The Search For The Holly Grail

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday November 25, 2006

Eric Hansen

Well, yes, it's spindly and nondescript, but King's holly is also one of the oldest, rarest and most endangered plants on earth. So surely the hike through a snake-infested bog to see it will be worth it ... won't it?

By Eric Hansen.

In the beginning it seemed like such a good idea. fly from Hobart to a tiny airstrip in the remote south-west corner of Tasmania and then hike 19 kilometres over a grassy plain to look at Lomatia tasmanica, commonly known as King's holly - one of the oldest,

rarest and most endangered plants on earth. The botanical details, provided by Dr Gintaras Kantvilas, head of the Tasmanian Her-barium in Sandy Bay, were intriguing. The leaves are similar to holly, but it is not related to that family of plants. A relic species from the Gondwanan era when Australia and South America were still joined, its closest living relative is Lomatia ferruginea, which hitched a ride east on a clockwise-rotating continent about 100 million years ago, and is now found growing in Chile.

King's holly exists as a single clone in one location, which means that the plant has zero genetic diversity. The pinkish-red flowers, similar in colour to grevilleas, are attractive but not striking enough to have large-scale commercial horticultural appeal. As a sterile genetic triploid (that is, having three chromosomes rather than two), the flowers do not produce fruit or seed. And without seeds that can be widely dispersed by wind, water or wildlife, the only way the plant can reproduce itself is by layering. A stalk leans over and falls on the ground where it re-roots itself and forms an exact clone of the original plant. Based on radiocarbon dating of fossilised leaf material found nearby, the plant colony in the Tasmanian wilderness has been cloning itself for at least 43,600 years.

Examining the dead, dried and pressed herbarium specimen of King's holly with Dr Kantvilas, I began to question my plans to search for the plant in the wild. It might be critically endangered, but my first impression was that the thing was weedy, spindly, nondescript and scraggly. Not the sort of plant that will ever inspire poetry. What I didn't realise, at the time, was that the plant was also capable of shredding human flesh.

Actually, I made up the part about King's holly shredding human flesh. The bloody flaying of skin is something that happens to the entire heel area of both your feet when you go looking for the plant in its remote habitat - a damp, sunless gully hidden in the foothills of the Bathurst Range, near Cox Bight in south-west Tasmania.

As a public service, and to discourage any potential plant poachers or other visitors to the habitat where King's holly grows, I think it is only proper to give fair warning that to get there you must first slog through kilometres of snake-infested buttongrass moorland - repeatedly sinking to your crotch in boot-sucking, stinking peat bogs - fall face-first into piles of freshly deposited eastern quoll poo, ford freezing rivers filled with sharp slippery rocks in bare feet, and bash through "cut grass" and leech-infested stands of impenetrable bauera scrub. The last line of defence, protecting the only known remaining stand of King's holly, is a five-metre-high and 25-metre-thick wall of vegetation whose common name is "horizontal" - Anodopetalum biglandulosum, for those of you into Latin binomials. It is a species of plant thought to have been originally introduced to the southern foothills of the Bathurst Range by Satan.

But I didn't know any of this as I loaded my pack into a single-engine plane at the Cambridge Aerodrome outside Hobart. During the low-

altitude, wind-buffeted, stomach-churning 20-minute flight to the tiny Melaleuca airstrip just south of Bathurst Harbour, I promised my guide, Jayne Balmer, a botanist for the World Heritage area, that I would not reveal the location of the King's holly habitat. She was primarily concerned about illegal collecting by rare plant hunters. Having been to the site and back, I can say you'd have to be a horticultural nutcase to make the trip. Jayne also told me that Phytophthora cinnamomi fungus (similar to potato blight), bushfires and global warming could lead to the plant's extinction, because it only grows in one place. Damage to the habitat by bushwalkers was another of her concerns, though luckily the King's holly hideout is well off the area's established hiking tracks.

