A Different Sort of Tasmanian Beach: Hard, hidden and hostile
Tinderbox Hills Trail: signage delineating the peninsula
The Tinderbox Peninsula, approximately 5.5 km long, points south east and rises steeply from the water. It’s forested with eucalypts that make their living on hungry soil and its cliffs make the Alum Cliffs look positively inviting. What’s more, they shoulder into at least three bodies of water: the Derwent, the D’Entrecasteaux Channel and North West Bay. I think it’s reasonable to add a fourth because water pays no heed to lines in the sand. Storm Bay is supposed to come to a halt a tiny bit south at Dennes Point, North Bruny Island but I think it exercises free will in this regard. Tinderbox is not outside its orbit.
If you take the lovely walk along the Tinderbox Hills Trail (see sign above), following the backbone of the peninsula the views of all this water – all the same water really – are pretty spectacular.
Looking across the Derwent, South Arm Peninsula and Ralphs Bay to Frederick Henry Bay from the Tinderbox HillsThe south west view to Tasman Peninsula from the Tinderbox Hills
South Africa (once my homeland) has one vast and magnificent peninsula, the Cape Peninsula, which is justly famous. There, mountains plummet into the sea. But Tasmania is an island of water bodies, peninsulas, isthmuses, mountains, lakes and islands. And there is quite a lot that is special about this particularly scenic peninsula. The white gums and blue gums that push their roots deep into the usually dry ground provide a livelihood for the forty spotted pardalottes, green rosellas and swift parrots. These trees are an endangered habitat and it makes for endangered birds.
This is a coastline I’ve mostly sailed along, both in calms and in gales. When you’re sailing along these Tasmanian beaches and the wind is from the west you can find yourself in a wind shadow along here. Conversely if it’s whipping across from the east beware this lee shore. One wintery night stands out. We’d been becalmed and then, passing Blackmans Bay a sinister, warm wind flowed over the beach and curled around the corner, a portent that as a rookie with a pretty sketchy knowledge of winds and landforms I noted with unease. We were becalmed again off Tinderbox, left far behind by the rest of the fleet, but what, two of us had been wondering, might be awaiting us in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel when we emerged from the shelter of the cliffs beside us? It had to be, and it was, total pandemonium.
Birngana off Passage Point, Tinderbox Peninsula
Conversely, on the day this photo was taken I wasn’t on Birngana, the boat I was crewing on some time later. I was at Boat Sales, finalising the purchase of Samos, but after that was done I drove along the Peninsula to see how the long distance race was panning out. Birngana was in the vicinity of Passage Point, heading for home and an easy win. We were well positioned to win the whole series but a week or two later disaster struck and there would be no more racing.
On board they could see the cliffs and the beaches, which from the road aren’t visible at all. They could see the cliff top houses in their spacious grounds – although, focussed on victory perhaps they were not looking. And there was one building that would certainly pass unnoticed, no matter how hard they looked for it.
Some people build themselves castles (even in Tasmania) but a South African millionaire decided to build himself ‘a boozy bunker’ – a tunnel and a cave worth millions, behind the cliffs – as you do. A place to party, to drink and to feast. There’s a door (disguised by a veneer of sandstone) that opens on to a rocky platform. You’d never know it was there.
And here’s another thing. For a long time it was supposed that the waters of the Derwent feed the D’Entrecasteaux Channel but actually, it’s mostly the other way around – channel waters predominantly feed the Derwent. (This is something Christine Coughenowr, Manager of the Derwent Estuary Program) explained to members of the Cruising Yacht Club of Tasmania at a meeting recently.)
Another observation from sailing this shoreline – as you enter the relatively small opening to the channel between Tinderbox and North Bruny Island, the depth decreases quite dramatically, just briefly. Imagine a different geography, with Tinderbox and the island connected. During the last Ice Age you could have strolled across to Bruny Island, rather than paddling your canoe. Bruny would have been a long, ‘isthmused’ extension of the Tinderbox Peninsula.
Along the Derwent River side of the peninsula the Tinderbox beaches are mostly inaccessible, mostly cobbled. They are my kind of beach – the type you have to go searching for.
Blackmans Bay: just south of Kingston Beach between Boronia Hill to the north and Flowerpot Hill to the south, is a long curve of pale sand surrounded by suburb. A rivulet enters the beach at each end and the presence of a stormwater outlet defiles an otherwise beautiful beach. Yachts moor beneath Flowerpot Hill.
Blackmans Bay Beach
We sat in the Beach Cafe looking out over the river on a cold, bleak day, talking about memory. Afterwards I stepped outside and surveyed the beach. There was still time enough for some exploring and so I walked the extent of the beach. The traffic has been slowed, native vegetation has been planted, the community has crafted tiles and inserted them into the pavement. They’ve beautified the esplanade and when I was here last week (May 2016) approximately 200 silver gulls, an oyster catcher and a pacific gull had the beach to themselves.
The view over the beach from Boronia Hill
Boronia Hill: The cliffs, the rocks and the blow hole
Boronia Hill gifts Kingston Boronia Beach with its little penguins and gifts Blackmans Bay a blow hole. I’ve walked the cliff top path between Powell Street and the beach on more than one occasion, gazing out over the river, peering down in search of this blow hole thinking I was drinking everything in.
Actually, I wasn’t.
On a warm, blue day I walked the rocks. Surfers were taking the clear, cold breaks and small parties of people were spread across the accommodating boulders enjoying a champagne Saturday. My walk north towards Boronia Beach was stymied by a gash too wide to jump. On the other side a group of girls were scuba diving off the extensive rock platform I’d seen from above.
This had to be where the blow hole was – and so I headed up to the wooded cliff top again, past the bird kindly signs reminding that ‘the sniff of a dog can snuff out a family’. So can human feet, I thought, attempting to stick to the path. This time I was alarmed to discover a man sitting on a precarious outcrop of rock on the wrong side of the safety fence. Worried about his intentions, I engaged him in conversation and was relieved when he climbed off his rock (‘just enjoying the view’) to come and show me the blowhole.
The view north along the cliffs
‘It’s right beneath your feet,’ he said and, puzzled, I walked a short distance into the remnant bushland with him. Maybe this was why I’d never noticed it from the water?
I don’t know that it’s actually a blow hole anymore. It’s more of a sea arch (the bit I’ve walked on several occasions) and behind it is a long drop down to the tiny cobbled beach building up inside it. Having found it, I then became aware of the signage pointing to it off Blowhole Road.
The Blackmans Bay blow hole (currently a sea arch)
When I returned to this area the other day I discovered that the corners of this beach hold their secrets close. I found a little rivulet here, a muddy little trench running through grass below a eucalypt canopy of black gums that I’d overlooked on previous walks. This small trail through the Mary Knoll Reserve has a minty fragrance and it’s the teensiest remnant of Blackmans Bay’s native vegetation, a mere 1 km long stretch available for the endangered swift parrot to attempt to sustain itself in this Hobartian suburb. Understandably, with so much of its habitat logged and cleared around the island, it’s having a hard time and has just been added to the endangered species list. The interpretive signboard announced that the ‘reserve frames one of the last natural watercourses in the Blackmans Bay area’ but it never calls this shy and tiny rivulet by its name.
Flowepot Point and Beach T 468
Flowerpot Point extends 200 m east at the southern end of the bay, with beach T468 located immediately south of the point in a small rocky embayment. The beach is 200m long and consists of a steep cobble and boulder beach bordered by the point and rock platforms, together with a central rocky bluff and outcrop. Steep vegetated bluffs rising to 40 m in the south back the beach, with bluff top houses behind. ~ Andrew Short (2006).
