Letter from a laptopped tree changer
writer and photographer VAL COLIC-PEISKER
My first year in lutruwita was great. But what’s the point writing about it then? If something’s great, just live it; do things, go places, talk to flesh-and-blood people, don’t bother readers with your bliss. People like to read about other people’s troubles, the adversity; it makes us feel that we belong to a generally troubled human race, everybody carrying their cross. We especially like “overcoming adversity”. There is a large library of books that fit into this genre.
In itself, however, the urge to write is rarely a sign of happiness. But do give me a few moments …
First of all, greetings from Gowrie Park!
“Where’s that?” I hear you thinking.
It happened abruptly. If someone had told me, not so long ago, that I’d live there, I would have said. “What? Why on earth? Where is it, anyway?” I was nicely ensconced in an inner suburb of Melbourne. I was not planning to leave … and here I was, an experimental tree changer in a near-ghost town.
Covid changed many people’s lives.
Tree change. Taken literally, an odd term. Yet, a tree changer is what I had become, suddenly and without a clear plan. Life pounced without warning, and I now live with a sense that life may change at any moment, a lesson taught by Covid.
I know I’m just part of a trend, but this feels a little demeaning. No-one, not even sociologists (I’m one of those) wants to be just “part of a trend”. We all want to be originals. But here I am – like many others who carry their jobs inside a laptop – having fled a locked-down city. Previously a liveability world champion, Melbourne became a global lockdown champion. Quite a flip. My relationship with the city soured and I moved to Tasmania
Here I am, a laptopped tree changer.
My friends who stayed in Melbourne, some of them urban slickers who have never stepped in mud, thought moving to the bush was an adventurous, or even a “brave”, decision, but they could not understand that I enjoyed living in Gowrie Park. “There’s nothing there, not even a shop!” one said. “I told M (a common friend) and she could not believe you moved from Melbourne to … what’s it called?” said another. “You’re insane!” said a third.
. . .
But we did move, two people with different tastes and passions but of one mind about loving greenery and mountains. And trees, of course. We increased the population of Gowrie Park by 6 per cent. A few scattered houses, some proper and respectable, the biggest hidden at the bottom of a private road. Some old, some brand new, some mere rickety shacks surrounded by junk; old tyres, cars whose parts divorced long ago; discarded kitchen sinks, the 1960s models.
There are farms too, with shelters for cows, sheep and goats. Lots of cows of all colours. “I’ve never seen this many cows in my life,” said a visiting family member.
During our 16 months there, the human population of Gowrie Park was exclusively white and, apart from me, Anglo-white. I was the most exotic person in town, if anyone cared about such things (sociologists do, and they are always at work, involuntarily, and probably regrettably too). Age average, fairly high. An interesting gallery of characters, perhaps above-average unconventional. A Tasmanian near-ghost town is a good place to be if you’d like to shed some of the shackles of conventional life.
From 1963 to 1973, Gowrie Park was, by Tasmanian standards, a town of a respectable size, more than 2,000 souls, complete with a school, shops, post office and a couple of churches. The town was not founded by some intrepid settler pioneer, but rather brought in on the back of trucks. Demountable dwellings housed the labour force for the local hydroelectric scheme (Mersey Forth Power Development). Once the job was done – there are five large dams and other hydroelectric infrastructure within about 40km and the headquarters of the Tasmania Hydro Electric Commission is still in Gowrie Park – the demountables were taken away.
So we lived among ghosts, but they were placid and benevolent. We stumbled upon one on the uphill path leading to the still fenced-off water storage that once supplied the town. It was a wow moment when, on top of a boulder, half-hidden by vegetation, we spotted a little memorial, complete with a brass plaque, a tiny bunch of synthetic flowers and a little plastic angel. It was dedicated to a woman who had probably lived in Gowrie Park as a child, having been born in 1963. She died in 2008. According to our neighbour with a darker imagination, perhaps at that exact spot.
The ex-town’s grid of roads and lanes is still here. Several sealed roads under a kilometre of cracked, patchy bitumen, west of the main access road, are used by a handful of current residents. The roads to the east of Wellington Rd are unused – only a beekeeper and occasional irregular camper drive through. They are carpeted in green and brown moss, soft and silent to walk, cycle or run on. Some smaller unsealed roads are overgrown with bushes, or blocked by fallen trees, or transformed by a leafy canopy into green tunnels and wallaby pads. Some roads eroded and are reclaimed by nature to the point of non-recognition. We also discovered magical little clearings covered by moss and grasses, soft to sit on. A child would love these hideaways but I loved them too, half a century past the last recesses of my childhood. The clearings are in places where there’s probably still bitumen underneath, preventing trees from taking root.