Seated in the back of the plane was Josh Iles, a handsome, fit, likeable and seasoned bushman who was hired to carry most of the food and equipment, as well as to cook and set up camp that night. Josh had hiked the nearby South Coast Track dozens of times as a professional guide but had never visited the site where we were headed. Both Jayne and Josh were at least 20 years younger and fitter than me, but I didn't give this much thought because in the early 1980s I spent six months by myself walking across the entire island of Borneo with groups of nomadic hunters and gatherers. I had also covered more than 1500 solo kilometres on foot in the mountains of Nepal. A 38-kilometre hike on relatively level ground in Tasmania sounded like a piece of cake. Unfortunately, none of my previous long-distance walks prepared me for what was to come. As a precaution, Jayne carried a satellite phone, snake-bite kit and first-aid kit, intended for emergencies. Josh, the seasoned and well-prepared Tasmanian bushwalker, carried a bottle of brandy, intended for drinking.

On his approach to the runway, the pilot came in low over the buttongrass plain that extends south and fills the fan-shaped, inclined valley between Melaleuca airstrip and Cox Bight, where the land meets the full force of the Southern Ocean. Beneath us I could just make out the flat, meandering trail that we would follow. It looked easy enough from the air. The plane touched down. We unloaded our supplies, fastened knee-high Gore-Tex gaiters to our boots and trouser legs, and then shouldered our packs. The plane took off, dipped its wings once to say goodbye, and with that we set forth into the land of the orange-bellied parrot, the broad-toothed mouse, the biting midge, the jumping ant, the flightless grasshopper, the bladderwort, and the burrowing freshwater yabby.

"Keep your eyes open and fingers crossed because tiger snakes like to sun themselves on the crowns of the waist-high buttongrass hummocks that we'll be walking through," said Josh.

"Venomous?" I said, as he waded into the first peat bog.

"Copious amounts of neurotoxic venom. Kidney failure, blood clots ...muscle damage. Paralysis and death within 30 minutes," he called out over his shoulder.

"Why me?" I asked myself.

The first botanical specimen of lomatia tasmanica was collected by local tin miner Deny King in the 1930s, but not until 1967 (when a flowering specimen was collected, also by King) was a scientific description written up and published by eminent Tasmanian taxonomist Dr Winifred M. Curtis. I had read that there were now approximately 500 stems, all genetically identical, growing from a single plant that covered an area about 1.2 kilometres in width. This makes it the second-largest single plant clone in the world, the largest being a two-kilometre-long huckleberry (Gaylussacia brachycera) in the United States.

The danger of extinction of King's holly is extremely high. Even Jayne admitted that her work to save the plant, through artificial propagation, was only slowing down the natural

process of extinction. Numerous attempts have been made to cultivate it from stem cuttings under laboratory conditions, but the family Proteaceae is notoriously difficult to propagate artificially and then keep alive. The cuttings root, but then they turn black and die, so these experiments have been largely unsuccessful and no viable "safety net" population of plants has been well established. The Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens have two artificially propagated specimens, but if the last stand of King's holly fails, the species will become extinct in the wild.

It was a windswept and cloudy day as we headed south toward Cox Bight. The trail through the buttongrass deteriorated rapidly, and once we were off the well-drained, crushed-gravel path and the slightly elevated plank boardwalks, we had to negotiate a path that was reduced to short lengths of slippery, submerged, half-floating sticks of wood laid crossways on the ground and bound with wire. Long sections of this part of the trail disappeared regularly into knee-deep, brackish water. In the worst places it was like trying to follow an underwater suspension bridge with missing planks, which made it prudent to make sure of each step so that you didn't fall off the planks and into some very major, deep doo-doo. Along relatively dry sections the surface of the ground looked solid enough, but time after time we sank deep into the sucking mud without warning.

After a couple of hours of this, my feet were getting blistered and sore, so I stopped Jayne to ask her to tell me about the flora and fauna of the bog we were slogging through. To my untrained eye all I could see was an expanse of wind-blown, damp, rotting and treeless wasteland. But Jayne immediately became animated and started pointing out the wonders at our feet.

"Oh, how darling," she said as she crouched down and touched a small plant. "This is the green mountain lily, Campynema lineare, the most primitive lily in the world." The diminutive yellow flower, in full bloom, was about half the size of my baby fingernail. I had to get down on my hands and knees to see the thing, which was indeed beautiful and delicate.

