Cycling the Island 1: Hobart to Triabunna

We travel, in essence, to become young fools again - to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. – Pico Iyer

I had wondered: would last year’s long journey on foot, 2 weeks and 250km across Portugal and Spain, sate my love for journeying? The answer came swiftly when I was offered the chance to join a small group riding 380km across my own island state of Tasmania. Of course I would go.

[Riders heading towards Tasmania's East Coast] 

The excuse, if any was needed, was provided by an electric vehicles conference being held in Devonport. The organisers thought an apt prelude to the conference would be an e-bike ride from Hobart to Devonport. Lynne and I had recently purchased e-bikes, and our friend Tim had soon followed suit. And it was Tim who invited us both to come on the ride. That sometimes ugly four-letter word – work – precluded Lynne from coming. But I agreed to join Tim, and we soon commenced rigorous training. Actually we just did a couple of relatively short rides, more to acquaint ourselves with our bikes’ abilities than to tone any cycling muscles.

[Our planned route from Hobart to Devonport] 

For those not familiar with the workings of e-bikes, it’s important to say that they are definitely NOT motor bikes. While they vary one from another, most e-bikes have a small battery-powered motor that is only activated when you pedal (variously called pedelec or pedal-assist). To get anywhere you still have to pedal, and sweat, and occasionally strain. That said, there’s a fair chance that you’ll do so with a smile on your face.

[Riders ready to leave Hobart] 

Our chief organiser, Jack, has arranged a public send-off from Mawson Place in Hobart. On a showery, cool and windy spring day, watched by a small entourage of supporters and media, we are sent on our way by Hobart’s Lord Mayor, Sue Hickey. With a degree of panache, she chooses to snip the ribbon with scissors while riding her own electric tricycle, as though she’s never been cautioned about running with scissors.

[Mayor Sue Hickey on her e-trike about to send us off] 

 Our route will avoid major highways where possible, but the very busy Tasman Bridge is our only viable way across the Derwent. With a police escort, a first for most of us, we quickly ease our way to the eastern shore. While Hobart is a small city, it pretends to greater bulk via its suburban sprawl. Thankfully most of that runs to the north, and our eastern trajectory soon gets us to the urban fringe at Cambridge.

Here the fields may be starting to fill with warehouses – and real houses – but the sky is wide and it feels as though the ride has really begun. Instead of contending with traffic, we take on the weather, which is blustery and showery, especially crossing the causeways to Midway Point and Sorell. At the latter we stop for two of the practicalities that will become our constants: topping up our batteries and having morning coffee. 

["Spaghetti Junction" at the Sorell recharging] 

We then take a winding gravel road between Sorell and Buckland via Nugent. This is often a drier part of Tasmania, but this spring it is green and pleasant, the fields close to lush, the forested hills blushing with fresh growth. It’s not hard to love our island given the chance to see, smell and hear it so intimately. And we’re more relaxed on the quieter route, sometimes travelling two or three abreast, and getting to know each other in the process.

[A rest stop on the Nugent Road] 

But the Nugent Road ride also tests us, as we have to climb to more than 300m before the descent to Buckland. The good news is we have a tail wind to add to our motors, and that makes the hills more manageable. The bad news is that the showers are increasing, and occasionally we’re getting hammered by hail. The convoy spreads out and sociable chatter declines. Now we’re Brown’s cows more than a peloton.

Near the top Tim, in his campervan/support vehicle, decides to pull over and boil up a fortifying brew. Refreshed and regrouped, we set off for the mostly downhill run to our lunch/recharge at the Buckland Roadhouse. Gravity and hunger get us there, and after our hard riding, we have no qualms about devouring plenty of hot, high-fat food.

But I do have conscience on another front, and invite Tim to have a ride after lunch, while I take a turn driving the campervan. It proves an inadvertently shrewd move on my part, as the weather deteriorates further on the afternoon run into Triabunna. Showers turn to rain, and Tim and co. get a good soaking before the convoy turns off into the Triabunna Caravan Park. Still it’s been a good 85km ride, and even if we’re wet, we can be pleased with our day 1 achievements. Once we’re dry and fed, we’ll sleep the sleep of the righteous.

One Scoop or Two?

