John Ando Anderson talks about his time on the Bibbulmun Track

STUMPS, logs, trees, bracken fern, grass trees, flat ground, hills, wind and rain and huts, wonderful huts. This is my world on the Bibbulmun Track, writes John Ando Anderson.

John Ando Anderson

STUMPS, logs, trees, bracken fern, grass trees, flat ground, hills, wind and rain and huts, wonderful huts.

This is my world on the Bibbulmun Track.

It is to the stumps and logs to which I want to pay tribute. How many times a day do I spot a stump or a log of that prized size that when you sit on it the bottom of the pack rises, allowing the webbing shoulder strap to rise above the tortured flesh. Aaaah. That feels good.

This is my third jaunt on the Bibbulmun and this time I’m seeing very few people. In fact most days, none. The nights are the same with the huts deserted except for the area of interior real estate taken up by me and the contents of my pack.

‘It’s just mad dogs and Queenslanders out here’

The reason the track is so quiet is because this is the wet season in this southwestern part of Australia. And it is winter. One advantage of it being so cold is that mice and rats are not out trying to eat my food at night and the tiger and duggite snakes are curled up in dry places, most likely under the sheets of six ply which makes up the floor of the huts. So it’s just mad dogs and Queenslanders out here, tramping around with wet weather gear and warm clothing stuffed into the dry bags in their packs.

Getting back to stumps and logs. There are patron saints for just about everything but not stumps and logs. Did you know, for example, that St Isidore is the patron saint of the internet? Yes, John Paul 11 thought the internet was so dangerous he decided it needed a patron saint. St Drogo is the patron saint of unattractive people (from now on Drogo is my go-to saint). And then we have St Polycarp, he drew the short straw, being the patron saint for earaches and dysentery. Poor old Polycarp, for all his trouble was bound and burned at the stake and while still alive, stabbed. But, still no saint appointed to stumps and logs. As soon as I finish this I’m ringing the Vatican to tell, not ask, to tell Pope Leo to let fly with some canonisation and pick someone to be the patron saint of stumps and logs.

Here they are, tree stumps and logs, providing so much solace and comfort to life’s wanderers, but they go unrecognised. Totally taken for granted. They deserve a gong, a saintly gong. Pin a god-medal to their chest, I say.

There are some mighty stumps here. They tell their own story. When they were in full bloom they were the boss trees, lording it over the lesser specimens below…until the crosscut saws bit deep and the men with the axes on their springboards, muscles filling on lanky frames, brought them crashing down.

The logs were snigged out by horse teams and bulldozers to the mills where they were split in half by the giant Canadian saws before being reduced to boards and beams. From the mills it was on to trains and trucks to Fremantle and onto ships to London.

It was this timber, the Ash, Jarrah and Marri that helped rebuild London after the German bombing of WW2. There had always been a timber industry here, but it was post-war that that witnessed the making of the west’s timber millionaires.

Now timber milled from the logs which once completed the stumps we now sit on is probably holding up libraries, cathedrals and grand public buildings all over London.

I’ve seen few people on the track apart from the bloke who I mentioned last week with the washing of jock’s obsession. I’ll probably never forget him. I did come across Ben. He was sitting on a stump, leaning forward with his full weight supported by his walking poles. He nodded and lifted his head slowly as I approached and said “gidday mate”.

We went through the usual, “how you going? How’s your missus’s chooks? And so on before I asked him if he was okay.

Hannah’s abandoned backpack.

“You looked a bit out of it there when I came along,” I said.

“Nah,” he replied. “I’m just tired. I was looking down at the meat ants in a trance. I could lie down in a foetal position and go to sleep.”

I ate a protein bar and he unpeeled a boiled egg and shook salt and pepper over it from a zip-lock bag.

Lucky him, I thought jealously, eyeing off his egg and mentally comparing its rich taste with the dry blandness of my ‘health’ bar.

We went our separate ways - he to the north, me to the south - and after making my way up a long hill, with numerous stops for oxygen reloads, I reached the top and sat on a stump. Just like Ben I leaned forward, sucking water through the mouthpiece of the tube that connected to the water bladder in my pack, and watched the meat ants below scrambling over leaves and twigs. After a minute I had to snap myself out of the trance I’d fallen into and stood up and started walking, one foot after another. That’s all it is, one foot after another while trying to clear the mind of any thoughts about an aching shoulder or an ankle tendon that feels like a red-hot wire is buried in your flesh.