The tide was high but I saw three figures just beyond the boathouse, a mother trailed by small children, picking their way back over the rocks below the hill and so I waited to talk to them.
They were avid beach adventurers and knew the area well and so I asked about the beaches of the Tinderbox Peninsula, further south. They mentioned Sleepo’s and one called Fisho’s and talked about a rocky beach beyond this point. After we parted company I retraced their footsteps, past the boat house and the yachts and out along the rocky point noticing some beautiful sandstone rock formations and tessellated platforms beneath the crumbling cliffs.
Patterns in the sandstone, Flowerpot Point
There was a little path up a slight cliff edge at the very tip of the point, and then a small rock formation formed an island just offshore. In company I’d have swung around the end of the point but the gap was a bit risky and if I’d fallen the tide might have collected me up before anyone noticed. I had to wait for a spring tide when the reef lay fully exposed to walk around to an exquisite cobbled beach fringed with forest. This secret beach held far more interest to me than the main beach. There were houses visible on the clifftops yet it retained a sense of quite intense quietude and mystery, as if moments before my arrival a small band of Mouheneer had disappeared around the far corner and the idea of tall ships sailing down the river was beyond the realms of possibility.
View from the Suncoast Track of beach T 468
Flowerpot Hill and the Suncoast Headlands Track
When I first used to come to Flowerpot Hill it was a whole lot more rural. Friends lived in a small house full of books and art on a big block with magnificent views. Now small lanes between a mass of houses link the roadways on the hill and lead walkers on to the Suncoast Track from many different directions.
The dogs and I last came here on a quiet week day to walk the Suncoast Headlands Track again – I’d walked it with a friend long ago. We drove there taking careful note of rivulets and the catchments I knew we were passing through and the ones I didn’t. Marina Abramaviks was talking about her art on the radio, the silent hours of communing with a donkey, and long hours of shared contemplation with the people who came and sat in front of her as part of museum exhibitions. I wondered yet again – how best does a person commune with a beach?
This thin ribbon of a track is scantily bordered by remnant native vegetation – casurinas and understory species, but the path is beautiful, with expansive views of the estuary and Storm Bay and human domesticity at your shoulder. As well as the long views you can also peep down and see Flowerpot Hill’s two cobbled beaches, the one I’d visited and the next one south. At times you walk alongside fences, at other times you almost feel you are in someone’s garden. Small signs erected by a local (an avid sailor, I’m pleased to say) asked others to come and help with weed control in this vicinity.
Where the houses end on the southern slope there’s a great grassy expanse that sweeps down to a copse of casurinas through which you can glimpse the Lucas Point Sewage Plant. This charges the atmosphere unpleasantly and so we turned back.
I met a Ten Pound Pom as I returned to Blackmans Bay beach. She lives near the spot where the bulrushes grow and the dinghies lie upside down on the grass. She told me how much the beach has changed over the decades. She said it’s a lot narrower than it used to be and put it down to repeated storm damage.
Together we stood there and regarded the beach and contemplated its future.
Source: Short, A.D. 2006. Beaches of the Tasmanian coast and islands. Sydney University Press, Sydney.
Kingston has three beaches. Boronia, tucked away behind cliffs is the most southern one.
Looking back at Kingston Beach from the Boronia Point track
May 2015
‘It’s a nudist beach,’ someone told me.
‘We’ve kayaked past it,’ the geo said.
‘Heaps of sea dragons. Brilliant for scuba diving!’
Whatever, the beach was there and I wanted to explore it. On foot. Especially because of a blog post and what the ornithologists had told me long ago – and then, when the time came, I totally forgot the most interesting thing about Boronia Beach. I was too engrossed in the place itself.
I had already had an encounter with Boronia Point. One Saturday, as we milled around behind the starting line with the fleet of yachts in the long distance race, I was surprised to discover that one buoy would be off that point.
‘Where’s that?’ some of the crew wondered, and S rushed off to confirm it on the chart. I planned to take a good look at the beach as we laid the line to that buoy but a great gust of wind swept down the valley and gave us a whack right at the opportune moment. We heeled with remarkable swiftness. There were yells to reef along with the arrival of that particular intensity that sharpens focus when the mast leans down to kiss the water and it’s all action stations on board. That’s why I totally forgot to study the beach.
This day there was a lot of canine energy going on as we three urban explorers (two of us canine) headed off along the track, starting on Boronia Point behind the Kingston Sailing Club, where Boronia Hill descends down to the water. They pulled me along, at first along the cliff top path under gums and casuarina trees. There are paths and wooden steps leading down to the track from gardens and hill top roads, and there is a small wooden bridge. On this day music drifted out an open window. Someone was practising at their piano, and an elderly man sat on a bench where trees give way to a swathe of grass, absorbing the long views north over Kingston and Tyndall Beaches and across the river to the South Arm Peninsula. The river gleamed with patches of white foam and still water. (It’s worth mentioning that rather sadly the bushland of the point is separated by a thick strip of houses and roads from the lovely top of Boronia Hill where there are tracks through remnant dry sclerophyll forest and delicious views from a grouping of large lichen dappled boulders beneath the trees.)
Soon we arrived at a fence, a gate and a sign saying reserve; no dogs, not cats, no camping – and there we turned back. I’d known this would be the case and I didn’t mind at all. This track was a real find. It made me feel expansive. I was happy to walk it any time.
THE SECOND EXPEDITION
Snow was forecast and although the wild wind had calmed it wasn’t until I reached Kingborough that the sky turned blue. Again the beauty. Again the piano music . I had a vague notion of what to expect beyond the gate because I’d explored the point using Google Earth the previous night, seeking a connecting path to Blackmans Bay further south but it was still a surprise to find that quite quickly after the gate the path started to descend. There are cyprus pines, the small cove of Boronia Beach opens up and the cliff line comes into view. Honestly, my first thought was Mama Mia! This could be a beach on a Greek island. Clearly a conventional thought – I’ve now seen is described this way many times. (But the sky has to be blue. I brought my sister here one overcast day not so long ago and it felt uncharacteristically sombre.)
The great view east: South Arm Peninsula hiding Ralphs Bay from sightLooking south with the Tinderbox Peninsula in the distanceBoronia’s cliffs. Not short on character
Some of the beach was in shadow but I had it all to myself (not a nudist in sight) as I wandered around absorbing its serenity. I discovered a manmade rock wall, quite low, just where there’s a rock platform, and I praised the cliffs for their beauty but mostly I was trying to find a way to walk to Blackmans Bay along the rocks.
There’s a small overhang below these cliffs (which are themselves full of incipient caves) and a crevice which stopped my progress. No route south, it seems, but as I walked back through the clearing I saw I now had company. Two people were walking stealthily and silently across the slope, bending down periodically to peer at the ground with torches. On their advice, I took a path that led me through a small gate, past a tap and into someone’s garden. Dead end. I turned back and discovered they had gone. Next I tried the path that led directly up the hill. It emerged through another gate (a weakness for this reserve – two gates) and onto a long dirt road, rather beautiful.
This sign reads no dogs, no cats, no camping… and people! Shut the gate!Jindabyne Road above the beach. Pony trap and picnic basket required.
