Peregrinations

Victorian gold

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At Devonport, waiting to board the night boat, Tasmania farewelled me with rain, as it had greeted me a fortnight before, then withdrew its forces to the now familiar lowering dark clouds over its mountains — and turned on a perfect double rainbow. Day or night, Tasmania, your wild skies have won me.

In the Macedon area of rural Victoria, where I had won a three-week writers’ residency, it was colder than Tasmania, and the long low clouds often found it hard to lift off the land. 

I had missed all the showy Autumn reds and burgundies, but it was still more autumnal — and European — than I’d experienced. 

Roads were lined with elms that had dropped the top half of their yellow leaves to carpet the road edges, but held them on the lower branches — as befitted the cusp of winter. 

I loved that so many fallen leaves were yellow, not brown. I had thought they died — ‘sere and brown’ — before they fell off the twig, if you’ll pardon the pun.

The bicycle track that ran beside this road was thickly edged with the clear bright  yellow leaves, saved by the grass from being scattered to and fro by the winds.

At Rosebank Cottage, the tortured willow filled the lap of the forgotten summer chair with pale lemony gold, and generously strewed it over the lawn. The quince leaves hung on to glow a deeper yellow.

In the morning fogs they joined forces to catch the first of the struggling sunlight, steal it from the rest of the cold and dripping garden, and warm the spiders in their webs.

The tallest White Gum in the world

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In Tasmania I learnt to expect plantations like these when I saw the word ‘forest’. I drove through miles of this to reach the Evercreech Forest Reserve, 52 hectares that wasn’t clearfelled.

I reached the tree for which the Forest is famous.

The White Gum, Eucalyptus viminalis, is thought to be 300 years old. I walked around the wooden platform at the giant’s base, looking up at its ninety-one metres. Awesome. But then I read its history, and the platform seemed more a collar imprisoning it, like a bear in a sideshow.

Twice it was saved from being felled, neither time by altruism or respect. In the logging of the 1940s and ‘50s, it and its fellow White Knights, as they have dubbed them for the tourists, were too big for the bullock teams to take out. By the logging resurgence of the ‘70s, they had bulldozers, which brought the road to the very base of this tree.

One of the foresters, thinking it seemed exceptionally tall and might set a record, had it measured. They then had to convince the world that it really was Eucalyptus viminalis, so far above the known limit was its height. With such a trophy to show off, they reserved 52 hectares as a display case for it.

But … how many others, almost as big and as old, did fall to the dozers? This is tokenism; the saving of the tallest tree was an accident of egotism.

In low spirits I took the walk along the moss-bouldered creek, where the tree fern trunks are so thickly furred with moss that they bulge like bottle trees. This is an intensely green world — rocks, logs, trees, sticks, earth — all green.

But the mossy ground was peppered with millions of tiny fallen leaves, shaped and shaded like roasted slivered almonds in their range of ambers, and bright colours from orange to burgundy intermittently called attention to clusters of fungi feeding on rotting logs.

My jeans became soaked as the track took me through waist-high ferns still dripping from earlier showers. I persevered to the promised waterfall, a dainty lacework train with a graceful bend, forever trailing down the shining dark slide of the rocks. Pretty. But I was cold and wet, and over ‘green’, as I wouldn’t be on a hot summer day.

I was glad to drive up into sunlight, the heater drying my jeans, but not looking forward to retracing my way through the other sort of forest.

Evercreech Forest Reserve is beautiful — if poignant. A reserve means a remnant; it reminds me of what is lost, the major part of a natural world that wasn’t reserved. An island of forest reserve in the midst of plantations has no wild edges.

Spanning in stone

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Stonework always fascinates me: the intuitive precision of its craft, the colours and textures of the stones themselves, the patterns they make, the beauty and functionality of what man can make of natural materials. In the case of stone bridges, the engineering skills of the past demand respect.

In Tasmania I saw two extreme examples of this.

