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| Picnic at Anakie Gorge 1984/85. From left, Judy Hickinbotham, an unidentified person bending over the table, Ned Hough and Ian Hickinbotham. |
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| Photo by Jenny Hickinbotham. |
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| Enjoying a family picnic: Jenny O’Regan (1963-1986) and Stephen Hickinbotham (1955-1986). |
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| Photo by Jenny Hickinbotham. |
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Robyn threw out the checked cloth and we unloaded the pastrami, semi-sun-dried tomatoes, avocado, lettuce, cheese, gherkins, baby beetroot, olives, bread and wine. Mike, her oldest, grabbed a slab of bread to make a sandwich: ‘Where’s the mayonnaise, Mum?’
‘Did you pack it?’
‘I thought you were doing the picnic.’
‘You and Pete were meant to help me, but apparently you were too busy playing games on your computer.’
While Robyn was looking for the mayonnaise, I relaxed and let my mind drift through all my memories of this place, Anakie Gorge in the Brisbane Ranges National Park, overlooking Victoria’s basalt plain. ‘Remember when you used to collect bull-ants here?’ I asked.
Robyn laughed. ‘That seems a long time ago now,’ she said. ‘But bull-ants were very easy to find here. Plenty of fungus, lichen and decaying leaves, their favourite foods.’
‘How do you catch them, Mum?’ Young Pete interjected.
‘I used to wait by their nests and push them into a jar when they came out for their fungus and lichen.’
‘Let’s do that too!’ Pete suggested. ‘I want to catch some bull-ants and watch them build a new colony.’
‘Have you got a jar?’ Mike said. I offered him the now-empty beetroot bottle.
‘But remember you have to put them back exactly where you got them from,’ Robyn warned. ‘When I collected bull-ants I used to return them to their nest the very next weekend. All the ants from one nest went into one jar, and ants from a different nest went into a different jar -- and I mapped each nest site so I could tell exactly where each lot came from.’
‘Why did you catch them, Mum?’
‘To milk them for natural antibiotic. It was when I was working on a research project at Melbourne University. I’d collect the ants on the weekends and milk them in the lab on Mondays. I’d wrap a piece of fishing line around a microscope slide twice, tie it off, pick up a bull-ant, and then force it’s head between the two pieces of fishing wire with a pair of forceps to hold it down so it wouldn’t bite me. I’d make sure it couldn’t wriggle by wrapping more fishing line around the lower part of its body, and then, with a very small pipette, I’d extract what’s called an exudate from the tiny sacks on either side of it’s back legs. I could get a micro-litre of antibiotic liquid from each bull-ant!’
I was as fascinated as the kids by now. ‘Why do bull ants produce antibiotics?’ I asked.
‘To protect them from the fungus they scavenge through every day. You often see them wiping their legs over their faces and they’re actually rubbing antibiotics on to protect themselves from fungal attack.’
‘Wow! So now that we humans are becoming immune to our current antibiotic drugs, ants could be helping us develop a new natural one!’
‘That was the idea. But I’m not sure where the project’s at now.’
We sat back, enjoying the open space, the sounds of the many birds and the happy cows on the other side of the creek. ‘It’s so peaceful,’ Robyn said. ‘I’d love to come and camp down here. There’s a camping ground at Bore Creek, or we could take the three day walk through the park. The kids are old enough to do that sort of thing now.’
I smiled, took a sip from my wine and a bite from my carefully constructed sandwich. ‘They’d love that! I can imagine them saying Are we there yet mum? for three days!’
‘Oh you’re such a sceptic. They would love it.’
‘I know. There’s not much water in the creek at the moment, but it sounds magical as it trickles over the rocks and around the water plants. Can you hear it?’
‘Mmm,’ Robyn said. ‘It goes perfectly with this Pinot Gris: light and breezy and fresh.’
The kids interrupted our peace and quiet again. ‘I’ve found a better way of catching bull-ants,’ Mike boasted. ‘Just tip water down the hole until they all come running out, then catch as many as you can!’
‘But you’ve wrecked their home!’ I protested.
'Just be careful’ their mother warned. ‘If they bite you’ll scream with pain and the sting will last for hours. Keep a couple in your jar and put the rest back so they can re-build their home.’
