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Kooparoona Niara - Mountains of the Spirits Nettie Hulme It is early winter and I am sitting with my favourite comforter around my shoulders, kettle gurgling softly on the wood stove. The cape is made from a very soft mohair yarn woven into a muted lilac & green tartan. I bought this small cape at a garage sale many years ago on a frosty morning in the Otway Ranges, south western Victoria, Australia. The seller told me it had belonged to a friend of hers, a small Scottish woman named Jean, who wore the cape every evening while she played a hand of cards and sipped whiskey. I wonder what Jean would have thought of the view from my bed here in the highlands of Tasmania... In this ‘land of a thousand lakes’ our shack sits in the lee of Dell’s Bluff, with the Mother Lord Plains behind us and stretched out in front, Yangina, the Great Lake, framed by mountains dusted with early season snow. Would it remind Jean of North Eastern Scotland along with the red deer antlers mounted on the shack wall? Would she
speak with the mountains like her country woman, Nan Shepard, author of the book I am currently reading, ‘The Living Mountain’. By squinting my eyes, I can imagine the purple shadows on the mountains to be heather and I try to visualise the land of my ancestral line. The trailing, swirling ever present mists would have transported the most homesick migrant back to the land of the Picts. Yangina was formed by the damming of existing small lakes and tributaries to generate hydro-electricity. This created the largest, highest fresh water lake in Australia at over 1,000 meters above sea level. This huge body of water is the perfect habitat for imported brown trout from Scotland. The Rainbow Lodge was built at Doctor’s Point in 1910 but it burned to the ground in the 1940s. I would have been looking right across to it, but instead there are many days when real-time rainbows dance across the water from east to west for hours at a time. My home here in Breona is in one of the coldest nonalpine locations in Australia. It has an ‘altitude-influenced subpolar oceanic climate’, a classification quite unusual for Australia, only shared with places in other subpolar regions such as Punta Arenas in southern Chile and Reykjavík in Iceland.1
1 T he Edge : a natural history of Tasmania’s Great Western Tiers / Sarah Lloyd ; foreword by Tom May (2012) Pub by Friends of Jackeys Marsh Inc