The first was at Richmond, a village so full of real — i.e. not gingerbread reproductions — colonial buildings still in use that it ought not to have been a surprise that the road out of town crosses over the oldest known large stone arch bridge in Australia.

It took the convict workers just seventeen months to build it, by hand, from local sandstone. Spanning the Coal River, it was completed in 1825. The proportions are gentle and satisfying, and the bridge looks as if it will last another 175 years, even more of a postcard favourite.

But the day I visited, the ambience was less than gentle. A colourful flock of ducks swam about under the bridge, where the acoustics were excellent for amplifying their incessant quacking and honking.

I walked under the low footpath arch to get a closer look at the culprits. They are Mallards, an introduced European duck that has settled far too well in south-eastern Australia, as it is overwhelming our native Black duck by interbreeding with it.

Over on the ever-changing and always spectacular east coast, it’s hard to look away from the water, with views like this. But at one spot near Swansea, my eye was taken by a sign on the landward side.

‘Spiky Bridge’ it said. I thought about what that could be for the next few hundred metres, then did a U-turn and come back, knowing I’d be forever wondering if I didn’t. Only a little way off the road, the spiky bridge was exactly as it said — a bridge with spikes  on it.

Convict-built in 1845, it was broad and well buttressed, seemingly a massive amount of stonework for the tiny watercourse it bridged, but the steep gully had been the main reason. The spikes were vertical shards, rocks as are found on the beaches nearby, and they were set into the bridge parapets on either side.

The bristling tops look fierce, warlike, but intriguingly, nobody knows why they were put there, or on whose order. One theory is that they were to stop cattle falling over the sides.

The Spiky Bridge is not elegant or graceful like the Richmond Bridge, and although built later, it feels more primitive. It has a power about it; I see wild warriors in rough fur cloaks, a clatter of spears and shields as they rush across this bridge. It’s as if some echoes of an earlier age, of which there are so many in the British Isles, were transmitted through the convicts who laboured over it and perhaps had a hand in its design.

Early birds

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When you get to a camp spot late in the day you don’t have time to look around much, beyond finding a flat spot for the tent, setting it up and scavenging leftover firewood at cold campsites.

I saw enough of Lime Bay, in the State Reserve near the northern tip of the Tasman Peninsula, to know that I wanted to be up early next morning to make the most of the time I’d have there.

When I woke, it felt far too cold to get up. But I unzipped the tent enough to see swans and this slow sunrise dawning. Not too cold after all.

I had learnt that sunrise takes a long time in these latitudes. Gloved, hooded and many-layered, I sat on a rocky point above the low tide and watched the other early birds, like the swans skimming the water in a slow take-off towards the sunrise.

I have never had the chance to observe black swans, so I had no idea until now that they wear white petticoats.

A solitary seagull floated over the gently rippling bay, whose colours changed more noticeably than the sky seemed to, picking up bronze in long smooth reflections amongst the silver blue of the broken water.

But the sky was changing, the indigo lightening to a more daytime blue, the peach skyline gaining a red blush, catching fire in the Bay. Only the land remained in night-time black.

Then the event progressed with a rush as yellow arrived, overwhelming the peach, turning the blues to purple. I hardly had time to take note of its aspects before the sun rose over the point.

Then the land was lit up as if by firelight; the tree trunks, the grass edge, the beach with its strange mounds of seaweed like stranded Pekinese and its long seismograph frills of black lace.

The millions of tiny shells that comprised the lower edges of the beach were glowing as I crunched along, not wanting to spoil the sand with footprints.

My feet were numb, but Lime Bay was more than worth getting up early for.

An almost wild edge

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Having decided that the sea is the real wild edge on the Tasman Peninsula, I was enchanted to come across a piece of actual coastal land that was almost wild.

Somewhere near Nubeena I found Roaring Beach.

A bush-lined dirt road led to a small car park for a conservation area. Beyond that the road was a dead-end. Only one parked car – a good sign.