"And over here, these small, hollow tubes of mud are yabby towers," Jayne said. She went on to describe yabby towers as being one of the most interesting aspects of the buttongrass ecosystem. Yabbies - in this case, burrowing freshwater crayfish - are a keystone species to the habitat. They tunnel into the peat and build extensive burrows that help to aerate, irrigate and drain the moorlands, which consist primarily of buttongrass (Gymnoschoenus sphaerocephalus). Once a tunnel has been excavated, the yabbies "farm" this feeding chamber by pruning the buttongrass roots and then return later to graze upon the fresh and tender root tips as they grow back. The yabbies also collect buttongrass leaves above ground. The leaves are stored in the burrows, where they undergo partial decomposition by micro- organisms before being consumed. The number and concentration of yabby towers are a good indication of the extent of tunnelling and the yabby population underground. Oddly enough, various species of this peripatetic crustacean are also found on the nearby mountain tops.

We hiked all day, with a quick break for lunch on the beach at Cox Bight. By this time my heels were raw and bleeding, but we had no choice but to go on until the light began to fade. We needed to reach our destination early the following morning, and then be back at Melaleuca in the afternoon for the return chartered flight. The last couple of kilometres of bush bashing were excruciatingly painful. We finally set up camp within sight of our destination, which was a ravine hidden in an outcrop of rainforest.

Night fell and Josh set up the tents in pitch darkness on spongy, sodden ground that felt like a huge waterbed filled with jagged rocks, mud and masses of sharp sticks. He somehow managed to get a fire started and then cooked a hot and delicious vegetable stew in a howling wind. As our joint contribution to camp duties, Jayne and I drank most of the brandy. Sometime later I vaguely remember removing my boots before climbing into a damp sleeping bag with my filthy clothes on and my socks glued to my heels with blood.

At first light we had a cup of tea and then struggled uphill, through waist-high scrub, in the general direction of the rainforest. About 300 metres from our destination, Jayne took off her pack and pulled out her boot-disinfecting kit. I placed my first foot (with boot attached) into a plastic tub. Jayne scrubbed the boot and then filled it to the brim with an evil, stinging, burn-ing solution that brought my mind into very sharp focus. Then she did my second boot. It was as if she had poured petrol and salt onto my raw flesh and then gone at it with a wire brush.

"Sorry, but this is a necessary procedure to pre-vent the spread of Phytophthora fungus," she said as she scrubbed away with renewed enthusiasm.

"Refreshing," I said, in my best imitation of a John Cleese breathless falsetto.

But don't get me wrong, this was a place of wild, haunting beauty. And a perfect setting in which to test one's threshold of pain. There were also many small and unexpected wonders to discover. Once we were again under way, Jayne pointed out what she called mossy rat runs. They were among the most beautiful things I saw on the trip. Down on my knees in the muck, I parted the grass and low-growing vegetation to closely examine a nearly hidden, lush, green, velvety meandering passageway about 12 centimetres wide.

"It's thought that the urea in rat urine helps develop these green velvet trails," said Jayne. "The labyrinth of passageways is commonly used by the broad-tooth mouse, the swamp antechinus and the Tasmanian subspecies of velvet-furred rat."

During the last hour it took to cover the remaining few hundred metres of terrain, we were serenaded by unseen ground parrots, field wrens and the emu wren. Then we arrived at a wall of "horizontal" scrub that stood between us and King's holly. Josh tried to part the inter-woven, gnarly tangle with his hands. The stuff had the strength of steel cables. Then he tried to kick and shove his way into the scrub by using his feet and shoulder. He barely managed to dent the stuff, and without a chainsaw or machete it seemed as if we would have to find a different way into the ravine.

"Here, let me have a go at it," said mild-mannered, soft-spoken Jayne.

She dropped her day pack, stepped back about five metres, took a deep breath and then, with head down and arms and legs pumping, charged the thicket of scrub. At the very last moment before impact she turned and hit the wall of vegetation with her back, ploughing her way into the horizontal with great clods of mud flying from the lugged soles of her boots. The still, mid-morning quiet was shattered by the violent sounds of snapping branches and a wild rustling of leaves.

