I’ve been on two kinds of journey today.
One has been very real; through the mountains of Eastern Victoria.
The other has been entirely in my head; it has been through the outline of my WIP.
Both have involved frustration of one kind and another.
My WIP has essentially languished for the past couple of months. I have written a few pages now and then. However, my limited creative time has been largely tied up with preparing
Veiled in Shadows for publication and working on the beginnings (planning stage) of a marketing campaign.
I should say a little about the WIP. It is tentatively titled
Veiled in Storms. The WIP is the second of a series of four stand alone novels that I have planned.
The first
Veiled in Shadows, is set in the years 1937- 1945 and follows a number of characters against the backdrop of war and the Holocaust.
The WIP
Veiled in Storms runs from 1941 – 1949. A few of the characters in the first book appear in the second but the backdrop shifts to the war in the East and the terror of Stalin’s reign.
Both books have a backdrop of world changing historical events. But in both books the main focus is on the characters, events may create challenges for my characters but what I am interested in is how they respond and grow (or otherwise).
So as I say my WIP has been languishing. That is something I want to rectify.
So today as Deb and I drove out to the East, I had my plot and what I have already written running through my head.
I ran into a problem. I realised that too much of what I have written so far is bogged down in the realities of the war in the East. I don’t want my WIP to become just a ‘war book’. Yes it is set in the war, but like the first it is meant to be about characters not events.
So frustration of frustration, most of the many thousands of words I have already written will never make it into the final book. The only saving grace is that most of what I have already created will become ‘back story’. My characters will be shaped (or even scarred) by the events they pass through but most of it will be simply touched on in the book rather than being the main narrative thread.
So most of what I have already written will be (figuratively speaking) mulched and turned back into the soil of my imagination.
Anyway back to the real world. Deb and I set off into the mountains of Eastern Victoria today. We had intended to go to a State Forest Reserve to see a tree called the ‘Ada Tree’.
The Ada tree is reputed to be the largest tree remaining in Victoria, so it sounded like it was worth the effort of a bit of a trek.
Anyway, after a lazy morning off we went. We drove to the east to the Yarra Valley before cutting south east into the mountains.
After driving along a windy mountain highway we turned off the main road onto what is essentially a series of unsealed forestry trails.
This firts piccie shows a fork in the trail about 20 km (13 miles) from the main road.
As you can see it was wet and muddy today.
The reason for our stop: to look at a logged forestry coup.
A ‘coup’ is an Australian forestry term for a portion of a few acres in a state forest that is logged for timber.
After the area is logged the remains of the trees are burnt in-situ. You end up with a mess like this.
Now before this apparently wanton destruction elicits howls of outrage I should say a little about Victorian forestry practice.
This coup, like most of state owned forest in Victoria has been logged this way before. This second piccie shows a few large tree stumps.
The tall one in the foreground is an old stump that was cut a long time ago (I would guess 60 – 80 years) by hand saw and axe. The low stump in the middle ground is a recent chainsaw cut stump. The low stump is a tree that has grown since this coup was previously logged.
The trees in the background are all young (probably 10 – 15 years) and are in a neighbouring coup that is being regenerated. Victorian forestry is probably as close to a long term sustainable industry as you can get.
The burning of the waste is the first step of regeneration. Many Aussie tree seeds won’t germinate until there is wood ash in the soil. It is a trait that helps the native forest regenerate after a bushfire. Rather than clearing large areas forestry will log a small area and then leave it to regenerate for decades before touching it again.
So a state forest will be a mosaic of areas of trees of differing ages. In terms of native vegetation and most wildlife it works really well to both have an industry and preserve diversity.
There have been problems though. Some species of possum and bird have become quite rare in the forestry areas. The reason for this seems to be a lack of very old trees with suitable hollows for nesting.
Forestry has taken some steps towards rectifying this. This third (not very good) piccie of the coup shows a couple of large trees that have been left.
These are designated ‘habitat’ trees that either already have hollows or are expected to develop hollows as the bush regenerates here.
It’s a good idea, and a step in the right direction. But if forestry really want to solve this habitat problem in the long run, I suspect they will have to leave more large trees standing in each coup that they log.
So back to the car, which as you can see from this piccie was already very muddy.
We arrived at the Ada Tree Reserve car park.
Frustration again, what with one delay and another it was already 4:00 pm. With winter the sun sets early and the cloudy wet day meant it would be dark in less than an hour. Not nearly enough time to do the return walk to the Ada tree itself (about 3 km or 1.8 miles of bush track).
Getting lost in the bush in the dark is not one of my hobbies.
So like my WIP we had to re-jig what was left of the day.
Deb ensconced herself in the car with some knitting and I set off to see what I could photograph in the immediate vicinity of the car park.
First, in the car park itself an old tree stump. This stump was cut before the days of chainsaws with old hand axe and crosscut saw.
I can tell by the height of the stump that it is old, with a modern chainsaw you’d simply cut through the tree close to the base.
In the old days they cut a tree above the wide buttresses to minimise the amount of timber they had to cut through by hand.
This notch was cut part way up the stump.
The timber getters would then stand on a plank inserted into the notch and cut away at the tree by hand.
The muddy posterior of the car caught my attention briefly before I ventured a short distance into the bush.
The main thing I found to photograph is a huge number of fungi that are busy putting out their fruiting bodies at the moment. Fungi love the wet winter weather.
These orange mushrooms were growing in the soil.
These odd little mushroom-like bodies protruded from a decaying moss-covered stump.
These little beauties were sprouting from the bark of a living tree.
They were tiny, with the heads of the 'mushrooms' about the size of a fingernail.
The same delicate little fellows viewed from below.
It's worth clicking on these piccies to get an enlarged view.
I spotted these ragged looking little fungi at the base of a stump as I went back to the car.
It was getting late so we began heading home.
On the side of the road not far from the first coup I spotted this odd sculpture.
I presume some bored forestry worker has been busy during a lunch break.
The result, a throne and table carved out of solid tree stumps with a chain saw.
The throne had a grand view down a logging trail into the mist wreathed mountains beyond.
I caught a few shots of this amazing fungi,
And from underneath.
Finally I reached the falls. After climbing down these stairs
I got this shot from a viewing platform about half way up.
Never one to make things easy for myself I decided to leave the formal path and climb down to the river bed to get shots from the base of the falls.
He was hunting for insects in a small patch along the river banks.
The shots aren’t great because it was really dark under the forest and he would not sit still.
The misty look is caused by spray from the falls. When I looked at the rocks I saw why I had fallen. Continuous drifts of moisture from the falls has caused them to grow a slick film of brown algae. What looks like rock is actually as slick as ice.