There had been occasional gateways so I knew people lived along here, but until I walked through the sand dunes and past the stranded lagoon to the sea — I didn’t realise how lucky they were.

The long empty beach — footprint-free —  was framed by house-less headlands, with a hump-backed island just offshore. A solitary surfer was in the water. The beach was mine.


It was a most interesting beach: at the edge of the dunes odd cakes of light brown rock were topped with flat rounded stones like choc chips. The same stones were scattered sparsely over the beach, each separate and supported by a wind-drift of sculpted sand.

I could imagine taking long and frequent walks here, with new formations and fascinations every time. Even the grass on the dunes seemed especially silvery, but I had little time to explore their secret humps and dips.

As I left the car park I spotted a house high back on a hill amongst the bush. Its entry lay off the road beyond the car park, so it was fairly private;  it had the best of both almost uncivilised edges — of bushland and sea. It was no ordinary house; it looked like its owners knew how to make the most of that special wild edge position.

I could live there.

Tassie love affair

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A Tasmanian has stolen my heart. I might have met him once, decades ago, in my own state; in fact I’m sure I saw him twice at my place. But now Tasmania is the only place we can meet.

At the Tasmanian Devil Conservation Park they also have a small area for the other carnivorous marsupial indigenous to Tasmania, the Eastern Quoll. I knew they could be different colours, and for no particular reason of sex or age.

The first one I saw here was asleep, curled up like a cat in a white-spotted caramel coat. No spots on the tail — which is the easy differentiator from my Spotted-Tailed Quoll.

‘Cute’, I thought, but then I saw the other.

Small cat-sized, black and white, alert and cheeky, lustrous dark eyes, dainty and elegant all in one. I fall for it, I exclaim aloud, tell it how beautiful I find it.

I want to have one living at my place, despite my knowledge that it eats any nestlings or eggs, lizards, larvae or worms it comes across.

The wire mesh makes it hard to photograph it with justice, but they can’t be in an open pen like the Devils, as they are superb climbers. I wish I could take one on a visit to its bigger cousin at my place, but my resident Quoll would probably eat it rather than greet it.

Even seeing it scoffing a lump of some dead animal doesn’t put vegetarian me off; after all, I have had relationships with carnivores before.

I am still in love with the Eastern Quoll.

Wild coast colours

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The infamous Port Arthur in Tasmania’s south-east is no longer remote nor a place of human suffering; it’s a tourist venue.

I got as far as the car park. Ruins are not just mellow colours and decorative patterns of bricks and stone. They hold memories, and one look told me I must not allow these ones into my too impressionable mind.

But the wilder landscape of the area compensated.  I saw this parrot first here, but then elsewhere and often.  It’s a Green Rosella, and is apparently the state’s most common parrot. ‘Green’ is hardly an adequate description of its many and subtle colours.

In light drizzle I walk through the narrow strips of coastal bush to each designated lookout or natural wonder, and am distracted by the frequency of the prolific pinks of this shrub whose name I do not know.

But it is the rocks of these bays that attract me most. Tumbled and shaped by southern seas, they grow lichen with as much ease as rainforest trees. Creams and limes and yellows and oranges predominate, with a lurid Dayglo green on any timber.

On the wild ocean edges, the colour is in the rocks themselves, revealing their origins as they are ceaselessly, slowly, weathered into mighty cliff formations like the Remarkable Cave or rolled upon each other to perfect smoothness, like the pebbles at its base.

Wild Tasmania(ns)

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Near the bottom of the east coast of Tasmania is the Tasman Peninsula, a ragged blob of land reached via another, smaller blob, the Forestier Peninsula.  They are a whisker of land away from being islands like Bruny, close to the coast — and to Hobart.

Having little time to find even a smudge of the wild Tasmania beyond the charming, hilly and human-sized Hobart,  I headed down to the Tasman Peninsula for a few days’ camping.

The coast around Eaglehawk Neck and beyond is rugged and stunning, but not totally wild, as outside the National Park, the accessible little bays in between the cliffs are dotted with small boats, and the shoreline with cottages, none of which can be called ‘shacks’ any more.

