Home is where the heart can rest in the here and now, and on Maria my heart has always beaten peacefully in the present.
I hadn’t been back to Maria Island for years. The kids have grown up and wander Nepal and Cambodia and Melbourne pubs instead of wandering and wondering on Maria Island’s beaches in search of penguins, nautilus shells and cuttlefish. Nothing in life stays the same for very long; time moves on whether you want it to or not. Time and memories sift away like sand falling through an hourglass, with one side filling up and the other emptying.
As the ferry approached the island, I felt a yearning for the past, a past that no longer exists except in our sand-shifting memories and photographs. A sense of loss came over me briefly, that sunken feeling that we can’t bring back our past. Once children are raised their childhoods can never be experienced again.
But seeing the dark frame of the mountains rising above the island, and stepping onto the familiar docks, seeing the old commissariat bricks and scanning the curl of the white sandy beach below the dunes, I quickly shook off the melancholy for the inaccessible past and felt renewed to be in the present, and able to take in the beauty around me.
Upon stepping ashore and hearing the honk of Cape Barren Geese and watching a wombat lope past, I was quickly drawn back into the timeless world of Maria Island, resuming a journey I began years ago. I felt like I was returning home. Home is where the heart can rest in the here and now, and on Maria my heart has always beaten peacefully in the present.
As we pushed the trolley loaded with our packs, boxes of food and battered old Esky toward the camping area, I watched a mob of Forester kangaroos bound across the open hillside as wallabies and screeching native hens scattered into the bush, a la Jurassic Park, and suddenly the urge to check my phone for emails and the latest news on politicians or global catastrophes or Hollywood faces vanished. I didn’t need any more input than what I was seeing here, here on an island that is a national park, where there are no cars or shops or news cycles.
The only cycles here are the tides and drifting clouds and the meanderings of the pademelons and scrubwrens.
. . .
We set up our tent in the same place that we always used – familiarity and tradition can be found in natural places and give a sense of continuity to one’s life. We put our food in the new bins, installed to keep belongings safe from possums and some new arrivals, Tasmanian devils. The devils come out in the evenings, seeking campers’ muesli, bread or chocolates – anything that we interlopers bring in for them to munch on.
Soon we were lying on our sleeping bags in the warm afternoon sun and scanning the golden summer hills and listening to the symphony of birdsong – honeyeaters and robins and finches twittering and chitter-chattering from within the casuarinas that horseshoed around us.
To daydream at a tent site and feel the sun, to hear the racket of cockatoos and rosellas, to daydream with crows cawing from the blue gums and pines – this felt good and familiar, like I had only been here five minutes ago instead of childhoods away, like I had never left.
Good ol’ Maria Island, nothing had changed. It was great to be back.
Did you know that yellow-tailed black cockatoos live to be over sixty years old?
. . .
I’ve never seen anyone in a rush on Maria Island – come here if you want to slow down and catch up to a heartbeat pace of life, away from lives that seem to be running ahead towards something that we do not know. There’s no haste here. Rushing doesn’t work – it goes against the grain of the island’s sense of place. Once you are here, in your tent or in your bunk or cabin, there is nowhere else to rush to. Here people go for leisurely bird walks, hike steep mountains, bike through the woods, laze on a beach, swim in the cold water, snorkel in the glass clear ocean or make sandcastles decorated with kelp and driftwood.
There is no hurry on Maria. Hurry up, for what? For more hurry? Haste is waste when you are already where you want to be.
On Maria Island you just wander around and do what you want. This is why people come to this island off an island off an island: here you can do nothing or you can be active, you can seek out the relics of human history or explore natural relics from fossil cliffs. It doesn’t matter what you do here. On Maria you can nap or walk or photograph or go spiritual to your heart’s content.
It’s the do what you want island.