The last time it snowed like this in Hobart was July 25^th 1986. Those old enough to remember – and a few who really weren’t – know it as “The Great Snow of ‘86”. It’s all relative of course. 8cm of snow is hardly “great” by world standards.

[Snow on kunanyi/Mt Wellington, August 2015] 

Yet for Hobart, with its mild maritime climate, snow is a rarity. Yes we can see it at any time of the year on our mountain, 1270m high kunanyi/Mt Wellington. But it’s when the snow comes to the suburbs that we Hobartians really make merry.

In 1986 my sister Liz and her two young daughters were visiting us from Sydney. It was her first winter visit, and she playfully expressed her wish that it would snow. Older and wiser, we assured her it “almost never” snowed down this far. And of course it did. Starting on Thursday night, and then well into Friday the 25^th, it snowed hard, right down to sea level.

[Family snap of snow in our garden, July 1986] 

As my sister was only visiting for a short time, I’d already arranged to take the Friday off. Of course everyone in Hobart ended up having that day off. When snow is rare, people aren’t prepared for it. Buses and cars stayed off the roads; schools and some businesses shut down; a few hardy types skied to work, just because they could. But most people rugged up and went out to play.

I witnessed some of the frivolity first-hand because, Murphy’s Law being what it is, I’d run out of film for my camera. I chose to walk the 4km down the snow-bound road to buy some. On that excursion normally staid neighbours called out their glee, a few even taking snow ball pot-shots at me, all in good fun of course.

And so to August 2015. Snow to sea level was forecast for August the 3^rd, and we woke to about 5cm of it at home. Our neighbours and their young children were soon out in the yard re-enacting the snow yahooing we’d done 29 years before.

[Morning snow on our garden, August 3rd, 2015] 

Lynne and I, still older and wiser, decided to stick to the usual and go for a walk in our bush. That was about all that was “usual” about the morning. What a different look and feel snow lends to the familiar!

Snow slanted down in flurries, covering our usual tracks, disguising the bush, threatening to disorientate us. Occasionally the icy wind bit hard into any exposed skin, then relented as the sun broke through. In that stillness, amid the muffled squeals of our neighbours and the caaarking of ravens, flakes of snow parachuted thick and slow around us. It was cold, certainly. And we were quite ready to get back to the fire and some hot coffee. But for now, there was nowhere we would rather be.

[Snow flurries in our bush] 

My sister died of a brain tumour too few years after “the Great Snow of ‘86”. Fast forward to August the 5^th 2015, two days after this year’s first dump. Again snow was forecast to “low levels”. Given Monday’s dump, and Tuesday’s freezing, wet conditions, you might think we’d have grown tired of this cold interruption. Instead I found myself hoping for lots more. Perhaps some of Lizzie’s playfulness was rubbing off on me, because there was nothing older or wiser about this hope. I felt more like a child clutching a cone at the ice cream van, imploring mum or dad for a second “scoop”.

Farewell to the No. 47 Bus

Commuting wouldn’t feature in many people’s top 10 list of most-enjoyable-things-to-do. Getting to and from work, especially in cities, is surely a big component of the grumpiness summed up as the daily grind.

Whether we’re drumming the steering wheel impatiently in a traffic jam or squeezed uncomfortably against a stranger on the bus/train/tram, few of us look forward to commuting.

[A typical Metro Bus in Hobart: pic courtesy MetroTas]

So it may seem strange for me to say, after 24 years of the same work-a-day travel routine, that I will miss my commuting. Perhaps it’s partly owed to the blessing of living in a small, human-scale city. It may also derive from the city-ward half of my commute being always on foot, with part of that along a pleasant track away from traffic and close to bush. But it’s also that I will miss the people I commuted with, now that I have retired from full-time work; now that my commute will be the short climb into my writer’s loft.

Each leg of my commute had its pluses and its minuses. I love walking, so the city-ward trip was a pleasure in itself. I long ago decided, perhaps inspired by a brief student-years career as a postie, that “neither rain nor hail nor sleet nor snow” would prevent me from walking. At times it could become an epic five and half kilometre walk, and a good test of all the waterproof gear I could throw at the conditions. But there’s a perverse joy in pushing through gales and storms.

