Hale Conservation Park — Attraction in Williamstown

I walked through this bushfire regeneration area in Hale Conservation Park yesterday. Most of the park was left intact and I found it reminiscent of the Hawkesbury sandstone country around Sydney in the dry. The area is rich in mica, the ground sparkles in the sunlight as you hike. The box trees have a somewhat relaxed attitude especially compared to the stringybarks, tattooed as they are by the gliders that tap them for sugar sap.

Standout cyprus pines huddle in family groups. straight, proud and orderly in contrast to malley forms all akimbo. There's a waterfall marked on the map, more aspirational than real unless you count the water seeping through the sandstone to form a soak, just moist enough to keep the mud wasps busy with their housing. A boulder has a curious cubic inclusion about the size of a pound of butter apparently harder than it basement layer, weathered around it. Is it a block of rock nestled on seabed hundreds of millions of years ago eventually becoming the sandstone before me, or more likely a cast from an ice block mould a natural example of lost wax casting? I can picture it, a sandy beach at a geological time known as snowball, or slushball earth, an ice block is partly buried in sand, that when melted leaves space for different material to fill it, a fill slightly harder, that weathers at a fractionally slower rate over the subsequent eons. Further up the hill, past the prickly hakeas and wattles gearing up for showtime, mica flakes are so large it looks like the ground is strewn with broken glass. Apparently there are masses of spider orchards here in spring.

It's a canvass that talks to its creation maybe 500 million years ago alongside of bushfires the year...

Update 15 May: Mosquito orchids are coming out. Update: I notice it every time there is a flat, eroded surface near the lookout that looks like has been sheared by ice.

Well worth the effort walking the track. There is lush vegetation along the creek and gnarly trees growing from heavily folded metamorphic rocks at the top. There are wild orchids growing close to copses of flame heath and insect eating plants on shady slopes. Every turn of the path reveals a different view. There is a variety of bird, reptile and insect life; unfortunately very few stop to pose...

I was with other people who went in, but I was tired so I stayed in the car by the entrance. It's a decent entrance. My friends are keen birders, and apparently this park is excellent for a variaty of bird life (or at least when we visited), so that's good. I like that there are info pamphlets (which can be borrowed and then returned before leaving), and nice choice laminating for...