A pink robin moved ahead of me through the wet forest, hopping from shrub to shrub under the towering canopy of swamp gums in the Styx Valley. By coincidence the route of the robin, and mine, was marked out by ribbons in the same magenta hue as the robin’s breast
The circular route about a quarter of a kilometre in length was the centre-point of a day of celebration for what are termed the “big trees” of Tasmania, the biggest being the world’s tallest flowering plant, the majestic swamp gum, or Eucalyptus regnans to give them their scientific name.
Although the Styx, together with the adjoining Weld and Florentine valleys, have been at the heart of south-western Tasmania’s forest wars in recent years, the latest event amid the gums and sassafras and myrtle was designed as more of an information day than a protest. The message was to promote this unique corner of the world as a tourist asset.
As a birder, my primary focus was on the birds, the pink robin the star among them, which call Tasmania’s forests home.
What was termed “a day among the giants” featured heavily in the media when it took place last year but I chose not to write about it then. I didn’t want to be accused of jumping on the bandwagon after Charles Wooley devoted his weekly column in the Saturday Mercury to it and a few weeks later it was the main story in the newspaper’s magazine.
However, the event made such an impression I decided to take a friend escaping lockdown in Victoria to revel in the Styx experience. He was blown away, especially after seeing his favourite forests in his home state destroyed in last summer’s bushfires.
“The soul sings in a place like this,” I told my friend as we stood under an 80-metre, 200-yeard-old swamp gum. I then confessed the quote was not mine, but from Charles Wooley.
In a podcast posted on the News.com.au website Wooley had other magical words to describe the Styx and its wooded giants.
“What we have in this small corner of the world on this remote island as far south as you can get before Antarctica, we have a tiny corner of the earth which reminds us what the rest of the world was like,” said the 60 Minutes correspondent.
Along the road into the forest, after the turnoff from the Maydena-Lake Gordon highway, a logged area stood in contrast to the coupe that was the centrepiece of the day.
Amid the flattened forest were the remains of a lone swamp gum, blackened and burned.
As Wooley noted, his trip was a case of “heaven and hell”.
“Hell because you go through the destruction of paradise to see it. Heaven because it is, it’s what we were created for.”