Photographer Bert Spinks
In February 1835, George Frankland set up a base camp at the southern end of Lake St Clair, and set off with his party north-west, across the buttongrass plains of the Cuvier Valley. The conditions were so delightful that the account of this early part of the journey reads more like a recreational bushwalk than the usual horror the early surveyors encountered.
On February 12 they climbed up the bulky dolerite mountain overlooking the lake. Frankland was swept up with the majesty of the view, reclining beneath the blue sky with his journal and sketchpad. He named it Mount Olympus, the “mountain of the gods” from Greek mythology.
Like all well-born young men of his era, George Frankland’s education introduced him to classical Greece. After serving in the British Army and working as a surveyor in India, Frankland was appointed as the Surveyor-General of Van Diemen’s Land in 1828. It was he who started the trend of assigning classical names to natural features in the highlands of Tasmania.
A glut of Greek names now mark the maps around Lake St Clair. Gods, heroes, giants and nymphs are all honoured in nomenclature, given by later explorers as well as Frankland. Along the famous Overland Track, where I work as a guide, there are a handful. Some of the prominent peaks are Greek; names that match mountains that not only exist in mythology, but that still stand with the same names today.
A network of paths in Greece’s north-east connects the original versions of Mount Pelion, Mount Ossa and Mount Olympus, and as I write this piece, I am walking these historic Greek paths.
I arrive to the city of Volos on a crowded train at about 5am, and see Mount Pelion from the train station. Pelion is rich with mythology. Aesop’s myths speak of a noisy, cave-dwelling beast at the base of the mountains. It ate humans and drank the local eau de vie. Pelion was also said to be the home of a wise centaur, Chiron, and it is named for the mythical king Peleus, who was the father of Achilles and a central figure in the story of Jason and the Argonauts.
Tasmania has two mountains named Pelion, East and West. Although in the same range, they are hardly symmetrical. Pelion West is grander, the third-highest on the island; Pelion East is only 100 metres shorter, but lacks the mass of its sibling. Guides with lowbrow humour have nicknamed it The Erect Nipple. They are two clear protrusions of dolerite but lack clear delineation from the mountains to the north.
Coming from the coast to approach Pelion, Greece, from its west is a tough slog, especially on a hot day and after a sleepless night. I pass through chestnut and beech forests, kicking sharp slabs of dolomite, and occasionally chancing upon welcome streams. Finally, at the end of a long day, I come to the mountain proper, and the summit, Pouranios Stavros, which stands at 1610m above sea level.
Tasmanian bushwalker Keith Lancaster climbed Mount Pelion West in 1946, and wrote in his journal, “The panorama from Pelion West is as grand as can be imagined.” High above the heavily forested Forth River valley, Lancaster was also high above the Overland Track, cut a decade or so earlier. And here was I, high above the bay where the Argonauts are said to have set out on the first long-distance nautical voyage, in search of a golden fleece.
Lancaster also made note of Mount Ossa, the tremendous mountain that stood before him. It was the next that I would tackle too.
Following goat-tracks and village roads over the next couple of days, I see the summit of Ossa after emerging from a fir forest in the early afternoon. The summit here is biblically named Profitis Ilias, and rises to 1916m, high above the Thessalian plain.
Mount Ossa is the name of Tasmania’s highest peak, although when it was first named this was not clear (about a dozen different peaks were considered Tasmania’s highest during the first 150 years of colonisation). In Greece, however, it is not an important mountain. The most attention it receives in Greek mythology is from a couple of lascivious giants who pile Ossa onto Pelion in an attempt to reach heaven and the pretty goddesses living there. Ossa descended so far into obscurity that its ancient name was replaced by the name Kissavos, which is how it is known today, although a nearby village memorialises the original title.