But it is this narrow ‘neck’ , only 30 metres wide at its narrowest, that has helped make it a good place to try to hold the line against the spread of the facial tumours that are rapidly slashing the population of the Tasmanian Devil, the wild Tasmanian I am most keen to meet.   Since 1996, the disease has killed 80% of them.

At Taranna is the Tasmanian Devil Conservation Park, where I get my first real-life sight of the Devil, Australia’s largest surviving native carnivore, now the Tasmanian Tiger, the Thylacine, is extinct. It is also the world’s largest carnivorous marsupial.

I am shocked — he is so small. Heavier, but no bigger than a male Spotted-tail Quoll, as I see at home. And such an odd shape, as if his parts are mismatched, with that big head and blocky hindquarters. Such red ears!  Such sharp teeth!

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Leaving the land

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Recently I left the mainland of Australia for the first time. I don’t count flying to other lands, since I didn’t experience the same physical separation.

This time my little red Suzuki and I were to be shipped ‘across the dtich’ as they say in Tasmania. From my first glimpse, across the promenade and sandy beach at Port Melbourne, I see that, appropriately, the Spirit of Tasmania vessel is red too.

Station Pier is quaintly old-fashioned, dwarfed by the ship. The actual shoreline is ringed with modern cafés and bars, with the light rail station’s open platform also the entry to a café. It’s so convenient that I think of the mad plot to get rid of the historic Newcastle Railway Station which similarly brings people right to the shore.

The other piers seem familiar, doubtless from Melbourne-based settings for crime shows and grainy grey art films; they are picturesque too — patterns and sculptures in weathered wood.

But it takes ages for the lines of motorhomes and campers, 4WDS and cars, to creep around the loop, long past Customs where I surrender my camping gas bottle.  By the time we are nearing the ship itself, the light is fading, the city turning pink. I regret anew that only night sailings are possible in these colder months.

I don’t realise that the seagulls will accompany us long into the dark, squawking and wheeling white in the lights above the boat.

Naturally I don’t manage to take a photo while driving into the maw of the ship, but it’s an experience indeed! Past corridors of parked transport trailers bereft of their prime movers, snaking around to go down a ribbed ramp, under a giant hatch that will be shut on top of us, and to be poked and packed into the narrow end with other small cars.

(Unfortunately I immediately forget on which level I abandoned the Suzi and will have trouble retrieving it.)

For the next hour, from the spray-dashed deck where only a dozen smokers and I congregate, all I see of Victoria is a seemingly endless thin flat strip of lights.

Twelve sleepless hours later — the ‘ocean recliners’ do not recline enough for sleep — I arrive in cold and wet Devonport, having been unable to see the approaching shore of this almost foreign land, Tasmania. I am disappointed, but too tired to do more than extricate the Suzi and head south to Hobart.

Cuter than coal

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About 80 km south-west of Bowen in Queensland is the historic mining town of Collinsville. They’re proud of their strong coalmining and union past here — as the saga of underground strikes and fatal accidents and protest convoys to Brisbane attests. I know this from the coal museum and their interesting online history site.

But the old underground mining methods and the mateship ways ended in the 1990s; now the Collinsville mine is a vast opencut and most of the workers come from outside the area, do their 12-hour shifts for four days, then go home to their families on the coast.

Just west of Collinsville is the tiny village of Scottsville. Here I am to stay with Carol and Vince Cosentino at Wurra Yumba — Kangaroo House — who have a very pleasant accommodation building in their garden, which really belongs to a menagerie of rescued wildlife on the mend.

It is often used by backpackers, whom I imagine would be fascinated by Carol’s varying ages and breeds of wallaby joeys, all with large and thoughtfully planned play areas and with their own night-time racks of colourful sling bag/pouches.

