Dandenong Ranges

The Dandenong Ranges rise from Melbourne’s eastern sprawl in a way that is almost abrupt — suburb, suburb, suburb, then suddenly mountain ash trees sixty metres tall and fern gullies so dense and wet that you can’t see more than thirty metres in any direction. I drove up from Ringwood on a Saturday morning with the windows cracked and felt the air change: cooler, heavier, smelling of wet bark and something green that was not the smell of any garden.

Sherbrooke Forest and the Lyrebirds

Most of the Ranges are protected as Dandenong Ranges National Park, and the walking tracks through Sherbrooke Forest are where I spent the better part of a morning doing nothing except moving slowly and listening. Mountain ash — Eucalyptus regnans — is the tallest flowering plant on earth. In Sherbrooke Forest the trees are in the seventy-to-eighty metre range, old enough that their bases are buttressed and furrowed and their upper canopy is invisible from below in any useful way.

The lyrebirds are the sound of these forests. The male lyrebird can replicate almost any sound it hears — other birds, chainsaws, camera shutters, car alarms — and incorporates everything into its territorial display, which it performs from a small cleared mound on the forest floor. I heard one before I saw it: a sequence of notes from eight or ten different birds, then something that was unmistakably the sound of a Nikon shutter. I found it eventually, scratching through leaf litter, singing to no one in particular about everything it had ever heard.

Olinda and the Village Circuit

The towns strung along the ridge road — Olinda, Sassafras, Belgrave — operate on a particular weekend economy of devonshire teas, antique shops, and garden nurseries selling plants that would survive a cool climate. Sassafras has a main street that takes about three minutes to walk and contains at least one building that appears in every travel article about the Dandenongs, a cottage with climbing roses and a handwritten menu board. It was full on Saturday. Fully, completely full.

I had a scone at a café in Olinda at a table near the window where rain was starting on the glass. The scone came with clotted cream and jam and cost less than I expected. The rain smelled of eucalyptus through the gap in the window frame.

Puffing Billy

Running between Belgrave and Gembrook, Puffing Billy is a narrow-gauge steam railway that was built in 1900 and never stopped running, which means it has achieved the interesting status of being both a heritage attraction and an actual functioning train. Children ride with their legs hanging over the sides of open carriages, which is technically a safety classification but functions as a sensory experience — cold wind in your face, smoke from the engine, the smell of coal and oil, the train rocking through forest tunnels.

I am thirty-four years old and I loved it unreservedly. The train crosses a wooden trestle bridge over Monbulk Creek that has been photographed by everyone who has ever been on it, and it looks like it sounds.

William Ricketts Sanctuary

Tucked into the forest above Mount Dandenong is a property that the sculptor William Ricketts spent fifty years filling with clay figures of Aboriginal Australians and forest spirits, embedded into tree roots and rock faces and mossy banks. It is deeply strange and clearly the work of someone who had a vision that did not particularly care about consensus opinion. The figures emerge from the foliage in a way that makes the forest feel inhabited by something older than the trees. I am still unsure what I think about it, which seems like the right response.

When to go: Any time of year. Autumn (March–May) for foliage colour and cooler walking temperatures. Spring for wildflowers and lyrebird activity. Summer weekends are crowded on the main streets but the walking tracks thin out quickly. Winter mornings are cold and misty and the forests are at their most atmospheric.