I met a man collecting armloads of eucalyptus bark in a paddock on the other side of the road and somewhere around here the Boronia Country House Hotel once stood. Curzona Allport sketched it. You can see this print and a couple of postcards at the State Library of Tasmania. Back in the early 1900s people liked to take the ferry that docked at the Kingston Beach jetty and visit this hotel for refreshments, just like at Crayfish Point. A garden with rhododendrums and dreamy views. But I was more conscious of the cyprus pines and the casurinas that had dropped curled tendrils all over the paths, the wallabies that scattered as I made my way along the paths and evidence of middens, testifying to a pleasantly sheltered spot to light a fire and enjoy the river’s bounty before ships began coming up the river.
Making like a swimming pool
Looking north up the Derwent River from Boronia Beach
It was only when I was heading home (through that first gate into this reserve – left open by the party of three I’d just past – that I remembered that the ornithologists had told me that Boronia Beach is the home of one of the last remaining rookeries of little penguins on the Derwent. Even the sight of that suspicious couple with their tiny torches, walking where, ethically, they should not have been, peering down burrows, risking putting their troublemaking feet right through them – even this had not triggered memory. But what I did remember more clearly was a blog post written by Mike Litzow, an Alaskan cruiser who liked visiting this beach with his family while living in Hobart for a year. Someone had not shut the gate, he wrote – and here I just have to say how sickened I am by how many gates to reserves along the Derwent I find left open. Who are these people??
I’m letting Mike tell the story of blood and carnage. His story testifies yet again to our great disconnect from nature. Here’s the link. It starts with the death of one little penguin, ends with the death of more than 20 and the comments are worth reading too.
The rookeries around the Derwent are very small and very endangered. At Boronia I’ve witnessed the gates left open, human feet trampling and, on my visit there earlier this month, people camping.
Three of us rode from the mountain to Kingston Beach, land once shared by the Mouheneer and the Nuenone but now an ever expanding suburb south of Hobart.
The rivulet track was a loose, slithery surface beneath the forest canopy, Strickland Avenue a fabulous swoop, the linear park serene, Sandy Bay Road provided a cycle lane, the Long Beach precinct a bounty of birds – swift parrots, galahs and cockatoos in the tall eucalypts, Taroona a snack and Bonnet Hill the exhilaration of views and the final descent down to Tyndall Beach. We crossed the footbridge, rode along the Esplanade and headed on to the sailing club beneath Boronia Hill.
Kingston Beach lies between Bonnet Hill and Boronia Hill and it is beautiful and charismatic. Unlike many of the pocket beaches of the Derwent that come and go with tides and the seasons and are hidden away down side roads, it’s a focal point. It has a eucalypt lined esplanade, a road running past it, beachside houses and a small but popular café strip.
The beach lies open to Storm Bay, staring it straight in the face like an ocean beach and small waves lure people into the water even on some of the coldest days. The fetch is wide here and as Sydney to Hobart yacht races are often lost or won on this last stretch up the fickle Derwent, it pays to know the way landforms shape the flow of wind and water.
The beach has its offshoot, Tyndalls Beach, running below Alum Cliffs, it has Browns River, arriving from its source on the mountain, visible in the background, by way of the Summerleas Rd valley as well as via Vincents Rivulet that flows along Proctors Road beneath Albion Heights. And it is a generous urban stretch of blond sand that stops at a rock platform where the sailing club is based, just below the headland of Boronia Hill.
Brown’s River separates the beach into two. Kingston Beach is on the right
But I’m interested in things less obvious and so to ponder the beach and its environment I went walking with my canine companions, down a path whose sign I’d previously ignored.
If Kingston Beach is the beautiful extrovert in the room, then the myriad of rivulets in its hinterland are shy and unassuming – Fisher, Coffee, Dunns Creek and the like. Whitewater Creek, while actually bearing signage and showing evidence of community adoption, is mysterious, and on first appearance gives every impression of being the skinny, bruised and battered victim in the corner.
We walked beside it from the Summerleas Road entry point, across a small bridge where, curiously, the rivulet goes two separate ways, and followed its leftward flow until we reached the entrance to an underpass, where signs amongst planted native vegetation explained that the pool in front of me was part of Kingston’s stormwater treatment plan. But the walk was desultory. Running behind houses on one side and the weed-choked creek on the other, it struck me that if there was an emergency number you could dial for a creek then I would be ringing it. Even the dogs seemed subdued. This was no path for an uplifting walk, I decided, but I would come back and ride it.
The next day I was back with my bicycle and the stretch we had walked (seemingly flat) turned out to be a long, descending gradient. With the wind at my back I was through that ugly underpass in no time at all, and continued my descent into Kingston.
And this was where Whitewater Creek showed me a different face. That stormwater pool was the first of many and when I crossed the highway and cycled down a path I’d never noticed before, I found myself weaving around a series of beautiful ponds, happily enveloped in flourishing native vegetation that local birds, including Tassie hens, were enjoying. There were sculptures, but most heart-warming was that the Kingston community was taking creative and active steps to make sure that the water spilling out of the creek and into Brown’s River was clean when it got there. I thought about poor, filthy, Sandy Bay rivulet. If only it, too, had this sort of support. Was there not scope for a small stormwater pool to be created somewhere along its urban extent?
I stopped for an ice cream at a café on the beach, then rode back into the wind and through the ponds and under the highway to the point where the creek diverged.
The rivulet and the track crossed Summerleas Road and I figured I must be headed towards the Fork in the Road. Tassie hens, a curious horse and browsing cattle turned out to be more visible than the rivulet itself, particularly as the path began to climb and close in on the highway. Beside a bridge it veered right and dropped me on to Spring Farm Road but I remained puzzled. All the other rivulets I’ve encountered take the most efficient course to the estuary but this wayward rivulet seemed to be having it both ways, travelling across country into the Blackmans Bay catchment.
I discovered that Whitewater Creek has a deep and ancient secret as the Mines Department discovered when surveying for a dam on its upper reaches in the 1970s. They discovered back in the there Tertiary era, far below the present horizon, another creek flowed beneath it in a ‘buried valley filled with sand, clay and gravel’. They traced it to Pritchards Road where it joined with an eastern tributary valley discovered in 1969. From here the water flowed south through the saddle between Doctors and Little Parks Hills (new names to me) down to North West Bay.
Well, who’d have thought?
‘From what had been up to this date strictly a dam site investigation widened in an attempt to trace the main Tertiary valley south to North West Bay and the two tributary valleys upstream into the two reservoir areas of the proposed dam sites on Whitewater Creek (Dept of Mines, 1979).’
Apart from learning a little more about the geology and geography behind Kingston Beach, I discovered the importance of geological surveys before you build a dam – leakage can be caused by an unfriendly geological substrate, like the faults this area is full of, and can render your dam useless.
I turned to my maps and saw that flowing south, it meets up with Boddys Rivulet to bring life to Leslie Vale, before flowing ultimately into North West Bay. Here were secrets I hadn’t known but now the course of the rivulets down from the mountain and the remnant vegetation around Brown’s River inform my view of what this landscape once looked like.
Brown’s River: the view north, an indicator of the forests and wetlands that once inhabited the floodplain behind the beach
Source: Tasmania. Dept of Mines. 1979. Whitewater Creek dam sites, Kingston and the Tertiary channels of the Kingston-Margate area. (Geological Survey ; Paper No. 3)
Looking north towardsHinsby Beach from the Alum Cliffs track
I had an assignation with Mr Brown’s River and so it seemed quite appropriate to invite him to accompany me, if only in mind, on the cliff top walk above the Alum Cliffs one day late last year.
That day I’d paused at the beginning of the track, surveying the view from a picnic table above the cliffs while chatting to locals, but mainly, I was quizzing Mr Brown, a drop out medical student from the University of Edinburgh who was thinking about all things floral while his fellow students focussed on cadavers, and whose enquiring mind and botanical obsession had, with a little help from Joseph Banks, brought him here aboard the Investigator in 1801, on Matthew Flinders expedition to discover whether New Holland was one island or many.
