In this second of a four-part series with south-west Tasmania guide Peter Marmion, Hilary Burden discusses a conundrum: Tasmania’s wild places teach human beings the slow road, but protecting such places is urgent.
Part 2: People
writer HILARY BURDEN photographer PETER MARMION
Tasmania has a way of taking you by the hand, sometimes by the scruff of the neck, making you realise that who you are is where you are.
You see this is on arrival at the gravel airstrip at Melaleuca. Here, in the deep south-west, the impact of rare landscape on humans has its own before and after moment. The light aircraft lands with a load of visitors on a wilderness tour. Many are strangers to wildness, fulfilling a dream. An earlier party waits to take the still-warm seats of the newly arrived. Minds leaving city routines behind smile at those who have untethered themselves from civilisation, if only for two nights, in this remote place. Consciousness shifting. You see it in the faces of the people leaving Melaleuca.
Departure is hastened. Weather is coming.
Even for a keen walker, while absorbing the unique beauty of triangular mountains that slope into this sprawling harbour at black run angles – the way a child might draw alpine peaks – Tasmanian Margie Nolan found herself “drawn into a profound sense of presence and serenity”.
“This magical place holds the deep wisdom of nature’s power and generates heartfelt respect and gratitude,” she wrote when asked to consider her visit.
Standing at the edge of Forest Lagoon, breathing slows. Spirits, wearied by the savageness of these times, are lifted. And we relax: walk slower, lower our voices, look around to share the view with the person next to us, and consider: sunlight through tea trees, what bird that is, the colour of a fungus, ripples lapping onto Balmoral Beach ... zephyr, is that the word?
Minds are stretched for ways to describe the infinite details of nature.
People who come here from cities – and that is most people – look up in awe through the rainforest canopy and cannot believe the serenity. No motorised, human-made noise disturbs the peace. No mobile or internet connection to distract from the present. Silence is as much an element as wind in this place – the intangible having the most powerful effect.
Sydney-based communications executive and amateur photographer Ian Rumsby says he felt like he’d been tattooed by the “surreal tranquillity” of the south-west. When he arrived at the Forest Lagoon camp by boat after flying into Melaleuca, he recalls there being no sound at all. “You could do little but watch and see,” he says. “All the adrenalin that lives with you in the city, evaporates. Bathurst Harbour’s impact is both physical and cerebral. I’ve had the good fortune of travelling to a thousand points across the planet, camera in hand; nowhere have I felt quite so small, or present.”
Two days can challenge the urban dweller into questioning lifelong habits. So, consider the impact of almost a lifetime of visits. Guide Greg Wells has taken people into the Southwest National Park World Heritage Wilderness Area for nearly 30 years with his family’s aviation and tourism business. Many of his guests’ experiences travel with him and add to his richly layered storytelling: there’s mention of Dave, who’s written at least 10 times to say his trip was the best thing he’s done in his life; and 80-year-old Olga, who was guided on a walk to the top of Mt Rugby that took 12 hours, but Olga got to see the 360-degree wilderness view – the achievement of a lifetime.
Greg Wells interprets the impact of wild places in this way, “Every person I take on a tour would stand in front of a dozer if this place was ever threatened and say, ‘You can’t do that’.”
While seemingly unlikely in 2022, the US Supreme Court’s recent turning back on climate change policy proves nothing is safe. Read about threats to the planet all you like, see the impact of climate change every day in the news – it’s being front-on to nature in all its vulnerable beauty that thaws the urbanised heart. Gets you in your gizzards.
Ian Rumsby found himself moving more slowly, “passing through places that had clearly been witness to overwhelming natural drama across millennia, much of it invisible to humankind. It felt like walking through a stranger’s home at dusk.”
Wooden boat builder Andrew Denman, from Kettering, has only visited the south-west once, but says the impact has been lasting. “There are not too many places in the modern world where you can walk off the end of an airstrip and not see another soul for a week,” he says. Chasing solitude, he’d intended to walk to South West Cape but never made it, captured instead by Hidden Bay, where he dumped the schedule and simply stayed for days.
Greg Wells’ fellow guide, photographer Peter Marmion, has for his whole adult life returned to Tasmania’s south-west (read Part 1 of this series). In a soon-to-be-published book – a meticulous, 50-year lived record of Port Davey exploration by land and sea – Marmion observes with characteristic dry wit, “Like all frontier environments, Port Davey attracts an interesting band of people who are often not satisfied to live out their lives in the safety of close proximity to services.”