Slow down on Maria and you will gather less than more, but what you gather may be of a different quality and might mean more when you bring it back to town. Walk the shore, hold hands with the one you love, gather shells and ponder the pink and gold lines curling deep inside them or marvel at the patterns on driftwood, appreciate the pile of slick-coloured pebbles at the edge of the beach where everything seems exactly in its right place … why does nature create such things of beauty and harmony? Does the universe tend towards harmony or entropy? Is the natural world now for recreation or for spiritual renewal? These questions may come to you as you wander here and detox. Here is a place to unravel your worries then re-ravel sensibly and realize what matters most in life – love and beauty and being who you really are or were meant to be.
From the dunes, with a glass of champagne, we watched a long sunset turn from liquid gold to ruby red to a dark velvety maroon. Adjectives often fall short of the beauty unfolding over Tasmania at dusk, like watching a painter paint and repaint the scene as the dusk turns into night and the stars came out to play above.
As I curled into my sleeping bag, cosy as joeys in a pouch, I listened to the waves gently slosh and recede on the shore. I heard a possum growling and a masked owl rasping. The stars were very silent.
I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world.
. . .
I recently read these words from the deputy premier of Queensland, “I don’t see any reason why anyone would want to go to Tassie. They’ve got no reef, they don’t have the kinds of rainforests that we have, and of course, I don’t think anyone would be going to Tassie to go to the beach. If I was in Tasmania, I’d be a lot more interested in coming here (to Queensland) than I would be going there.”
I guess this particular Mr Deputy has never camped on Maria or had the pleasure of visiting any of Tasmania’s 350 offshore islands. If he had, he might have changed his tune.
. . .
Did I miss my kids? Was I lonely for them? Not really. We figured we had earned this right to wander the island, to do what we pleased when we wanted. We’d paid our dues. We saw others with families, in tents, making sand castles on the beach, pushing prams toward the painted sandstone cliffs, exploring the historic convict ruins, kids chasing hooting geese, and we were happy for them, but we’d been there and done that. So we did different over the next few days. We did adult things … with the enthusiasm of children.
We climbed Bishop and Clerk, a good steep hike that affords dramatic views across the sea to the Freycinet Peninsula and Schouten Island. At the top of B&C we lay down on our stomachs and inched our way to the edge of the steep cliffs and peered over the edge, looking straight down on the 600-metre dolerite columns to the wild blue sea below. Here is a spot where we could never relax in the past, with wild monkeys scrambling around on the cliff tops, looking over the edges, just a trip away from catastrophe (why would anyone voluntarily have kids?)
But today we could just take it all in and look for whales and fishing boats and wave currents and swirls being created on the wide expanse of the deep blue sea stretching out before us. The sea, in all its wild and vastness, seemed very calm and I felt calm and sane gazing upon it. I may have grey hair from raising a family, but I was still sane, or close to it, when I was out in nature.
. . .
Doing nothing on Maria is your greatest challenge. The opportunities to explore here are irresistible.
On the last morning, we finally slowed down and sat in our tent and watched a wombat forage – could this be the same wombat that the kids named Wilbur so many years ago? Perhaps. The wombat didn’t care about us, he was just poking along, digging and gnawing for grass and roots (wombats can go years without drinking water as they get their water needs from the grasses they eat). Wombats put life into perspective. They don’t care about news bites or megabytes. They just want to go circle the island like a scratchy record revolving and playing a tune. Go analogue on Maria and forget the digital age.
We are all plodders, but wombats are the best at it – they are our mentors toward learning the art of living. The art of living is here to find on Maria, for old and young, for families and for empty nesters. I was glad we had returned and to learn the art of living from a wombat.
As the ferry sped away and Maria receded into the distance, I felt like I was leaving home. But it was a good feeling, for I knew I would return, as soon as possible. I still have much to learn about the natural world here. I need to learn more about the rich Aboriginal history here (the puthikwilayti people), and maybe go kayaking, or read a long book.
So much to do, and Maria has all the time in the world to do it. Timeless and tempting, this island is a home away from home.
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. His book "Tasmania: An island dream", can be bought through the Forty South Bookshop.
