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IF EASE OF ACCESS and over-use are currently the park's biggest problem, it was quite the reverse in the days that followed the grand official opening. Authorities were keen to demonstrate the value of this innovation and promote its use to the maximum extent. Early in the 1920s the Government Tourist Bureau produced a high-quality, 32 page brochure entitled 'Tasmania's National Park'. It is resplendent with ornamental borders, illuminated capitals and lavishly illustrated with excellent photographs. It contains all the expected information and, in addition, quite detailed and authoritative accounts of the park's geology, fauna and flora. All-in-all it is a small gem of the publicist's art and the following quotations are from its pages.
It precedes its specifically descriptive sections with an eloquent rationale for the notion of a national park:
'Tasmanians are apt to under-estimate the value of a National Park. We have natural beauties around us where-ever we may take our stand, and it is difficult to realise that in a generation or so many of these may disappear. Forests will be effaced. Streams whose route is now clothed with typical Tasmanian verdure will be bared to the banks. This country will, in course of time, become over-crowded and it will be found that much of the land's natural beauty has been filched from the people by the necessities of civilisation. Then, and then only, our National Park, reserved forever from selection, will be assessed at its true value.'
Physically, the park is an elevated area south of the main Tasmanian central highlands. Its foundations comprise fossiliferous Permian mudstones some 220 million years old (they are exposed in lower areas, notably at Russell Falls) which are covered by yellow to brownish sandstones of Triassic origin. The mountain caps are dolerites of the Middle Jurassic intrusion, common to much of central and eastern Tasmania, dating from 165 million years ago. The only later rock is a basaltic dyke to be found on the northern side of Lake Seal. The broad topography of the area, along with the characteristic columns that flank most peaks, resulted from significant faulting that occurred around 70 million years ago. The particular features that make the landscape so spectacular, however, result from much more recent events.
During the Pleistocene epoch, some tens of thousands of years ago, a huge permanent snow cap covered the Mt Field plateau in the centre of the current park area. It fed a number of glaciers, the most significant of which gouged its way north up the Broad River valley. The result is numerous characteristic and spectacular landforms.
The Broad River valley itself is the classic 'V' -shape with a flat bottom and parallel sides extending in a straight line for some six kilometres. The river meanders along this length without any hint of the more usual overlapping spurs that characterise water-eroded valleys. Across the valley floor lies a series of recessional moraines - lines of boulders deposited by the ice as the glacier retreated in stages up the valley when the climate became warmer. There are also some notable erratics huge boulders carried by the ice and dumped on the valley floor.
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