Walnuts on the hills

   

This far from civilization,

The hills feel like a lost world –

Wet forests, cathedral of ferns

An antiquity, in green unfurled

 

If Mount Wilson felt aloof

Imagine, further on, the winding road –

Mt Irvine, silent cold

What lies here? What abode?

 

Not the English gardens

Left behind, in autumn’s colours grand –

But something more, unexpected

With names from Maori land

 

In that same hillside, basalt belt,

Lie chestnut-walnut farms,

Kookootonga – smiling now for fifty years

With its own withdrawn austere charms

 

After the rains, on 40 acres

Are strewn, walnuts-chestnuts, on the ground

While all along, I wonder

In this darkness, how will the stars abound?

 

No houses anywhere close,

A far-off farm on this hillside ridge –

Yet, connecting so many lands that

Continents join in Kookootonga’s bridge

 

Buckets fill with bounty nuts

It was worth to make this journey long

And feel solitude sink, so deep within

Amazement, an unexpected song

 

But it has been here all along

For a hundred years, Mt Irvine stands

Fighting fire, resisting snow –

On three generations and their hands

 

Amazing travellers as they pass

Glimpsing history, unchanged past

Chestnut memories from the hills -

Silence accepted, then at last…

 

15^th April, 2024

 

The Blue Mountains are renowned for their cool climate English gardens strewn largely around Leura and Mount Wilson. These are the few places around Sydney where Autumn colours can be seen. Compared to other villages and towns of the Blue Mountains, the Bells line of Road beyond Bilpin feels remote, aloof, and brimming with the beauty of isolation, surrounded by dense gum forests. Mount Wilson stands on this last frontier of seclusion with no village centre or shops.

And then, beyond the English gardens of Mount Wilson lies Mount Irvine, even more remote and guarded by its towering rainforests and fern gulleys. In 1897, surveyor Charles Robert Scrivener was amongst the first to explore these lands with a suggestion to the government to maintain the rich plateau as a reserve but when the ask was rejected, he was amongst the first to accept land grants to settle here. He brought his son Passerine Scrivener and his son’s friends Basil Brown and Harold Morley from Richmond to establish their farms here over hundreds of acres of land. Charles later went on to achieve his seconds of fame in choosing Canberra as the location of the national capital in 1909 before settling for good in the hills of Mt. Irvine that he had seemed to admire so much. Passerine and his two friends became the first European settlers here establishing farms and naming many of their houses with Maori monikers – Kookootonga, Taihoa, Painui, and Cooinda.

Why these names from across the Tasman, I couldn’t find many reasons (the Scriveners were from Richmond and Windsor while Basil was from NZ, perhaps with the Maori connection). Talking to the current owners, Mark and Robyn, I understood the meaning of Kookootonga – meaning south wind (while Taihoa meant so evidently ‘not to hurry’). They further mentioned that the chestnuts and walnuts were planted by the children of Passerine Scrivener in the 1950s and 60s, with the farm retaining a long tradition of nut-picking for years now.

I spent a long time at the farm – while the original native vegetation was cleared over a hundred years back, nothing much may have changed beyond – deep in the heart of the mountains, there has not been more conquests by man leaving the hills and their surrounds perhaps exactly as they have been over the last century. Yes, there has been the occasional vagaries of nature – summer’s bushfires and even snow in winter, but Kookootonga perhaps largely remains the same as Charles Scrivener, the unofficial founder would have retired in – far from the humdrum of civilization, eye to eye with the twinkle of the Milky Way at night, with the occasional south winds susurrating through the leaves of the sprawling chestnut and walnut trees, softly justifying the name Kookootonga again and again…