It’s mostly mundane. But there was a touch of drama. I’d briefly met Hannah. She was doing a two-night loop walk, sleeping in her new tent. She was cheery and set off to set up camp after telling me her husband and kids were picking her up at a nearby forest track the next morning. It was dark when I set off at 6.45am. Hannah was still in her tent.

I got to the Grimwade hut 21km away early that afternoon and set up camp and made a cup of tea. At 4.45pm who turned up carrying nothing but an empty water bottle but Hannah. She was in a distressed state, having become lost and disorientated. I gathered she had been unable to find the track where she was to meet her family and had somehow lost her way until managing to stumble back onto the main north-south track. She had drunk all her water by 11am and still had many hills to climb. She was dehydrated and seemed to be suffering from shock. She had abandoned her pack two kilometres back. She had an Optus phone which is useless in this part of the world and in any case the battery was flat and the cord for her solar charger was broken.

I got her water from the tank at the hut and luckily, where we were, I had a single bar on my phone which she used to text her husband. There wasn’t enough grunt on the phone to make a call. The husband I learned later, had already contacted police and reported her as missing.

It’s dark here at 6pm but there was still enough daylight to walk back to retrieve her abandoned pack. I went back and found it beside the track. There was a plastic bottle of what looked like alcohol beside it. Exhausted as she was, she insisted on following me out and back. I asked her about the contents of the plastic bottle. It was some sort of Italian liqueur. I didn’t say anything. When we got back to the hut there were two girls there. Her daughters. Her husband to his credit had found his way down a rough vehicle track close to the Grimwade hut she had mentioned in the text and the girls walked the rest of the way in. After a tearful embrace, Mum and the girls walked off, reunited.

I cooked my dinner and was in bed reading my Kindle by 7pm. A late night by any standard on the Bibbulmun Track.

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Is the state of our CBD looking up?

Great news this week that our city’s namesake retired navy vessel HMAS Townsville will be put on display at the Old Curtain Brother’s slipway on the Ross Creek for residents and visitors to enjoy.

Earlier this year I spoke with former president of the Townsville Maritime Museum Tony Manning who bemoaned the fact that the vessel had been sitting idle out of public view since it was gifted to the museum by the Commonwealth Department of Defence after she was decommissioned.

But it seems work has been happening behind the scenes and the Maritime Museum of Townsville, in partnership with Port of Townsville will be moving the vessel from the Townsville Marine Precinct to be put on public display next week.

The 180-tonne vessel was removed from the water in late 2024 for cleaning and minor repairs and had oils and fuels removed ahead of her move.

Artist impression of HMAS Townsville in her new home at the Old Curtain Brothers slipway.

The vessel, which is no longer operational, will be towed on water from the TMP to the Port on Tuesday morning (July 22) before she is guided down the Ross Creek on Wednesday morning to be slipped at her final resting place.

I’m told it will be quite the procession with the Townsville Water Police, Maritime Safety Queensland, Coast Guard and Port of Townsville all assisting with the move.

Anyone who would like to see the grand ol’ lady take her final voyage should gather at the Breakwater Wall near the Townsville and Entertainment Centre from 7am Wednesday to wave her past.

The HMAS Townsville relocation is the first step being taken to beautify and improve amenity of Port lands on the southern side of the Ross Creek, with plans afoot to install a viewing platform and improve footpaths between the Maritime Museum on Palmer Street and Quayside Terminal – where our cruise visitors disembark. Hopefully this is the first on many tourism offerings for our city which will stand as a point of difference to our seafaring guests.

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JOKE OF THE WEEK:

Before performing a baptism, the priest approached the young Irish father and said solemnly, “Baptism is a serious step, are you prepared for it?”

“I think so,” Murphy replied. “My wife has made appetisers and we have a caterer coming to provide plenty of snacks and cakes for all of our guests.”

“I didn’t mean that,” the priest responded. “I mean are you prepared spiritually?”

“Oh sure, Murphy says, “I’ve got a keg of beer and a case of whiskey.”

Originally published as John Ando Anderson talks about his time on the Bibbulmun Track