This week, with many people taking the Summer holidays as an opportunity to travel, but with the weather also hot and sticky, Roy decided it was the perfect time to visit a cool and tranquil oasis not too far from popular holiday destinations. Roy loves the bush, but some of the most fascinating areas, in his view, are rainforests. With such a range of different types of rainforest, and of course with wonderful variable vegetation, he thinks they are fascinating. This week, he is visiting one which has a particularly significant history, the Yarrawa Brush.
If you would like to visit the Yarrawa Brush there is a beautifully preserved remnant in Robertson in the Southern Highlands, called the Robertson Nature Reserve. To get there, take the Illawarra Highway, which will take you through Robertson itself. From the Illawarra Highway, turn into Meryla Street and follow the road until you reach the sign for Belmore Falls. Turn left, instead of following this sign and you will soon see the area of rainforest. The walk is wheelchair accessible (though it can have rather a lot of fallen leaves over the track) and provides a leisurely stroll which can be completed in under half an hour.
Once, the Yarrawa Brush covered the entire area around Robertson, with an estimated 2500 hectares of the rainforest once growing on the rich, red basalt soils of the area. The brush is special because although Robertson is not far from the coast, it is high up and this creates a microclimate where this special type of rainforest exists. The Yarrawa Brush is a temperate rainforest, but it is neither cool nor warm. Unusually, it is both, with pockets of both warm and cool temperate rainforest coexisting! Early visitors to the area certainly made mention of this special rainforest, but they were usually not positive. The first explorer to make his way through the dense rainforest was Charles Throsby who in 1817 forged a route from the highlands around Robertson to the coast. The brush was not easy to traverse though, being incredibly dense and in some places nigh on impenetrable. Fortunately, the path through the remnant brush in Robertson makes the brush easy to traverse.
In 1830 Robert Hoddle, a well known surveyor, set out to cut a track through the Yarrawa Brush from Robertson to Kiama. He and a team of 20 men worked hard to build the track, sometimes clearing as much as a mile a day, but the brush was hard to work with. Sometimes the density of the vines and surrounding vegetation actually prevented trees which had been cut from falling at all! Yet the rich basalt soils in the area were perfect for farming, and of course this meant that people wanted to settle in the area. ‘The brush’ as many early settlers called it had to go. Clearing the brush was easier said than done though and early settlers actually avoided the area, settling other, more easily cleared areas in the fertile Southern Highlands first. Robertson itself was not settled until the 1860s. Late settlement didn’t save the brush though and by 1900, only 40 years or less after settlement in Robertson began, over 80 percent of the brush had been cleared.