Echoes of the Past and Quoll Encounters

The turn is at Avoca, and then the road runs north toward Ben Lomond with the mountain getting steadily larger in the windscreen until it stops being scenery and becomes the thing you are driving underneath. We had spent a week on the northern side back in autumn and walked up to Legges Tor. This was the same massif from the other side, which is a strange thing to do to a mountain you think you know. Different road, different valley, and Ben Lomond presenting a face we had never seen.

At the end of the road is Storeys Creek, which used to be a town.

Tin and wolfram came out of the ground here, and a community grew on the back of it, and in 1971 the mine closed and the community stopped. What is left is not a ruin in the picturesque sense. It is a street plan with most of the buildings gone and some of them still standing, roofs opened to the weather, floors going soft, blackberry coming in through the windows. One house is still occupied. Somebody lives there, in a town that ended fifty-three years ago, with the forest at the fence line.

Anth went looking for geocaches and found several among the buildings, which produced the odd sensation the hobby specialises in: proof that other people had come out here, stood roughly where we were standing, and cared enough to leave a marker. Nobody lives at Storeys Creek to speak of. But people keep visiting, and keep signing the log, and that is its own small argument against the place being finished.

We parked on the cricket oval. It is still legible as one, flat where nothing else is flat, with the shape of the boundary readable in the way the trees stop. But the grass is waist-high and young eucalypts have come up through the outfield, and in another twenty years nobody will be able to tell. There were men who played here every Saturday. There was probably a scorer's hut. Now it is a clearing with a bus on it, and above the whole arrangement stand the dolerite columns of Stacks Bluff, catching the last of the sun long after the valley floor had gone into shadow.

We got a fire going before the cold arrived properly, which at that elevation in late May means before about five. The night went down hard. We sat close in, doing the thing everyone does at a fire, turning slowly to keep both sides working, hands out, the front of you cooking while the back of you goes numb. Above the ridge the stars came out in the quantity you only get when there is no town for thirty kilometres, and the reason there is no town for thirty kilometres was sitting in the dark all around us with its roofs falling in.

When the fire dropped to embers we took a torch and walked the oval.

The quolls were at the edge of the beam almost straight away. Eastern quolls, three or four of them, moving in that low bounding way they have, stopping dead when the light found them and then carrying on about their business. Dark fur with white spots scattered across it, ears up, entirely unbothered by us. They are extinct on the mainland. Have been since the sixties. This island is the only place left where you can walk out of a camp at night with a torch and simply find them, going about a life that ended everywhere else.

We watched until they moved off into the grass, then let them go and did not follow.

That was the whole of it. A town that stopped, a cricket ground going back to forest, and a species holding on in the one place that still had room for it. We went to bed cold and lay listening to a valley that used to have a hundred people in it and now had two, plus whatever was moving around outside in the dark, doing perfectly well without us.Read more