There was a breeze, I was ostensibly alone and a single yacht had the white capped river to itself as it headed up river just like the Investigator, which spent some time in the D’Entrecasteaux and the Derwent. Accordingly, Robert Brown spent a lot of time collecting plant specimens from Table Mount (aka kunanyi / Mount Wellington) and along the river, encountering and following the course of Brown’s River in the process. These are my tramping grounds, but on the voyage out he’d visited another of my favourite haunts – Cape Town, where he climbed Table Mountain several times and enjoyed botanising in the fynbos and across the surroundings slopes, including Devil’s Peak.
Defeated by the boulders below the cliffs (see previous blog) it was a whole lot easier rambling along a well formed path that often felt more bushland than clifftop as it wove through eucalypts (silver peppermint and blue gum) and banksias, past epacris in bold red flower, with the companionable little sounds of small birds calling. It’s a sunny and shadowed path with a faintly minty fragrance in places, that occasionally deposits one at the cliff edge for filtered views across to Trywork and Gorringes Points and the long vista through the gap into Ralphs Bay as well as north and south along the river’s two shores. The Iron Pot was visible out towards Storm Bay. I had no doubt that samples of the plants I was walking amongst were included in the 3000 specimens my companion collected and that made their way back to the UK on the very damp Investigator. A conversation between Robert Brown and Charles Darwin, I decided, would have been interesting. They were both lateral thinkers with acute observational skills of the natural world, including geology who spent time here that led to new insights.
Rock platform below the cliffs
These cliffs, where Bonnet Hill abruptly meets the estuary, are unstable and prone to collapsing into the river along their fractures and faults. They’re siliceous and weather from their greenish-grey to a far paler white, patterned with hues of oranges and lemons. Sometimes oxides and pyrites stain their fractures and as they’re composed of Fern Tree Permian siltstone they occasionally bear fossils. I sauntered over all this rich geology not much thinking about it except to wonder, as I walked by the junction of the Brickfields Track, whether the alum they hold ever found its way into the tanneries that used to line the Hobart Rivulet and made it whiffy back in the early years of settlement. Robert Brown came from Edinburgh, that cold city of stone and so it’s not surprising that geological samples, the substrate on which plants grow, and which moss, a favourite plant of his, is prone to nibble, were among his samples too.
I crossed three small rivulets by way of wooden bridges and passed a few other people out walking that day but otherwise had the friendly solitude of the forest all to myself until, quite unexpectedly, I was out of the forest and crossing a broad and sunny expanse of grassy reserve with lovely views from the bench down to the beach where people walked their dogs oblivious to the fact that they were being observed from up on high. I clambered down the steep steps to the beach. I had left Taroona behind and was now in Kingston, originally known as the Brown River Settlement.
Brown’s River, or Promenalinah, as it was named by the Aborigines who enjoyed its bounty before their lives were rudely disrupted, divides Kingston Beach into two shifting halves and although it’s really a single beach the northern section that has gone to the dogs in the best possible way (although shorebirds would disagree), is known as Tyndall Beach. This section is continuously shape shifting in the most beautiful way. There’s a small cove in the northernmost corner tucked behind a lovely rock formation, it is fringed by vegetation and eucalypts as opposed to the houses and shops along the main beach but we walk it with a heavy footstep and so there are few shorebirds.
Brown’s River (upstream)
Tyndall Beach looking north
After lingering at the cove, I chose the narrow path that winds through the strip of vegetation at the foot of the cliffs in deference to my companion. A fair number of his new discoveries from this area turned out to have been discovered already by La Billardière on D’Entrecasteaux’s 1792 expedition. The two men didn’t just have botany in common. Conversely, La Billardiere started off with botany but later qualified in medicine.
I crossed the casual parking area between park and beach. Time was against me but the northwesterly was due to swing south westerly so at least I’d have the wind at my back on the return walk. And so there I paused on the footbridge over Mr Brown’s River contemplating both it and the floodplain it has carved between Bonnet Hill and Boronia Point. The tannin in the river makes it whisky coloured. It rises on kunanyi and I’ve followed much of its course, from above Silver Falls, down to the estuary. It runs narrow and free down the slopes (although some of its water is detoured into Hobart’s water supply) and then it weaves through its floodplain.
Robert Brown found the river when Aborigines still camped here and enjoyed the river’s largess and the hunting to be had behind the beach. There’s still a remnant wetland and there’s still the remnant bush I’d walked through, but my eyes took in an urban landscape – houses smothering the floodplain, and houses on the surrounding hills with their gobsmacking views. Looking down from the Channel Highway, the clubhouse of the golfcourse is the Red House built by John Lucas way back when. He was a a member of the first settler family to acquire land here. They picked up several hundred acres of land around Brown’s River and it’s on this land that, in about 1808, Kingston began to take shape. (For a historical perspective see the photos below). He found other things to, being the first person to describe a living cell nucleus and observing the tiny random movements of miniature particles down his microscope. You learned about this in Biology. It’s named after him – Brownian motion.
I retraced my steps, trailing my companion but mingling with modern day locals using the track. With the arrival of the south westerly the river grew wilder and the forest canopy transformed into an orchestra of wind instruments. I hoped the trees would hold.
I once took a walk in Eastern Turkey with a friend. That path was the only link between two villages. It crossed a shallow river that my friend traversed on a donkey. There were caves where hermits had once meditated; the way we were walking was thousands of years old. The Alum Cliff track links Taroona and Kingston but it is purely recreational. It’s quite possible that Aboriginal feet originally made it but I don’t know this to be a fact. Even though these days the purpose of footpaths has diminished, in the same way that arriving at an anchorage by boat is so different in feeling from arriving by car, so is it different arriving at a well known destination by foot.
There are at least two suburban developments in Hobart that would have thrown Robert Brown into an apoplectic fit behind his desk in Joseph Banks’s library (he became its librarian). One is Tolmans Hill, completely natural not that long ago. The profound shock when the first house appeared up there! The dismay as the suburb grew. The other is the small enclave above Tyndall Beach that doesn’t really belong anywhere but has further eroded the landscape Robert Brown found so rich and strange. This used to be native bush but subdivisions continue to happen on Bonnet Hill and in the fullness of time the land still open land looks set to disappear.
Historic Photos of Brown’s River (Source: LINC Tasmania)
They were mine for paddling, and kayak along these cliffs I did, before discovering sailing and long before embarking on this humble little project. Now, standing on Hinsby Beach gazing south along their tall and shadowed extent, I wondered about the possibility of actually walking along their base. I’d once assumed the Alum Cliff track that begins at the bottom of Taronga Road on Bonnet Hill was the only way. Now I was not so sure.
Alum Cliffs from the path above Hinsby Beach
The coastline south from Hinsby Beach to Kingston is known as Alum Cliffs; the hill’s abrupt and perpendicular descent into the river. There is no beach at its feet, just rocks and boulders, as well as a rocky platform containing fossils beneath Taronga Road (a cul de sac that runs from the Channel Highway down to the edge of the cliffs not too far north of the point where the highway – in reality a narrow semi rural road – begins descending down to Kingston Beach).
Rocky platform, Alum Cliffs
I knew about this fossilised platform from chats with locals on Hinsby Beach and from Sue Mount’s article. They said that once it was possible to reach it on foot but a local landholder had built a fence that now excluded the public. Did they mean from their beach, or, in hindsight, did they misunderstand me and mean from Taronga Road? Exactly how you accessed this platform wasn’t too clear but I was determined to try.
