"Where else in the world can you see a peacock and a wallaby eating breakfast together?"
A pair of shorts has been in the trees outside the Gorge Cottage for months now. It is only one of the items of forgotten clothing there. There is other rubbish, too, and plenty of graffiti. These are signs of a well-used, if not always well cared-for, place.
I have decided to spend a full day in the grounds of Cataract Gorge. I pass a lot of my time here – the final reaches of the South Esk gliding out into the Tamar River, having twisted and turned 250 kilometres from its origin near Ben Lomond, south-east of Launceston. I swim, stroll, picnic and occasionally pitch a tent in the Gorge. I have done so for years. The place is glutted with my memories.
Aside from the abandoned boardies, I am greeted almost immediately by another tree-frolicker, a grey fantail making playful movements in a paperbark, its black-and-white tail-feathers opening and closing against the turquoise river. It’s as impressive as any peacock, and its coy call of meep a lot sweeter than the honk and hoot of those exotics strolling the gardens further along.
It’s a skittish autumn morning, and along the shady side of the river I find only leisurely strollers, mostly tourists. A cruise boat comes floating down between the cliffs, the captain’s commentary drifting up to me: “A coupla restaurants, lotsa peacocks, lotsa wallabies, some English trees,” is his summary of this place. The boat blows its sharp, single pipe, turns around, and departs.
Meanwhile I’ve clambered off-track up the hill to investigate the regrowth of a section that was burnt during the summer. An untrusting pademelon gazes out at me from a pile of non-native bushes. I roam around the gardens, have a squiz at the feather collection in the chairlift operator’s shelter and visit Daffodil Hill. Here I become lost in my memories – nearly ten years ago I rolled romantically down the hill, through the blooming daffodils, with a young woman. I go following another reminiscence to a rocky lookout where I retreated many autumns ago, in an hour of grief.
I am suddenly jolted out of my reverie. A homeless man, whom I recognise, is sleeping there.
I turn quietly and head to the lawns for lunch. The sun has come out, and there are a few other parties picnicking. These include a quiet couple on the picnic benches (cold meat, bread); parents holidaying with their adult daughters (banana sandwiches, nuts, fudge); and a group of perhaps 20 Chinese visitors. I am reading Claudio Magris’s Danube, a history of a river; it seemed appropriate, in a moment of trying to appreciate my own river.
. . .
After lunch, I stomp around the Zig-Zag Track for a while. I have just spent some time investigating a small footpad, slippery with she-oak needles, marked by a simple cairn and leading down to a column of sheer rock capped with ring bolts, an ornamentation made by rock climbers. It represents contention: two different breeds of clamberers blue over whether bolting is acceptable to the sport.
When I leap the fence back onto the Zig-Zag, I have emerged in front a woman in a green-and-white polka-dot dress. It is my friend Emma, and she has come to exercise before work. We decide on a quick swim. The water temperature is brisk, its colour that of wet slate beneath a suddenly overcast sky.
Across the basin is a gathering. At first I suspect that it is a cult meeting, as candles, flowers and a poster-size photograph of a beatific figure are produced. But it seems, instead, to be a kind of wake, or the scattering of ashes. A tender scene.
Emma leaves for work and I go for coffee at the tea-house. With me are a few tourists (a solitary Melburnian, a couple from Newcastle), a couple of regulars, and a mother and her primary-school-aged son who is terrified of the peacocks and almost gives up his hot chips to them.
Further investigations are to be made. On a rock in the middle of the Gorge, before the gap between the rocks widens towards Kings Bridge, I have spotted some intriguing graffiti. Broad paint strokes on two adjacent faces of a streaked boulder proclaim several words: “Demand” is on one side, and “Soviet Russia” on the other. No meaning can be determined. The paint is fading; disintegrating into tiny flakes, peeling off and floating away, day after day.
. . .
The official Cataract Gorge website describes it as “wilderness just 15 minutes walk from the city centre”. Wilderness is a wriggly word at the best of times, but you’d have to employ a pretty liberal version of it to call this a wilderness. It is a beautiful but manipulated scene. Peacocks, rhododendrons, sequoias, a swimming pool, a chairlift, “a coupla restaurants”, myriad paths, bridges, carparks, culverts – not to mention the river’s various manipulations – show the Gorge to be a succession of attempts by countless officials and citizens to make this place more picturesque, according to whatever values existed during that time.