His observations of Port Davey people are prefaced by an acknowledgment of the Needwonee, Ninene and Lowreenne, First Nations people who occupied the south-west for millennia. You can search the mountain faces and ask their harbour reflections all you like, there are no answers to how the first people thrived here for such an impossibly long period of time.
When both Greg Wells and Peter Marmion guide together, it’s like Christmas. They finish and enjoy each another’s stories. They’ll tell you about the Huon piners who for decades made a small town at Settlement Point at the mouth of the Davey River as early as the 1830s. Of the whalers’ graveyard at Bramble Cove, once the site of a whaling station. Of Critchley Parker, who died alone in a sleeping bag on the shores of Bathurst Harbour while searching for a Jewish homeland. Of iconic Tasmanians like Charlie and Ollie King, Herbie Hall, Bern Cuthbertson, Win and Clyde Clayton, of Rupert Denne ... people whose lives tell the story of a remarkable landscape, and others whose names write the map: Joe Page Bay, Mounts Beattie, Rugby and MacKenzie, and the Western Arthur Ranges.
In particular, Peter Marmion details his conversations with Port Davey’s most famous resident, Deny King, a man “used to pacing himself to long term goals”. That’s a big clue to surviving in wild places. Deny King, the painter, tin miner, environmentalist and collector, spent 50 years living self-sufficiently in the south-west. Marmion believes the Melaleuca house Deny built with his sister and father is a vitally important national monument, representing how a family was able to thrive despite such a remote location.
If needed Deny King would save your life. He could also warm your soul with freshly baked bread and raspberries picked straight from the garden. “The custom of reciprocal assistance established in Deny’s tenure lives to this day,” says Marmion.
Wells and Marmion say they rescue people three or four times a season. People, they say, either underestimate the circumstances, or over-estimate their ability. There’s always a lesson in bush skills in their stories. Never separate yourself from your gear.
Peter Marmion has gathered stories from people with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Port Davey area, people who had fished the southern waters for nearly 40 years, and families who handed down knowledge lived through generations. In her 2001 biography of Deny King, Christobel Mattingley describes the King family upbringing as “an education of time and spartan living”. And Deny King as “nature’s gentleman – a man at one with himself, at home in the domain he loved to share”.
Much can be gleaned about south-west life through two Port Davey residences. One is the Kings’, a Nissen-style timber and iron house that Deny King built in 1946-7 on Melaleuca’s open plain. It is still maintained as a holiday home by Deny and Margaret’s daughter, author and artist Janet Fenton, who generously allows people to visit the garden and peer through the window into their living room. It’s all so homely that I feel like a peeping tom even when there’s no one home except the birds.
The other residence was home to Clyde and Win Clayton from 1962-1976, now maintained by Friends of Clayton Corner, and accessible to walkers on the path up Mt Beattie. The home, still loved, shows we are more than a species intent on destroying the planet; we are creative in enhancing it too. How we survive without; we craft, mend, salvage, make do. Find chairs in trees and steps from roots. We add personality and meaning to landscape as much as tear it down. This is the best of us.
Strangers rarely have cause to sing together unless they’re in church, or at a music concert or maybe a footy match. But on a boat on the Melaleuca Inlet, a song about a south-west man’s piano, by Greg Wells, man of the south-west, brings a boat load of strangers together in song. Few even knew the words; it didn’t matter. A story born of this place sung from the heart, shared on the wind, in a haunting land full of stories from the past. All we have to do is listen.
. . .
The trees are different here. Some are 2,000 years old. How did the modern human being ever earn the right to mess that up? Tasmania teaches how the love of a place bonds people together. That’s why the greens movement started here. You can see that in a photo of a group of strangers walking together on Mt Beattie overlooking Bathurst Harbour – looking wild, at flowers, and weather and telling stories – and if we could all find that bond again in our daily lives, the planet would be a whole lot better off.
The world will be saved by people who love it.
Hilary Burden was a guest of Par Avion.
Peter Marmion’s book on 50 years of Port Davey will be published in 2023.
Hilary Burden is a British/Australian author, journalist and photographer. She lives and writes from a shack on an acre in the low hills of Swansea. Her memoir, A Story of Seven Summers – Life in The Nuns’ House, was published in 2012 by Allen & Unwin. More of her photography can be seen on Instagram, @hilaryburden.
Peter Marmion lives in the Huon Valley where the scent of the south-west sweeps through his garden on the frequent gales, and wedge-tailed eagles can be observed from his living room windows. When not working as a wilderness guide, he volunteers on a range of nature conservation projects, including feral animal and weed eradication on Tasmania’s many offshore islands.