Having left the lush green of the north east coast I’m now in the hills somewhere between Ballade on the east coast and Koumac on the west. I thought that since I was up this way I might as well do the full tour of the island by following the highway that loops around the northern end of Grand Terre. I had thought that I might stay at a campsite just outside of Oegua on the Diahot River, but arriving in town the place looked so uninspiring that I just followed my gut reaction and kept on driving. However, as the sun neared the horizon, and with no good options, I decided it was time to look for a campsite and so have stopped in a quarry by the side of the road. I have initiated what Mike and I used to refer to as the naughty camp protocol, used when camping in locations where camping is either dubiously acceptable or outright prohibited. The procedure is described fairly simply: set camp after the sun goes down, break camp at dawn, no campfire. For some the last stipulation probably sounds like hardship, but I’m pretty lazy in any case, and generally have to be coaxed into making a campfire by more enthusiastic campers.
The landscape I am camped in is like Australia, but through a looking glass. The hills roundabout are covered with what all of the books on the subject describe as savannah, although there isn’t really that much grass. It looks like it could be anywhere west of the divide in New South Wales or Queensland except that on closer inspection the dominant trees are not eucalypts, but instead Broad-leaved Paperbark, Melaleuca quinquenervia known here as niaouli.
Broad-leaved Paperbark may look familiar as in Australia it’s the dominant tree in lowland swamps in a broad arc from around about the vicinity of Sydney, where you can see it dominating Lachlan Swamp in Centennial Park, all the way up the eastern seaboard and then across to the Top End. In New Caledonia it can be found in swamps as well and that presumably was its original habitat. However the firing of the landscape first by the Kanaks and then by the French opened up a niche that few of the native species were adapted to fill, so Broad-leavd Paperbark, with its tolerance of fire, spread across the landscape wherever the original forest has been pushed back by fire. The only real exception is in the vast block of ultrabasic soil in the southern third of the island where concentrations of nickel and other metals are simply too high for it to tolerate. Broad-leaved Paperbark is planted as a street tree in Australia, and so it is well known that it can survive outside a swamp environment. But nonetheless it’s a surprise to see it clothing dry hills and plains, and I can’t help but wonder, when seeing the odd plantings of eucalyptus around the island, whether the latter species might in time usurp Broad-leaved Paperbark’s position in the landscape, presuming that the current practice of firing the landscape continues.
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