The walk could also yield joys of a different kind, as I’ve described elsewhere, http://www.naturescribe.com/2014/03/the-urban-platypus.html. Wallabies, birds, even the odd platypus or snake have made surprise appearances along the track. But there were also the regular walkers who I met and chatted with. The foremost, and most deliberate of these was my wife Lynne. She always joined me on her non-work days, and we invariably walked first through our back bush rather than down the road. We found that walking together, side by side, was a very fruitful way for us to discuss any and everything. And sometimes nothing at all. When we'd meandered through the bush back to our road, she would turn left for home. And I would turn right and take the Rivulet Track towards the city.

[Along the Rivulet Track, South Hobart] 

Further down the track, a popular dog walking space, I often seemed to share doggy tales with strangers and acquaintances. At other times I might discuss wildlife, or walking, or politics with other walkers. And just occasionally we’d get personal, and death, grief, love or faith would tread the track beside us.

Of course the down side of the walk was that I was going to work. As good as that work could be, it was still work. And most work has elements of drudgery or conflict or stress alongside its rewards. Given the choice I’d rather have been walking in the opposite direction, towards the mountain.

[The allure of kunanyi/Mt Wellington] 

My usual homeward commute was on the Number 47 bus, and the people on that bus became (literal) fellow travellers – and sometimes friends – on the larger journey of life. Through long exposure and a degree of pushing beyond polite chit-chat, we managed to have some amazing conversations. For us this was never a head-in-my-newspaper type of commute. Births, deaths, marriages, illness, politics, retirements: none of these seemed off limits. And because the No. 47 bus heads towards what some have dubbed “Greenie Acres”, we inevitably talked about environmental issues. It wasn’t that we all agreed on these, but it was something most of us were passionate about.

Soon after I first started catching the No. 47, I remember one commuter growing rounder and rounder as she reached the advanced stages of pregnancy. When her baby joined her on the bus a few months later, he became “the bus’s baby”. That he has now started university is both a surprise and a signal. Perhaps I’ve been catching this bus long enough. Perhaps it’s time to let the next generation make what they will of this ordinary but amazing mode of transport.

As for me, I will keep my “Green Card” bus pass, and will still catch the No. 47 bus from time to time. And the walking will definitely still happen. I even hope to keep in touch with some of the other Rivulet Track walkers, and their dogs. But no-one should be surprised if, every so often, I turn left instead of right, and head up that mountain.

[What awaits on the mountain!] 

From City to Summit 2: Not Easily Tamed

[Hobart Town Rivulet and Mount Wellington by John Skinner Prout (1847) Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office: Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts]

It was going to be such a simple exercise. Walk from Hobart city upstream, close to the line of the Hobart Rivulet, until I got to the summit of kunanyi/Mt Wellington. Yes, I did expect a few complications with transport, especially once the walking group included three generations of family. But I hadn’t counted on the vast number of diverting stories I would uncover along the way.

Take, for a start, the convict “king”: Jorgen Jorgensen. It would be hard to invent a story more colourful than his. Born in Denmark in chaotic times, he grew up with a thirst for adventure. In 1809 he sailed to Iceland to trade, and while there he overthrew the Danish Governor and declared himself “Protector” of the Danish colony. Just two months later his “reign” ended with his arrest and imprisonment.

[Portrait of Jorgen Jorgensen by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg
(Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons]

Although released a couple of years later, he continued to find himself on the wrong side of the law. He was eventually convicted of theft by the British and was transported to Van Diemen’s Land, arriving here in 1826.

His viking spirit was well suited to the needs of the colony, and he soon became an explorer of some of its wildest parts. Back then that even included the Hobart Rivulet, just upstream of the town. Here’s his 1835 description of the area.

An impervious growth of the thickest brushwood, surmounted with some of the largest gum trees that this island can produce, and all along the rivulet as far up as where the old and upper mill now is, was impassable from the denseness of the shrubs and underwood, and huge collections of prostrate trees and dead timber which had been washed down by the stream and were strewn all around.

On a chilly autumn morning, a couple of centuries later, Sally, Tim and I gather in Collins Street in the city. We’d planned to start with a warming coffee, but it’s 9am on a Sunday, and nothing is open. Instead we hoist our day packs and wander up for our first encounter with the Hobart Rivulet. Just downstream from Molle Street it has been tamed and corralled between sandstone and concrete banks, though boulders in its bed are a reminder of its former wildness. A little closer to the city the concrete restrains it still more, giving it the look of a glorified open stormwater drain.

