Myrtleford is a nice enough town without being special. On the roadside was displayed the root system of a fallen tree.When we stopped for a closer look, we discovered that it had been somewhat hacked about which, it seems, had turned it into a sculpture. The sculptor decided that part of the root system resembled a phoenix rising from the ashes and so named 'his' work The Phoenix Tree. Written on an adjacent notice board were the words, reproduced in green, below the pictures.
The mythical phoenix bird, rising
to new life from its own ashes, is depicted in the top centre of the sculpture
and gives the work its title.
The various creatures down amongst the roots are, like man, dependent
on the tree for survival.
On one side of the trunk the form of a bulldozer blade shows man's interference
in nature but on the other, Halley's comet represents his part in the
cosmic system.
The wonderful rings of time at the end are our moment in the universe.
Sculptured, flowing, musical lines from trunk to root bind all together
in a symphony of life.
The whole great tree symbolizes the importance of the renewal of forests
the world over.
Hey, if you know where there's an uprooted tree you could become
a sculptor too. Just slice a few chunks off it and sell it to the local
council as art. Of course, you'd have to wax lyrical about it but that
can't be too difficult. Let's practise. I'll have a go at expanding the
description (above) to encompass some of the tree's surroundings.
The concrete pads below the tree represent man's
anchor to the earth that nurtures him.
The sail overhead, with its delicate flowing curves, shelters and shades
the tree from the elements,
a function that the tree itself once so graciously fulfilled for us.
The floodlights around the tree remind us that though the sun may sink
each evening, the trees have not gone away.
Though our eyes may no longer perceive them they await the next dawn with
infinite patience.
The toxic fumes from passing traffic emphasise how the tree's leaves once
cleaned the air for all living creatures.
The graffiti on the nearby bus shelter . . .
Enough! Stop! It's just an uprooted stump. (And there wasn't really a
bus shelter anywhere.)
Consulting our GPS seemed a sensible idea - for a while, anyway - but the roads it showed that would take us towards home just didn't exist. Other times a fork would be shown on the screen but the the purple line indicating the recommended route went both ways! Talk about hedging your bets. Finally we abandoned the GPS which repeatedly squarked, "Off route. Recalculating," and just followed the track. About ninety minutes later, having made several wrong decisions, we emerged back near Lake Buffalo. God only knows where we'd been, but we were back on bitumen with Myrtleford only a half hour away and Happy Hour only an hour away.
We set off to visit the Mount Buffalo National Park, however
a 'burning off' operation some distance from Bright combined with an atmospheric
inversion to fill the Ovens Valley with smoke. As there wasn't a breath
of wind to disperse it, it just lay in the valley.
We set off west for Mount Buffalo but it was apparent it would be a wasted
day, the remarkable, rugged landscape was substantially hidden by the
smoke. We did a U-turn and backtracked past the caravan park, through
Bright, and turned off towards Mount Beauty. As we zigzagged steeply up
the ridge the smoke gradually thinned. By the time we reached the summit
the air was clear. We descended into Mount Beauty, refuelled, and took
the road to Falls Creek.
Immediately we were again climbing steeply on another switchback. Again
poor Pam was terrified by the unguarded drop at the side of the road.
Atypically, however, there is a safety barrier along this section. What the picture doesn't show is just how far the slope falls.
Right: Looking in the opposite direction there are thousands of dead Mountain Ash trees covering most of the landscape.
From the middle of the bridge, the yellow sun was reflecting off the ripples on the surface of the water.
It appears that Major Ovens had a very good friend, a judge named Ellis Bent, who had died in 1815 and was buried in the George Street burial ground, presumably in Sydney. Ovens requested that his remains be interred in the same grave as Ellis Bent. And so it came to pass. What if Mrs. Bent (who had five children to the judge) had wanted to be buried with her husband? Presumably the coffins would be stacked vertically in the grave. If so, Major Ovens would have been the meat in the sandwich, as it were.
According to the biographies of both Ellis Bent and John Ovens, their remains were moved to Garden Island in 1825. Ovens didn't die until 7th December of that year so if the records are correct, he must have been back in the fresh air before he was even cold.
That wasn't the end of the two corpses' travels, however. They were exhumed yet again at a later date and buried at St. Thomas's in North Sydney. There they remain to this day - no pun intended. Are they both still in the same grave after all the cavorting around? Who knows.
Though the biographies of Ovens and Bent concur on the two re-interments, there's no mention of Ovens anywhere in the biography of Judge Ellis Bent.
The name Buffalo was bestowed by explorers Hume and Hovell around 1824 because the mountain's shape reminded them of a sleeping buffalo. We couldn't see it ourselves but we didn't know from where they viewed it. There is a car park at the summit from where you can walk the final one and a half kilometres to the Horn - the actual peak. The views from there were breathtaking . . .
air thermals condensed. Note that all the cumulus clouds have billowing tops but you can almost draw a straight line along their
bases. That's the dew point level. The shadows of the clouds were scattered across the mountains. You can also see a swath cut
through the trees starting at the lower left corner of the picture, disappearing behind a ridge before reappearing as a line
running up the right side of the picture towards the horizon. They can't be seen on the photo but there are pylons supporting
high voltage power lines strung along the path through the trees.
