Yass Landcare Group's walk in the Mundoonen Nature Reserve on Saturday 28th November included a visit to the old Charcoal Pits. Kate Wilson found this beautiful poem by Jane Baker about the site, bringing to life some local history:
Mundoonan Charcoal Pits
In the silence of the bush
the charcoal pits grow old.
Wind and frost have stripped
black carbon stains from their
hewn rock walls, softened now by
tapestries of moss and lichen.
Leaf fall and forest debris
disguise the depth of these pits
where string-thin men stoked
and sweated in calico shirts
above dusty trousers belted low
and tucked into broken boots.
The bush has long swallowed
the blue spiral of charcoal smoke,
and eaten both the timber props
and steel pickets left by lonely men
surviving only in sepia photographs
that curl like fern fronds.
Now wallabies pad through gullies
generations removed from the scream of
the two-banded saw and the double bounced
thump of felled timber, as the bush
quietly and firmly reclaims the pits.
By Jane Baker
From her recently published book “That Other World”
