Black Hill Conservation Park
With Keith ConlonIt rises steeply, mountain-like, from the north-eastern suburbs of Adelaide, but then it rounds off to become Black Hill. And all around it, the native bush is preserved. On Postcards, I made a flying start to our trek round the Black Hill Conservation Park, introducing viewers to the spectacular sights from the top of one of The Sugarloaves, three smaller peaks in a row, and posed the question "Why is Black Hill so black?" After all, it's covered with dense scrub. The answer, and the summit, would come later.
This is a young conservation park, now rising from fully developed Athelstone beneath. The government was still getting hold of the last bits of the jigsaw only twenty years ago. The preservation of such a dramatic part of the hills face along the Adelaide Plains seems so obvious now, but urban planners had to blow the whistle as late as 1962. "The suburbs are coming!", they said. Glancing out over the rolling streets of Tea Tree Gully, with its spired shopping centre, it's clear they were right.
Now, you can walk in from the streets that define the park perimeter - and this is very much a walking park, as there are no public roads up the steep hills. One of the walking trails comes in from the Gorge Road near the site of the old strawberry farm, and another leaves Addison Avenue to snake up through Ghost Tree Gully. Looking down on its distinctive white-barked eucalypts, you can imagine how on a moonlit night they'd have spooked a woodcutter with a rum or three in him.
There is no denying that most of the trails involve a fair climb, but once you've worked up to the ridges above 400 metres, the pay-offs are plentiful. The Black Hill Track, for instance, winds its way along the long ridge that runs north-south with the Mt Lofty Ranges. From the northern, or Torrens Gorge end, the views are glorious. Looking east into the hills, the orchards rise up the slopes from Castanbul, and beyond is the Kangaroo Creek Dam, with a back drop of forest and grazing land quilting. Past the licks of sun on the cliffs in the gorge, the new Golden Grove township rolls over the mini-escarpment and down towards Salisbury and the silver waters of the Gulf of St. Vincent.
A short walk to the south and the track runs along a narrow saddle with a park gully on one side and a birds'-eye-view of the huge Montacute blue metal quarry on the other. Just out of the park and cutting into the next hill, its giant trucks look like miniature toys against the dolomite quarry face. It is close to the old David Copperfield mine. Nineteenth century Cornish miners sank a lot of shafts through these hills looking for gold and copper. As the Black Hill Track meanders southward, it's accompanied by a wide low-fuel zone. The National Parks staff mow through it every four years to maintain a fire break, and with good reason. In almost every year in the 80's and early 90's bush fires ravaged Black Hill. That is not the reason, however, for its name.
Next in our Postcards tour of the Park came Ambers Gully. There is a well sign-posted entrance to Black Hill Conservation Park on the Gorge Road, with a small car park. The trail runs past a handful of new houses and leads into a nature trail that is also a family-friendly walk into a timeless scrub gully.
My guide, National Parks and Wildlife Service Senior Ranger, Andrew Walker, pointed to the extensive new plantings and noted that Ambers Gully was once well grazed and infested with olive trees, blackberries and a lot of weeds....in other words, it was not typical South Australian bush at all.
"The Friends of the Park and their school projects that have gone on for a decade now have been marvellous in restoring this beautiful gully", he remarked, pointing to trees and shrubs that have recreated a hills habitat. At the entrance to the steep sided gully, there are early settler signs. The ruins of a two-roomed cottage stand right next to the little creek and an old sheep-hanging cross-timber is now deep in the fork of an old river red gum that's grown round it for the last century and a half.
A few minutes walk up the single-file track from there is a sight worth the trek in its own right. Where the ancient quartzite has formed a cliff across the gully, there is a strange and beautiful "frozen" waterfall. Looking like a twenty metre high distorted toadstool, it is a rare formation of tufa, a calcite deposit that has been created over thousands of years. Calcium has been leached out of the hills above, and the rarely running creek has trickled over the brink, as the sun has evaporated the flow, more crystals have deposited and added to the unusual phenomenon.
It is also clear that once there was much more rainfall and flow here. Alongside the current fall are weird , bulbous formations looking like overlapping stone umbrellas, all formed in the same way. For our Postcards revelation of this secret gully, we were lucky to borrow some video footage of the Ambers Gully waterfall in a late winter flow from a great conservation champion, Friends President Graham Churchett. It's a special treat.
Black Hill Conservation Park is about sustaining a part of the Adelaide Hills bushland very close to the suburbs. A recreation park it is not, but it is certainly all about walking in and around the several trail loops. A map put out by the Friends of Black Hill and Morialta is very helpful for novices. It shows, for instance, that there is an easy-going walk along the base of Black Hill itself. The Buffer Zone Track winds through an old sandy quarry site where in happier days for the parks, a big water feature was added. With extensive regrowth, it's now a pleasant wetland area between the trees.
As government funds have dried up, the old wildflower garden nearby has suffered badly. Naturalists and education groups still love it, but it's overgrown and weed-infested paths are no longer trod by tourists. But it was an important building block for a new Park when Campbelltown Council brought it from its private originator, Mr F C Payne, in the 1960's. Good close up views of Black Hill from this area, too.
And why is it black in colour? I left the answer to the end of the program, and the summit of Black Hill itself. The answer lies in the "slatey" sheoak trees that love the western face...the one we see from all over the plains. The male trees foliage has bronzed in the winter, but in the summer, they turn a dark gray that looks distinctly black from the suburbs.
The summit itself is a little underwhelming, given the climb to 465m above sea level, but the close encounter with the scrub and the teeming bush birds and flowering shrubs on the way, makes the expedition well worth a try. Winter is a good time, too, with the snakes asleep and the weather cooler for the ascent. And this is the 140th anniversary of a tiny nature reserve being declared on the top. Four hectares were set aside after colonial European nature-lovers recognised the joys of nature atop Black Hill.
Details:
Black Hill Conservation Park
115 Maryvale Road,
Athelstone. SA 5076Phone: 08-8336-0901
Fax: 08-8336-0900Friends of Black Hill and Morialta Inc
Graham Churchett
President
88 Addison Avenue
Athelstone. SA 5076For more information you can email: info@postcards.sa.com.au