Many years ago, when I was deeply into archaeology I walked the Brickfields Track (also accessed on Bonnet Hill) with the Tasmanian Archaeology Society. The Taronga Road area has mudstone, dolerite and a patch of quality sandstone along its ridge and is strewn with evidence of early colonial activities.
On that walk we came across remnants of the Brown’s River Probation Station (1840s) where over three hundred predominantly road building convicts once lived. There were the remains of a kiln used for brickmaking. Bits of the station are scattered through local gardens now and there’s a house with a swimming pool built into the old quarry. As the years have unfolded some of the bricks once part of structures or left lying about have been removed and incorporated into new structures or lost altogether. Some have no doubt ended up in the river. On my earlier walks I’d encounter red bricks remoulded into satisfyingly round and textured shapes by water.
On the Channel Highway, close to Taronga Road, there is still evidence of an old convict built wall. Some of that high quality sandstone (by Tasmanian standards) from the Taronga Ridge became the Shot Tower, locally famous for being the last remaining circular standstone shot tower in the world, built in 1870, almost twenty years after the probation station had become redundant. It, too, eventually became redundant but in its heyday was used for producing lead shot.
Kayaking, you can get much closer to the cliffs than when you’re on a yacht, although it can be unpleasant when the waves rebound strongly off them. On a yacht it’s best to leave a little seaway, especially along a lee shore, and when I pass by Alum Cliffs these days I’m usually sailing, observing these dark cliffs rising from the water, more wildness in the city precincts, topped as they are by communities of trees and shrubs forming a satisfying stretch of bushland.
There was a strong north westerly wind blowing on the first day I first set off to uncover a route along the cliffs from Taroona itself and I was feeling uncharacteristically despondent, in need of an activity to blast that mood away. Sue Mount’s article seemed to be a hint that the Alum Cliffs track had once started at the right of way onto the beach at lllawong Crescent. I’d looked at other brochures and I’d looked on Google Maps. None of them show it starting at this point.
But still I searched. I returned to the start of the Hinsby Beach track at Wendell Crescent. I walked down it and saw that there was in fact a path to the right that went along the very edge of the cliff, somewhat steep and slippery. I got as far as a patch of escaped daisies from the garden above. They were growing over the track and to proceed I had to grab hold of vegetation to pull myself upward. It wasn’t clear that the path continued on the other side so I decided that as I was alone and the path a tenuous, unused one so hazardously close to the edge, I’d best go up to Taronga Road and see if I could meet up with it by heading north.
I was enthused by the discovery that I could indeed head north to Taroona on the Alum Cliff track but I was not far along it when I met a local walking her dog, one like Ash, and so we got talking. She confirmed what I had already learned: that once it had been possible to take a path down to a large rock platform at the base of the cliffs hereabout and continue along towards Taroona, but it had been closed off by a landowner. If I continued along this path I’d reach the Shot Tower.
‘And it’s steep,’ said a man I encountered a little further along, and he was right. I came to a point where I had a clear view of the path heading downhill and then up the other side. My focus is on beaches and the stretches of coastline between them, and with these beaches it’s on the river itself, particularly (but not only) where it interfaces the land.
I declined the path’s feeble invitation and turned back.
On the rocks below Alum Cliffs
This was back in June 2015. Since then, I’ve gone back to Hinsby Beach on five or six separate occasions, all on the most promising of low tides, sometimes in winter but also at the supermoon’s low last month (9 March), when, unfortunately, the seabreeze worked against me, hurling waves at my knees in a quite malicious fashion as I tried to negotiate a watery gap in the rocks close – very close, I feel – to the little turn the cliffs take as they head to the area beneath Taronga Road. You’ve no business to be here, I felt they were saying. You people have made your track, now walk it.
But that day beneath the supermoon, I sat for a long time enjoying my splendid isolation, looking back towards Hinsby Beach, marvelling at seeing the cliffs with so much more of their base exposed, and enjoying their powerful presence at my back. They are not the only cliffs in the world. They are not even spectacularly tall but all the silence of the ages they contain gives them an undeniable aura in which I basked while deciding that, feeling personally rejected by the cliffs and the river, reaching the rocky platform and climbing up to Taronga Road wasn’t going to happen. The track above the cliffs is there for a purpose, I could only agree, and it affords a different vantage point from my watery stamping grounds. I decided with regret that I’d be satisfied with that.
Dropstone and periwinkles
The rocks below Alum Cliffs
And so that walk along the top of the Alum Cliffs from Taroona to Kingston is the subject of my next entry.
Several years ago I went on a weekend course to learn to sail. There were four teachers: the skipper, the yacht, the wind and the river. I made some good friends and the wind, which until then I’d abhorred, was one of them. ‘Learn to feel it on your face,’ the skipper said and I realised that the wind was really a stranger to me, in part because I struggled to tell west from south and north from east. The wind also presented a very different personality depending on what quarter it emerged from.
If it blew from one direction it blew consistently, right? But no. Focus on it against your face and you’ll see how much it flickers around, how much its strength can vary. A prevailing wind is not a single tone; there are plenty of other notes in there too and there’s no better guide than the windvane (aka masthead fly). When you sail you spend a lot of time looking up because the wind on your face and the wind at the top of the mast might well be behaving differently.
I learned that what the wind is doing above the Tasman Bridge might be different from what’s happening further down the estuary. It messes with the northerlies rampaging down (and vice versa the southerlies heading up). Betsy Island, the South Arm Peninsula and the Eastern Shore contrive to block the south easterly but wind spills in through the valleys. I learned from the geo that landforms can bend and twist the wind, spread it, funnel it (North West Bay is notorious) spin it, like in Sullivans Cove, deflect it, like at Sandy Point, block it as does Pierson’s Point so that suddenly the sails flap and you’re pooling around in a wind shadow.
There are the winds caused by the big weather systems, like the prevailing westerlies that cycle eastwards in these middle latitudes and then there are more local winds like the sea breeze that arrives in the afternoon on those summer days when the island has warmed enough, and it sometimes arrives gently but often it barges in with its muscles flexed. It may stall for a while at the entrance to the Derwent – you watch that dark blue line of indecision, and then the wind rushing across the water towards you, it’s speed and power influenced by the ‘fetch’ as it begins to fill in and in so doing it might ‘knock’ you inconveniently or give you a ‘lift’ to where you are headed. One thing is for sure, on the Derwent the wind takes a different guise diurnally, a different speed depending on where it happens to be (stronger in the wider zones, milder in sheltered bays) and it differs depending on the season. Katabatic winds prevail, blowing in from the NW and the temperature inversion that takes place as wintery cold air sinks to the valley floor gives rise to the Bridgewater Jerry that moves magnificently south down the river, a beautiful white snake of a cloud, its belly down low on the water and awfully cold to be stuck in.
You and your yacht become that pivot point between the wind and the water, their dance made manifest. You learn to read the wind in the water. It might be barely perceptible where you are, about Force 4 on the Beaufort scale for instance, but further away those yachts all heeled over to starboard? The wind is coming your way and it means business. And so you reef because two of the arts of sailing are observational skills and, as my partner on Birngana’s big mainsail used to say ‘Anticipation’.
There are other skills to be learned by the wind out on the Derwent. There’s patience when it deserts you and there’s staying grounded when it thrashes you, so that you’re all heeled over, hanging on and staring directly down into the water, the boom dragging through it, the headsail ripped, the person on the winch knee deep in the river coming over the coaming.