It’s a harsh, stony climb to the summit, through swarms of stinging flies, and past a seemingly-lost turtle. At the top is a bell, a Greek flag and a chapel dug into the rock full of icons and candles. I take my time at the summit, as I have done each time I climb Tasmania’s Ossa. From there, on a clear day, it feels like you can see half the island, and a landscape that seems devoid of human interference. From Profitis Ilias, I see a village, an abandoned electrical station, and a couple of roads curving down the plains.
And I see Mount Olympus.
If Ossa was neglected for some centuries, it was as much as anything because of its difficulty to access. Between Kissavos and Olympus is the Vale of Tembi, through which the Pineios River flows out to the Thermaic Gulf. The historian Herodotus records that the Persian King Xerxes inspected this deep gorge during his invasion of the Greek mainland around 480BC, with (in Herodotus’ estimation) a million troops. The native population there sided with the Persians as they marched towards Athens. They also believed that the morphology of this region was the work of Poseidon. “And the story is a reasonable one,” Herodotus writes, “for if one believes that it is Poseidon who shakes the earth and that chasms caused by earthquakes are attributable to him, then the mere sight of this place would be enough to make one say that it is Poseidon’s handiwork.”
Nowadays, a highway runs along the Pineios, through the Vale of Tembi. I descend from Kissavos, cross the highway, and begin the slow ascent to the summit of the gods.
The summit, Mytikas, is 2918m high, the highest point in Greece. Its name refers to “nose”, and is an isolated tower formed by climatic and glacial forces. Olympus’ geological origins are not well known, but it is possibly contemporaneous with the Jurassic dolerite of central Tasmanian peaks. Either way, it is the traditional home of the Greek deities, with the mercurial Zeus at the helm. The 12 Olympic gods lived in ravines running down the sides of the mountain; Mytikas was their meeting-place.
The poet Homer described Olympus as “headlong”, “rugged” and “many-folded”. These were all fair warnings for one approaching it on foot. Even from the distance, I see a white sheen of snow covering the massif, making it look like a lump of ice-cream. Oak forests give way to belts of black pine and beech, and later to Bosnian pine and stunted Alpine shrubbery. Hemmed in by the Vale of Tembi and the Thermaic Gulf, it’s a steep climb to meet the gods, and was probably not first achieved until 1913, by two Swiss mountaineers aided by a local goat-hunter.
Rising through the foothills of Olympus is an act of following a path through history. Conflict between Ottomans and Greeks was sparked here several times through the centuries; in World War II, the mountain was a significant place for the Greek Resistance, and Anzac soldiers fought alongside them here. Cliff-clinging villages have hovered precariously here for centuries; people raising goats, growing olives, collecting the wild herbs and moulding their lives around the mountain’s ways.
But following the track up the mountain, I felt more like George Frankland did as he ascended his Olympus. I shared his euphoria of reaching a difficult place, trodden by few others; the reward of all this hard work was a romantic panorama, and the equally romantic sensations of solitude, aloofness and independence. The feeling of freedom.
And yet on top of these famous Greek mountains, I was also moved by the memory preserved in the land and sea below me. Poetry and language, history and empire, mythology and spirituality had been laid out as if in strata, piled upon each other just like those giants gone wild did in the native stories of that country.
When George Frankland explored the mountains of Tasmania, he did not invoke its autochthonous myths. Instead, he thought of the old yarns of a land he had likely never visited, mountains made of different rocks and covered with different trees, inhabited by distant gods and populated for millennia by a different people. And when I come home and scale the columns of dolerite above the Overland Track once more, I can’t help but wonder what names our mountains once had, and what historical and mythological stories were attached to them by the Tasmanians who lived near them for some tens of thousands of years.
For the most part, we do not know.
The trove of wisdom attached to the mountains of Greece makes clear how much memory was lost in the early days of colonisation in Tasmania. If only the contemporaries of George Frankland had also been interested in sharing in the imagination and wisdom of Aboriginal Tasmanians, as well as the Greeks.
Bert Spinks writes poetry, and poetic prose, about wilderness. He has also played football on Queenstown’s gravel oval. In this blog, he fills in some of the space between these essentially Tasmanian extremes.