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Friday, 7 September 2007

ON THE ROAD - travel & places...

TASMANIA
Small hut on a rocky plateau -

It is not an easy hut to find because it blends into its surroundings. Chances are that those venturing onto the Wellington Range will not find it unless they stumble on it. Once found, they will wonder who built it and who uses it now.

Small stone hut on Mt Wellington summit plateau

Those questions may never be answered as there is ambiguity about the builders. Some say it was constructed by a school group that made use of the plateau for outdoor education. If it is true, then the hut was probably built in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Somebody, somewhere must know when it was erected and who built it by labourously placing stone upon stone. That information, however, may be lost. If those who know do not pass it on then it will be gone for good.

But does it really matter? Ephemera like dates and histories satisfy only a particular type of mentality. Others like the mystery of not knowing, the unanswered question.

The forest might have been beautiful but the hut was not. A tin shed in the Mt Wellington forest.

A hole in the roof

Bang! The blast from the .30 calibre punches a hole through the roof and the partially inebriated climbers are scared out of their wits. Is this an armed madman loose on the slopes of Mt Wellington? No, it is not. It is Alex Skelenika, an emigre from one of Eastern Europe's Stalinist states who made his home at Fern Tree, the small village in the forest on Mt Wellington's slopes.

This is one of those stories that are repeated over the years and is probably based on truth. Those who know Alex know such a story is credible. The time was the late1960s or the opening years of the following decade, but whether fact or otherwise, Alex is a bit of a wild man in his own way. Why else would he be walking around Mt Wellington armed with a rifle?

The story concerns one of Mt Wellington's small shelter huts situated not far from The Springs, a flattish shoulder on the south-east corner of the mountain where the steep upper slopes grade into the gentler, but still steep, lower slopes. The hut is only a few metres below the summit road and is a recent construction in stone with an iron roof.

Walkers on the track from Cascades to the summit encounter another hut, this one situated among the tall timber about twenty minutes walk away. Completely characterless, more like a wayward industrial structure, this is a mere metal shed put up in the 1960s.

These huts are the rather unimaginative latter-day descendants of the picturesque buildings erected along Mt Wellington's foot tracks during the earlier decades of the twentieth century. Then, Wellington's slopes were home to a number of practical but fanciful structures.

Huts as historic artifact

In those unregulated times a number of huts, some of two stories, were built in the sloping forests above Hobart. They were weekend get-aways, places of recreation where a day or two could be spent in the company of friends in the bush. In this, they were similar to the little huts of iron and wood that were built by the beaches. Like the mountain huts, they too have mostly disappeared.

For those who know where to look the signs are still there, hidden in the scrub. But as time passes they are harder to find - nature is making rapid work of reclaiming those last vestiges of a history long gone. Yet, as recently as the late1970s, the footings of one such hut were still visible beside the walking trail that starts behind Cascades and makes a switchback as it climbs the lower slopes of the mountain.

Photographs from this first phase of hut building on Mt Wellington are scarce but revealing. Men and women stand on the verandahs and in the doorways of those long-gone structures; dressed in the attire of the time they gaze at the camera and, across the decades, at the few who view those images today. The pictures speak of a time less affluent when simpler values and pursuits prevailed, a time when people took the effort to make things properly, to make something of substance of simple bush huts.

The fate of those early huts is not hard to guess. Some were claimed by the bushfires that swept Wellington's slopes. Others were probably abandoned as their builders started families in town or moved away in search of work. They were left to rot, finally to collapse and be consumed by fungi and the forest's detrivores. As time went by even the memory of the huts and the way of life that went with them was lost, the record of their existence found only in old, faded photographs.

An practice now extinct

From the city, it is possible to look up at Mt Wellington and imagine the huts that existed within its forests. What is no longer possible is building a hut.

Today, the city has extended its control over the mountain as it has over all of the island state's wild country. Huts no longer have a place unless they are part of a commercial tourism venue, are maintained by national park authorities or, like the trout fishers huts on the Central Plateau, enjoy official permission to exist. Hut building, once an unofficial right of the ordinary citizen, has joined so many other activities in the museum of Australian culture.

Changing perceptions of the bush contributed to the disfavour in which huts are held today. In the 1970s a wilderness ethic then influential in the USA was imported into Australia. It proclaimed that human works have no place in wilderness areas despite the evidence that humans and wilderness have long been companions. A fervour to remove the works of humans, such as bush huts, eventually spread into the national park service, due in part to its advocates establishing themselves in influential positions within the service. The larger body of conservationists concurred and the era of hut building was brought an end. This sentiment continues today.

But go into the mountains and they will still be found here and there, like that small hut in the isolation of the boulder fields on the Mt Wellington plateau. Artifacts of times past they may be, those older huts are an honest expression, in local materials, of a human need to create a sense of place.

For more on the history of Mt Wellington's huts, visit the website of J&M Grist: www.jandmgrist.com