Ash Climbing

- Australian Geographic Magazine- Australia

With every step here on Mt Skeen, dry Alpine Ash leaves crack underfoot releasing their medicine in pungent bursts. Shining Gum bark tendrils flap in the wind like prayer flags, turning and listing. Mountain Wattles squat wanly along the trails, looking more dead than alive in this winter wind. On the highest ridges grow the spectral Snow Gums, shepherding this tenuous ecosystem. These trees have been growing here since January 13th 1939, when fires ravaged the Victorian highlands. Fires are an integral part of bush ecology, but sometimes the bush needs a hand.

Alpine Ash trees do not carry seed until they are 20 years old. Many regenerating stands of Ash in northeastern Victoria, logged less than 20 years ago, were destroyed in the bushfires of early 2003. In the Final Report from the Ministerial Taskforce on Bushfire Recovery (April 2003), the government asserts the importance of supporting an ongoing timber industry by re-establishing the lost stands of Alpine Ash, a key timber resource in the area. One of the closest areas of mature unburnt Alpine Ash stands is here, just west of the Alpine National Park in Victoria. Mt. Buller is just visible to the north on a clear day from the camp at Hannaford Creek Flat.

Heath Baird is a climber in one of a handful of relatively small logging operations commissioned by VicForests, the Victorian section of the Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) to help re-sow Alpine Ash in burnt areas. The project entails climbing thirty to forty metres up mature seed-bearing Ash trees with climbing spikes and lanyards. From the top, limbs with plenty of seedpods are removed by small chainsaw. The seed pods are then separated and sorted by hand on the ground, bagged and taken to a processing centre in Mansfield to extract the raw seed. Imagine huge clothes dryers with twigs and seedpods tumbling inside. The heat induces the seedpods to open and release the miniscule seeds, which slip through a filter. The seeds will then be broadcast over affected areas where they will hopefully germinate and become the 2074 timber harvest.

This is a small team, run by Michael Eddy and his family. Inside an old shepherd’s hut since mounted on wheels (a logger is never in one place for too long), Michael is writing in a notebook in front of a wood heater stoked so high that the flu is glowing red three feet above the roof. This is where we spend all of our time from sunset until sunrise. It is too cold outside once the sun goes down, and there isn’t much else to do but make a well-earned dinner, and tell tall tales until the moon rises. Michael looks at me deadpan, “So do you think you could live like this, up here all week in the cold with no contact?” Living on a wooden bunk or up a tree for five days a week; waking up to cold rain in the morning. In a few weeks it will be snow.

Michael says that 2000 hectares of Ash trimmed for seed will enable regeneration of 2000 hectares of burnt stands. “These trees are nothing,” Michael says, pointing to an Ash about 2 feet across, “Up in the higher country up north they are so big around you can barely climb them.” Based on the advice of local forestry staff, he doesn’t expect seeding work to extend past May 2005. “After this winter, there will probably be one more season of picking…then we will just go back to logging again. But you have to make hay while the sun shines.”
©Carlisle Rogers, 2004