^{Crowdy Bay National Park}

Crowdy Bay Memories

Early Memories of Crowdy Bay

This is a place of old memories that go back to childhood visits in the summer of 1949-50 and 1953 I think. We went fishing at Diamond Head when we stayed at Uncle Harry's at Coralville.

Just reading about Kennedia brought back sweet memories of  first sightings of the "Dusky Coral Pea" when I was but a kid of 10 or 12. Up at Uncle Harry's at Coralville near Moorland. I knew it from Dad's copy of "What Wildflower is That?" by Thistle Harris. An appropriate name for a botanist. The plant was a big tangled mass growing over the crown of a felled tree near the old house. Even to my colour-blind eyes it was a mass of red on a background of big bean shaped leaves. It is funny how in my embryonic botanical mind the Kennedia took precedence over the much more common Hardenbergia. 

Perhaps it was the scale of the bush and the exotic location. Uncle Harry's was always a place of excitement and pushing back the boundaries of childhood experience. I am a bit embarrassed to recall how important using a .22 rifle was in that personal development. I won't confess my sins here.

 Across the narrow dirt track there was a Cymbidium suave growing in a dead Paperbark (Melaleuca quinquenervia) I recognised it as an orchid and cut the tree down and took back the section containing the orchid to Glenlea. It would have survived for the duration of the holiday but it would have slowly died, deprived of most of its roots penetrating deep down the hollow tree trunk.

 As a child I remember the Christmas Bells on the plain were absolutely magnificent. They had been harvested commercially for many years. In my youth they were bright red with yellow trim; colours favoured by the pickers. Many years later the local population were pale orange with yellow; the colours rejected by the pickers. Un-natural selection over a few decades.

Memory is an amazing force. I was back in the littoral rainforest which grew along the beach between Crowdy Bay and Diamond Head. It was destroyed all those years ago by sandmining but in my mind it still exists. Standing under a gaudy umbrella in the rain at Byron Bay in my mind's eye I could see the rough bark of the "Beech" trees, or was it beach tree in the vocabulary of my Uncle Harry. There were the Bird's Nest ferns and the Elk Horn and Stag Horn ferns on the tree trunks. Behind me was a great knobby paperbark that was a marker on the sulky track leading back across the swampy plain to the old family house. Byron Bay had vanished, replaced by childhood memories. 

To the west are the plains which are rich with Christmas Bells, Boronia, Grass Trees and Sprengelia. Tough and difficult to walk through but completely adapted to survive the more or less annual fires lit by a local who ran a few permanently scrawny cattle on the plains.  The beach forest was always so cool and sheltered after the hot walk across the plain or after the blinding white of the beach. That was where we rested before venturing onto the beach to look for glass bubbles off the fishing nets washed onto the beach. Glass bubbles before the invention of plastic now forming ubiquitous beach litter. 

Crowdy Bay beach was not a beach for swimming but for adventuring and exploring, a place to dig for pippis that would later become bait for rock fishing at Diamond Head where Uncle Ernie Metcalfe lived. 

As I write about those images from long ago I can see uncle Harry splitting kindling with his big razor-sharp Plumb (or was it a Kelly) axe in one hand as if it was a tomahawk. That lean and muscular man of my memories now exists as a frail old man who, with his sense of humour intact, has at least outlived my father. He seemed so big to me as a child, especially as he felled the big blackbutts with just axe and crosscut. 

Harry had a way with bees too. They were content to walk over his calm skin without stinging. He cut a wild hive from one of the beach trees near Boggy Creek and I watched from a safe distance, cowering under a bee veil. I was still stung - the bees knew. Still, the honeycomb tasted wonderful. Honey does not taste as good these days. Harry cut into the soft white wood with deft blows and big chips flew from the hollow tree. A little smoke and the bees seemed willing to be scooped up in Harry's hands and transferred to a bee box. I wonder how many wild bee nests were burnt when the sand miners set fire to the rainforest north of Crowdy Bay? 

The rutile that was mined from what is now Crowdy Bay National Park probably still exists as part of the ballistic missile arsenal around the world but the rainforest that grew on those sands no longer exists, except in the minds of those who remember. Even today we still make the wrong choice between rutile and rainforest. The family property where Harry still lives lies on a low rise between the Crowdy Bay Plain and the big swamp that runs south from the Watson-Taylor Lake. It is a few kilometres north of Coralville which was originally named Big Swamp.

A much more accurate name that acknowledged the huge swamp that runs in from Harrington to Moorland and Stewarts River. This rise must have been a peninsula of land between the Watson Taylor Lake and the Harrington estuary when the interglacial was at its peak and the west side of the Crowdy Bay Plain was the coast line , several kilometres from the present beach.

