The call of the striated pardalotes echoed from the most unlikely place. I was on a tour of the historic convict coalmines site on the Tasman Peninsula when I was stopped in my tracks by the familiar “pick-it-up” refrain that I usually hear in my regular stamping grounds in the foothills of kunanyi/Mt Wellington.
It’s one of the ironies of bird-watching that places of intolerable pain and tragedy for humans can be meccas for birds.
I remember being spellbound by my first sight of green rosellas at Port Arthur when I arrived in Tasmania and now at the location of an equally harrowing place, the coalmines in Lime Bay, I followed the flight of pardalotes carrying food for their young.
The flight led me to the cracks in the crumbling sandstone walls of the coalmines complex where a species that nests in cavities had found a happy home.
Not only pardalotes of two species – the striated and the spotted – could be spotted at the site. Black-headed and new holland honeyeaters flited about the extensive grounds, with outcrops of ruins nested in a sea of grassland and native vegetation.
The coalmine visit was part of an unexpected side tour of an adventure cruise my wife and I had taken with On Board cruises, which primarily had birds in mind. But human history and not birds were top of the agenda on this occasion but somehow the two intersected. Harrowing, yes, and painful to read the interpretation signs, of beatings and floggings, of a miner crushed under a run-away wagon loaded with coal.
Life was hard and generally short at the coal-face but I couldn’t help wonder when the miners came to the surface whether they noticed the birds, and revelled in their freedom and song.
Perhaps the birds represented another kind of pain – a symbol of the freedom that was denied these men described as the “worst of the worst” by the authorities that sent them from Hobart to these cruel outposts.
Coal fuelled the British empire and at Lime Bay it ruled supreme, while Port Arthur was mainly concerned with ship-building using plentiful timber found on the western side of the Peninsula.
Tunnels and other underground workings at the coalmines leave no doubt as to the importance of the industry there. Coal is still scattered everywhere, right down to the beach that once held a loading bay. It was a curious sight to see an oystercatcher, in starched-white plumage, plucking crabs from the coal debris.
Large sections of the mine infrastructure remain, including administrative buildings, a school, a hospital and, of course, solitary confinement cells. Some of the buildings look strangely elegant, in finely carved sandstone, high and wide window and doorframes in the Georgian style.
Much work for the stone mason, and much appreciated by the striated pardalotes that make the coalmines their summer home.