Right into the Dandedongs

This weekend we were kind of casting about for things to do, since this is one of the only weekends that we don’t have excursions planned for our Engaging Australian Culture class, so we had a lot of spare time (comparatively) and not a whole lot going on. Well, someone from the other flat suggested that we head out to Dandendong National Park, that we can get to with our met passes, but is remote enough (about 2 hours by train) that we still feel like we’re doing something cool and exciting. So we set out bright and early Sunday morning (comparatively, like 10:30) and caught a few trains till we ended up at Upper Fern Tree Gully Station, only a short walk away from our next adventure. I must confess that the better that I know the land of my new, temporary home, the more I love it. The forests that we visited were amazing. As the train made its way out into “the country” we could see the rolling hills on the horizon, carpeted with trees like astroturf run amok. I certainly was not prepared for what remarkable scenery we were about to see. At the head of the trail, there were groves of tall, stately eucalyptus trees, stretching back like ghostly pillars as far as I could see and creating a tall, leafy canopy over head. I remember reading in one of our exploration accounts for Oz Lit that the explorer narrating found the eucalyptus trees to be rather distasteful, thinking that their leaves were a drab, ugly olive green. I find that I must heartily disagree with this assessment. I never saw so many shades of green as I did in the bright bushy heads of the gum trees (don’t get lost, still talking about eucalyptus here). And not just greens, but ambers and reds, which tinged the sides of the leaves and added to the rainbow of the forest.

As we went further, the scenery on either side of the path became even more breathtaking. In addition to the mammoth gum trees, there were also monolithic ferns of a size that boggles my puny North American imagination. At least 6 feet in height and four feet in circumference, these giants looked as though they had been beamed in from a primordial time period, as attested to by layers and layers of dead fronds that drooped to skirt the trunks of the trees as their life span had ended, making something that seemed like a grass hut around the bottom. Then, in stark contrast to the old life of the fern, in the very center of the verdant ring on the top, the new shoots sprang out in architectural glory. They looked like a natural version of the top of a bishop’s crook, curling in on itself over and over in complex spirals of the life-yet-to-be. So each fern is reflecting its whole life span in its layers of foliage.

Then as we hiked up the fairly steep trail (at least I thought it was steep, which my hips verified in whining tones all the next day) we stumbled upon and old, old hollowed out tree, coated in lime green moss and vacant, for the moment, at least. Exploring inside, we find every child’s dream woodland playhouse, the haunt of elves and fairies, with shafts of sunlight streaming in the bounce off the ripples of the little stream that ran through it. The tiny, tender fingers of new roots were emerging from a branch that slanted through to break up the space looked as fragile and the little mushrooms that were carving out a spot in the wall of the old, sagacious tree.

Not only this, but the variety and the novelty of bird life that we saw were also remarkable. We saw these amazing birds that were bright blue and red and others of the same size and shape that were bright green and yellow. They were fairly small and would race through the canopy like Luke Skywalker getting chased around the Death Star by those other guys, making a chirpy, chattering noise. Then, of course, there were the usual suspects. The sulfur crested cockatoos that would streak through the brush screaming angrily and the kookaburras with their cheeky smiles and teasing laughter.

Ummm…I can’t think of how else to end this post, so hey, if you ever happen to go to Oz, this is one of the places you should visit. Word.