[The imprisoned Rivulet flows toward Barrack Street, Hobart] 

The rivulet hasn’t always cooperated with its imprisonment. It has flooded seriously a few times, most recently in April 1960 when lower Collins and Liverpool Streets had up to a metre of water over them. Jorgensen’s “huge collections of prostrate trees and dead timber” were among the culprits. After 1960 tree and boulder traps and trash racks were constructed upstream of the city to prevent such debris choking the flow in future.

[Tim and Sally on the Rivulet Track] 

We cross Molle Street, enter the Hobart Rivulet Linear Park, and meet the first of these barriers. They stand like derelict factory foundations, rusty and awkward astride the stream. The factory reference is apt. For much of Hobart’s early life the rivulet was not only its main source of drinking water, it also drove the wheels of the mills and factories that supplied the town.

[Tree traps on the Hobart Rivulet]

The 21^st century’s gentrification of the Rivulet, once wild, then industrial, has been ongoing. The old Cuthbertsons’ tannery, which once supplied leather for Blundstone shoes and boots, has recently been demolished. Speculation is that a housing development will take its place. Sally vividly remembers the “fruity” air that used to waft up from the factory to the adjacent South Hobart School, where all three of our children began their schooling.

There were far worse factories than the tannery. A little further upstream we pass the Cascades Female Factory, now a World Heritage Site, though for many years a feared and fearful place. Here convicts and “fallen” women of the early colony were housed – some with infants – for “correction” through hard work and discipline. An 1829 newspaper reported with great optimism:

Farewell now to idleness and impudence, lover-letter writing, throwing of packets &c. over the wall, and all the concomitants of clandestine taking and receiving.

[kunanyi/Mt Wellington above the wall of the Cascades Female Factory] 

A truer report might have mentioned overcrowding, corruption, inadequate nutrition, disease and death. There were even riots among the women in the 1840s. By the 1850s it had become a straight gaol, and it eventually closed altogether in 1877. Today you can be entertained by re-enactments of life in the Female Factory, with actors dressed in period costume. It’s one way of celebrating what is now considered of World Heritage significance. But while we're being entertained, it's as well to remember that Hobart’s past, like its Rivulet, is not easily tamed.

From City to Summit 1: Planning a Pilgrimage

It’s raining at home. Where the mountain should be there’s a ragged cloud, a dishevelled doona pulled up around a chilly summit. Perversely, it has me thinking about walking. Mountains always do that, even when they’re trying to sleep.

[Sunset over the Mountain] 

But today I’m also thinking about history, and Hobart’s history in particular, because kunanyi/Mt Wellington plays a big part in that. After a short-lived and fraught experiment on the eastern shore of the Derwent River, Hobart was founded in 1804 on the opposite shore, near its current town centre. Water reliability was the principal reason for that early move. And that in turn was encouraged by the regularity of the rain – and sometimes snow – that fall on the flanks of the mountain.

[Wild and well-watered: the top of kunanyi/Mt Wellington] 

A good proportion of what falls there ends up in the Hobart Rivulet. At less than 10km it is too short to be called a river. Still it proved a reliable and constant source of fresh water for the port of Hobartown. In my 28 years living alongside it I have never known it to stop flowing.

[Hobart Rivulet in its untamed state]

‘Though its lower reaches are now piped and tunnelled, and outflows from stormwater drains, factories and the city’s tip mingle with mountain-fresh water, the Rivulet’s upper waters are still used in Hobart’s renowned Cascade beverages. “Out of the wilderness” its beer advertisements once spruiked. We locals smiled at the exaggeration, yet were still proud of our city’s proximity to relatively wild places. How many other capital cities have ready access to such wildness?

Most work days I walk down that valley, close by the rivulet, “out of the wilderness” and into the city. Truth be told, I often yearn to be going the other way, towards the wild. So one day I decide to do just that. I will start from the comforts of a favourite Hobart café, and walk upstream to kunanyi’s windswept 1271m summit.

