Purple mushrooms & more

There are miles and miles of private walking tracks on Anketell Forest, nice wide tracks kept clear through regular maintenance by Steve and our friendly yellow D4, Dolly the Dozer. My job is to read books and drink tea in the sun atop boulders follow and catch up every now and again in the ute cleaning up the odd rock and log along the way.

Today we went over tracks along the northern part of the property ending up at Top Flat. Steve stopped Dolly and said, “Want to see a big tree?”.

We took off through the bush following wallaby tracks when they went in our direction. Even without wallaby or Dolly tracks the bush here is pretty easy to walk through as long as you mind your step. We passed clusters of old ti-tree teeming with small birds. Rounding a large patch of boulders Steve pointed and said, “See? There.”

Earlier that day I’d seen an old hollow blackbutt that was once huge and majestic and probably already dead when this area was first colonised. Now in front of me was a tree just as old but thriving and solid with a wave of branches above the rest of the canopy. Its progeny and relatives where scattered around in the nearby gullies, some almost as big, their roots deep in leaf and bark litter. In our simple understanding of tree taxonomy they are red gums of sorts.

These gullies just below Hollys Peak are the headwaters of Stephens Creek which runs through a number of properties before joining with the Deepwater River which flows into the Darling. Like many areas on the property, its aspect, water resources and soil composition have created a special microclimate and ecology.

Amongst the boulders and detritis at the base of one of the trees were these bright, very surprising purple fungi (above). I think they are Cortinarius archeri in their mature stages.