Imbolc in the Farawaye Tree

The two young travellers from Van Diemen’s Land arrived on the coast highway and spent the night under a railway bridge before calling us. Brother and sister, they’re Willing Workers On Organic Farms (WWOOFers) backpacking their way north, so they phoned to see if we had any work on the land for them. Of course, there are always a multitude of things to do; we live spread across more than a thousand acres of partly arable and mainly wild, rugged land whose altitude ranges across several hundred metres (in Oz we use measurements as we see fit) and whose climate varies from temperate to subtropical, depending on where you are standing.

            The siblings were given a spare handbuilt stone, pole and timber house near the ever-flowing stream (connected to phone and power) and immediately began to make themselves useful and at home. Cyrus is a multimedia graduate whose backpack laptop is employed each night designing websites and programs; he and his sister Sophia are both avid readers as well, absorbing the small but varied libraries we maintain out here in the bush and employing their creative talents in their spare moments.

By day we socialise over easy orchard work for a few hours, picking, pruning, mulching and planting rainforest and food-bearing trees and go for walks in the meandering fern-filled rainforest valleys, gullies, cascades and gorges under canopies of rare (and in some cases unclassified) buttressed trees, dripping with stag and elk horns and birds nest ferns. Such is life.

Yesterday, on Imbolc, the weather was right for a trip to the Faraway Tree at the font of the spring that is the headwaters of our stream, eight hundred metres above us and a fantastic two-day walk on these short winter days. Four of us climbed into the Bluebird of Hippieness instead and began to mount the narrow gravelled forest road which winds serpentine across the ridge-tops, rising through the forests covering the ridged tongues of stone, clay and ash which are all that remains of a massive volcano whose last paroxysmic upheaval occurred around the time of the demise of the dinosaurs, according to official geological dogma (dogmas are predatory in ancient forests – the spirits abhor them).

Skirting fallen trees and washaways, sliding by sheer drops of hundreds of metres to the emerald valleys below, the little low-slung sedan carried us to a widening plateau whose trees suddenly reared above the rest of the forest, mature adults compared to the toddlers most people mistake for adult trees. After driving a steep and circuitous twenty-three kilometres from an already remote location, we had finally reached forest that had not been despoiled by human steel – except for the narrow strip of muddy road we were using, cut through the canopy by bullock team drivers a scant century ago.

We stopped next to a pair of tortuously rearing giants, a fig and a yellow carabbean whose tops were hidden by layers of canopy above, each ten feet thick and over a thousand years old. Beside them, the fifty-metre crown of a thousand year old massive brown fig tree had speared into the forest floor, snapped off forty metres over our heads; the winds are arriving with more force every year. Only one circuit of seasons ago this great bearded grandfather seemed sure to last another millennium.

We picked our way through the vines which protect the deep forest from the narrow lighted corridor of road, walking through leaf mulch between hundred year old walking stick palms only two metres tall and stepping over small seedling trees which may be a decade old in their long wait for the accidental penetration of light to the depths of the forest floor. Wompoo fruit doves swept over our heads and the call of a wedge-tailed eagle could be heard out of sight in the invisible sky.

Here on a mountain-top resides one of the last massive and incredibly diverse seed source of species thoroughly eradicated everywhere from the lands inhabited by the Gubbas, the ‘Westerners’ who arrived here two centuries ago; exterminated by the cow-eaters who ‘developed’ an ecosystem of thousands of species of unique animals and plants per acre into a monoculture of meat.

Today Spring is in the air and butterflies are everywhere, but as usual the invisible giant rainforest snails are nowhere to be seen as we amble through this original home of hominids to a convoluted wooden wall which stands before us, a giant stinging tree twenty feet across whose girth deserves Imperial measurement, whose top foreshortens above us in perspective as we crane to glimpse it.

Impressive as it is, and rapt as we are in its ancient immensity, its roots like giant pythons pouring in and out of the soil, providing serviceable stools before winding off out of sight around us – there is something else. This tree has moved. Not that anyone would be expected to believe it, but this ancient monster used to be fifty metres further into the forest; now it stands within plain sight of the road.

We walked through a field of strange stones in the surprisingly wide spaces between the trees, sharp-edged pumices mixed with broken mudstones and hollow bubbles of glass encrusted with moss amid volcanic rocks studded with dark metallic ore. This field of debris lies a metre thick all over the ground here at 800 metres above sea level, strewn everywhere above a deep layer of clay and volcanic ash into which these ancients are firmly rooted. Some paroxysm has delivered them here scant thousands of years hence – yet here they are, still on the surface in a mulch-strewn millennial rainforest whose ongoing processes should have buried them deep in topsoil ages ago.

We come to the black muddy spring pooling at the foot of the Farawaye Tree and remove our shoes. This strangler fig is somewhere between two and three thousand years old, peering over the crowning oldsters all around to peek into the distant horizon of unhindered wilderness.  Covered in a cloak of epiphytes whose succulent berries draw exotic animals and birds, studded with huge ferns and wrought with vines thicker than a strong man’s thigh it has survived the wax and wane of climate and history, luxuriating in eternal paradise.

Once it was a parasite, winding down from the top of a rainforest giant that is now only a memory immortalised by the shape of the strangler fig that surrounded and ultimately engulfed it, swallowing it up over a millennium. We bow down through a delta-shaped portal of vine-roots and emerge into a circular room, the ground floor of a tunnel winding up to the sky. And of course we have to climb this perfect cylindrical ladder, festooned inside with bearded protrusions become hanging roots piercing the stony floor, providing fireman’s pole access up and down as an alternate route. The entire interior is a grid of criss-crossed veins of living wood providing hand and footholds that anyone can easily climb. Halfway up we pause at a vesica, a doorway out to the canopy with a dizzying view forty metres down through the tops of palms. Further up there are higher windows providing views across the roof of the world to the distant horizon. We pause to feast on fruit, rarefied oxygen and good cheer. The climb to the crown is daunting – it requires leaving the snug tube, the central shushumna in which we remain snug and secure.

Of course, when we come back down we are in a different, better world than the one we had left. We are ready to return, coming down from the mountaintop to the desert of grassland washing across the floor below the Great Dividing Range, to the fringe of the modern mindfield, where rainforest meets metal. Home.