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A link in the chain of Tasmanian history

July 31, 2022 Don Knowler

A black currawong walked with a stately gait across a wooden table on the deck of the restaurant at the Cascade brewery.
Tourists who had gathered for drinks after the brewery tour might well have thought the “black jay” was from central casting, with a role in the script.
The lone currawong certainly had star power at the brewery, the bird floodlit in the flash of mobile phones in the fading light.
As if from nowhere, the currawong had emerged late afternoon from the shadow of kunanyi/Mt Wellington towering above the restaurant.
It was right on cue after the brewery tour had ended, presenting a living symbol for the brewery rather than the extinct Tasmanian tiger which graces its beer labels. It could have been snapshot from the modern history of the brewery but the currawong had also flown out of the past.
The currawong’s association with the Cascade brewing business is as vital as the pure and sweet water running off the mountain.
The trumpet call of the currawong would have sounded out across the wet eucalypt forest when trees were cut for a milling enterprise that morphed into brewing in the 1820s. The call of the black jay, an old name still surviving today in some districts, would have serenaded the brewery’s founder, Peter Degraves, as he inspected the felled forests and the creation of the dam that trapped the mountain water to make beer.
No doubt the currawong begged for food as he took lunch, or even stole it as it would have done with the stonemasons who crafted the limestone structure that is the brewery’s picture-postcard home.
And the currawong would have been there for the rebuilding of the brewery after the devastating bushfire of 1967, which killed 62 people and put the brewery out of business for months.
With its wide-winged, undulating flight the currawong has been a totem of the brewery through good times and bad. Perhaps we might also see it as a vestige of the good and bad times of the ancient Muwinina people, who trod the adjacent hills, streams and trails for 40,000 years before they were forced to make way for a people who brewed beer.
As tourists come and go, the spirit of the Muwinina people lives on, as strongly as the fabric of cement and stone of more modern times. Muwinina and currawong shared the bounty of the mountain, feeding on alpine shrubs like mountain berry in summer and moving to lower altitudes in winter to plunder the nuts of hakea and banksia.
And did the Muwinina marvel at the currawong’s cheeky, bold behaviour, its mad yellow eye, jet-black plumage and ebony bill as the tourists do today?
An endemic currawong stealing and begging food at the brewery is a link in the chain of Tasmanian history, an assertion of place and time.

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