The kids ran off again and we resumed our conversation. ‘Do you remember we came down here for a picnic one day about ten years ago,’ Robyn said. ‘Beatrice and Harry, you and David, Helen and Nick and John -- and Maria brought Susie. She must have been about six months old. Nick sprawled out on the ground after lunch and went to sleep, and John took a photo of him. I still have that photo!’
‘I remember! We thought we were alone, but then that forty-seater bus turned up at the bottom of the gorge! I can’t imagine how the driver made it around all those hair-pin bends. And do you remember how it got stuck half way up and blocked the whole track because the rear axle went over the precipice!’
‘David and I walked back to the vineyard to get the tractor. David had to back all the way down to the bus so he could hook up the steel tow-rope, and pull it up the track. You’ve never seen anyone so grateful as that bus driver! He couldn’t thank us enough. He’d been to hell and back that day and David was his Mephistopheles. He owned that guy’s soul!’
‘Just for a moment! I think his passengers must have ordered the bus without telling him where they wanted to go. Poor guy had probably never heard of Anakie Gorge and didn’t know how steep the terrain is.’
The kids had tired of hunting bull-ants by now and were growing impatient. ‘Let’s go, Mum.’ Pete demanded.
‘All right. We’ll go and look for native orchids.’
‘We can take the track towards Stony Creek Picnic Ground.’ I suggested, as I helped put the picnic things in the boot.
Within minutes we had everything back in the car so wandered off down the track through a mini-forest of grass tress with their beautiful spear-like flowers protruding high into the air. We hadn’t walked far, however, before Robyn called us to a halt. She was looking around the base of a eucalypt tree. ‘This is a sign!’ she said.
‘What’s a sign, Mum?’
‘See these pieces of leaves.’ Robyn picked one up to show us. ‘Who do you think chewed on that and dropped it down here for us to find?’
‘A possum!’ Pete said.
‘They eat fruits and leaves, but I don’t think a possum ate this leaf. Look up in the tree and see what’s there.’
We craned our necks looking into the branches. A large ball of fur seemed to be stuck in the fork of a branch. ‘It’s a koala!’ Mike shouted excitedly. ‘She’s looking down at us.’
‘She knows we’ve found her. She’s not too worried though,’ Robyn said.
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| Koala dropping pieces of gum leaf to the ground, a ‘sign’ for vigilant visitors. |
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| Photo by Jenny Hickinbotham. |
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‘Mum, I’ve found another sign.’ yelled Pete. ‘Scats.’
‘Koala?’
‘They might be. I’ll have to check the drawings in my scats book at home.’
I pulled a small plastic bag from my pocket and passed it to Pete. ‘I keep these for picking up such things when I walk my dogs!’ I told him. He took the bag and expertly picked up several little turds to identify later.
We left the koala to munch on her leaves and strolled down the track. The eucalypts were growing quite tall and straight here as they competed for the limited light in the narrow gorge. The only sounds were the leaves crackling under our feet, the birds singing in the trees and the water bubbling around the rocks in the creek below. It was hard to believe that such a lovely, peaceful place had been created by such violent geological faulting. I tried to explain this to the kids to get them to imagine what the Brisbane Ranges might have been like four million years ago when the faulting occurred.
‘But what’s faulting?’ Mike asked.
‘It’s when a large crack forms in the earth and one side of the crack shifts up into the air and the other side shifts down. I think it happens very suddenly during an earthquake when there’s lots of rumbling and shaking and falling rocks.’
‘You wouldn’t want to be around when it happened!’ Robyn joked with her boys.
‘We’re walking along the part that moved down, and the ridge over there is the part that moved up. There’ve been many other changes over the last four million years though. Little Stony Creek has probably deepened the valley considerably since then.’
‘Would faulting happen today?’ Pete asked.
‘No, there’s no chance of the earth cracking here in the foreseeable future,’ I reassured him. ‘The ridge is too old and sleepy to fault now. Even Mount Anakie, where the vineyard is, has become too old and tired to do anything much, even though once upon a time, it shot tonnes of scoria and rocks and lava into the air. When all that lava and scoria cooled and weathered in the sun and the rain it turned into beautiful, rich soil for us to grow grapes in, and for our neighbours to grow peas.’
‘I hate peas.’ Pete said.
‘But you love native orchids, don’t you,’ his very patient mother said. ‘And I’ve found a beauty. A Bearded Greenhood. Isn’t it gorgeous?’
Copyright Jenny Hichinbotham, 2003.
Fixed 13 May, 2003.
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