A Walk in the West: Part 1

[A welcome glow!] 

In a climate where it rains almost continually for nine months in the year, mere pack tracks through a boggy soil are not in the best of condition, almost every step taking you up to your ankles in mud, and repeatedly you sink down to your knees in the sludge.

So wrote a reporter in Melbourne’s Argus newspaper during an 1895 assignment to the mines of Tasmania’s Dundas area. Given the hype associated with mining in Tasmania’s west at the time – and the fortunes won and lost on mere rumour - you’d expect to take even weather and track reports with a grain of salt.

But the anonymous scribe’s descriptions proved accurate enough during our recent trip into the area. The forecast had been reasonable a week or so out, but the west coast had reverted to its default position by the time we reached Queenstown. Showers continued as we wound around the curvaceous roads north of Queenstown. We reached what had once been the mining town of Dundas in time for lunch.

The map had led us to imagine we’d see remains of at least a school and a recreation ground. The 1:25 000 Dundas map even had a “post and telegraph reserve” marked nearby. Instead we found not one single building or ruin, only unmarked roads and tracks, a disused gravel quarry, and a lot of rainforest. Rain started afresh as we got our gear out of the car.

[Tim and Jim: on the right track] 

Kitted up in full rain gear we crossed the Dundas River on a log and wire bridge and started our two hour ascent up old mining tracks. Our destination was Fraser Creek Hut. The hut seems to have begun life in the early 1930s as a temporary building supporting King Billy pine milling in the area. Miners used it in subsequent decades, but it was as a Scout hut that it most recently came into its own.

We were to be hosted by Terry Reid, retired park ranger and Scout leader, and an old colleague of mine and Tim’s. A Queenstown local for many years, Terry, along his brother Peter, and Zeehan Scout leader Roger Nichols, was heavily involved in the hut’s restoration from the late 1970s onwards. They learned how to split King Billy palings, then passed on some of those skills to Venturer Scouts and other students. The palings were used to restore the hut’s walls and floorboards, and it became a base for those learning wilderness expedition skills.

[Fraser Creek Hut]

Our ascent towards the hut followed a steep 4WD mining track, which soon narrowed to become an even steeper walking track. Although the showers persisted, the ever-changing beauty of the rainforest did its best to distract us. A few routed signs assured us we were on the right track. One marked “Carbine Saddle” was accompanied by a helpful sign saying “Chocolate Stop”. Falling rain didn’t make obeying that a fully enjoyable task, but we did our token best.

[Anyone for chocolate?] 

After the saddle we hoped for, and were blessed with, a downhill track. It led to a creek crossing, helpfully sign-posted with names that would mean more to us in due course. We followed a track that had a remarkably symmetrical set of climbing “steps”, which we guessed were the foundations of a tramway used in mining and logging. Water flowed down the track, but at least there were no knee-deep bogs. Not long afterwards piles of cut logs stacked beside the track gave us the strong hope that we were nearing the hut. Smoke swirling through the sodden forest was the clincher. And we were just in time for afternoon tea!

Terry, Jess and Mel had come up a day ahead of us, and as we stumbled into the hut we were relieved to find the fire going and the kettle boiling. Once we’d got our (very) wet gear off, we relaxed by the fire, downing a cuppa or two as Terry introduced us to the hut.

[Tim and Terry chat inside the hut] 

If there is a timber as fine and versatile as Tasmania’s King Billy pine, I’d like to meet it. With the fire light flickering on the pine-lined walls, the hut exuded a honeyed warm glow. Once we had food and wine inside us, the memories of the sodden walk were banished. Talk flowed, the fire was stoked, and for now there was no better place to be in the world.

The Wild Wet West

[Scenes from Tasmania’s West Coast]

[Roaring Forties waves pound the shore at Granville Harbour, Tasmania]  

It is an effort to get to Tasmania’s west coast – its actual coast. Even when you’ve reached the unofficial capital, Queenstown, the nearest accessible salt water is still 40km away by road. And what a road!

Tasmania’s road builders were reputedly paid by the curve, not by the mile. The joke is very close to the truth for the road between Queenstown and Strahan. In the 1930s, the Commonwealth government appeared keen to evade its obligation to pay for a road between the two towns. They thought that they would succeed by agreeing to only fund the construction of the road surface, but not any bridges or culverts.

I can picture the Australian government advisor poring over the map; looking at the rumpled topography; considering the drainage patterns; raising an eyebrow at the huge rainfall. Surely the impoverished State government, he eventually suggests, would never be able to cover the considerable expense of bridging such a route.

He hadn't reckoned on the engineering skills of a workforce used to constructing mine access roads in the wild and hilly west. Today the road is a testament to the cunning of the locals: a triumph of the "little" people over the big city sophisticates.

But the triumph comes at a cost for any road traveller prone to motion sickness. The notoriously winding road follows the contours and somehow evades all of the many creeks. We arrive at dusk, a little green, and mightily relieved.

The next day we explore the shores of Macquarie Harbour by mountain bike. Showers scud by, mud flies up from the wheels, and muscles unaccustomed to the work are stretched. We rest in the rainforest around Hogarth Falls. A deep still green pervades the place. Vivid lime green ferns, both terrestrial and epiphytic, are the highlights contrasting with the regal green of myrtle beech and blackwood, and the whisky hues of the creek water.  

[Forest scenes from western Tasmania] 

I have been in Fiordland, New Zealand, at the same time of the year. There similar forests are watered by similar clouds heaved onto the land by the same roaring forties. In Patagonia I’m told I could experience the same weather, see sibling forests also dominated by southern beech trees of the Nothofagus genus.

Gondwana may have separated nearly 100 million years back, but some of the genes are remarkably and recognisably persistent in these now geographically scattered forests.

A few nights later we sleep in a cabin in Corinna’s Gondwanan forest. The night is still, and remarkably silent. It’s the kind of quiet you can hear. Or perhaps that’s the sound of your blood pulsing. And then the rain comes, first tapping, then drumming, then thrashing and lashing and deluging on the roof just metres above us.

We’re in a rainforest: it’s what you would expect. But this is not ordinary rain. It’s borne by heavily pregnant clouds, which have sprawled down and broken their waters directly over us. The thundering gush makes conversation impossible, even if I wasn’t determined to try and stay asleep.

Here the water cycle is vivid and concise. Just a few kilometres downstream from Corinna, the Pieman River will swiftly return this newborn water to the ocean, although it will meet resistance from the incoming rush of gale-blown swells at the Pieman Heads. And the same winds will bring more clouds, low, fat and ragged, to dump yet more rain and hail on the already sodden land.

But in the morning the birds sing the silence awake, and the sun returns. In the forest, rising vapour interfingers with the growing sunlight, and all seems right with the world.

[Morning, Tarkine rainforest, western Tasmania]