Lost Worlds (39 page)

Journeys of Solitude Through a True Wilderness

“Could be a bit choppy,” says Phil, the pilot.

“How choppy?” asks this nervous traveler, unaccustomed to flying in tiny four-seater planes through clouds that crowded in at the Plexiglas windows and made it feel like we were plowing through thick oatmeal porridge.

“Hard to tell, mate. Over the Arthurs could be a bit rough.”

“How high are these Arthurs?”

“’Round about thirty-five hundred feet. West Portal is thirty-six hundred feet.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.” I’d flown over far higher ranges in my travels but usually in a martini haze and couched comfortably with a favorite book, lights and fan that flicked on with the press of buttons, and flight attendants anxious to respond to my every whim. (Well, for the first hour or so. After that they usually disappear. I’ve never found out where.)

“’S not so much the height, mate. It’s the bloody wind shear you get on those ridges—especially the first one. But—take it easy—we’ll know soon enough.”

Yes—I bet we will. Like we’ll know when we hit one of those vertical air cliffs and gravity takes over and we end up skewered on a needled pinnacle in one of Australia’s last true wildernesses.

Silence. Too much silence. Phil isn’t exactly sweating, but he’s certainly got a tremble in his hands unless that’s just the judder that constantly rattles your teeth and nerves in this cardboard and paste flying machine.

Retrospective time.

How did I get to be here in this cloud-cuckoo land on the lowest chunk of Australasia with nothing between me and Antarctica but fifteen hundred miles of frigid Pacific Ocean?

Tasmania?

Most people have no idea where it is. Maybe vague recollections of a remote island that exports apples, fragments of irrelevant information from musty geographical diatribes given by a teacher who’d possibly never left his hometown. An island in Indonesia, maybe? Somewhere in the South Pacific? Near the Philippines?

The only image that seems to generate a flicker of recognition is that glowering, growling, slobbering Saturday morning cartoon character, the Tasmanian Devil.

And ironically most mainland Australians (the “north islanders,” as the Tasmanians call them) often have similarly hazy views of the place. They know where it is, of course—that little heart-shaped blip south of Melbourne, a short air hop across the Bass Strait. But when it comes to understanding its topographical and social idiosyncracies I usually hear such offhand remarks as:

Or the dismissive:

Or the well-intentioned:

And then come the snide jokes that I must have heard in a dozen different guises on the “north island”:

And much more of the same. Far too much triteness for a truly beautiful island of half a million relatively pastoral people living leisurely lives among its soaring mountains, Ireland-green meadows, and lovely coastal coves.

It was in a pub, way up on the western coast of Australia, when I finally decided to take a trip to Tasmania.

“Unbelievable place!” The young eager-faced sheila (Aussielingo or Strine for a girl) gushed as she sipped her beer and leaned forward into our group, her eyes sparkling.

“Southern Tasmania. It’s like no other place in the world. You’re out there in the middle of nowhere—six days’ walk from anything. No people, no farms—nothing except all this incredible scenery. Mountains, lakes, beaches—I mean beaches like you’ve never seen—white, empty—going on forever….” She paused to take a breath. “It’s fantastic!”

The group nodded. They could feel the enthusiastic vigor of the girl’s experience. Most of them were your typical back-to-the-elements-crowd. Two were suntanned surf bums living a life of ease and frolic among the waves of the west coast. Another couple were from England and, by the tone of their conversation before the girl joined us, more than ready to return. Four others were true outbackers, hippielike, with long, straggly hair, flinty eyes, and of indeterminate gender. Your regular ragtag bunch of world wanderers sharing the magic of new places and undiscovered delights.

The Foster beer “stubbies” came and went as the girl described her lonely six-day odyssey along a wilderness path from a place called Melaleuca (“There’s nothing there except a hut—it’s just a name”) to the first farmhouse near Cockle Creek. The table was a litter of all those heart-arresting, fat-filled, salt-soaked, deep-fried Aussie junk foods with such palate-pandering names as deep-fried seafood rolls, bacon and potato triangles, meat pies, sausage rolls, egg and bacon pie, deep-fried mussels, deep-fried dim sum, et al. Then she let fly with the kind of comment that is always guaranteed to hook this particular world wanderer:

A week later I took the hour-long flight from Melbourne across the Bass Strait and landed with a rollicking thump in Hobart, capital city of Tasmania. As always, my plans were vague. A night in some city hotel and then off to find a small plane to fly me to the start of the South Coast Track at Melaleuca in the heart of the South-West Tasmanian wilderness.

Apparently this region is so valued as one of the earth’s last temperate wildernesses that it’s been declared, along with other major portions of Tasmania’s western hinterland, a unique UNESCO World Heritage Area. This region, covering almost a fifth of the state, with over seven hundred thousand square miles of some of the most pristine, untouched scenery in the Southern Hemisphere, is thus doubly protected by both Tasmanian government and UNESCO resources and will be maintained in its present natural state forever.

