All that remains...

This is the sawdust pile at a campsite in the Grampians called Smith's Mill. A Mr Smith had a sawmill here for many years, and accumulated a 3m high pile of the remnants of Grampians forest. Some of the sawdust burnt, there have been many fires through here, but very little grows on the remains of the trees.

The sign at Smith's Mill tells it all. There are a few remnants of millers cottages, many pine trees, and an obviously second or third growth forest around. The animals are friendly, or rather unconcerned, and I fed a currawong that was quite happy to sit on a post while I ate my breakfast.

Just a few km away, on the western side of the range is this new source of weeds, an olive grove. The Adelaide Hills are full of these mediterranean weeds, many Europeans have , in earlier times, satisfied their craving for olives and olive oil by picking the fruit. Now, along with the deer farms, we have olive groves. This one is on the side of a track on the way into another campsite.

This is a little out of the way of the Grampians, south, but still in the general area. It is a panorama of the Tower Hill park. This was once a source of much timber for the many farmers who lived in the area, potatoes are one of the earliest of the horticultural products of the area, but it was denuded for many years. In recent times there has been an attempt to reafforest Tower Hill, a vast slumped volcanic cone, with variable success.
I saw a koala busily eating itself out of house and home, having denuded all the food trees along the ridge where it resided. We watched while it ate the last few leaves off the tree in which it was roosted. Koalas were dumped into the park in the interests of nationalist notions of Australian landscapes, they are not native to the area. Weeds again.

The source of information of what Tower Hill looked like once upon a time is a famous painting by Eugene von Guerard from the 1850s-1860s. He spent some time in the Western Districts drumming up commissions, and sketching. There is an interesting case to be made out for his accuracy in depicting what he is painting, and there is also the problem of what is a picture and what is the reality. This picture was taken form an observation point which is claimed to be the one von Guerard used to make his sketches.