True wind is the wind au naturel. Apparent wind is when the wind made by motion combines with true wind to change its angle and speed. The more you speed up, the more the apparent wind slips ahead of you, streaming through the ‘slot’ between your mainsail and your headsail and powers you along. In effect, it’s your yacht’s most local wind.
When you’re close hauled and the wind is strong, the sails in tight, it’s a bouncy ride, sometimes tense, maybe exhilarating and then when you come about and the wind slips behind you, you can spread your sails out wide, kick back and relax, and the breeze that seemed to have it in for you when you were up against it, becomes a friendly zephyr following behind you. Yet it’s the same breeze and the way you experience it depends on the way you approach it – much like life.
By the same token, it’s easy to let your defences down and wonder why others have their life jackets on when you’re reaching for your bikini because its glassy out there and your boat is going nowhere. But it could be into a vacuum like this that the south westerly roars, attempting to break its own speed record, taking you and the Met Bureau unawares.
Glassy conditions on the Derwent: barely a breeze
The wind lifts sand from dunes and spreads it along beaches. It might take from one beach and deposit elsewhere. It may work with a high tide to push waves harder and higher up dunes and cliffs, or it may lose its territorial battle and be shoved aside by an opposing, more powerful wind from another quarter.
The interplay is dynamic and affects you whether you’re walking, kayaking, cycling or sailing and the Derwent is a brilliant playground to learn all about it’s subtle idiosyncrasies and its full and merciless fury. While conscious of the wind that fills the sail there are other breezes far higher in the atmosphere that pass overhead unregistered. Aeolian drift in the highest reaches carries tiny beings – small spiders, for instance – as well as seeds over vast intercontinental and oceanic distances, making a mockery of quarantine services. And out on the ocean birds, like sailors, yearn for a favourable wind to support their trip or exhausted from flying head on into stormy conditions, might hitch a ride on a yacht, trying to regain the strength to carry on.
On the river in the bleakest of weathers, the world becomes magical, the rain in one’s face exhilarating, the shoreline intoxicating as powered by that beach making and breaking wind we make our way.
Last October I was at Eumarrah, Hobart’s oldest wholefoods shop, when I bumped into an acquaintance I hadn’t seen in quite a while. It so happens that we are both interested in the environment, and birds in particular have been a long and avid interest of his.
I was keen to find out his take on my observation of low bird numbers around the Derwent’s shores, be they on the western or eastern side or in Ralphs Bay, that beautiful low energy embayment near the mouth of the Derwent, these being some of my current stomping grounds. I had also walked ocean beaches with this concern uppermost in my mind and actually, it was while writing this now in my little mountain study, that it dawned on me that there used to be a flock of seagulls that flew over our ridge en route from North West Bay (we used to assume) to the tip in South Hobart. ‘ When had this stopped?’ I asked the geo. ‘The sight and sound of them used to be part of the daily rhythm up here.’
‘I reckon they stopped flying over about two years ago,’ he said.
Two years for us to notice a pretty obvious change in our environment. That’s sobering. The only large flock I’ve seen since I started my walks has been at the dirty little mouth of New Town rivulet but perhaps I have not been focussing on gulls sufficiently because today, sailing Samos into Sullivans Cove just as the cold front arrived with a blast, I noticed a fair number perched on the roof of the new Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies building and there was also a small flock at the Wrest Point casino.
It’s easy to assume that these birds, long considered the rats of the sea, are safe from our abuse of the environment… but what if something sinister is going on right under our noses that we are not aware of? And what if the seagulls are not as robust as we once thought? Of course, there could be some perfectly simple explanation. Down at the tip they might have introduced a management practice to stop scavenging seagulls from spreading toxic debris along the shorelines. Certainly, some councils have waged war on them (see links below).
Gulls and cormorants are also regarded with trepidation by those sailors who have boats on moorings. I have a couple of friends who have been most unhappy to discover a seagull after party mess on their yachts. Some people resort to nautical scarecrows, profiles of eagles, plastic bags and webbing. Take your eye off your yacht and this is what happens.
Seagull central: it’s our palace now
Anyway, this man so knowledgeable about all things avian, was kind enough to let me record our talk and so here are some of the points he made during the course of our long conversation.
Shorebirds are in decline. Some natural causes include high tides washing away nests. When you think about the more volatile oceans and weather we’re getting with climate change and the way dunes are being hammered by sea level rise, this would be headline news if birds like little penguins and short tailed shearwaters produced newspapers. Native fauna like quolls prey on birds too.
I could add my own examples: go out to Chappel Island in the Furneaux Group off Tasmania’s north eastern coastline and you can barely put one careful foot in front of the other without stepping on the snakes that prey on the short tailed shearwaters that have their southern summer burrows there.
He cited more examples and based on what he had to say I suggest we all go and peer at ourselves in the mirror because the main cause is our lack of restraint in the way we behave around beaches. Some locals walk straight through the plastic fences that councils erect on dunes to safeguard both nesting birds and eroding dunes. People camp on beaches, dunes, or just behind them. Radios blare, kids race about on quad bikes and dirt bikes. Adults in four wheel drive vehicles mistake dunes for playthings, crush nests and mess with the role of dunes as a barricade against the sea.
‘When this sort of thing is happening on remote ocean beaches,’ he said. ‘You know there’s no haven.’ And he mentioned a researcher dissecting a bird on Lord Howe Island, (a tiny speck in the ocean 600 km off the Australian coastline) and finding it chock full of plastics.
‘ And over fishing, acidification of the oceans, the warming seas,’ I said.
‘Dogs,’ he said. ‘Horses on beaches.’
‘Seven Mile Beach,’ I said.
‘Marion Bay Narrows,’ he added.
He had begun talking about birds, like oyster catchers and the endangered hooded plover that choose to nest in the tiny scrapes they make in soft sand. Instead of limiting themselves to the hard sand close to the watermark, people and their dogs trample all over the beaches. It’s possible to stamp on a nest oblivious to what you are doing. ‘You may think your dog is doing no damage, but these nests are hard to see.’ And dogs, he emphasised, run all over the beaches. ‘It’s bad enough when they’re leashed. They still scare birds away.’
He told me about the annual gull count that is run over the June long weekend and includes the Derwent River. On Bellerive Beach, for example, ‘there’s a veritable passeggiato of dogs and their owners and so there’s no chance for a bird to make use of it’, he said.
I began to feel uneasy. I have two beautiful canine companions, fellow adventurers where their presence is allowed. I thought of all our lovely beach walks. It seems to me that even people walking quietly and carefully down a beach with no dog at all disturb birds and even scientists monitoring or researching bird behaviour and lifestyles have that same effect no matter how careful they try to be. Birds nestled over their eggs leave their nests, for instance, when they see that most dangerous of all mammals (us) looming, albeit with a scientific title. But mostly I was thinking about the consequences for me in raising my awareness about this issue. My dogs! The beach! Were they two incompatible loves? And what was more important? Shorebirds, or the delight of seeing my happy dogs enjoying the surf?
‘And boats too,’ I said with a heavy heart.
‘Yes,’ he said. And he told me about a particular reserve on the Derwent River, a little one, just a handful of hectares. He’d recently gone there to do a survey and he explained how its done. You spend twenty minutes on each hectare noting the birds you see and hear. ‘That’s how the atlas [Bird Atlas of Australia] was done, right across Australia. But in those twenty minutes there was a jet ski out on the river in front of me, jets from the display squadron from the RAAF – two went up the river, a helicopter going up the river, a fixed wing aircraft directly overhead at low altitude, there was big earthmoving equipment on a block just up the road from me and somebody was using a brush cutter the whole time I was there. So how am I to rely on my ears to do the survey?’