Before I leave in the morning I watch Carol give the morning feed to this appealing group of young Pretty-face Wallabies who had slept — slung — just outside my door. As you can see, she can always use an extra pair of hands!  When the slower ones emerge for breakfast, she has to use her knees as well as hands to hold the bottles.

This is merely one of many groups. Carol gets no funding for her rescue and rehabilitation work, which includes birds as well as other mammals. Feed and formula bills are huge, let alone all the incidentals, and the constant restructuring of the space to better cater for her charges’ needs. Husband Vince helps with the latter work, while donations for the occasional accommodation might cover the tonnes of tissues Carol must use, from what I saw!

You can reach Carol at Wurra Yumba on 07 4785 5497 or visit her website.

But it is actually Carol’s village of Scottsville that is closest to the Collinsville opencut mine.

At night, a drive along a hilltop road revealed how huge this mine is, or so I thought; but satellite maps show me it is far bigger.

And the newer Sonoma mine is far too close as well. There has been a coal-fired power station here since 1976, and with what I know from the Hunter, the combination does not augur well for the health of Scottsville and Collinsville residents.

Trashing the tropics

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Lately I went to look at the coal mining explosion in Queensland, to see for myself if it was as frighteningly out of control as that in NSW. It is.

This grim industrial scene is on the coast just south of Mackay, Hay Point — not your typical tourist vision of sunny Queensland’s tropical waters.

The coal comes by rail in trains up to 2 km long, uncovered, passing through Central Queenland for up to 300 km to the two major coal loading export terminals, Dalrymple Bay and Hay Point. These extend far out into the bay, 3.85 km and 1.8 km respectively.

As you can see, they can’t load fast enough; I counted 50 ships, and there were probably more obscured further to sea. About 130 million tonnes a year passes through here to fuel climate change elsewhere in the world.

At the viewing parks, large signs boast of the output and the environmental care being taken, and invite me to follow the Mining Trail inland to the mining towns that feed this port. I  did, but I doubt my reaction was the intended one.

Yet tourists who were fortunate enough not to live in coal mining areas might be awed at the novelty of the mechanised scale — or the ugliness.

They wouldn’t want to hang around too long or breathe too deeply, as the coal stockpiles are large and open and right next to the tourist car park.


People with no choice in what they breathe or what their seascape looks like still live in the small community of Louisa Creek, just north of the coal terminals. A major industrial development threatens on their other side.

Louisa Creek is a picturesque seaside village, the street now gappy where the houses of those who gave up and sold out have been taken away on trucks.

It is being whittled away, with a few stalwarts attempting to hold the remnant community together and the coal operations to account.

People had chosen to live here for the beauty, the fresh air, the peace and quiet – and not least the fishing – and sacrificed the convenience of shops. There were still a few fishermen by the creek the day I visited, but the peace and quiet no longer exists; I’d be concerned about the air — and I doubt I’d be beach fishing.

The wooded point opposite is Mount Helton Conservation Park, whose immediate rear the industrial area will be nudging. 
I fear for Louisa Creek.

My Mining Trail has just begun — and the all-too-familiar anger and sadness for the victims of coal is well ignited.

Women’s International Peace Walk  — Australia

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Brisbane to Canberra 13th March—26th May 2010

My friend Christa is part of the group of women undertaking this walk — she designed the great fundraiser postcard too.

FootPrints for Peace is a global community of friends who are dedicated to creating change through peaceful action. They organise events throughout the world that bring people together to deepen our understanding of environmental, cultural and spiritual issues.

FootPrints for Peace believe that every step counts and would like to invite women to walk with them for one hour, one day, one week or the whole journey. They have five women doing the whole walk:  June Norman, Di Jenkins, Dawn Joyce, Sue Gregory and Cassie McMahon, with others walking significant distances and locals who will be walking with them for a day or meeting them on the outskirts of their town.  

If you are planning to walk for more than one day, please download the registration form from the Footprints for Peace website and email it to them here. You will also need to print the form, sign it and bring a copy with you when you commence the walk.

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