On the dolerite’s kaleidoscopic colours are names etched vaingloriously (a sentimental favourite: “Nan Pop Emily Bella 2011”). And why not? There are all sorts of official graffiti. I’ve lost count of the plaques. Pipes, drill-holes and certain capital letters – part of some long-forgotten game for children – mark the way. All of these things at one time or another were thought of as a good idea, and while some of them may still have consensus in their favour, some seem bizarre. I hate the bony shelter made of concrete pretending to be timber (once, in a similar location, Crusoe’s hut stood, a structure of manfern trunks, it was perhaps less sustainable, but far more picturesque). There is an art piece on the northern pathway, a granite sculpture that plays anagrammatically with the words silent and listen. When I listen, however, there is never silence. There seems always to be the roar of an aeroplane engine.
I accept the Cataract Gorge for what it is. I like the experimental palette, the garden green of northern cypresses and conifers against the dust-coloured surrounds of the she-oaks higher up and further back. Once, reading on a picnic table by the pool, I was interviewed by a travel programme, and in it I stole a line from my good friend, “Where else in the world can you see a peacock and a wallaby eating breakfast together?”
Of course it changes; of course it will change. All places do. The geologist can tell you this. Or one can look down at the smooth bowls shaped in the boulders by movement of rock and river. Nevertheless, the urge to keep adding to this area seems unwise. All these new features are rooted in the shallowest soil, short-term thinking manifested in steel, wood, iron and plastic, soon to be as irrelevant as the painted words “Soviet Russia”.
Claudio Magris suggests that “contemporary” is a slippery word too. The addition of the bridge, for example, which I cross without care and consider an ordinary part of the Gorge scene, would once have been considered a hideous intrusion. When it comes to places, the way a location was when you first felt attached to it is the contemporary version of it. We all have this prejudice, vision veiled by the brevity of our lifespan.
But one can also learn to see on another scale.
. . .
Another swim at dusk with the regulars, with whom I often splash about at this hour. Craig tells me about his recent trip to Marrawah; Rowena leans her head back and cackles gloriously at one-liners. Don asks me if I have a hot shower after a swim. We are an intimate company.
I dine on sausages and salad in the latest of the barbeque areas, a practical but unharmoniously brutalist construction beneath a fine stringybark. It is getting dark. I have one last sortie, past the yoga practitioners and pool bathers, and over the suspension bridge, before ascending to my secret tent-site. Admirably, there are still hoots from swimmers over at Hoggs Rock. I am tempted to join them, but instead, I snuggle into my sleeping-bag – until I discover a jackjumper has hitch-hiked with me on my trousers, and is now fanging into me. Once this has been dealt with, it is time to sleep.
I wake to rain, the dark hour before dawn. The barbeque area is shelter. I see only two female joggers in neon active-wear. Morning tries to force its way through the mizzle. Someone comes down and thrusts some bread upon the birds. I do my last tour of the major routes around the lawns. Walking down the shady side of the Gorge to depart – back to my house, which is a minute’s walk from Kings Bridge – I see again the homeless man, a tall man with a blonde mane and an impressive stride. He has a plastic shopping bag. He has been somewhere outside the grounds, and has is now returning to his place. The rain doesn’t seem to worry him.
When you stay in one place for a whole day, it is easier to appreciate the various ways we each belong to it. However, to truly understand a place, one must map it more deeply, in time as well as space. The dolerite cliffs have Jurassic origins, perhaps 170 million years old. Eucalypt trees first evolved in South America 50 million years ago. Humans first knew this part of the world only some 40,000 years ago. Perhaps this is ought to be our “contemporary”.
At the beginning of this millennium, a geologist light-heartedly suggested that we might live in the Anthropocene Era, in which future readers of rock would find unprecedented human influence on the landscape. The shorts in the trees will soon be gone, but the record of plaques, paths, levees, pipes, shelters, bridges and chairlifts will remain.
I would stay in Cataract Gorge for the whole era if I could.
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.