And, I wondered, how do birds communicate against so much mechanical volume.
I walked out of that shop with a lot on my mind. Shorebirds are up against our way of life. To be a migratory bird travelling the Asia-East Australian Flyway the odds are getting steeper. Will there be water in a particular wetland or will a new housing development have put paid to that refuge? Will weeds have covered your burrow or stifled a food source when you arrive? And let’s not even talk about hunters.
It seemed to me that if I was going to walk the birds’ beaches then I had to do it with even more care, in a way that gave more than it took. But how?
I tried to think of communities that live with restraint. Apart from the locals of North Sentinel Island, denizens of the deep Amazon or the San still sort of clinging to a Kalahari lifestyle, I could only think of the Amish.
But on the bright side, a friend is elated to discover that ten Little Black Cormorants have come to hang out with the Pied Cormorants living on Cormorant Rock off her home (see here).
And on a really world changing scale, Boyan Slat, a teenager from Holland, has come up with an idea, now crowdfunded, backed by the scientific community and at pilot study stage, for cleaning the oceans of plastics within a ten year period. Impossible? His Ted Talk is here. See what you think
‘There is much heaving related to water conditions and light structures are moved with the changes’ ~ David Leaman (1999)
I was on such a high after completing that walk that I couldn’t return to those beaches fast enough. The very next day I was back, sleuthing around behind the beaches, particularly the Grange end of Dixons Beach as well as Crayfish Point.
There, in the shade of the canopy behind the boat sheds at Grange Avenue, was the bed the rivulet had made for itself and heading south was a clifftop track.
I bumped into two locals who’ve live behind the beach (Grange, or Grange end of Dixons, take your pick) for decades. I knew the one – she’d taught my daughter. The man and I soon discovered a common connection, this being Hobart. They were happy to share their knowledge about what to expect from the nearby tracks, set me right about the location of Cartwright’s Point but could not identify Beck’s and Retreat Beaches. ‘My dear, I have not been down to the beach for years,’ she said.
The dogs and I pondered the rivulet and the bed it has made for itself then wandered along the cliff top track – and, just for the record, we’ve been back many times since then, accessing it most often from Uitekah Crescent on the southern side of the rivulet. The cliffs are unstable (which is why, for some years, it was closed to the public) and to avoid broken limbs and worse, there’s a wire fence along the edge. There’s also the option, further along the walk, of taking the steep steps down to the shore (where Dixon’s Reef lies wide and exposed on a spring tide) or continuing through a lane, along roads and through bushland down to the beaches at Taroona High School. On this section from Grange there are beautiful views of the estuary through the fringe of casurinas on the cliff edge. On the other side of the path are gardens and the sounds of the suburb.
Sue Mount’s article on bushwalking tracks in Taroona explains that there’s been a path running along the foreshore a long time before the Apex Club upgraded it in 1972 and I like the idea that this was Mouheenener made. I haven’t found anything to suggest that it was but there’s a human tendency to take the path of least resistance and so there would have been a big attraction to following in earlier footsteps. This might seem a long way from Taroona, but in his book Lost trails of the Transvaal (1965), T.V Bulpin says the ox wagon trails of the Voortrekkers often followed already existing tribal pathways through Southern Africa.
Sue Mount also writes in such a way that makes it sound as though the track continues along the Alum Cliffs to the south. I was intrigued – did a path linked with the Taroona beaches run all the way to Kingston or did she mean that you walk along the rocks to Taronga Road and clamber uphill to join the Alum Cliffs track there? This blog heads there next. I made a note to self: find out!
I so wanted to show the geo my new discoveries but when, late one evening, I finally got him to walk the garden path with me down to the beach at Grange, malicious little waves were hammering at the steps and the cliffs.
‘It’s gone!’ I gasped, my disappointment profound. You would not have known a beach had been there. For a moment he looked unimpressed but then he turned to watch the wave action on the cliff with growing interest. ‘It’s being undercut,’ he said and we turned and walked back to the car talking beach erosion. And so, perhaps, I took him there in what were for him, ideal conditions after all, but I felt that I had lost my friend, the beach. (Later, on more long walks, I was to realise that just like Lord’s Beach in Sandy Bay, this beach expands into long and impressive proportions along which there are many instances of beach art.)
The dogs came with me to explore Cartwright Creek too. We followed it from the base of Mount Nelson, across the road and down the grassy bank to the reef below. We visited on high tides and low tides, the expanse of reef exposed and one fine day, with my cycling friend, we walked from Lamberts Rivulet to Cartwright Creek. The creek does have friends. The Friends of Truganini group apparently attempts to make headway against the riot of weeds beneath which it is largely hidden and at this point it does not look as though they are winning the war, at all.
The Sandy Bay beaches inspired me to look into history to make sense of their current shape and appearance but Taroona, with the cone of its volcano beneath the Alexander Battery (Leaman, 1999) and the squiggles in the roads indications of multiple repairs, lured me into burying beneath the surface to try to understand the variable geology of the beaches
Going along for the ride
The land here is unstable, the soils expansive. The schools and many Taroona streets and houses are travelling on the back of a slow moving landslip down towards the river, and yes, on some cliff tops, their tenure could be precarious! Cracks in walls, roads and soils, hummocky earth and gutters, contorted trees and sudden shifts in slope angle are some of the clues as to what’s lying beneath, as are the inclinometers that track it’s incremental journey.
For those with a short attention span for matters geological, I promise I’ll be brief!
Simon Stephens is a geologist who has focused his attention on Taroona and he writes that it is ‘a complete microcosm of the geology of the Derwent Valley’, pointing out that the geology determined the way settlement and construction happened in this area. But long before the explorer’s ships anchored, long before the Mouheenener attuned themselves to this land, and at that point in time when the Permain and Triassic rocks had laid themselves down, Tasmania was a part of Gondwanaland, and was a large basin of accumulating sediments, at other times a shallow sea or lowland flats with icebergs visible offshore. Transformed again, a slow river meandered across ‘a vast riverine plain’ (Stephens). I forget dates fast, so I’m not noting the chronological dimensions of eons here – I’m more interested in the different climates and landscapes that have taken a ride through Taroona.
Today, for instance, there are hard, older rocks on the hills and softer rocks, somewhat younger, on what Stephens refers to as the ‘coastal apron.’ The oldest rock is the Grange Mudstone (Permian) and Fern Tree mudstone also occurs here, sometimes with drop stones in it, as well as worm castings. It smells of sulphur if you strike it – but I haven’t, and I’m not going to run through all the different rock formations either, as there are lots, so instead I’ve linked to relevant resources. Also, because my little project has led to geological conversations at home, I’ll put up the geo’s take on the Derwent and D’Entrecasteaux too, I think perhaps after Pierson’s Point where the view to starboard is of the channel, the view to port the river and Storm Bay.
There are glacial scratches on some rocks that I found along this shore and those stones that have dropped into the mudstone (when it was still mud) have probably dropped out of icebergs and I think that is amazing! It’s actually no wonder that these kaleidoscopic landscapes have led to such a confusing shoreline.
In short, according to Stephens, the climates in which the rocks were laid down varied from Northern Siberian conditions to the sweltering heat of the African Rift Valley. Taroona, (and okay, the island) has had long drawn out climactic moods. But we’ve had our impact too. Here’s a conglomerate of ‘anthropocite’!
