A Choir of Waves

South West Cape Walk, Part 2

Tim takes in the wild south-west coast at New Harbour 

They say 24 hours is a long time in politics. Which just proves how little bushwalking has in common with “the art of the possible” (as von Bismarck defined politics).

For us 4 hours – the time it took to trudge, wade, grumble, leap and muddle our way from Melaleuca to New Harbour – felt an eternity. With our packs at their heaviest; our feet at their tenderest; the weather at its most recalcitrant; and the daylight waning, it felt like bushwalking had become the art of the impossible.

I’d been trying to play the optimist card all day, reminding the group how beautiful the destination would be. Would there be mud, they’d asked early on? I’d pleaded that it was about 15 years since my last visit here. But yes, I did have memories of “a bit of mud” towards the end of the day’s walk.

As we hit the worst of that “bit of mud”, the promised hail came. Jim was almost gleeful, in an Eeyore kind of way. The rest of us pulled our rainhoods tighter and trudged on.

Memory is a fickle beast. Both precious and daunting memories are subject to the attrition of time. One particular fragment of memory chose to reactivate just as we started to hear the roaring of waves on the shore; just as we’d begun to grin at the nearness of our camp. I confided to Lynne my recollection that there was a scrub band guarding the beach.

“What’s that?” she asked innocently, trying hard to keep both energy and optimism intact. I explained that my vague memory of it was that we had to push through some “jungle” before we’d get to the beach. “And then it’s still a kilometre or so along the beach to our campsite.” I’m not sure I heard Lynne’s response but, bless her, she kept going. And so did everyone else.

At about 7pm we broke through the “jungle” – which actually wasn’t that bad – and stepped out onto New Harbour beach. We were greeted by a bedraggled and grizzled looking group of walkers who had occupied the easterly campsite. “It was more sheltered from the wind here” they told us “although there’s lots more room at the next campsite.” I would have taken this as a territorial hint had I not recalled that the next campsite was far superior to this one.

Lynne arriving at New Harbour as day fades 

We left the group to their dinner, and immediately had to work out how to cross the fast-flowing freshwater lagoon. Both Jim and I still had dry socks: something of a badge on a walk like this. We walked as far seaward as possible, and found the shallowest crossing point. The wet-socked ones were less worried, and soon we were all over and lumbering up the long beach towards home.

And what a home it would prove to be. New Harbour is a vast, wide bay held in the embrace of long, south-trending rocky headlands, all set about with hills variously wooded or buttongrassed. This evening, as must often be the case, wet and fresh winds were conversing loudly with long sets of waves, while oystercatchers, gulls and plovers strutted, flew and trotted along the strand.

Amid all this wildness it was oddly comforting to find a set of wooden steps leading from the beach to our campsite. There, sheltered under a dense stand of native laurel trees, we found plenty of fine tent-sites. We used the last of the day’s energy and light to set up tents and get dinner cooking.

Camping beneath native laurels at New Harbour 

And after that? How blissful was it to be horizontal, dry and warm inside a tent, and to be sung to sleep by a loud choir of waves? Worth the pain is my answer.

Never Truly Lost: Part 2

Off-track: Traversing a boulder field on kunanyi/Mt Wellington (Tasmania)

We are creatures of the grid. It’s written in the landscapes we make; the rectilinear neatness of our footpaths, roads and railways; the cubed containment of our buildings; the maps we use to describe them all. Even our minds, as the digital age bites deeper, seem more and more inclined toward binary ways of thinking.

It’s enough to make you want to go off-grid from time to time, to seek some of the rounded, fecund chaos of the natural world. For me that not only means ‘going bush’, but making the extra effort to occasionally go off-track.

As I stand on the edge of the track, the safe, cairned or posted route, and scan the scrub, I am a sailor staring out to sea. Though I admire the view, and tell all who will listen that I love the ocean, until I push the boat out into the tide, I’m just another land lubber.

When I take that first few steps off the beaten path, I will notice an immediate difference. I will now feel the resistance of untrodden bushes, and will have to scan the ground for secure footing. I’ll notice the pungent waft of plant/earth/water/air; hear the crackle and scratch of undergrowth, the chip and chatter of bush birds.

I will find that I’m no longer merely traversing the terrain, I’m immersing myself in it. It is thrilling, and just a little chilling: an amalgam of newness and danger; freedom and risk.

Out in this sea of scrub, I start to see that tracks and maps and compasses and digital devices give us only an illusory mastery of the landscape. They can help, but I must equally rely on my senses. Wits, weather, maps, companions and dumb luck are all part of the mix when you’re off-track. Losing your way and then losing your head are a short-cut to losing your life.

