One of Tasmania’s great short walks, tucked into a quiet valley of the Great Western Tiers, is the Liffey Falls track. It is a walk that I have repeated many times over the past 35 years and I have never grown tired of it. In fact each walk has taken me further into its beauty, and has helped me travel across the world in a rainforest dreamtime of possibility and appreciation. As Thoreau may have put it, I have travelled far at Liffey.
Learning how to really see the natural world is one part science and one part mysticism. Combine them, and you sink beyond the surface of things and into what wild places have to offer our brains and souls. There is more than meets the eye.
This is why I keep walking Liffey, as the promise of what it has to offer keeps tantalizing me. I am only now just beginning to really see it, perhaps as the Aboriginal people did, and it has taken me more than half my life just to get a glimpse of what might be there.
The landscape has a long memory at Liffey and it is we who must try to tap into it. The hints are everywhere. Look up at the cliffs on the side of the valley, and the enticing ancient caves within them. They tell of a time when the sea floor was above you. Look at the geology under the Liffey’s flow, the sandstone base that lines parts of the river. Look along the river’s edge and you might even notice glittering quartz dropstones – rocks that travelled here in glacier periods from Cradle Mountain.
We are all just dropstones, travelling across Tasmania, being deposited for the future to find and wonder about.
The landscape here is like an open book inviting us to read it, telling us a story that can be imagined in many ways. Many years ago ocean and ice covered this land, then the climate changed and for several million years water has flowed down from the Tiers, carving through the soft mudstone, creating the river’s path – the past leading the future as it always does – etching the creative roots of this place.
Geologic history teaches us about transience and transformation, that only impermanence lasts and our voices here on this rainy day are just as ghosts in a dream.
Walk Liffey many times and these are the kind of daydreams that might come to you too. I am not sure I would recommend it; it may take you out of your comfort zone to realise you are a ghost. You might prefer taxonomy to the transcendental. I don’t seem to have much choice, for I’ve always been a dreamer. At least I’m not the only one.
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As you walk the muddy path along the Liffey River’s edge, below the wet, weeping cliffs, in the dark, womb-like damp of the rainforest, you might feel the shadow of past inhabitants sliding past you. You might hear unfamiliar voices and songs carrying down the river valley, stray syllables and alliterations from a lost language; bits of oral history floating in the oxygen atoms that we share with everyone who has ever lived.
Listen to the river as you tramp, close your eyes and open your ears, and there –in the churn and flow – there are indeed voices. I have no idea what they are saying, but it doesn’t stop me from trying to imagine. Did these locals marvel at the clear green river as we do? Did they sleep in the sandstone caves above the river? Did they build fires at night to keep warm and sing songs to keep away dark spirits? Are these the shreds of melody I hear in the river’s rushing whirls and spirals? Is that a child’s voice screaming from the rapids?
It is easy to get side-tracked on a simple walk at Liffey.
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The best way to begin the Liffey Falls hike is not to drive to the main falls car park area at the top of the hike. The best way is to start at the campground at the bottom and walk the long way upstream, past the flow of river and back into time. This is the proper way to see this place. The long way is the shortest way to wonder.
Start at the bottom and walk into a shadowy secret garden, into an enchanted world of tall waving fronds, of Gondwana-relic forests and strange, screeching flying things. See the fluorescent blue of a fairy-wren flicker and flit past. Listen to the melody of the river’s cool flow mix with the chirping song of a pink robin. Walk and pause. If you are awake to your surroundings you will, without notice, lose your memory and your worry of temporal things. Human constructs like deadlines and tasks and taxes will disappear into the ether of the velvet-green, chlorophyll beauty around you.
Soon you will be lost and found in the beauty and optimism that a walk in the woods always brings to one’s soul. Soon you will find some connection, however vague and inarticulate, with the mosses and lichens and glistening fungi that cling to the trees. You might even find connection and identify with a millipede that you see on top of an upturned rock. You might be surprised about finding a marine fossil here deep in the bush. You might forget you are walking altogether and feel a bit light-headed from all the fresh air and from feeling the pulse of photosynthesis that is flowing around you.
