1993_04_april_budawang

When the Labor Party was socialist, in its pre-Whitlam days, conservation was a largely a matter for political conservatives.

Heritage and environment had to be protected from Stakhanovite socialists who would industrialise everything in the name of giving the workers a higher standard of living.

Now conservation values have to be protected against capitalists in the form of pastoralists and miners and against a spreading population that demands more and more water.

Early this century in NSW, conservative politicians sought to protect tracts of Crown land by creating what they called primitive areas and national parks.

One was Mark Morton, elected to the NSW Parliament in 1901. Morton National Park, between here and the coast, was named after him.

In the mid-1930s Morton proposed a primitive area which would have embraced the Great Shoalhaven Gorge. Some of what he proposed was gazetted in 1938, six months after his death, and named Morton National Park, much smaller than its present boundaries.

Morton’s three sons were also NSW Members of Parliament and his grandson was Minister for Lands.

The original park is much smaller than it is now. Moves to extend it faltered during the war. In the early 1960s the NSW Government rejected extensions, saying the wild nature of the area was protection enough. But pastoralists and loggers encroached. In 1970 it was extended, but its boundaries are unsatisfactory and reflect economic values rather than ecological ones, a Colin Watson has pointed out in üPigeon House and Beyond, published by the Budawang Committee.

Cliff faces have little economic use, so they can go into a park. However unless a buffer and some corridors are also protected, the flora and fauna are soon eroded. Human interference through trail bikes, and beer-can-carrying day trippers, rather than dedicated bush-walkers, endanger then very reasons for having a park.

And now the demands for water by the growing population of Sydney and the coast are imposing upon the two rivers Morton worked so hard to protect: the Shoalhaven and the Clyde.

Part of the Shoalhaven Gorge that Morton wanted to protect has been flooded by the Tallowa Dam. More of the Shoalhaven is threatened by the proposed Welcome Reef Dam to supply Sydney with water. And the upper reaches of the Clyde are under threat by a proposal to pump water to supply Milton-Ulladulla and from forestry.

While people go to Kakadu, they ignore a stunning park in Canberra’s back garden.

Morton, and adjoining Budawang, are fabulous parks. In Monolith Valley, a dinosaur would not have been out of place.

In fact the dinosaurs were recent visitors. The park contains a geological history going back 550 million years. The dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago. Plant species survive perhaps as old as the dinosaurs.

Monolith Valley is, mercifully, fairly hard to get to. It is an easy drive to the edge of Morton National Park: go down the Clyde Mountain, turn left 25kms this side of Bateman’s Bay on to the Western Distributor dirt road, drive 45kms to the Yadboro River, walk 3km along an easy track.

The comes the hard bit: walk a further 3km up a steep rocky track and through Nibelung Pass between Mouth Nibelung and Mooryan.

The names are as if they come from Lord of the Rings, and the scenery befits them, except this is ancient Australia, far more ancient than the legends of Arthurian England and their derivatives.

Monolith Valley is carpeted with ancient ferns a dark green moss. Orange phallic banksias stud the higher ground. Around are the great Budawang walls. Shrouded Gods Mountain, Donjon Mountain, the Seven Gods Pinnacles, and more mundane in name, but as majestic in geology, Mount Cole and Mount Owen.

Great eroded overhangs provided shelter for Aborigines for thousands of years. It is a heady place, quite close to Canberra, but far from the machinations of the SES, the Cabinet submission or the vacant Class Five in the Personnel Section.

The northern part of the park includes the Ettrema Wilderness Area, which was declared last year. The Budawang Committee says another wilderness area in the western part of the park was promised in 1990, by the then Minister for the Environment, Tim Moore. It hasn’t happened.

Wilderness is different from national park. Development in the land surrounding the wilderness is restricted.

The committee is worried about new houses and other development along the Braidwood-Nowra road on the western side of the national park.

Also in the northern part of the park is an Aboriginal bora ground, with ceremonial stones still in place, overlooks Pigeon House Mountain.

Pigeon House was named by Captain Cook in 1770 as he sailed by. A better view of Pigeon House is had from the inland, from the Castle.

It is reached by taking the Monolith Valley track, turning right 5kms along, going through a natural rock tunnel and climbing through a gap in the 50m-high cliffs. It is worth the climb.

You look across Byangee Walls, over the Clyde gorge, to the green coastal fringe beyond. It is the demands of those on the coastal fringe that threaten places like Morton and Budawang National Parks.

In 1967 former NSW Liberal Leader and then Minister for Lands, Tom Lewis, said: “”We are fortunate, in spite of growing pressures on our land resources, that this state does have reserved of unalienated Crown Land possessing national park, state park or nature reserve potential. The responsibility rests with us to preserve all that is unique, rare and beautiful from this natural heritage while the opportunity still remains.”

The opportunity has shrunk since 1967.

David Torrens, the secretary of the committee, said an opportunity to buy some buffer farmland adjacent to Morton is likely to fall through because of lack of money, even though the seller is keen to see the park get it.

To preserve the things mentioned by Tom Lewis will require the will of both sides of politics to put the values of both Stakhanov and unbridled capitalism aside.

üFootnote: The Budawang Committee is at 40 Alexandria Avenue, Eastwood, NSW 2122. Phone (02)8742901. Its other publications are:Fitzroy Falls and Beyond, The Man from Misty Mountain and the sketch map of the northern Budawang range, available at most bush-walking shops.