Kooparoona Niara - Mountains of the Spirits

It is early winter and I am sitting with my favourite comforter around my shoulders, kettle gurgling softly on the wood stove. The cape is made from a very soft mohair yarn woven into a muted lilac & green tartan. I bought this small cape at a garage sale many years ago on a frosty morning in the Otway Ranges, south western Victoria, Australia. The seller told me it had belonged to a friend of hers, a small Scottish woman named Jean, who wore the cape every evening while she played a hand of cards and sipped whiskey. I wonder what Jean would have thought of the view from my bed here in the highlands of Tasmania...

In this ‘land of a thousand lakes’ our shack sits in the lee of Dell’s Bluff, with the Mother Lord Plains behind us and stretched out in front, Yangina, the Great Lake, framed by mountains dusted with early season snow. Would it remind Jean of North Eastern Scotland along with the red deer antlers mounted on the shack wall? Would she speak with the mountains like her country woman, Nan Shepard, author of the book I am currently reading, ‘The Living Mountain’. By squinting my eyes, I can imagine the purple shadows on the mountains to be heather and I try to visualise the land of my ancestral line. The trailing, swirling ever present mists would have transported the most homesick migrant back to the land of the Picts. Yangina was formed by the damming of existing small lakes and tributaries to generate hydro-electricity. This created the largest, highest fresh water lake in Australia at over 1,000 meters above sea level. This huge body of water is the perfect habitat for imported brown trout from Scotland. The Rainbow Lodge was built at Doctor’s Point in 1910 but it burned to the ground in the 1940s. I would have been looking right across to it, but instead there are many days when real-time rainbows dance across the water from east to west for hours at a time.

My home here in Breona is in one of the coldest nonalpine locations in Australia. It has an ‘altitude-influenced subpolar oceanic climate’, a classification quite unusual for Australia, only shared with places in other subpolar regions such as Punta Arenas in southern Chile and Reykjavík in Iceland.1

‘Breona’ is Aboriginal for ‘fish’. 2 It is also a Celtic word meaning ‘exalted’ and ‘noble’. A strange coincidence to have the same word, with different meanings, in two ancient cultures separated a world apart. A sad haunting permeates this harsh landscape. Precious knowledge and wisdom garnered over countless generations of Tasmanian Aboriginal people, for over forty thousand years, has been lost. All the skills essential to survive physically and spiritually in this wild landscape. We are all the poorer for this immeasurable loss and it will take thousands of years to unlock the secrets of this Country once again. Yet, to wake every morning to this epic landscape, despite the horrific human history, is to be anointed with grace. It is like being bathed in the elementals of life; water, air, earth and fire. Everything needed to sustain life is to be found here. Stepping outside the door is to enter into a glamourie, a magical land of deep time with limitless possibilities, where all things, from stones and rocks; to trees and the mountains themselves, are animated. Is someone watching from the hole inside that rotting trunk? The flickering light through the stunted forest casts a shadow play on the river of rocks, tricking the eyes to see all manner of beings. Supernaturals inhabit this land still. And the mountains have seen it all, absorbed it and continue to keep watch. These ‘mountains of spirits’ seem able to hold all the joy and all the sorrow together, echoing through the ages with a tangible intensity. To dwell in this Gondwanaland landscape is to be in a constant state of awe and enchantment bringing on a daily welling of gratitude for this life. With these mountains as companions, I am never alone. The first time I spoke with a mountain was in the Canadian Rockies. I was overwhelmed by the surreal nature of their height and majesty. Being Australian born and not much travelled globally until my fifties – I never fully understood the concept of a ‘mountain’ until I crossed the world. Travelling along the Columbian Icefield Parkway was very ‘trippy’. The mountains didn’t speak to me in words. They didn’t need to. They just communicated in a mind-meld kind of way: ‘I Am’. The second time I communed with a mountain she taught me a song. I was boating with friends through a fjord at the water’s edge of a sheer cliff on the wild southern coast of Newfoundland. One of those fathomless fjords that map 540 million old mountains of rocks wherein lie fossils of the first skeletal creatures on this planet. So high was this monolith I was unable to hold my head back far enough to see the summit and my heart felt like it would burst with a joyous rapture. I joined in spontaneous song with this mountain: “I see you now, I breathe you in.” We breathed each other in as the boat passed quietly along the side – as above, so below – our boat being about the middle mark of the mountain.

Now, here at the bottom of the world, I am reading these words of Nan Shephard’s and know exactly what she is conveying. Something that a decade ago was ineffable to me:

‘So, simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being.’3 As shrouds of mist close in around the shack, I snuggle further into Jean’s cape. I pour a ‘wee dram’ of whiskey and raise a toast to all the ancestors who have been before and all the descendants yet to come to this snow dusted plateau and dolerite-capped highlands. A toast to all the mountains and their spirits. They have so much to tell if only we have the ears and heart to listen. Acknowledgements The Palawa people belong to the oldest continuing culture in the world. They cared and protected Country for thousands of years. They knew this land, they lived on the land and they died on these lands. I honour them. I pay my respects to elders past and present and to the many Aboriginal people that did not make elder status and to the Tasmanian Aboriginal community that continue to care for Country. I recognise a history of truth which acknowledges the impacts of invasion and colonisation upon Aboriginal people resulting in the forcible removal from their lands. Our Island is deeply unique, with spectacular landscapes with our cities and towns surrounded by bushland, wilderness, mountain ranges and beaches. I stand for a future that profoundly respects and acknowledges Aboriginal perspectives, culture, language and history. And a continued effort to fight for Aboriginal justice and rights paving the way for a strong future.4

3 Shepherd, Nan. The Living Mountain . Canongate Books. Kindle Edition.

4 https://www.utas.edu.au/riawunna/welcome-ceremony-protocols

Accessed 18 Nov 2020