Tasmania’s south-west wilderness provides many useful examples. The Frankland Range, for instance, has only vague routes and pads, rather than recognised tracks. Walkers tend to rely very much on visual cues and wobbles in topography that vary from the subtle to the gargantuan.

During one trip there, low cloud and phantom walker pads found us having to set up camp in the middle of some low alpine scrub. Only a few hundred metres from a known mountain, we thought that going on into the gloom would be too risky. It was a good decision, as we found out when the cloud lifted late the next morning.

Poor visibility and a series of minor navigational errors – despite proper use of map and compass - had compounded to take us onto a false spur. If we’d continued we’d have gone further in the wrong direction, and deeper into the unknown.

It’s not only cloud that can confound us in high places. The Southwest Cape Range, in the bottom left corner of Tasmania, is another largely trackless area. But here we found the trick was to tell the difference between pads formed by bushwalkers, and those formed by wombats or wallabies. The latter can make very fine routes, although they have limitations. Often a wombat pad continues as a low tunnel through thick scrub, leaving the walker to find their own way around – or through – the same scrub band.

It’s not necessary to be in the wilderness to get this “off-grid” feeling. I’ve discovered the same effect on the boulder streams of kunanyi/Mt Wellington. Although only a few hundred metres from the Pinnacle Road, we were free to choose to clamber over any and every dolerite boulder we wanted to, all the while wending our wonderfully wiggly way towards our destination.

Tenuiramis woodland, South Hobart, Tasmania

Still closer to home I might choose to wander off-path in South Hobart's tenuiramis woodlands, or wade and dally in the Domain's themeda grasslands. And I’ll discover much the same exhilaratioin about wandering off-track there as I will anywhere. It's not so much what our old maps used to warn us: 'Here be dragons'. It feels more like 'Here be fierce peace!'

Never Truly Lost: Part 1

Now Where Is That Track? A relatively open bit of Tasmanian scrub. 

Never Truly Lost is what Paddy Pallin, pioneer bushwalker and outdoor gear maker, entitled his 1987 memoir. More than 3 decades later, with the advent of GPS, PLB, EPIRB and SPOT*, you might almost believe that Paddy’s wry boast was achievable by any bushwalker.

Going off track in Tasmania’s scrub should convince you otherwise. Scrub is no respecter of technology. I discovered this in the early day of GPS, when a techy friend and I went for a day walk in the Southern Ranges. Wandering off track in search of lyre birds, we entrusted our location to the small electronic brick that my friend had carted up the steep slope.

The beauty of this GPS, he told me, was that it would tell us exactly where we were, when used in conjunction with a map. Eventually, finding ourselves suitably lost, we fired up the device. For some minutes it scanned the sky for satellites, eventually finding enough to reveal exactly where we were. We soon confirmed on the topographic map that we were precisely 300 metres west of the marked track.

Desirable devices? (from left) A PLB, a GPS and SPOT

The simple solution would be to walk 300 metres east, and voila! we’d find the track. True enough, but the problem was that the intervening 300 metres was dense south-west scrub. On that occasion the scrub was kind, and it took less than half and hour to get back on track.

On other occasions I’ve been less fortunate. Once I spent more than four hours “walking” about 400 metres uphill to a known and visible destination – a banksia tree marking the end of a band of scrub. We had “misplaced” the track, but because we could see where we needed to be, we assumed that pushing through the scrub would be the best tactic. It wasn’t.

Carrying full packs into a wall of bauera, tea-tree and horizontal scrub, we did everything we could to make headway. We crawled; we rolled; we flung ourselves bodily into the scrub; we even climbed metres above the ground on see-sawing branches, feebly imitating Tarzan and Jane. We stumbled, fell, became covered in scratches and bruises, and wore botanical specimens from head to toe.

We cursed, swore, laughed, kicked, screamed and cried, and I came the closest I have ever come on a bushwalk to choosing to lie down and die. Try it for four hours and see if you don’t feel the same!

Somehow we eventually broke through to the banksia. We gave it a feeble hug before falling to the earth for a long, breathless, wordless rest.

This all happened before GPS was a twinkle in some military mind’s eye. But GPS would not have been any help. We knew where we were, we just (almost) couldn’t physically get to where we needed to be. 

As the same Paddy Pallin observed "in the bush, the problems of life are no longer complex." Perhaps not, but they certainly can be stark.

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* Glossary

GPS = Global Positioning System

PLB = Personal Locator Beacon

EPIRB = Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon

SPOT = Satellite Personal Tracker