photographer PETER GRANT
It is an effort to get to Tasmania’s west coast. Its actual coast. Even when you’ve reached the unofficial capital, Queenstown, the nearest accessible salt water is 40km away by road.
And what a road!
Tasmania’s road builders were said to paid by the curve, not by the mile. The joke is close to the truth for the road between Queenstown and Strahan. In the 1930s, the federal government appeared keen to evade its obligation to pay for a road between the two towns. It thought that it could do this by agreeing to fund only the construction of the road surface, but not any bridges or culverts.
I can picture the Australian government advisor poring over the map, looking at the rumpled topography, considering the drainage patterns, and raising an eyebrow at the huge rainfall. Surely the impoverished state government, he eventually suggests, would never be able to cover the expense of bridging and draining such a route.
He hadn't reckoned on the engineering skills of a workforce used to constructing mine access roads in the wild and hilly west. Today the road is a testament to the cunning of the locals; a triumph of the little people over the big city sophisticates.
The triumph comes at a cost, however, for any road traveller prone to motion sickness. The long and winding road follows the contours and somehow avoids all of the many creeks. We arrive at dusk, a little green, and mightily relieved.
. . .
The next day we explore the shores of Macquarie Harbour by mountain bike. Showers scud by, mud flies up from the wheels, and muscles unaccustomed to the work are stretched. We rest in the rainforest around Hogarth Falls. A deep still green pervades the place. Vivid lime green ferns, both terrestrial and epiphytic, are the highlights contrasting with the regal green of myrtle beech and blackwood, and the whisky hues of the creek water.
I have been in Fiordland, New Zealand, at the same time of the year. There similar forests are watered by similar clouds heaved onto the land by the same roaring forties. In Patagonia, I’m told, I could experience the same weather, see sibling forests also dominated by southern beech trees of the Nothofagus genus.
Gondwana may have separated nearly 100 million years ago, but some of the genes are remarkably and recognisably persistent in these now geographically scattered forests.
A few nights later we sleep in a cabin in Corinna’s Gondwanan forest. The night is still, and remarkably silent. It’s the kind of quiet you can hear. And then the rain comes, first tapping, then drumming, then thrashing and lashing and deluging.
We’re in a rainforest – it’s what you would expect. But this is not ordinary rain. Its thunder conversation impossible.
Here the water cycle is vivid and concise. Just a few kilometres downstream from Corinna, the Pieman River will swiftly return this newborn water to the ocean, although it will meet resistance from the incoming rush of gale-blown swells at the Pieman Heads. And the same winds will bring more clouds – low, fat and ragged – to dump yet more rain and hail on the already sodden land.
But in the morning the birds sing the silence awake, and the sun returns. In the forest, rising vapour interfingers with the growing sunlight, and all seems right with the world.
Peter Grant lives in the foothills of kunanyi/Mt Wellington with his wife. He worked with the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service for 24 years as manager of interpretation and education. His passion for the natural world led him to write Habitat Garden (ABC Books) and found the Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize. More of his writing can be seen at naturescribe.com.