You might like to drink the fresh river water and marvel at how cold and sweet it tastes; you might want to splash your face and wake up before you dream your life away.
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There is nothing like walking in the rain in the rainforest. This is when the forest is truly dreaming itself and is experienced at its best. The entire world here flows in the rain. Creeks disappear under thickets and flow under the woods, secretly feeding the river. Raindrops dimple the river’s skin, and are carried downstream. Water seeps down the slick trunks of tall gum trees. Blackwoods sway. Parrots scowl from fog-shrouded treetops.
As you walk along the remains of the Pleistocene, listen and you will hear the yellow-tailed black cockatoo’s chalky cry, as primitive sounding as the river basin looks. It is not hard to imagine these same birds flying here 40,000 year ago, seeing men for the first time, watching curiously as the wingless ones eked out an existence and stayed warm in the caves.
The cockatoos would have flown above the first European explorers – frontiersmen that replacing clansmen – and there would have been much suspicion by both birds and men. Soon they would have been screeching above and about the loggers and then years later tentatively surveying the hikers of today. Maybe these birds are a hundred years old. Maybe they are a thousand years old. My heart says they are the guardians of this place and have been here a long time and have a lot to tell.
The birds have seen it all … so much to learn, so little time; keep walking.
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In less than an hour of mind time from the start of your walk, or within a timeless dream of heart time, you will climb up to a junction below massive myrtles and tangled leatherwoods, and from there you can descend to the falls. It measures a few minutes on your watch, and 250 million years geologically, as you walk deep into the Permian when the sandstone was formed.
In summer you can walk under the falls and feel the cold burn of the fresh water. You can also climb into the caves that have been undercut on the side of the falls and imagine the Trowunna people sheltering here by a small fire tens of thousands of years ago, watching the megafauna – giant Diprotodon wombats and supersized kangaroos – slurping from the river.
In winter, one can watch the water tumble down over the cliffs, slam into the rocks, break apart in chaos, then reform into a river and flow on down the valley, galloping over the dolerite boulders, renewed and rejuvenated from such a symphonic ride.
There are voices in the falls too. Amidst the honeycomb of bubbles there is chanting and lost stories floating down the river. The Liffey River was originally called Tellerpangger by the Panninher clan. I haven’t learned what the voices are saying yet, but I am sure there are warnings as well as revelations. There is joy and sorrow in the Liffey’s songs.
The river has been continuously flowing here for how many thousands of years? The river is time itself, one long continuum, always the present, always connected upstream with the past and downstream with the future. Watch it and be set in place by perspective. Contemporary politics are meaningless here. What is important here is connection – one long connection floating past as you gaze at the falls and the river. If you only connected for a moment that is worth it – those are the moments I live for.
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A short walk back up the track and above the main falls one can hike to several other smaller but no less intriguing waterfalls and mudstone etchings. These cascades are worth seeing, but dreaming is harder here as, being close to the upper car park, there are signs and other distractions.
Walk to the top to the picnic area, feed your head with interpretation insights, then turn around and walk back into the dark whispers of the past, back into heart time where there are no clocks or chimes or complete sentences, just fronds bobbing, rain dripping, waters flowing and cockatoos cockatooing.
Don Defenderfer is a native of San Francisco who once went on a holiday to Alaska where he met an Australian who told him to visit Tasmania. So he did, and while here he met a woman. That was 30 years ago. He was state coordinator for Landcare Tasmania for many years, a job that allowed him to be inspired by not only the beauty of the Tasmanian landscape but by the many people that are trying to repair and renew it. He has a Masters Degree in Social Ecology and a Bachelor of Environmental Studies with a minor in writing. He has published three volumes of poetry, and his work has appeared in newspapers and periodicals, including The New York Times and The Australian.