One of the tracks on the western edge of the Crowdy Bay National Park goes to a long waterhole that is lined with tall reeds and big tropical waterlilies. There were also bright yellow flowers of the Frogsmouth, an aquatic plant which has flowers that resemble the beaks of open birds. 

I think the name should be "Frogmouth" as the bird definitely has a yellow lining to the mouth and opens its beak wide as a threat when disturbed. Come to think of it I have never seen a frog with its mouth open so the flower is definitely not a "frog's mouth". 

The pond looks quite beautiful and it takes a bit to realise that it has straight sides and was actually the dredge pit from the sandmining days in the 50s. It looked as if it should have ducks and grebes on it and herons in the reeds but there were no water birds at all. We had gone there in the hope of adding to the bird list. Not in the rain but in dry times this would be a great place to wait for birds to come in the evening for a drink and a bath. The track then continues on beyond the pool to a destination unknown. Worth exploring on her mountain bike Gail thinks.

It was annoying to find that someone had dumped garden rubbish beside the track and initiated an infestation of Wandering Jew. There was feral gladiolus there too. Ironically they had left behind a label from a foreign cypress tree; evidence of the policy of destroying the natives round the house to make way for exotics. We found a number of Bitou seedlings scattered along the tracks and pulled them out symbolically. I was musing at morning tea this morning about the fate of Australia if the continent had magically escaped discovery until today. Would our process of colonisation be any kinder to the native inhabitants than it was 200 years ago? In theory we know the right things to do. However, I suspect that we would be overcome by greed and destroy the biodiversity of this incredible land buy our acts of selfishness in pursuit of short term profits.

Orchids

Probably the most interesting, if not the most beautiful, plant I saw was an albino form of Dipodium variegatum, the leafless Hyacinth Orchid. I have never seen an albino Dipodium before but I suppose an entirely saprophytic plant can afford to be without pigment. It is a wonder that albinos have not been reported before. 

The normal hyacinth orchid, with a green stem and pink spotted flowers is common along the coast. It is an impressive plant because it produces a magnificent stem of flowers 50 to 100 cm tall without any leaves to collect energy from the sunlight

The bush where I remember walking freely as a child is now extremely dense, as indicated by the three or so Whip Birds that live there. It would be a difficult and unpleasant task to push through the bush now. Much of the undergrowth consists of Hop Bush and bracken fern. On one Hop Bush I noticed two rather impressive grubs, rather like Emperor Gum Moth larvae with numerous brightly coloured "prickles" over their body. They have an odd angular shape that tends to dissuade the eye from seeing a "caterpillar" shape attached to the plant. 

The eye wants to interpret the object as a half chewed leaf. This shape camouflage would be the first line of defence and the harmless prickles would be the second line of defence against any critter that came close enough to see this thing was not a chewed leaf but a grub. I can only think that even a half grown grub of, say 4 cm long, would be too much for the little wrens and thornbills that live in this dense bush. However, they would be able to kill and eat the young grubs of this species.

At the moment the system is unbalanced in favour of the Hop Bush and there are not enough hop-bush-eaters to keep the species in check. The only serious pest of the Hop Bush seemed to be a particularly big round wax scale. These scale are round and glossy and almost look like fruit clustered on the stem, rather like the fruits of a bottlebrush.

Pat was quite taken by the dead stem of a Sun Orchid that still had the dried capsules intact. She looked at them closely and commented on how perfect they were with their slotted ribs and walls. Even after several months these delicate structures were complete and showed how the tiny seeds would have been exposed to the wind for dispersal. 

Normally I do not give such seed pods a second look but Pat recognised their innate functional beauty and insisted on taking this small treasure back to be given a place of honour on Nanna Metcalfe's shrine to the Virgin Mary. Nanna was very religious and prayed every day at her little shrine. Tim and Harry kept the shrine intact as a memorial to their mother for these last forty years, even though they themselves are not religious people.

Banksias

This is a great place for Banksias as there are five species growing close together in a diverse natural area. Veteran Old Man Banksia serrata and B. integrifolias are quite common and the occasional B. robur can be seen, with its massive leaves, in the swamp. There has been a massive regeneration of B. ericifolia along the western edge of the plains. At present they are three to four metres tall and line the track so densely as to make you feel hemmed in as if walking in a maze at an English castle. 

The young plants already have some seed stored in cones that are just one or two years old. It is easy to see how it would be possible to discriminate against this species by burning every year or so for "fire prevention". This species requires a few years to build up the seed bank before it is safe to put another fire through the area and kill off the young plants.