A bunch of red and yellow roses had been placed near the base of the Silver Falls just above Fern Tree. Such tributes are usually to be found on war memorials spread throughout the country on Remembrance Day, November 11 and it was puzzling to find picked flowers at this beautiful location. The falls had in an instant become a shrine but in honour of whom for what?
Remembrance Day had been in my thoughts because 24 hours previously, on an outing to Richmond, I had seen poppies and wreaths on the stone cross dedicated to the fallen in the historic village.
As often happens when I view such monuments or walk the Avenue of Remembrance on the Queens Domain, I hear the flute-like song of magpies, such a powerful symbol of Australia bringing a poignancy of their own.
No magpies at the Silver Falls, however. It was left to a green rosella to sing of the magic of the Australian landscape, the nostalgia, that pull of home that these soldiers must have felt in the trenches or on the beaches of far-flung lands.
But still the mystery persisted about the flowers placed at the Silver Falls. The mountain is often described as “sacred” by Tasmanians and so it seemed appropriate that its shimmering cascade of silver water should assume the mantel of a shrine.
People find glory, and solace, in such places.
Along with the roses, Mother Nature had provided flowers of her own. On the hike on the mountain’s lower slopes I had seen the first of the waratahs in bloom, their crimson crowns matching the red of the roses at the waterfall.
The Silver Falls and the trail that leads to it by way of the Upper Pipeline Track is one of my favourite walks. The Browns Rivulet, after spilling out over the lip of the cascade, runs parallel, splashing and gurgling over rounded, mossy rocks.
The rivulet is framed by man ferns and sassafras, and beyond them myrtle, swamp gum and gum-topped stringybark.
I’ve seen platypus here, negotiating the rapids by sliding over and between the rocks, leaving the stream sometimes to bypass difficult cascades when the rivulet is in flood with melting snows from higher above.
I now hear a pink robin proclaiming its territory with a soft, melancholy song close to the falls and then I see the bird in the low branches of a blackwood. He is beautiful in spring plumage, magenta on the breast and sooty matt black on the head and back.
On Armistice Day I think of such natural beauty wreathed in splendour, and those who never came home. If there were a wild place that a fading soul might yearn to visit just one last time, it would be the Silver Falls on a late-spring day, a pink robin’s keen hanging in the air.