Wongamine Nature Reserve: Geography of an Island Community

The morning mist has lifted by the time you reach the reserve. As you enter the woodland, the sun rises higher and a clear blue sky yields unfiltered light that is cast upon the cream coloured trunks of Wandoo. The soils here are clay-brown and they feel gentle underfoot. They have a softness that compliments the openness and airiness of the space. You make your way along an old vehicle track and you come upon the first of a series of termite mounds, protruding from gaps in the leaf litter like miniature pyramids. Their surfaces are marked by an almost “puffy” texture that whilst rough, is suggestive of the honeycomb network of air pockets that constitute the interior of such nests. Further along the vehicle track, the trail takes on a greenish, algal hue as you notice the small red tendrils of a flowering Sheoak alongside a gully to your right.

Leaving the vehicle track, you follow the contour of a hill that is capped by lateritic boulders. Dark reds and browns are offset by the pale light-green of lichens that have colonised the pockmarked, porous surface of the rocks. There is a small cave, with its darkness serving as a home to an abandoned wasp or hornet nest. The sun has disappeared and been replaced by a layer of grey cloud, giving the woodland a muted quality. You make your way northeast, along level ground, coming across an old iron barrel rusted completely brown, lying amongst more termite mounds. You realise this area has not been disturbed by industry for a long-time. The extent of the termite colonies points to the development of an ecosystem dominated by ecosystem engineers.

You come to a steep-sided gully and you follow a narrow track along the slope before finally descending to the gully floor. The texture and quality of the materials here are quite clearly the product of movement via water and you realise that you are walking along a dried-out streambed. A ferritic stone stands outwards from a pile of wooden debris, interspersed with large blocks of quartz that have been concreted into a sedimentary matrix over hundreds/thousands of years. Further downstream, you find the dried-out skull of a macropod, with white bone stained green around the orifices. Eventually, you leave the surrounds of the streambed and climb steeply upslope back onto a plateau where you are met with a “township” of termite mounds and grass trees.

When an island of habitat is left undisturbed by the direct hands of humans, it nonetheless remains in a state of flux. Underground, at the scale of insects and microbes, life constantly grinds away at the task of acquiring energy for growth and reproduction, transforming carbon into sugars, transforming humus into nitrogen and minerals, cycling and recycling materials while the form of the surface of the land changes in accordance with the whims of the climate and the biome. This is how soils are formed, going on to serve as the foundation for primary production, leading to the establishment of mature vegetation communities and habitat for fauna communities, hence completing a cycle in the infinite process of ecological succession. That is, until a major disturbance – fire, floods, or the introduction of disease (hallmarks of human activity).