Way back in the late 1800s, shortly after convict transport to the island from Britain had ended, this portion of “Van Diemen’s Land” (as Tasmania was originally known) attracted the hardiest of adventurer-entrepreneurs. They arrived in hundreds to prospect for gold and mineral deposits, hack down the Huon pine and hardwood forests along the coast, and set up stations for whale and seal hunting. Tracks were cut through the wilderness and even small communities established, none of which exist today.

As the pine forests and whales diminished, the pioneers moved on and the South-West became a forgotten land. New maps of the territory labeled it impenetrable or unexplored and so it remained until the 1920s, when an upsurge of bush walking and mountaineering brought lost world-lovers back into the territory seeking challenge, adventure, and solace in solitude.

Much of the region has remained unmolested while the more fertile, low-lying areas to the east were transformed into pastoral havens for farmers, stock rearers, and orchardmen. Hobart became the capital and focal point of the island’s pastoral and commercial economies. Today it is a pristine little place of 160,000 inhabitants or so strung around both sides of the Derwent River and overshadowed by the ominous and often cloud-topped bulk of Mount Wellington. Beyond the elegant church spires and modest glass-walled towers of recent downtown redevelopment, much of the city seems to consist mainly of typical Australian bungalows trimmed with Victoriana fretwork, topped by red tin roofs, and surrounded by privet and laurel hedges. They’re dotted in the thousands up the foothills of Mount Wellington and offer their residents constant vistas of the river, the mountains, and the scraggly eucalyptus-topped hills to the east.

In recent years Hobart has become a haven for retirees from “north island” and, despite its occasional cloud-and-drizzle climate, possesses a mellow postmenopausal mood. There’s none of Sydney’s flash-and-flurry here, none of the sun-saturated serendipity of the mainland “Gold Coast,” and only fleeting touches of Perth’s cultured cosmopolitan ambience. In spite of its size and its jet-set-styled casino, you sense a small-town spirit here verging on complacency—mom ’n’ pop retail outlets that close early and never open on Sundays, pretty eucalyptus-shaded parks, cozy beaches for weekend barbecues and, for the most part, careful drivers and law-abiding, respectable citizens.

Hobart’s notorious nineteenth-century reputation as a place of “last exit” for British and Irish convicts seems hard to appreciate in today’s green and graceful city. Admittedly the ruins of the once-dreaded Port Arthur penal settlement (“a natural penitentiary,” according to Lieutenant Governor Arthur in 1830) are only fifty or so seagull-flying miles southeast of the capital, on the tip of the Tasman Peninsula. Doubtless that strange Australian obsession with its criminal origins still ripples close to the surface of psyches, but I sensed none of these ominous overtones. Even the rather maudlin tone of Peter Conrad’s excellent book on Tasmania,
Behind the Mountain
, which I’d read on the flight down, failed to diminish my initial impressions of Hobart as a lively, history-aware community, proud of its new roads and glass towers, proud of its one-time whaling men and its boisterous democratic traditions.

The day I arrived the Green party claimed they’d jostled the government into a “vote of no confidence” dilemma and were demanding mass resignations and a new election. The next day, however, the “no-fleas-on-me” prime minister had turned his virulent opponents topsy-turvy through a series of postmidnight alliances and “understandings” and left the Greens gasping and gawking at his typical Tasmanian penchant for wile, guile, and political gamesmanship. Ironically, at the time of this minor political flurry, Australia was enduring a period of international rebuke for the “cowboy” antics of some of its leading entrepreneurs—Alan Bond and Kerry Packer in particular—whose widely admired, Trump-like triumphs of the eighties had now degenerated into sleaze ’n’ greed reputations and public denunciations by reputable world economists. Well, apparently Tasmania’s prime minister had a little of the cowboy spirit in him too.

Unfortunately, nighttime reveals another Hobart, particularly in the empty downtown streets where packs of restless, wolfish youths ramble and stagger through the shadowy alleys looking for a flurry of fists with unsuspecting victims. (Me, for example. Only the presence of slow-moving police cars kept me from a couple of roustabouts with drugged or drunken gangs.) I hoped to find respite in the pubs, but they too were filled with similar huddles of young men whose glazed eyes roamed the smoky rooms seeking easy pickings among the long-haired, cherubic-cheeked (but equally dead-eyed) girls. I sensed all the things that diatribic monologues about “our young generation” proclaim—hopelessness, directionlessness, drug-induced escapism. I’d sensed the same in small-town Australia, where rowdy gatherings at stubbie-stained tables seemed the only outlet for frustrated energies and disillusioned ambitions. The media blames unemployment, lack of parental discipline, inadequate education, a fascination for fast wealth, and “the constant search for instant gratification” in the form of glue-sniffing and stubbie-slurping highs, easy sex, “cool-at-all-costs” attitudes, and remnants of the high-flying eighties’ “me-first” mentality.

When I returned to my small hotel I felt depressed and out of it all. Get me to the mountains, I begged of my little interior plan maker. Get me to where I’ll be “the first person ever to have walked in the remote places of Tasmania.”

Hence the four-seater plane, bucking and bouncing through the porridge clouds, heading west to the wilds of Melaleuca deep in the southwestern wilderness.