Flowers and flowering bushes are showily present in their respective blooming seasons. Natives happily mix with immigrants. In spite of living in Europe for more than half my life, I had never seen as many daffodils in early spring, yellow, white and yellow-white varieties. They, and other immigrants, are remnants of the cultivated gardens planted more than half a century ago. Torch lilies, natives of South Africa, were a mid-summer explosion of bright orange. Erica lusitanica’s (aka Spanish heath, but I like the sound of Erica) tall white-flowering bushes were a winter affair. Droplets of morning dew glistening on flowers made me sit at the bay window and enjoy a moment free of daily worries and trivialities. Larger plants, mainly wattle trees, tea trees and the Erica, had grown to take over the ground where the town once stood.
Gowrie Park is an unintended experiment showing what the world will look like when our civilisation obliterates itself. In this kingdom of echidnas, wallabies, pademelons, rabbits and wombats, the animals scattered as we approached, especially at dusk. Terrified rabbits ran in a zig-zag line in front of car lights. The natives were smarter and usually nicked off along the shortest trajectory. Echidnas leisurely crossed our gravelly driveway. It seemed the right order of things that the wildlife numerically dominated the population of clumsy bipeds by a factor of about fifty to one.
But unlike in my native land, rustling in the undergrowth did not mean potential danger; a creature much larger than myself or a predator with strong, sharp teeth. I liked that too. Usually, it was a wallaby or a pademelon. The latter often stood there, in the middle of a mossy road, only scampering off when I came quite close. Were they shortsighted, I often wondered, or just curious, and unwarrantedly fearless?
. . .
On the map, Gowrie Park is in the middle of northern Tasmania, as the crow flies 30km inland from Devonport, cupped by three tall rocky bumps that go by the common name of the Fossey Mountains. They were the epicentre of my middle-of-nowhere bliss.
Each side of our house looked at a different mountain. Mt Roland, to the north-east, is dominant, the tallest, a bit up himself, showing off his razory, vertical cliffs, tempting photographers and rock climbers. That was the first sight from my bedroom window every morning. Mt VanDyke, to the south-east, was steep, forbidding, stunning at sunset with deep orange shadows on sharp cliff edges. Mt Claude’s southern skyline was rugged, like old, crumbling teeth. Precipitous cliffs created a dramatic line of its long ridge. Below the cliffs of all imaginable shapes, we also saw Mt Claude’s furry, wooded flanks, in the mornings often enveloped in falling or rising mist.
Twenty minutes uphill from our already elevated residence, at 500m above the sea, thickets of hardy scrub and tea-trees give way to a proper forest of gum trees in beautiful colours. A huge, centuries-old white gum collapsed from its charred lower trunk, and formed a perfectly perpendicular and stable bridge across O’Neills Creek, which flows from Mt Roland. On the mountain slopes, many hollow trees, some burned, some just old, still support considerable crowns, waiting for the next windstorm to come crashing down.
To me, born-and-bred in Europe, Tasmania seems nearly empty of humans. My faraway native land is smaller but has a population eight times that of Tasmania. Hiking up a mountain on a fine day without meeting anyone is a Tasmanian luxury. Being of the species of profligate homo sapiens, which recently developed into the enemy of the planet, I guiltily enjoyed my Tasmanian privilege.
. . .
As we were about to reach our first anniversary in Gowrie Park, my passion for the place started to cool. One of our newfound friends died under a tractor; at his funeral we both picked up Covid. Far from anything that represented civilisation, the ghost town was not a fun place to be sick. Under the Fossey Mountains, the month of June was grey, gloomy, wet and cold. I could not get my weekly mountain hiking fix.
The infatuation with Gowrie Park started to fade.
Yet, at the end of that first tree-changing year, I loved trees even more. It was clear that this was true love, not infatuation. Past my human-embodied existence, I’d like to be a forest ghost, swirling around trees like mist, encircling their trunks with my airy, amorous tendrils. But while still in the human form, and in the human condition fraught by definition, we realised we needed to move back to civilisation, that is, among people. They may be the Sartrean hell, but les autres are also a necessity, and often a pleasure as well. We found a more permanent home in Ulverstone. The experiment is over. My Tasmanian life is now a proper day-to-day reality.
Val Colic-Peisker is a native of Croatia, and worked there as a high-school teacher, journalist, radio presenter and producer, and freelance writer, interpreter and translator. After migrating to Australia, she spent more than 20 years in academia. At the end of 2020, she opted out and devoted herself to bushwalking, writing and other creative pursuits. She has lived in northern Tasmania since 2022.
Val Colic-Peisker's first novel, "Francesca Multimortal", published under the name V.C. Peisker, was published in 2023.