"Very ... impressive," said Josh.

"Good God!" I said.

Jayne disappeared deep into the thick scrub and, judging from the sounds of progress, it took her at least a dozen similar charges before she finally broke through the far side and into a dark, damp, fetid place where the sun didn't shine. Josh and I bent low and followed Jayne's tunnel. By the time we caught up with her she had already located a tagged specimen of King's holly. Our holly grail.

"This is it?" I said. In my fingers I inspected a spindly, multiple-stemmed branch of Lomatia tasmanica. The small, glossy-green, irregularly shaped leaflets were pinnately arranged on a central stalk, and, to be perfectly honest, far less interesting than the dead herbarium specimen that Dr Kantvilas had shown me two days earlier. The feeble branch was about two metres long and so limp that it lay on the ground. Here and there, other stalks lay on the ground as if ready to die from malnutrition and lack of sunlight. I hesitate to say that I was disappointed, because I am one of the select few in the world to have seen the plant growing in the wild, but never before have I travelled so far and suffered so greatly, for so very little.

I took a few photos of King's holly and then we were off on the dreaded return journey to Melaleuca airstrip, retracing our original route. I worked out that the trip back would involve more than 30,000 steps, each one a cause of excruciating and mind-numbing pain. But there was no stopping, and no time for horticultural dilly-dallying on the way, because we had to meet the plane by 4pm, before the typical afternoon cloud cover would ground all light aircraft. The first 16 or so kilometres were a blur, but then shortly before 4pm, when we were still about three kilometres short of our destination, I spotted the red and white Par Avion aircraft parked at the far end of the runway. There was no way the pilot could see us coming, and if we didn't get to the plane in time, we faced the grim prospect of another night of mud camping, this time without the brandy, which was unthinkable.

"We will have to hurry," said Josh. A kilometre from the plane, Jayne looked back and asked me how I was doing.

"Just shoot me," I said, "and save yourself."

By this time, my feet were so numb they felt as if they were encased in concrete. But if I stopped walking, even for a moment, the numbness would go away and the pain would rush back and so I had no choice but to keep going. We arrived at the edge of the runway just as the pilot started his engines. Through the last few remaining bits of scrub I could see the plane taxi into position for take-off. The wing flaps moved up and down and the engines began to roar as Josh staggered onto the crushed-gravel runway, waving his arms. The engines returned to idle and, with little time to spare, we heaved ourselves on board to join a group of sightseers dressed in spotless, well-ironed, name-brand adventure-travel attire. They were returning to Hobart from a leisurely air tour of Port Davey, Payne Bay and Bathurst Harbour, and I highly recommend this mode of transport for visiting the area.

Bloodied, crippled, stinking of dried quoll poo and unknown detritus from the peat bog, we fastened our seatbelts, grateful that the plane hadn't left us to our fate in the vastness of the buttongrass moorlands.

Once we were airborne and headed into the cloudy mountain passes, one of the men sniffed the air briefly before turning in his seat to ask how long we had been out in the bush.

"About 24 hours," said Jayne.

"Crikey," the man replied, before falling silent.

Back in Hobart, Josh, Jayne and I said our goodbyes, and hugged each other in that unsteady, shocked and hypothermic sort of way that is familiar to anyone who has returned to civilisation to tell the tale. Back in my room at the spotless and exquisite Henry Jones Art Hotel I was faced with the problem of removing my boots without the use of a local anaesthetic.

Not knowing what else to do, I filled the tub with warm soapy water and stepped in, fully clothed. The water turned dark brown and I sat on the edge of the tub to let my feet soak for an hour before getting the boots off. I cut off the outer socks with a pair of scissors, but unfortunately the thin inner socks were impossibly and permanently glued to my heels. They finally came away with two wrenching motions that took large sheets of skin off both heels. The blood flowed and strong oaths were spoken. I showered, dressed my wounds with gauze and tape and briefly mused on the horticultural wonders of south-west Tasmania. Then it was time to turn my full attention to the liquor selection of the mini bar and consult the in-room dining menu. Crisp, lightly starched, 100 per cent cotton bed linen has never felt so good.

© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald

Back to News Index | Back to Home