After Blinking Billy 3
Taroona’s fault
There are many fault lines in Tasmania and Taroona has it’s very own (although Sandy Bay has more.) It’s about 60 million years old and when the land subsided and formed the Derwent Valley this fault started opening up, quite possibly as a result of Australia breaking apart from Gondwanaland. Stephens says it runs from close to the Grange quarry (Truganini Reserve), across the Channel Highway and south to the top of Taroona Crescent where it turns and travels out to sea near the southern end of Hinsby Beach and not far from Alum Cliffs. That steep gully I thought so pretty as I came down the wooden steps on to Hinsby Beach? It’s an exposed part of this fault.
After Blinking Billy 3
Tropical Taroona
Sometimes Taroona exposes its more tropical self in the form of clay soils and fresh water sediments from when it basked beneath a torrid sun. Stephens says that in the area around Karingal Court ‘the sediments are much finer with clay layers which sometimes contain impressions of leaves and other plant matter.’ A friend of mine recently spent time in Coffs Harbour and couldn’t get over all the turtles she saw swimming around in a lagoon. If we could time travel back to when Taroona was (sub)tropical, we could sip on gin and tonics while watching the turtles, rather similar to the Murray River turtles, swimming around our feet in Taroona. It’s true; there’s evidence in those sub-tropical chapters of the rocks.
BLACK SAND AND ZIRCONS
After the last glacial period the sea rose to today’s level. Dolerite from the hill tops weathered and fell into the sea, releasing heavy minerals like magnetite. There is black sand on Taroona beach and well as magnetite you can find zircons here.
So that’s all I’ll say about reading rocks to discover Taroona’s hidden personality and life experience, but the geo has assured me of the need to look at the big picture and not just the local details and so I tasked him with scoping the Derwent River Valley and the D’Entrecasteaux. I think Pierson’s Point is the right place to point that particular telescope starboard up the channel and port side to Storms Bay and the Derwent River valley and in the meantime there more places to go and people to see.
Bibliography
Leaman, D. (1999). Walk into history in southern Tasmania. Hobart, Tas: Leaman Geophysics.
Mount, S. ([n.d.]). More walking tracks. [Hobart], Tasmania: Dept of Sport and Recreation.
Stephens, S. (n,d,). Introduction and early history. [Hobart].
Before they built the High School that provides ‘an education fit for a princess,’ a nod to the fact that Mary Donaldson (also known as Princess Mary of Denmark) attended school here, an earlier school for girls existed on this spot and before that, in the 1830s, it was an inn, The Retreat, run by Harriet Baines, and reached via a rough track (now Sandy Bay Road) from town or via the water, where visitors made landfall at the Crayfish Point jetty. (There is still evidence on offshore rocks of some of the original structure and the crayfish, for which it is named, are apparently still plentiful but not for the taking).
The Retreat had a cricket pitch and a bowling green. Back then, a lot of people had their own boats but if you were one of those who didn’t, you could hire one here and go fishing, or ride a horse, or simply unpack your bags and spend the weekend relaxing in the garden, enjoying the substantial meals Harriet put on.
In the early days of the settlement the sailing races sometimes used Crayfish Point as a down river mark and so The Retreat would have been a good spot to watch the yachts gybe or tack for the homeward stretch, sails goose winged before the sea breeze. Some people like the Reverand Knopwood came out here by boat to fish a little, sometimes with women from the Aboriginal community who were skilled divers for crayfish.
These days, given student activities, it was good to see cormorants and gulls still making use of the rocks on High School point.
After the walk along Retreat Beach, the undercut slope on my right, the tree with its roots exposed, the school grounds above, I crossed the road on to Beck’s beach, tame and civilised compared to the beaches earlier in my walk. No more than a cove, marooned from Retreat by the road, it is known for its quaint row of boatsheds and the dinghies/kayaks that lie upside down on the grassy slope. Further back there’s a row of houses with great views out across the river. Beck’s (also known as Melinga Place Beach) is tucked into the northern corner of Crayfish Point, but the Taroona Foreshore trail that I ambled onto behind the rocks at the beach’s southern end, meant easy walking along a well made track with a number of different points of interest – the casurina trees, the blackwoods, the Tasmanian Aquaculture and Fisheries Institute’s labs higher up above the track and, behind it, unseen, bowls and tennis grounds.
It’s also on this point that the Parks and Wildlife Service has enclosures for the Tasmanian devils that are part of its release program, a project attempting to save from extinction this unique marsupial that’s been suffering from a rare infectious cancer, Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumour Disease, in epidemic proportions. There are also breeding aviaries here, designed to support the endangered and migratory orange bellied parrot to make a recovery from near extinction. There are really so very few of them left.
Crayfish Point is a lightly wooded hillside but it’s the water views that make it the kind of place that draws you back and the sewerage works that once tainted the air aren’t quite so repellent anymore. But this place also has contact history: in 1805 it was one of the first places that the aborigines and the settlers made contact, exchanging kelp and crayfish for potatoes and bread . Later, Norfolk Island settlers like the Colleys (who arrived desperate for food, their ship having been poorly provisioned) were granted land in this area (Goc, 1997).
Becks Beach (Melinga Place Beach) looking woebegone on an overcast day – it’s usually so much prettier!Boat sheds on Beck’s Beach with Retreat Beach and High School Point in the distance
According to the Derwent Estuary Program, there are approximately 3.3 square kilometres of rocky/cobble reef in the Derwent estuary and a fair bit of this is along the Taroona shoreline. Kelp forests grow here, thanks, no doubt, to the Crayfish Point Scientific Reserve in front of the TAFI labs.
I revelled in the river views. On the Eastern shore, between Trywork Point and Gellibrand Point there’s the opening to Ralphs Bay, an area a local I chatted to on Hinsby Beach did not know about – I had to point out its entrance. There’s often a ship anchored in the middle of the river avoiding port taxes and there’s an open view downriver into Storm Bay.
There were more people on this part of the walk, several couples, a mother and her children. I loped past Batchelor’s 1810 grave (one of the earliest in Tasmania), across Taroona Beach, Taroona’s most popular, where we’ve launched our kayaks from in the past, and then I walked along the track that runs below the houses to Hinsby Beach.
Not that long before this walk, down a cul de sac, I had found the long steps at its southern extent. They led down a steep, quite dramatic ravine onto the beach, just where the Alum Cliffs begin. In fact, for a small, secluded beach it has a lot of different access points, as well as boat sheds and rivulets, but it also has an interesting feeling of intimacy and wildness in comparison to Beck’s, the Alum Cliffs looming large along its southern extent.
High above I could see Taronga Road where the Alum Cliff walk begins but I promised myself that on another generous low tide I’d try to walk along the base to the rocky platform at the bottom of Taronga Road where I’d heard there were fossils.
Just for a moment I stood and considered the walk I had done and all I had seen and then I turned around and made my way back to Taroona Beach and my waiting lift. The walk had taken three hours. My phone was flat because of all the photos I’d taken and voice memos I’d made. It had been exhilarating and explorative and full of fantastic discoveries. I’d never left the city and yet I’d felt worlds away and I couldn’t have felt more inspired than I did at that moment to carry on exploring Tasmanian beaches.
There were lots of marine buoys on this particular day a week or two ago (Feb 2016). It took a while before I realized they marked the marine reserveRemains of the jetty and the big view south. The building (right) is linked to the sewerage works).The path through the blackwood groveTaroona Beach, looking south along Alum Cliffs, with Hinsby hidden from view.Hinsby Beach from the southern endThe kelp and the rocks ~ on Hinsby BeachHinsby Beach: tide out
Tasmanian Beaches: Exploring the Coast on Foot, by Bicycle, Kayak and Sail 