This book is a compilation with no named editor, but built from contributions ranging from stunning photography to flora, landscape, history and cultural heritage. The ten contributors include Robert Purves of the WWF, Sharnie Read, Dr Sally Bryant, Rick Ridgeway and not forgetting Bob Brown.
It’s an almost impossible task to do a conventional review except to say that overall it’s highly emotional in love of the land, environment and heritage and is essentially dedicated to longtime campaigners and the brick walls they have had to climb over in seeking recognition and preservation. Three constant themes emerge: the unique value and beauty of the cool temperate rainforest and its landscape, the millennia of occupation by First Nations people, and the almost total lack of formal preservation of a terrain that’s unquestionably of World Heritage rank.
Figures 1 and 2 taken on my March 2021 Climate Council trip, give a fleeting glimpse of the Tarkine rainforest vegetation. I say 'glimpse' because if you want a fuller picture you need to buy the book ($75 available through most quality bookshops). The book's predecessor, much harder to find, is the pictorially stunning Tarkine, compiled through the WWF by Robert Purves and published by Allen and Unwin.
Fig 1. Savage River near Corinna fringed by dense myrtle beech Nothofagus cunninghamii rainforest.
Fig 2. Myrtle beech rainforest flanking the Pieman River is strikingly punctuated on the left by a tall Huon pine. An even taller eucalypt, probably a mountain ash, towers skywards on the right.
I could close off there but there are aspects of the landscape and vegetation of NW Tasmania and the Tarkine that come to light viewed from high points and need to be highlighted. These impressions have accumulated in several visits over 30 years, but the Climate Council trip of 2021 brought them into sharp focus.
The geology of NW Tasmaina is hugely complex and built of highly deformed sedimentary rocks of Neoproterozoic age. The ragged, jagged coastline exposes these beautifully (Figure 3), so why then do these ragged rocks not create rocky spurs and ridges everywhere? Why is the landscape a low, undulating plateau indented and cut by steep-sided valleys (Figure 4)? Well, it’s actually a classic uplifted peneplain that was previously worn down and smoothed over by erosion over many millions of years, then blanketed and softened by vegetation under a climate that rivals North Queensland in rainfall levels.
Fig 3. Jagged coastline of Neoproterozoic sedimentary rocks north of Pieman Heads.
Fig 4. Looking south across the Pieman River from the slopes of Mt Donaldson. The landscape has essentially a uniform elevation 100 to 220 m asl but incised by numerous river valleys.
Fig 5. View across a tiered landscape crowned by Cradle Mountain and Mt Ossa. The wet heath and button grass slopes and enclaves tend to dominate the higher ground, but are otherwise scattered fairly randomly as groves within eucalypt and rainforest.
A second intriguing feature. If you’re familiar with the consistent 1700 to 1800 m treeline in the Snowies then you’ll perhaps be puzzled by the apparently random relationship of forest to heath and swamp in Tasmania (Figure 5). However if you take on board our typical forest-swamp relationships in the Blue Mountains or Hawkesbury Sandstone country you will conclude that few tree species like wet feet. NW Tasmania is very very wet, with many sites exceeding 2 m mean annual rainfall and without a long dry season. Climbing steep, heathy slopes like Mt Donaldson near Corinna one is struck by the swampy heath sweating and trickling as one slips and slides through the mud. Trees clearly tend not to like such in wet ground. One might also need to consider historic First Nations burn patterns that may have fine-tuned heath/forest boundaries.
Reviewed by John Martyn
takayna/Tarkine: One of the Last Wild Places on Earth
Compiled by Australian Geographic
Hardback, 224 pp