New bike tracks threaten mountain’s timber heritage secrets

Precious colonial heritage hidden in the bush foothills of Hobart for more than 200 years is in danger of being lost, destroyed by new mountain-bike tracks, writes SIMON BEVILACQUA.

TIMBER was arguably the major driving force in this island’s colonisation.

When the British arrived in Van Diemen’s Land, as Tasmania was known, it was akin to the US or China trying to establish a human base on the moon today.

The biosphere of Tasmania did not pose the atmospheric and gravitational challenges that the moon does for human settlement, but it was so remote, so far from British resources, that the first priority was to find local resources, rather than expect the new settlement to rely on supplies.

Where a moon base today requires access to lunar water and resources to construct shelter, generate breathable air and protect from radiation, for the Brits arriving on the island 200 years ago the keys to survival were drinkable water and timber.

In the 1800s wood was used to build everything from bridges, wharves, wheels, carts and houses to fences, huts and sheds on farms. Burnt in kilns, fireplaces and boilers, it fired bricks and pottery, warmed homes, and produced steam to drive machines.

Timber production was also a potential source of revenue for the young colony because Britain’s growing global empire was founded on massive ocean-going vessels constructed from wood. Among Governor King’s instructions to Lieutenant Bowen on arriving in Van Diemen’s Land was to survey local forests for timber of high enough quality for building the King’s ships.

It was these first forays into the mysterious unknown of the ferny bush in the foothills of kunanyi/Mt Wellington by intrepid sawyers, convicts and overseers that enabled the settlement’s survival through the first few tough years, and established one of the first export industries on the island.

Timber pioneers with axes and cross saws.

Incredibly, more than two centuries later, traces of these historic first European slices into the mountain are still observable on the forest floor.

Tasmanian archaeologist Anne McConnell has investigated remnants of the historic timber operations in the bush behind Hobart — from Turnip Fields Rd, an early logging road, to the main spur ridge off Mt Arthur, and north of New Town Rivulet to the 600m contour and down to the Cascade Brewery, which was originally a sawmill site.

She has documented major logging roads, sawpits and clusters of snig tracks where logs were chained to stumps and hauled by hand to a landing to be processed or dragged to Hobart Town.

Logging the tall, wet mountain forests was brutal, dangerous and exhausting work. British-made axes were sometimes not strong enough for the hard timber of mountain eucalypts and bent and broke.

Not a lot is known about early timber felling, and that is another reason these historic sites are so important: there is still much to be learnt in unravelling the story of these colonial foundations.

Generally, once a tree was felled with an axe and sawn into log lengths, it was either split where it was or dragged to a carefully constructed sawpit, with a timber frame, where one man would push on the down stroke of a crosscut saw from the top of the log, while another man, down in the sawpit, pushed on the up stroke from under the log.

The old mountain stumps suggest the original gums felled by the colonists were giants, the likes of which no longer exist on the foothills.

Great slabs of wood were split and hewed with mauls, wedges, axes and broad axes.

Henry Gritten’s 1856 oil painting of Hobart Town and Mt Wellington.

In the earliest years, sawn flinches, shingles and palings were carried out of the bush by convicts, with timber strapped to their backs or dragged to roads to be loaded into carts.

It was such exhausting, gruelling work that timber hauling was incorporated into the convict punishment regimen, with men who misbehaved put on timber gangs, and those who worked hard rewarded by being transferred to lighter duties.

McConnell says the mountain foothills contain “substantial timber industry heritage”, believed to date back to soon after Hobart’s settlement in 1804 up to the 1840s and possibly 1850s.

“It contains remnants of colonial government timber getting, as well as the private operation of Degraves Mill from the 1820s,” she said.

“Much of this heritage is clustered. The densest and largest known cluster of logging roads, snig tracks, saw pits, hut sites, sawn stumps and a possible sawmill site is the area of the Guy Fawkes Rivulet tributaries.”

For the best part of four years, McConnell has been pushing for this to be declared a protected heritage area.

In recent years the historic sites have been damaged by unmanaged mountain-bike use and by the construction of the Cascades Track. At least one historic timber industry track (lower Sawmill Track) has been also opened as a walking track.

McConnell has urged Hobart City Council and the Wellington Park Management Trust to suspend building mountain-bike tracks while more research is done and better ways to protect the heritage landscape are developed.

“A number of the sites and sawpit-snig track clusters within Wellington Park are recognised ‘sites’ under the Wellington Park Management Plan,” McConnell said.

“Very few of these sites, however, have been recorded in the field, documented or assessed, particularly those outside Wellington Park. None of this heritage is listed in the City of Hobart Planning Scheme Heritage Code or registered on the Tasmanian Heritage Register, or has been considered for listing to date.”

But McConnell says the fact these sites are not listed does not mean they are insignificant or unworthy of protection, just that they have not yet been properly assessed.

The only other known large area of relatively well-preserved heritage of this type anywhere in Australia is at Koonya on the Tasman Peninsula, where there has been extensive archaeological work done in recent years.

“This complex on the lower slopes of kunanyi/Mt Wellington is considered to have very high cultural heritage significance at local and state levels, and likely to also have significance at the national level, given its complexity and relatively good preservation,” McConnell said.

“An assemblage of early colonial timber industry heritage, well-preserved, and surviving in a natural forested setting is very rare in Tasmania and Australia.

“It is extremely rare to find well-preserved early colonial heritage of any type surviving to the present day due to it generally being overprinted by later development.

“In this respect the Hobart foothills, with their long-term ownership by the Cascades Brewery and the reservation of the western portion as Mountain Park and later Wellington Park, has been an important element in the survival of this heritage.”

Surely, it is important to suspend any potentially damaging work in the area (such as cutting new mountain-bike tracks) that threatens these incredibly early remnants of Tasmania’s colonial history while the archaeological experts assess its heritage values and design ways to protect it?

There may even be more heritage secrets to be revealed.