Bill McDermott – the last in a long line of Tasmanian pioneers – was very much in my thoughts as I trod the rounded, flat paving stones leading into what was once his farmyard.
A scarlet robin watched my progress and in the scattered blue gums a yellow-throated honeyeater called.
On a sunny day the scene was very much as it would have been during days gone by before the McDermott association with this magical place in the foothills of kunanyi/Mt Wellington was to end in tragedy.
Bill McDermott’s pioneer family had from the time of Queen Victoria’s reign run cattle across what is now known as McDermott’s Saddle along the Pipeline Track below Fern Tree.
A virtual recluse, Bill ran the farm for many decades, only leaving the property once a week to buy groceries in Hobart. His only companion was a dog called Brandy Shamrock McShane.
Bill allowed his cattle to graze on the adjacent Ridgeway Reserve, leading to a long-running dispute with the Hobart City Council.
But his run-ins with the council were the least of his problems when, on February 7, 1967, the Black Tuesday bushfires destroyed most of the farm. Although 80-year-old Bill managed to save his house and his six cattle, days after the fire he was gored to death by his fire-traumatised bull.
The council demolished his home after his death, leaving just the paving stones of the drive.
It is not just the life and times of the McDermott family recorded by an interpretation sign at the site of the farm, which is situated about a kilometre from Gentle Annie Falls going north along the track.
The sign explains that it was ancient human activity that made McDermott’s Saddle so suitable for ranching. Archaeological studies point to significant use of the mountain foothills by the Muwinina people of pre-European times. The Muwinina helped to create the open grasslands of the Chimney Pot Hill area through regular burning of forests to assist them in hunting game. And there is evidence of seasonal occupation: rock shelters in sandstone outcrops and pieces of flaked stone, the result of tool-making, on the banks of the Sandy Bay Rivulet below McDermott’s and the adjoining Hall’s Saddles.
On a late-summer day I rest having reached McDermott’s Saddle along a fire trail leading from Waterworks Road. Summerbirds – more formally known as black-faced cuckoo-shrikes – have joined the scarlet robin in song. And at the forested edges of the grassland, a mob of Bennett’s wallabies rest in the shade of the gums, one of them with a joey in her pouch.
Birds are our living link with the past, and generations of the McDermott family heard these very songs and saw these very birds flitting across the grassland. And there’s a silent echo of the past – each year daffodils still bloom in what had been the farmhouse’s garden.