.

What a wonderful winter walk. Now for a long, hot bath with lots of scented bubbly stuff and a good book.