[Sunrise and moonset over kunanyi/Mt Wellington] 

While it’s hardly an expedition – there are tracks all the way, and it’ll be done in a day – it does require that I gain more than 1200m in altitude. So there will be sweat and effort required. But the more I plan, the more I come to see how much of that effort will be mental. Because the walk will involve transecting a slice of Hobart’s natural and social story, I will need to be alert not only to what IS, but also to what WAS. That makes it a symbolic journey: a kind of local pilgrimage to places with significant stories, human and non-human, past and present.

I want this to be a series not because it is a long walk, but more because it promises to be an involved walk. It won't be just an A to B bushwalk. Perhaps no bushwalk ever should be.

Climbing With Darwin

The summit of Kunanyi/Mt Wellington from the southern side 

In February 1836, while on the voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin climbed a mountain. It happened to be Tasmania’s Mount Wellington. For years it had been blandly labelled Table Mountain, but in 1832 it was renamed in honour of the victorious Duke.

Darwin’s ascent of the mountain took him five and a half hours. He blamed this slowness on the “stupid fellow” who guided him via the wetter gullies on Wellington’s southern flanks, rather than up the drier northern slopes.

I look out on those same wetter slopes from my writing desk. Although much has changed in the 175 years since Darwin’s walk, the gullies remain damp. It gives me some sympathy for the man struggling up the same creek lines that harbour the same tree-ferns, that produce the same “gloomy shade”, he described.

But Darwin also carried some of that gloom with him. He had been at sea for nearly five years on what was supposed to be a three year voyage. Sea sick, home sick, perhaps sick-at-heart over the implications of his ideas, he was described by the Beagle’s Captain FitzRoy, as “so much the worse for a long voyage”.

Certainly he was in no mood to be impressed by Hobart and its mountain when the Beagle docked. After comparing the town unfavourably with Sydney, he went on to describe Mt Wellington as “of no picturesque beauty.”  Yet he was still determined to climb the mountain. And rather than be easily put off, Darwin made two attempts to reach the summit, succeeding only on his second try.

On that fine and warm February day he was kitted out in walking clothes that would horrify the modern walker. They were basically the same as any 1830s gentleman’s street clothes. Ankle length woollen trousers were tucked inside leather boots; a coarse long-sleeved shirt and woollen waistcoat covered the body; a neckerchief covered the throat; a sunhat covered the head. He may well have discarded his heavy outer coat and pocketed his neckerchief, but his clothes would still have been heavy and cumbersome, his boots poorly suited to mud and slippery surfaces.

Dicksonia antarctica: lover and creator of "gloomy shade" 

I picture him on those slippery slopes, a scratched, muddied, puffing, sweating gentleman, tetchily at odds with his incompetent guide. Certainly in his journal he summed it up as “a severe day’s work”.

But once at the summit Darwin seems to have recovered some of his appreciation of life. “The day was splendidly clear, and we enjoyed a most extensive view” he wrote. He stayed on the summit for some hours, not returning to Hobart town till around eight in the evening. I smile at his inability to resist noting in his journal that he’d found a better way down.

Nonetheless I resist poking fun at the famous gentleman from this safe historical distance. It may seem fair to say that getting to the top of this particular mountain is nothing out of the ordinary. But in the context of his time, his health, his equipment, his food and the rigours of a long sailing voyage, he showed great stamina. Not many of us actually continue to push ourselves; to explore; to edit out the pain and sweat; the march flies, the heat, the sleet, the wind, the fog, the fear, the fatigue or whatever else might be involved in getting to a mountain summit.

That stamina in itself is enough to earn some small esteem from me, a fellow walker who has trodden some of the same fern gullies, reached that same unspectacular yet uplifting summit. That alone I can admire. And of course there is the person who this Darwin became, the famous Darwin whose mind and body ranged over some of the wildest terrain, and grasped at some of the hardest ideas possible.

But there is another Darwin, a kind of ghost-Darwin - one that is far more like you and me - that I fancy is always climbing that mountain. It mutters its way up the gullies; it heaves towards those summit cliffs; it humphs at inept companions; it mulls over its deep and dangerous thoughts; it is uncomforted over the absence of its loved ones.

Perhaps one day it will reach that summit again, and get some sense of rest and peace as it looks out over a world far grander than it - or any Darwin - could imagine.

Charles Darwin around the time of the Beagle's voyage